The Mammoth Book of Threesomes and Moresomes

Don’t Be Mad at Me

Adriana V. Lopez

I don’t usually come on to authors I interview. But the baby-fine hair peeking out of the young Spanish writer’s open collar was breaking my concentration.

I had devoured his book in one lonely weekend. It was a sophisticated exploration of alienation in contemporary Barcelona. At the novel’s centre is an unsuccessful young author who’s hired by an enigmatic older woman to write her life story.

When I finished it, I stared at his author photo, looking for the depth in his welcoming eyes that had led to this work. I had to see him in person. I researched the controversial underground Barcelona literary journal he and his cohorts founded named Crack, and I found my angle. I decided he would make a good feature on the Spanish avant-garde for Publisher’s Forum.

David Canetti happened to be in New York for a few months on a writing scholarship. He responded to my email immediately. This is what I love about being the international editor at the book review magazine. It’s “meet the author” all the time.

David and I were sitting below a Moroccan-style ceiling fan struggling through the leaden humidity of a mid-August night. I told him to meet me in the Lower East Side at a cafe bar called the Red Pony. Seven p.m. I’d be the girl carrying an emerald-green book tote that said “Reading is Radical”. I told him I was tall, with short black hair, and would be wearing a sleeveless turtleneck dress.

After our initial Spanish two-cheek hello kiss and some nervous prattle about the similarities between New York and Barcelona, I got down to business. I asked him about his sales. I could see the creases taking centre stage on his smooth forehead.

I focused on his large, hazel eyes as he attempted to save face. They were encased in a thick set of dark lashes that made him appear as if he were wearing chocolate-coloured eyeliner. I furrowed my brow a little and nodded, feigning concentration.

“Few people actually read the novel today,” he lamented in strained English.

“Yes, it’s a problem for all authors. It’s tough to keep up with the shorter attention spans.”

Like a Modigliani painting, his face and nose were long. His fingers were long, too; he had them wrapped around a short glass filled with the amber-coloured whiskey we’d both ordered.

I was as drawn to him as I am to unreadable books.

His eyes remained glued to mine. He took a sip of his whiskey and sat back in his chair and grinned at me.

“So you’re family is Latin American?”

“Yes. My mother is Colombian, and my father is a Spaniard. But I was born here.” My delivery was flat. I’ve been told that I can come off as cold, a little arrogant.

“Aha! I thought you were too attractive to be just American. Do you prefer English?”

“Spanish is fine. I need to practice.”

“You have a slight accent to your Spanish. It’s very cute.”

“Thanks,” I said, tensing at the dig.

“But it’s much better than my English. Nobody in Spain worries about their English.”

Of course he had the linguistic advantage. I only got to practise my Spanish with my parents and a bunch of stiffs in my prep school classes on the Upper East Side. Or on the dreaded occasions my parents dragged me to visit my humiliatingly snobbish families in Bogota and Madrid.

“OK then, Spanish it is,” I said in the tongues of our mothers. The r’s rolling from my tongue gave me a whole new sexy persona. I felt like I had tapped into that dormant nineteenth-century maja I had in my veins.

“Bueno,” he concluded.

My cell phone was sitting on our table. I pretended to check it. I needed to divert my eyes from his intensity. I acted as if I didn’t see him staring at me.

“I’m expecting a call from the office,” I mumbled. “A never-ending edit I’ve been trapped in all week.”

My face was getting hot. I have the kind of skin that easily red dens in the heat or when I get nervous or excited.

I downed my whiskey too fast.

“So what are you reading now?” he asked.

“Well,” I began hesitantly, “I just finished reading you.”

“Thank you, that makes a whole ten people.”

I smiled. If ten had read his last novel, that meant less than five poor souls in the New York literary world would have read my own pathetic attempt at experimental fiction a few years back.

“Did you hear about Samuel Reverte-Ferrante’s latest novel?” I blurted, without pausing to think about the book’s racy subject matter.

“About the Italian talk-show host who goes to bathhouses to fuck adolescent boys?”

He said the word “fuck” in Spanish. I was surprised at how my nipples hardened with the release of that single word. Follar. Just to pronounce it forces one to clench one’s teeth and snarl.

“Did you read it?” I asked.

“No. Read about it. It’s caused quite a stir, no? Everyone thinks Reverte-Ferrante is gay now, though he’s happily married to some big-shot editor.”

“Everyone is thinking: How could someone write about it and describe it so well if he hadn’t done it himself?”

“Men have been writing about the female orgasm for centuries, Anna. What do they know?”

It was the first time he addressed me by my first name, so soon after saying fuck. Ah-na. He pronounced it softly, as if he were stroking the back of my neck with his words.

“Too true,” I said.

“I say good for Samuel!” David said suddenly. “What’s the big deal really if he screwed some guy in the name of good research? Flesh is flesh, no?”

“Sure.” I shrugged, though I didn’t really agree. I decided to give him a taste of my New Yorker attitude. “But screwing your wife’s brother is crossing the line, don’t you think?”

“Perhaps. But haven’t you ever crossed the line in a close relation ship?” he asked.

“Of course, but. .” I replied, wondering how I could change the subject.

We were coasting quickly into unchartered waters for your standard Publisher’s Forum interview.

“Really?” he said playfully. “What, with a friend or something?”

He was as excited as I was, hanging on every careless word that flew out of my mouth. David was sitting up straight, resting his hands placidly on the tops of his spread thighs. His head was tilted low and slightly to the side. He was my captive audience.

I took a breath and told him about my room-mate at Vassar, even though I couldn’t believe what I was saying. I remembered the drunken night when things went too far with Natasha for the first time. The smell of Johnson’s baby powder exuded from her belly button as I pulled down her panties.

Our friendship had reached that point of overwhelming curiosity. She asked if she could kiss me. I couldn’t say no to a girlfriend. We were both each other’s first, and we took it seriously. We left our usual fits of cackling laughter out of it.

I was larger breasted than Natasha, but just as malnourished. We both lived on cigarettes and Diet Coke. We rolled around my twin dorm bed kissing. I told David that her small pointy breasts and bony hips barely touched mine. I said that Natasha moaned too loudly and overdramatically for what I was doing beneath her perfectly manicured landing strip of a bush. (Mine in comparison was an untidy patch of overgrown ivy.)

Shocked at how dirty I was talking, I stopped myself. His face had turned red.

“This conversation has gone way past any chance of professional ism, hasn’t it?” I told him. But I relished the macho bravado of my words.

“I’m enjoying myself immensely,” he said with an earnest smile. “Do you still talk to this Natasha?”

“No, her husband doesn’t like me much.”

“Fool.” He tsk’d.

“So, what about you?” I shot back, downing another gulp of whiskey for support.

“My turn, huh?” he said.

“Come on. I just revealed a little too much information to you. Offer me something as good. None of this will be published, I swear.”

He let out a tinny laugh. I couldn’t tell if it was nervous.

“OK then. You’ve heard of Sergi Canetti, right? The writer who wrote the historical novel about Hadrian, the Roman emperor?”

“Yes, you and he and some friends started Crack. You two related?”

“By father. We grew up together. Our father had moved us to Paris when we were boys. He was just opening his bookshop at the time. We were lonely, awkward looking and had no friends. Our French was poor, and we felt like outsiders in that city. We spent a lot of time alone together. One day we just decided to experiment on each other.”

“What do you mean, experiment?” I asked.

“We gave each other our first blow jobs.”

I nodded.

“This is quite common for boys you know, at least in Europe,” he said. “I don’t know about American boys.”

“How old were you?” I asked.

“Sixteen or so.”

“Here, boys feel each other’s cocks at sleep-away camp,” I said. “But no one dares to talk about it. It stays in the woods, with their campfire tales.”

He laughed at my attempt at being funny.

Then he suggested we try another place.

I chose this divey basement bar on Mott Street. It was called Double Happiness, and I found the name cynically comforting. The light from the hanging red paper lamp in our corner booth ruddied our sallow cheeks to a much-needed healthier glow. It seemed we both shared a dislike for healthy outdoor lifestyles.

We sat close to one another. So close that our knees kissed, though they were still separated by a hairline crack. This proximity interfered with making conversation. So I pulled my knee away slightly to concentrate on what the hell I was saying, and hopefully, to seem a little out of reach. If that were still possible.

We jump-started the dialogue by discussing new book releases we thought important (always an ice-breaker for book people), when David mentioned one that I had read by a Mexican American journalist. It had just been translated into Spanish. It was about little boys in Mexico who cross the border by themselves to look for their labourer mothers in the United States. The boys leave their country with only a few pesos in their shorts and an approximate address. They try dozens of times to sneak over, only to die like stray dogs in the desert.

My heart had begun to beat faster and I felt the blood drain from my face. The mere mention of that book brought me back to that terrible time in my life.

“So you haven’t read it then?” David asked.

“No, I have.” I responded, sounding stiff.

“Oh. It didn’t look like it registered with you.” He looked con fused.

I hadn’t wanted to tell him about my mother. I preferred not to talk about her with anyone. But the sad man trapped in his eyes told me to. Despite his generous smiles, he had a sombre look that made me think he understood the incomprehensible, like death, or why we fall in love with the wrong people.

“That book takes me back to a hard time in my life recently,” I said. Then it all came out. The alcohol was making me emotional. “It’s been two years since I last had sex with a guy, you know.”

I was suddenly insane with an urgency to talk about it. It was like I was a bottle of Coke he kept shaking, lifting the cap to watch me splatter. He took a sip of his Scotch and placed it down slowly on to the coaster with the Chinese Double Happiness symbol.

“Wow.” He paused, taking a deep breath. “Why?”

“My mother died two years ago. It closed me up to the world, made me hate it. Hate love, mistrust men, everyone.”

“I’m so sorry. What she die of?”

“Oh, a bad case of sadness. She overdosed on sleeping pills. Her long-time lover announced that he was going back to Rome for a younger woman he had met while on business. She never wanted to get out of bed again.”

“Oh God, Anna. I’m so, so sorry.” He widened his eyes and shook his head.

“Thanks,” I shot back as if he had just passed me the salt shaker. “I’m OK, don’t worry.”

I concentrated on carefully taking out my pack of smokes from my bag and lighting a cigarette. I inhaled and exhaled dramatically; it was a necessary release. He placed his hand on my right thigh. He didn’t squeeze or press. He just rested it ever so lightly. His long fingers splayed open like a starfish.

As he rested his limb on mine, I noticed what a feminine wrist he had, despite the generous layer of fur encasing it. It was the first time he had placed a hand on my body, other than to tap me on my arm, guiding me away from an oncoming waitress back at the Red Pony.

I had to explain how I got to that point from the mere mention of that book, even though his heart was coming out of his eyeballs with sympathy. I began telling David about the whole experience with a certain peace I hadn’t felt in years. His whole being was an open receptacle to my feelings.

“After my mother’s suicide I hadn’t been able to read for pleasure, something I relied on since childhood to block out the world or my parents’ high voltage fights. I showed up to the office a few days after the funeral and dived into my work as usual. It saved me. I had just recently broken off a seven-year relationship, and I hardly saw any of my friends.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. It was one of those brutally cold New York winters,” I ex plained. “I would sit on my couch curled up in a blanket desperately trying to escape into another world.”

“You mean, through books, yes?”

“Exactly. But it wouldn’t work. I would start to read the sentences and a voice in my head would interrupt telling me I wasn’t reading. The words. . I couldn’t absorb them; they couldn’t get through all the other noise in my head. I lived in a kind of panic that I would never be able to enjoy reading again. But this book broke through. It took me out of myself for once. Its words spoke a simple truth, and I could follow their trail. The pain of these abandoned little boys in the book finally allowed me to privately mourn my mother’s vanishing from this earth. I mean, those little boys just wanted their mom mies. And I could understand that.”

“I couldn’t put it down myself,” David said. “That journalist really took you there, all those sordid details about eating out of garbage dumps to survive.”

“I know; it’s just terrible,” I added.

I felt self-conscious again. I took another sip of whiskey, and my hand trembled as I brought it up to my mouth. I knew I was acting strangely, telling him about my mother and about not having slept with a man for a while. This isn’t what you’re supposed to do when you first meet someone, especially an accomplished author whom you’re writing about.

I let out a nervous guffaw.

“God! Doesn’t talking about death just kill a mood?”

He gave me a smile more warm and generous than any I’d ever received. “I’m not uncomfortable talking about it, Anna. Go on.”

“You’re probably regretting ever having mentioned that book or saying yes to me interviewing you. See what you did! You unleashed my inner monster.” I was back to flirting shamelessly.

“She’s a wonderful little monster,” he matched, responding quickly.

“Oh yeah?” I thought for second, then went for it. You only live once. I wanted the air, the light around him. “You want to see where I live?”

“I’d love that. But on one condition.” He grabbed my thigh and gave me a serious look. “We need to get some slices of New York City pizza first. My little monster of a stomach is growling.”

He slid out of the booth and excused himself to go to the bath room. I looked around the room to see if anyone was looking. No one was. I pocketed a darling little red ashtray that the barman had just placed on our table.

It would complement the other souvenirs I had accumulated over the years, little mementos from places where something memorable had happened.

The Lower East Side at midnight bustled with street action from every living, breathing walk of life. And something about its energy must have gotten under David’s skin, making him stop short in the middle of the street.

Without warning, he grabbed my hand and pulled me into the darkness of lonely Eldridge Street.

“What are you doing?” I asked even though I knew.

“Dejame, just let me,” he said like a boy who wanted to stay up later than his bedtime. He took my two hands and raised them over my head, pushed them up against the rough red bricks of the tenement building I had my back on. I was his prisoner as he breathed on my face, slowed himself down to smell me, and pressed his wet mouth on to mine.

Here was our chance to rise, to overcome the heavy gravity of re spectable, dignified social interaction. We took our time exploring each other’s mouths, opening them slightly, then pulling back and beginning again, deeper and deeper the next time in, for anyone who cared to watch. I remember opening my eyes and seeing his closed so sweetly, tasting the booze and cigarettes on our saliva, smelling the cheese. All the pores on his naked face reeked of the slice of pizza we inhaled walking and giggling on the way to my place. On my ex, Jonathan’s, face I had hated the smell of cheese, but on David it was delicious. Like a sampling of his body’s baser smells to come.

We raced up the five endless flights to my apartment and panted like porno stars from severe shortness of breath. Fucking cigarettes! Still insanely aroused at just listening to his heavy breathing, I fum bled placing the key into the hole.

Once we were inside, I flicked on the dozen little lamps in my place, and David found his way into my bedroom. That’s where all my books were, in disorganized piles all over the floor. I had never bothered to get bookshelves or nightstands, so my books became my flat surfaces for glasses and candles. Now he was sizing me up, like all book people do, by what I had or didn’t have in my collection. I usually never felt self-conscious about the process but with him, I felt instantly exposed.

I took my time and slowly walked into the bedroom. He was sit ting on the edge of my bed reading Death in Venice. He didn’t ac knowledge me. Looking very studious, he was either ignoring me or enthralled with the passage he was reading.

I sat next to him and stared at his perfect Roman profile, and then I leaned into him and kissed his neck. He continued to read without looking up at me, and I kissed it again.

“Can’t you see I’m reading?” he said, without looking at me. The sides of his mouth twitched with abstained laughter.

“Uh-huh. I can see that.”

I got on my knees and unbuttoned his shirt. I placed my hands on the centre of his chest and massaged that hair I had so admired ear lier. His skin was sticky from a night’s worth of sweat. Without saying a word, I pulled at his left sleeve. He threw his shoulder back and held the book out with his right hand. He did the same in reverse when I was ready for the right sleeve.

Shoulders hunched over, legs spread apart, he continued to read, as I sat kneeling on the Persian rug in front of him, taking him in. He was thin but perfectly T-shaped. Bigger on top, narrower towards the waist. His trail of dark body hair mimicked his shape and thickened in the belly area. As I stared at his torso I could sense him eyeing me over the edge of the book.

He was waiting for me. I leaned forward and kissed his stomach gently. Through the hairs, his skin smelled of sweet milk. Like the sticky remnants of a summer day’s ice-cream cone on some sweet child’s cheeks. I licked the area around his belly button. Now I tasted salt. He twitched and grunted softly. Then I inserted my tongue right into it, his inny, and he pushed me away from him. His face morphed from shock to lust in a millisecond.

“Take off that dress,” he said, indignant.

“No.” I said. “You.”

His face bore no expression.

He lifted my dress up over my head in one smooth movement. And I was left in a pair of Gap yellow underwear. Not even the thong kind. I forgot I was wearing them.

“Are those boys’ underwear?”

I shook my head no.

“Turn around,” he said, still sitting on the edge of my bed. He lowered my underwear and sat silently looking at me.

Then he grabbed my hips and pulled me closer to him, sticking his tongue right into the crack of my ass. No man had ever gone there first.

I could hear him unbuckling his belt, unzipping his fly. Then he stuck his fingers into my sex and turned me around.

His long, thin cock was sticking out of his jeans, waiting. “Sit down.”

I lowered myself on to him.

He broke through pubic hair, tissue, blood vessels, pride, sadness, desire, me.

Then, there wasn’t any room left for air in my lungs. I came pools on to his dark-blue jeans.

My cigarettes called. I left him lying on my bed with one hand behind his head, the other resting on his stomach, smiling big as he caught his breath. His limp dick twitched as it rested outside his open zipper.

“Bring me one too,” he said. “And that little red ashtray you stole tonight.”

Later, when I had been lying there awake watching him snore, his hands clasped over his chest, like my mother in her black beaded dress the day of the funeral, I imagined his life back in Barcelona.

I thought about this half-brother, Sergi Canetti. I wondered if Sergi was gay. Did David consider himself bisexual? Did it just hap pen once?

I got up to go to the bathroom, closed the door, then placed my hands over the cold edges of the sink and pressed my face up to the mirror for a reality check. The whites around my brown eyes were bloodshot and smudges of faded black eyeliner streaked the tops of my cheekbones. My lips were chapped and redder than usual. My classmates had called me “Bubble Lips” when I was a girl, but now those bubbles were extra puffy from an entire night of David’s love nibbles. “I love your mouth. I love your lips,” he’d said to me as I sucked his cock before we went at it again. He made me feel beautiful, alive again. I laughed at myself in the mirror, gave myself a wink. The man I had stared at so intently in an author’s photo was now snoring loudly in my bed.

We decided that David should move in after our third date. We couldn’t be without each other, and his time in New York would dwindle away fast.

When he first brought all his things over from the dingy little studio he was renting in midtown Manhattan, I was taken aback by how light the man travelled. For a four-month scholarship trip he had brought his laptop, two dress shirts, two T-shirts, one V-neck wool sweater, two pairs of shoes, a pair of dress slacks, a pair of jeans (which I had soiled) and a black blazer. The pairs of underwear and socks he had brought (less than a week’s worth) he hand-washed daily in the nude and hung out neatly on the circular metallic ring around my shower to dry.

The only things that weighed him down were the seven books he intended to read or use as references for his writing. We hardly socialized or saw anyone for that first month and a half. Though I liked to blame our antisocialness on David’s less-than-perfect English, I really just wanted him all to myself.

David was a social animal by nature. His mother had told him that as a child he opened his arms for everyone to hold him. He made her nervous, thinking he’d embrace a stranger con malas intenciones one day. Unlike most of the misanthropic writers and editors I had come to know and sympathize with over the years, David genuinely liked people.

As time went on, I got used to losing him and his attention at those publishing-world events he did eventually want to go to. In conversation, his whole being was absorbed in the plight of other people’s pain, just like he had become absorbed in mine. He was a charismatic empath, and both women and men alike were taken with his boyish charm. Most hadn’t heard of his work, but they pretended they had when I introduced him as one of Spain’s current avant-garde.

He would perk people up like wilting flowers. I even found my self feeling jealous during a genteel dinner party given by a power editor at Random House. Dressed in a low-cut, very transparent blouse, Elaine Williams was just recently divorced. She had allowed her six-year-old daughter Chloe to play with the adults, and both wouldn’t stop flirting with David. While Elaine told him all about her horrendous break-up, the girl kept lifting up her frilly dress like a little whore trying to get his attention.

He pinched Chloe’s little stomach and turned back up to Elaine’s big batting eyes as she continued telling him about her loneliness. Yes, I’m ashamed to say, I felt like strangling mother and child right there.

I studied him with other people: complete strangers, new acquaintances, good friends of mine, it didn’t matter. I knew his look so well, because it was the way he looked at me that first night, and thereafter, and I fell in love with him for it. I felt safe and special in that tolerant gaze of his. When he shared it with others, I began to grow resentful.

But he was all mine at home. David worked methodically on his novel while I checked into the office every day and counted the hours until I could rush home and have him again. He inspired me to kick-start my second novel, despite my first’s disastrous reviews, and for the first time in years I felt confident and creative again. I wanted to write screenplays with him, edit anthologies, and co-edit another literary journal with him. I was mad with creative energy.

One beautiful fall morning, David invited me to go live with him in Spain. After that, coming home to him in the evenings involved a whole new mindset of possibilities for a future together.

When Sergi Canetti entered our lives, he shook our very foundation. I came home at around seven the night it happened, the time I usually arrived. I’d been thinking about David the whole way home. When I walked in, I immediately stripped in the vestibule, knowing he would follow my lead. We met naked in the centre of my living room, under the low-hanging antique chandelier with small ivory roses I took from my mother’s apartment. With all our body parts saluting the other at attention, we wrestled over who would suck the other first. I won the fight, and I kneeled before him in haughty victory.

Then he regained his power, becoming serious in order to sit me down gently on the rickety wooden chair by the kitchen window. I smoked my after-work cigarette, complaining about the idiots I worked with. He knelt at my mound, opened my lips, and suckled my clit until I felt faint. I told him to stop. He stopped his sucking and leaped up on to his feet and put on his best society lady posture. “Yes, my queen,” he said, bowing before me.

With one eyebrow raised abnormally high, he pranced around the room speaking Briticisms, his hands fluttering like butterflies, while his bright red penis pointed the way. I laughed as I studied him. He was beautiful in his girlie man sort of way, and I tackled him on to the bed. He played hard to get until I mounted him, pinned him down. I could do that; we were practically the same size.

He lay helpless beneath me, eyes closed, moaning away as I squeezed and rode his dick like I had learned to ride a horse as a wannabe child jockey at our house upstate. English style, back straight, propped up on my feet, legs bent at my sides. I’d push my self up and down, up and down. I concentrated and stared at him below me, leaning back and turning around to caress his delicate balls. They felt cool to my hands, like little plastic bags of sand to play with.

I looked down and saw his feet. His long toes were curled in arthritic pleasure. It was the pleasure of being encompassed by my insides. He was my captive animal, trapped beneath my long, strong legs he loved so much, his chaleco de salvavidas, as he liked to call them.

Wanting to somehow participate, he lifted his upper torso to my left breast and sucked me, the saliva popping loudly in his mouth. He’d look up at me occasionally with one of my reddened nipples in between his teeth. I liked it when he did that, with that look of complete submission. At that moment I was Mother Mary giving milk to her baby Jesus. I was omnipotent and feverish, on a sort of low-grade heroine haze. And then suddenly I tired and alighted off him, lying down and spreading myself out for him. I felt shaky, anaemic.

He tried to eat me again but my body couldn’t take any more, and I captured his eager head in between my hands like the saviour and lifted it to give him my breath. We kissed furiously, mouths stretched open to their full capacity, teeth knocking, unfurling our tongues like safety ropes.

Then his cell phone rang. I hated that thing. He stiffened for a bit, as if feeling a change in the air. He looked over at it, contemplated getting it, then thought again. He looked at me instead. Then he let himself inside me elegantly, as his eyes peered into mine. It was like he was looking right through me, intuiting my life’s accumulation of sadness. I tried holding my eyes right back to his like I usually did, my lioness instinct. But this time I wanted to hide. I didn’t know why, but I felt shaken by the way he looked at that phone. I lowered my lashes instead.

The urge to cry was rising in me fast. I thought of my mother, her pain in love, her long-time fear of ageing, of dying alone. I thought of how she finally decided to face this fear by violently making it come true. I felt myself shrinking in his sentient gaze. As he pumped me, his eyes were welling up with tears along with mine. I held back and fought the demon. I didn’t want him to know how much I loved him yet or how happy I really was despite my current state. How I wanted to become part of his world and abandon mine!

Deep within me, David twisted and coiled himself, sensually taking in the texture of my inner walls. Then he stopped and said, “Let’s get on our sides. But keep me inside of you.”

I went with him, face to face, as he grabbed my left buttock, and carried me into a half-turn on to our sides. Never disconnecting our selves, David had somehow managed to go even deeper in that new position. We rocked back and forth tensely; his cock massaged my clit, our bodies aching in perfect symmetry. There was so much moisture. He pulled out, buried his head at my breasts again, allowing for us to dry off a bit.

When he re-entered me, he pulsed three times and whimpered at the sensation. That was all he could stand and I was ready too. We came in muted silence, and I allowed myself one stray tear to travel down my face as David shut his eyes and rolled over on his back. I quickly wiped it off.

“You OK?” he asked, catching his breath. He stared up at the white glare of my high antique tin ceilings. I had always thought they looked like dozens of tiny breasts lined up in quadrants. He placed a hand on my leg for reassurance. He wasn’t one to touch after sex, too busy recoiling into himself.

“I thought about my mom and got emotional,” I mumbled.

“You want to talk about it?”

I tried to decipher his tone before answering. Then I thought about the phone call he received during sex. Who could it have been? Why did he even consider stopping to answer?

“No, it’s OK. It’s passed now,” I lied.

“Some water?” he asked.

“Oh yeah, parched is an understatement,” I answered.

I forced myself up with him and went for a cigarette while he took his phone with him into the bathroom. It was probably Sergi. I had heard David whispering on the phone with him late at night. When he came out of the bathroom, I asked him who had called.

“It was Sergi. He likes to reminisce when he’s drunk.”

It was 3 a.m. Spain time, 9 p.m. ours.

“Doesn’t he have anyone else to call?”

It wasn’t just the question, but the way my voice shot it out. It had a tone of desperation. I felt threatened. It was the tone that my mother had used a million times on my father when he told her he wouldn’t be coming home for dinner or that he had another important business trip.

I was envious of a something I couldn’t even put into words or quite understand about him and Sergi. It was just a gut feeling I had. There was nothing I wanted more than to be proven wrong.

He was calm. “A mutual friend of ours is arriving into town tomorrow, Anna. That’s what he was really calling about. Miguel Velasquez. He’s an old friend of the family who’s here on business. He’s an art dealer.”

“Great,” I said, trying to keep my sanity. “Where shall we take him?”

We arranged to meet Miguel the next night at a high-end, big-chef restaurant on the newly reformed Clinton Street. We went through three bottles of South Africa’s finest wines, since this was thankfully on Miguel.

It was my first time seeing David with a close friend, riding down the green, comforting path of memory lane. Miguel was jet-set handsome with perfectly styled salt-and-pepper hair. He was married to a rich Catalana who stayed at home and raised their two boys while he frolicked around the globe. He was cordial to me but didn’t go beyond the niceties to make me feel like part of the old clan.

His attention was all on David. He had a fountain of questions about David’s work and about his mother and her health. Miguel asked if she had remarried since David’s father passed away. Like a pair of old women, they unearthed fresh and hardened dirt about themselves and their mutual friends.

Sergi’s name was splattered over practically every adventurous tale there was to tell. Remember when you and Sergi had that party for. . or when Sergi and you and those girls. . You and Sergi disappeared with those Swiss dudes. . Whatever happened to them!

It was obvious the Canettis were the life of the party.

“Yeah, whatever happened to them?” I interjected, giving him a shove and raising an eyebrow.

“Nothing!” David said and laughed. “Nice purple mouth you got there, Anna. Why don’t you have some more wine?”

My teeth and lips tend to suck up the tannins. I must have looked like a fool. And he was trying to change the subject.

“Aw come on, man,” Miguel egged on. “Those guys were like in love with you and Sergi. You guys were such the cock-teasers!” said Miguel. He glanced over at me to try to detect a reaction.

My blood was boiling, but my face muscles were contained.

Their banter was so drenched in homoeroticisms, they might have as well been fencing with their dicks.

I changed the subject to something neutral. I asked about the art Miguel was viewing in New York. Mentally, I prepared myself to confront David when we were alone.

I knew that I was quieter than usual on our walk home.

After we saw Miguel into a cab uptown, David tried a million times to jump-start conversations about Miguel’s shallow art world. But all his attempts fell flat. I was trying to breathe and shoo away the black birds of paranoia circling me. We tired from our walk and hailed a short cab ride home.

We slid into the back seat, and I gave the driver directions. I turned to David.

“Tell me more about your experimentation with Sergi.”

He was instantly defensive. “Why are you making such a big deal about him? Do you think I’m gay or something?”

“I don’t know. What the hell did happen with those Swiss guys then?”

“I told you, nothing, we just did lines together. What’s wrong with you, Anna?”

“I just want you to tell me more about how you and Sergi first fooled around with each other.”

We got back to my apartment and opened another bottle. I listened. I had no choice. I tried to appear calm. He delivered his words casually, like canapes swallowed with champagne. My own sepia-coloured movie reel rolled in my head as he spoke.

David explained that he never believed he was a homosexual. He worshipped girls in his classes when he was young, but absolutely no one paid him or Sergi any mind. They were hideous then, he claimed, and foreigners in a xenophobic country to boot. They were simply desperately horny, pimply little bastards who only had each other for company. Sergi’s mother, their father’s first wife, had died during childbirth. So Sergi lived with an aunt in his early years. He became too much to handle as a pre-teen, and his aunt sent him back to live with his father, his father’s new wife and his half-brother.

The first time Sergi and David touched each other, they’d been sitting in front of their television set in their small apartment in Paris. While David’s mother smoked cigarettes in the courtyard and their father banged university students in exchange for discounted books in the back of his shop, the boys gave one another their first blow job.

The television had been turned to one of Europe’s many soft-core porn channels, where shapely naked women lathered one another in the shower. The boys’ virginal cocks pulsed and rose, begging to be set free from their pants. Through the zipper of his blue jeans, Sergi, the taller and more handsome one, released his cock and stroked it wildly to its fullness while he stared straight ahead at the telly. His bottom lip jutted out as he bit down and broke through the violet skin of chapped lips. A rebel strand of wheat-coloured hair es caped from a thick mass of an overgrown pageboy haircut and dipped in and out of the pock hole on his upper cheekbone, a mark left from a severe case of the measles. David’s cock swelled in sync from the excitement of seeing dozens of hardened nipples. The sound of his mother’s voice giggled in the distance while Sergi worked on himself with a passionate energy that David had never witnessed before in his brother. Tense and excited, David took his out too. The boys, both sixteen, sat alongside each other on a couch too small for their rapidly growing limbs. They looked over at one another, glassy-eyed and trembling, as they pulled at their reddened cocks together. Sergi, who always felt he could control David, asked him in a desperate and unequivocally commanding voice to “Kiss it, now.” And David, without hesitation, leaned over and took in the warmth and mixture of perspiration and detergent smell of his best friend and half-brother’s manliness.

David propelled himself up and down on Sergi only a pair of times before David, overcome with emotion, ejaculated burning droplets of embarrassment at the newness of it all. Sergi pushed David off and finished himself off with his own hand, feeling over whelmed with the sight of David’s come and now his own all over his trousers.

With a hand over his mouth, David pointed and laughed at the mess and Sergi, registering what had happened, stayed perfectly still. He gave David a shove and told him to go and get something to clean it up before David’s mother walked in. David brought back some napkins, they cleaned themselves up, and they switched the channel to some American gangster flick.

I realized then that Sergi hadn’t blown David and that, in game theory, he owed him one. But I didn’t want to know any more.

David left for Barcelona a day before New York had its first big snowfall. He had an important engagement to attend back home at the Circulo de Lectores. I assured him I would join him as soon as I could figure out what to do about work. My first days and nights alone again were spent obsessing over Sergi and David. I imagined the wild, sexual adventures that awaited them when they reunited in Spain again.

After the reality that David had left set in, I spiralled from ecstasy to a one-lane freeway towards depression. I had been on a four-month hiatus from its dark fog, and now I was back. I began seeing my shrink again. I told Laura about my feelings of jealousy about David’s experimentations and his intimate relationship with Sergi.

Sitting in front of me, on her hunter-green chair, in a long, flowing khaki-coloured skirt and brown riding boots, Laura was serene. She joined in the Greek chorus of those around me who pooh-poohed my irrational fear of thinking David a closet homosexual.

“This is natural behaviour for men. They’re just as capable of experimenting with the same sex as women are,” she said. She paused and asked, “You’ve been with women, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Why is it different or more acceptable that you did?”

“I don’t know. It’s just different.”

“It’s the same. Just be grateful that he told you,” she said. “This proves a wonderful aspect of his open character. He’s sharing him self, his past, who he is with you.”

“I guess so.”

“He’s chosen you, Anna. Trust him, trust yourself. OK?”

“OK.”

Time was up and having him so far away didn’t help my overactive imagination when I wasn’t seated in my shrink’s chair.

My life in New York was no longer mine for the few months that followed. I lived in an altered state, a time-zoned paralysis as I imagined his fabulous Barcelona life six hours ahead of mine. Six hours ahead on working wonders on his novel, gallivanting with his arty friends, meeting other fascinating, brilliant women, other dashing men.

He’d send me horny one-liners in awkward email English. I click on your clit with my dick. I’d get them at work. He had his 3 p.m. siesta jerk-off while I was hitting my 9 a.m. caffeine-fuelled “what am I doing here?” hour.

One day I found myself completely unable to concentrate on the stories I had to edit. I needed to kill the throbbing between my legs. So I decided to masturbate in the office bathroom. I watched myself in the mirror of the handicap stall, the one with the extra-large sink. With my head thrown back and my mouth pleading to be filled, I let my raised nipples loose from my bra. I thought of his dick rubbing against me and touched myself, my clitoris expanding underneath my fingers. I imagined him and a strange man he’d met in a bar. I pictured him and Sergi in one of their threesomes he had told me about. I saw him and random sexy girls speaking in that castrating Spanish of theirs under the sheets.

As I looked at myself in the mirror, I didn’t recognize the savage woman that looked back, the edges of her mouth sinking, her skirt hitched up under her. I was becoming like them: my lascivious parents.

High on recklessness, I resigned the next day. Without a hint of remorse I asked my publisher, Martin Powers, if he would still allow me to submit articles from Spain on the goings on in the European market. He said yes. I told Martin, who had become a father figure to me (even though at times he was overcome with visible thoughts of incest) that I was going to be working on my next novel in Barcelona.

That night I went home to buy a one-way ticket to Barcelona. I called David to tell him that I had decided to come try it for a while. I could feel his lust and longing through the receiver. He whined and told me to come right then, and I could practically come just hearing his voice, but for that we had to wait another two weeks.

Then the vibrato of that joyous conversation lulled when he told me that my arrival would coincide with Sergi’s, who’d be visiting from Madrid. He was going to be there for two weeks doing a series of talks on his latest tome for Barcelona’s big literary festival, Diada de Sant Jordi.

I pouted over the phone line and told him that I preferred for us to be alone, reminding him that I wasn’t a quiet fuck. It didn’t go down well with David at first. He insisted that he had a large flat and plenty of extra rooms and bathrooms. It took some convincing with old truisms like, three’s a crowd and a woman needs her privacy.

It annoyed me that David didn’t innately understand my argument of wanting alone time after such a long period of not seeing each other. He finally grunted an OK, muttering that he’d tell him to find another place to stay. He was obviously worried about Sergi’s reaction. And I celebrated winning this small battle for now.

On that cold and rainy April night at JFK airport, I crossed myself. I made the four-pointed arm gestures of the crucifix slowly as I waited in line to check in. In the name of the Father. . the Son. . the Holy Spirit. . Amen. Like I had seen old wrinkled-up women do in the face of the unknown.

It was 10 a.m. Barcelona time, 4 a.m. mine, when my plane arrived. David was waiting for me at the airport. A lover of public transportation, he insisted we take the metro back to his apartment in the centre of the city.

He was all skin and bones, wearing red unisex espadrilles as he rolled my fifty-pound suitcase over the furrows and protrusions of Barcelona’s cobblestone streets. He was wearing a cream linen shirt, open to the third button from the top, exposing that pile of chest hair I so adored burrowing my face into. His skinny legs were sheathed in some army green-coloured cargo pants with one leg rolled up.

Despite the tremendous weight he dragged behind him, he zigzagged like a Twyla Tharp dancer from one side of the pavement to the other, escaping la Rambla de Catalunya’s undulating pedestrian traffic. Used to the daily inconveniences of living in one of the world’s most enchanted cities, he parted the crowd of morning tourists with a gentle brush of his extended right hand. They obeyed like a herd of cows, letting us pass at his command.

“Almost there,” he reassured me, looking back to see if I was still with him. Then he made a sudden right on to a street with an impressive Gothic church rounding its corner. Never taking my eyes off his regal back, I followed him from behind. It was impossible to walk at his side on Barcelona’s truncated sidewalks with my huge suitcase in the way. I appreciated the moment alone, so I could prepare myself for reuniting with him at his apartment. “OK,” I sang back. I stared like an awed little girl at the ancient stone buildings that led to David’s building, their flowers cascading over verandas and dark-shuttered doors with the promise of spreading open to mysterious lives above.

There was a morning chill in the air. My nipples rose to their points under my white shirtdress. I looked up and noticed an old man was looking down into my open neckline. I smiled, and he gave me a salacious grimace in return.

Carrer de Carme, 24. That’s where my David lived. It was a busy side street off la Rambla in the Arab-dominated ghetto of el Raval. The neighbourhood was a mix of strange Old- World seedy and pop bohemian artsy. It was undergoing its predictable gentrification. David had taken the inheritance his father left him and bought him self the coveted top floor of an architecturally impressive, but structurally dilapidated building. “This is it.” He grinned, breathing hard through his teeth.

The building was called La India, and it had gargoyles and faces of ominous indigenous women skimming its rooftop. We walked into the cool of the building’s open marbled lobby, past two sets of pillared columns and into a small metallic elevator-made-for-two hidden behind an antique glass door.

We were finally alone, nose to nose in the tiny elevator that smelled of days of accumulated sweat. I just stood there staring at him, expressionless from nerves. David shoved his hands up my dress. He slipped his hand into my underwear and cupped my wet sex. He grazed my clitoris with his fingers. I thought he was going to take me right there. His hardness was pressing up against me. We kissed furiously as the mechanical gears roared and until the elevator car jumped, signifying that we had landed. David removed his fingers from my insides and licked them clean. “We ’re here.”

We tumbled out of the elevator into a dark, windowless hallway with a floor of large black-and-white squares of ceramic. There were only two doors on each floor, and David’s apartment was behind the big wooden one on our left with an old metallic lion’s head knocker in its centre. Once he turned the thick golden key he took out of his pocket, I heard a click, and he pushed it open.

In an instant, all of Barcelona’s splendid light poured on to us through the uncurtained windows with such grandeur it was like we had been doused with a bucket of golden honey. He rolled my suit case to the side and welcomed me. “You ’re home.”

In that light, I swear he freaking shimmered. His black waves of hair painted with rays of white light. He’d be beautiful, even old.

Light was important for David and his writing life, to psychically be away from the city’s dark and noisy streets below. I squinted, feeling a headache coming on. I desired my sunglasses.

“Wow ” was all I could say. Some sort of low-grade aphasia had hit me with the jetlag setting in. And there was so much to absorb about David’s world without me.

He took my hand and walked me through the long hallway of his railroad apartment. The floors were a swirling mosaic of salmons, browns and greens. Their florid hues had faded and veiny cracks of time now intermixed with their patterns instead. We passed sparsely furnished parlour rooms with white-curtained French doors. There were one-person guest beds and wooden bookshelves along with antique desks with mismatched chairs scattered throughout.

In one of those rooms, a medium-sized suitcase and a pair of men’s fancy dress shoes sat beside the bed. The shoes were a shiny dark-brown leather, Italian, too elegant to be David’s. Feeling my stomach drop, I intuited they had to have been Sergi’s. I chose to re main silent. I didn’t want to ruin our first moments. I decided to pretend I didn’t notice them.

He showed me to our bedroom and told me to settle in. It was a large white room, with a balcony facing an interior courtyard where neighbouring families hung out their underwear to dry. I stepped on to it and looked down. I noticed there was a black-haired Barbie doll, her stiff arms raised over her head, lying naked on the cement. A small child tiring of her must have tossed her out the window, wondering if she could fly.

I looked around his bedroom. His style was minimalist, mostly from lack of need. A queen-size bed, covered in white sheets and a down comforter contrasted a dark wood chest of drawers, and two matching night tables. He had a bottle of water propped up on his nightstand and book casually left open. Nothing was out of place, everything had a purpose. He must have thought my place was a tornado disaster area.

“You should eat something,” he said, in a tone that seemed sud denly formal.

His words startled me. I realized I was standing there dissecting it all in silence.

“I’d rather eat you,” I said playfully, turning to face him. I stepped over to him, grabbed his crotch, and kissed his neck, taking in his Mediterranean blend of olive soap and tobacco smell.

“Don’t,” he said, unhooking my hands and placing them at my sides. His eyes darted back and forth in thought. All the sexual energy from before had been drained from the room.

“Don’t what?” I said.

“Later, Anna.” He said it in the way a woman might if she had a headache.

“Fine,” I said, audibly pissed.

“We have all the time in the world to make love.”

He always said that. “Hacer el amor” instead of follar, fuck, which I liked to say now. Like in the Almodovar movies. He liked to correct me on this, disapproving of my crude Spanish. “We don’t fuck Anna, we make love,” he’d say with a smile.

I always rolled my eyes at this. The thought of making love all the time killed the mood.

“Let’s put some food into you, OK? I pre-prepared our lunch.”

Though he was going through the good host’s manual step by step, he was still acting a little weird. I started to suspect he had second thoughts about me coming.

“I’ll freshen up then.” My voice came out a note higher than usual.

I turned to fidget blindly with the zipper of my suitcase, his eyes still on me. And just as that feeling of exasperation of being in this unknown place was rising, the hot tears ready to roll, David came up behind me and hugged my bent body, clasping his hands over my uterus. “I’m so happy you’re here,” he whispered in my ear.

Once he left the room, I went into the bathroom and unpacked my toiletry bag. There was a stale smell of old plumbing that turned my stomach, and I breathed through my mouth instead. Con fronting my appearance in the mirror, I got back what I expected to see. I was green from a week’s worth of little sleep and anxiety.

After brushing my teeth with my Tom’s of Maine mint toothpaste (David teased me about it, calling me nature chica), I dabbed on some lipstick and debated which of David’s fragrances to put on to liven me up. Lavendar, Vetiver, Musk, Figuer. The latter was a high-end French cologne that smelled of dirt and figs. I remember thinking this was funny. Figa, in Italian, is slang for pussy. I hadn’t known him to be a perfume wearer in New York. I went for the Figuer, in tribute to its symbolism.

Finished with my mild grooming, I went back into the hallway and walked towards the sound of banging dishes in the kitchen. On the way, I saw what seemed to be his study. I decided to dip into it before re-encountering him so soon.

On an old rickety side table adjacent to a big beige comfy reading chair sat a pair of framed photographs, the only ones I had seen in the house so far. One was of a thin, bearded man in a dress shirt and high-waisted slacks. He was standing in front of a bookstore with a proud look on his face. It was almost a smirk. It had to be his father.

Then there was the other photo. Two twenty-something boys in matching white T-shirts and jeans laughed hysterically, tears running down their faces, with their arms tightly enwound around each other’s waists. Sergi and David, long haired and tanned, posing with that barely perceptible femininity in their stance that only I could clearly see. Sergi towered over David, who was nestled into the crevice of his armpit. Physically, Sergi was way more striking than David had ever suggested in his descriptions. And it was obvious he held the reins.

From what I gathered, Sergi was David’s ringleader, his pimp. David was always under his tutelage in writing and when it came to getting laid. Throughout their teens and twenties they’d date the same women, bed them together, and get off on the group sex. Watching the other pump. Lending a generous hand, patting each other’s backsides in brotherly support. I never had the nerve to ask David if they’d engage each other during these threesomes.

An unwanted vision of David’s thin lips around Sergi’s cock appeared in my head. My hands clamped up around the edges of the cold wood frame, my heart beat faster in panic. I wanted to throw the photo against the wall and smash their big smiles to pieces. Why the hell was I jealous of a man? What did he have that I didn’t? I thought I already knew the answer.

“Anna, come to the balcony,” David called out from a distance. The balcony spread along the back end of his apartment so you could enter it from various parts of the house: from his bedroom, the study, or from the hallway. He had quite a spread of Spanish culinary cliches awaiting me: olives, jamon serrano, Manchego cheese, grilled squid, tortilla espanola.

“You doing OK?” he asked as I stepped out into the dry, yellow sun. A comic vroom vroom of a motor scooter from the side street below answered his question before I could.

“Sure. Just feeling a little woozy. Probably hunger.”

It was somewhere in the early after noon, and David was pouring us glasses of full-bodied Rioja. I could still feel his tension and I was grateful for the upcoming intoxication.

He dragged out a metal lawn chair for me to sit down in and slowly, as if with arthritis, eased himself into his seat. The sky was monochromatically blue and the sun’s rays were penetrating my scalp. David had his sunglasses on so I couldn’t see his eyes, but I could tell his wheels were turning; he was pushing out his mouth in thought.

It was the quiet before the storm.

“So we’re not alone, huh?” I ventured first. His silence was irritating me.

He sighed a sigh that weighed half his entire body weight. “Yes, Anna. I wanted to tell you beforehand, but I didn’t want you to rearrange your plans or decide not to come or something crazy.”

“Sergi’s here, I know,” I said.

David reached for his glass and took a swig. I reached for one of his Lucky Strikes, focusing on the bomb target symbol on its packaging. Neither of us had touched the food.

“Listen, I want you to meet him. He’s part of my past. Yes, he’s been a pain in the ass all his life, but he’s family and I can’t shut my door on him. He’s harmless. God, why do you hate him so much?” His voice was whinier than usual. He looked at me, his upper lip in a curl, his mouth slightly ajar. I had never seen him look so annoyed, so nervous.

Then he put his head down, resting his elbows on his splayed knees, staring at the ground. He looked defeated. I caught a whiff of the Manchego.

I have to confess that his weakness gave me a whole new sense of strength. Sergi was obviously a touchy topic, and David was beginning to seem half the man I fell for in New York.

“Listen David,” I said calmly, using my best phone operator voice. I was good at concealing the pain when I had to. “I thought we had agreed that he was going to stay somewhere else while I was getting settled in here at least. You told me this.”

He sat up in his seat, “His plans fell through with some other apartment, OK? And he has to be here for a few Diada de Sant Jordi book events. Lord knows I have enough extra space in this place. What’s the big deal? What do you have against someone you’ve never even met?”

“I have absolutely nothing against him,” I said. “Really, I don’t,” I said even slower, sounding like I was gurgling underwater. “I guess I just feel kind of uncomfortable, perhaps threatened is a better word. . with all the women and all your sexual liaisons together.” I took a long drag of my cigarette. “I’m not into being shared, you know. I just don’t need that sort of juvenile shit in my life.”

“He’s not going to try anything, Anna. That was the past. We’re adults now. Trust me. He knows that you’re special, and that I’m in love with you. We’re done with all that.”

David was visibly trying to pull himself together. I wanted our be ginning to go as smoothly as possible. I flashed him my big joker smile instead. I knew it looked natural, but it wasn’t. He laughed with a gullible relief.

“You’re so nutty, Anna. You’re a real paranoid case.” He caressed my cheek, then licked it, and with the other hand he took a piece of ham and placed it into my mouth. It was salty and warm from sitting in the sun. I think it was the best ham I’ve ever tasted.

“I’m taking you to a fancy party tonight.”

“Really?” A shiver of excitement raced down my spine.

“It’s Libros magazine’s kick-off party for Diada de Sant Jordi at the Ritz. Everyone will be there, including our friend Sergi. He’s giving a brief speech, which will probably be inappropriate and sarcastic. People love to hate him here.”

“Including you?” I asked.

He thought for a moment. “Yes, sometimes, including me. Don’t take this badly, but you re mind me of each other. You both can be charmingly arrogant on the exterior, but viciously insecure inside. Watch, you guys are going to become wicked pals.” He laughed, tears filling in his eyes.

I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe we could all be friends.

Barcelona’s springtime literary love fest, Diada de Sant Jordi, is Cataluna’s take on St Valentine’s Day. The holiday takes place on 23 April, the anniversary of Cervantes’ and Shakespeare’s deaths. It spotlights love’s finer accompaniments: books, roses and playing hooky from work. I loved this take on the holiday; it was a welcome switch from America’s garish pink Hallmark cards, helium balloons, or the obligatory heart-shaped boxes of chocolates perfunctorily sent to one’s cubicle.

Way back in the dark Middle Ages, the legendary and valiant Saint George (Sant Jordi) was said to have rescued his Catalan city and his pouty princess from a fire-breathing dragon that plagued the people. He stabbed the beast in the heart with his long sword and killed it. Now in tribute to all that reptilian bloodshed, and the miraculous rosebush that blossomed from it, it is the custom that men give red roses to their ladies. In return, the ladies give books to their men.

Local booksellers and flower vendors cram the length of la Rambla and other streets, and everyone in Barcelona finds a good excuse not to do a stitch of work. Instead, people stroll the streets with their lovers, browse for books, crowd the plazas and eye the fashionable authors of the day.

It is also a big day for cultural critics and the literati to see who got invited that year to sign their books around town. The high-society Svengalis behind the Sant Jordi events had chosen Sergi as one of the honorary invitees, while David with a new book out, had been slighted in his own hometown.

David acted like it didn’t bother him. He pointed out that he and Sergi had been invited previous years during the height of Crack’s popularity. I knew some part of him felt hurt. Could he be so above this kind of sibling rivalry? Was he already content with his literary credibility? I didn’t know whether I’d ever be.

Deep down I already knew I was a better literary critic than I was a writer. I had graduated with an MFA in creative writing from a top school only to see all my friends get offered immediate high-profile book deals with their theses. I reworked my thesis over and over until I killed it. When I finally published it with some trendy indie publisher based in Brooklyn, it was so overwrought, so self-conscious, that one critic labelled it “cold and overly stylized”. Somehow, this kind of criticism had never touched Sergi’s dense work. His new book on Hadrian, an impenetrable thicket of pompous jargon and historical assumptions, was oddly more popular than David’s last heartbreaking novel about alienation.

After David had caught me up on all the literary gossip on the terrace, we scurried into the bedroom. Talking about the book fair was our post-fight, verbal foreplay right before we finally sprang into bed and spread each other’s folds open — the tension had been so ripe. We then passed out in a sundrenched, red wine stupor, our sweaty bodies laid out naked above the sheets after a much-needed fuck.

The balcony doors were open to their full glory and I awoke to the soothing feeling of sunlight warming my bush. The sensation made me want him again, but I didn’t want to wake him.

I needed water. I grabbed David’s Chinese robe and straightened myself up before exiting the bedroom, thinking, perhaps hoping, I’d run into Sergi on my way to the kitchen. This time the room with the shoes’ door was practically closed. I assumed Sergi had been here while we were napping. I tapped softly on the door and called out hello. There was no answer, so I pushed the door open.

The shoes were gone. The suitcase was now an explosion of white dress shirts, sleek belts and identical pairs of dark denim jeans. Sergi was obviously in a rush to get in and get out fast. There were copies of his books strewn on the floor. I picked one up and stared at the black-and-white author photo. It was a more recent photo than the one I’d seen in David’s study, and he was still just as stunning, having grown more distinguished with age. He had grown facial hair, and I immediately thought it was a vain attempt to look smart, less pretty boy.

White sheets of paper with elegant and scripted writing were scattered hastily over the unmade bed. They looked like drafts of his short speech for Libros magazine’s Sant Jordi event that night. Maybe he wasn’t as spontaneous as David had suggested.

While I showered before the party, I imagined what my first words to Sergi could be. I chose my outfit carefully. I didn’t want to look like another literary social climber in a flowery minidress and pristine pumps. I decided to go for a black-fitted pants suit instead. I let my braless breasts hang free in their teardrop position, rounding out the edges of my jacket. Black pointed flats provided maximum comfort while walking Barcelona’s dark streets with the boys later that night.

I lined my eyes with black eyeliner and smoked them up with grey shadow. I skipped the lipstick. I wanted to be all eyes that night.

Surrounded by the unnaturally attractive Spanish publishing world, I was glad that I had fixed myself up. In the packed ballroom, the Ritz’s chandeliers cast a romantic light on the wiry women in dramatically draped scarves and the men impeccably dressed in dark jackets.

We were boxed into a room of wall-to-wall mirrors where violins played and enormous golden vases with long-stemmed roses for Diada de Sant Jordi lined the walls. A mighty mix of booze, nerves and jetlag kicked in as David and I made our first rounds. I felt like Rita Hayworth’s character trapped in the Hall of Mirrors in The Lady from Shanghai, where everything looks warped through the lens of paranoia.

I tried to spot Sergi or anybody I knew in the mirrors’ reflection, but a low-lying cloud of cigarette smoke hung over our heads like a rain cloud, fogging up my view. Suddenly, David was dragged off by a pack of faceless arms in one direction. I was pulled in the opposite direction, in the liver-spotted, red-nailed clench of Catalan literary agent Silvia Riera.

I’d gotten to know Silvia well over the years through my reporting on the Spanish literary circuit. She was a been-here-done-that kind of woman in her late fifties, who I suspected was still up to lots of that. She came from a good Catalan family and got into the literary business because she liked highbrow books, cocktail parties and sleeping with struggling writers. She was asking me why the hell had I left my high-profile editorial position to come to Barcelona when I finally spotted Sergi. He stood five heads away from us, laughing big and showing fangs. He turned his head towards me as I eyed him up and down. I told Silvia I’d just gotten sick of New York.

It was impossible not to notice him. He was taller and blonder than most in the room. He turned his entire body to face me, even as he was still chatting up an austere, balding man, probably another veteran of Spanish letters making nice to the new lion. Silvia moved on to a woman she knew standing next to us, and Sergi kept on looking. Noticing he had lost Sergi’s attention, the gentleman of letters spotted me, gave me the once-over, and continued his monologue anyway.

Despite his refined looks, Sergi’s smile was vulgar. He raked his eyes over me as if I were standing there naked. I blushed like a nun and soaked myself at the same time. It reminded me of why I knew I’d hate him. Did he know who I was? How did he know who I was? He mouthed a hello. I nodded in camaraderie and gave him a frigid politician’s smile. Then he turned away to continue his conversation with the gentleman.

Silvia had seen our unspoken exchange. She turned back to me. “Oh darling, watch out for him. Don’t tell me you two have already. .?” She paused.

“Nooo,” I said loudly. I made a hissing sound to punctuate my negation, for both of our ears. “I’m here with David Canetti, not Sergi Canetti.”

“Uuff,” she said. “A little better, but still, the Canettis are quite the dogs around town you know.” She looked at me sympathetically, reading it all so clearly on my face. She continued. “But David has always struck me as the Abel to his Cain in that strange brotherhood. It seems they never get too far from each other, like Frack and Frick,” she said in English, pumping extra gasoline into her rrrs.

“Yes, they’re tight,” I added with an upturn in my voice. I tried to steer the conversation away from the sewage she was ready to spill.

I scanned the room, desperately looking for David. I spotted him. He was talking with Sergi and a group of Spanish literati. He was doing a lot of double-cheeked air-kissing and man-to-man back-rub bing. I thought about how much more people touched in Europe.

Despite my distraction, Silvia pressed on. “Don’t worry. They’ll treat you well. You’re with Publisher’s Forum, and they’re dying for some recognition in New York.” She placed her hand on my shoulder in pity. Though I hated the gesture, I appreciated her brutal honesty, as always. In exchange, she tolerated my bad reviews of her navel-gazing authors.

I excused myself. I looked for David, who had managed to slip into the crowd again. I was hoping we could do a little public fondling. That’s when I saw Sergi cutting through the crowd, quickly moving in my direction.

The bar was packed. I managed to hide myself in a group of huddled men, waiting for my chance to order a drink. Sergi slid between the men and grabbed the top of my arm. I wasn’t going anywhere; his grip was too tight. He towered over me, and I was forced to look up at him.

“Anna, I’m Sergi, David’s brother.” He leaned in to kiss me twice, speaking to me in English, not in Spanish like everyone else did. His English was perfect, far better than David’s. His voice was deep, a smoker’s raspy.

“I know,” I said coldly in Spanish, not wanting to look like a foreigner. As we brushed faces, I could smell the Figuer cologne on him. “When’s your little talk?” I asked.

And he continued in English as if he hadn’t heard my question. “What are you drinking? Let me get it for you.”

He raised a long finger and one of his thick and wickedly arched brows and instantly got the busy barmen’s attention. I assumed he was a man who never had to wait for much.

“ Quiero un whiskey,” I said, insisting on speaking in Spanish.

Sergi faced the bar looking away from me, staring stone-faced into the mirror in front of us. In the mirror, I saw people around us recognize him, subtly pointing as they whispered to each other. They must have recognized him from all the pre-Sant Jordi media blitz he had done. He ran his hand through his long and wavy hair with hints of grey in it and looked down at the floor momentarily before turning back to me. He was a man used to having eyes on him. And I was stunned by how good it felt to be the woman standing next to him.

“You are an absolutely stunning creature when you’re naked. Has any man ever told you that, Anna?” He was still speaking to me in English, our drinks in hand, when he turned to face me.

I felt my sex draw back into itself, tight and tense. I just stared at him.

“I watched you and David fucking this afternoon,” he said. “I want you to know I really got off on it. I’m surprised you didn’t sense me there on the balcony,” he said, incredulously.

“No, I didn’t,” I said back in English, in an icy, even tone. “David didn’t tell me his brother was a stalker.” Sergi registered my comment by looking away. I tried to remain cool, wondering whether David had known he was watching. Our lovemaking was especially acrobatic, David taking me, turning me every which way he could on to him.

We were silent, as partygoers pushed and bumped up to us like small pesky waves out in deep water. We just stood there, feet an chored to the ground, enveloped in a sticky net of paralysing hate for each other.

Then a young woman with a dark tan and a tight white sleeveless dress stepped between us, leaning into Sergi seductively to say some thing in his ear. He said OK. It was time for his speech. Before I could say a word, she pulled him away from me.

Sergi’s speech was predictably stagey.

I looked for David as Sergi started his talk, his devoted listeners hanging on every word. And no one was more attentive than David, his most loyal fan, who I found standing at the corner of the stage.

“Look sweetie, it’s Sergi.” He giggled like a proud mother at a first dance recital. He was so proud of his conceited brother that I decided not to tell him about our conversation. He did not see him as I did, he never would. David and I had exchanged fluids. As had they. But they were flesh and blood. This was a battle between Sergi and me.

So I just stood there, next to David, and imagined Sergi naked, jerking off, coming pathetically into his hand, watching us. I imagined me sucking his oversexed sanguine cock with bravado. I couldn’t deny the fact I found him attractive. I imagined David walking in on us fucking secretly in the marbled men’s toilet of the Ritz, staring at us with repugnance and utter joy.

When the open bar at the Ritz closed, the three of us left with a large pack of horny literary alcoholics trailing behind us. They were middle-aged and preppy, sputtering vulgarities at the end of every sentence.

On the way out, Sergi swiped two long-stemmed roses from the Ritz’s vases and presented them to David and me. “To my favourite lovers on Sant Jordi,” was all he said before doing a disappearing act into the crowd behind us. I caught his sleazy double meaning. We flooded the streets with a group of about fifteen, half of whom, it seemed, had slept with either David or Sergi (or both) at one point or another. The babbling women were eager to share their nights of as phyxiating surrender to the Canettis’ charm with me. The men were more reserved, but they eyed me like a woman would her ex’s new conquest.

Then, without warning, David let go of my hand and clasped his rose between his teeth to jump into a comical flamenco dance in the middle of the street. My pulse raced, and I dropped Sergi’s rose to the ground, letting it slip naturally from my hands. Then I flicked my cigarette butt at it. Our group shouted oles, and some joined him, while Sergi and I stood back and watched. He looked on with feigned amusement. I knew that he had watched me drop the rose. I clapped harder, faster, as David stomped furiously for his finale. Sergi burned holes through my suit with his eyes all the while.

We moved our parade to the next place. We drank rounds of whiskey at tavern after tavern as we walked from the architecturally breath taking streets of upper Gracia to the piss holes of lower Barrio Gotico. The night’s path paralleled my degenerative transformation into a walking oral fixation. I chain-smoked, accepted drinks from strangers, chatted up the group, and made out with David wherever I could. I was mad with the new-found freedom of Barcelona’s street life and being surrounded by people who didn’t know me. I felt grotesquely alive.

Sergi never strayed too far away from David and me. But he avoided talking to me alone at the bars. He liked standing next to me silently, making me uneasy. I heard him breathing. I could smell his odour of perspiring figs as he’d rub his pelvis as close to my body as possible when we were standing together cramped in a group.

He also enjoyed interrupting me. I was commenting on how much I liked Spanish writer Javier Marias’ long run-on sentences and closeted narrator to an editor couple in our group when Sergi cut me off in mid-sentence. He said that Americans couldn’t possibly understand Marias’ genius. He liked attacking Americans’ ignorance of foreign literature, making it clear that when he said “Americans”, he meant me. He carried on and on, in love with the sound of his voice. But I was a snake as slick as he. When he finished, I asked him if he had been able to find an American publisher yet to translate his books into English. He smiled, his eyes said touche. But I could tell he was annoyed. He said that he hadn’t found a publisher. I gave him my sympathies, excusing myself to find David.

Around 3 a.m., I opened my eyes in the midst of a room-spinning kiss with David and saw Sergi standing behind him, looking me directly in the eye. We were at a dive bar called Kentucky, and the group was down to a total of five, including the Canettis and me. Testing how far Sergi would go to follow us, I dragged a very drunk David to a dark corner of the bar by the bathrooms.

I had never seen him so wasted. The night’s tension of having me and Sergi in a room together had driven him to it. I had watched him drink whiskey after whiskey to keep up with Sergi. But his body weight could never match his brother’s. So as David got sloppier and sloppier, Sergi appeared in complete and eerie control.

David had asked me repeatedly throughout the night if I was happy, if I liked Sergi, and if we could all be friends. I lied and said yes to all his questions, assuaging his doubts. Standing by the bath rooms, he swayed like a palm tree at the mercy of a Caribbean windstorm. I held him still.

“Let’s go,” I said. “Let’s put you to bed.”

“No, I’m fine. Just touch me.”

I pressed my body against his; I wanted him to feel my breasts. I began chewing on his ear and rubbing his cock over his trousers. And just as I suspected he would, Sergi appeared and leaned himself up against the wall in front of us. He was our one-member audience, standing in between two doors with the male and female gender symbols on them.

David’s eyes were shut tight in ecstasy. I elongated my tongue, showing Sergi how long I could stretch it out into David’s ear. I was waiting for some kind of response from Sergi. He watched without expression. It drove me mad.

David opened his eyes slowly. He saw Sergi and calmly asked, “Hey, man, what’s up?”

“I need another drink. Do you have any cash?” Sergi asked, balancing open a sheet of rolling paper and sprinkling in the loose to bacco.

“We’ll be right there,” David said, finding my hands so I’d continue.

Sergi licked the cigarette shut, exposing a long pink tongue. Then he nodded and took his time walking away. I punched David in the arm, disgusted by his passiveness.

“What?” he said.

“You’re going to fucking just let him interrupt us?”

He looked at me with eyes as glazed as glass marbles and began rubbing my crotch. He pushed the side of his hand in the crease of my pussy, calming me in an instant.

“Do you like it when I do this to you?”

I pushed his hand away. “We gotta go, remember?” I said. “Sergi needs his bottle.”

The bar was getting ready to shut down as we went out into the main room to look for Sergi. The other couple had gone home at this point, and we found Sergi standing outside talking to a sweet-looking woman with long black curls. We waited for him to finish and when he said goodbye to her, she looked very disappointed. I pitied her.

Sergi’s hands were tucked into the pockets of his blazer, his hair pulled back now into a messy stump of a ponytail. With his head tilted to the side he looked directly at me, ignoring David. “Shall we continue this journey?”

My anger neutralized with the thought of another drink and I had liked the tone that Sergi had addressed me with. “Sure,” I said nonchalantly, and we began to walk towards some underground after-hours bar that both he and David seemed to know.

It was just the three of us now. A trio, a tribe, a tribu. Primitive cultures knew that when there were more than two people to a group, a new set of laws had to be established to maintain order.

Nobody was walking a straight line any more. Neither was the rest of Barcelona at that time of night. David was sputtering nonsensicalities about the dragon and Sant Jordi that made us laugh. We were some how bonding over David’s amateurish inebriation and our love for him.

I kept David’s step steady with my arm as Sergi led the way to the next whiskey bar. David belted out the lyrics to an old Joy Division song in his bad British English. And I joined in. We were happy as could be.

We turned on to a dingy street in el Raval lined with African prostitutes giving us some serious come-hither looks. Sergi knocked on a nondescript rounded wooden door and a man popped his head out. After Sergi gave him some mumbled password, we were let into a cavelike lair blasting eerie opera music below. We ordered some Scotch, smoked the hashish that was passed to us, and all fell mute.

Sergi eventually left us to go wander in the back room while David and I zoned out to the music and to rubbing the skin on each other’s arms.

Time went by; I can’t say how much but I had the urge to pee and excused myself. As I walked to the back, I remember noticing that I was the only woman in the place. I climbed some rickety spiral stairs to an upper room with a cheap exposed red light bulb hanging in its corridor. Before I opened the door where the toilet was, I saw two men embracing, deep in a hungry kiss, leaning against the communal sink. The men hadn’t sensed me there. But from the blazer and small ponytail, dark designer blue jeans, fine shoes, I knew it was Sergi.

I studied them, entranced by the forcefulness of the kiss. The other man was Latino looking, black shiny straight hair, olive skin, a long mestizo nose that thickened at the base and led into full bitable lips that Sergi was devouring. The other man noticed me but didn’t stop what he was doing; he couldn’t. Sergi now had his hand on top of the man’s head and right shoulder, lowering him down to exactly where he wanted him. I suddenly thought I could do better and was stunned to feel myself turned on. Sergi was in total control. I backed out of the hallway as fast as I could. Forewent the peeing.

I told David the bathroom was broken and that we had to go. He asked if I had seen Sergi, and I told him he’d probably gone home already. It was around 5 a.m. and the streets were still littered with drunken Euro hipsters. We found a dark alleyway to piss in by some old Gothic church. David took it out and aimed at the wall beside me as I squatted and pushed my crotch out towards the wall, spreading my legs so the urine wouldn’t slide under my shoes.

“So I saw Sergi sucking face with some guy at the bar,” I said from below, getting up to zip myself up. I was surprised by how upset I felt again. “Sergi’s a full-fledged bisexual, huh? Just like Hadrian, the Roman emperor.”

“No he just fucks around occasionally,” David said.

“Then you could say he’s gay then?”

“The man is not gay, Anna. He loves women. He just likes flesh. Flesh is flesh, right?”

“Maybe it’s more like he’ll fuck anything that moves, including his own brother,” I shot back.

I wanted to hit him from frustration. I wanted to ask him if he fucked men on the side. But I refrained. Then he grabbed me by the hips and drew me closer.

“Stop it, Anna. Don’t be mad at me, but he told me he wants to sleep with you.”

I could tell David was turned on, his hands caressing my ass, his pupils huge in the night’s fading moonlight.

“And what did you say?”

“I told him to go to hell and that I’d never let him. He found you fascinating. What did you think of him?”

“Honestly, I think he’s an asshole.”

“No, I think you like him,” he drawled drunkenly, his hands had moved to the sides of my breasts.

“No I don’t, David.” But I wasn’t so sure.

“Yes, you do, all the girls do. But he can’t have you, you’re mine.” He licked my neck.

“And he can’t have you, either, you bastard,” I said, wanting to possess him, completely.

Then a German couple walked in on us and kindly asked for directions.

We walked home in silence, still floating on a cloud of hashish. We passed minivans stocked with hoards of red roses and empty tables waiting for the books that would be displayed and bought to morrow by idealistic, unassuming women for their seemingly perfect, Spanish men.

Our bedroom was encased by the purple glow of dawn when I awoke. We had been asleep for a half-hour, maybe a deep ten minutes, when I heard Sergi’s footsteps in the hallway coming in the front door. I couldn’t tell if he was alone or if he had brought some one back. Aroused instantly by his presence, I sat up in bed, fully awake, and listened.

I imagined him smelling like the cheap cologne and soilings of that man from the bar. I lay back down, with a desire to touch myself as David snored peacefully beside me. I threw the white sheet off David and reached for his cock, trying to waken him with my touch. Now I really needed him to enter me, fuck me hard, fuck me loud. I wanted Sergi to hear it all.

David let out a cranky moan as I planted my face between his legs, lifted him up from his buttocks, like a mother lifting her child to change him. Trailing his hair-lined stretch from anus to testicles with my tongue, I took his flaccid cock in my mouth and it came to life, even before David fully came to.

“What are you doing?” he asked. Propping himself up on his el bows, blinking hard. He was startled, his heart beating fast. I didn’t answer; enthralled on getting him off, I held on with my mouth, kissing, sucking as loudly as I could.

There was no sound coming from the hallway or from any part of the apartment any more. The house was frozen in screaming silence aside from my mouth’s wet popping sounds and David’s gentle moaning. He was lying down again, tossing his head from side to side.

“God, I love you,” he said softly. And I loved him too. But maybe I hated him more right now for making me feel so vulnerable. I wanted to hurt him, to hit him. So I did. I sat on top of him and slapped his face. It was harder than I meant to. He shot up like an alarm clock had gone off under him.

I pushed him back down and laughed loudly. I splayed his arms out like Jesus on the Cross and bit his neck hard, wanting to leave my marks on him for everyone to see.

“Stop it” he said. “That hurts.”

And he looked hurt. I didn’t feel like comforting him. “Wake up and fuck me then,” I said. I got on all fours and lifted my ass to him. He obeyed like I knew he would. He licked my ass and stuck his fingers in my swelling cunt.

“Fuck me, David,” I demanded.

He placed his delicate hands on my hips and positioned himself to carefully enter. And he pumped slowly, softly, as if he were nod ding off on a swinging hammock. I closed my eyes and moaned for him. It felt so sweet, like being rocked in a lullaby. Holding my breath, I felt the first tinglings of an orgasm.

Then I saw a pair of strong thick legs with light-brown hairs on the shapely calves and a fat, rose-coloured prick being stroked happily in my peripheral vision. I didn’t hear him enter the room, but I knew he’d come. I felt it.

I refused to look up at his face and concentrated on David inside of me instead. I wanted him to defend me, to scream for him to get out. He didn’t. Instead, Sergi sat on the edge of the bed and cupped my left breast, weighing it, massaging it, as if he were buying a cantaloupe from the Boqueria market. He was whetting his mouth, moaning, “Mmmm,” at the premonition of sweetness to come.

While Sergi concentrated on my torso, David’s pump had gotten increasingly faster and even deeper with Sergi in the room. I could feel him spasming, becoming more erratic in his thrusts. I had be come disconnected from my body. I floated to the corner of the room, took a seat, and saw it all. Sergi’s power, David’s frailty, my complete submission. My heart pounded, so did my head, my throat and my dripping cunt. Sergi stuck his hand in my mouth and I obediently sucked on his fingers. Where had those long and dirty fingers been all night? I caught whiffs of cigarette, semen and garlic.

It was all beginning to hit me hard and my entire body hot-flashed. Sensing this, Sergi ran his fingers through my short hair and clenched the taut skin on the back of my neck. Like you would a cat. David pinched my nipples and slapped my buttocks. I tingled and shivered, growing weaker and weaker with overwhelming pleasure. “Do you like us touching you?” David’s voice was close to cracking from the excitement.

I heard a yes hissing from my throat and I wasn’t sure where it had come from.

I was one of them now. Before meeting them I was woman who demanded respect. Now I’m a woman who accepts humiliation. There is a beautiful kind of strength in this kind of shame.

Sergi shoved his penis into my face. He hit my forehead, my eye lids, the bridge of my nose, with his swollen sword. He was getting back at me for the entire night, for something. Something he probably couldn’t understand himself. Then he took aim and shoved his cock to the back of my throat. I gagged and coughed, unable to lift a hand.

Still on my knees, Sergi got off the bed and went somewhere be hind David who had resumed fucking me. I hadn’t felt Sergi get on the bed with us so I figured he was standing somewhere in the room. But where?

David put his lips to my ear and whispered, “Please don’t be mad at me.”

Then, as if David had just been shot in the head, he collapsed his entire weight over the curve of my back. Straightening myself, tensing my muscles, I held him up with all my strength while Sergi let out a wail and David cursed the air. Sergi was hurting him, thrusting himself gratuitously, forcing himself into David’s small channel. Our interconnected motions awkward, stunted; like being connected to a long, thick, knotted sailor’s rope catching, bumping, and slithering up the edge of a boat.

I fought and contorted myself trying to keep David inside of me. Caught in between us, David was falling apart, on the verge of burst ing. He was snorting like Quixote’s Rocinante, shouting for God, sobbing quietly, for all of us. I joined in their guttural wails. It was the holiest and saddest of choruses. And then like a crescendoing car alarm screaming at the night, it was over.

Sergi pulled out and walked out. David fell into a ball of wasted flesh in coital position beside me. At that moment, I couldn’t imagine a greater pain than loving a weak man. He couldn’t look at me, at least not yet. Then I thought of my mother, thought of what she would think, if anything as terrible had ever happened to her in her life.

I craved solitude and began sliding my body off the edge of the bed. My knees cracked, my joints ached. I reached for my pants suit lying in two disjointed pieces on the floor. I grabbed my shoes, my bag, and walked barefoot out of the room, down the swirling corridor of mosaic tiles, past Sergi’s room with its door closed, and out the front door, leaving them alone in their stifling silence. My heart pounded loudly in my ears.

As I stepped out of the elevator and on to the shaded entrance of La India’s outer lobby, I remember thinking that I didn’t feel a single emotion. Neither happy nor sad. But I must have been wearing some kind of face, because a straight line of cheery tourists slowed down to look at me as they passed. I rummaged through my bag and found a last bent cigarette. I gave it one puff, looked right back at their innocent sun-blotched faces and had the urge to vomit.

Turning the corner off Carrer de Carme, I let it all out. The en tire night’s bile released on to the grey, rounded-stone streets of this Iberian port city that had witnessed so many centuries of misery.

I hung my head down for a while and watched the last string of saliva detach itself from my mouth. Holding myself up with one hand on the stone wall before me, I found its coldness provided a sobering effect. I wiped my chin with my sleeve and slicked my hair back from my face. As I straightened myself up, an old and squat Catalan couple walked by me, cautiously observing me with two sets of beady brown eyes. There was a rose in her hand and a book tucked safely under his left arm.

It was Diada de Sant Jordi. The sun felt strong. It’s nice to be warm when you’re feeling cold. I decided I would walk to las Ramblas and browse all those books I had yet to read. Buy a book, maybe two, maybe three. It was the new beginning I had wanted, though it was a beginning to an end. But I was good at endings.

Then a song popped into my head. It was a song that used to make my mother cry whenever she heard it in passing. “Perfidia”, Treachery, was its name. La perfidia de tu amor.

There was no turning back. Barcelona’s morning sky was the steeliest of blues.