But Álvaro should understand the situation better than any of them: he was as much a part of the business as I was (he who was like a son to my father, the son he inherited from his best friend) or as I once was, he can hardly complain about the death of a limb when the body has died. The firm collapsed on the very same day for him as it did for me, not a day sooner, I waived all privileges. The same day and the same hour for the carpenter’s actual son and for the guy who was like a son to the carpenter. I didn’t jump overboard and start swimming to see if I could reach the beach a minute before him. I stood on the deck until the very last moment so that we would go down together. If the business goes under, then so do we. I go under and Álvaro goes under. We go under together. That’s how it is. The others, the ones I took on more recently — Joaquín, as I say, is the exception, a very strange fish indeed, a complete mystery, who knows what lies behind that eternal smile of his? — the others were merely birds pecking at the elephant’s fleas, despite Álvaro’s alarm when he saw how skilled Jorge was. The business consisted of my father, Álvaro and me. Isn’t that right? We don’t exploit anyone, we just do our work, isn’t that so, my friend? It doesn’t matter that Álvaro has grown-up children and even a few grandchildren and has paid off his mortgage. Losing his dream of an RV is not so very grave either. They can use the car they’ve always used. A seven- or eight-year-old Renault Laguna, which he bought, apparently, because the magazines said it was the safest car on the market, and Álvaro’s very keen on safety. It’s not bad at all, it’s perfectly fine. If he’s looked after it — and I know he takes more care of it than he does of his wife, checking it, studying it, cleaning and caressing it — it could last him another ten years. And I think his wife has a car too, because she drives to work. He’ll get two years’ unemployment benefits too. That’s not bad at all. Two years. Many people would happily sign up to a guarantee that they’d have that much time in the world. Besides, his wife has worked for years at Mercadona, which is about the securest job you can get at the moment, and even though she’s been off sick lately because of depression — or has been suffering from depression after being diagnosed with heart disease or one of those rare illnesses they diagnose people with nowadays — she’ll still get disability. I know it’s not the same thing, of course it isn’t, but if they’ve been left jobless, so have I, and it’s far worse for me, because the workshop and the machines no longer belong to me, not a single one of the planks in the stores — which have presumably all now been impounded — is mine. Those cunts don’t yet know that even the bed I sleep in is no longer mine, not even the showerhead I use when I wash my Dad. My account books have been impounded. I got so tired of creditors ringing me up, I decided to rip out the landline and throw my cell in the lagoon — there’s no point going through the rigmarole of canceling my account — and thus I have joined the long list of the lagoon’s destroyers and contaminators. Yet another one. Criminals throw incriminating weapons into the marshy pools; recently, acting on a tip, the police dragged one of the lagoons and found a veritable arsenal, I read about it in the local newspaper, dozens of guns with their serial numbers erased and the barrels sawn off, thus removing all the bore marks, which doubtless correspond to bullets found in bodies dumped on garbage heaps, on empty building sites, in the trunks of cars or abandoned on the sidewalk or inside a bank after a robbery; police divers even found a car submerged beneath the water, it’s really nothing new: years ago, Bernal used to off-load asphalt roofing felt into the lagoon. But what was I saying, ah, yes, the telephone has drowned, the workshop is shut, the bank account is frozen, the Toyota will be clamped by the local authorities in a couple of weeks’ time, because that’s the deadline for me to hand over all the relevant papers to the judge (not that I’ll do that, no, I won’t be giving the incumbent of Court Number Two in Misent that particular pleasure) and as for the house, there’s a foreclosure notice that will come into force in a month: they’ll confiscate all the furniture, thus adding to the problems at the court warehouse, which, in this, the age of foreclosures and evictions, is already full to bursting. They’ve run out of space for all the confiscated electronics, furniture, machines and tools, for the old cars that are no use to anyone, but that have been seized simply to comply with a court order, whose sole aim is to punish the owners for having failed to keep up with their mortgage repayments. There just isn’t room for all those cars, and so they stay out in the street, slowly falling to pieces, getting covered in dust and rust, and at the mercy of predatory scrap merchants. What matters is ensuring that the owner is well and truly screwed. Every now and then, auctions are organized to try and get rid of some of that junk, but even auction vultures aren’t keen to take on those particular bargains: apartments, mattresses, computers, cars with four or five thousand miles on the odometer. What had once seemed so necessary is now excess to requirements. Yes, the courts will take everything, imposing a court order that my brother and sister will challenge as soon as they find out that my father’s ghost continued to sign checks, guarantees and loans right up until his final moments. O to be a fly on the wall when they realize there’s nothing left, because, in order to get the necessary loans that would allow me to take on the extra work for Pedrós, I forged my father’s signature with, as my accomplice, the bank manager, the one who preceded the Secular Pear, and into whose office I dragged the old man, who was clearly in no fit state to sign anything. It cost me a fat bribe, a fancy dinner and a couple of bottles of French white and Spanish red. We sat in the manager’s office with my tamagotchi father, whose signature I forged several times, signatures that appeared on every page of every contract, copies and all, as well as I don’t know how many other documents and checks. I can imagine my sister Carmen’s fury when she finds out, although, if she and my brother have any sense and get themselves a good lawyer and an expert to certify that the signatures are forgeries, and, above all, if they don’t get flustered or lose their heads, they just might win the case. And then they would be far better off than me, because I am about to abandon them, not in order to swim to shore from the sinking ship, nor even to have the satisfaction of saying “fuck you.” They are only a small part of the theatrical company I’m bidding farewell to, because that’s what’s required by the particular play my father and I are performing. They’re welcome to their unemployment benefits or, indeed, their tantrums at the lack of them or, in the case of my brother and sister, their properties, always assuming they can wrench them from the bank’s greedy grasp. My future would be a pension, of which I’d only be able to hang on to six or seven hundred euros, because anything above that would have to go to slowly reducing a debt that could never be paid off in a hundred years, and a second count, as the judges say in their summings-up, of forgery, fraud, misappropriation of funds, or whichever term the penal code would use to describe what I’ve done — I didn’t bother to consult it before forging all those signatures — and a subsequent prison sentence. And I really don’t see myself doing time in the can at my age: in winter, in Fontcalent prison, you could probably get by, a bit of sun warming the exercise yard and a couple of blankets to keep you snug at night, but in summer, it must be unbearable, a frying pan where you fry in your own fat. Álvaro’s fucked, but not because of my finaglings or my failures. He gambled his life away just as I did, no, he’s fucked because his sole ambition in life was to stay in a stuck-in-the-mud, dead-end carpentry workshop for more than forty years. Can a lazy bastard also be a hard worker? Álvaro is living proof. Slogging away out of sheer idleness and indifference, because it’s easier, because you can’t be bothered to walk a hundred feet to find yourself another more instructive, more exciting job, with more prospects and possibly better pay. Such workers used to be described as model employees, and they’d be presented with a gold-plated medal on the day they retired: fifty years in the same company and what do you get? A ribbon round your neck and a medal. Fantastic. An idler who has sat in the same chair or stood at the same machine for fifty years. Now it’s mobility that gets rewarded. Loyalty is seen as lethargy, a lack of get-up-and-go; you get brownie points for betraying your various bosses, and with each new betrayal comes more money and promotion. Ahmed and Jorge have two quiet years ahead of them in which to rethink their lives, I don’t know what Joaquín’s situation is, whether he still has some unemployment benefits owing to him from previous jobs, and then there’s always child benefits, worth four hundred or so euros for anyone who’s been long-term unemployed and so is no longer eligible for unemployment benefits, and then there are the short-term contracts given out by the town council to do cleaning, gardening — which is something he knows about — or bricklaying. Julio won’t have that possibility, but that’s his fault for choosing to work illegally, because it suited him to receive unemployment benefits and child benefits or help for the long-term unemployed on top of his wages, which meant that he could easily afford his rent or his mortgage or whatever; I don’t honestly know what his situation is and, frankly, I don’t care. At least he has youth and time on his side. I’d happily swap places with him. No question. His future for mine. It’s a deal. I hear them talking about their lives, telling me about their dreams, as if I were a wizard who could grant their every wish, a fairy godmother with a magic wand capable of turning pumpkins into golden carriages. You know, Don Esteban, last Sunday, after my husband hadn’t even bothered to come home the previous night, I took my two kids to the park, and there beneath the clear blue sky, I sat listening to the band and watching my kids playing on the swings and the slides and in one of those rope maze things, and I was thinking if only I could have been born in a place where you could just sit and listen to a band on a Sunday morning and watch your children playing, rather than having to pack up and leave everything behind. I thought, too, that I didn’t really need him, Wilson, I mean; God knows where he’d got to, because he was out all Saturday night and didn’t come home until Monday. Just me on my own, listening to the music and with my kids there with me. Don’t cry, Liliana, because when you cry, I