Midnight arrives. The countdown begins at the tables to either side, there are arguments over who has the exact time, one taps the glass of his wristwatch with an index finger, another shakes his mobile as if it were a rattle. The waiters, some Chinese, some of Hispanic descent, hand out plastic flutes among the tables. You can see the chips in them; they aren’t new, they’ve been used for some other celebration, last Christmas or a birthday party. We make a toast. Iris and I with our extremely light glasses, Simón with his fist clenched. But I can’t drink much, the champagne is acidic, like old-fashioned cough syrup. Either it’s really bad or I’m just not used to drinking and it’s a matter of taste.
Surprise, says Iris and takes a bag containing two packages out from beneath her chair. One long and curved, for Simón, the other small and narrow, for me. We unwrap them at the same time: for me, a fan with dragons on it, for Simón, amazed, the samurai sword from the Chinese shop. Thanks, I say, and it’s inevitable that I feel inadequate. It didn’t occur to me to buy any presents, not that anyone is going to reproach me for it.
After the toast, there’s a commotion. People are abandoning their tables and congregating by the entrance, some out of anxiety, others just following the crowd. The door becomes a bottleneck. Although my plan is to stay where I am and watch through the window, Iris and Simón force me to get up. The fireworks, Iris chides me. Sure enough, the restaurant staff have prepared a small fireworks display that puts a silly smile on every face.
Once the excitement is over, after the arsenal of rockets brought out by one of the Chinese men, the eldest, who spent all night behind the till, everyone apart from the teenagers and the foreigners sits down again. Simón stays outside, on the window sill, back leaning against the glass, legs dangling. Another bottle of white wine and I’m not sure whether it’s the second or the third. In her drunkenness, Iris passes from euphoria to melancholy in minutes. First she tells me she met a man online. A systems analyst. A strange guy, solitary type, with a moustache. They saw each other once, they went to the cinema, then to a motel, says Iris and in her mouth the word motel sounds deep and serious, like a mythological character. When they were in the room she asked him to take a shower and the guy slipped getting out of the bath and split his septum on the towel rail. He spent the rest of the night with a piece of toilet paper stuck in his nose to stop it bleeding. They slept together that once and never called each other again. Then her tone changes and she returns to telling me more details about the story I heard the first day, how she met Draco, what a great time they had over there in spite of everything, how he convinced her to come here, how difficult it was at the start, the uncle and the tyre business, the way he was gripped by racehorse madness, the fights and the separation. The whole time, it looks as though she’s going to cry but she never cries, it’s deeper than that; at times the sadness turns to hate and she looks like she’s on the verge of throwing a chair across the room. Until the calm arrives and it’s all held back in her watery eyes.
Ok, I say before she loses it, it’s an old story, it’s in the past. My words must have some effect because she proposes another toast. We drink. Iris is pensive, gazing outside, with the whistle of the last rockets in the background. And what about you, she throws at me suddenly, coming off her cloud, do you fancy anyone? I shake my head and smile; she does too, as if saying she doesn’t believe me at all.
On the way out of the restaurant, Iris wants to walk me to my building. I pick Simón up when he starts dozing off after ten steps. We take it in turns to carry him, one block each. On the way, at corners, in front of bars, in the square where the nativity scene was, people are getting together, beeping horns, two men are shouting from one car to another, their heads sticking out. Come here and say that to my face, arsehole, shouts one who is driving in a Father Christmas costume. The other replies by threatening him with a fist. The light turns to green and they both shoot off at the same time. I can’t work out whether they were genuine insults.
Three blocks further on we cross the avenue and turn down a passageway the celebrations haven’t reached. No noise, no shouts, no firecrackers. Because Iris can barely stand, it’s me who ends up carrying Simón most of the way, and if at first it feels like he’ll break my back, I adapt as we go and that annoying kick between the ribs becomes just another part of my body. Like everything, once the novelty has passed, things stop hurting or making you happy.
At one point, Iris stops short, using a tree trunk to prop herself up, she doubles over, mouth open, as if she’s going to vomit but she doesn’t. She takes a deep breath, rearranges herself and as she starts walking says: She won’t be able to look after him any more. She says it like that, in the third person, as if she were talking about someone else. Five disconcerting seconds before she explains. She’s been offered shifts at the zoo, manning the cash desk for the sea-lion show in the afternoons. I won’t be able to look after the boy any more, she says and stumbles on a broken paving stone. She looks at me askance, gauging my reaction. She’s going to work ten- or eleven-hour shifts, depending on the day. It seems like a lot to me, but I say nothing, all the same she justifies herself. She says she wants to buy a plane ticket so her father can come and visit her. She makes some calculations, babbling figures: in five months she’ll have enough to pay for the trip. I tell her I think it’s really great, not to worry. The thing is that from the second of January, I won’t be able to count on her any more. I’m sorry, she says, and starts crying all of a sudden, like a child, not because of this, of course, but because of so many other things I couldn’t even begin to suspect. With Simón on my back, I can’t hug her as I would have liked to. I pat her on the back, she leans her head against my free shoulder and the tears fall harder.
The building’s entrance is occupied by merrymakers. Iris stays at the fringes, she wants nothing to do with it. I tell her to wait for me a moment, I’ll take Simón to bed and walk with her for a few blocks. She shakes her head: No, no, no, she says, I’m fine. I insist: I’ll be back in a minute. Entering el Buti, there’s a commotion in the corridor, I push my way through carrying Simón. Tosca’s door is open, I try to pass undetected but if she can’t see me, she can smell me. Come in, girl, she murmurs. I’m about to feign deafness but somehow I can’t and I go back. I lean in, wave with my free hand and show her Simón sleeping on my back. Put him to bed here, come and drink a toast, girl, she insists. Later, later, I promise. On the staircase I bump into some familiar faces, we exchange silent greetings, without stopping. Canetti too, who invites me into his flat for a drink. I’ve got chilled cider, he says quietly, so as not to wake Simón. I tell him maybe later.
When I finally put Simón to bed and open the window to let in a little air, I remember Iris. I go downstairs quickly, dodging bodies. I walk to the corner, nothing, not a trace. I wait for a while in case she comes back, unable to decide whether to follow her steps back to the Fénix. In the end, neither happens. Back in el Buti, I linger at Tosca’s; she’s very animated, with a bottle of spumante on the desk. She pours me some, we clink glasses: You think I’ll make it to the end of the year, girl? Let’s bet on it. And Benito? I ask. He’s with his father’s family, that’s how it is every Christmas. It’s going to be a struggle to get out of here, she doesn’t want to be left alone. To keep me there she constantly refills my glass with that delicious wine. A touch more? And she talks ceaselessly. She also sings opera arias, a trio of tarantellas and the Italian national anthem.