* * *
Marcia Parini is crying beside the bed at the prestigious psychiatric center for children where her daughter Valentina is sleeping with white plastic straps around her wrists and ankles and a drip delivering sedatives into a vein of her arm. She cries and dries her tears with a wrinkled handkerchief and once in a while holds her daughter's inert hand. A nurse with a bruise on her face and her arm in a sling comes in to check the reading on the ECG machine. Marcia looks up at the nurse with a troubled face.
“Oh, for God's sake,” says Marcia to the bruised nurse. “You have to give me your medical bill.” She shakes her head sadly. “I never imagined the poor little thing was so strong.”
The nurse smiles weakly.
“We're insured against patient attacks,” she says. “It's one of the downsides of the job.” She pauses and looks at Valentina with her eyes gathered together. “Does her father know she's here?”
Marcia dries her tears with her wrinkled handkerchief.
“Her father's in Uruguay,” she says. “Anyway, Tina doesn't get along with him.”
The nurse nods. There is a moment of silence punctuated by the barely audible beep of the ECG machine.
“We have a coffee machine on this floor,” says the nurse kindly. “If you want we can go have some breakfast together. After all, it is Christmas, isn't it?”
Marcia Parini smiles and nods as she blows her nose into her wrinkled handkerchief. Marcia and the nurse leave the room.
In her bed in the children's hospital, surrounded by machines and white furnishings, Valentina Parini opens her eyes suddenly. Her pupils dilate and begin the trembling, rough dance of sleep's rapid eye movement phase.
CHAPTER 31. The Down With The Sun Dream
Lucas Giraut lifts his head, trying to get his bearings on the deserted, wind-swept avenue that Tottenham Court Road seems to have become. Not a neon sign as far as the eye can see. No rivers of shoppers with their plastic bags from department stores and no giant West End theater marquees. Lucas Giraut takes refuge in a doorway and lifts an arm to protect his face from the gale winds. There may be someone nailed to the Astoria's door. Lucas doesn't want to get closer to check. The wind drags dried leaves and tattered newspapers. Lucas catches one in flight. He reads the date: August 7, 1972. He starts to count on his fingers. With a frown. It's really amazing how many pieces of newspaper are flying along Tottenham Court Road.
Three blocks farther up, he arrives at the pub he has to go to following the internal logic of the Filial Down With The Sun Dream. It isn't hard to find: above the pub, tied to the roof of the building and floating in the night sky, is an immense hot air balloon in the shape of a pig. With pig ears and a pig tail. And with an inscription on the side in those cloudlike letters that were popular in the early seventies. It reads: “WELCOME TO THE DOWN WITH THE SUN DREAM.” Giraut shakes off the pieces of newspaper stuck to his back and shoulders and pushes the pub door open.
Inside the pub it's warm and full of people, and yet no one is speaking. Everyone is silent. The faces that stare at Lucas Giraut when he enters are terrified faces.
“In the back room, darling,” says a blonde on the other side of the bar who looks terrified and wears a T-shirt advertising the Filial Down With The Sun Dream.
Lucas Giraut thanks her for the information with a half smile and continues walking among the crowd of fearful faces.
“In the back room, buddy,” says a guy smoking a pipe.
Lucas Giraut enters the back room and looks at the three official members of the Down With The Sun Society. They're cheerfully occupying a round table filled with empty pint glasses, on which a shockingly young and not yet bald Bocanegra has just put down four full pints of beer. Lucas looks at Bocanegra. Then he looks at Koldo Cruz. Then he looks at his father. Finally he looks at the fourth figure seated at the table. The fourth figure has no face. His entire body is wrapped in bandages like those Egyptian mummies in old horror movies that come back to life. The bandages are stained with blood in various spots. On the wrists and the ribs and the forehead. Neither its height nor the configuration of its limbs is particularly human. There are two yellow lights where there should be eyes, which can be faintly seen through the bandages.
“David Gilmour's over the hill,” Bocanegra is saying as he puts the beers on the table and sits between Cruz and Lucas's father. “I don't think the band will last another year. I mean, let's be serious. Roger Waters is Pink Floyd. They're synonymous.” He pauses. He looks in the direction that his fellow members of the Down With The Sun Society are looking and notices Lucas, standing in front of the table. “Ah, Lucas! You're late. We should have toasted to our invisible house twenty minutes ago.”
Lucas Giraut sits on the paisley sofa where the club members are seated and takes the pint of beer that someone offers him. The five figures around the table bring their pints together and all take swigs before putting them back down on the table's wooden surface. Lucas looks around him. The three members of the Down With The Sun Society have long, tangled hair and denim jackets over paisley shirts. There are eight necklaces among the three of them. Seated beside him on the paisley sofa, Koldo Cruz holds a joint between his index finger and thumb and is looking at it with a lethargic smile. Without a metal plate on his right temple. Without a patch covering his right eye. With glitter sprinkled over his face. None of the three members of the club seem older than twenty-five.
“The invisible house is what paid for this trip,” explains Lorenzo Giraut. Looking at his son with a kind smile. Lorenzo Giraut's arm is resting on the shoulders of the inhumanly tall figure covered in bloody bandages the way young men lean on their girlfriends' shoulders. “Which isn't really an invisible house. It's just a house that doesn't exist. We sold a house that doesn't exist. That is how the Down With The Sun Society was born. We sold an invisible house and took a vacation to London with the money.”
Lucas recognizes something of his own vaguely namby-pamby seriousness in the way his father talks. That sort of namby-pamby seriousness that often causes people to get easily distracted and stop listening. Lucas changes position on the sofa with a pensive face and his feet splash in an enormous puddle that he could swear wasn't there a moment ago. He examines the floor planks near their table. Obviously there must be a pipe broken somewhere in the bar, because water is coming from somewhere and flooding the room. Koldo Cruz has taken a bag of marijuana out of one of the inside pockets of his denim jacket and is rolling another joint with the same lethargic face. Bocanegra leans in toward Lucas to whisper in his ear.
“Don't even ask.” He points with his pint of beer to the figure covered in bloody bandages. “We don't talk about that at this table.”
“Is that why everyone's so quiet?” Lucas Giraut looks at Bocanegra, who has abruptly moved away and now seems to be acting like he hadn't said anything, his eyes fixed on the legs of some terrified-looking girls at the next table. “Is that why it looks like everyone is afraid? Because of this…? Because of the one with the bandages?”
“Listen.” Lorenzo Giraut stops kissing the bloody cheek of the bandaged figure and looks at his son with a namby-pamby serious expression. “You're here for a reason. This is the night it all began. And not only for obvious reasons. This is the real beginning of the story. If you want to understand it, pay attention. What happens between us three tonight is the real beginning of everything.”