Lucía rests her elbows on the counter and rubs her temples with her fingertips.
Hearing a screeching of brakes outside the hotel entrance, she turns around. A black man, well over six-and-a-half feet tall and with his leg in a plaster cast, gets out of a Mercedes and chucks the car keys at the chest of the valet, a skinny boy with a cap perched on top of his head. He then hobbles into the lobby on his crutches and calls the lift.
‘Ouch,’ complains Lucía. Tomás is biting her thigh. It’s something he does to get her attention. ‘Isn’t he a bit old to be doing that?’ Pablo said to her a few months earlier. ‘Is there an age for doing that?’ she replied. Ending that dialogue and starting another, he asks: ‘Aren’t our kids a bit weird?’
‘Give it here,’ says Lucía, snatching the voucher from the guy on reception. She makes it clear that she’ll be back. If they haven’t cleared that seaweed in half an hour – she waggles a finger at him – she’ll be back.
Rosa’s mouth is stuffed full of cubes of cold, raw tuna.
‘You can’t eat all that, you’ll get a sore tummy,’ Lucía says to her.
That’s unlikely: the tuna is served on platters of ice and every so often somebody emerges from the kitchen wearing a hat, gloves and apron and replaces them with fresh platters. Lucía tried it; it’s perfect. That’s why she doesn’t nag Rosa too much, although she’d like her to show some restraint. She’s already refilled her bowl twice and scoffed the whole lot as if it were cornflakes.
Tomás served himself the same as Lucía: chilled tomato soup. He’s been engrossed in his book ever since he got up that morning. ‘Do you like it more now?’ Lucía asked him a while ago. He shook his head, ‘I’m finding it increasingly flawed.’ Tomás sure knows his words. He’s a miniature adult. And he’s so similar to her that sometimes she wonders if maybe he’s some kind of sick joke, an experiment carried out by her fertility doctor: let’s implant a clone in this woman, we’ll tell her it’s her son, but really it’ll be an exact copy of her DNA. What for? For information. Science doesn’t need immediate answers, it needs only to gather information which, one day, will be used to support a theory.
‘So, what happened in your story, Tommy?’ Lucía asks him. Rosa has gone over to the dessert station. ‘Did it end with the meteorite?’
‘No.’
‘What happens next?’
‘Disintegrated Benjamin travels via fibre optics.’
‘Where does he travel to?’
Tomás frowns and is about to say something else, but a waiter interrupts. He holds out a phone to Lucía and says she has a call.
Pablo’s aunt tells her that she’s in her house.
‘You’re where?’
Pablo is fine. Well, considering the circumstances: fine.
‘When did you arrive?’
She’s left him there, in the kitchen: his torso slumped over the table, sleeping like a baby. She’s taken a shower. It’s a hot day. She’s borrowed some flip-flops; she’s not sure whose they are. In the rush to leave her house, she left hers behind.
‘Yesterday,’ she replies, ‘I arrived yesterday.’
Pablo had called her on the phone. How long had it been since he’d called her? Months. That’s why she thought he might need her help, even though he didn’t ask her directly. When Pablo told her that she and the kids weren’t there, she got worried. But, well, now she was there to look after him. There was a pause, which Lucía didn’t fill.
‘So, you’re in Miami?’ says Lety. ‘How lovely; that’s great. Is it hot there?’
‘No,’ says Lucía.
The air is roasting. She’s gone out onto the terrace of the restaurant so she can talk out of earshot of the children.
She went to the farmers’ market, Lety tells her. She’ll leave the fridge full of nice healthy food.
‘What happened, Lucy?’ she asks then. Lucía hears her turn on a tap, the sound of running water.
‘What happened with what?’ says Lucía.
‘With Pablo,’ says Lety. ‘A heart attack is a serious matter.’
‘It wasn’t a heart attack.’
‘Oh, no? So, what was it?’
‘A warning.’
After a pause, Lety speaks again.
‘Why did you leave? Why’s he on his own?’
The Mercedes guy is sitting at a large table with some other people. They must be his family. All of them are black and are dressed in sportswear in garish colours. They are taking photos of each other with their phones and then showing one another. There’s a baby a few months old being passed from one person to the next. It’s wearing an electric blue bodysuit with silver letters on the chest that read: Number One.
The heat is too much for her. She sits down at an empty table with four chairs around it. Her reflection in the glass doors makes her feel sad: she needs to go to the hairdresser to get her greys done. When she sees other women her age, they look old to her, because they are old. But she rarely thinks of herself as part of that group. Beyond her reflection, she can just make out Tomás and Rosa tucking into a plate of cheesecake.
‘Lucy?’ Lety says.
She tells Lety she has to go, that the children are on their own, and that she’d better talk to Pablo, he can explain things to her. She hangs up without saying goodbye. She stands up and leans against the balcony railing. Below is the swimming pool. A Russian couple are sunbathing on a family-sized rattan lounger. She’s wearing a hot pink diamante bikini and he’s in tight black speedos and tiny mirrored sunglasses. Their three blond children are splashing around in the water with a woman who must be their grandmother – she has the same face as the mother, but it has drooped, a strong gust of wind has blown it downwards. The beach is now clear. So is the sky. No seaweed, no clouds. Beach umbrellas and loungers lined up in rows facing out to sea.
5
The night of the barbecue at Gonzalo and Elisa’s was a release for Pablo; he unclogged a blocked pipe. That was how he could explain it to himself, and to Lucía, if she gave him the chance. The Argentinians brought litres of wine, cocaine and a desire to party like he’d never seen before. Gonzalo and Elisa were fairly dull: their barbecues were usually mild, meagre affairs, with wine in moderation. Elisa was in good shape; she taught yoga classes. Lucía attended her classes for a while, which essentially enabled her to learn to elevate her pulse using breathing techniques – ‘it cleans you from the inside, it eliminates toxins, it heals you’ – and to deepen her contempt towards that whole milieu, which she considered ‘moronic and filthy’. She complained about all the feet up in the air and the way the room filled with smelly gases: a mixture of beans and vegetables. ‘Gases don’t escape,’ she said to Pablo, ‘you either expel them or you hold them in. But she encourages everyone to let them out, feeding us some inane prattle about relaxation, which some members of the group seem to interpret as shitting their pants.’ She basically thought Elisa was an amoeba. And a pig.
During that period of time when Lucía attended her classes, Pablo felt like she’d become slightly obsessed. ‘Can you picture those two fucking?’ she asked him one day, as they were watching TV in bed. Pablo replied that it would be fairly vanilla: him on top, her underneath, and never from behind. He couldn’t imagine Elisa’s scrawny buttocks accommodating anything very sizeable. Lucía said to him, ‘Sometimes I imagine Gonzalo inserting Elisa whole up his ass… she swims swiftly up through his bowels, getting caked in shit, then comes shooting out of his mouth, like a fishbone that’s been stuck in his gullet.’ Then she leant her head back on the pillow and started chewing on an old pacifier belonging