CHAPTER 1
What if I told you no? Every day I ask myself this question, especially until we find a place to spend the night. It's a few minutes of regret that accompany me until I drop the backpack with the things I'm carrying, which are less and less because my spine is already empty.
In that space of time, between placing my buttocks in a soft place and letting my back go horizontal, I swear and perjure that tomorrow, as soon as the sun rises, before your lips come close to mine, I will tell you that I am not going on, that we have come this far, that we have already gone too far. That I can't wander around the world anymore, that I don't want any more shelters, no more empty stations, no more public toilets. It's just a few moments of rebellion because my dream plays in your favor, and I fall into your hands. And you, you take advantage. You take my weakness on the fly and like a red light juggler you tell me a story, the same one since I've known you, the one with which I got hung up on your words in that bar where, for the first time, I heard you tell it.
- Are you up for a storyteller tonight, it's in the Vistillas, in a bar. I don't remember the name, but you can't miss it - Mercedes told me, my roommate and classmate at the university.
- A storyteller?
- Yes, haven't you seen one?
- No, it's the first time I associate those three concepts: stories, adults, bar.
But why not? -.
And as always in my life I said yes. The bar was nice, a coquettish place, one of those that without great pretensions embrace you, invite you again and again to take the penú ltima. A few old leather armchairs scattered around the place, one of those in which your memories sink in; the marble tables attached to an old Singer, which always took me back to my childhood and the image of my grandmother hunched over the canvas, giving the iron pedal, like Buster Keaton in The Machinist of the General. The dark wooden counter, rounded at the edges, curved at the
The dark wooden counter, rounded at the edges, curved at the sides to tuck in, like a round woman, the lovers of the fixed bar.
As soon as we entered, the terracotta-colored walls felt like a warm blanket around our shoulders. The night was cold. It was one of those late January nights when you can count the stars and knead the puffs of mist and your stomach cries out for a piping hot carajillo.
After a while of being thereı́, while I was pouring the cream of milk of an Irish coffee, one of the best in Madrid, by the way, you appeared on the scene. The dim light of the floor lamps softened your features. The background music, almost imperceptible, velvelled your resounding “R's”.
- Another one? - Mercedes asked, pointing to my empty glass.
I nodded my head, unable to take my ears off your words. You noticed it, you read me the pansy look, the one I get when I like something too much. And then the story was just for me, or so I thought.
I came back to the bar one week after another, until spring, until your last performance, when you approached my table and with the certainty of someone who won't take no for an answer, you proposed me to go with you to travel the world, while you stamped a kiss on my lips like an international postage stamp.
- It will be a few months, then we will come back and you can continue with your studies - you told me knowing you were lying.
And I, once again in my life, said yes. That I would go with you to the last corner of the earth if I had to, that I wouldn't miss this adventure for anything in the world and that when I came back we would see.
With my yes in front of me I grabbed your hand, I still haven't let go, I'm still hanging on your words. For seven years now I've been clinging to your sounds, to your resounding R's and above all to the echo of my own syllable, which echoes in my head every night when fatigue is about to defeat me. And then, I wonder what the flavor of no will be, what color its two letters will have, what hidden power its sound has, the one I have not yet been able to pronounce.
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