This Too Shall Pass Read Online Free PDF Page B

me. Well, I think both Oscar and Guillem love me.
    —I think it’s a great idea, Sofía says. Normal is boring. Let’s drink to being abnormal.
    —Here’s to being abnormal! I shout, and we hug.
    When Sofía’s had a few too many, she starts kissing and declaring eternal love to whoever is sitting closest to her.
    —Oh, and Santi will be there too. With his family, I add quickly.
    This time even Sofía looks at me dubiously.
    —It’s going to be fun—just wait and see.
    They both stare at me with eyes like dinner plates. I laugh.

Taking off for Cadaqués is always a sort of expedition. The three children are sitting in the backseat, Edgar, Nico, and Daniel, Sofía’s boy, together with Úrsula, the babysitter. I’m driving and Sofía occupies the copilot’s seat. It still seems bizarre and even a little absurd that I should be at the head of the excursion, the person who decides what time to leave, who gives Úrsula her instructions, who picks out the clothes the children will wear, who drives the car. At any moment, I think, as I peer through the rearview mirror and catch the children fighting and laughing at the same time, someone’s going take my mask off and send me back there with them, where I belong. I’m a total fraud at being an adult, my efforts to progress beyond the playground at break time have all been resounding failures. I feel as if I’m still six years old; I see the same things, the little jumping dog whose head appeared and disappeared from the frame of a ground-floor window, a grandfather holding out his hand for his grandson, handsome men with their radar on, the charms on my bracelet reflecting rays of sunlight, lonely old men, couples locked in ardent kisses, beggars, suicidal old ladies crossing the street at a turtle’s pace, trees. Each of us sees different things, but we always see the same things, and what we see defines us absolutely. Instinctively, we love other people who see the same things that we do, and we recognize each other immediately. Place a man in the middle of a street and ask him: “What do you see?” It’ll all be there, in the way he responds, like in a fairy tale. What we think isn’t so important; it’s what we see that really counts. I’d hand in this pathetic cardboard crown of adulthood without thinking twice—I wear it so ungracefully anyway, it’s constantly falling off and rolling down the street—if only to be once again sitting in the backseat next to my brother, Bruno, with Marisa the nanny and Elenita, who always joined us on holidays, our two dachshunds, Sapho and Corina, and Lali, Marisa’s giant poodle, that ungainly, flea-bitten, hysterical dog who hated Cadaqués and the refinement of our own dogs.
    —Hey, boys, what do you say we buy a Ping-Pong table for the garage in Cadaqués?
    They all readily approve the idea.
    —But you have to be careful of the dogs and the Ping-Pong table, OK?
    —Why? What for? Nico and Daniel ask at the same time. Edgar, like a typical teenager, is messing around with his mobile not saying a word, though I can tell he’s paying attention, he always is.
    So I tell them how Marisa’s psychopathic dog Lali used to have these sudden hyperactive fits in Cadaqués, how she’d bolt off, galloping full speed down the stairs, while Elenita, Marisa, and I chased after her shouting and trying to catch her. She’d be practically at the garage, when she’d jump out into the open space of the stairwell that was some four meters down, and crash-land onto the Ping-Pong table where my brother and his friends would be peacefully hanging out and playing. The sudden shock of such a huge black dog crashing into the table sent the children running in all directions, terrified, and as the summer advanced, Bruno was left without Ping-Pong pals. He was convinced that it was me who taught Lali to throw herself down the stairwell and onto the Ping-Pong table, just to annoy him.
    —Yeah, right, Edgar says, looking at me