‘That’s all for today,’ she said.
‘But I’ve only just begun.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘But we’re not going to disentangle you in a single session. This is a long process. There are no short cuts.’
‘But we’re just … we’ve just started touching on things.’
‘That’s right. It’s been a good first session,’ she said. ‘I want you to do some thinking. I want you to ask yourself if you see any similarities between the Jimenez family and your own.’
‘Both families have the same number of children … I was the youngest …’
‘We’re not talking about it now.’
‘But I need to make progress.’
‘You’ve done that, but there’s only so much reality that the human mind can take. You have to get used to it first.’
‘Reality?’
‘That’s what we’re striving for.’
‘But what are we in now, if it’s not reality?’ he said, panicked by this thought. ‘I have more daily doses of reality than anybody I know. I’m a homicide detective. Life and death is my business. You don’t get more
‘But that’s not the reality we’re talking about.’
‘Explain.’
‘The session is over.’
‘Just explain that one thing to me.’
‘I’ll give you a physical analogy,’ she said.
‘Whatever … I have to know this.’
‘Ten years ago I broke a wine glass and, as I was cleaning it up, a tiny sliver got into my thumb. I couldn’t get it out and because of the nerves there the doctor didn’t want to touch it. Over the years it hurt occasionally, nothing more, and all the time the body was protecting itself from that glass. It formed layers of skin around it until it was like a small pea. Then one day the body rejected it. The pea came to the surface and, with the aid of some magnesium sulphate, popped out of my thumb.’
‘And that’s your explanation of the kind of reality we’re talking about?’ he said.
‘Slivers of glass can enter the mind, too,’ she said, and just the concept nauseated him. ‘Sometimes these slivers of glass are too painful to deal with. We push them to the back of our mind. We think we can forget them. Our mind even protects itself from them by scarfing these slivers in layers … I mean, lies. And so we distance ourselves from the sliver until one day something happens and, for no reason at all, it heads for the surface of our conscious mind. The difference between the mental and the physical is that we can’t apply magnesium sulphate to draw the sliver of glass into consciousness.’
He stood and paced the room. Those tiny slivers of glass rising to the surface had triggered some minor terror. It was as if he could feel them crackling in his head like … like an ice field. Was that another physical analogy?
‘You’re frightened,’ she said, ‘which is normal. None of this is easy. It demands great courage. But the rewards are enormous. The reward is eventually a real peace of mind and the restarting of all possibilities.’
He walked down the stairwell, away from the light of Alicia’s door and into the dark of the street, turning over that last line, coming to terms with the fact that she was thinking that he’d reached the point at which the end of possibilities would become a probability.
He hit the street and walked quickly alongside a group of young people heading into the centre of town. Most of the streets were empty, still hung over after the ecstasy and excess of Semana Santa. The bars were still shut, not opening until tomorrow when the Sevillanos would finally get back into the stride of their normal living pace. Falcon found himself in squares which would normally be full of people, even in mid week, but which were nearly silent and dark, with only disjointed voices, as if it was much later, and the street cleaners were out discussing last night’s football. His mind was empty of the usual crush of everyday life, where nothing is thought about and each action begets the next.
The disjointed voices fell silent. He had no desire to go home. He would tramp about like this for some hours. He compared the Jimenez family to his own. Yes, his family had been torn apart, too. No, torn apart was too strong. His mother’s sudden death had not broken them up, but it had damaged them, like the hairline cracks on pottery glaze. He remembered his father’s stricken face, as he’d looked from Paco, to Manuela, to Javier. And he somehow saw his own gaping and fragmented face, as he gasped at the theft of his whole world. The thoughts started up a terrible welling of black ghastliness, so that he quickened his pace over the satin cobbles.
Better times came to mind. The sunny return of Mercedes. The woman who would become his father’s second wife. Javier had instantly fallen for her. And now this memory was tarnished by that photograph he’d found in Raul Jimenez’s apartment: his father consorting with Mercedes before his mother was dead. That rucked up something worse and he jogged across the Plaza Nueva, the trunks and branches of the trees gloved in fairy lights. Christmas every day now. He stared blankly into the spot-lit perfection of MaxMara, the pristine clothes on the eternally perfect mannequins. He prayed for a less complicated life, where he didn’t have these thoughts and emotions that flayed his insides, leaving him looking almost the same from the outside, but raw and internally bleeding like a bomb-blast victim.
Sweat popped out of his forehead as he walked, half trotted, down Calle Zaragoza, and something like hunger opened out in his stomach, so he thought about going to El Cairo and having a
