Consuelo had asked her if she could be at her home in Santa Clara at around 10.30 p.m. Her sister had assumed that there was a problem with the nanny.
'No, no, she'll be there looking after the boys,' said Consuelo. 'It's just that I've been told I need someone who's close to me to be there when I get back.'
'Are you going to the gynaecologist?'
'No. The psychologist.'
'You?' her sister had said, astonished.
'Yes, Ana, your sister, Consuelo, is going to see a shrink,' she said.
'But you're the most sane person I've ever known,' said Ana. 'If you're nuts, then what hope is there for the rest of us?'
'I'm not nuts,' she'd said, 'but I could be. I'm on a knife-edge at the moment. This woman I'm going to see will help me, but she says I need support when I get home. You are the support.'
The effect on her sister was shocking, not least because it had been an unsettling realization for both of them, that perhaps they weren't as close as they'd thought.
As she left the safety of her office, Consuelo felt something like panic forming in her stomach and, as if on cue, she remembered Alicia Aguado's words: 'Come straight to me from your work. Don't be distracted.' It started up some confusion in her, a voice asking: Why shouldn't I? And as she fastened her seat belt, her mind swerved away from its earlier objective and she thought about driving past the Plaza del Pumarejo, wondering if he would be there. Her heart raced and she hit the horn so hard and long that one of the waiters came running out into the street. She pulled away and drove straight through the Plaza del Pumarejo, eyes fixed ahead.
Fifteen minutes later she was in the lovers' seat in the cool blue room, her wrist exposed, waiting for Alicia Aguado's inquisitive fingers. They talked about the bomb first. Consuelo couldn't concentrate. She was busy trying to hold her fragmentary self together. Talk of the shattering effects of the bomb was not helping.
'You were a little late,' said Alicia, placing her fingers on the pulse. 'Did you come straight here?'
'I was delayed at work. I came as soon as I could get away.'
'No distractions?'
'None.'
'Try answering that question again, Consuelo.'
She stared at her wrist. Was her heartbeat so transparent? She swallowed hard. Why should this be so difficult? She'd had no problem all day. Her eyes filled. A tear slipped to the corner of her mouth.
'Why are you crying, Consuelo?'
'Aren't you going to tell me?'
'No,' said Aguado, 'it's the other way round. I'm just the guide.'
'I fought a momentary distraction,' said Consuelo.
'Were you reluctant to tell me because it was of a sexual nature?'
'Yes. I'm ashamed of it.'
'Of what exactly?'
No reply.
'Think about that before our next meeting and decide whether it's true,' said Aguado. 'Tell me about the distraction.'
Consuelo related the incident of the previous night, which had finally precipitated her call for help.
'You don't know this man?'
'No.'
'Have you seen him before, had some kind of casual contact?'
'He's one of those types that walks past women and mutters obscenities,' she said. 'I don't tolerate that sort of behaviour and I make a scene whenever it happens. I want to discourage them from doing it to other women.'
'Do you see that as a moral duty?'
'I do. Women should not be subjected to this random sexism. These men should not be encouraged to indulge in their gross fantasies. It has nothing to do with sex, it's purely a power thing, an abuse of power. These men hate women. They want to verbalize their hate. It gives them pleasure to shock and humiliate. If there were women foolish enough to get involved with men like that, they would be physically abused by them. They are wife-beaters in the making.'
'So why are you fascinated by this man?' asked Aguado.
Tears again, which were combined with a strange sense of collapse, of things falling into each other and, just as the gravitational pull of all this inner crumpling seemed to be achieving a terminal velocity, she felt herself untethered, floating away from the person she thought herself to be. It seemed to be an extreme form of a phenomenon she referred to as an existential lurch: a sudden reflective moment, in which the question of what we are doing here on this planet spinning in the void seemed unanswerably huge. Normally it was over in a flash and she was back in the world, but this time it went on and she didn't know whether she was going to be able to get back. She leapt to her feet and held herself together in case she came apart.
'It's all right,' said Alicia, reaching out to her. 'It's all right, Consuelo. You're still here. Come and sit beside me again.'
The chair, the so-called lovers' chair, seemed more like a torturer's seat. A place where instruments would be inserted to reach unbearably painful clusters of nerves and tweak them to previously unexperienced levels of agony.
'I can't do this,' she heard herself saying. 'I can't do it.'
She fell into Alicia Aguado's arms. She needed the human touch to bring her back. She cried, and the worst of it was that she had no idea what her suffering was about. Alicia got her back into the chair. They sat, fingers intertwined, as if they were now, indeed, lovers.
'I was falling apart,' said Consuelo. 'I lost sight…I lost my sense of who I was. I felt like an astronaut, floating away from the mother ship. I was on the brink of madness.'
'And what precipitated that sensation?'
'Your question. I don't remember what it was. Were you asking about a friend, or my father, perhaps?'
'Maybe we've talked enough about what's troubling you,' said Aguado. 'Let's try to end this on a positive note. Tell me something that makes you happy.'
'My children make me happy.'
'If you remember, our last consultation was terminated by a discussion about how your children made you feel. You said…'
'I love them so much it hurts,' finished Consuelo.
'Let's think about a state of happiness that's free from pain.'
'I don't feel pain all the time. It's only when I see them sleeping.'
'And how often do you watch them sleeping?'
Consuelo realized that it had become a nightly ritual, watching the boys in their careless sleep was the high point of every day. That pain right in her middle had become something she relished.
'All right,' said Consuelo, carefully, 'let's try to remember a moment of pain-free happiness. That shouldn't be too difficult, should it, Alicia? I mean, here we are in the most beautiful city in Spain. Didn't somebody say: 'To whom God loves, He gives a house in Seville'? God's love must come with half a million euros these days. Let me see…Do you ask all your patients this question?'
'Not all of them.'
'How many have been able to give you an answer?' asked Consuelo. 'I imagine psychologists meet a lot of unhappy people.'
'There's always something. People who love the country might think of the way the sunlight plays on water, or the wind in the grasses. City people might think of a painting they've seen, or a ballet, or just sitting in their favourite square.'
'I don't go to the country. I used to like art, but I lost…'
'Others remember a friendship, or an old flame.'
Their hands had come apart and Aguado's fingers were back on Consuelo's wrist.
'What are you thinking about now, for instance?' she asked.
'It's nothing,' said Consuelo.
