PART

ONE

1

SEEING HERSELF IN THE MIRROR, Lucía said, That fat woman is me.

This was not said insultingly; she wasn’t being mean to herself. She, after all, was pretend thin rather than fat. So her mother had said when she was a girl, while brushing her hair after getting her out of the bath one day, Look at your thighs. You’re pretend thin, like most wading birds are.

In bed that night, the girl puzzled over the contradiction. Why did she look thin if she was actually fat? She was to spend the next several days searching for pictures of wading birds in books, then checking her thighs, and throughout the rest of her life she monitored herself obsessively, worried that her body would eventually give her away. But she made it through the rest of childhood and adolescence without the physical changes inherent in that transition doing anything to alter her mother’s pronouncement. At no point did the subtle proportions of the wading bird desert her, and these, as she came to see in time, had the effect of blurring the line between abundance and nimbleness.

At the place where Lucía worked, there was a pathologically obese woman who died upon suddenly losing weight. To begin with, everyone put it down to how fat she had been, but then they put it down to how slim she had become. Her death confirmed people’s suspicions, whatever they were, given they were impossible to substantiate either way. The day after she died, the company, an app-development firm that also installed, configured, and maintained IT systems, filed fraudulently for bankruptcy and shut down.

The world was full of programmers younger and better equipped than Lucía, and now the thought of her work prospects produced a physical unease in her, which grew more intense as she left the company building and hailed a taxi—her car was at the mechanic’s. She had a cardboard box full of her belongings, like good-bye moments in movies. These were:

a snail shell from the beach that she used as a paperweight

a ceramic cup and a box of green-tea bags

a Spanish-English dictionary

a dictionary of synonyms and antonyms

a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste

a jar of moisturizer

a box of tampons

a notebook she used for working out algorithms

a pair of thick wool socks for when the heating was down low or the air-conditioning up high

a nail-cutting kit: scissors, file, and cuticle scissors

a toilet roll and two packets of Kleenex

a packet of energy bars

a packet of disposable paper panties

The taxi driver turned out to be a programmer as well; when his company folded, he had been unable to find work again in the sector.

With the payout and some savings, he told Lucía, I bought myself a taxi license, and now I’m my own boss.

And you make enough money? she asked.

There’s the initial outlay to cover, but then, yes, if you put in the hours, you can live off it. In spite of Uber and Cabify, all that lot. But you do have to enjoy it. I love going around all day, meeting new people, listening in as they chat away in the backseat. You get into all kinds of scrapes. Plus, I imagine I’m in a different city every day. New York, Delhi, Mexico …

Which city are you in today? Lucía asked.

Today—Madrid.

But you don’t need to imagine that; we’re in Madrid.

"But my thing is that I need to convince myself. He held up a self-hypnosis book he had on the passenger’s seat. It’s like when you succeed in imagining what you’re doing and doing what you’re imagining, all at the same time, the anxiety in your life goes away. I used to be a really anxious person, but I dealt with it and now I’m able to be in Madrid when I’m in Madrid."

Right, said Lucía.

And when you manage to get mind and body in the same place, reality takes on this extraordinary glow. Believe me.

Like when you imagine you’re making a tortilla while you’re making a tortilla, she said, her irony lost on the man.

Exactly. Or like imagining you’re having sex at the same time as actually having sex.

She said nothing to this; it had to be a come-on. She caught the man’s eye in the rearview mirror, and though he was nice-looking enough, she thought it wasn’t the moment.

It was midmorning when she arrived at her apartment. She put the cardboard box down by the front door. Rosi, who came and did three hours of cleaning twice a week, was doing the vacuuming. Lucía asked her to take a seat before telling her she was going to have to let her go, at least until she herself found another job. Rosi coolly heard her out and, after they’d settled up, left the vacuum cleaner where it stood, without unplugging it. Before going out, she took the apartment keys from her pocket and flung them onto the sofa, though they bounced off and landed on the floor near Lucía’s feet. Lucía hadn’t expected thanks, but she’d anticipated at least a rundown of the chores.

The dishes Lucía had left in the sink had been washed up. She moved the vacuum cleaner aside with her foot, took two steps, and stopped in the middle of the kitchen–living room. She stood doing nothing, feeling afraid, as though having found herself in an apartment that wasn’t her own. And really, at that hour of the morning, it wasn’t. She took her shoes off and went through to the bedroom to see if the bed had been made. The atmosphere felt slightly sinister to her; the building was completely silent, like everyone had fled following a nuclear attack warning.

The bed had also been made.

She went into the bathroom, looked at herself in the mirror, and it was then that she said, not in an insulting way, That fat woman is me.

Then opera music started to play. At first, she thought it was inside her head, but then she realized it was coming through the air vent above the bath. She didn’t like opera and wasn’t in general very musically attuned, but there was something about this—a sort of eavesdropping, without knowing where the music was coming from—that hit her like a truck. She owned a CD of Maria Callas arias that had come free with a Sunday supplement sometime before. She had put it on one day, simply for something to do, but turned it off after a couple of minutes because it made her feel uneasy. The aria coming through the air vent was the first one from that CD; she recognized it straightaway from the familiar unease it produced. Now, however, sitting on the edge of the bidet and listening, she was in rapture. Before long, idiotic tears were flowing down her cheeks.

Something’s going to happen, she said.

This was a phrase she had spoken thousands of times in her life, though it did not, in general, precede anything happening. She had gotten it from her mother, who would sometimes stop mid-action and say, Something’s going to happen, followed by a vacant look coming over her. Then, since nothing happened (nothing visible at least), she would go the rest of the way down the stairs, or finish brushing her hair, or whatever it was she had been doing before the sudden stoppage. Lucía had inherited that sense of some vague but threatening event being constantly just around the corner.

But there had been one occasion, on the day of her tenth birthday, to be precise, when something had happened. Since it was a Sunday, the girl had run into her parents’ bedroom the moment she woke up and asked for her present, about which the only clue she’d been given was that it was a surprise. While her father got out of bed to fetch it, her mother sat up and said, Something’s going to happen.

At that moment, Lucía’s father came back in with a bird in a cage. Its beak looked disproportionately long and its feathers were so black as to look blue. Its head shifted nervously from side to side, as though it was looking around for someone it knew, first with the left eye, then with the right. At the girl’s ambivalent look, her father said, It was your mother’s idea.

Her mother then went over to the cage, pursed her lips, and made a sort of click with her tongue, which seemed to soothe the creature.

It’s called Calaf, she said. It’s come all the way from China.

Can I pet it? Lucía asked.

Once it gets to know you.

There was a party for the girl in the afternoon, with family and various school friends invited. The plan had been to celebrate out in the garden, but it had rained in the night and the grass was wet. Everyone was, therefore, inside, in the kitchen, where the girl had just blown out her ten candles and her father was handing out slices of cake to the children. It was then that Lucía noticed her mother had disappeared, and she went to look for her in the living room. There was no sight of her, but something prompted Lucía to look out into the garden, where, she found, her mother was crouching down to pee. The scene made the girl uncomfortable, though she explained it away, imagining that perhaps the downstairs bathroom had been occupied.

She watched as her mother lifted her skirt, pulled down her panties, and crouched down, only for a blackbird to then drop from the sky like a missile, crashing beak-first into her head. Lucía heard the sound of the bird’s neck breaking on impact, and the crunch of her mother’s skull. Both mother and bird fell to the ground, unconscious or dead. Lucía was rooted to the spot, unable to move or cry out, as always tended to be her way when it came to any moment of conflict in her life.

Her father, having noticed mother and daughter missing, came in and, seeing the girl staring in horror out of the window, opened the door and went into the garden. In the time it took for him to find Lucía’s mother, and without his being able to see—the mother had ducked down to pee behind some shrubs—Lucía saw a kind of soap bubble with smoke suspended inside it emerge from the bird’s beak before entering her mother’s mouth, squeezing its way in between her lips. With that, she came around. Lucía’s father found her, and Lucía saw her trying to explain what had happened, pointing now to her head, which was bleeding profusely, and then to the dead bird.

With the help of Lucía’s father, she pulled her panties up and, leaning on him, returned inside. One of Lucía’s uncles, a doctor, was there, and he, examining the wound, said it needed stitches.

Maybe a tetanus shot, too, he said.

Her mother and father hurried off to the hospital and the party continued under the supervision of the remaining adults. Lucía pretended to be having a good time, and she even made an effort to do so, but the events of earlier on meant she found it hard to throw herself into the proceedings fully.

Her parents came back three or four hours later, by which time all of Lucía’s friends had been picked up. Her mother had a bandage on her head, with a shaved patch around it. Part of her head had been shaved. But she felt fine, she assured them, in spite of the ten stitches—ten, the age Lucía now was.

Her mother and father had a drink, everyone saying what a crazy thing it was to have happened, and her father then suggested they go out and take a look at the dead bird. It was dark by this time and there were no outside lights, so they took the powerful flashlight with them from the garage. Lucía thought the bird looked like Calaf, the bird she’d been given as a birthday present.

It’s a giant blackbird, said her father.

Lucía’s uncle, the doctor, wasn’t so sure. Though the orange beak looked like a blackbird’s, the creature was closer in size to a crow. Both thought the best thing would be to put it in a plastic bag and then in the trash. Her mother, though, said they ought to bury it where it lay, and nobody dared argue. So Lucía’s father brought a shovel from the garage, dug a grave, and dropped the bird inside before covering it over with soil. The girl’s uncle said his good-byes and then it was time for