Chapter 9 - The Boarding House on Calle Olivo
On the other side of the mountains, fifty miles north in the working-class suburb of Vallecas, the morning sun was not golden; it was a pale, gray smear filtered through the concrete canyon of a railroad overpass.
Inside a three-room basement apartment on Calle Olivo, the air smelled of stale cabbage, cheap detergent, and the damp, sour chill of an unventilated ground floor.
Teresa sat on a vinyl armchair beside a small electric heater that rattled with a broken bearing, wearing three layers of gray cardigans, her swollen knees wrapped in an old acrylic blanket.
Her hands, spotted with liver marks and stiff with arthritis, were clutching a cup of instant chicory coffee that had gone cold an hour ago.
The room was silent, save for the rhythmic, concussive rumble of the commuter trains passing fifty yards from the barred bedroom window.
In the tiny kitchen alcove, Diego stood over a rusty two-burner hotplate, trying to fry an egg in sunflower oil that was spitting against the grease-stained wallpaper. He wore an unwashed hoodie, his eyes hollowed out by six months of working sixteen-hour night shifts as an uncontracted package sorter at an Amazon logistics depot in San Fernando de Henares.
"Diego," Teresa rasped from the armchair, her voice thin, papery, and stripped of all its former aristocratic thunder.
"Is there any of that bread left from yesterday?"
"No, Mom," Diego replied, not turning around, his spatula scraping the aluminum pan with a sharp, ugly screech.
"The bread was finished last night. And the landlord came by at eight AM. He said if Andrés doesn't pay the four hundred euros for the gas bill by Friday, he’s cutting the line."
The front door unlocked with a heavy, metallic rattle.
Andrés walked into the room.
He had lost twenty-five pounds in six months.
His dark hair was uncombed, long over his ears, graying rapidly at the temples; he wore an old polyester raincoat that was missing two buttons, scuffed synthetic leather shoes that were soaked with morning slush, and carried a plastic grocery bag containing two tins of sardines and a carton of generic milk.
He had spent four hours standing in line at an administrative temporary employment agency on Calle Atocha, only to be told that at thirty-seven, with an unfinished law degree and a three-year gap on his resume, his only qualification was for weekend inventory shifts at a commercial hypermarket in Getafe.
He set the plastic bag on the laminate table, his shoulders rounding as if an invisible iron beam were resting across his cervical spine.
"Did you call her, Andrés?" Teresa asked, lifting her watery, bloodshot eyes from her chicory cup.
"Did you call the girl? Her uncle Roberto told me last week that she sold the olive harvest in Toledo for eighty thousand euros... she has money, Andrés. You are still her legal husband until the ecclesiastical tribunal dissolves the vows! The Church recognizes the sacrament!"
Andrés slowly turned his head to look at his mother.
In his hollow, bloodshot eyes, there was no love.
There was no filial devotion.
There was only the vast, festering, and terminal resentment of an adult man who had realized that he had traded an empire, an honorable marriage, and his own self-respect to obey an old woman whose only talent was poisoning every well she drank from.
"The Church doesn't pay the gas bill, Mom," Andrés said, his voice dropping into a flat, dead register that sounded like two dry bricks grinding together.
He pulled a folded newspaper clipping from his coat pocket—a full-page profile from the Sunday supplement of El País featuring a photograph of me standing on the stone terrace of the Toledo farmhouse, laughing with Mateo beneath the olive trees.
He looked at the photograph.
He looked at my face—radiant, young, unarmored, and completely sovereign beneath the Spanish sky.
"She isn't coming back, Mom," Andrés whispered into the cold, damp room.
May you like
"She was never coming back."
He picked up his empty coat, turned his back on the frying egg and the weeping woman in the armchair, and walked back out through the iron door into the gray rain of Vallecas, disappearing into the anonymous crowds of the morning commute forever.
