It had been a short time since my parents opened up a business, at the start only of photography, at Gabriel Lobo’s street. I was playing with my camera in the square opposite the shop and I didn’t know the quarter’s neighbours yet. Leaning on a car I saw a guy my age that was looking at me with curiosity. When I finished the session and was coming back to the shop he asked me what a camera it was. I went to him and showed him the camera. As we surely would meet frequently, because he lived at the very square, I would give him details of the possibilities of a camera like mine at another moment, for I saw my parents were locking up the shop and I had to go. We became friends. A little after Vicente bought his own camera and followed a photography course, at last mounted up a laboratory in his house bathroom. We both flirted with girls and the usual when you have no girlfriend at twenty-five. Some day he told me he had known a chick who was a playwright and that he had been crashing out at her flat in Plaza Mayor for three days. The chick was going to perform for the first time her last play and he accompanied her every day to rehearsals. I may give him something of what I wrote for Marisa, that was her name, to read, because he had mentioned to her he had a friend writer, so that another day he would introduce her to me and this way we would already have something to talk about. I gave him a forty pages autobiography that I had already sent to a very well known publisher in which the author didn’t save in putting on airs as president of the Third Republic.

A little after this Vicente took me to Marisa’s flat. When going towards Plaza Mayor we warned me that whatever I had given to him for Marisa to read wasn’t any big thing according to her. Some days before he had given me a copy of the play Marisa was going to perform for the first time and I had only had a look between smoke and smoke, the truth is, because my first impression was that the play was too much musical, lacked of originality when it was supposed we should try and even presume doing something wisely, intelligent and good. I don’t remember whether Vicente and I had smoked or not, but most surely we had, so it isn’t strange the situation on sitting down in the lounge after introductions was uncomfortable and funny at the same time and I couldn’t help restraining some chuckle. Marisa said to me that what was missing only was my carrying Molotov cocktails on me in there and my already throwing them down to the street from her flat's windows or seeing them coming into her flat through the windows, as though she understood my ideas and was fraternal on it with me, as if it was normal, that if the pages she was giving me back had reached her hands was because Vicente had extremists, radical friends, and that was what she suspected since she started to read, that I was an extremist, a radical. I smiled doing an imperceptible grin which always appears when I see my writings provoke hostility to those who think they have the right to have more rights and live better than others unpunished, that that had happened to me more times already, and I tried to reason talking about writers and philosophers, which kept us busy for a very short time, because Vicente gestured me from behind Marisa’s back and I went languishing on purpose to finish by apologising and going away hastily and with evident relief of the playwright.

Vicente knew I needed shelves for my books and he had spoken to me of a friend of his who had a workshop at a basement in Fuencarral street and was precisely a shelves maker. One day we were going through Fuencarral street in his car and in spite of the late time his friend Carlos workshop was opened yet. We parked on the sidewalk just beside the workshop’s door. We came in and Vicente introduced each other. My shelves subject came out at once. Carlos offered himself in a good mood to make a bookshelf at that very moment. He said, beginning to measure and cut conglomerated boards, it would take him only ten minutes at the utmost. Vicente was kind of in a hurry but he agreed to wait for the bookshelf to be finished and take me home after with the bookshelf in his car’s back seat.

I had appointed with Vicente in the square opposite my parents business. Vicente’s doorway is visible from the square and I was pending of seeing him appear any moment. When I made out his figure coming out from the doorway I realised something strange was happening. It wasn’t his usual way of walking, he rather came towards me as though quavering, as though it supposed to him a painful effort to get to where I was. Pale, made a bunch of nerves, he stood looking at me speechless. What’s the matter? Come on, tell me. Is something serious? He tried to outline a smile but it was a roar of laughter what came up and between laughter and pants and quavering all the time he told me what had happened to find him in that state. I was one of the few Vicente’s friends that knew he was engaged to Marisa.

Carlos, the maker of my new and useful bookshelf was also one of the few that knew too. And it happened what happens only by chance some times. Last Saturday night Carlos went to a fashionable disco near Gran Vía, not too far from his workshop in Fuencarral street. The case was he got drunk and finished by confessing to a new friend he was engaged to a playwright that had a luxurious flat in Plaza Mayor, where he did whatever he was in the mood of, smoked joints one after the other, he came in and came out whenever he wanted, they went to dine out splendidly alone or with people almost every day, to good restaurants certainly. And, well, here I am, you see, being so short and thin as I am, I had driven her crazy, she does whatever I tell her.

It turned out Carlos disco’s new friend to whom he was so confident had been Marisa’s friend in childhood. And, of course, Vicente had gone to Marisa’s, in the morning this time, and was just back from there. Marisa had opened her door to him not completely and the drivel started at once: How did you dare? So, this is a luxurious flat where you do whatever you are in the mood of, smoke joints one after the other, come in and come out whenever you want to, we often go out to dine out splendidly, to be certain never at your expenses... How can you fall so low? Your friend Carlos was so kind as to give his card to my friend, you know. This morning I have rung him up at his workshop and I have asked him, being him so close friend to you as he is, to deign to come to a party in my flat, so that we four would be together, do you understand me? And you see, he assured me he would, of course he would, that you had told him I give fantastic parties at my big flat, and I repented on hearing this and said to him better not to come ever..., you can imagine... And with this she made Vicente a gesture meaning to go away. Vicente was already laughing at it openly on seeing me cracking up and gestured to me sort of what mess I have done and listen to me that I haven’t finished yet. He had just spoken with Carlos by phone. Before Marisa rang off she told Carlos she knew he was a repulsive dwarf and that his friend had enjoyed himself a lot laughing inwardly knowing some other moron should be playing a bad trick to her... And here Vicente couldn’t but let go out what he had in mind with big tears and mucus for a while that seemed endless.          

Madrid, 27 October 2007