Everything You and I Could Have Been If We Weren't You and I

by Albert Espinosa

  They looked at us in surprise, but no one said anything. The situation of such recent death was so strange that nobody dared to comment anything.

  The stranger saw her and became emotional. I could feel his reaction.

  “Can you leave me alone with her, please?” asked the stranger.

  The people in the room weren’t expecting that. They had never seen that stranger, or the people who had come in with him.

  “Please... I am a close family member.”

  Then he pointed to the large photo that crowned the room. It was of a man without a hand but who looked very much like him. He really did look just like the photo, even though now in a teenage version. The people could see the incredible resemblance and must have been convinced that the man who was asking for space alone with her was a relative: a cousin, a grandson, a son... Despite the obvious resemblance, no one thought that he was the man in the photograph, much younger.

  We were left alone. He sat on the bed. He looked into the face of that old woman and cried.

  He burst into tears, as my mother used to say.

  I did nothing to console him; the girl from the Teatro Español didn’t either.

  After ten minutes of crying, he gradually calmed down and finally placed his hands on the woman’s face. And suddenly a hologram appeared above the woman. You could clearly see some images of planets. They were strange planets, like some interplanetary GPS.

  I only recognized Earth and the planet with the red rain. The planets moved and on one of them, the Earth, there was a blinking light... Like a soul.

  With shock and emotion, we watched as the soul went from planet 2 to planet 3. It was amazing, I didn’t know that a gift existed that allowed you to watch a soul—or whatever that blinking light was—travel.

  “I am going to go with her,” said the stranger, stroking the old woman’s face. “Even if she doesn’t recognize me, I’m sure that I will end up finding her again. And if not, on the next planet, and if not in the next life.” He kissed the woman, a kiss so filled with passion that it seemed the woman would revive. “Please, leave.”

  I think he was doing the right thing, without a doubt, but it was difficult for me to accept.

  “Don’t you want to wait a few days?” I asked.

  “There is nothing here that matters to me,” he responded. “And being born on the same day as her might be the key to our finding each other.”

  Then he took a piece of paper and a pencil that was in the second drawer of the dresser on the left side. It was as if he knew it was there. He wrote something down and gave it to me.

  “Here you have your relationship on the first planet. You two decide if you want to read it,” he said, handing me the paper. “I give it to you in exchange for this: when you die and find me on the third planet, if you still have your gift and you have any memory of me, of who I was, of who she is, I want you to tell it to me immediately.”

  I nodded. I would definitely do that. If I ran into him in another life, if I had the gift, I would give him that information without a second thought.

  I embraced him, his scent went through me again. The girl from the Teatro Español kissed him.

  We left that room. He lay beside the woman in the bed.

  I remembered the image of my mother and me in that skyscraper hotel, although the age difference was greater. Maybe my mother had raised me to be able to accept that image.

  Suddenly I felt the stranger stop breathing, the sound of his inhaling and exhaling disappeared. Maybe he had already practiced in other lives how to be able to leave planets quickly.

  The image of the two of them together had something lovely about it, like a dream being finally completed.

  19

  EVERYTHING YOU AND I COULD HAVE BEEN IF WE WEREN’T YOU AND I

  I was exhausted. It looked like she was, too. We saw a hostel a few meters from the house and we booked a room.

  We knew that we shouldn’t distance ourselves too much from the stranger. From everything that had been his life.

  The room they gave us was small, with two old paintings hung very close together that showed landscapes of the region.

  The bed that presided over the room was lovely, or that was how it seemed to me.

  I glanced out the window, which overlooked the plaza. I liked it. What’s more, dawn was breaking. That night was something really special.

  I didn’t know what to say, how to begin. I didn’t know if I should unfold the paper and read it, or just go for it and give her a passionate kiss or paint a picture of her.

  I decided on the last option.

  “Can I paint you?” She nodded. I took out the paints. I begin that lovely ritual I had been missing for so long, mixing colors. Getting dirty to achieve beauty.

  She sat down in a chair and looked at me.

  “My mother told me one day that in order to paintsex I should feel that I would never have it. You can only paint things that you don’t feel.” I looked at her. “I feel that we will never have sex, I don’t know why but that’s my sense, maybe the paper will tell us the reason.”

  She continued looking at me.

  “What do you want me to tell you?” she asked me.

  “Do you know how to dance?” I asked her.

  She nodded.

  “Well then dance for me.”

  She began to dance. As she danced I felt a shiver run through my body. It was incredibly beautiful, filled with sensuality and sexuality.

  As she danced she moved toward the suitcase, opened it with slight movements and began taking out everything that was inside it.

  I couldn’t stop painting. I painted as if imbued with an uncontrollable force. Reds, greens and yellows mixed with black and created powerful images I never thought I was capable of.

  She pulled out the two jazz records my mother always carried with her, she pulled out her albums of photographs of jumps... For years she photographed people jumping; she believed that dance and jumping made the mask fall off and offered people’s true images. I never imagined there were that many photos. I had jumped for her so many times!

  Her dresses. Her small vanity case where she kept some of her secrets and her fragrance.

  The paintings, my two paintings about childhood and death. She carried them rolled up; she brought them with her to every hotel, to every place where she created. That particularly moved me.

  And her diary. I knew that it would be there and I also knew that in it I would find the name of my father. Written on some page.

  Two secrets would be revealed that night. I had one of them in my pocket, on a wrinkled piece of paper that came out of the second drawer of a dresser. And the other was in the diary that the girl who was dancing spectacularly for me held in her hands.

  I continued painting. My mother’s music flooded everything. There was no record playing but I heard it.

  It was incredible, the most exhausting and real experience of my life.

  The painting was almost finished. The painting of sex desired but not achieved. And my mother still hadn’t arrived, or maybe she had, to another world but not by my side.

  She stopped dancing and lay down on the bed. I placed myself beside her.

  We didn’t say anything. We were breathing as we had in the theater. The words at the end of Death of a Salesman echoed inside me: “we’re free, we’re free.” That was how I felt by her side. It was an epic moment.

  I remembered the injections. I felt that that was the epic moment I had been waiting for to take them. I pulled them both out of my pocket. I showed them to her.

  “I don’t want to take them. I don’t want this second life to be any different than it was created to be. And, above all, I don’t want to stop sleeping, because, when I wake up, I want to find you by my side for a long time. I don’t want to miss that image of seeing you come back to life every day.”

  I couldn’t image not seeing her wake up. I watched my mother wake up so many times over the years... I loved slee
ping next to her; after that day in the skyscraper I made a habit of it. I liked how she awoke, how she came back to life; it was very sweet. She would look at me, smile and say; “I’m waking up, Marcos.” And she would kiss me on the cheek.

  I think I was in love with my mother.

  I had never thought that, but I loved her. And I think she loved me too. That love that she always spoke of and that had nothing to do with sex.

  She taught me about sex and I ended up feeling love for her. She believed that we have to educate our children about love, sex and life. I will never be able to thank her for it. She was brave. She never cared what people thought. It was just what she thought was right.

  “Sounds good to me,” said the girl from the Teatro Español. “I don’t want to quit sleeping either. Can I see the painting?”

  I nodded. She picked it up, carried it to the bed and looked at it. I think there was part of the sex for my mother, sex for her and sex for Dani. The three most important sexes in my life.

  I realized that I would give Dani the injections. One day I used my gift on him and saw his most heartbreaking memory. His father beat him, although that wasn’t the horrible part. The worst was that Dani had nightmares, every night, about his father beating him. His father was dead but he lived on in his dreams and there he could still hit him.

  That was why he wanted the medicine, to kill him. And I would be an accomplice in that dream murder. Maybe that would help Dani to find someone and forget me. And I would lose him and, as my mother used to say, the pain of losing something, even though you don’t need it, would become something terrible.

  “It’s lovely,” she said, still looking at the painting.

  I smiled. I don’t know how to describe that painting to you. It was abstract but if you looked at it and you were in sync it was very realistic. Wasn’t sex just like that?

  My mother said that sex was: “A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” I always thought it was a lovely definition. I told her that I liked it. She laughed, it wasn’t a definition of sex; it already existed. Churchill had used it to define Russia. We laughed a lot that night wherever it was that I was with her.

  We burned the diary; it didn’t matter who my father was. The fire, on the other hand, was necessary; that heat was what we needed, as if it were the perfect atmosphere for what we were going to do.

  I gave her the folded piece of paper. She was going to open it, we were going to know who we were in another life, on that first planet.

  She read it and then passed it to me. I read it.

  There was a long silence.

  Then, I remember that I said: “Everything you and I could have been if we weren’t you and I.” She nodded.

  We hugged each other and slowly we fell asleep. I think it was the first time I slept well in a strange bed.

  Knowing that you are only living a tiny part of one of your first lives is very calming and gives you great pleasure.

  I thought of my mother. Now I know why I felt that way: she hadn’t been the person I’d most loved, she had been the person who most loved me.

  It is hard to lose the person who most loved you.

  I hugged my daughter close.

  Albert Espinosa (Barcelona, 1973) is an actor, director, scriptwriter for film, theater and television, and an industrial engineer.

  He is the creator and writer of the hit TV show Red Band Society, which has been broadcast in many countries around the world and adapted in the US, Italy and Russia to enormous success, winning numerous prestigious awards including Best Series in the 2015 Emmy Kids Awards. Red Band Society is based on The Yellow World and Espinosa’s personal battle against cancer. Published in 2008, this book has become both a best and long seller internationally, available in the United States, Great Britain, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Finland, Norway, Japan, Taiwan, Slovakia, Korea, Greece, Portugal, Poland, Turkey, Bulgaria, Hungary, Brazil, Israel and Russia, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay, Chile and Peru. All of his titles are available as e-books, and are among the top sellers in this format.

  Among his films are Planta 4.ª [4th Floor], Va a ser que nadie es perfecto [Turns Out Nobody’s Perfect], Tu vida en 65’ [Your Life in 65 Minutes], No me pidas que te bese porque te besaré [Don’t Ask Me to Kiss You, Because I Will] and Héroes [Heroes].

  He has written the novels El mundo azul. Ama tu caos [The Blue World. Embrace Your Chaos] (2015), Brújulas que buscan sonrisas perdidas [Compasses in Search of Lost Smiles] (2013), Si tú me dices ven lo dejo todo... pero dime ven [If You Ask Me to Come, I’ll Drop Everything... But Ask Me] (2011), all of them published by Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial.

  His novels have been published in more than 40 countries, with over 1,500,000 copies sold around the world.

  Original title: Todo lo que podríamos haber sido tú y yo si no fuéramos tú y yo

  Edición en formato digital: july 2015

  © 2010, Albert Espinosa Puig

  © 2015, Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, S. A. U.

  Travessera de Gràcia, 47-49. 08021 Barcelona

  Cover design: Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial

  Cover illustration: © Llorenç Pons Moll

  All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Contact CEDRO (Spanish Reproduction Rights Center, http://www.cedro.org) if you would like to reproduce a fragment of this work.

  ISBN: 978-84-253-5354-3

  eBook design: Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial

  www.megustaleer.com

  Cover

  Everything you and I could have been if we weren't you and I

  Prologue

  1. Deer with eagle heads

  2. My mother left me and I decided to leave the world

  3. Thinking like the thief who's looking for it and like the person who's hiding it

  4. Fear and its consequences

  5. Vocal cords in the shape of a gramophone needle

  6. The dance of the esophagus

  7. I Don't know if my gift found me or if I found it

  8. The portuguese girl and the baker who loved horses

  9. Red rain in childhood

  10. I couldn't enter his mint without knowing him

  11. Accepting unwanted love before losing it and wanting it

  12. He is a stranger because he tolerates unimaginable pain

  13. Dreaming without canvases, painting without colors

  14. Life is turning doorknobs

  15. Three sips of coffee and a suitcase full of memories

  16. The art of drawing a good bath and the bravery of enjoying it

  17. Be brave, in life, love and sex

  18. Unexhaling and uninhaling

  19. Everything you and I could have been if we weren't you and I

  Biography

  Copyright