THE STORY OF RAFA AND DANI 8

You went to the kitchen. The kitchen in the semi-basement was a narrow corridor with a counter on one side and a wall on the other. No window. The light was a fluorescent tube that flickered every time you turned it on, an epileptic flicker that lasted three or four seconds before stabilizing into a surgical white that made everything look even uglier. And in this kitchen, it was already difficult to make anything look uglier. The yellowed white tiles from smoke and grease. The Formica counter lifted at the corners, with cigarette burns that Carmen extinguished there when she couldn't find the ashtray, black marks like small lunar craters on a surface that was once white. The sink with three plates, two glasses, and a frying pan with stuck fried egg remains that had been there since Wednesday or Thursday or the previous week. The refrigerator, a Balay from the nineties that hummed with an asthmatic noise of a dying engine, decorated with a Telepizza magnet and a photo of you when you were six years old, smiling with one tooth less, the only photo of you in the entire house, the graphic proof that at some point in history, there was a happy child in this hole.

You prepared the coffee. Italian coffee maker. The only thing in the kitchen that worked correctly, because you took care of it, you cleaned it, you changed the gasket when it wore out, because morning coffee was the sacrament, the only ritual that this broken family celebrated with some regularity. Water up to the valve. Ground coffee from Hacendado, the one with a red package for one euro and a little, a generous spoonful that you flattened with your finger. Roast. Medium heat. Wait.

As the coffee maker heated up, you leaned against the wall and breathed.

The fluorescent light flickered three times and stabilized.

You were here. In the kitchen of an illegal semi-basement in Carabanchel, with five hundred euros hidden in a shoe box under the mattress, making coffee for a woman who had stopped living years ago, on a Saturday at eleven in the morning, with eighteen years, with a hickey on your neck, with your ass still open, with the memory of Javier —his hands, his mustache, his thick and curved penis to the left, his way of fucking as if he were doing a procedure, efficient and methodical and absolutely devoid of tenderness— throbbing inside your body like a second heart.

And you were fine.

That was the screwed-up part. That you were fine. That you weren't crying in a fetal position or calling a helpline or having an existential crisis. You were fine. You were calm. You were making coffee and thinking about the upcoming week with something that looked a lot like anticipation. Like desire. Like that electricity in the stomach that rich people feel before a trip to Thailand and poor people feel before getting paid, that impatience that tells you that something good is coming, hold on, hold on a little longer, that Friday will arrive.