Chapter 2 

I never phoned my sisters. I did mean to but I just couldn’t do it. The first week passed and then the second. A month, a season and I still didn’t feel like it. Around Christmas I had enrolled myself at the high school near Eusebio’s bookshop-house and he didn’t tell me anything. He never did, though his financial situation was way worse than ours, bordering on dire. 

Maybe that’s why I stayed with him. He was a very nice old man. Despite he had been a riot in his youth (hanging out with Almodovar, Macnamara and Alaska), he never asked me a thing or even judged me like everybody else used to do. 

I felt sorry for him. The years had not been kind to him. Most of his money was gone as a result of a “chain of unfortunate decisions” along with his friends. It’s not easy to grow old in such an environment where age is your worst enemy. The family hated him and waited for him to die and leave the last building he owned, right behind the Casa de las Conchas, to them. I mean, he only had a meagre state pension and that bookshop to keep a full palace alive. He could have turned it into a hotel or even a hostel but he hated the idea. 

As the antique books business wasn’t as buoyant as people might believe, I took a part time job at a pizza chain (lying a little about my age, but they didn’t really care) and every night I would deliver pizzas to university students. Erasmus kept them so busy studying that they couldn’t be bothered to cook and god bless them for being so lazy that they couldn’t move their asses down the street to the pizza parlour.