Before We Begin
This is the story of how I found out who had chosen my life. I’m telling it the way it happened, with its twists and its silences, because that’s how the important things come to light: late, and in pieces.
But I don’t want you to read it only from the outside, like someone looking at a lit-up house from the sidewalk. A very wise doctor once asked me to keep a notebook and to write down whatever I found beneath the white. I did. At the end of each chapter you’ll find a pause for you: a few lines about what you’ve just read, a question, and a sentence from that notebook.
And when you finish the book, your own notebook will be waiting for you, with one exercise for each chapter and room to write. You can do them as you read or once the story is over—whichever you prefer.
You don’t have to answer anything. But keep a pencil nearby. Just in case.
Chapter 1
A Stranger’s Handwriting
Sometimes the person we recognize least is the one we used to be.
Lake Sanabria, August 2001
The water was so still it looked as if someone had ironed it. Irene was laughing, her feet dangling off the dock, and I was thinking that never, in my whole life, would I be this happy again. I thought it exactly like that, in those words. I was seventeen, and I didn’t know that some sentences are prophecies.
There’s a way of lying that doesn’t need words. It consists of smiling on cue, of saying “how lovely” when someone shows you a photo, of choosing the right dress and getting home at the expected hour. I had spent twenty-five years perfecting it, and I did it so well that even I believed it.
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That Thursday in October, I was measuring a living-room wall in Ruzafa when my phone rang. The client, a young woman who wanted “something Nordic, but with soul,” watched me from the sofa over her cup of tea. I held the tape measure with one hand and with the other wrote the measurement in my notebook: three hundred forty-two centimeters. The usual number. Every wall in my life was more or less the same size.
I didn’t recognize the number, so I let it ring. It rang again. On the third call, the client raised her eyebrows with that mix of curiosity and irritation people have when they’re paying by the hour.
“Sorry,” I told her. “This will just take a second.”
I stepped out onto the landing. The stairwell smelled of bleach and of someone else’s stew.
“Elena Soler?” asked a man’s voice, an older voice, with a classroom tone I recognized before I recognized the voice itself. “This is Julián Benet. I don’t know if you remember me.”
I remembered. Don Julián, my literature teacher at Sorolla High School. Thick-rimmed glasses, a corduroy jacket in the middle of June, and a way of reading Machado aloud that silenced even the kids in the back row. I remembered him the way you remember a photograph: sharply, but without being able to step into it.
“Of course, Don Julián. What a surprise.”
“I’m calling about the capsule,” he said, as if I ought to know what he meant.
There was a silence. He interpreted it correctly.
“The time capsule, Elena. The one we buried in the courtyard with the class of 2001. We said we’d open it after twenty-five years. Well, the time has come. The school has organized an event this Saturday, at noon, in the gym. I’m trying to track all of you down. It wasn’t easy finding you, you know. You’ve changed everything.”
He said it innocently, but the words lodged inside me like a small stone in a shoe.
“I’m not sure I can make it,” I answered. “On Saturdays I usually—”
“There’s a letter of yours,” he interrupted. “Every student wrote a letter to their future self. Yours is in there. If you don’t come, the school will file it away in the archive, and honestly, that would make me sad. You were the last one to hand yours in.”
“The last one?”
“We’ll talk on Saturday,” he said, and I heard something in his voice I couldn’t name. Caution, maybe. Or pity. “It’s really good to hear your voice, Elena. Truly.”
He hung up before I could tell him no.
I went back into the living room. The client asked if everything was all right, and I said yes, it was my daughter’s school. I lied without thinking, out of habit.
The client explained again what she wanted. Light wood, linen, a big plant or two, “but I don’t want it to look like a catalog, you know? I want you to be able to tell someone lives here.” I nodded and took notes. I had been doing that for twenty years: listening to strangers describe the life they wanted and translating it for them into colors, textures, and square meters. I was very good at it. I could guess what people wanted even when they couldn’t find the words.
While she talked, an absurd question occurred to me: what would I say if someone asked me the same thing? “And you, Elena—what do you want? What do you want your home to be like?” I pictured myself with the tape measure in my hand, opening my mouth with nothing coming out. It wasn’t a lack of taste. It was something else. It was like opening a drawer you’d always believed was full and finding it empty.
I measured the other wall. Three hundred forty-two centimeters.
I didn’t tell Álvaro anything that night. Not because it was a secret, but because I didn’t know how to tell it. A teacher from high school called to give me a letter I wrote when I was seventeen, and I don’t remember it. Put like that, it sounded like an anecdote. But it wasn’t an anecdote. It was a small alarm, the kind that goes off in another room and you’re not sure whether it’s yours.
Because I didn’t remember writing any letter.
I remembered the capsule, though. A huge gray PVC tube that the custodian had sealed with silicone while we seniors applauded as if we were launching a rocket to Mars. I remembered the June sun and the smell of fresh-cut grass. I remembered Irene beside me in a Cranberries T-shirt, saying that in twenty-five years there would surely be flying cars.
Irene.
Whenever I thought about her, my memory did something strange. It didn’t slam shut like a door. It went soft, like fogged-up glass. I knew things about Irene. I knew she had reddish hair, that she bit her nails, that she could sing an entire song after hearing it only once. I knew she drowned in Lake Sanabria in August 2001 and that I was there that summer. I knew it the way you know the date of a battle: a fact, not a memory.
I never talked about it. Nobody ever asked me. My mother made sure, at the time, that nobody would.
“You’re very quiet,” Álvaro said as he loaded the dishwasher.
“Tired,” I told him. “The client in Ruzafa wants something Nordic, but with soul.”
He laughed. Álvaro has a kind laugh, with no sharp edges, the laugh of a man who has never had to defend himself from anything. We met when I was twenty-three, at a dinner my mother organized. His mother and mine played tennis together. He was a civil engineer, polite, handsome in a calm sort of way. My mother said, “He’s perfect for you,” and I thought that if she said so, it must be true. Nineteen years after that dinner, I still had nothing to reproach him for. That, which should have been good news, sometimes struck me as the problem.
I watched him arrange the glasses on the top rack, all facing the same direction, and thought about the word I had just used. Tired. I used it a lot. It was a comfortable word, one that didn’t force anyone to ask anything more. It worked for sadness, for boredom, for the anger I didn’t know where to put, and for that nameless feeling of living in someone else’s house. Everything fit inside tired, the way everything fits in a closet if you push hard enough on the door. That night, for the first time, I wondered what would come tumbling out if I ever dared to open it.
On Saturday it rained. One of those autumn rains in Valencia that arrive without warning and flood everything in ten minutes. I thought it was a good excuse not to go. I kept telling myself that while I got dressed, while I looked for the car keys, and while I parked in front of Sorolla High School, which was just as ugly as it had been in 2001, with its liver-colored bricks and its aluminum windows.
There were about forty people in the gym. Some I recognized right away; others took me a while. All of them seemed to be wearing a kind of costume: the same eyes as back then, inside faces that time had been filling in. Someone had hung a banner that read CLASS OF 2001 · 25 YEARS LATER, and there was a long table with bottles of water, coffee in thermoses, and packaged muffins.
“Elena Soler!” shouted a woman with short hair and red glasses. It took me a second too long to realize it was Nuria Climent, our class president. “You haven’t changed a bit!”
It was a lie, but it was a nice lie, and I was grateful for it.
Don Julián was standing by the basketball hoop, leaning on a cane. He had shrunk. The glasses were new, but the corduroy jacket looked like the same one. When he saw me, his face lit up in a way that made me uncomfortable, because it was the way you look at someone you’ve missed.
“You came,” he said, and took my hands in his, which were dry and cold.
“You made it hard to say no.”
“I had to give you this in person.”
The gray tube lay open on a table. Beside it, two current students in volunteer vests were pulling out yellowed envelopes and reading the names aloud. People clapped, laughed, took pictures. Someone had put in a floppy disk. Someone else, a Tamagotchi. A girl whose name I can’t remember had saved a ticket from an Estopa concert.
When they called out “Elena Soler Ferrer,” I didn’t move. It was Don Julián who picked up the envelope and brought it to me.
It was an ordinary envelope, white, the kind you buy in packs of fifty. On the front, in round, cramped handwriting, it said: For Elena, in 25 years. Don’t open it if you’re happy.
I stared at it for a long time. It was my handwriting. It was the handwriting I had used for every exam in high school, the handwriting of the Christmas cards I wrote to my father’s parents. But there was something in it—in the pressure of the pen, in the way it leaned to the right, as if in a hurry—that I didn’t recognize.
“Don Julián,” I said, “why did you tell me I was the last one to hand it in?”
He took off his glasses and wiped them with his handkerchief. It was a gesture I remembered from class. He did it whenever he needed time before answering a difficult question.
“Because the capsule wasn’t sealed in June, Elena. The custodian’s silicone went bad and we put it off until September. All of you had turned in your letters before the summer, you included. But you came on the first day of the next school year, even though you weren’t our student anymore. You found me in the teachers’ lounge and asked me to keep this one. You told me the one you’d written in June wasn’t any good anymore.”
I felt the gym floor tilt a little.
“I don’t remember.”
“I know,” he said, and looked at me with a tenderness I found unbearable. “It was just a few weeks after what happened to Irene. You were… very thin. Very serious. You made me promise nobody would read it. And you seemed so determined that I thought if I didn’t keep it, you were going to burn it.”
“And the one I wrote in June?”
“You asked me to give it back. You took it with you. I don’t know what you did with it.”
Someone interrupted us to take a group photo. I stood in the second row, smiled when they said “cheese,” and held the envelope against my chest as if it were an official document. In the picture, which Nuria Climent posted that same afternoon to the class WhatsApp group, my eyes are a little wider than usual. I look like someone who has just heard a noise in the middle of the night.
I didn’t open the letter in the gym. Not in the car either, although I sat there for twenty minutes with the engine off, listening to the rain on the roof. Don’t open it if you’re happy. I laughed to myself, a short, dry laugh. How easy she made it sound. As if happiness were something you could check, like tire pressure.
I am happy, I told myself. I have a healthy daughter, a husband who loves me, a job that brings me money and prestige, and a penthouse with a terrace on Calle Colón. My mother brags about me at her care home. I’m the kind of woman other women ask, How do you do it?
So why were my hands shaking?
I tried a test. I asked myself what was the last thing I had done just because I felt like it—something no one needed, something that served no purpose. I went over the week. Meetings, estimates, groceries, Lucía’s parent-teacher conference, the visit to the care home. I went over the month. I went over the year. I found things that had gone well, things I was proud of, things I had done for others with real affection. But I couldn’t find a single one that was only mine. I couldn’t even say what my favorite color was. Me, who made a living from colors.
I tore the envelope open with my index finger, clumsily. Inside were two notebook pages, folded in four, written on both sides. The paper had the texture of things that have spent a long time in the dark.
Valencia, September 17, 2001
Elena,
If you’re reading this, twenty-five years have gone by and you’re forty-two. I don’t know what you’re like. That’s what scares me the most. I don’t know if you’re still painting. She says that’s not a profession, that it’s a pastime for people who don’t have to earn a living. Maybe she’s right. Maybe she’s been right for a long time already, and that’s why you’re reading this in an office, in a suit, with no paint under your fingernails.
I want you to know a few things, in case you’ve forgotten them. You’ve most likely forgotten them, because I’m doing everything I can to forget them.
You loved the color of the lake at nine at night, when it isn’t blue or gray anymore but a color that has no name. You wanted to live in a house with a dock. You wanted to study fine arts in Barcelona. You loved Marc. You loved him so much that sometimes you were embarrassed to look at him in front of other people.
Irene is gone. You already know that. What you may not know, or may have decided not to know, is that that night didn’t happen the way they tell it.
I’m going to do what they’ve asked me to do. I’m going to be good, I’m going to study what I’m supposed to, and I’m going to stop painting. I’m going to become someone who doesn’t cause any trouble. It seems like the only thing I can do right now to make this hurt less. But you don’t have to keep paying forever.
If you’re reading this and living a life you don’t like, it means she won.
Go back to Sanabria. Find Marc. He knows what really happened.
And forgive me. I didn’t know how to do any better.
Elena (the one from before)
I read the letter three times. By the third, the rain had stopped and the sun was slanting in through the windshield, lighting up the dust on the dashboard. I thought, absurdly, that I needed to clean the car.
I took the measurement notebook out of my purse and, under the three hundred forty-two, wrote my name. Then I unfolded the letter again and put the two samples of handwriting side by side. The one from now was small, upright, clean-lined: the handwriting of someone who signs estimates and doesn’t want any doubts. The one from then leaned forward, as if it were running after something. The e’s were the same. So were the l’s. But the woman in the notebook wrote to be understood, and the girl in the letter wrote because if she didn’t, she was going to burst. I wondered when I had stopped running. I couldn’t answer. All I knew was that I hadn’t been the one to decide.
Then I thought about my mother.
She says that’s not a profession.
You didn’t have to be very smart to know who “she” was. My mother had repeated that sentence throughout my adolescence, in almost the same words, while she gathered my canvases from the hallway and stacked them in the storage room so they “wouldn’t collect dust.” My mother, who chose my degree, my first job, the apartment on Calle Colón, and the man who slept beside me. My mother, who now lived in a care home in Godella and who sometimes called me by her dead sister’s name.
It means she won.
I folded the letter carefully, along the creases from twenty-five years before, and put it in the glove compartment, under the car manual, where nobody ever looks.
I started the engine. In the rear-view mirror I saw a forty-two-year-old woman with her hair pulled back, a bone-white silk blouse, and discreet pearl earrings her husband had given her for their anniversary. I looked at her a second too long, just as I had looked at Nuria Climent in the gym.
It took me a while to recognize her.
That was the day I stopped being myself. Or, to be precise, the day I discovered I hadn’t been myself for a very long time.
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