This Too Shall Pass

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Translation copyright © 2016 by Valerie Miles

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

crownpublishing.com

HOGARTH is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited, and the H colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

Originally published in Spain as
También esto pasará
by Editorial Anagrama, S. A., Barcelona, in 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Milena Busquets Tusquets. This translation simultaneously published by Harvill Secker, an imprint of Vintage, a division of Penguin Random House UK, London.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Busquets, Milena, author. | Miles, Valerie, 1963– translator.

Title: This too shall pass : a novel / Milena Busquets ; translated by Valerie Miles.

Other titles: También esto pasará. English

Description: First United States edition. | New York : Hogarth, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015038776

Subjects: LCSH: Grief—Fiction. | Self-actualization (Psychology) in women—Fiction.

Classification: LCC PQ6702.U89155 T3613 2016 | DDC 863/.7—dc23 LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/​2015038776

Hardcover ISBN 9781101903704

ebook ISBN 9781101903711

International Edition ISBN 9780451497345

Cover design by Elena Giavaldi

v4.1

ep

For Noé and Héctor. And for Esteban and Esther.

For some strange reason, I never considered what it would be like to be forty. When I was twenty, I could imagine myself at thirty, living with the love of my life and a bunch of kids. Or at sixty, baking apple pies with my grandchildren—me, who can't boil an egg to save my soul, but I would learn. Even at eighty, as an old bag drinking whiskey with my girlfriends. But I never imagined myself at forty, not at fifty, either. And yet here I am. It's my mother's funeral, and if that's not bad enough, I'm forty. I have no idea how I got here, how I got to this town that suddenly makes me want to puke. I swear I've never dressed so badly in my entire life. When I get home I'm going to burn every last stitch of clothing I have on today—they're all drenched in exhaustion and sadness, there's nothing worth saving. All my friends are here today, and a few of hers, and some others who don't seem to be friends of anybody. A huge crowd of people, and yet some of the important ones are missing. Illness evicted her from her throne so cruelly in the end, it completely destroyed her kingdom, and pretty much screwed us all up one way or another. And you pay for those things when the funeral comes around. First there's you, Mom, the dead person, who fucked them over, and then me, the daughter, of whom they were never fond anyway. It's all your fault, Mom, you know that? Little by little, unawares, the weight of your dwindling happiness found its place on my shoulders. And it weighed so heavily, so heavily, even when I was far away, even when I began to understand and accepted what was happening, even when I separated myself from you for a while, because I realized that if I didn't, you wouldn't be the only casualty left in the wreckage. But I do think you loved me, not a lot, not a little, you just loved me, period. I have always thought that people who say “I love you so much” actually love you very little, or maybe they add the “so much,” which in this case really means “so little,” out of awkwardness, or fear at the sheer command of an “I love you,” which is the only real way of saying “I love you.” The “so much” turns it into something for the general public, when it's never meant to be. “I love you,” the magic words that can turn you into a dog, or a god, a lunatic, a shadow. Anyway, most of your friends were “progressive,” though I don't think that's what they call them now, or maybe they don't even exist as a collective anymore. They didn't believe in God, or life after death. I remember when it was so fashionable not to believe in God. Nowadays, people gape at you in embarrassment if you say you don't believe in God, or in Vishnu, or Mother Earth, or reincarnation, or the spirit of something or other, or in anything at all, and they say: “Oh, so you're not illuminated.” The people who didn't show up to the funeral must have calculated the situation and decided: “Better to stay home, on the couch, with a bottle of wine, and pay respects in my own way, which will be more meaningful than going to the mountains with her idiot offspring. After all, funerals are just another social convention.” Or something like that. Because I imagine they forgave you, if there was anything to forgive, and that they loved you.

As a young girl, I used to watch you all laughing together, playing cards until the sun came up, roving and skinny-dipping and going out for dinner, and I think you had fun, you were happy. The problem with families of choice is that they disappear more easily than the blood ones. The adults I grew up with are either dead or living who knows where. They're certainly not here, under the blazing sun that's melting my skin and cracking the earth. I know this narrow, winding trail through the olive grove by heart. Despite only spending a few months a year in the town, it is, or was, the way home, leading to all the things we liked. I don't know where it leads now. I should have grabbed a hat to wear, although it'd just be another thing to throw away. I feel dizzy. I think I'm going to sit down next to this dreadful angel with swords for wings and never get up again. And here's Carolina, always so aware of everything; she takes me by the arm and leads me over to the wall where nobody can see us. From here I can catch sight of the sea, now close by, just beyond a hill of exhausted olive trees. Mom, you promised that when you died my life would be on track and structured, that the pain would be bearable. You never said I would feel like ripping my guts out and eating them. And you told me these things before you started lying. There was a moment when you, a person who never told a fib, started lying and I don't know what sparked it. The friends who have gone out of their way to be here weren't around you much toward the end, they remember the glorious person you were ten or ten thousand years ago. And here are my friends, Carolina, Mercè, Elisa, and Sofía. Mom, in the end we decided not to bury Patum with you. This isn't Pharaoh's Egypt, you know. I appreciate how convinced you were that her life would have no meaning without you, but if you stop to think about it, she's a big dog and she would never have fitted in the niche—I can just imagine the two undertakers pushing her bum to squish her in, like we used to do so many times at sea, to get her up the steps and onto the boat after a swim—and, anyway, I'm pretty sure the whole idea of being buried with a dog, well, it's illegal. Even if she were dead, like you. Because you are dead, Mom. I've been saying that over and over for two days now, asking my friends again and again in case it's just some big mistake or maybe a misunderstanding, but they've assured me every time that the unthinkable has happened. Aside from the fathers of my children, there is only one interesting man here, and he's a stranger. I know, here I am on the verge of collapsing from the horror and the heat, and despite everything, my radar can still home right in on the presence of an attractive man. It must be the survival instinct kicking in. I ask myself what are the protocols of hooking up with someone in a cemetery. I ask myself whether he'll come up to me to pay his respects. I don't think so. Coward. A handsome coward, though—but what is a coward doing at my mother's funeral, my mother, the least cowardly person I've ever known in my entire life? Maybe that girl by your side, holding your hand and staring at me so adamantly and with such curiosity, is your girlfriend. Isn't she a little short for you? OK, midget girlfriend of the mysterious coward, today is my mother's funeral, I have the right to do and say whatever I want. As if it were my birthday. Can't hold it against me.

The funeral is almost over. Twenty minutes in all, the silence nearly complete, no speeches, no poems—you promised you'd rise from the dead and haunt us for eternity if we let any of your poet friends recite—no prayers, no flowers, no music. It would've been even shorter if the geriatric undertakers who were charged with hoisting the coffin into the niche hadn't been so clumsy. I get that the beautiful man is not going to approach me and change my life, though I can't think of a better and more suitable time than this; however, he could have had the decency to help the pair of fossils when the coffin almost fell to the ground. One of them shouted, “Goddamn it!” These are the only words pronounced at the funeral. They seem very appropriate ones, very precise. I guess all funerals I attend from now on will be yours. We take off slowly down the hill. Carolina grabs my hand. It's over. My mother is dead. I think I'll head over to the municipal registry in Cadaqués. Now that you live here, it's the best place for me too.