A Not So Perfect Crime by Teresa Solana Page A

travelled, tried his hand at various trades and seen enough of the world to learn that the good guys always end up losing. His silences led me to deduce his love life hadn’t been days of wine and roses.
    â€œI’d rather not discuss that,” he said looking down. “Better we talk about the future. About our future.”
    He explained his idea – the company where we now work – and suggested I should give up my job and enter into partnership with him. He’d been a rolling stone for too long and wanted to settle down, or so he said.
    â€œI have a couple of matters to settle and can’t carry them forward by myself,” he said confidentially. “I need you, Eduard. And anyway, it’s not as if your finances are booming.”
    â€œNo, you’re right,” I had to agree. “We’re still paying the mortgage off, and although Montse works and is a civil servant, we only just keep our heads above water. And the twins are a bottomless pit. You must meet them, Pep.” I still hadn’t got used to calling him Borja. “After all, they are your nieces!”
    â€œAll in due course. If everything turns out as it should, you’ll pay off your mortgage before long and be able to take that trip round the world you wanted to do when we were kids.” He paused. “You haven’t done that yet, have you?”
    No, I hadn’t. When I succeeded in escaping from the hell that was life with my uncle and aunt at the age of twentythree and set up on my own, I enrolled on a university course. I couldn’t give up the bank job that fell into my lap at the age of nineteen thanks to mysterious strings pulled by uncle, yet at the same time I still dreamed of becoming a writer. Borja had been much more adventurous than me, had gone abroad and fled the miserable vision of the world with which our relatives soured our adolescence, and I was alone. Too alone to embark on an adventure I’d always dreamed I would share with my brother. I’ll never cease to wonder how different our lives might have been if our parents hadn’t crashed on the Garraf corniche when Borja and I were thirteen.
    In any case I never managed to write a single novel or finish my degree course, and Don Quixote was partly to blame. To my great misfortune, I can’t stand that book. In those heroic days when we students went on wildcat strikes and smoked joints in the Arts Faculty quad, I was a proud, naïve idealist, and that got me into the odd spot of bother. Including never taking my degree.
    â€œI don’t know what Montse will make of all this,” I reflected aloud while I polished off the crema catalana I’d ordered for my dessert.
    â€œSo you ended up marrying your psychoanalyst! That’s really funny!”
    â€œNo, I didn’t, Montse isn’t a psychoanalyst. She’s a psychologist.” I pointed out.
    â€œYes, but you did get involved with her,” he smiled mischievously.
    In fact, it was down to Don Quixote and my trauma that I met Montse. She had just finished her psychology degree and
was the friend of a friend’s girlfriend. After she’d worked out my problem she insisted on helping, and, although she failed in that, I did end up marrying her.
    True, I have a trauma in relation to Don Quixote . I only have to hear the title mentioned to go all jittery. I can’t help it, but I have a terrible complex about it, a sort of phobia, I’ve always thought it’s because it is a novel everyone praises to the skies. Politicians, whatever their stripe, quote from memory some of its wittiest lines and praise its author, and suffer no outrages of fortune when it comes to spending our taxes on all manner of commemorations and homages, which, knowing the likes of them, just have to be extremely dubious. For my part, I’m convinced most of our parliamentarians have never bothered even to leaf through the book, although, to be honest,