10/10/10

IN THE middle of the night on October 10, 2010, I got a call from my wife. At that hour, I was asleep in a five-star hotel in Medellín, Colombia. I was sharing a double room with my then business partner. We’d gone there to oversee the setting up of an exhibition on Spanish architecture as part of the VII Bienal Iberoamericana. I can’t remember now if I picked up the phone or if my colleague did. I do remember the room, though, presumably because it was the same as all hotel rooms: a brief corridor leading off from a tiny hallway, with the bathroom on the left and a fitted wardrobe on the right, and beyond that an open space filled by two ridiculously large beds, very high and very firm.

I remember leaning back against the fake wooden headboard. I also remember the darkness in the room, the silence, and, at the other end of the phone, my wife’s voice, which sounded very faint, as if she didn’t want to wake me or our daughter, who would probably be sleeping beside her. It must have been six in the morning there in Spain when I received her call. She asked me how I was, and I, being still half-asleep, presumably replied in monosyllables. Then she fell silent for a moment before giving me the news. I don’t think the silence could have lasted more than two or three seconds, but I remember it as being much longer, because there’s only one reason why your wife, who loves you and knows you, would wake you up when you’re thousands of miles away, and that’s because she has bad news.

Over the years, I’ve given enormous weight to those two seconds. I’ve filled them with some of the feelings we humans spend our entire lives avoiding. I’ve elevated those seconds to the category of myth or foundational moment. I’ve thought about them so often that I’ve even adorned them with the crackling sounds that used to accompany telephonic voices, as if her voice were coming to me via thousands of miles of badly insulated copper wire mounted on wooden poles or resting on the bed of an ocean as deep and dark and silent as that two-second pause.

SEVEN YEARS before, in 2003, the advertising agency I worked for went bankrupt and all the employees were dismissed. It was a small agency in Madrid with just a few very select clients, but it was apparently doing very well. In 2003, the Spanish economy was going great guns and money flowed like water. People were buying big cars, big houses, and flat-screen TVs. Property developers were making money hand over fist, the banks were giving out canteens of silver-plated cutlery, and advertising agencies like ours were earning obscene amounts of money for doing very little. We could earn the equivalent of what my father would have earned in two months as a teacher in a state school, just for coming up with some stupid slogan intended to convince people that our car insurance was the cheapest. My boss spent his earnings on Ferraris, and on taking us out to some of Spain’s