NOT REACHABLE

19 January 2017

Faculty of Humanities, Hanover (Germany)

While the professor Iago Miranda was going over what his students would need to do before their next class and asking them to read a short text, the sound of chairs scraping the ground as their occupants stood up betrayed the fact that the students who were most in a rush were already on their way out of classroom FO23 in the Faculty of Foreign Languages at the University of Hanover.

As the last students left the room and while he turned the projector and computer off, Iago was still giving a quick answer to a student who had approached him at the last minute. Once he’d picked up the last of his things from his desk, he turned his phone on and was surprised to see he had four missed calls and a flood of Whatsapps. Still in the classroom, he checked and saw that his friend Martín had tried to get hold of him on several occasions. He clicked on the green icon for Whatsapp and amidst other chats, found his friend’s name, who had indeed written to him three times in little over an hour:

MARTÍN MOBILE: “Hi Iago, I’ve called you a few times now. I need to ask you something, ring me later if you can”, 9:19.

MARTÍN MOBILE: “Ring me when you can please, it’s urgent”, 10:03.

MARTÍN MOBILE: “Iago, I think I’m in a bit of a mess. Something’s not quite right, we need to speak as soon as possible. Phone me back”, 10:31.

Iago was surprised by Martín’s sudden need to speak with him. He was used to calling him once every three or four weeks, but the messages confirmed something serious was going on with his friend, who had reached out to him multiple times in a relatively short amount of time. Without waiting any longer, Iago clicked the button to ring him back and impatiently listened to the dial tone when his friend didn’t pick up. He thought that maybe Martín was on the phone to someone else and chose to finish collecting up his things and head to his office.

In the five minutes it took Iago to get back, he reflected on his last conversations with Martín and ruled out a few of the absurd ideas he thought could be the reason for his friend’s distress. As soon as he’d got through his office door and dumped everything on the table, Iago tried his friend again, but this time it became apparent his phone was either off or out of service. “He’ll ring back as soon as he sees I’ve tried to get hold of him”, Iago thought, calming himself down as he glued his eyes to his phone screen, which now showed a deluge of emails waiting for him to reply.

After lunch in the university dining hall and one of those watery drinks the Germans dared to call coffee and insisted on serving in plastic cups, Iago remembered Martín’s messages and made another futile attempt to get in touch with his childhood friend. With just one short sentence, he confirmed in writing that he’d received his friend’s messages and once that was done, he went back to work:

“Let’s see what you’ve got yourself into, mate, I’ve called you a couple of times and I can’t get through so when you’re back, ring me and put my mind at ease. Be careful and don’t do anything stupid”, 13:47.

Iago spent pretty much the entire next hour watching his phone as anxiously as a teenager, but his friend didn’t call or write back. After an afternoon caught up in preparing classes and exams, Iago really started to worry when he saw that Martín, who was audibly stressed, had sent him a voice note at around 5 o’clock:

MARTÍN MOBILE: “Iago, we’ll talk more later. If anything should happen to me, go and pick up an envelope I left for you where you met Mariana”, 16:58.

Without waiting a second, Iago clicked the button to call him back, but once more the only answer he got was: “The number you have dialled is switched off or out of service”.

IS THIS WHERE EVERYTHING HAPPENED?

19 January 2017

Hanover (Germany)

Once more: “The number you have dialled is switched off or out of service”. “But what on earth was all this about? What was Martín playing at? What was this envelope?” The three attempts Iago had made to speak with his friend had all been futile. His friend had never been a dramatic type and his messages, along with their content, didn’t seem to fit the calm and pleasant life he knew Martín to have in Compostela. “TV series are causing so many issues,” he forced himself to think to try and diminish the severity of something he felt could actually turn out to be quite serious indeed.

He tried again and once he’d run out of patience and was about to leave his office, he decided to write to Silvia, who had been Martín’s long-term girlfriend in the past and who he’d initially put off contacting.

Iago knew his friend had never completely forgotten Silvia and that the two had stayed in touch, but he’d hardly spoken to her again since that night between the two of them, the night Silvia had called “an alcohol-induced accident”. Since then, every time they saw each other, they acted as though everything was normal (or at least that’s what they tried to do), but it was clear they were avoiding one another and Iago felt particularly uncomfortable in these situations.

“Hi, Silvia. How are you?” Iago deleted the question he’d just typed out, deeming it completely ridiculous. He started again. “Ola, Silvia. I’m trying to reach Martín and he’s not picking up. He’s tried to ring me several times today, but I was in class. Have you heard from him? Send me a message if you do. Thanks.” He sent the message and closed the door to his office.

Sat on the tram on his way home, Iago looked at his mobile a couple of times, but neither Martín nor Silvia had written back to him yet. About the same time he arrived home, he heard his phone ping announcing a new message had arrived:

SILVIA CATOIRA: “Hi. It’s like Martín’s disappeared. He’s not picking up his phone and he’s not at home either. As soon as I reach him, I’ll tell him to ring you”, 17:37.

It wasn’t good news. Iago tried Martín again and was met once more with that tinny voice repeating the same litany he’d already heard multiple times that day. As soon as he got into his apartment, Iago turned on his computer to see if he’d received any emails and then he opened Facebook. Once he’d seen that none of the messages waiting to be read were from his friend, he went straight to Martín’s profile. The last post on his wall, at 11pm or so the day before, caught his attention: “The University of Santiago is selling the old Provincial Hospital for 7.1 million euros”.

Next to the link, which described how the property was being sold to an investment group (though it didn’t specify how exactly the old building, which had been empty since 2003, was going to be used), Martín had written a comment that seemed far too mysterious to have come from him: “Was this where everything happened?” As well as all the blue thumbs that had “liked” the photo, there were also seven or eight comments from people Martín knew, some making jokes which were either only minutely funny or not even close and all asking the same thing: what did Martín mean by his question? On top of this, there was no comment or “like” from Martín in response to be seen anywhere.

After a few hours without any news and in case he decided to look at Facebook, Iago wrote Martín a message there, although he imagined Whatsapp would be the first app his friend would open when he could. While Iago calmly read over the article that described in detail how the old hospital in which he’d been born was being sold, a message from Silvia popped up on his phone. Iago immediately clicked to open it and went as white as a sheet when he read the three words Silvia had written:

SILVIA CATOIRA: “Martín is dead”, 22:18.

THE SOON-TO-BE ROSALÍA DE CASTRO AIRPORT

19-20 January 2017

Hanover (Germany) – Santiago de Compostela

Dead? How could he be dead? Years had passed now since Iago’s last conversation on his own with Silvia, but he punched her number out immediately. Before the phone had even had the chance to ring once, Silvia’s voice on the other end of the line confirmed her message wasn’t any sort of macabre joke.

“I don’t really know anything, only that they found his body on the South Campus,” said Silvia between hiccoughs.

“But how? Are you sure? Was it an accident? What happened?”

“I don’t know, I just found out. I rang Clara, Martín’s sister, but I don’t know anything else yet, just that they found his body next to that statue of the bagpipe players on the campus… I don’t know if you know which one I mean, it’s right by the Fonseca halls… opposite the hockey field…”

“It can’t be true… listen… I’m going to try and tie up everything here so I can fly to Santiago tomorrow… I’ll call you later.”

With term about to finish and all his syllabi practically completed, Iago managed to hand the classes and supervisions he’d planned for the next few weeks over to a PhD student. He also left her to co-ordinate the exams he’d already set. He rang his department head to tell him that he was going to take a few days off and head to Compostela the next morning. Once everything was arranged, he booked a ticket for a plane that would stop in Madrid and land in Santiago the next day at the airport which, according to the Galician newspaper he’d bought in Terminal 4, would soon be renamed Rosalía de Castro Airport.

Sat on the plane, Iago pored over the newspaper to find some sort of piece on the appearance of his friend’s dead body, but the papers had completely ignored his death, even the obituary pages. He read the recent news on the sale of the hospital in Galeras and some inane comments from the CEO of the new property group, but he really wasn’t in the right headspace to be concentrating on reading much else. The sparse information he did know at this point went round and round his head, while questions kept popping up, questions he was hoping to find an answer to in Compostela.

As well as Martín’s sudden interest in speaking with him (and asking that question), all Iago knew was that he’d left him an envelope with something in it and that that envelope was waiting for him in the café which had belonged to the Law Faculty during their university years, but was now the official caffeine supplier to the hundreds of students who spent hour after hour at the Conchi (the shortened and more popular name for the Concepción Arenal Library).

The fact that Martín hadn’t written the name of the café in his message had seemed a bit too much like a film to Iago, but now that his friend had been found dead, he wasn’t sure what to think.

It was almost midday in Santiago and when he got off the plane, he thought that the crisp air in Lavacolla wasn’t all that different to what he’d left behind in Germany. While he waited for his suitcase to come round on the belt, he sent his friend Roi, who was coming to pick him up from the airport, a message.

Roi Aneiro was another of Martín’s friends though their lives had taken different paths and so, as the years went on, they’d seen each other less and less, pretty much only when Iago went back to Santiago and made the effort to meet up with all his oldest friends.

The Roi of the late nineties, studious and responsible, was now not only one of the most renowned doctors at the Clinical University Hospital at the age of 35, but also, having married his long-term girlfriend, father to twins who had tattooed a permanent smile on his face, robbed him of hours of sleep and laid seed to the grey hairs that were starting to show around his temples and in his well-trimmed beard.

As soon as he left the terminal, Iago looked around for his friend. He saw him sat with a coffee in the closest café to the Arrivals gate, looking studiously at his phone. Without knowing how to explain it, Iago felt something strange the moment he saw Roi. He gave him a hug and asked if he had any news:

“Do we know anything more yet?”

“Yes, everything suggests Martín was murdered.”

“Are you sure? What?” Although Iago had already thought it might be the case, he didn’t want to believe what he was hearing.

“It seems that way. We still don’t know much, but from what they’ve told the family and what his sister Clara’s told me, it’s all a bit frightening…”

“Frightening? What do you mean?”

“It sounds like they beat him to death and he’s missing a finger on his left hand.”

THE NINETIES IN COMPOSTELA

20 January 2017

Santiago de Compostela

After the significant news stories Santiago had experienced over the last few years, from the Codex Calixtinus being stolen to the incredibly high-profile case surrounding the young girl Asunta Basterra, it seemed as though the authorities didn’t want to share too much about what had happened to Martín, at least until they were really sure what was going on. On 20 January the Telexornal on Galician TV simply mentioned that a body had been found on the Campus Vida at the University of Santiago de Compostela, but they didn’t share any of the other information Iago had heard.

Iago and Martín’s friendship went back to when they were in kindergarten. They hadn’t just shared the same desk and afternoons playing football and doing homework together, but their entire teenage years in the nineties in Compostela; their first sneaky cigarette had been together, so too had their first late nights at the iconic Liberty Club, their innocent and inexperienced first kisses, the Fridays they spent under the covered arches on Rúa Nova and their first drunken nights out where everyone ends up drinking too much and being sick. After they sat their pre-university Selectividade exams, their paths wouldn’t stray too much from one another and they would continue going on nights out and spending time together. But while Iago seemed to have hit the nail on the head with his decision to study Philology at the University, Martín would burn his way through two years of university matriculated in the Maths Faculty, which, as even he would admit, he scarcely set foot in. He often called it his “two-year gap year” during which, according to a song lyric he often cited, “he lived more at night than during the day and drank more than he should have done”. Iago and Martín were enrolled at the end of the nineties and the beginning of the new millennium, a time when the university was on fire with record numbers of new students. In Compostela, the number of students at this time almost equalled a third of the population and it felt as though the city never fully went to sleep. Tuesdays and Wednesdays felt like Thursdays, the number of bars and pubs in the Ensanche district went up and up and they all reached dizzy heights of success simply by opening their doors. During the day, university-branded folders were to be seen everywhere in the city’s streets and when it was exam time, you could see long queues of young people waiting outside the libraries to get a spot where they could spend the day studying.

 Those two years of his degree, where he’d only passed a few exams spread across just a couple of classes, were enough both to completely exhaust Martín’s parents’ patience and to introduce him to pretty much everyone who went out for drinks in Compostela. It’s not that after this parenthesis Martín had suddenly become an adult, but it’s true he underwent a significant change, throwing himself into a professional training course for programmers and following that up with another in system management. Thanks to these and after several internships and precarious contracts, he was able to set up shop on his own with a significant amount of help from his parents. From then and until the day before his death, Martín had run his own business and unlike many during the economic crash, it seemed to have more assets than debt.

Though Martín had dated quite a number of girls during those two years at university, some for a while and others for not long at all, the only serious relationship Iago had known him to have was with Silvia and that had been for a few years around the time he was setting up his business. She’d recently finished studying law and had spent a couple of winters burning the midnight oil and leading a life that was almost monk-like so she could pass her civil service exams. Her high marks meant the Xunta de Galicia placed her in Group A and in turn this meant she got a good role in San Caetano with both the job security you’d expect from the civil service and a strong dose of professional boredom.

Though he’d tried to avoid bringing it up since the “accident”, Iago was convinced that Martín had never completely got over his break-up with Silvia, their relationship being one he described as “the best four years of his life”.

Before heading to his childhood bedroom in a house that had long since stopped being his home and now just belonged to his parents, Iago remembered that night he’d spent with Silvia three years after her break-up with Martín and asked himself, yet again, if he’d done the right thing in not telling his friend. Either way, he wouldn’t be able to change that now.

NO OBITUARY IN THE NEWSPAPER

21 January 2017

Santiago de Compostela

The alarm on Iago’s phone woke him up and as soon as he switched off airplane mode, he received a message from Clara, his friend’s sister: “Hi Iago, Silvia told me you’re in Santiago. Thanks for coming”, 4:23.

Judging from the time Clara had sent the message, Iago imagined she’d been up late and hadn’t been able to sleep all night long. He did the maths and calculated that Clara would be about thirty by now. Though they’d known each other since they were small and had seen each other grow up, they’d never been friends beyond knowing each other through Martín, Clara’s older brother, who had lived with his sister in their grandparents’ flat in the Ensanche district for years. Iago took her short message as an invitation to call her, ask how she was and find out how her parents were doing too.

Before replying, Iago got up and went to read the newspaper in the kitchen, stopping to make himself a cup of coffee which turned out to have been poured already and seemed to be waiting for him. He didn’t find anything about his friend on the front page or in the local section either. Without really knowing why, the fact that the press was ignoring Martín’s death for the second day running reinstilled a sense of calm in him. Yet, as soon as he turned to the obituary pages and saw there was nothing about his friend there, not a word about his death or funeral, he couldn’t stop himself imagining a couple of forensic medics splitting open Martín’s body so they could carry out an autopsy on it.

Iago quickly decided it was likely details about Martín’s death hadn’t been made public yet due to legal restrictions that would have been agreed between the municipal and autonomous governments, both of which would have had little interest in sparking fear, encouraging tourists to pack their bags or for the city to start being depicted negatively in media outlets across the whole country. That any morbid details were able to be kept from the press was surely not going to last for long, but for now at least it put a block on journalists from all over Spain becoming so interested in the case that they made Martín’s family’s life impossible. It also meant his funeral wasn’t about to turn into a media frenzy.

Overnight, Iago woke up on several occasions asking himself what could possibly be in the envelope his friend had supposedly left for him in a café on the university campus. With Martín now dead, he very reasonably wondered whether it would be dangerous for him to go and pick up the message. The fact the people responsible for Martín’s death could have taken his phone and had a chance to read his message could well justify why Martín had cautiously written “the place where you met Mariana” since this would prevent (or at least make it a lot more difficult) for someone to know exactly where the envelope was. Mariana was one of Iago’s old girlfriends who had married a Brazilian engineer and lived in Salvador de Bahia for years. Iago firmly believed she had nothing at all to do with what was going on and that his friend had used her name so he could get away without saying exactly where he’d left the envelope. There was also the added bonus that Mariana wasn’t exactly easy to find if someone did want to try and get that information from her.

Iago also kept thinking back to the post Martín had shared on Facebook about the hospital in Galeras. What could that have been about? Who was that message, launched into the void as it was on a social network, intended for?

Iago thought about telling the police, which would probably have been the most sensible option, but he figured Martín must have had a strong reason for not doing so since he hadn’t spoken to them himself. Iago’s head spun round and round until he finally decided to get in touch with the police just as soon as he’d figured out what was inside the envelope and was sure what his friend’s reasons for not speaking to the police had been.

That’s when he’d call Clara and tell her everything he knew.

KB

21January 2017

Santiago de Compostela

Although he thought he was probably being quite paranoid, as soon as he left his house on the Rúa de San Pedro, Iago checked there was nobody waiting to follow him. He walked straight to the old part of town, entering it via the Porta do Camiño, and once he reached Casas Reais, he cut off to the left down the Ruela da Oliveira, taking advantage of the short, narrow streets to make sure nobody could follow him. In less than fifteen minutes, he was sat in the same seat at the Law café where he’d met Mariana almost twenty years earlier.

The situation seemed a bit strange to Iago, but he tentatively got the attention of a waiter he hadn’t seen before.

“Excuse me, my name’s Iago. My friend Martín said he left an envelope here for me.”

The boy, who didn’t look old enough to be a university student, responded politely, giving Iago a brown envelope that bore his name scrawled in pen on it:

“Here you go”.

Iago drank his coffee, focusing more on finishing it quickly than on how it tasted, and left the café, looking around before he did to make sure none of the students were watching him. Without opening it to see what was inside, he placed the envelope in the inner pocket of his jacket and started the walk back to his house, on a quest for the privacy and calm he needed to search through whatever had been left in the envelope.

This time Iago took a busier street, heading up the Rúa Rosalía de Castro. Once he’d left the Praza de Galicia behind him and walked quickly along Virxe da Cerca, his jacket pocket, where his phone nestled up against the envelope, started vibrating. As soon as he got his phone out, the screen told him it was Silvia calling. He thought about not picking up, but in the end he said:

“Hi, Silvia.”

“Hi, Iago.” After a few uncomfortable seconds of silence, Silvia continued, “You’re in Santiago. Did you get here OK?”

“Yes, I’m here, I arrived last night. How are you?” Yet more silence on the other end of the line made Iago carry on, “What a stupid question, I’m sorry. I’m out running some errands, but if you’d like, we can meet for a coffee a bit later on. What do you think?”

“OK. Will you call me later?”

“Yes, I’ll call you as soon as I can.”

Iago hung up, put his phone in his trouser pocket and picked up his pace so he could get home as soon as possible. When he finally got back to his room, he opened the envelope carefully so as not to damage anything and then saw what was inside: a USB stick, a SIM card and a key.

Without waiting for even a second, he turned his computer on and noticed that the key, which could easily be for a door or a safe, didn’t have any sort of identification code or number on it.

As soon as his computer was up and running, Iago put the USB stick in and immediately copied its contents onto another one that he’d pulled out of one of his drawers. Before he looked at its content, he ejected that second pen drive and put it in his wallet.

When he finally opened the first USB, he found two folders. The first was called “Medical History” and the other only “KB”.

Iago opened the second one first, wondering what the two letters could mean. Inside it, amongst other files, he found a photo in which he immediately recognised Martín as a young man out drinking with his group of friends somewhere that seemed to resemble the football pitch on the South Campus, just below the viewpoint by the Paseo da Ferradura in the city’s Alameda park.

Taken when people still used film cameras, the quality of the photo made it very clear it was a scanned image that had been digitised. After trying and failing to spot himself in the photo, Iago realised he only recognised five of the eight people in it.

DRINKS ON THE CAMPUS VIDA

21 January 2017

Santiago de Compostela

On the left of the photo were Mariana, Roi and his cousin Lois who had also studied Medicine. There were three other people stood with their arms draped around each other’s shoulders: a blonde girl Iago hadn’t seen before, Martín and David de la Riba, a party animal through and through who would go on lots of nights out with the group back then. Kneeling down, in front of them, were two other pretty girls Iago couldn’t identify.

The supermarket bags and the bottles on the floor to the left of the photo as well as the student halls in the background helped Iago place the photo towards the end of his degree. The fact that Lois, who was two years younger than them, had been there made it impossible the photo could have been taken during Iago’s first years at university.

In the folder “KB”, Iago found a couple of newspaper clippings from 2002 and 2003 about how the General Hospital of Galeras was closing and moving to Vidán. But what really caught his attention were the screenshots and links to news stories in local newspapers about the death of Kathrin Brinkmann, a German student who had been on an Erasmus year in Santiago in October 2002.

Iago cast an eye over all the headlines that had been published in the local papers about an event he couldn’t remember happening. The sparse text in the news stories only gave a few details about how a young woman’s body had appeared a few metres from the oak trees in San Lourenzo, semi-submerged next to the riverbank where the Sarela is little more than a small stream. Someone who lived in the area realised she was there after his dog discovered a body off the beaten track, past the bridge that’s at the bottom of the hill at Cano and near some of the old houses whose outside walls are still standing, covered in moss.

The fact the body was still dressed and there weren’t any visible signs of violence, beyond what one would expect from falling into a river, meant it was easy to think, in the first instance, that this had been a fatal accident. With a sexual motive ruled out, the high concentration of alcohol in Kathrin’s blood and the fact her girlfriends’ statements all corroborated each other, the investigation was closed quite quickly. From what Iago could glean from the short news stories published just a few weeks later, all of Kathrin’s friends had said she’d decided to go off on her own back to the university halls at Monte da Condesa after she’d had too much to drink and started to feel sick. This all indicated that her falling into the stream had been no more than a simple accident, a tragic end to a drunken night gone wrong. Kathrin’s parents only went to Compostela to collect their daughter’s body so they could bury her in Germany and didn’t spend a minute longer in the city than was strictly necessary to arrange all the paperwork.

Only in one of the articles published around the time in El Correo Gallego was there a small picture of the Erasmus student and Iago immediately identified her as the same blonde girl that had appeared in the photo of the drunken night, stood between Roi and Martín. To confirm the very small doubts he had, he opened the picture on the pen drive again and saw Kathrin was smiling, leaning on his friend Martín’s arm.

Apart from those short articles that had appeared in local newspapers towards the end of October 2002, what happened to Kathrin Brinkmann had hardly received any attention at all, which explained in part why Iago, who around that time had just left for Germany, didn’t know about the case.

What seemed even stranger to him was that his friend had never spoken to him at all about what happened. As he looked back at the photograph, Iago asked himself if he actually wanted to know the truth behind all this mess, which was starting to seem really quite sinister to him.

LEAVING COMPOSTELA

Fourteen years earlier – 17 October 2002

Santiago de Compostela

Martín woke up with a hangover worthy of Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas. He got out of bed too quickly and tried to remember how he’d got home. As he tried to piece together his hazy memories of the night before, he found his jeans on the floor of his bedroom alongside his shoes and a pile of material that had been a crisply ironed shirt only a few hours earlier. He couldn’t see his jacket so he got up and saw it had been dumped on top of his desk. He calmly checked he still had his wallet, mobile and keys. A little more at ease now, he sat down on the chair in just his underwear, which is how he’d slept too, and holding his head in his hands, he thought how lucky it was his internal GPS had got him home again. His grandmother had always said that drunk people have a guardian angel. If that was true, his would have more than enough work.

It had been quite some time since he’d been drunk like that and he thought to himself that he was no longer used to drinking how he had before, when he was young. For Martín, his “before” were those two years he’d been “matriculated” in the Maths Faculty (to use the word “study” for what he did during that time would be completely inappropriate). In the first term he didn’t pass a single class and in June, he managed to get four credits, which was enough to give him the right to still be matriculated the year after.

Martín carried happy memories of his “gap year” of parties and high jinks. The only bad memory was of how his parents had run out of patience when he got his results from the exams he’d taken in his second February as a university student. On some of his first nights out, Martín had met David de la Riba and the two of them quickly became friends. They would go out together every night from Wednesday to Saturday, saying yes to any drinks, birthdays or Paso de Ecuador celebrations that came their way.

But it had been some time since then. Over the last two years, Martín had taken a course in programming and he was about to start an advanced course in the administration of IT systems. Though he still went out from time to time, as you’d expect from a 23-year-old, the endless drunken nights, when he’d still been there as they switched off the lights in some of Compostela’s dingiest bars, were a thing of the past. The fun-loving David, on the other hand, was still living his life as he always had, though his father, a well-known and well-reputed cardiologist in Santiago with a seat in the Galician parliament, didn’t find it funny at all that his son was out there making a name for himself in this way. Martín and David were still good friends, if we take friendship to mean spending lots of nights and early mornings together in Santiago. Other than going out for drinks though, they didn’t spend much time in each other’s company, nor did they have much in common besides drinking.

The night before, Martín had decided to go out because it was one of the first Thursdays of the academic year and knowing Silvia was going to be out with some of her girlfriends, he was hoping to see her. Sat in his kitchen, he thought it was a shame they hadn’t ended up seeing each other in the end. “Or not,” he thought, remembering how drunk he’d ended up. He pieced together as best he could what he remembered from that night and images from pre-drinks outdoors on the campus came to mind. At the football ground there were loads of people, like there always were on Thursdays at the start of the academic year on nights when it didn’t feel too cold yet and the eternal Compostela rain afforded a moment of respite. The small groups of students got to know each other easily, lubricated by cheap alcohol. Asking for some ice cubes, a plastic cup or for someone to light your cigarette was enough to start to open up the circles of friends that congregated around the white supermarket bags. That night Martín, David, Roi and Lois were with Mariana and another friend and sat next to them was a considerable group of Erasmus students. Martín felt embarrassed remembering how he’d spoken to a girl from Austria, whose name he couldn’t remember, in the kind of English you’d expect from Planeta DeAgostini.

Shockingly hungover, Martín went into the bathroom and took a drink from the sink. As he bent down, it reminded him of David peeing in the bushes near the Esperanza health centre. From there they’d seen a girl disappear into the campus and its darkness. Martín was so drunk he’d vomited right on the spot:

“David, I’m going to call it a day. I’m off home.”

“What do you mean? You’re not going anywhere.”

“Yes, I am. You head out with the others, I’ll tidy up here.”

Martín couldn’t really remember how he’d got home or which path he’d taken, but it was clear he’d been capable enough to make it back.

Text © Lito Vila Baleato

Translation © Harriet Cook