No se muere solo una vez

Synopsis

Gael Landaluce Romero is forty, writes a travel column for a digital magazine, and has learned to describe his failed relationships in the precise vocabulary of psychology: intermittent reinforcement, limerence, emotional dependency. He can name everything. He cannot stop anything. He meets Anaís Rodríguez on a dating app after months of hollow encounters. She has just left Agathe, a narcissistic Frenchwoman who subjected her to years of systematic emotional control, and she comes to the relationship with one clear condition: no hierarchies, no exclusivity, total freedom for both of them. Gael, who considers himself enlightened and ready to explore non-normative bonds, agrees with pleasure. What he does not anticipate is the degree to which that agreed-upon freedom will become the perfect mechanism for his own destruction. To survive the uncertainty Anaís imposes—her silences, her disappearances, her sudden reconciliations—Gael drafts, on a night flight to the Caribbean, Las Leyes de la Fratría: seventeen articles governing what he calls their «unión libre y voluntaria». It is a document that is absurd and solemn in equal measure, proof that the person most in need of control is the one who has least of it. The novel moves along two parallel tracks. One is the relationship with Anaís, rendered with clinical precision and without self-pity: the jealousy Gael converts into tactic, the humiliations he accepts and those he does not even recognise as such, the moment she seems to give herself completely and announces that she wants him to meet her family. The other track is the logbooks: dispatches Gael sends to Luisa, his editor and closest friend, from Isla Estevanica and later from the occupied territories of Zebouan Oriental, where he passes himself off as a tourist to slip into a region closed to journalists. These pieces—on colonialism, inequality, migration, dictatorships—are rigorous accounts of other people's realities that function, beneath the surface, as an attempt to escape himself. Unsent letters to Anaís and interspersed poetic passages make visible what journalism, by definition, must leave unsaid. The turning point comes when Gael is detained and held for several days by the local authorities, accused of links to suspicious activities for the simple reason of carrying a book about the territory's history. Back in Madrid, broken, he receives the call he has been waiting weeks for: Anaís wants to see him. What follows is a scene that rearranges everything the reader thought they understood about both of them—a pregnancy, a reconciliation that turns out to be far more calculated than it appears, and a discovery, obtained by means Gael knows he should not have used, that reveals the full extent to which he has been manipulated from the start. Rather than withdraw with dignity, Gael responds with a move of his own: a cold, near-surgical negotiation that stakes his legal paternity against continued access to the only drug keeping him alive. No se muere solo una vez follows a narrator who can diagnose with pinpoint accuracy the mechanism that is destroying him and who, even so, cannot stop feeding it—right up to an ending that leaves the reader, not the protagonist, the final word on what has actually happened.

Machine translation, pending review.