Somatizando

Synopsis

Hugo Caraballo arrives in Madrid at twenty-four with three suitcases, a backpack and a bag he fished out of a bin that still has its price tag attached. Behind him he leaves Cádiz, Bilbao and a lifetime of moving that has turned him into someone from nowhere in particular. Ahead lies an extortionately priced screenwriting master's, a bedroom lit like a Zack Snyder film and three flatmates the university has assigned him more or less at random: Irantzu, a large, luminous Basque woman who gave up her dream of becoming an actress and is now holding together a four-year relationship that is starting to come apart at the seams; Valentina, a Colombian film director who has just ended a decade-long relationship and fights every month to keep the visa that lets her stay in Spain; and Carmen, a journalist with the face of a fascist and a wardrobe out of a magazine, who conceals her own heartbreaks behind a perfectly calibrated irony.

As classes drag on among insufferable rich kids and free cocktails, Hugo throws himself into Tinder with the faith of someone who prays. What follows is an increasingly absurd parade of men: the waiter he nicknames el Anzuelo for anatomical reasons, an aerospace engineer who cannot get over his ex, a straight-identified redhead—or so he claims—who keeps seeking Hugo out between stolen kisses on the metro and girlfriends he never quite mentions. Every failed date, every ghosting and every bad blowjob becomes a somatisation: the anxiety attack, the vomiting, the exhaustion with which Hugo processes—or rather, fails to process—each setback, accompanied by a private dictionary of slang coined between friends that runs through the book like a secret language.

As the months pass—a Christmas in a nearly empty flat, a master's trip to a film festival in France, a nine-thousand-euro graduation—the four flatmates stop being strangers and become the only stable family any of them has in the city. Between late-night confessions, shared STIs, breakups that repeat on a loop and the constant promise to stop needing a man to feel whole, Hugo begins to suspect that his obsession with finding a partner conceals something much simpler and much harder to admit: an old fear of abandonment that already has a name and a face in his past.

With humour that is direct, unfiltered and deeply Andalusian, Somatizando charts a year of disastrous dates, orgasms with their own soundtrack and friendships built on two-euro beers and uncomfortable truths. A novel about the difficulty of setting limits, about the contemporary LGBTIQ+ community and, above all, about the discovery—as simple as it is elusive—that sometimes the family we are looking for is already there, sharing the flat.

Machine translation, pending review.