She doesn’t know what is she doing there. Or when did she think this whole theater was a good idea. Out of habit, she thinks, she did it out of habit, because Carlos was so tiresome that, in the end, she agreed only for him to close his mouth and leave her alone. She should have sent him to hell, but anyway.

She forces herself to think it isn’t so bad. In less than an hour, she will start drinking until she loses consciousness. She just wants her tongue to be free before they take her to bed so that she can tell everyone what she really thinks of them. She is going to tell her mother all the reproaches she’s been swallowing since she was a teenager, she’s going to throw in her father’s face his visits to “gentlemen clubs”, and then her future in-laws will be next. Blessed gin, that’s going to help her slagging off Carlos’s mother, that passive-aggressive, superficial witch full of prejudices, the queen of what-will-people-say and what-you-have-to-do. Let’s see if she stops talking to her and puts up alone with her idiot son and her useless husband, that stupid aspiring company dog, who believes himself intelligent just because he likes repeating what he reads in the Sunday supplement and is interesting for nobody. And then, when she drops the bomb, she is going to keep on drinking until she doesn’t care anymore. Maybe fortune smiles on her and she gets a blackout.

But now she has to hang in there and put on a brave face, and hope that nobody notices her discomfort too much, although she knows everyone will blame it on her nerves. I wish I was nervous, she thinks, because she would have started drinking by now and, with a little luck, this hellish hour and this parade of false smiles and stupid comments would also be erased from her memory forever.

She looks at Carlos and the stupid face with which he looks back at her and she almost rolls his eyes. He’s not a bad guy, she says to herself, but how is she going to spend her whole life looking at that idiot face, knowing that she is tied to it forever? No way. As soon as she leaves, she starts drinking. The first thing that falls in her hands. Until someone reprimands her for embarrassing herself and gives her cause to air everybody’s dirty rags and shake them in front of those present. Afterward, she’s going to get more drunk, she’s going to survive the hangover the next day and she’s going to start again no matter how.

But before that happens, she concentrates on doing what is expected of her. So he looks away from Carlos and, repressing the desire of erasing his smile from his face with a punch, she says out loud, for all to hear:

“Yes, I do.”

– Izaskun Gracia