The central character is Flavio Guijarro, a restless, contradictory man who has spent most of his life trying on professions without becoming outstanding at any of them. He has been a draughtsman, musician, designer, interior decorator, psychology student, photographer, performer, writer and actor, but his most stable occupation is working as a waiter at his cousin’s terrace in Madrid. He is intelligent, sociable, bilingual and enormously enthusiastic, but also dishonest, impulsive and insecure. His first major breakthrough occurs almost accidentally when he accompanies a handsome but intellectually limited Spanish actor, Alez Mazado, on an international promotional tour. Flavio is officially translating Alez’s interviews, but because he finds the actor’s answers painfully banal, he quietly replaces them with more intelligent and sophisticated responses in English. At the same time, something else happens: Flavio discovers that he can write extraordinarily well while flying. He never sleeps on planes and fills the blank pages, margins and even airsickness bags with notes. During the flights with Alez he writes La adicción, a confessional monologue about Carmelo, the great love of his youth, disguising himself in the text as a female film director. The monologue wins a Special Mention in a provincial competition, enough to convince Flavio that writing may finally be the artistic identity he has spent his life searching for. His fascination with Alez is already sexual, although at this point he deliberately keeps his distance.
La adicción reveals the defining trauma of Flavio’s romantic life. In the fictionalised version, the narrator meets Carmelo amid Madrid’s nocturnal artistic world. They rapidly become physically and emotionally inseparable, but Carmelo begins using heroin. What initially looks like a manageable vice becomes the organising principle of both their lives. Carmelo lies, disappears and repeatedly relapses; Flavio tries to rescue him, takes him travelling to remove him from Madrid and discovers that, temporarily, unfamiliar places seem capable of freeing Carmelo from drugs. They travel through places such as Abidjan, Havana, Istanbul, Mexico and the Dominican Republic, creating some of the happiest memories of Flavio’s life, but every return to Madrid brings Carmelo back to heroin. Flavio screams, breaks things and eventually even hits him once. After years of repetition, he finally understands that loving Carmelo will not cure him. He takes him back to his parents’ village and leaves him there. Three years later Carmelo has recovered, and Flavio initially dreams of reuniting with him, but Carmelo’s mother believes Madrid and Flavio belong to the world from which her son needs protection. Flavio accepts the cruel logic: if he truly loves Carmelo, he must stay away. The lesson that “love is not enough” becomes one of the emotional foundations of the entire novel.
Meanwhile Flavio’s professional life takes an unexpected direction. Actors realise that although he is mediocre as an actor himself, he has an exceptional instinct for understanding characters. A friend asks him for help with a role, and soon Alez hires him as his acting coach. Flavio helps transform Alez’s performance in Noche de Ramblas, which becomes an enormous success, and within five years Flavio is one of the most sought-after acting coaches in Spain. His cousin sells him half of the terrace, and Flavio comfortably combines the bar with coaching. Yet success does not eliminate his anxiety. He begins forgetting words: entereza, póstumo, funda, names such as Douglas Sirk and other ordinary or literary terms disappear from his memory. He starts maintaining a notebook of “lost words,” capturing them whenever they return. Language becomes almost a living organism capable of abandoning him. He also keeps enormous files of quotations from writers including Virginia Woolf, Susan Sontag, Borges, Bolaño, Clarice Lispector and Pessoa. His obsession with time, language and memory intensifies, as does his anxiety. He eventually consults a psychiatrist, but even therapy becomes another literary encounter: he discusses Virginia Woolf’s descriptions of anxiety and half-jokingly considers her suggested remedies. The real problem is that Flavio wants to write and cannot reproduce on land what happens effortlessly in the air.
