Let No One Sleep

by Juan José Millás, Thomas Bunstead

Genres: Absurdist Fiction; Horror

Synopsis

An odyssey of operatic proportions, featuring an obsession-fueled taxi driver

After Lucía loses her job at an IT firm, she has a vision of her future career as a taxi driver, brought on by the intoxicating opera floating through her apartment’s air vent. She obtains her taxi license and meets the neighbor responsible for the music. Calaf is the man’s name, which also happens to be the name of the character in Puccini’s Turandot and the bird Lucía received on her tenth birthday from her long-since-dead mother. When he moves out of her building, Lucía becomes obsessed, driving through Madrid and searching for him on every corner, meeting intriguing people along the way. What follows is a phantasmagoria of coincidence, betrayal, and revenge, featuring Millás’s singular dark humor.

Let No One Sleep is a delirious novel in which the mundane and extraordinary collide, art revives and devastates, and identity is unhinged by the treacherous forces of contemporary society.

 

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Release date: August 23, 2022

Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press

Print pages: 204

Sample

1

SEEING HERSELF IN THE MIRROR, Lucía said, That fat woman is me.

This was not said insultingly; she wasn’t being mean to herself. She, after all, was pretend thin rather than fat. So her mother had said when she was a girl, while brushing her hair after getting her out of the bath one day, “Look at your thighs. You’re pretend thin, like most wading birds are.”

In bed that night, the girl puzzled over the contradiction. Why did she look thin if she was actually fat? She was to spend the next several days searching for pictures of wading birds in books, then checking her thighs, and throughout the rest of her life she monitored herself obsessively, worried that her body would eventually give her away. But she made it through the rest of childhood and adolescence without the physical changes inherent in that transition doing anything to alter her mother’s pronouncement. At no point did the subtle proportions of the wading bird desert her, and these, as she came to see in time, had the effect of blurring the line between abundance and nimbleness.

At the place where Lucía worked, there was a pathologically obese woman who died upon suddenly losing weight. To begin with, everyone put it down to how fat she had been, but then they put it down to how slim she had become. Her death confirmed people’s suspicions, whatever they were, given they were impossible to substantiate either way. The day after she died, the company, an app-development firm that also installed, configured, and maintained IT systems, filed fraudulently for bankruptcy and shut down.

The world was full of programmers younger and better equipped than Lucía, and now the thought of her work prospects produced a physical unease in her, which grew more intense as she left the company building and hailed a taxi—her car was at the mechanic’s. She had a cardboard box full of her belongings, like good-bye moments in movies. These were:

1. a snail shell from the beach that she used as a paperweight
2. a ceramic cup and a box of green-tea bags
3. a Spanish-English dictionary
4. a dictionary of synonyms and antonyms
5. a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste
6. a jar of moisturizer
7. a box of tampons
8. a notebook she used for working out algorithms
9. a pair of thick wool socks for when the heating was down low or the air-conditioning up high
10. a nail-cutting kit: scissors, file, and cuticle scissors
11. a toilet roll and two packets of Kleenex
12. a packet of energy bars
13. a packet of disposable paper panties

The taxi driver turned out to be a programmer as well; when his company folded, he had been unable to find work again in the sector.

“With the payout and some savings,” he told Lucía, “I bought myself a taxi license, and now I’m my own boss.”

“And you make enough money?” she asked.

“There’s the initial outlay to cover, but then, yes, if you put in the hours, you can live off it. In spite of Uber and Cabify, all that lot. But you do have to enjoy it. I love going around all day, meeting new people, listening in as they chat away in the backseat. You get into all kinds of scrapes. Plus, I imagine I’m in a different city every day. New York, Delhi, Mexico …”

“Which city are you in today?” Lucía asked.

“Today—Madrid.”

“But you don’t need to imagine that; we’re in Madrid.”

“But my thing is that I need to convince myself.” He held up a self-hypnosis book he had on the passenger’s seat. “It’s like when you succeed in imagining what you’re doing and doing what you’re imagining, all at the same time, the anxiety in your life goes away. I used to be a really anxious person, but I dealt with it and now I’m able to be in Madrid when I’m in Madrid.”

“Right,” said Lucía.

“And when you manage to get mind and body in the same place, reality takes on this extraordinary glow. Believe me.”

“Like when you imagine you’re making a tortilla while you’re making a tortilla,” she said, her irony lost on the man.

“Exactly. Or like imagining you’re having sex at the same time as actually having sex.”

She said nothing to this; it had to be a come-on. She caught the man’s eye in the rearview mirror, and though he was nice-looking enough, she thought it wasn’t the moment.

It was midmorning when she arrived at her apartment. She put the cardboard box down by the front door. Rosi, who came and did three hours of cleaning twice a week, was doing the vacuuming. Lucía asked her to take a seat before telling her she was going to have to let her go, at least until she herself found another job. Rosi coolly heard her out and, after they’d settled up, left the vacuum cleaner where it stood, without unplugging it. Before going out, she took the apartment keys from her pocket and flung them onto the sofa, though they bounced off and landed on the floor near Lucía’s feet. Lucía hadn’t expected thanks, but she’d anticipated at least a rundown of the chores.

The dishes Lucía had left in the sink had been washed up. She moved the vacuum cleaner aside with her foot, took two steps, and stopped in the middle of the kitchen–living room. She stood doing nothing, feeling afraid, as though having found herself in an apartment that wasn’t her own. And really, at that hour of the morning, it wasn’t. She took her shoes off and went through to the bedroom to see if the bed had been made. The atmosphere felt slightly sinister to her; the building was completely silent, like everyone had fled following a nuclear attack warning.

The bed had also been made.

She went into the bathroom, looked at herself in the mirror, and it was then that she said, not in an insulting way, That fat woman is me.

Then opera music started to play. At first, she thought it was inside her head, but then she realized it was coming through the air vent above the bath. She didn’t like opera and wasn’t in general very musically attuned, but there was something about this—a sort of eavesdropping, without knowing where the music was coming from—that hit her like a truck. She owned a CD of Maria Callas arias that had come free with a Sunday supplement sometime before. She had put it on one day, simply for something to do, but turned it off after a couple of minutes because it made her feel uneasy. The aria coming through the air vent was the first one from that CD; she recognized it straightaway from the familiar unease it produced. Now, however, sitting on the edge of the bidet and listening, she was in rapture. Before long, idiotic tears were flowing down her cheeks.

“Something’s going to happen,” she said.

This was a phrase she had spoken thousands of times in her life, though it did not, in general, precede anything happening. She had gotten it from her mother, who would sometimes stop mid-action and say, “Something’s going to happen,” followed by a vacant look coming over her. Then, since nothing happened (nothing visible at least), she would go the rest of the way down the stairs, or finish brushing her hair, or whatever it was she had been doing before the sudden stoppage. Lucía had inherited that sense of some vague but threatening event being constantly just around the corner.

But there had been one occasion, on the day of her tenth birthday, to be precise, when something had happened. Since it was a Sunday, the girl had run into her parents’ bedroom the moment she woke up and asked for her present, about which the only clue she’d been given was that it was a surprise. While her father got out of bed to fetch it, her mother sat up and said, “Something’s going to happen.”

At that moment, Lucía’s father came back in with a bird in a cage. ...