Just a Sweet Dream (5)
Saturday, February 15, 2020. Around 3:00 PM.
Beyond the car window, an unassuming yellow building came into view: Calle Don Pedro Infinito, the place where Benjamín Saúl awaited me.
The curtains on the second-floor window fluttered gently in the breeze. Catching my eye, they were brown now—an interesting change, considering they had still been yellow back in January.
“We’re here.”
“Yes. Thank you, Uncle.”
“Kyunghun.”
I paused, my legs halting at Uncle Bari’s call.
“I have a meeting with Miguel this afternoon. I already spoke to Benjamín, so just take a taxi home today.”
“All right.”
“I’ll fill you in on how things stand tonight. We need to make a decision by tomorrow lunch at the latest. If you’re comfortable with it, it might be good to discuss the subject with your counselor.”
“I will.”
Even without him mentioning it, I had plenty to talk about today anyway.
Moments later, Uncle Bari’s car accelerated down the long boulevard before vanishing into an alleyway. Instead of heading straight upstairs, I sat on the landing for a moment to sort through my thoughts, separating what I could say from what I wanted to keep to myself.
When I knocked three times on the solid wood door, approaching footsteps echoed from inside.
Click.
A slender, gaunt figure with brown hair appeared. My counselor, Benjamín Saúl.
“Hola.”
“Welcome. Come on in.”
Without missing a beat, he asked what kind of tea I wanted. Without much hesitation, I asked for raspberry. Somewhere along the line, I had become addicted to its distinct aroma.
While he boiled the water, I noticed a new sculpture resting near the kitchen table.
“Is this new?”
“Yeah, picked it up at the market. There’s a guy named Baro who usually looks out for pieces for me.”
An eagle crouched in a nest perched atop a crucifix; it struck me that Benjamín had quite an eccentric taste. I couldn't fathom why anyone would spend good money on something like that.
“The study all right with you?”
“Sí.”
“Let’s head in.”
Each holding our mugs, we made our way into the study.
Settling back against the counseling chair felt surprisingly familiar. Having visited several times now, the blend of aged paper wafting from the bookshelves and the subtle room freshener had grown comforting.
“How have you been?”
“So-so. What about you?”
“Stayed cooped up at home until the festival was nearly over, then finally went out for groceries. Picked up some fruit, rice, seafood, and a bit of bread.”
Benjamín smiled faintly and brought the mug to his lips. I couldn't deny that he carried an air of unmistakable elegance. Would I carry myself like that once I hit fifty? Well... Dad’s just like me, so probably not.
“And what about you?” he asked.
“Well, recently I played in a Copa del Rey match. Before that, I got a transfer offer from Barcelona... It’s been pretty hectic all around.”
“Aside from professional matters. Didn’t you go see the festival?”
“Watched it from a distance on a restaurant rooftop.”
“And your father?”
“He hates crowds. Besides, my family isn’t religious, so we always keep our distance from festivals.”
He chuckled softly at my answer.
“You don’t need to be religious to enjoy a festival, so that’s a bit of a shame. Squeezing through the throng of tourists is an ordeal, true, but it’s well worth seeing.”
“I saw the Three Kings’ Day parade two years ago.”
“Did you?”
“Yeah. Just like you said, it was way too crowded, so I decided never to go again.”
Benjamín chuckled again, murmuring that it was a pity.
“Nothing else happened besides that?”
“I got a text from my maternal grandmother asking to borrow money.”
“Mmh.”
As if lying in wait for the question, I laid the main issue out on the table. If not now, I would miss the right moment and waste the entire session. Before long, the turmoil inside spilled past my lips.
The ties between my family troubles and the transfer. The wages, and the inner hesitation shaking me to the core. Perhaps because Benjamín was a complete stranger, it wasn't as hard to talk about as I had feared. For me, it took a tremendous amount of courage.
“Let’s clarify a few things first,” Benjamín said calmly.
“Okay.”
“Do you want to give money to your grandmother?”
“……”
“Let’s push the transfer and talking to your father to the back burner for a second. The more I listen, the more it feels like the core issue is being swept under the rug, which is why I’m asking.”
He offered the sharp insight I had expected, yet I could only cough up a lukewarm answer. It wasn’t a simple matter.
“If Mom is really struggling, shouldn't I help her? As for my grandmother... I just don't know.”
“What does your mother say?”
“We rarely speak.”
“You haven't discussed this issue with her even once?”
True to form, Benjamín drove straight to the heart of the matter.
“...Mom never brings up money.”
“Meaning you haven't asked her directly either, right?”
“...Yeah.”
“You can speak freely. In Spain, we have data protection laws like the GDPR. Medical professionals are strictly bound by them. The moment I utter a word of your story anywhere else, I go to prison.”
When I hesitated, he wielded his professional knowledge to put me strangely at ease. I let out a soft huff and shook my head.
“It’s fine. I’m not worried about that at this point.”
“Would it be all right if we talked a bit more about your mother? It seems intertwined with this whole situation.”
“Sure.”
“Do you barely keep in touch at all?”
“No, quite the opposite. Three or four times a week, I get one-sided messages.” In a pitch slightly higher than usual, I continued, doing my best to sound indifferent. “Lately it feels even more frequent. Ever since about two or three months ago?”
“Calls? Or...?”
“She contacts me in the dead of night, so even if she calls, I can't answer. Usually, it's texts. Sometimes a call comes through after morning, but I’ve never answered in time. Either I ignore it, or I simply missed it. Always one or the other.”
“……”
“Whenever she reaches out... well, I don’t quite know how to describe it. Walls of text. It's packed so densely that it's exhausting to read.”
I lifted the mug closer to my nose. Raspberry might have sounded more refined, but to me, it smelled just like green tea.
“Certainly not a typical relationship,” Benjamín noted.
“Yeah. The greeting is at most two sentences. The rest is blaming Dad, blaming Grandmother, blaming me. When I see curses sprinkled in, I wonder why she’s like that, but at the same time, it scares me.”
“Why does it scare you?”
“Because I’m terrified she might come find me. So I just live turning a blind eye, treating it like an inevitable burden.”
“...When you get those texts, do you read them all?”
“Sometimes. Wondering how she’s living, if anything has changed. Holding onto a faint hope that things might have improved. But it’s never turned out the way I hoped.”
As steam rose from the mug and vanished into the corner of the room, silence settled between us for a brief lull. If I stripped away my prejudice that he was just a thief trying to steal my secrets, Benjamín Saúl seemed like a genuinely good person. He never spoke carelessly.
“Care to tell me a little more?” he asked.
“About what? There isn’t much to say about the texts. I just closed them without reading to the end anyway. I never reply.”
“Not the texts. Your mother.”
I didn’t refuse Benjamín Saúl’s intrusive request. I had only come seeking advice, not intending to bare all my past. Yet once I started talking, the recorded ledger of my memories unspooled without stopping. Whether something weighing on me had pushed my heart, or whether I had simply been waiting for a chance to confess it to someone, I couldn’t tell.
“...Mom and I used to make a pretty good team. My personality was terrible, so as a kid, you couldn’t find a single friend of mine even if you washed your eyes out looking. Dad was probably the same way. I took after him, after all.”
“I see.”
“It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when things fell apart. But... at some point, Mom spent all her time lying in bed. She’d habitually claim she had slipped on an icy road, but looking back, I think her heart hurt far worse than her body.”
“……”
“Mom loved teaching kids, and Dad opposed it. Now that it’s all behind us, I sometimes think that if I hadn’t been allowed to play football, I might have felt the same way.”
Benjamín Saúl was looking somewhere else in the study, sparing me from meeting his gaze. He seemed to be doing whatever he could to make me comfortable. Strangely, I felt surprisingly composed.
“Two years, then three. She endured and endured, until finally, when she couldn’t take it anymore, disaster struck.”
On a day with crystal-clear skies, Mom had called me into the master bedroom.
“I came home from school to find Mom looking at me with a desperate, pleading expression.”
“Mm.”
“Out of nowhere, she asked how I’d feel if she and Dad got divorced. It was a horrible question. I was only twelve, a foolish kid who couldn’t tell heaven from earth.”
It astonished me that I could speak of it so nonchalantly. It felt as though I were an outside observer, making me wonder why I had kept it bottled up for so long.
“Because she looked like she might shatter at any second, I told her it was okay. Without really understanding what that meant, I nodded. Just like that, I took Mom’s side.”
“Anyone would have done the same.”
Would they really have? If only I had possessed the foresight to look further ahead, I would have tried everything to stop it. If only I had embraced her wounds and encouraged her. I rewound the clockwork of regrets I had revisited hundreds, thousands of times.
“Dad hit the roof. As little as I had anticipated it, Dad had been just as blind. For a month, he downed alcohol he couldn’t even handle, begged, and apologized.”
“……”
“It was too late. Nothing changed, and Dad left the house. Even these days, I still vividly recall our final exchange of glances.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yet Mom... once Dad was gone, she wept as if the world had ended. I couldn’t understand it. Why cry? Even now, I still don’t get it. Why did she cry? It was a decision the two of us made together.”
Wetting my lips with the now completely cold raspberry tea, I pressed on, undoing the locks latched around my heart. Stopping now would feel far more foolish.
“Meanwhile, school became even harder. I spoke less and stopped smiling. Maybe Mom thought it was because of the divorce. At first she tried to make me smile, but then, starting one night, she began hitting me.”
I paused, staring into the dark red liquid.
“I don’t know what went on in her head. Maybe I reminded her too much of Dad.”
“……”
“After getting struck on the head with her open hand, I would retreat into my dark room and think about so many things. Why did I nod to an offer I couldn’t handle? Couldn’t we go back to the good times?”
“……”
“And so, for quite a while, I lived in complete silence.”
“Mmh.”
“Honestly, it wasn’t that I lacked the strength to fight back... but Mom looked far more in pain than I was, so I just quietly learned patience. Could I have some more hot water? The tea’s gone cold.”
“...Of course.”
He put the kettle on and returned, offering a basket filled with cookies.
“Have some if you’d like while we talk.”
“Thank you.”
Taking a small breath, I continued.
“Then one day, our relationship came to an abrupt end. The evening I returned from cram school, Mom sent me off to Dad through my grandmother’s hands.”
“Through your grandmother’s hands...?”
“I was sitting in the empty house when the two of them walked in. One was Mom, utterly silent; the other was my grandmother, scolding me and demanding to know if I wanted to go to my father.”
“……”
“And that’s how I ended up living with Dad.”
Glancing up, I checked the clock on the study wall. Barely twenty minutes had passed since the session began. It left me with a bitter, bittersweet taste—disconcerted that the weight of my past amounted to no more than that, yet strangely relieved.
Using my parents’ lives as a mirror, I was striving to become a better person. Yet in reality, I found myself trailing right in their footsteps. That monumental mistake of sealing my parents’ divorce had been clutching at my ankles at every turn. Deciding on the transfer, failing to firmly reject my grandmother’s demands—it was all the exact same thing.
A moment later, Benjamín returned with the screaming kettle from the kitchen. As steaming water poured into my mug, warmth once again seeped into my hands.
“First, thank you for sharing what was in your heart. I know it wasn’t easy.” Following his thanks, he went through the process of reviewing my story once more. He said that to offer sound counsel, grasping the precise situation was paramount. “All right, Kim. What follows is my personal take.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you happen to bring your phone?”
“...Here.”
“You don’t need to hand it to me. What I want is for you to text your grandmother a rejection right now.”
I was completely taken aback by the sudden demand. Where had his refined composure gone? Benjamín’s eyes gleamed with piercing intensity.
“Right now, you are avoiding most of your problem situations. If you don’t refuse, those issues will pile up and haunt you for the rest of your days.”
“……”
“A person must learn how to say no.”
Without mercy, he stripped bare the unvarnished truth of my heart.