Algo habrá que hacer para soportar esta mierda de vida

“Algo habrá que hacer para soportar esta mierda de vida” is a recurring expression of practical defiance: life is bad, the speaker concedes, but something can still be done to bear it. The line moves from a late-night drink to the cover of a clandestine romance and finally to the narrator’s Sundays with Experta, gathering different forms of pleasure, complicity, and loyalty as it recurs.

First Use: Anise and a Night of Conversation

The phrase first appears when the woman offers the narrator a drink instead of immediately giving him what he has asked for. She reads his willingness in his eyes, takes a glass matching her own from a cupboard, and justifies the modest pleasure with the line. The drink is poor anise, bought with the little money her miserly aunt gives her; she describes herself as a poor relation and explains that her mother became pregnant by an unknown man when nearly forty. She has imagined her father might have been Basque, partly because of the unusual name her mother gave her.

The sentence is not presented as a grand declaration or a promise that circumstances will improve. It makes endurance sound deliberately modest: a glass, a conversation, a cigarette. The two spend the night talking, smoking, and drinking in the kitchen until dawn. In that setting, the line gives their shared reprieve its plain rationale: hardship remains, but it need not exclude small pleasures.

The Phrase Becomes a Cover

The wording returns after the narrator has gone out with María Aránzazu. At the elevator she tells him to go upstairs and not wait awake, then takes an old, large key from her handbag. Instead of entering the building’s courtyard by the usual route, she walks along the passage from the entrance and opens an iron gate leading into the adjoining building’s courtyard. Before going through, she turns back and whispers the familiar sentence. The narrator understands it in the stillness of the night.

He then identifies what that understanding makes him: an accomplice and cover for María Aránzazu’s clandestine affair with Matías, the porter at number 26. Matías is a short, bald, older, frequently drunk man, described as funny; the war has allowed him to leave his wife behind in a village in Alicante. The narrator’s nights out at the cinema give the lovers a safer opportunity to meet. María Aránzazu no longer has to stay awake for hours, slip out on tiptoe, risk discovery, or find that her lover has fallen asleep before she arrives. The phrase now does more than excuse a drink: it names a small arrangement that helps others find privacy under restrictive circumstances.

A Sunday Answer

Later, María Aránzazu asks where the narrator goes every Sunday. He answers with a smile that the others are not the only ones who can do something to endure this life. His reply echoes the earlier line without simply repeating its original situation: the same logic of making life bearable now accompanies a regular commitment elsewhere.

The narrator visits Experta in Vallecas nearly every Sunday at midday, usually inviting her to eat at a nearby roadside inn with her daughters if they join them. Experta’s two surviving sons are serving their sentences in the same penal battalion, and she misses their appointment when she can go to see them. The narrator never misses it. He says that without Experta he would have gone nowhere, and that he can repay only some part of a debt he can never settle, using money, the cheapest good available to him. Set beside this lasting obligation, his smiling answer acquires a different weight: what helps him endure is not only diversion, but also the chance to remain loyal to someone who once mattered to him.

Meaning Through Recurrence

The phrase links three distinct scenes without making them equivalent. In the kitchen, it accompanies a shared drink and a night of talk; at the iron gate, it marks the narrator’s tacit acceptance of María Aránzazu’s secret; in the Sunday exchange, it becomes a teasing explanation for his own recurring absence and commitment. Its repetition turns a blunt acknowledgment of misery into a flexible language for coping—through pleasure, through solidarity, and through keeping faith with a person to whom one owes more than can be repaid.