Discontent

Marisa is a 32-year-old creative strategist at an advertising agency in Madrid. The novel opens in late August as she draws a parallel between herself and Marina Joyce, an English YouTuber whose followers suspected she was being held captive based on subtle changes in her videos. Like Joyce, Marisa appears functional in meetings but is inwardly medicated and desperate. Eight years in advertising have taught her to master "the office game" rather than develop genuine skill. Her job is selling manufactured insecurities back to consumers: lipstick as the promise of beauty, perfume as the promise of being memorable. She knows the work helps no one, yet she still believes a fast-fashion dress will transform her into a happier version of herself.

To avoid real work on the Christmas campaign, Marisa emails her master's students a fake assignment so she can steal their best ideas and delegates research to Natalia, her eager subordinate. She retreats to her office to watch YouTube, then takes a taxi to the Prado Museum on the pretext of a client meeting. There she takes an Ativan, a prescription tranquilizer, and gravitates toward the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, the 15th-century Dutch painter whose work she considers the closest thing she has to therapy. Her dream at eighteen was to work at the Prado; instead she drifted into advertising during the post-2008 economic crisis and stayed out of inertia. Standing before Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, a three-paneled painting, she interprets the central panel not as a condemnation of sin but as a vision of everything desirable life could offer. She avoids the third panel, hell, because she already spends too much time in it.

Marisa has experienced anxiety attacks for years. After a colleague named Rita, a quiet graphic designer and Marisa's only real friend at the agency, recognized the symptoms during a cafeteria episode and urged her to see a doctor, Marisa was prescribed tranquilizers and recommended therapy. She quit therapy after concluding her problem was the fundamental requirement of going to work at all, and continued receiving the tranquilizers by fabricating a story of childhood sexual abuse. She and Rita had bonded over bringing books to lunch as shields against small talk; talking to Rita made the workday bearable.

A company email announces the upcoming mandatory team-building retreat at a five-star hotel in Segovia, filling Marisa with dread. That evening her neighbor Pablo, with whom she has maintained an intermittent sexual relationship and an unbreakable friendship over five years, comes up for wine on her terrace. She confides that her exhaustion stems not from workload but from the repetitive, meaningless cycle of her days. They sleep together, and Marisa describes the sex as not epic but necessary, a mutual gift.

At the office, her boss Ramón, the head of creative and a fatherly figure who avoids conflict, asks Marisa to lead a creativity exercise at the retreat and mentions that HR has arranged a minute of silence for Rita. The name triggers a dissociative episode. During a lunch break she allows herself to think about Rita, who was deeply unpopular because she never worked beyond her contract or joined after-work socializing. One day Rita did not show up. On the third day, HR announced her death by email. Rumors circulated that Rita had died by suicide, though no one could confirm this because no one knew her life outside work. She was quickly replaced. Marisa had taken Rita's box of belongings home and stored it unopened in her closet for 11 months.

A chance encounter transforms Marisa's emotional landscape. At a Japanese restaurant, Elena, her closest friend from university, recognizes her. Elena is nearly unrecognizable after extensive cosmetic surgery, but her warmth remains the same. That evening over wine, Elena explains that she extracts money from wealthy men by performing the role of a beautiful, helpless woman, framing her choices as a feminist critique of the heteropatriarchy, the male-dominated social order that she argues will always objectify women. Marisa shares her own constant performance at the office, and Elena declares, "Life is a performance."

That night, drunk and spiraling with anxiety, Marisa finally opens Rita's box. Among the personal items she finds a black notebook filled with meeting notes and caricatures of coworkers. A drawing of Marisa depicts her holding a phone and a pill box with the speech bubble: "The day doesn't start until I take my first Ativan." As the pages approach August, the month Rita died, the drawings grow darker, ending with a fantastical apocalypse replacing Rita's office view. Nothing follows. Marisa wraps herself in Rita's shawl and falls asleep crying.

After recovering, Marisa compiles her students' submissions into the Christmas campaign, delegates further work, and books a post-retreat vacation to Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands. Pablo offers his leftover marijuana, MDMA (a euphoria-inducing drug), and pills for the retreat.

At the Segovia hotel, the retreat opens with a minute of silence for Rita in a forest clearing. One colleague calls Rita "a very special person"; another adds she was "a self-starter." Marisa is enraged by the inadequacy. During paintball, she lights a joint and has a panic attack, a bad reaction to marijuana known as greening out, having left her Ativan at the hotel. That evening, after a former priest turned corporate-values speaker delivers a talk mixing Christian parables with business lessons, Ramón tells Marisa the second speaker canceled and she must present immediately. With only minutes to prepare, she makes a fateful decision: she crushes Pablo's pills and MDMA into pitchers of pineapple juice and has a waitress serve the spiked drinks to the audience as part of a "hydration" lesson. The drugs take effect and her improvised talk transforms the evening into an unexpectedly euphoric party. Marisa dances with colleagues she normally despises and reflects that perhaps they are all just confused tiny fish trying to survive in the same tank.

Part Two, titled "OOTO" (Out of the Office), consists entirely of an email chain from the following week. HR announces an internal investigation after the speaker is hospitalized and tests positive for illegal substances. The company arranges drug testing and involves the National Police. Throughout the increasingly frantic thread, every reply triggers Marisa's automatic out-of-office reply, since she is vacationing in Fuerteventura, creating a darkly comic rhythm.

Part Three, titled "In Itinere," a legal term for a work-related commute accident, opens with Marisa narrating from a hospital bed. On her first day back from vacation, she slipped while walking to the office in uncomfortable sandals and was struck by a delivery cyclist; a car then ran over part of her body. Her injuries include a dislocated shoulder, broken ribs, a cracked hip, and the loss of three fingers on her right hand. Because the accident occurred on her commute, she is entitled to full salary during leave. She marvels at the irony, since she had been recklessly crossing streets for months hoping for exactly this kind of lucky misfortune.

In the hospital, Pablo visits and she smiles. Elena visits and she smiles. Her parents arrive and she nestles into her mother's embrace. Looking at her injured hand, she feels bliss at the thought that she may never return to work. A lawyer estimates that between a substantial settlement and permanent medical leave, Marisa is financially set for life. Elena moves in to help, and when the doctor confirms a long leave, Marisa asks with rehearsed gravity, "Doctor, will I ever play the guitar again?" Pablo and Elena suppress smiles, since Marisa does not play guitar.

The novel closes with Elena bringing a picnic to the hospital: heirloom tomatoes, baguette, tinned fish, and goose-down pillows. Pablo arrives with a cold six-pack of beer. Looking at them both, Marisa recognizes them as her family, "a strange family." She imagines how her story will be retold at the office forever, keeping her present without requiring her presence. She takes a bite of tomato and declares it delicious. The novel ends with her realization: All anyone truly needs is someone who loves them, a bed with nice big pillows, a few cans of cold beer, and tomatoes that still taste like something.