ALSO BY
ALICIA GIMÉNEZ-BARTLETT
Dog Day
Prime Suspect
Death Rites
Europa Editions
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2015 by Alicia Giménez-Bartlett
First publication 2018 by Europa Editions
Translation by Andrea Rosenberg
Original Title: Hombres desnudos
Translation copyright © 2018 by Europa Editions
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco
www.mekkanografici.com
Cover photo © panic_attack/iStock
ISBN 9781609454777
Alicia Giménez-Bartlett
NAKED MEN
Translated from the Spanish
by Andrea Rosenberg
NAKED MEN
I don’t much care, really—I don’t love him anymore. Sometimes I wonder if I ever did. Fifteen years of marriage—that’s the bad part, the feeling I’ve wasted my time, though, really, what would I have been doing during those fifteen years if I hadn’t been married to him? I don’t know. Nobody can guess the past, much less speculate about what the past might have been like had some elements of our lives been different. I must be a strange sort of woman: instead of crying my eyes out, what I feel most acutely is curiosity. Maybe I’m just trying to be different to avoid ending up a cliché: the wife whose husband has left her. There isn’t really any other way to interpret it: they’ve left me. My husband left me for another woman, one who’s younger than I am, prettier, happier, and more optimistic. Apparently she’s completely problem-free, fresh and radiant as a flower. She’s a simultaneous interpreter. Blond, penniless. Probably inexperienced in love, given how young she is.
Our breakup showdown was intense, like something out of a cheesy soap opera. I was already pretty sure he was having an affair, and when he got all serious and said we needed to talk, I guessed immediately what we’d be talking about. But I never thought he’d crank out such a hackneyed confession, so according to script, so man-having-affair-during-midlife-crisis. It was like it came straight of a manual: How to Dump Your Wife. I kind of lost it, but I don’t feel bad about that. I’ve spent my entire life controlling myself. I don’t think I even cried when they first brought me into the world. The nurses in the maternity ward loved me: “What a sweet baby girl, so well behaved!” Of course, I didn’t have any reason to cry back then: my family was rich, and I was the firstborn daughter of a perfect couple. He was brilliant; she was beautiful. There was no way of knowing then that my beautiful mother would die soon after, ravaged by cancer. But I still had my father. Papá worked long hours at his company, but he always took very good care of me: affectionate, indulgent, he’d give my nannies strict instructions and demand a full report when he arrived home. I never threw tantrums or sulked. Papá was always tired after a stressful day, and I didn’t want to do anything to upset him, to make him regret coming home to be with me, since we were so happy and so close. I didn’t want him to decide to keep working late the next day so I couldn’t even give him a hug because I’d already be in bed. Papá always smelled good, like sandalwood cologne. David never smelled like that. Sometimes he smelled like dense office sweat, like mid-level executives at the end of the workday. He’d have been flat broke if it hadn’t been for Papá, the company, me.
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, Irene. Things haven’t been good between us for a long time. Sure, we live together, we’re polite, we help each other out when problems come up, but that’s not enough. Marriage calls for more than that—or at least it should. We don’t feel that shared affection that makes life so magical anymore. We never make love. I’m forty-six years old, I’m still young—I don’t want to live like this. We put a good face on it in public, but there’s nothing between us at this point. What will my future look like if we stay together? I can’t just bury myself in my work. I feel a pang of longing when I see couples kissing on the street, when a friend tells me he’s in love, when I see the passion people feel for each other. But I’m not going to lie to you—maybe if this other woman hadn’t come into my life, you and I would have kept going like this forever. But it is what it is—I did meet her.”
It is what it is? What a dick! So he met another woman. How dare he even mention her to me? I wanted to slap him, the way, in an earlier era, you might have corrected a servant who had crossed the line, talked back, stolen some object of value. And he says he’s still young, too—right, he’s a real stud!
“Her name’s Marta. She’s a simultaneous interpreter from English. She works for a company. She’s never been married. I don’t want to carry on a relationship with her while I’m still with you. I fell in love, Irene—it may sound harsh, but it’s the truth. We have to be mature about things, face reality. This marriage fell apart years ago. It’s so hard to tell you these things, but I have to be honest. Maybe things would have turned out differently if we’d had children, but there’s no point in having regrets now. We were happy once, and that’s what matters. You’re young too, you’ve got the company, and you’ll be able to rebuild your love life if you want to. I know you’ve always been pretty pragmatic about things. You’re solid, a sensible type.”
I wanted to lash out at him in the rudest, most obscene terms, but I was too flabbergasted to react. If we’d had children! He’d never complained about that before. Children—what children? What a relief, now, that we never had any! My intuition always told me never to have children with any man—not David or anyone else. After all, there weren’t any other men like Papá. When he died, I instantly realized he was the last real man I’d ever have in my life. David says I’ve still got the business, and that’s true—I’ve managed to keep it afloat—though I tend to think David’s leaving me because of the global recession. I’m yet another victim of the crisis. He’s convinced I’m going under, and he’s trying to jump out of the boat before it sinks. Fine, that’s nothing new. I never believed he’d married me for love. He was a pathetic loser when I met him, a two-bit lawyer with no future, a hustler who saw that being with me meant having it made. He’s done well for himself working at my company, thanks to Papá, thanks to me. He wasn’t a bad worker, but anybody else would have done just as good a job, maybe better. We’ll see how he does now in his new life as a still-young man. “You’re solid, a sensible type,” he tells me. The man has no dignity. Who gave him permission to dump that hokey nonsense on me? Oh, sure, love’s so important! “You’ll be able to rebuild your love life.” Such garbage! Since when does he talk like that, like a B movie, like a goddamn romance novel? What I do or don’t do with my love life is none of his business.
But I didn’t say any of that. I was finding it difficult to say anything at all—he was a stranger to me. Fifteen years? Clearly, fifteen years aren’t enough to get to know a person. We might as well have been introduced the day before yesterday. When he was done talking, I think I gave a mocking smile and declared calmly, “You’re fired, of course. We’ll find another lawyer—it won’t be hard. If you want to sell your stock in the company, I’ll make you a reasonable offer.”
I paused, and he muttered something about how cold I was being, how it was just like me.
“As for the house, you have a week to clear out your things. Come by and pick them up any morning. I won’t be around.”
He kept griping. He’d expected me to say that, he k
new I was going to act this way. I was made of ice, totally heartless. I told him to get out. I thought a week to pick up his things was more than generous.
“I realize that half of the house is yours,” I added. “When the business is on firmer footing again, I’ll buy you out. For the time being, I’m staying put.”
This time he didn’t respond. He headed for the door with his head held high and left. I hadn’t actually said all that much—what more was there to say? He’d already used all the melodramatic clichés. There was no way I was going to join him on that foul terrain. I have to be able to live with myself, and I’d lose all self-respect if I sunk to his level. I didn’t want to see him again. A note he sent days later went straight into the wastebasket, ripped into tiny pieces:
“Please understand, Irene. I wouldn’t be able to look at myself in the mirror if I hadn’t made this decision.”
That’s great, David, you go ahead and look at yourself in that wonderful mirror for the rest of your life. I hope you like what you see. There’s nothing to understand.
I didn’t reply, obviously.
* * *
They’re asleep. The story I’m telling is so boring, they’re nodding off. I see their eyelids drooping, their minds drifting away to places I’ve never visited. Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa of Ávila, the Spanish mystic. No wonder they’re bored. What relevance do Teresa’s visions and the convents she founded have to their lives? None at all. The Internet. Twitter. Facebook. What examples can I offer to give them the vaguest idea of what I’m talking about? I can’t think of any—most likely, there are none. In the end, all they get are anecdotes: Saint Teresa levitated when she prayed, rising in the incense-heavy air, and angels appeared to her with flaming swords that they plunged into her heart. Not even these iconic images bring the girls any closer to the real context of mystical feeling. My students import mysticism to their trendy fantastical subworlds: they imagine Saint Teresa with extrasensory powers, maybe aboard a spaceship. The angels turn into those beautiful teenage vampires from the blockbuster movies. If I try to tell them that a mystical trance is like an extreme concentration of the mind that leads to the abduction of the senses, I might as well be speaking Chinese. I don’t think any of them—not a single one—has ever concentrated for more than five minutes straight. They have a hard time focusing their attention on anything. They live scattered lives, connected to dozens of people at once, even if they have nothing to say. Mystical ecstasy? No idea, no answer. Ecstasy sounds like a drug they’re not supposed to take, since this is a Catholic school and they’ve internalized a lot of those kinds of prohibitions. It’s the term mystical that I futilely attempt to explain.
They no longer care about classic literature as it’s taught in school. The past doesn’t exist for them; they catch glimmers of it through images from the movies and television, but as far as they’re concerned, it doesn’t have anything to do with their lives. They don’t see anything brilliant about Lope de Vega, or entertaining about Francisco de Quevedo, or interesting about Jorge Manrique. They don’t perceive any tragic sense of life in Unamuno, or appreciate the rhythmic sonority of Machado’s poetry. “One thousand times one hundred is one hundred thousand. One thousand times one thousand is one million.” They don’t feel its melancholy beauty.
Sometimes I discuss this with my colleagues in the teachers’ lounge, but they don’t have anything useful to say. They recite the same litany of complaints I’ve heard so many times before. The more radical ones write off the entire generation: “They’re totally shallow, the lot of them. They get everything they want handed to them on a silver platter. Their parents didn’t teach them the value of things.” The conformists offer generic platitudes: “You have to be patient. They don’t even realize it, but we’re showing them the joy of learning, and the effects of that will last a lifetime.” I tend to suggest more drastic solutions: changing the curricula or, better yet, scrapping them altogether. Finding works of literature that can accommodate these girls’ new sensibility, no matter what movement, period, or country the authors are from. I always get pushback, as if I were a revolutionary attempting to do away with the sacred, natural order of knowledge. Ultimately, they’re just trying to keep their jobs, their monthly salary, the barest sense of security.
I should have taken that tack myself, especially given what came afterward, at the end of the school year, right before classes finished. The school director called me to her office.
“Do you know why I’ve called you in here, Javier?”
“I don’t know, Mother Superior. Something to do with my classes, I imagine.”
“It is something to do with your classes, but it’s not good news. We’re happy with your work. The girls like you, you’ve done a good job with the syllabus, and there’s no doubt about your professionalism. But you know what things are like in the country right now. This may be a private school, but we still depend on subsidies from the Ministry of Education. Budget cuts affect us too, same as everyone else. We’ve got just enough to conduct our core educational program, but we’re going to have to cancel our review courses, except in math. Back when we started this new project of offering literature review courses, things were different. I hope you understand—it’s become a luxury, something we can’t really justify. But you’ve got all summer to look for another job. You’ll get some severance pay, of course, as required by law. It won’t be much, since you’ve just been working part-time. Can your family help you out any?”
“My parents died years ago in a car accident.”
“Heavens, how tragic! Did they leave you anything you can use now?”
“They were working-class. The little they left dried up ages ago.”
“Do you have any siblings?”
“Just an older sister who lives abroad. She’s married, has her own life—we hardly ever see each other. But I live with my girlfriend, and she’s working.”
“My advice is that you study for the certification exams so you can teach in the public schools. That’s your best option.”
“There are hardly any job openings, you know that.”
“The Lord will look after you, Javier. You’re a fine young man. In any event, I’ll talk with the administration and have them pay you for the whole summer. That’s the best we can do.”
“Thank you, Mother Superior.”
What an idiot—I ended up thanking her. Not that it would have done much good to kick up a fuss. She advised me to take the certification exams, as if that hadn’t occurred to me, but I’ve always been intimidated by having to prove my worth, having to compete with other people. Plus, studying would require one hundred percent commitment, but I still need to bring in some money every month. My father used to tell me I should be a lawyer. He was a bricklayer, and for him becoming a lawyer meant you’d arrived. It was a strange obsession—he could just as easily have suggested I study architecture or medicine, but for him the law was the ultimate status symbol. My mother, who was more of a romantic, just wanted me to be happy no matter what path I chose. The car they were traveling in veered off a straight stretch of highway. It wasn’t raining or foggy. Most likely my father fell asleep. They were on their way to the beach for a few days to stay at a vacation apartment they’d rented. A sad story, but all too common. My sister cried a lot, but as soon as she left the funeral home she went back to her family, and I’ve barely seen her since. The only family I had left was my grandmother, and I kept visiting her every week until last year, when she died suddenly of a heart attack. And that’s where this whole nightmare began. Life is unpredictable—ultimately, really, it’s crap.
For the school director, her educational program comes first. The only thing she cares about is that her wealthy students keep learning. That’s what I should have told her that when she fired me, but I didn’t think of it. Not that or anything else assertive. My father wanted me to be a lawyer, but I wouldn’t have
been any good at it. I never come up with brilliant retorts. I’m not combative. And anyway, being a lawyer doesn’t guarantee you a good job these days. Sandra is an economist, but she’s working as an administrative assistant.
That night, as usual, I waited for her at home. She was exhausted when she came in, also as usual. She gave me a kiss on the lips. Given the time of night and the time of year, she was surprised I wasn’t grading my students’ assignments. I asked her to sit down and told her about my conversation with the school director. She immediately burst into tears.
“Things were going too well!” she said. “I have a job and you were bringing in some money too, even if it was just part-time. Now what are we going to do?”
Then she wiped away her tears and got angry.
“Those damn nuns, tossing people out on their ear like that! They could have at least just cut salaries without canceling any classes! All that nice talk about educating future generations, and then they go and act like real turds.”
After a while she calmed down and became reasonable, even encouraging.
“Don’t worry, Javier, don’t look so glum. We’ll figure something out. I got upset because it’s so frustrating that these things are happening all over the place, and with total impunity. It seems like anything goes. It’s not fair. You always took that job really seriously—you wanted those girls to learn, to read, to understand literature. But we’ll figure it out. They’ll give you some severance pay for now. Then you’ve got two years where you can collect unemployment. It won’t be much, but it’s something. I’m still bringing in my salary, which is enough to live on. Things would have to be really dire for you not to find another job in the next two years. So let’s not panic. Everything’s going to change.”
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