He’d always tried to live up to Gonzalo’s expectations, but it was exhausting, knowing that every step he took was being scrutinized, put to some sort of never-ending test: the way he examined his grades with arched brow, asked stupid questions about friends and girls, surreptitiously sniffed Javier’s clothes and breath when he got home Saturday nights. Javier even suspected that his father had been rummaging through his stuff, though he’d taken care not to leave any tracks. Things were in slightly the wrong place—some clothes moved, a book on the wrong shelf. Javier smiled maliciously: maybe he was expecting to find notebooks full of porn, women with huge silicone tits, contortionists in some hard-core circus, a baggie full of drugs and syringes, or wads of cash from dubious sources. It would all be so much simpler if his father simply sat down and talked to him, but he never said a word. He preferred to keep quiet, avoid facing up to the truth.
Javier glanced up and saw his sister standing in the doorway. She hadn’t dried her feet and left a trail of water on the floor behind her.
“What’s up?”
“There’s a black man outside, looking into the backyard.”
Javier went out to see. From the gate he saw the “black man”—a young guy, more or less his age, walking down the street, a linen jacket over his shoulder, one hand in his pocket. There was nothing remotely suspicious about him.
“Just someone going for a walk, looking around,” he said, and went back inside. And then, in horror, he saw what Patricia was holding.
“Give me that! Right now!”
For several seconds Patricia gripped the .38. It was old and rusty but still worked. Javier had tested it, firing the revolver out in the country. Luckily, he’d emptied the drum. He snatched it out of her hands.
“How did you find this?”
“I saw you hide it in the garage.”
Evidently he hadn’t hidden it very well. If Patricia had found it, anyone could.
“Personally, I don’t care, but Papá will be really mad if he finds out you have that,” his sister said, staring at him with an intensity atypical of a ten-year-old girl. Javier got a sudden glimpse of something, a shrewdness peeking through the cracks in her childhood.
“There’s no reason for him to find out if you don’t tell him and promise me you’ll never touch it again.”
Patricia now sat in the swivel chair in the living room. She was pushing off and spinning in circles, feet held up in the air. Javier stopped the chair midspin, so brusquely that Patricia’s body was hurled forward. Her cheeks were flushed and she looked a little dizzy.
“Promise me!”
“You don’t have to shout at me.”
“I’m not shouting at you.”
“Yes you are, and I know why you’re mad all the time, too.”
Javier felt his cheeks burn. “What is it you think you know?”
“What you do. And how you always cry after. It doesn’t bother me. You should tell Papá.”
Javier gave his sister a defiant stare. “You don’t know shit.”
Patricia was unfazed. “I know what I know.”
He became furious, grabbing her tightly by the shoulders.
“You’re hurting me.”
“You think this hurts? Do you know what happens when you grow up?”
His sister shook her head, her face frightened.
“You learn about real pain.”
“I’m telling Papá when he gets home.”
Javier raised his hand, but before letting it come down across his sister’s face, he contained his rage.
“No, you’re not. Promise me. Because if you do, I’m going to leave and you’ll never see me again.”
Patricia noted with relief that her brother’s hand had relaxed once more.
“If you promise you’ll take me with you, I promise I won’t say anything. Please don’t leave me alone here ever, ever, ever.”
Javier accepted his sister’s embrace, disconcerted. She’d thrown her arms so tightly around his waist that it was like she was trying to weld herself to him. He swallowed hard, touched, sad, and frightened. Javier stroked his sister’s wet hair and kissed the top of her head.
“I promise; we’ll always be together.”
He’d arranged to have lunch with his mother. Lola’s travel agency was in the Gracia district, on a street with hardly any direct sunlight, even in the summer. The place wasn’t big, but she didn’t have to pay rent on it, and his mother, ever the pragmatist, had valued this above all else. The street got very little traffic and the agency was on the first floor, with no front window, just a metal plaque on the front that was barely noticeable to passersby. Javier knew his mother didn’t need the business, and that it wasn’t particularly successful. His grandfather Agustín made sure they had everything they needed, but the agency was a way for her to stay busy and to believe she was still an independent woman.
Two enormous sculptures stood guard on either side of the door—expressionless ebony nudes, a man and woman. The man’s erect phallus brushed against Javier’s knee; the woman’s vulva had been sculpted in such painstaking detail that customers were sometimes offended by the sight of her. Javier stroked her vagina with his middle finger, pretending to see her shudder in pleasure as the big-dick male cursed him from stony immortality, burning with jealousy.
He heard his mother’s voice through the stairwell; she was upstairs. There must have been someone with her—she laughed in that fake, drawn-out way only in the presence of people she didn’t know very well. Javier climbed the narrow spiral staircase and negotiated a path through the piles of travel brochures. His mother stood leaning against the wall with her arms crossed, clearly amused by something. Javier followed her gaze to a guy wearing a sorcerer’s mask, clowning around. Suddenly aware of Javier’s presence, the clown stopped and took off his mask. Lola froze and turned to the stairs.
“Javier! What are you doing here? We weren’t supposed to meet until later.”
Lola touched a hand to her hair, voice trembling a bit, as though caught in a compromising position. The awkwardness in the air intensified as she did up a button on her blouse, which had been revealing more cleavage than necessary. Javier didn’t shift his gaze from the pretend sorcerer. Instead, with his eyes, he asked: What should I make of this?
“You know Carlos, don’t you? He’s going to be leading our August tour of Burkina Faso.” His mother walked over to the young man and took the mask from him without knowing, suddenly, what to do with it.
Javier nodded. Of course he knew Carlos. His mother had clearly forgotten he’d been the one to introduce them. Five or six years older than Javier, Carlos was studying humanities at the university and repeating his senior year. They’d met a few months earlier at a bar and struck up a friendship. He was looking for a summer job and had worked as a guide in the past, leading tours through Africa, so Javier thought it would be a good idea to introduce him to his mother; she hired him on the spot. Carlos’s résumé was better than a NASA candidate’s. No doubt half of the information on it was fake, but it hadn’t mattered to his mother. Carlos was a natural Don Juan: long blond Nordic hair with messy curls, a razor-sharp goatee with hints of red in it, Crocodile Dundee–style necklace with fake sharks’ teeth, and macramé bracelets that gave him a sort of retro air. He dressed with calculated carelessness: stone-washed jeans showed off his attributes—a great ass and a dick that could compete with the statue downstairs—scuffed-up hiking boots, and a Greenpeace T-shirt. A professional beefcake, fully aware of his allure and only too happy to exploit it.
“Teaching my mother a few shamanic rituals?”
“We were just fooling around, chilling out.” His voice was deep but friendly; he could have been a radio announcer or soap-opera star. To top it all off, he had perfect teeth. Though his mouth smiled at Javier, his almond-shaped eyes did not. He acted friendly because Lola wa
s present, but the concessions he was willing to make to a wary son had their limits, those eyes said. They weighed each other up in silence for a few seconds and the atmosphere grew tense, until Carlos relaxed his shoulders. Javier picked up on the mockery in the way Carlos shook his hand when they said goodbye.
“See you around.”
Lola walked him out, and Javier followed them downstairs in time to see the friendly kiss on the cheek they exchanged.
“Is it me, or were you a bit hostile just now?” his mother asked once they were alone in the shop. She was nervous and upset.
“Are you into that guy?”
She glanced at her son with undisguised alarm. “What kind of a question is that?”
“The kind it sounds like.”
His mother planted herself firmly before him, hands on hips, conjuring up all the authority she could muster, but it still wasn’t very convincing.
“What kind of nonsense is that? I’m offended.”
“Listen to me, Mamá. This guy’s no good for you. I know what I’m talking about.”
Lola barked out a sharp laugh much different from the one Javier had heard a few minutes earlier. It sounded like a dry stick being snapped in two.
“Well, I see Mr. Expert has spoken. In the first place, I don’t even know why we’re having this conversation; Carlos is going to work for us, and that’s all. And in the second place, what is it you think you know? You have a very excitable imagination. I don’t need him to be ‘good for me,’ I just need him to do his job, and I assure you he can do it well.”
Javier shrugged. “All I’m saying is be careful with him.”
Lola slung her purse over her shoulder and jingled the shop keys in her hand.
“I dislike the tone of this conversation with my seventeen-year-old son, so let’s go to lunch and forget about it. Agreed?”
“I’m almost eighteen.” And I have a gun, he added silently.
“I don’t care if you’re forty, Javier,” Lola retorted impatiently.
They walked down to Plaza del Reloj, a square with a clock tower at the center, and found a spot at a restaurant there. Lola sat with her back rigid and focused her attention on a flock of pigeons fighting over crumbs at one of the tables outside. She was uncomfortable at the erroneous impression her son had formed of what he’d seen. But now she wondered how she herself should interpret it.
What did she think she was doing with Carlos, a boy hardly older than her son? Maybe it was a childish urge to prove she was up to snuff, that she wasn’t just an attractive older woman or Carlos’s boss but a woman who deserved his attentions. An innocent slip-up on her part, trivial. She had no intention of sleeping with her son’s friend. It would have been too predictable—cliché, and pathetic at that. Forty-something woman with young stud. She’d never do that. Would she?
It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. Lola looked at her son. She loved Gonzalo, there was no doubt about it. But she’d loved him eighteen years ago, too, perhaps more than she did now, or at least more passionately. And yet she’d crossed the red line she herself had drawn: You can fantasize about the life you want, but this is the one you’ve got, the one you chose and the one you have to fight for. She broke the rule and had an affair that lasted several months, with an old friend from the university, one of those men who reappear in your life to convince you that you lost out on something in the past but are still in time to get it back. He didn’t mean much to her really, but he did get her pregnant. This was her secret and she was the one weighed down by the burden of it. She could have left Gonzalo at the time, could have taken another path, but she didn’t dare to, or perhaps want to. It didn’t make much difference either way. All these years she’d tried to convince herself that she’d made the right decision. Then Patricia came along. Her birth was like a huge rock blocking Lola’s escape route. There was no turning back, but she couldn’t help feeling that she’d lived a bottled-up life since her marriage. Without realizing it, she’d slowly given up more and more parts of herself in the name of her family, and little cracks were appearing once more, barely noticeable fissures in her sense of security. Who was this other woman inside her, always trying to undermine her?
“Why did you ask me to lunch?” Javier asked, saving her from her swirling contradictory thoughts.
“We need to talk about your father. He’s going to need your help, Javier. Not just because of what he’s been through, it’s more complicated than that: his sister’s death, his firm’s merger, the new house…and quite honestly, you don’t make it easy on him.”
Javier held his mother’s look, his face blank. He didn’t want her to see anything but indifference.
“What about you? Do you make it easy on him?”
Lola was shocked. She moved her lips, uncrossed and recrossed her legs under the table, and tried to focus her gaze on the little bouquet of violets in a vase on their table. The flowers were wilting, as were those on other tables: No one watered them or changed the dirty water in which floated blue and white petals that would soon be thrown in the trash.
“Your father and I share a life together. It’s a road, and sometimes it’s easy to keep moving forward and other times you feel stuck. But we work out our differences because we love each other.”
“By pretending, keeping quiet. That’s what I see at home. Is that what loving someone means? That you lie? Is that the way to nourish love?”
Lola’s face tightened the way it did after she applied firming creams each night, becoming a solid mask. Her son had no idea what he was talking about. Ignorance is always outspoken, and he believed in the arrogant power of words. He put too much stock in them, not realizing that words can be like broken glass—you can’t force someone to walk over them in bare feet.
“You have no right to speak to me that way.”
Javier simply moved his spaghetti around on the plate in front of him and took small sips of mineral water. His mother stared insistently at him. She’d hardly even tasted her tortellini but was on her second glass of white wine.
“Don’t you have anything to say?” she probed, awaiting an apology.
Javier saw himself like the punching bag hanging from a chain in the garage, something there for other people’s frustrations to be taken out on, something to be kicked and punched while it remains silent, doing nothing but lightly sway. He’d seen his father punch that bag furiously after work or an argument with his mother. When he was done, the surface of the green bag was smooth and tight, no trace of his knuckles, as though nothing had happened. His father would go take a shower, dress as meticulously as ever, and sit down at the table with the grave demeanor of a Lutheran pastor. This was what his family was like. He’d grown up amid strangers who struggled to give the impression that everything was under control yet couldn’t help giving themselves away by their gestures. It was sick, to have let himself fall into their trap, to become one of them, full of secrets and lies and uncomfortable silences.
He leaned back in his seat and slowly shook his head, imagining what would happen at home if he told them what he’d done, or worse: what he was. His father would strut around, heavy on the heels, shoes squeaking, then stare at him for a few minutes and perhaps say something awful, but he’d do it in such a civilized way that the abject cruelty of his proclamation would be almost imperceptible. And his mother would be speechless, eyes flitting desperately from one side to the other. She might cry but would quickly recover, hold him in her arms, kiss his hair, and call him all the baby names she still liked to use because it scared her to think that her little boy now had pubic hair, and for a few days she’d bring him breakfast in bed. And then at night Javier would have to cover Patricia’s ears so she couldn’t hear the terrible things their parents said to each other—the never-ending reproaches, the refusal to accept responsibility, blaming each other for everything. What could he possibly gain
? Some sort of absolution that was no longer possible and that perhaps he no longer even wanted? Who were they to judge him?
“You’re right, Mamá. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have spoken like that. I’ll make things right, I’ll be nice to Papá.”
Lola observed her son mistrustfully. “Promise?”
Javier watched a few gray pigeons fighting over crumbs under a table. They pecked furiously at one another, fluttering their wings and leaving in the air a cloud of broken feathers. He gave his mother a beatific smile, the best one he could manage. In their family, everyone made promises they didn’t keep. What difference did one more make?
“Of course. I promise.”
A buzz notified him of an incoming text on his phone: See you tonight, same place? I need your help.
Javier remained pensive. He typed a quick reply: I don’t want to see you again. I thought I made that clear.
His finger froze before hitting Send. He thought better of it and rewrote the message, in a swirl of emotions that included both desire and defeat: I hope you’re not going to stand me up this time.
He hit Send and then erased the message from his in-box before he had time to regret it.
His mother looked on curiously. “Girlfriend?”
Javier clenched his fists beneath the table. What’s the point of having eyes? People were so blind it would make no difference if they had buttons sewn on instead, covering the holes left by their empty expressions.
“Something like that, yeah. Can you lend me some cash?”
Lola opened her wallet and handed him three folded bills.
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