by Susana Aikin
We had known for years that Father had never finished school, that he had a learning disability that today would be called dyslexia, but back then was punished as an act of noncompliance, or even contempt, by teachers and parents. Boarding schools whipped boys for academic failure, and his father, a strict, cruel man, made sure no sanctions and deprivations were spared to discipline his rebellious son. Father ran away from the family home at sixteen, and all trace of him was lost for a long while, until he reappeared fifteen years later, married to our mother and starting to create his small empire in Spain. In the meantime his own father disinherited him and handed over the textile manufacturing family business to his younger brother, Uncle Phillip, who drove it soon to bankruptcy. Father had never rebuilt the family ties. He traveled all over England for business matters but never stopped in Manchester to visit. Even Aunt Kay was surprised to see him in London more than once every five years. Father had never told us the whole story, but sometimes bemoaned the fact that he was never able to study, because he had to start working at a very young age. He also had a penchant for disowning his own success. When anyone flattered him for his business accomplishments, he would wink an eye and say, “Never forget, Anna, that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
To Father, Spain was the land of the blind, a backward country with lazy, incompetent people who had to be not just coerced to do the work, but also disciplined and supervised most of the time. Father ran a tight ship to counteract these ingrained tendencies. No one was allowed to come in with excuses about failed missions, or jobs not impeccably accomplished. The consequences of inadequacy were met with sharp, demeaning reproaches and unpaid overtime hours to make up for the blunder. Everyone feared him, and underneath this fear ran a wide spectrum of feelings between hatred and reverence. They also admired him. He was the demigod who opened a door to a remote world through which poured an array of outlandish businessmen, and gigantic machinery with reams of instruction booklets in foreign languages. His despotism was mitigated by some with a whole set of legends that went around the office.
“Mr. Hooort, you sure can sell a donkey to a Gypsy,” Montes said to him sometimes, when a couple of drinks at the Aristos had relaxed them. It was one of the jokes by which the staff flattered Father, Roma people being in Spanish slur lore the ultimate dealer rogues, the shrewdest merchants and swindlers. Father appreciated the comparison and enjoyed it each time, because he figured he was beating the Spaniards at their own game. He was king not just by power of rule alone, but also, and mainly, by virtue of his ability, a sort of topping meritocratic achievement.
But the sheer power of his rule still overran everything in the day by day. His commands and opinions were indisputable; nobody ever questioned anything he said. People walked into his office with a hesitant step, surrounded by a halo of apprehension. He would look up from his desk and pierce them with his ice-blue irises, waiting impatiently for a clean answer, or an efficient solution to a problem.
Silvia was one of his habitual victims. “How many God-forbidding times are you going to file a letter in the wrong cabinet? Where’s your brain? Or should I ask, do you even have one? You can plan on coming in Saturday to reorganize all correspondence into the correct files.”
“But Mister Hooort, I did it last month.”
“Silvia.” He raised his hand to indicate there was no possible argument in the matter. “Even if it takes a billion times to have it in perfect order. Order is essential to business.” And with that, he waved her out of his office.
“Do you realize no one in this office looks at you directly in the eye?” he would say to me. “That puts them instantly in the position of suspects. They’re either playing some antic to avoid doing their job, or else covering up some other misdemeanor.”
There was only one person in the office who walked casually into his office, stood confidently, and looked directly at Father with an unflinching eye. It was Marcus. Of course, he wasn’t technically an employee, he worked in the capacity of an associate representing Father’s German partner. But that wasn’t the whole explanation, since I had seen Father stare down clients, fellow businessmen and the like. There was something in Marcus that was fearless and unblinking, something I perceived as arrogant, big-headed, even smug. Something in the way he discussed matters with Father and even dared to contradict or correct him.
But Father seemed to enjoy him. “He can be a bit cheeky, but that only comes with the conceit of youth. Life will humble him. He is a clever lad. And hardworking. Two qualities I appreciate.” Initially he encouraged me to watch him at work. “These Germans are sadly square-headed, but they get the job done. They’re good workhorses, although terribly in need of creative spark. That’s where an Englishman like me fits in,” he’d say with a chuckle.
I shunned Marcus’s company and his friendly approaches from the beginning. I watched his quiet, industrious presence around the office with an impervious eye, his supple, athletic body, broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, as he leaned back easily in his chair, talking on the phone or typing his own documents, something unheard of among other male workers. He kept mostly to himself. But with me, he wanted to linger if we met in the kitchen while procuring one of those atrocious cups of coffee. And I didn’t just avoid all personal conversations, but also made sure I adopted a mean stance when he was around.
The first time I met Marcus in the workplace, I had been sent by Father to deliver some documents to the repair shop, a large garage area underneath the office building that the company had converted into a mechanical workshop. Here the engineers kept inventories of spare parts, and brought in small machinery and company vehicles that needed repair. It was a bare, open space with a gray concrete floor stained with grease. Along the walls hung all sorts of tools, coiled cables, and connector cords on rows of pegboard, alongside calendars with busty women in bikinis sprawled over hoods of trucks and cars. In the back, metal racks held collections of labeled machine parts. Strange, convoluted conglomerations of metal cylinders with jutting rods and colored wires sticking out, pieces I saw initially as unintelligible objects, but would eventually get to know well by name and function. Winch motors, rotary seals, torque converters, sprockets, and the like. This was the engineers’ habitual hangout when they were not in the office, where they felt most at ease. It was a man’s world. They lounged about in dirty blue overalls, cigarettes dangling from their mouths, going about their work with swearing and lewd joking, cleaning equipment and putting together engines and mechanical appliances.
I walked in, hugging the paperwork file to my chest. I felt small and out of place. Montes, Lopez, and their assistant Francisco stood looking under the open hood of a truck half hoisted in the air.
Montes turned around. “Miss Anna! What brings you down here?”
“I was asked to deliver the documentation for the Caterpillar crane that’s being shipped tomorrow,” I said.
“Oh, good! Let’s see it.” He looked quickly over the file. “But here’s paperwork that still needs to be filled in. And it’s in English.” He snapped the file shut, bent over the truck and cried, “Germany! You’re needed out here.” The two other men stepped aside, and underneath the truck rolled out the body of a man stretched on a dolly. Strong, powerful legs emerged first, followed by the rest of the body clad in a tan overall, a tool belt packed with heavy wrenches and screwdrivers around the trim hips. Last came the head, and I recognized Marcus’s hazelnut hair above the plastic goggles that covered his eyes. In a quick gesture he removed them and replaced them with the regular glasses he took out of his chest pocket. He leaped up from the dolly and stood facing me. His face and hands were smudged with dark grease. But something about his hair and tan overall, about his blue eyes and clean-shaven face, shone against the grimy setting of the workshop.
Lopez passed him a cloth and he wiped his hands.
He smiled. “Welcome to the underbelly of the business. Is this your first time down here?”
&
nbsp; “Will you be able to fill in this document?” I asked, ignoring his question.
“If you give me a minute, I’ll wash my hands.”
“I don’t have a minute. I need to go back. I’ll leave the file with you.” I put the plastic file in his hands. “You can bring it up later.” I turned on my heels and left. As I stepped out, I heard one of the engineers whistle under his breath, as if saying, Whoa, tough chick! My heart fluttered as I hurried up the ramp toward the office.
If I was honest with myself, there was no reason for me to be locked into this aversion toward Marcus. My hostility could be linked to the memory of meeting him at the turning point of Marion’s tragedy. Or to the fact that Father had chosen him as a worthy distraction to steer her away from her matador. It might also be that I saw him as competition when it came to Father’s consideration.
But Father only had thoughts for me. He tried hard to keep my attention focused on one aspect of the work or another, took me to meetings and lunches with clients, taught me the business database of the company and soon had me micromanaging certain small operations and projects. I was still overcome by tedium. The moment he wasn’t breathing down my neck, my mind would wander away from the office, sweep past the immensity of the beige carpet and fly out the door into the vast beyond. The monologue I had prepared all summer in anticipation of the first audition at Saint Martin’s still reverberated in my head. A thousand years have passed since the earth last bore a living creature on her breast, and the unhappy moon now lights her lamp in vain. It was one of Nina’s speeches in Chekhov’s famous play The Seagull. The words throbbed in my ears as if in a parallel reality while I listened to Father giving instructions, as I sat by his side in meetings, or read through technical brochures and written materials. No longer are the cries of storks heard in the meadows, or the drone of beetles in the groves of limes. All is cold, cold. All is void, void, void . . . I went over the text over and over again, clinging to the words as if they were a lost lover I was desperately struggling to retrieve. Or a disappeared continent, whose sounds and images I was determined to retain by incessant repetition. Once in a hundred years my lips are opened, my voice echoes mournfully across the desert earth . . .
Father would say, “Anna, are you with me? I need your full attention in this matter,” and I would drag my mind back into his office, bring my eyes to focus on whatever paperwork he was pointing at, like a prisoner who crawls back into his dim cell after having contemplated the sky from the prison yard.
After a few months, Nina’s monologue started fading away and I found myself having to confront the reality of the office as it was, a dry territory that had to be ploughed through day by day with the tenacity of the excavator with double jaws full of metal teeth we represented. This was the beginning of my extended visits to the bathroom with books of poetry up my sleeve. But despite this convenient escape mechanism, my underlying despair would sometimes peak.
Once, while pulling some documents out of a filing cabinet, I found a brochure on one of the products the company sold, Large Bored Piles. That was surely what I had been developing, sitting on my ass all these months and pacing back and forth on the dry wasteland of the tan carpet. I leaned my forehead on the open cabinet and uttered a laugh. It sounded more like a long croak, a twisted moan coming from a suppressed sob. I was wasting my youth, my thirst for poetry, for life.
“Are you all right?” Marcus stood close behind me.
“I’m fine,” I said. “It’s just that finding funny messages hidden inside the daily routine can be hilarious and pathetic at the same time.” I turned toward him and held up the brochure to his face.
Marcus stared at the Large Bored Piles. “Umm, I don’t really get it. What’s so funny about this?” I was looking at his eyes behind the rimless glasses. They were a different kind of blue than Father’s. A darker, calmer blue, the type you see in deep lakes surrounded by mountaintops. His skin was smooth, with close-shaved cheeks and chin. Strong jaws framed his well-delineated face. He held his lips tight in a way I had seen before, when he was trying to figure something out.
A gust of impatience overtook me and I put the brochure back in its file. “Never mind.”
“No, no, I want to understand. Please.”
“Don’t you have piles in Germany?” I asked as I felt my mean spirit rising in my throat. “Piles in your butt? What would you call them, hemorrhoids?”
“Hämorrhoiden! Okay, I get it! I guess those exist everywhere.”
“That’s all it was,” I said, closing the file cabinet drawer, annoyed at having engaged in the whole explanation with someone as slow as him.
“I wonder if we should add a price surplus to the product, in the light of this added advantage.” Marcus rubbed his chin with his thumb. I looked at him, puzzled. “Bored-to-death hemorrhoids could be the most financially valuable, since they are, after all, the most rigid, the most reliable in the reinforcement of buttress structures . . .” He was mimicking the salesman for the bored piles who had visited the company a couple of months ago, a Herr Gottlieb Schwartz. An older, ceremonious German businessman with a strong accent who spoke with great solemnity about the brands he represented.
“Stop!” I was holding my sides and pealing with laughter. Everybody around was staring. Even Father was looking up from his desk and glaring through the glass window that connected his office with the rest of the space.
Marcus cut his parody short. “Let’s return to our desks and bore our piles back into our seats,” he whispered and walked away.
I wiped the tears on my face as I turned to leave. But Father summoned me with a gesture of his hand. “Now, Anna, please remember to be watchful of your behavior in the office. Too much camaraderie with employees makes it difficult to exercise authority.”
“But Marcus isn’t . . .”
“Yes he is. He’s at a higher level, but he’s still an employee.”
“I thought you said . . .”
“Never mind what you thought. Return to your work.”
Back at my desk, I avoided all eye contact with Marcus for the rest of the day.
That evening as we drove back home, Father looked intently ahead and gripped the steering wheel with unusual clout. “Anna, I don’t want you to forget that you will inherit the business, that you will be a leading CEO. Hanging around with secretaries and engineers is below your station, and should be kept to a minimum. If you need something or feel lonely, you should come to me. We’re the team, and everyone else works for us. Never forget it.”
Friday night was the happy hour moment at the Hotel Aristos, when many of the office employees got together after work, had drinks and socialized. The evening started with light drinks, which got heavier as the hour advanced into the night. Gin tonics, martinis, and rum-and-Cokes then flowed freely, particularly if it was the end of the month, close to paycheck time. Younger and lower-paid employees like administrative assistants and junior secretaries left early, as did most of those with families awaiting them at home. The heavy-duty patrons on these extended occasions were always the single senior secretaries and the engineers, who felt entitled to stay around and flirt openly, as well as criticize everyone else in the office. I disliked these gatherings, but it was difficult not to show up at all, given the pressure to join the crowd. So, I tried to keep them to a minimum, politely declining anything after a first small glass of wine and leaving as quickly as possible.
It was a few days later after the bored piles incident, at one of these happy-hour occasions, when Margarita, who became quickly exhilarated after a couple of drinks, walked up to me and said, “What about the German? Don’t you dig him?”
“The German?” I echoed, taken by surprise.
“Yes, Marcus. Well, don’t you?” she insisted in a slurred voice.
“Not really. Do you?”
“I do. We all do, but none of us have a chance in hell, ’cause all he looks at is you,” she said, standing uncomfortably close to my face while her
booze-heavy lids drooped over her drunken gaze. “D’you know he runs for an hour every morning before coming in to work? No wonder he looks so good!”
Silvia joined in. “The guy must be a beast in bed.” She was the raunchiest female in the office and always made lecherous comments about the men. “I can’t wait to find out and give you all the details.” Both she and Margarita burst out laughing.
“Aren’t you overrating him?” I asked, stifling my mirth and trying to sound cool.
“Hell, no!” both said in unison.
As I turned around I saw Marcus across the bar, standing in a group with the engineers, and paying no attention to whatever besotted conversation they were engaged in. Instead, he was looking directly at me and, as we locked eyes, he raised his cup in silent toast.
Because Father had asked me to pick up a set of files he had to work on during the weekend, I stopped by the office before going home. The place was dark and I flitted through the dimness toward my desk, where I’d left the documents. As I turned to leave, my eye caught a glance of Marcus’s desk across the floor. An orange shaft of light from a streetlamp pooled over it through the adjoining window. Before I knew it, I was hovering over his workspace, observing how neat and organized everything looked, papers perfectly stacked together, pens and pencils grouped in a pencil holder, his calendar marked with bullet-point notes in precise, clean-looking handwriting. So different from mine, with doodling all over my paperwork and scraps of paper penned with soulful words or irresistible metaphors. I opened one of the drawers and rummaged through a few items: a calculator, a box of paper clips, color felt pens, a small audio recorder. I opened another drawer and found a blue-and-red striped tie, a tiny Spanish-German dictionary, and a tatty paperback. I pulled out the book. It was a Penguin version of The Nibelungenlied, with a picture of medieval knights in battle on the cover. I opened it randomly, and read: