The Heart Tastes Bitter

by Victor del Arbol

  ‘Dreams that shouldn’t be dreamed can hurt you,’ she smiled.

  Mr Who took her finger and held it in his hand. Mei didn’t know much very about him — just what he needed her to know. Who preferred it that way; he didn’t want to put her in danger, and certainly didn’t want to scare her by telling her what he did, and what he was planning to do.

  ‘At least Chang won’t be back tonight. We’ve got that,’ she added, her tiny body curling up against Who’s torso. When he held her, he could feel her ribs beneath the baggy dress and apron, which she hadn’t taken off. He felt her tiny heart trying to pound its way out, as if his chest were a wall and her heart a battering ram about to knock it down. ‘I want it to be today. Now. With you,’ she said almost inaudibly, her voice muffled against Mr Who’s jacket.

  Mei had never made love with a man before, never even seen a man naked. Even in the close quarters of the sweatshop she managed to bathe and go to the bathroom in private and hold on to her decency — that was the one thing that kept her from turning into an animal in that heaving overcrowded zoo. But she’d heard Chang talking, and knew it was almost her turn. They were going to take her, give her to a stranger — or maybe Chang and his men would rape her first, force her to take drugs, beat her, humiliate her. They were going to take the one thing she had left — her dignity — and trample it, turn it to rubble. That was why she had decided upon this one final act of freedom. She wanted to know what it felt like to be made love to slowly, with tenderness, with love, even if it was just this once.

  She never imagined it could be so beautiful. The veins in Mei’s throat throbbed and she opened her mouth as if to cry out in silence. Mr Who couldn’t stop staring into her half-closed eyes, and he entered her with a tenderness and intensity that came from a distant, long-forgotten place. Mei was his mirror, a place he could let himself go, fall deeper and deeper into those eyes; it was a chance for salvation, poetic justice. Suddenly he felt lost and awkward, his fingers trembling uncontrollably — he, a man who fucked for a living, a man who specialised in all things kinky, now saw that life was so much more than his experiences, that it could begin again, that people are born anew each time they cross a new frontier. Mei was his New World.

  She saw that Who’s eyes were shining, looking like he was going to cry, and because she had no experience to judge by and also felt a supreme joy that led her to the brink of tears, she thought that that must be the language of love. So she stroked Who’s face, wanting to heal him, to tell him that she was with him. That the two of them were so real they could conquer the impossible.

  Orgasm flooded through them both, leaving them in a state of wonder. For a long time, Mr Who remained inside her, neither of them moving, not wanting to sever the invisible bond that held them together. They remained silent even longer, legs entwined, Who stroking the tapestry of red that had flourished on her delicate skin despite how gently he’d touched and kissed her, Mei exploring his tattoo with her fingers.

  ‘Your heart is beating so fast. Are you in a rush to get somewhere?’ she asked with a beautiful smile, free of fear and guilt. She wanted to exchange confidences, to engage in the pillow talk that follows sexual intimacy, to feel the pleasure of being able to say and hear things lovers only say and hear after making love, things and gestures that under other circumstances Mei would never have dared express.

  But Who’s mood had darkened. He was still there with her, wanting to stay by her side as long as possible. But the sounds of the street and the voices in his head were already dragging him, by the hair, back to the reality he lived when he was not with her. He held Mei tightly in both arms, his legs circling her hips. Mei went limp, trying as hard as she could to merge with him. She sensed the doubts churning inside him, could almost hear his thoughts. And they weren’t good.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked with a hint of uncertainty. She’d heard that some men ran off the minute they were done having sex. And she didn’t want Mr Who to be one of those.

  He tried to find the right words to express what he was feeling.

  ‘What would you think if you found out that this is not who I am?’

  Suddenly Mr Who’s voice was very thick. Mei propped herself up on one elbow and examined him closely.

  ‘I’d say that I must be crazy, because that would mean that what just happened didn’t happen, and I didn’t really feel what I felt. If you’re not the one here with me now, then you’re a ghost. So I must be crazy and this must be a fantasy.’

  Who hadn’t yet grown accustomed to Mei’s style of deductive reasoning. He struggled not to interpret her view of the obvious as naiveté.

  ‘What I mean is, I’m more than one person. There are other people inside me, and you wouldn’t like them all.’

  ‘We open only the doors we wish to open, that the light may enter slowly,’ she replied soothingly.

  ‘Do you have always the answer?’ he asked, slightly irritated.

  ‘No, not always, although I imagine there must be one.’ She wasn’t stupid. She knew what Who was trying to say, but she didn’t want to hear it. She hardly knew him, they’d spent so little time in one another’s company and it was always furtive. They were always stealing time, blurting out what should have been said patiently, expressed over time. That night was the first time they’d ever shared a bed, spent a whole few hours together, shared the intimacy of their bodies. And even though she herself had no experience, it was clear to Mei that she was not the first woman Mr Who had loved, despite what he claimed. It was as if he were a professional ballet dancer who’d forgotten the basic steps and was trying to relearn them with her. He hadn’t wanted to scare her or panic her. But now his words and questions were doing just that.

  ‘What if you could ease one person’s sorrow by causing another’s?’ he asked.

  Sometimes questions are cast out like bait. But this wasn’t one of those.

  Mei shivered. She didn’t want to know what was behind those doors. Not until she was sure she could handle it, or at least understand what she was going to find on the other side.

  ‘I’m not entirely certain what you’re trying to tell me,’ she replied, reflecting for a few seconds, ‘but transferring one person’s misfortune never heals the harm that’s been caused — the original harm, I mean. It simply becomes a series of errors and suffering that takes you away from the source of sorrow but not to its end.’

  Mr Who realised he should say no more. She was imploring him to, and his need to be honest was not based on her acceptance of him, but simply on his need to ease the burden weighing on him. It wasn’t fair.

  ‘I don’t know why I said all of that. I’m sorry,’ he said, after a brief sigh.

  ‘Of course you know, but that doesn’t matter now,’ she replied, closing her eyes for an instant. Her eyelashes were short and gave her a languid look. Mei sat on the mattress and began to gather her clothes. ‘I have to go back to the factory now or Chang’s men will become suspicious. And you have a call to answer on your mobile phone.’

  Mr Who fished his phone out of the pocket of his overalls. It was a woman, one of his clients phoning. He could already imagine what she wanted. He hung up without answering.

  ‘Nothing important.’

  Mei stroked Who’s cheek. He was lying again, but she felt that once again his lies were like armour being used to protect her. As long as lies can be detected in the face of a liar, all is not lost, she thought. And Who’s expression was as transparent as a little boy’s.

  ‘Let’s leave the insincerity to the insincere, okay?’

  Mr Who went to say something, but she stopped him, sealing his lips with a kiss.

  ‘I don’t know what it is that torments you. But I do know that you can’t walk forward when you keep looking back.’

  When he got home, Mr Who had to face his mother’s tormented look. Since the night he’d told her that he’d fou
nd and was going to kill Eduardo, they hadn’t spoken about it again — as though it were a done deal, as though there were nothing to discuss. But, at dinnertime, she pushed her wheelchair to the table and stared at him as he cut his meat, served himself salad, dressed it with vinegar. Her silence was so loud drowned out the sound of their cutlery. Her expectant silence turned to disappointment every night, when Mr Who put the dishes in the sink and kissed her goodnight. When are you going to do it? she asked, without saying a word.

  But each night when he returned home, his hands were empty. And clean.

  ‘There’s a woman, and a little girl. They love him. They’re like a family.’

  They were in the kitchen, having finished dinner, crumbs and the wet ring of a glass still visible on the oilcloth. Who said it without thinking — it just came out, as he wiped the crumbs and dried the watermark with a dishtowel. To avoid looking at his mother, he stared at the television. An ad for detergent. ‘Spotless’, they claimed, ‘clean as a paten’. Who wondered how many people actually knew that a paten was the gold plate that held the bread during the Eucharist. Mei’s skin was spotless, he thought. Her eyes, too. He would have liked to find sanctuary in them, and not have to look into his stepmother’s — when Mr Who unconsciously wanted to distance himself from Maribel, he thought of her as his stepmother rather than his mother. In that sense, at least, the poison Chang fed him during their sessions had worked. When Teo used to hit Maribel (it wasn’t often, in truth, but from time to time he did take out his anger on her with a slap or two) Who thought of him as his stepfather, too. Something a step away from a real father, as if his father was standing on a stool and he could kick it out from under him and watch him fall.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  It wasn’t a question; it was an attack. Have the guts to say what you’re thinking. Tell me you’re having doubts, that you don’t know what to do. Tell me to my face that you’re scared to avenge the death of my husband.

  Mr Who looked at Maribel. Calling her by her name was another way to distance himself from the woman leaning towards him expectantly, elbows on the metal armrests of her wheelchair. As if she could get up, as if she could leap up and attack him. He watched her try to conceal her sense of urgency and took his time picking crumbs off the dishtowel. Now there was a commercial for deodorant on — ‘Natural’. The only thing that’s natural is skin. It perspires. It suffers. It dies.

  ‘I mean that it’s been fourteen years, and people change.’

  He didn’t say that he was in love with a girl who was in Spain illegally. He didn’t say he was afraid of going to jail; or that he was young and had a future — any future — far from the house that had turned him, too, into an invalid. Nor did he tell Maribel that he loved her, that he’d always love her, no matter where he was, and that in a way he’d never loved Teo. Or that one day she’d be a grandmother, and he’d send her photos and postcards of his house, his business, her grandchildren, who would have both Spanish and Chinese blood. And he’d teach them the songs she used to sing him when he was a child, and that he wouldn’t let them smoke, not even Chinese tobacco. And that they’d never be forced to degrade themselves to put food on the table.

  It wouldn’t have done any good, he knew that. His words, his reasoning, would have bounced right off Maribel’s stony-faced determination. He didn’t want to say those things, didn’t want to feel the pain of a wound reopening, one that would never heal. He didn’t want to hear that his mother didn’t care about her own son’s happiness (oddly, Who had never called himself her stepson). All she cared about was her own pain. And pain was an insatiable god who demanded endless sacrifice, Who’s hopes and dreams being the first of them.

  Instead he simply shook the crumbs into the sink, and this time Maribel didn’t reproach him, saying that’s how the drain got clogged and he should use the rubbish bin, since that was what it was there for. When he turned, she’d already wheeled herself out of the kitchen. He heard her go into Teo’s bedroom. A minute later he heard her wheeling herself back down the parquet of the hall. With sudden energy, she circled the table, stopping a centimetre from Mr Who. On her lap was an olive-coloured, square metal box. She placed it on the counter.

  ‘Open it,’ she commanded.

  He had no need to. He knew what was in it. He’d heard the story hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times. And yet Maribel began to repeat it, opening the box for him. She struggled to speak, overcome by an emotion as intense as it was heartrending.

  ‘Since the time he was a little boy, Teodoro was fascinated with stamps, coins and bills. He used to say that money got dirty being passed from hand to hand, but when it finally came out of circulation — which is what contaminated it — it was beautiful. That it became an object symbolising the lifelong human endeavour to quantify, to give things a concrete shape, to overcome the arbitrary nature of simple exchange. A bill like this one, or coins like these, explain part of our desire to become civilised. He liked to imagine what they smelled like, fresh out of the mint or the press; liked to wonder how many pockets they’d been in; what places they’d seen; what things had been bought and sold with them; how many lives they’d saved or ruined; how much joy or misfortune they’d caused. He had one of the best collections in the country and spent his whole life on it, but it wasn’t complete — there were pieces he was missing, the very ones he obsessed over. Obtaining them was his dream, his passion.

  ‘A man with no dreams or passions is an empty shell, and it doesn’t matter whether the obsession is stamps or beer cans. When you’re passionate about something, you don’t stop until you’ve got it, no matter how absurd others may find it. It took Teo years to find the coins this box holds. He spent so much money he almost ruined us, and so much energy, it almost made him sick. You should know that, you should remember his face that morning, when he finally closed the deal. He was the happiest, proudest man I’ve ever seen, so full of life. I’d never seen him like that. He was practically levitating before our eyes. I think that was the moment I loved him the most. And at that very instant, the man who came to my house a few weeks ago as though nothing had happened — the man you say has the right to change — stole him from me. I felt his blood spatter on my face! I watched the coins fall from his hands! I couldn’t react. But still, I managed to put myself between you and the bullet that would have killed you, the bullet that ruined my life. I lost everything to save you. You owe this to me. You owe me that man’s life.’

  ‘Even if it means ruining my own?’

  Maribel did not reply. She stared at him fixedly. And the wound that Mr Who had tried to keep from being ripped open began to bleed.

  Sometimes Sara hated her mother. In fact, sometimes she hated everybody. Everybody but Eduardo. He was always safe from that vague feeling she got that, when she really thought about it, maybe wasn’t hatred exactly but more like a mounting unease she felt when she was around other people — a kind of edginess that she could hear under her skin, like water going down the pipes when she flushed the toilet. From time to time, the groaning sound grew louder in her head, and it got so loud it took up all the space of her thoughts. She didn’t know why it happened, there didn’t seem to be anything specific that triggered it. But happen it did, and she couldn’t stop it. She tried to stop it, and now she had an ally — her lucky cat. She hugged him tight, spoke to him and sang him songs, pretending she wasn’t hearing the sound she was hearing, that buzzing that sounded like flies trapped in her eardrum.

  They only way she could explain what happened was by simile, and the doctor said that that was good, that the images she used helped others understand her better. And the sound she heard in her ear was just like Eduardo had said, when he asked, Is it like when you trap a fly under a cup and then hear it banging into the glass trying to escape? He’d asked her that when she had tried to explain that she hadn’t kicked his bad knee to be mean, it was just that she was hearing that noise
in her head and couldn’t make it stop. And that was exactly what it was. That was why Eduardo was different, because he was like her.

  Before running away she’d seen her mother sitting by the window. She was smoking in her bedroom, head held high, shoulders tense. The smoke distorted her face, or maybe it made a new one, unhappy. That was the look her mother got when something made her sad. And if she was smoking by the bed it meant that soon she’d start to sob, and then she’d start drinking and her tears would turn to lava — thick, cloying, burning hot. When she saw her mother like that, the volume of Sara’s rage increased and the flies started buzzing too close to her ear. And then she got the irrepressible urge to run away from home, to hide under a bench on the street — like she was now — bent over her knees, hugging her cat and covering her head with her hands until the noise stopped. She didn’t run away to punish her mother, or to be mean. Of course not, of course you don’t. It’s just that you have to run, and scream, because if you don’t your head is going to explode. Yes, Eduardo understood her. Years ago, he’d needed to do that sometimes, too, he confessed.

  She felt better now. Really. She didn’t need to keep hiding. The ground was dirty and there were cigarette butts and sunflower seed shells poking her through her socks and sticking into her shins. She could go home now; she knew the way. She’d only run a couple of blocks. She’d dust herself off, fix her hair and walk calmly home. She didn’t want to go to the hospital this time. No, she was fine now. It had just been a little warning, so her mother would stop crying before she even started. When her mother was sad, Sara hated her a little bit more. And she didn’t want to hate her. That was another reason she liked Eduardo. Because her mother was like a flower blooming from within another flower whenever he was around. Because she’d put blush on her cheeks and giggle nervously when she dropped her compact on the floor. Eduardo chased away her sorrows and took them for himself — hers and everyone else’s. That’s why he was always walking around with his shoulders slumped, like he was carrying a heavy sack full of everybody’s grief.