by David Trueba
Mom says I should go stay with her until Monday, said Sylvia. Lorenzo shrugged his shoulders. Whatever you want.
Pilar comes into Sylvia’s bedroom after knocking lightly on the door. She helps her sit up. You want to shower? Later, says Sylvia. Her hair is tangled and her eyes swollen after sleeping almost twelve hours. Pilar thinks she looks gorgeous and tells her so. Santiago went to Paris and won’t be back until tonight. Sylvia puts a sweater on over her T-shirt and her mother puts a winter sock on her other foot. They go to the kitchen, Sylvia hopping. Pilar makes breakfast for her. Drink your juice first, otherwise it loses its vitamins. Are you cold? Do you want me to bring you some pants?
Her mother usually dressed down at home. Sometimes she would share a worn bathrobe with Lorenzo. So Sylvia was surprised by the skirt and shoes. They were new. They looked good on her. The thick weave of the sweater hid her extreme skinniness. Her hair was better taken care of, tastefully cut and dyed a mahogany shade that brought out her eyes.
The night before, Sylvia called Mai. She had gone to León again this weekend. Mateo is treating me horribly, I’ll tell you about it later, she told Sylvia. It’s that I’m super-clingy. It was hard to talk to Mai about anything but her new relationship. She had talked to Alba and Nadia, too. No news at school. She’d missed a week, but, according to them, nothing happened. She hasn’t spoken to Dani since the chilly text message exchange. She checks her cell phone every once in a while, carrying it in her hand when she moves around on her crutches. It’s strange, but she often has the feeling that Ariel is going to call her. When it rings or a message comes in she’s surprised to notice that she gets a little worked up imagining it might be him.
But it never is.
Pilar sits in front of her and brushes a lock of hair out of her face. Do you want me to pull it back for you? Sylvia shakes her head, making her curls quiver. How does Lorenzo seem to you? Pilar asks her. All her life, he’s been Papá and now hearing her mother call him Lorenzo surprises her; she finds it strange, as if Pilar were talking about someone else. Maybe she is. Does he see his friends much? Sylvia shrugs her shoulders. I don’t know, the usual, they go to games. They talk about Grandma Aurora, the string of hospital stays. Pilar gets serious. I’m going to give you some money, I don’t want you to have to ask Papá for money during all this. Sylvia smiles and holds the glass of warm milk with both hands. I should warn you that I’m going to spend it all on drugs and men. I have no doubt about that, replies Pilar. Better to spend it on men, and on quality ones, at least. Sylvia looks up. My problem isn’t quality, it’s quantity. Pilar gathers up the glasses and brings them to the sink. Do you have a boyfriend now? Sylvia is taken by surprise. Now? As if I ever had a boyfriend before. Sylvia shakes her head, takes a bite of her toast. There’s no rush, says her mother. Well, I hope it’s before I’m an old crone. Pilar turns, amused, I notice a certain hint of desperation. A certain hint? I’m totally desperate.
A second later Sylvia asks, Mamá, how old were you when you first had sex? With a man? No, with your teddy bear, responds Sylvia. Pilar pauses. Twenty years old. Sylvia lets out a whistle. I hope it’s not hereditary. She observes her mother’s shy smile and makes a mental calculation. But, then, that was with Papá, right? Pilar nods. Papá was your first? Sylvia’s gaze wanders before settling on the table. She makes the plate dance on the tabletop with her fingertip. She doesn’t look at her mother as she asks, and Santiago was the second? Pilar nods.
For a moment, she only hears the sound of a bus opening its door at the stop. Sylvia thinks about her mother, reviews her life in fast-forward. Without really knowing why, she says, what a life, huh? Kind of … Pilar looks at her, and her eyes dampen. There was a time when I was very happy with your father. I may never be that happy again with anybody. I haven’t missed … but she stops, she doesn’t finish the sentence. Sylvia plays with a lock of hair and brings it to her mouth. Pilar sits back down in front of her and pulls the lock out. They don’t say anything. Sylvia reaches for the radio on the corner of the table. She searches for a station with music that’s not too cheesy. Heavy guitars. Do you really like that noise? asks Pilar. Who would have guessed it.
14
He goes back on Thursday.
Leandro is in the Jacuzzi. His back rests against Osembe’s chest and his hands are on her thighs. She caresses him with a sponge and for a moment it looks like he is going to fall asleep in her arms. The bathroom is not very large and has a shower with a murky glass door splattered with drops. The Jacuzzi is blue, oval. Every once in a while, it shoots out jets and Osembe laughs at the underwater massage. A thin layer of foam has formed. Leandro’s gray hair is damp and hangs limp. I’ve been reading about your country, says Leandro. It’s very big. It has more than a hundred million inhabitants and they say that soon it will be the third most populated country on the planet. I’m from the Delta, she says, Itsekiri. And she pronounces the word in a very different tone from the one she uses in Spanish, less tentative. You’re in good spirits today. Happier, Leandro says to her. Osembe squeezes up against him. You come, I happy.
Leandro had sat among the students at the outsize tables of the Cuatro Caminos public library, with the encyclopedia open, to learn something more about Osembe’s country, as if he, too, were preparing for an upcoming exam. He read about its history, its legendary founding, the religious divisions, the poverty, independence, corruption. You know more than I do, says Osembe now when she listens to him. My country is very rich, the people very poor. Someone knocked on the door. It’s Pina, an Italian girl with very short hair, dyed blond. She comes in wrapped in a towel, as if she just finished a session. This is the life, she says with a chipper accent. Leandro remembers her from the parade of girls the first day. Do you mind? Leandro feels them both watching him, waiting for his response. Okay, he says.
Pina takes off the green towel. Her body is thin, with scant breasts, her ribs showing. She gets into the tub and sits in front of them. She extends her arms, approaches, and the three bodies touch. Very lucky grandpa, two girls for him, she says, and Leandro regrets having let her get in, though he is still smiling. She seems too cheerful; maybe she’s on drugs. She kisses Leandro on the mouth, but a second later caresses Osembe’s breasts and kisses her on the shoulder. You like to watch? Pina strokes Osembe and they mock him with a very coarse, obvious lesbian game.
That afternoon Leandro was reading the newspaper beside Aurora’s bed. She seemed to envy his concentration. Read me the news. Leandro looked up. At that precise moment he had been immersed in the international pages. In Nigeria, which had attracted his attention because it is Osembe’s homeland, there was a strike of workers at the oil refineries. More than fifty dead during the protests. It was a devastated, polluted territory, where the large oil company controlled all the resources. Yet the violence had been sparked by religious conflicts between Muslims and Christians. What do you want me to read to you? asked Leandro. Whatever. He skipped over the international pages. It was also best not to read about domestic politics. Endless electoral campaigns. He read her the crime section. A man had killed his wife by throwing her off the balcony of their house. The young woman was four months pregnant. Two men had stabbed each other in an argument over soccer. It seems they were brothers and had gone to the game together. What is the world coming to, my God, said Aurora, and Leandro took that to mean he should skip that section, too.
He read her an interview with a British writer who had fictionalized the life of Queen Isabella “the Catholic.” Today, in his opinion, she would have been locked up in a psychiatric institution as a hopeless paranoid with hysterical delusions. Leandro looked up. Aurora seemed interested. He continued. The decision to expel the Jews was actually made by her mediocre advisers, who were afraid of the economic and social power the Jews were beginning to enjoy. The advisers feared losing their positions of influence, choosing instead to go against the best interests of the country. He had heard his friend Manolo Almendros talking authoritat
ively on the subject at some point. With the expulsion of the Jews, Spain makes its first formal declaration of mediocrity, officially becoming a despicable nation filled with complexes. And on the second of May, he added, territorialism won out, each region making up for the national powerlessness. Leandro continued reading, but an ad on the bottom of the opposite page drew his eye. As part of a classical music series, sponsored by a bank, it advertised a piano concert by Joaquín Satrústegui Bausán. On February 22. He mentioned it to Aurora. Look, Joaquín is going to play the Auditorio. Are you going to get tickets? How long has it been since we’ve seen him? she asks. Almost eight years. It would be nice to see him play again. Leandro hesitates. I don’t know, if you want to.
Leandro and Joaquín Satrústegui had known each other since childhood. They grew up on the same street in Madrid. They played together among the ruins of the bombings during the war. They collected bullets, remains of the bombs launched by Franco’s planes. With Joaquín he had found a corpse amid the rubble on an embankment that is now part of the Avenida de la Castellana. A swarm of flies had clustered on the man’s swollen belly and Leandro threw a big rock onto him to scare them off. The rock, when it sunk into the chest, made a dull sound, like a parade bass drum breaking. The two boys ran off, but the scene gave Leandro recurring nightmares throughout his childhood. He still can’t eat raw meat. That morning Leandro told his mother what they had seen. Beasts, was all she said. Nothing more. But he never forgot the desolate tone of her response.
He had vague memories of the war, that boundless time when kids lived in the streets. The victory meant the return of men, the return of the absent authority figure, the end of freedom. Leandro’s father purged his Republican affiliation with two years of military service, but his destiny was helped along by Joaquín’s father. During the war, that man, a career soldier, had been given up for lost near Santander and, in the neighborhood, everyone treated Joaquín like an orphan and helped his mother survive and raise him and his older sister. But his father came back with an important military post and a tidy situation once the war was over. They said he was a hero, that he had been in Burgos, close to command. He was a large man, with a heavy gait, his face run through with tiny red veins and an enormous double chin that spilled over his chest like a fleshy bib. Joaquín’s piano lessons took place at the house and Leandro, by then known to everyone as the seamstress’s son, particularly after his father’s death from gangrene, was allowed to join in. Don Joaquín also paid for both of them to study at the conservatory. He told them, work hard, because art is what distinguishes men from beasts. Any animal knows how to bite, how to procreate, how to survive, but can it play the piano? Joaquín and Leandro secretly made fun of him and forced Inky, Joaquín’s mother’s ugly, bad-tempered dachshund, to play the piano with his paws. Boy, will my father be surprised when he sees you play Chopin’s nocturnes.
As a teenager Joaquín’s relationship with his father grew more tentative. At seventeen he moved to Paris to continue his piano studies. He and Leandro kept in touch, at first by writing, then sending greetings to each other through mutual friends, and finally they only saw each other when Joaquín came back to Spain for some concert, after he had become a celebrated pianist. Losing friends is a slow process, in which two people who are close move in separate directions until the distance is irreparably great. Leandro saw Don Joaquín die, old, sad, longing for news of a son he admired, but barely spoke to. Leandro understood the man’s bitterness. He, too, had become something remote to Joaquín, a memory of another time. He might not even remember us, he said to Aurora. Come on, she replied, don’t be silly.
Aurora urged him to order tickets for the concert; Leandro gave in. It moved him that Aurora was more enthusiastic about it than he was. He’s your friend, he’ll be glad to see us. Shortly after, he stopped reading because of the aggravating presence of Benita, the cleaning lady, who, at that point in the morning, was more focused on conversation than on physical labor.
When they left the hospital, the doctor recommended that Leandro get a wheelchair for the first few days, for trips outside. That afternoon Leandro went to a specialized store on Calle Cea Bermúdez. The wheelchair was heavier than he thought it was going to be. He doubted his ability to maneuver it and decided to rent it. With any luck, Aurora would walk again without any difficulty; at least the doctor was optimistic. His relief at leaving the hospital was overshadowed by his panic at the new situation. Buy the nurses some chocolates, they’ve been good to me, said Aurora.
Now Pina was laughing hysterically, showing two large incisors, one on top of the other, an ugly mouth with thin lips, and a gaze that made Leandro uncomfortable. It is the first time he has been in one of those enormous bathtubs, filled with orifices. Osembe pushes Pina away from them twice, both times when the Italian woman is being too bold. Leandro lets her masturbate him for a while with her bony hands, the nails painted dark purple, but he moves closer to Osembe to make his preference clear. The afternoon ends without ecstasy or even real moments of shared pleasure.
The madam, Mari Luz, accepts Leandro’s credit card. He explains that he doesn’t have enough cash on him when she informs him that he has to pay for both girls. Leandro doesn’t want to argue, but while the card receipt is printing he adds up the amounts. Today he’s paying five hundred euros, plus the ten euro tip he slips into Osembe’s hand every time he says goodbye. In two visits, he’s used up his entire retirement check. I don’t want the Italian girl to join us again, okay? Mari Luz nods, you’re the boss, and Leandro feels he has regained control over the situation with that show of authority.
Leandro heads out into the street. His damp hair traps the cold afternoon breeze. He had combed his hair in front of the bathroom mirror. The little cabinet was empty and dirty. It had a comb and a worn toothbrush in it, a tube of toothpaste without a cap, crusty and clogged. The dirtiness of the place seemed to be tucked into corners, just hidden; you had to work to find it. On the street, he looks back at the chalet with the lowered blinds. I’m totally irresponsible, insane. He calms himself by thinking that maybe it is the last time he’ll see that place. This has to end. It doesn’t make sense.
It doesn’t make sense.
15
Lorenzo waits at the door to his parents’ house. He paces ten yards up the sidewalk, and then back down. The entryway is exactly as it was in his childhood, only the solid door was changed to a lighter, uglier, and more fragile one when they installed the intercom phone. After school he used to wait in that hallway for his mother if she hadn’t yet arrived from shopping or some errand. He had spent many hours of his life sitting on that step. His childhood street was no longer how he remembered it. There used to be low houses with whitewashed walls and red roofs. Now the number of apartment buildings with aluminum windows has multiplied. The old couples that founded the neighborhood in the forties and fifties had almost all died. When they go out for a walk, they look more like shipwrecked sailors than neighbors.
Lorenzo responded to his father’s call. His mother wants to go for a stroll and he can’t get her downstairs alone. After two days of almost nonstop rain, weak sunlight illuminated the street. Lorenzo helped his father carry the wheelchair the two flights with no elevator. On the first landing, Leandro rubbed his hurting hands on his jacket. At home, his father’s hands had always been protected. He never cooked or used knives, he didn’t open cans or jam jars or carry dangerous things. He never did odd jobs around the house like other fathers. See if you can do it, you know Papá shouldn’t touch it, Lorenzo’s mother would say to him when it came time to hang a painting or check an outlet. His father’s hands were what supported the family, and once when he hurt his finger by pinching it in a chair, he wore a leather fingerstall for days to protect it. That morning he carried the wheelchair to the street and it made him think, I’m too old and weak to take care of a sick woman. They live in a building without an elevator, with a wide, old staircase. They are banking on Aurora recovering her mobi
lity, but if that doesn’t happen, they’ll both have to get used to a new way of living.
We’ll take a stroll through the neighborhood, but we’ll be back soon. Lorenzo had lied to them when he said he had a job interview. It wasn’t hard to find a bar; that was one thing that hadn’t changed. There’s practically one for every two doorways. They survive over time, just bare bones. They’re small, dirty, completely unsophisticated, but people use them as offices, meeting places, lunchrooms, confessionals, living rooms. There was a woman at the back sticking coins into a slot machine with her empty shopping cart parked beside her. The bar’s aluminum countertop was so scratched it looked white. In the newspaper, he found a feature article on Madrid’s lack of safety that mentioned Paco’s murder. It was written in an alarmist tone, describing “the violated tranquillity of a man returning home at night.” They called it a “brutal murder.” Lorenzo continued on to the classifieds. He circled two. Maybe he’d call later.
He missed Sylvia. The rainy days without her at home had become heavy and sad. Lorenzo was comforted by the constant stream of music that came from her room. He liked to hear her going in and out in a rush, listen to the murmur of her talking on the phone with her friends. Without her the house was quiet. It didn’t matter if he put on the TV or the radio, sat down to balance his checkbook in the kitchen, whistled in the living room. If she wasn’t there, the echo turned the house into the den of a wounded wolf.
The day she left, Pilar came for her and Lorenzo offered to drive them to Atocha Station. He brought the car up to the doorway and as he was helping Sylvia get comfortable in her seat, another car appeared, honking and demanding to pass. Lorenzo turned violently and confronted the driver. It was a woman. What’s the problem? Are you blind? The woman shot him a disdainful look and Lorenzo was about to walk over. Papá, leave it alone. That bitch saw your cast and still honked, what a joker. Lorenzo contained himself, seeing Pilar’s nervous gesture in the backseat. He took his time sitting down behind the wheel. He stretched out the process of turning on the ignition. The city sometimes produced these car duels. The woman behind honked again. Lorenzo lifted his middle finger and showed it to her in the rearview mirror. Fuck you, moron.