Learning to Lose

by David Trueba

  Her grandfather arrives around eight in the evening. He comes in immaculate as usual, his expression serious, irritable. Did the heating guys call? Nobody called, Sylvia tells him. Through the intercom, Lorenzo says, I’m parked on the sidewalk, ask Sylvia to come down. She goes in to say good-bye to her grandmother, who’s awake. I heard a beep from your backpack. Sylvia checks. Oh, it’s a message. Her pulse starts racing, but she doesn’t say anything. I’m leaving. Her grandfather helps her down the two flights of stairs. I don’t know what we’re going to do without an elevator here.

  “How’s that leg?” The message isn’t very telling, but at least it’s something. And it’s from Ariel. Many days have passed. She was sure he’d erased her from his life after visiting the hospital. And what more could she expect? She has the cell phone on her lap as her father drives, but she doesn’t know what to write. Have I fallen in love with him? she thinks. Could I be that stupid? She hadn’t mentioned his visit, their meeting, to anyone. She hadn’t been able to talk through what she was feeling and thinking, she couldn’t make light of it. Like everything you keep bottled up, it was growing, growing like an untreated infection. He’s handsome, with a baby face, seems like a good person. I’m sixteen years old. He’s famous, a soccer star. I didn’t ask him. Maybe he’s married and has three kids. Soccer players are like that. They seem old at thirty. She’d have to ask her father.

  I could talk to Mai about it, she’d think of something clever. But she’s obsessed with Mateo and wouldn’t be able to put herself in Sylvia’s place. She’d have to explain so many things to her. Besides, last weekend her trip to León had just gone okay. We went out with his friends and they didn’t pay any attention to me, like my being around bugged them, Mai complained to Sylvia. I’m not going back there, let him come to Madrid if he wants to see me.

  Finally she wrote a message: “The worst part is having to drag it around all day.” She sends it, biting her lip. She regrets it almost immediately. She should’ve written something more brilliant. More daring. Something that forces him to respond, that draws him in, something that creates a chain of messages that eventually brings them together. When the phone’s beep announces a message received, Lorenzo turns his head. You kids spend all day doing that, what a hassle, you’re going to forget how to talk. It’s cheaper, Sylvia explains. A second later, she’s disappointed as she reads Ariel’s response. “Don’t let it get you down.” Sylvia wants to laugh. Laugh at herself. She looks into the side mirror, searching deep into her eyes. It’s broken, cracked. The mirror. It’s broken, she says to her father. Yeah, I know, it’s been like that for a few days, some son of a bitch.

  Ariel’s reply brought Sylvia back to reality with a slap in the face. She reminds herself of who he is, who she is. Feet on the ground. She’ll have to avoid Ariel slipping in through the cracks of her fantasies. She’ll have to watch that he doesn’t intrude on her dreams, her musings. That he doesn’t find his way into her reading, into the music she listens to. That her free time isn’t filled with longing for him to call, for contact that will never happen. She knows that the only pleasure available to her comes with a stab of pain, a sort of dismal resignation. She’s sad, but at least the sadness is hers. She created it with her expectations, no one brought it on her, she’s no one’s victim. She’s fine with that suffering, it doesn’t bother her. She lies back. To wait. She doesn’t know for what.

  18

  Leandro sat down in the kitchen. He’s helping the boiler technician with his work. He doesn’t feel like talking. He’s mad. The man ignores his discomfort and jabbers on incessantly. He took the metal top off the boiler, revealing the sickly, malnourished belly of the motor, along with the burners that refuse to light. Leandro admires his rough, damp, greasy hands, which move skillfully. He has never known how to use his hands for anything besides extracting music from pianos, correcting his students’ positions, sometimes marking a score with a pencil.

  He moved his things to sleep in the studio. He cleaned the bedspread of record jackets, papers, scores, and books. He pushed the old newspapers he hadn’t finished reading under the bed. He’d rather Aurora slept alone. He’s afraid of rolling over in the night and hitting her. He wants her to be comfortable. Also he’s ashamed, though he doesn’t say it, of grazing her clean body with his, just back from spending an hour or two with Osembe’s sweaty and acrid-smelling skin. He has always had respect for Aurora’s body. He’s watched it age, lose its firmness and vitality, but it has never lost the almost sacred mystery of a dearly loved body. Which is why now, when he brushes against it, he feels dirty and evil.

  In recent days, his bad mood has gotten the better of him. Friday night the house was cold and he wanted to turn on the boiler. He couldn’t. He called the repair service. They didn’t work until Monday. That meant spending the weekend without heat or hot water. They suggested he call an emergency repairman. So he did. A hefty guy came, with a black leather jacket. It was almost eleven at night. He took out a Phillips screwdriver and knocked on various pipes. It’s a question of spare parts, you should contact the manufacturer. Leandro explained to him that he had called, but they weren’t working until Monday. The man shrugged his shoulders and handed him a bill as he checked his watch. He wore his cell phone on his belt like a gunman. When Leandro saw that the man was billing him 160 euros, he was shocked. The guy itemized the amount. Emergency house-call, at night, on a weekend, plus the half-hour minimum for labor. Leandro was seized with indignation. He gave him the money, but as he led him to the door he murmured, I’d rather be mugged, you know, I’d rather have a knife put to my neck, at least those people need the money. You guys are the worst. Come on, man, don’t say that, the repairman said in an attempt to defend himself, but Leandro refused to listen, slamming the door on him. Aurora’s voice was calling out, and he had to explain the situation to her. Okay, don’t get upset, there’s an electric heater in the attic, see if you can reach it, she said.

  The next morning he tried to shower with cold water. He stood inside the bathtub awhile, his hand in the freezing stream, waiting for his body to get used to the temperature. Then he gave up. Somewhat devastated, he sat on the edge of the tub and studied his naked body. Old age was a defeat that was hard to bear. It was disgusting. His whitish skin trembled with cold. His flaccid chest, diminishing body hair. The dark patches on his skin, his arthritic fingers. His bony hands like a sickly person’s, the calves, the flabby forearms, as if someone had let go of the cables that kept the skin taut. He recalled those paintings he had always thought little of, where Dalí paints the passage of time as melting viscous matter. Now he was seeing his skin slip away like that, toward the floor like old clothes, leaving only a corpse’s skeleton visible.

  He thought of Osembe’s tender flesh, young and exuberant, of the repugnance she must feel at licking his pale decrepitude. He held up his testicles for a second, his pink, fallen penis, useless, languid, poultry skin. He couldn’t explain the power it still held over him. Who had said that it was the faucet of the soul? It wasn’t the erection, now intermittent, unexpected, random, that dragged him toward Osembe all those afternoons; it was something else. The contrast of their bodies, perhaps the escape through physical contact, the feeling of abandoning his own body to possess the body he touches and caresses.

  He left the chalet with dismal regret; seized with guilt; later he was flooded with pleasurable memories; then anxiety came over him again, as much as he resisted. Leandro accepted the moment his finger rang the doorbell on number forty as a defeat. But it was such a short gesture, so quick, that it didn’t give him time to think, to run away. He felt compelled. He, a man trained in loneliness, used to monotony. He was able to beat the urgency for a day, two, to say no, an emphatic no, to put his mind on other things. But he always ended up succumbing, kneeling before Osembe’s black nakedness, before the reflection of her white teeth, before her absent gaze that now, as he studies his own body, he understood as a necessary barrier against dis
gust.

  Leaving the chalet, he despised himself. He considered the female body coarse. He thought of Osembe and told himself she’s just a mammal with breasts, muscular and young, a mass of flesh that shouldn’t attract me. He denied her all mystery, any secrets. He found her folds dirty, her orifices despicable, he visualized desire as a butcher does a piece he’s flaying or a doctor the tissue through which he traces his incision. But that rejection mechanism collapsed under another, a higher order. And so he returned to visit the chalet on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

  Contemplating his own body turned Leandro’s morning into a sad one. He immediately threw himself into pleasing Aurora, tending to her. He read her the newspaper supplement with its absurd leaps in stories, from the painful subsistence in Gaza to a feature on the benefits of chocotherapy, illustrated with photos of models slathered from head to toe. He prepared her a tea and sat with her to listen to the classical radio program. He avoided the news so it wouldn’t leave its violent, sinister fingerprints in its wake. As his friend Almendros, who came to visit Aurora often, would say, we old folks tend to see the world as hurtling toward the abyss, without realizing that really we’re the ones headed toward the abyss. The world goes on, badly, but it goes on. Leandro often delights in the fact that he’ll die before seeing total hate unleashed, before violence swallows up everything. All signs point toward inevitable destruction, but when he expresses his pessimism aloud his friend smiles. It’s us, we’re the ones on the way out, not the world, Leandro, don’t be like those old guys who stupidly console themselves by thinking everything will disappear along with them.

  Almendros always reminded him of a cartoon that made them laugh. Two cavemen dressed in animal skins beside their cave, and one says to the other: here we are without pollution, without stress, no traffic jams or noise, and look, our life expectancy is only thirty years. Almendros laughed in spasms. Wasn’t it Maurice Chevalier who said old age is horrible, but the only known alternative is worse?

  The last afternoon with Osembe, as he fought to maintain his erection, Leandro told her about the news of the sit-in in Nigeria, two hundred women protesting ChevronTexaco. Osembe didn’t seem impressed. Where did you read that? In the newspaper, he answered. They only mention bad things about my country in the paper. And she seemed mad, as if no one believed in the beauty of her homeland. My country very rich, she insisted. But she also told him she’d lost a brother in an explosion when he was stealing gasoline from a refinery with some other boys. They pull half a million barrels of petroleum a day from the heart of that country. The politicians steal everything, she said.

  Leandro spent the morning repeating to himself, I’m not going, I’m not going, I’m not going. But he went. At a quarter to six, he was already on the sidewalk in front. He usually rang the bell at six sharp and he now considered that time reserved for him. Waiting nearby, he saw Osembe arriving in a taxi. A black man was in the cab with her. He didn’t get out. She rang the bell and they opened the door for her.

  Do you have a boyfriend? Leandro asked her that evening. My boyfriend is in Benin, she said. Does he know what you do for a living? Osembe nodded. I did this there sometimes, too, the tourists have money. Leandro was surprised he allowed it. He knows that with him it’s different. If you aren’t from Benin, why does your boyfriend live there? Leandro asked her. Osembe told him about the violence, about a massacre in Kokotown and how she had moved to Benin before coming over to Europe. Leandro imagined she had arrived in a makeshift boat, but Osembe burst out laughing, showing her teeth, as if he’d said something ridiculous. I came on a plane. To Amsterdam. I worked in Italy, first. A friend of mine used to work in Milan. She made a lot of money.

  Osembe had come to Spain four months ago in the car of a friend, someone who took care of her. Leandro thought of the man in the taxi. I saw you arrive this evening, he told her, there was a man with you. I don’t like to take taxis alone, a friend of mine was raped by a driver. But Leandro insisted on asking her about the man with her, and she ended it with, I don’t want a black boyfriend, they’re lazy, I want a boyfriend who works. Black guys are good for fucking, they have big dicks, but they don’t make good husbands.

  Leandro laughed when he heard her categorical, steely opinions. Are you laughing at me? I’m not smart, right? She usually responded to his personal questions vaguely. They spoke lying on the mattress, letting the hour slip away, and when she felt that his questions were pushing the envelope, she put up a barrier, brought her hand to Leandro’s penis, and started up the sexual activity again, as a way of capping the conversation.

  Leandro knew that the first place where she had worked in Spain was on a highway on the Catalan coast. And from there she came to Madrid by car. Arriving at this chalet, she said, was an accident. They needed an African girl for a good client, a Spanish businessman who was getting into the diamond business in Africa and had to close the deal with an exporting company. After dinner he brought his new partner to the chalet. In Spain it seemed to be a tradition to close business deals with an invitation to a whorehouse. The steakhouse, the after-dinner drink, a cigar, and some hookers. One day Almendros had told him that his daughter worked at a large agricultural mediation company and that after meals she took their out-of-town customers to a trusted brothel. It disgusted her, but it was something imposed, something inherited from her predecessor, and the men didn’t seem to mind that it was a woman who accompanied them and took care of the bill.

  They had me come in for the man who wanted an African woman. He was drunk, but he paid well and came back two more times, but he had trouble keeping it hard, his cock, because he had had a bad hernia operation, explained Osembe. He was affectionate, but very drunk. They asked me if I wanted to stay. Here you work with good people, it’s not like the street, where you do it in cars, sucking guys off in the front seat or in the park, you know? Here there’s even a doctor who comes to see us. I don’t have AIDS or any disease, she told him in an almost threatening tone.

  Do you like this job? Leandro realized he had asked a stupid question. I know it’s not right, she said. I know it, but it is just for a short time. Leandro had seen on some lame television program how these women were extorted by networks that paid for their trip to Europe and then demanded one or two years of prostitution. Exploited by threatening their family members back home in their country, they were forced to work until their travel debt was paid off, with their passport held hostage by some compatriot until they earned ten thousand euros to buy their freedom. There were also stories of kidnapping, savage rapes, and blackmail with superstitions or voodoo, where they made a ball with menstrual blood, pubic hair, and nail clippings and then threatened to enslave them with supernatural control. Osembe laughed at the stories he told her. Did you read that in a novel?

  They know the girls and they know where their families live, that’s enough. Forget about witchcraft. Besides, I don’t believe in that, I’m Christian. Aren’t you Christian? Leandro shakes his head. She is very surprised. You don’t believe in God? Leandro was amused by the question, her almost shocked tone. No. Not really, he replied. I do, I believe God is watching me and I ask him for forgiveness and he knows one day I’ll quit all this. In long sentences Osembe’s tongue crashed against her upper lip. She had trouble making certain sounds, but her intonation was very pleasing. And it doesn’t bother you to have to be with an old guy like me? asked Leandro. You aren’t old. Of course I’m old. There was a silence. She kissed him on the chest, as if she wanted to show him some sort of false loyalty. I guess my money is the same as anyone else’s, sighed Leandro. You like money, huh, what do you spend it on? I don’t know, clothes, things for me, I send some home. I have brothers and sisters, five. And me and my boyfriend are going to open a store in the New Benin Market or on Victoria Island if things go good for us.

  I want to see you outside of here, said Leandro when he finished getting dressed. Give me a phone number. She refused. It’s not allowed. All the money would be for
you. Osembe shook her head, but with less conviction. Think about it. She said, no, it can’t be. Leandro was convinced their conversations were being listened to, that Osembe knew she was being watched. Someone knocked on the door—that was how they announced the time was up. Osembe jumped from the noise, then reacted with an enormous, relaxed, honest smile.

  On the street, Leandro felt stupid about the conversation, his attempts to get to know her, to see her away from there. What did he want? Intimacy? For her to tell him her life story, her particular dramas? Share something, get closer? He could pay to have his desire sated, but that was it. Then he had to go back home, call the boiler repair service again, cry helplessly when another day passes and they don’t show up, no matter how much he explains that his wife is in bed, sick with a bone disease. He organizes the bills, reads the newspaper, receives a visit from some relative, eats, drinks, washes himself, peeks out onto the street, at other people’s lives, trying to reach bedtime peaceful enough to be able to sleep, perhaps dream of something, be it pleasant or unpleasant. And one day disappear. Leandro knew full well that he was seventy-three years old and was paying obscene amounts of money to put his arms around the body of a Nigerian in her twenties. It was a chaotic part of his routine, a time bomb in his daily life.

  The repairman is talking to him, this boiler’s got some years on it, but once I change this valve, it’ll be like new again, you’ll see. Leandro shrugs his shoulders. It breaks down every winter. He’s been curt with the repairman ever since he arrived. It is his tiny revenge for the humiliating wait of the last few days, with the house turned into an inhospitable freezer, like a cheap motel. The man, his fingers like blood sausages, smiles. Things have to break down, otherwise what would we live on? And besides, now they make things more sophisticated so that not just anybody can fix them. Take cars, for example. Have you noticed? Before, anybody could stick a hand in the motor and patch up the damage, but now you open the hood and you have to have two college degrees just to find the distributor cap. And in the garage there’s no repair less than fifty thousand pesetas. Since the euro came in, doesn’t sixty euros seem like nothing? Well, that’s ten thousand pesetas, which used to be a fortune. Now it’s seems like pocket change. Doesn’t it seem that way to you? Doesn’t it? Huh? Doesn’t it seem that way to you?