Learning to Lose

by David Trueba

  Sylvia leaves the house before there is any movement from her father’s room and his door remains closed. The morning of classes holds some charm of normality for Sylvia. She sees her schoolmates and laughs at their jokes more indulgently because she knows that in the evening she will be far away. She enjoys her lunch break with Mai, the conversation with Dani when he joins them. A normal life hemmed in by the gray walls of the high school.

  Mai had been a bit low since she broke up with her boyfriend, Mateo. He moved to Barcelona, to a squat. She went to see him with hope of reconciliation. She had gotten Ma+Ma tattooed onto the inside of her arm, in gothic letters. Mai plus Mateo, she explained, but it ended horribly. There I was washing everybody’s dishes. The house stunk, there was a group of French kids who had never heard of the invention of the shower, I can’t even tell you … And on top of it all, they had dogs covered in fleas. Is it completely necessary to be so skanky? Fuck, it’s one thing to be against the system and another thing altogether to be against soap. She carried over her annoyance to the small inconveniences of the cafeteria, the schoolyard. She now used her sharp wit for aggravation rather than irony. The failed relationship had made her lose a lot of her self-confidence, even though she talked nonstop. When I came back I showed my mother the tattoo. I did it for you, I told her, and she got all choked up. Sylvia appreciated the interruptions from other students and Dani’s arrival, despite the fact that she sometimes detects his sad eyes.

  The night Ariel got injured in Barcelona, when they returned to Madrid on different planes, they ended up sneaking into her room. He asked to with a childish smile and she agreed with a challenging expression. Sylvia opened the door without making any noise, but could barely stifle her laughter when Ariel went through the living room, in the half light, hopping with his crutch. From her father’s bedroom came some monotonous snores that stopped abruptly when Ariel crashed his crutch against the edge of the coffee table. Is that you? Yeah, Papá. What time is it? Sylvia approached the door. One-thirty, see you tomorrow.

  Sylvia put a T-shirt over her desk lamp, creating an orange glow in the room. Ariel looked the place over. The computer on the desk, the messy pile of CDs, the clothes overflowing from the open closet, hanging from the door and the knob, on the chair, and at the foot of the bed. There is a teddy bear on the bed and a yellowed poster of the vegetarian singer of a British band. Who is that? asked Ariel. You still haven’t given me a photo of you. They laughed, sitting on the bed, and talked in a whisper. Every once in a while, she lifted up her hand and shushed him, listening to make sure her father wasn’t moving around the house. They kissed for a long time. Sylvia noticed his erection beneath his pants. You want me to jerk you off? Ariel threw his head back. How can you ask me that? My God, you’re so crazy … Then Sylvia led him back to the door of the apartment. They parted in silence on the landing. He waited to call the elevator until she had gone back to her room.

  In the afternoon, she stops by to visit her grandmother before taking a cab over to Ariel’s apartment. She finds her weak, unable to have a long conversation. Your father came to introduce us to the girl he’s dating. Her grandmother’s remark surprises Sylvia so much that she reacts strangely. Oh, yeah? He introduced her to you? She pretends she had met her already and adds a nod of the head when her grandmother says she seems like a nice girl. Sylvia thinks that Lorenzo’s interest in meeting her boyfriend and finding out about her relationship was just a way to open the door for him to introduce her to his own new partner.

  She’s shocked to discover that her grandmother is wearing a diaper. Her grandfather comes in to change it and makes her leave the room. Sylvia peeks through the half-open door of her grandfather’s studio. The piano lid is open and there are scattered scores. Your grandfather’s going to start teaching his student again, Aurora had told her with excitement.

  Her grandparents’ home conveys an atmosphere of illness and lack of life. Even the stairs of the building are sad like worn tears. She had promised her mother she would spend this weekend with her. That was before Ariel got injured. And now she doesn’t want to leave him alone. When she calls her mother from the street and suggests postponing the trip for next weekend, Pilar responds with an extended silence.

  I knew this would happen, that we wouldn’t see each other for weeks. And it sounds more like she’s punishing herself than recriminating Sylvia. Come on, Mamá, we talk on the phone every day. I just have to do some work for school, with other kids in the class. I swear I’ll come next weekend for sure. It’s not such a big deal, is it?

  Yeah, but I’m not seeing you grow up, isn’t that something?

  Sylvia laughs into the telephone. Relax, Mamá, I promise I haven’t grown up. I don’t grow anymore. If anything, only my ass is growing.

  14

  It’s the third time in ten days that the bus drops him in the plaza, beside the jardinières glistening from recent watering. From there he walks three streets, to the blocks of apartments with small balconies and green awnings. Móstoles is a remote and unfamiliar place to Leandro, a man raised in old Madrid, ignorant of those margins, cities around the city. Osembe gave him the name of the street, the number of the building, and the apartment. He wrote it down and then searched for the most accessible route in the street atlas, put together the itinerary as if it were an adventure. He left from the traffic circle under construction in front of the old North Station, and the bus went along the highway to Extremadura.

  It was a shared apartment, divided into small rooms, originally designed to house a conventional family and which thirty years later held seven people. Osembe had told him that she shared the apartment with six girlfriends. It was quite messy. The kitchen was a corner filled with furniture and junk. At that time of day, they were alone. They cross through the square living room, where the blinds are down, and light from the outside barely enters. She leads him directly to the room. She says, this way, and then, how nice to see you again. She is wearing jeans with a gilded design along the hem. She seems younger and more cheerful than in the chalet. But when she closes the door and invites Leandro to sit on the bed, she regains her old serious expression and her mechanical style. The money first, of course, she says. She wears pink slippers with thick soles.

  Love on the clock, thought Leandro. Because Osembe could go from licking his stomach to lifting the alarm clock to check the time without changing expressions. When the time was up, she became slinky and sweet again and she said, stay another hour, and if Leandro handed over the money, another 150 euros, then she went back to killing time indolently and chatting a bit and she got up to talk or send messages on her cell. Leandro was aware that she stretched out the time to make more money. She didn’t want to spend a second with him if it wasn’t in exchange for cash. He didn’t deceive himself about that. But he didn’t do anything to avoid it. She, for example, would lick and dampen his ear, something that bugged him and made him worry about getting an ear infection like he had in the past, but he couldn’t find a way to say, stop, it bothers me. He let her do it, like a puppet on a string. He hadn’t seen her for weeks and now he focuses on her skin again, her hands, the calf muscles of her legs when she leans over him.

  A noise is heard in the apartment. A roommate coming back. Do they have the same job as you? asks Leandro. No, no, and they couldn’t even imagine that I do this, but Leandro knows she’s lying. Only with special clients like you, she had said a little earlier, and then she had smiled. She kept the money in a drawer of the night table. The same place where she hides the condoms. On the table are a fashion magazine and scattered clothes. Also perfumes and lotions. And a large bottle of body oil that she rubs over her skin and which Leandro suspects she uses to interject a film of distance between their bodies. Photos are stuck into the frame of the mirror on the wall, of her with friends and maybe her boyfriend, a young smiling guy sitting with her on the outside table of a bar. In spite of the lowered blinds, the unbearable noise of the street comes in. There is constru
ction nearby that causes an annoying rumble. When the sexual activity quiets, Leandro is cold, but she doesn’t invite him to get beneath the sheets. There is a thick, worn blanket on top of the bed. The place is dirty and Leandro finds it unpleasant.

  Days earlier his friend Manolo Almendros showed up at his apartment with his wife. It was almost lunchtime. They convinced Leandro to go out to eat with Manolo while she stayed behind. They strolled to a restaurant on Raimundo Fernández Villaverde. From there they could see the black skeleton of the Windsor Tower, which had burned on the night of February 12, with immense tongues of flame. There were still speculations about it. Someone had recorded images of shadows inside the building during the fire; there was talk of ghosts, later of firemen ransacking the safes of the many companies in the skyscraper. The workers took apart the remains in a fenced-in area.

  During lunch Leandro was about to confess to his friend about his dates with Osembe. They had known each other for a long time. Unlike him, Almendros was still enviably vibrant, able to get excited about a book or a new discovery. It’s strange, he told Leandro that day over the meal, we lived through the café period, when we were young and the only way to discover the truth about things was to put your ear to the bar. You remember? Now all that has disappeared. There’s a giant virtual café and it’s called the Internet. Now young people have a peek in there, and it’s not like, let’s see what Ortega or Ramón is saying, no, everything is anarchic and over the top, but that’s just the way things are. You know, in this country nobody wants to be part of an association or a group, but everybody wants to be right. That is the old café. And then you can find a lot of information, but that’s all chaotic, too. I already told you I’m writing a piece in praise of and in answer to Unamuno, right? Well, I go to find some new information and when you type in Unamuno the first page that comes up is about Unamuno, but all jokes about his name, rude jokes, some of them fun, all making light of his name. Imagine. Leandro was familiar with Manolo’s passion for Unamuno. Manolo used to quote entire paragraphs of his tragic perspective on life, shared his passion for origami, but also made jokes at his expense and speculated about the phimosis operation he had when he was already an old man. Has anyone wondered if there is a before and after in his painful view of the world? Spain hurt him and maybe what was hurting him was something else.

  Then the conversation about the Web turned to pornography. Almendros had been completely taken aback by the things one could find with just the click of a mouse. It’s like a huge erotic bazaar devoted to masturbation in all its forms. There are girls being spied on, exhibitionist couples, perversions, humiliations, aberrations. Sometimes I think it’s better that we’re going to miss out on what’s coming next. People will live in cubicles and never step out onto the street, we will be a planet of onanists and voyeurs.

  Maybe, answered Leandro, but street prostitution hasn’t decreased, it’s gone up. People still need to touch each other. Well, we’ll see. I think humans are going to touch each other less and less, until one day we don’t touch each other at all. Those women who put in plastic tits and plastic lips. You tell me, they don’t want them to be kissed or touched, they just want them to be looked at.

  And you, you never?

  Almendros lifted his shoulders. I find that world depressing. Who would be so stupid as to pay for something faked? And give money to the mafias that traffic in women. No, it disgusts me. I think anyone who contributes to that market is swine. Then, during that second, while a Polish waitress brought their first course, Leandro didn’t confess to his friend out of shame, out of fear of not being able to explain himself and not having enough of a justifiable reason. Did he have one? There wasn’t even love, which justifies everything. I fell stupidly in love with a girl, but it wasn’t true. That wasn’t it.

  He didn’t tell him that he had spent three mornings walking aimlessly around Coimbra Park in Móstoles. Curiously watching the people who passed, those who stepped out onto their balconies, anyone driving by in a car. He stopped to carefully observe the African women walking by with their grocery bags. On a few occasions, when one of them was alone and in spite of the frightened expressions his approach provoked, he dared to ask them about Osembe. Do you know a Nigerian girl named Osembe? And they shrugged their shoulders, suspicious, and said no.

  He didn’t tell his friend Almendros that the third morning, sitting near the park, as he read the newspaper, he saw a black girl get off a bus. Her hair was different, shorter, but it was her, no doubt about it. She was walking with two other women and wore a very striking red leather jacket and high-heeled shoes at the end of her jeans. He followed them for a while, to see if they parted at any point. He couldn’t hear their conversation except when they erupted into laughter or an exaggeratedly loud sentence, and in the end, screwing up his courage, he dared to raise his voice and call her, Osembe, Osembe, and after the second time she turned and saw him. She showed a sarcastic, but dazzling, smile.

  Osembe separated from the group and walked toward him. Well, well, my little old man. Leandro explained he had been looking for her in the neighborhood for several days. Ah, but I don’t do that work anymore, no, no. Not anymore. Leandro looked at her with interest. Can I buy you a cup of coffee? Chat with you for a minute? No, I’m with my friends, not now, really. She must have sensed Leandro’s devastation because she said, call me, call me on my cell. And she dictated a phone number that Leandro didn’t need to write down. He memorized it. It was filled with even numbers and that made it easier for him. Even numbers had always seemed friendly to him, ever since he was a boy; he found odd numbers, on the other hand, objectionable, awkward. Her number floated in his head as Osembe returned to her friends, who received her with giggles. What would she tell them? That’s the old guy who can’t get enough of me, the one I told you about?

  He let a few days pass before calling her. Osembe’s absence had made him feel better. Getting her out of his sight was the end of a nightmare. One afternoon he dialed the number from home. Aurora was being visited by her sister and Leandro spoke in a soft voice. She laughed, as if their meeting put her in a good mood, gave her power. And then she said, but, honey, why don’t you come see me?

  Osembe shows off her muscles for him. It amuses her to tense and relax areas of her body. She laughs like a teenager. She’s vain. That afternoon she won’t agree to take off her bra. The only thing she doesn’t like about her body, she had told him many times, are the lines on her breasts. Stretch marks, Leandro tells her. They look like an old lady’s, she says. Leandro tries to take off her bra, but she won’t let him, she laughs, they struggle. She has small nipples and white lines that run along where her breasts meet her chest. He tries to kiss them, but she says it tickles and she pushes him away again and again, as if she wanted to be the only one in charge of the game.

  Leandro likes her dawdling. He doesn’t mind her gaze constantly shifting to the alarm clock. When they talk, they tell each other simple things. He asks what she spends all her money on, she says that’s my business, I like to be pretty for you, and other lies so obvious the conversation grows grotesque.

  I don’t want to see you here again, Leandro tells her. I don’t like coming here. It’s very far, it’s dirty. I don’t want to bump into your roommates. Nobody’s going to say anything to you, we’re comfortable here, no one orders us around, she says. The next time I’ll find someplace else, says Leandro, ending the conversation. He doesn’t shower there. He is repulsed by the plastic covers on the toilet, the rusty little tub, the worn bathmat and the pistachio-colored tiles.

  The street is jam-packed with people. There are children playing ball. Almost all of them the children of immigrants. The trip home takes Leandro almost an hour. Aurora’s sister, Esther, is still beside her bed. They kid around and try to remember, with absurd doggedness, the name of the chocolate shop where their father used to take them for fried dough strips after Mass when they were girls. They say names at random and Esther laughs with he
r dynamic, horsey smile.

  In the hallway, before leaving, Aurora’s sister starts to cry in front of Leandro. She’s dying, Leandro, she’s dying. Leandro tries to calm her down. Come on, come on, now we have to be strong for her. Esther speaks in a bereaved whisper, but she’s so good, my sister has always been so good. There’s nobody like that anymore.

  Leandro waits for Aurora to fall asleep and then dials Joaquín’s number. Jacqueline answers. They speak for barely a second. He can’t come to the phone right now, but call back in twenty minutes. When they finally speak, Leandro tells him that he’s made a date with the biographer for next week. Ah, perfect, he’s a charming kid, don’t you think? And Leandro tells him the reason for his call. I wanted to ask you about your apartment. If I could use it one of these nights. Joaquín’s silence is thick and tense. Only if it’s not a problem, of course. Of course, when do you need it? I don’t know, it doesn’t matter, maybe Friday. Sure, sure, tomorrow I’ll talk to Casiano and you can come by and pick up the keys, before eight, okay, the doorman goes home at eight. Perfect. You want to impress someone? Joaquín asks him with a laugh. Well … At this point, what can we do. But please, do leave the sheets in the washing machine. There’s a woman who comes by to clean on Mondays. Yeah, sure, says Leandro, it’ll just be this once, eh. That’s good, because if Jacqueline finds out …

  I found the letters, the letters you sent me from Paris and Vienna, they might be interesting for the book. Leandro knew Aurora had kept them, surely he could find them. Joaquín’s voice regains its enthusiasm, fantastic, that’d be fantastic, although they must be infantile, well, it will be amusing. Of course.