The longed-for exception: Eneko, eight years older than she. They knew each other from the Tánger bar, where Nerea routinely had her midday cocktail during the period when she was working in the Oquendo Street offices. The two of them were often in the bar at the same time since he worked nearby, in a real-estate office in Guipúzcoa Plaza. An exchange of glances, greetings, more glances, and finally Eneko gathered up enough courage to approach her. Hi, I’m so-and-so, I work nearby, what would you think about our getting to know each other? That simple. A simple, direct man without pretentions. One of those men as yet not burned by matrimonial acid, who turn up for a date with a rose or a gift book. Defects? None that at first sight she couldn’t forgive: not much taste in clothing, slightly overweight, fond of soccer.
Nerea got used to his company, to the slightly paternal touch of this man, older than Xabier, who transmitted tranquility and, something few could do, could make her laugh. Eneko, a sofa man: soft, fluffy, perfect for peace of mind. On rainy days, he covered her with his umbrella while he got wet. That kind of small thing meant a great deal to Nerea. And after a few months she was wrestling with the idea of suggesting something more than going out together because the man frankly seemed right to her. The question posed by her girlfriends: if there was love. Of course, but there was friendship, too, which was not the same thing. Nerea said it was friendship that held a couple’s relationship together when love lost energy and heat.
Despite all that, a black, bottomless crevice separated them. It accompanied them at all times during the almost ten months they were living so closely together, and they didn’t see it. In fact, Eneko never saw it. So, if he’s still alive, what became of him? Maybe he goes on wondering what could have gone wrong. And it was the fact that just as she never spoke about what happened to her father, he never spoke about what happened to a brother who was serving a sentence for crimes related to terrorism in the Badajoz prison. Love, friendship, laughter, the sofa man, the rose or the gift book, all of it was swallowed in a matter of seconds by that deep crevice.
This is how it happened. Evening was coming on one January Monday in 1995. Nerea and Eneko agreed to take their usual walk through the Parte Vieja, nibble a couple of brochettes they’d wash down with wine, and ultimately go to his flat or hers or each one to his own because tomorrow, maitia, is a workday. From bar to bar, sharing an umbrella, they made their way along 31 de Agosto Street. Nerea was laughing at some jokes Eneko was telling. When they got to the La Cepa bar, her laughter suddenly stopped. She heard on radio news that five or six hours earlier an ETA gunman had murdered the deputy mayor in there while he was eating with some comrades from his political party.
“Isn’t this where Gregorio Ordóñez was killed?”
“I won’t be shedding any tears for him. Thanks to guys like that my brother is in jail.”
“A brother in jail?”
“In Badajoz. Haven’t I ever told you? He’ll be in for some time.”
“Why is he locked up?”
“What else could it be? Fighting for what he loves.”
They reached the church of Santa María. Eneko went back to his jokes, but there was no more laughter on his girlfriend’s lips. Nerea wasn’t even listening. She detached herself from his arm using the excuse that she had to dig something out of her bag. What do I do? Start running? Her features, pure rigidity, a phony smile, were a mask of serenity. Inside, such anxiety had been unleashed that she couldn’t stop herself from releasing a not inconsiderable amount of urine. The road to the Bulevar became eternal. He went on talking, jovial, chatty; she kept silent. At the bus stop, in a mix of repugnance and terror she said goodbye after allowing herself to be kissed on the cheek. Even though there were empty seats next to the windows facing the sidewalk where he was waiting to wave to her as he usually did, Nerea sat on the other side. On her way back to Amara, the way to justify breaking things off with him occurred to her. She called him as soon as she got home. That there was another man in her life. An infallible lie in such cases. She said it and without waiting for his reaction hung up. She could have told him the truth, but then she would have had to mention her father. She’d rather die.
She told her girlfriends four vague reasons about the end of the relationship. They weren’t all that interested. The clique dissolved in the years that followed, although once in a while they got together for dinner. The usual thing happened: some found partners, the widow remarried, another got a job in Barcelona. Things like that. And Nerea? Well, there she was, stuck to her loneliness. She compensated herself with trips to the ends of the earth: to Alaska, to New Zealand, to South Africa. Also by filling her free time with activities: she took courses at a language school to perfect her English, she went to the gym more often, she took a cooking course. Sometimes, yes, she would go out with some friend who was separated or about to separate who would spend hours telling her about her family problems and marital problems and ask her for advice, asking someone who had no experience whatsoever as a mother or wife.
And that was that, time went by and she turned thirty-six. Thirty-six! How quickly time passes. But I’m not going to get bitter. And since it was festival time in San Sebastián, she went with a girlfriend to the flag raising in Plaza de la Constitución. They danced, they drank, and they went on drinking, and at a certain moment, very late at night, Nerea found herself in a taxi with a man who had perfect teeth, who smelled marvelous, who played with her breasts, and don’t ask me any more about it because I don’t remember. I do have some blurry memories. I know from the sound of water that he showered at about sunrise. Then he came and undressed her. Nerea facedown on a strange bed, so drunk she was about to pass out. She deduced that the man had penetrated her since during the morning hours she found dried sperm on her thighs. He was waiting for her in the living room, luxuriously decorated. He was very handsome, wearing a navy-blue silk dressing gown at a table set for breakfast, with flowers, and candles and a ton of delicious things to drink and eat. Whatever I tell you is nothing compared to what was there. It was then, when she sat down opposite him, that Nerea learned his name: Enrique.
“Though my friends call me Quique.”
97
THE PARADE OF MURDERERS
Hours after meeting him, Bittori judged him with no compassion whatsoever: totally conceited. The vainest man on the face of the earth. A man who wears out mirrors, fumigated with perfume, a man who only speaks so he can hear himself talk. And with biting irony, she asked Nerea if this gentleman went to bed wearing a suit and tie. Nerea warned her to start getting used to him because he’d entered her life to stay.
“You’re not going to tell me you don’t think he’s handsome.”
“He’s too handsome.”
“And elegant.”
“Much too. Let’s see how you figure out keeping other women from stealing him. You’ll have to keep an eye on him twenty-four hours a day.”
Bittori was unaware that Quique and Nerea had resolved that issue beforehand. The agreement cost her sleepless nights and tears; but in the meantime, she made her calculations, balanced advantages against inconveniences and ultimately, advised by a girlfriend, decided to pay back his egoism with her own. To hell with it. And she gave in. From the first instant, she noticed a kind of interior widening of her person. What? How? Let’s say I felt liberated. Another consequence: between the two of them a complicity was born that through all these years has provided a solid foundation for their relationship, despite repeated and practically regular breaks.
By way of explanation, Nerea gave a girlfriend an example:
“I doubt there exists in the world a couple who has separated more times than we have. Once, at his place, I told him that I was breaking up with him forever, that this was the definitive separation. But it was raining and I’d been at the hairdresser just a few hours before and I had no umbrella. So I decided to stay and together we spent one of the mo
st tender and most romantic nights I can remember.”
At no time did Quique make up stories. He turned up late for a date with a fresh scratch on his chin. He excused himself, explicit and unperturbed:
“Honey, sorry I’m late. I was with some chick and the thing took longer than I thought it would.”
In Nerea’s head, like a luminous explosion, a single word lit up: “separation.” And after the pyrotechnic explosion a weeping willow of sparks flowered and on each spark she could read: it’s over. This guy not only cheats on me but actually rubs his insolence in my face. They’d barely been going out a few months. And now this. Nerea was in love from head to foot and back again and would have sworn that Quique, courteous, tender, a handsome bastard, loved her, too. In her embarrassment, she looked all around as if she were looking for the hidden camera that would confirm the joke.
“What’s the matter?”
He seemed sincerely surprised. Nerea, my dear dope, do I have to explain it to you? He did:
“Honey, other men are tennis fanatics or they collect stamps and coins. Me, what can I say?, I like sex. I need the sensation of possessing feminine bodies. Hundreds, thousands, as many as I can for as long as I can. This is a sport I’m quite good at, see? It has nothing to do with our relationship, which is simply marvelous. I love you to death. You’re my Nerea, my one and only. You mustn’t doubt that ever. On the other hand, the women who supply me with orgasms, the ones I go to bed with without knowing even what their names are or where they live, mean nothing to me from the point of view of my feelings. I’ll say it again: NOTHING. They’re an instrument of pleasure. That’s all. You see I’m not keeping any secrets. Don’t you go to the gym? Well, I do the same thing, except that instead of getting on a treadmill, I exercise with an attractive body. I’d be really sorry if you didn’t accept me as I am.”
“And would you accept my doing the same with masculine bodies?”
“Wait a minute. When did I ever tell you not to do this or not to do that?”
“Okay. Give me some time. I’ll have to think it through.”
She got up. They were on the terrace of the Caravanserai, a blue afternoon with children and pigeons, and Nerea, serious, walked around the cathedral, upset, asking herself: God, what the hell am I doing? Why don’t I just tell him to go to hell? Okay, if I do tell him to go to hell, how do I get him back right away? And she imagined scenes, one more humiliating than the next, more shameful, all of them the opposite of what she understood as a couple’s relationship, I don’t know, a normal relationship, reasonable, with canasta and slippers. Each one there for the other, fidelity, things like that. Of course, here I am thirty-six years old, not about to let the last train pull out on me, especially a train as well put together as this one.
She set up an urgent meeting with a girlfriend she could trust. Sunken eyes after a sleepless night. On the table, café con leche and croissants. After listening to the details of the matter, the friend asked Nerea with no preambles whatsoever if she loved Quique.
“Well, I’m afraid I can’t say I don’t. If I didn’t I would already have ditched him. The problem is that I don’t want to share him. I want him all to myself.”
“And what do you give him in exchange? You’re thirty-five.”
“Thirty-six.”
“Look here, Nerea my dear, it doesn’t seem to me you’re in as difficult a situation as the one you described to me last night on the phone. If you really love him you don’t have many options. Either an immediate break, where you lose everything and go back to being alone with your thirty-seven years—”
“Thirty-six.”
“—or you play your cards cleverly and tolerate his fondness for orgasms. It hurts, I know, but the important thing is winning the game.”
“What if he falls in love with another woman?”
“What I think is that the risk is greater with men who are unsatisfied and repressed.”
“What if he gets an infection? Like AIDS, for instance, and he gives it to me?”
“I see. Call him and tell him it’s all over.”
“Are you nuts?”
“Then you have to accept him as he is.”
“It’s going to cost me.”
“It will cost you, but you can do it.”
“He’s a pig.”
“He’s your pig, Nerea. Be kind to him.”
She didn’t want to meet him in any of their usual spots. Why? So as not to exaggerate her submissiveness. Quique, tender over the phone, asked no questions, accepted. Hidden behind the kiosk on the Bulevar, Nerea saw him arrive punctually and perfectly dressed and take a table at the Barandiarán café. Meanwhile, she sat on a public bench where Quique couldn’t see her, and for twenty minutes she amused herself watching the crowd. Let him wait. Before going over to him, she touched up the shadows under her eyes looking into a compact mirror and put on her wrists a few drops of an expensive perfume she’d just bought.
Because you know I’m not going to let this conceited fop beat me out in elegance or aroma. She walked through the mob with the exaggerated movements of a model, click-click-clicking her high heels, her hair loose, knowing she was being watched by various men and also by Quique, who from the terrace saw her walking straight toward him. Halfway there, her lips disobeyed her. That smile, Nerea, don’t deny it, was a dead giveaway. Just one? It was the giveaway. And Quique stood up to receive her all kisses, elegant, helping to seat her like a well-mannered gentleman.
Nerea got straight to the point.
“Never ever before my eyes.”
She said nothing else. Quique made a slight gesture of approval, made sure the waiter was taking care of them, removed from an inside pocket of his blazer a small leather box. He handed it to Nerea in silence. Inside, a chain holding a gingko leaf—all in gold. Without making a fuss, Nerea judged it pretty. After which, Quique brought his mouth close and she kissed him.
They chatted. He sipped his whiskey on the rocks and from time to time raised the glass to look through the liquid; she, since she had an English class in about an hour, just had tonic. Just then, they saw emerge from Calle Mayor, just a few yards from where they were sitting, the usual parade of families of imprisoned ETA members. Men and women marched forward at a snail’s pace, divided into two parallel files, some talking among themselves, others silent. Each of them carried a long pole. On it, a poster. The poster was the photo of a captured ETA militant with his name below. The photos, all of young people, were the sons, brothers, or husbands of those carrying the poles. And pedestrians made way to let them pass.
Walking through the Parte Vieja, Nerea had come upon processions like that on myriad occasions, often as she suddenly turned a corner. Neither up close nor from a distance did she pay them any attention. As if they didn’t exist. She turned her back to them and good riddance. She spotted Miren in the row nearest the terrace, grim and stiff, carrying her son’s photograph. Nerea had seen her other times.
Quique:
“There goes the parade of murderers.”
“Speak more softly. I don’t want problems.”
Then he bent forward to whisper into Nerea’s ear:
“There goes the parade of murderers.” And straightening up and in his normal tone of voice: “Is that better? I have the same opinion no matter whether my tone is loud or low.”
Now it was Nerea who leaned her mouth toward him and he who brought his to hers to complete the kiss.
98
WHITE-DRESS WEDDING
They set the date for the wedding. A few days later, a woman stopped Nerea on a street in the Amara neighborhood.
“I’m going to kill myself and it’s your fault.”
The woman, apparently, had been waiting for her. Nerea didn’t know her and didn’t ask her name. She tried to get past her, but the woman (about thirty, attractive) wouldn’
t let her go.
“You’ll never make him as happy as I can.”
Nerea began to understand. There was despair in that face staring at her closely with challenging, fierce, irritated eyes suggesting she’d recently been crying. The woman went on, not aggressive, not insulting, but with a raised index finger of warning and clear signs of suffering nervous distress.
“Don’t fool yourself. Do you think that at your age you’re going to give him satisfaction?”
Nerea, hold it all in. Nerea, hold it all in. Nerea did not hold it all in.
“Why don’t you kill yourself once and fucking for all and leave me in peace?”
The woman, obviously, was not expecting such a reaction. She stood there dumbfounded, hypnotized, rooted to the spot. And Nerea took advantage of her shock to leave her behind and continue on, click, click. She never saw her again. Could she have killed herself as she said or promised? Did she promise? Don’t be perverse, my dear.
She was tempted to tell Quique about the incident, but why bother. She supposed the woman was one of the many who’d spread her legs for him. Poor thing. Perhaps one who wasn’t happy to work for the firm SOINC (Suppliers of Orgasms Incorporated) and wanted to fight me for the throne.
She asked Xabier for advice. Either community property or separation of property. Which did he think better. With no hesitation, he chose the second. And he added that he wasn’t saying it out of hostility toward Quique.
“After all, his economic situation is solid. But, considering what might happen in the future, it would be better if you had the final say about your estate yourself.”
And that’s what she did at the office of the notary, and Quique made no objection. They married, he an atheist, she with religious doubts, in the Cathedral of the Good Shepherd. Bittori said she would only come to the cathedral if the bishop did not perform the service. She said that gentleman only took mercy on murderers, that they should please never mention his name in her presence because it turned her stomach, and that it was principally because of him she’d lost her faith. Quique’s parents, from Tudela in Navarra, had kept theirs. And more for them than anything else and, in passing, to give the event some class, they had a church wedding, both of them wearing white.
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