by Andrés Barba
PRAISE FOR SUCH SMALL HANDS
“Barba inhabits the minds of children with an exactitude that seems to me so uncanny as to be almost sinister.”—The Guardian
“Barba is intensely alive to the shifting, even Janus-faced nature of strong feeling.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Such Small Hands is a magnificently chilling antidote to society’s reverence for ideas of infantile innocence and purity.”—Financial Times
“Barba’s stunning and beautiful prose helps us realize that our adult incomprehension is not absolute.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
“Each one of these pages is exquisite, and the end result is a perfectly expressed work that transmits the perverse and bizarre experience that is youth, where games signify life and death and where relationships are teased and pushed to the breaking point.”—Music & Literature
“A lyrically rich and devastating portrayal of adolescent struggle.”—ZYZZYVA
“A darkly evocative work about young girls, grief, and the unsettling, aching need to belong.”—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
“Barba explores what the dynamics of an orphanage reveal about any insular community and the trials of its inevitable outcast.”—Idra Novey, author of Ways to Disappear
Published by Transit Books
2301 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, California 94612
www.transitbooks.org
La recta intención
Copyright © 2002 Andrés Barba
Originally published in Spanish by Editorial Anagrama S.A.
English Translation Copyright © 2018 Lisa Dillman
ISBN: 978-1-945492-09-9
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2018930165
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To the memory of Marcela Martínez,
for the gift that was her life.
To her family: Alberto, Marta, and Felipe,
for teaching me to forgive.
To Jason V. Stone
“I have tormentors then in me, O father?”
“Ay, no few, my son; nay, fearful ones and manifold.”
“I do not know them, father.”
“Torment the first is this Not–knowing, son.”
The Corpus Hermeticum
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Right Intention
Nocturne
Debilitation
Marathon
Descent
NOCTURNE
THE AD IN THE “MALE SEEKING MALE” SECTION SAID:
I’m so alone. Roberto. (91) 4177681.
and was placed among others listing predictable obscenities and a series of oral necessities. Page 43. At the top. Above a bisexual named Ángel soliciting a threesome and beneath the photo of a man of indeterminate age and sadness who wore a mask that gave him the pathetic air of a terrorist just emerging from the shower; it said so alone just like that, like it was nothing, it said it with the afternoon languor pressing in through the living room window (the one that overlooked the park) almost the way you accept the ritual of Sunday afternoon boredom, with no resentment.
I’m so alone.
If he had accepted Marta’s invitation, he would have an excuse to get dressed now, go out; the doorman’s little desk would be empty, the street would be empty, the dog would stare up at him, watery eyes, panting tongue, tail wagging to the rhythm of his desire to go for a walk, “Platz, paw, sit,” repeated, the same as the light, an anonymous conversation beneath his bedroom window, the one that overlooked the courtyard, the cars.
He’d bought it last night and the first thing he did was check the ages of the men who’d placed the ads (almost never stated, which was worse because it meant that the majority of them were probably young). The ones who dared to send a photo took the risk of being recognized. He had gone out to buy cigarettes and ended up buying the magazine. When he got home he started to masturbate to one of the personals but ended up using an erotic art catalogue he’d bought last month. When he finished he washed his hands, made some soup, and fed the dog. There were no movies on TV. Marta called to invite him over for Sunday lunch with Ramón and the kids and he declined, saying he had other plans. But he didn’t have other plans. The movies playing at the theater didn’t appeal to him enough to make him want to go out, deal with the hassle of the ticket and refreshment lines, and then return home without being able to rave about or even discuss what he’d seen. He hadn’t been to an art exhibit in years. He fell asleep thinking tomorrow he would take it easy at home, and it didn’t sound like a bad idea. Sometimes he liked to stay in, lose track of time watching TV after lunch, listen to Chopin while lounging on the sofa, leafing through a book. The magazine lay on one of the armchairs like a long and accepted failure. After having used it last night, he thought he’d throw it away, but he’d left it there and when he finished watching the afternoon movie it had sat there, looking up at him saying Madrid Contactos on the cover in red letters and death to hypocrisy in smaller ones, under the headline and above the photo of a woman who looked like his brother-in-law Ramón’s sister because, like her, she wore half a ton of mascara on each eye and her thin lips were made up to look fuller, filled in beyond her lip line. He opened it back up to the “male seeking male” section. He lingered over the pictures again, became excited again.
I’m so alone. Roberto. (91) 4177681.
It dawned on him that this had been going on for many years. Simply, almost painlessly, he had become resigned to the fact that he himself would never demand the things the personals were asking for, and although on a couple of occasions he had contracted a rent boy and brought him up to his apartment, the fact that he had to pay, the whole act of the wallet, the question, the exchange, turned him off to such a degree that he would then become uncomfortable at how long he took and once or twice ended up asking the guy to leave out of sheer disgust.
The dog barked and he found his shoes to take him down for a walk. He left the light on and put on his coat.
Monday everything looked the same from his bank office window. A Coca-Cola sign flashed on and off, as did the recently hung lights announcing the imminent advent of Christmas. He had heard something about an office party and, although he’d said he would go—declining would have launched a desperate search for excuses—they knew, as he did, that it had been years since he last liked Alberto’s jokes (always the same, whispered to the new secretary or the newest female graduate hire), Andrés’s toasts, and Sandra’s conversations about the kids. The fact that he was the oldest employee at the office allowed him to decline those invitations, ignore them without having to worry about subsequent animosities that were felt but never expressed. He enjoyed this in the same way that he enjoyed his solitude, his collection of consolations and little excesses that he had grown used to (Napoleon cognac, fancy cigarettes, a weekly dinner at an expensive restaurant) and which led him to grant that he was a reasonably happy man. Jokes about his homosexuality told in hushed tones at the office met with his indifference, making him invulnerable, and although his exterior coldness had begun as a survival technique, now he really did feel comfortable in it, like someone who has finally found a warm place to take refuge and is content to settle there, without yearning for better.
But the ad in that magazine said:
I’m so alone. Roberto. (91) 4177681.
And those four words, since he
read them on Saturday night, had begun to unravel everything. When he finished work on Monday he felt anxious and he didn’t know why. Or he did, but didn’t want to admit it. Accepting that he wanted to call that number would have meant accepting disorder where, for many long years, there had reigned peace, or something that, without actually being peace, was somehow akin to it: his Napoleon cognac, lunch at Marta’s house once every two weeks, walking the dog, the nightly TV movie he watched until tiredness overcame him, maybe the occasional rent boy he’d bring home in his car and whose presence he would then try to erase as soon as possible, fluffing up the sofa cushions (not the bed, never the bed), opening the windows, repenting.
That night he took the dog for a walk earlier than usual and then it became undeniable. Something had broken. Something fragile and very fine had broken. He always ate dinner first, smoked a cigarette watching TV and then took the dog out. Why hadn’t he done that today? The dog hadn’t even wagged his tail when he saw him approach with the leash and, on the way down in the elevator, had looked up at him with an expression of bovine wonderment.
“Paw,” he said. “Paw,” and the dog gave him his paw, tongue out and eyebrows raised, as if his owner were teaching him the rules of a new game.
When he got back he looked for the magazine. He’d left it on the table, he was sure, and now it wasn’t there. He looked in the bathroom, and in the kitchen. He shuffled through his desk drawers. Any other day at this time he would have already had dinner and be smoking his cigarette, getting ready to walk the dog, yet that night not only had he not done it but he was also nervous, desperately searching for that magazine that he wouldn’t even have been able to masturbate to without the help of the erotic art catalogue he’d bought last month. Finding himself in this situation increased his desperation, but he didn’t give up until he found it. It was on the floor beside the sofa. He opened it again, and became excited reading the personals again, but there was something a little different. It wasn’t the TV, or the cognac, or the dog, but himself, in the midst of all those other things. Reading all of the ads was a game he submitted to, fooling himself and yet all the while knowing precisely what he was looking for. Page 43. At the top. Above a bisexual named Ángel soliciting a threesome and beneath the photo of the nude man with the mask.
I’m so alone. Roberto. (91) 4177681.
Finding it was like feigning surprise when an expected visitor arrives, except this time the surprise was real; it was as if the ad had never been there and he had invented it at the bank. He had never met anyone named Roberto, so—though it was a common name—it hovered there on page 43 like a riddle waiting to be solved. It wasn’t an ugly name. Roberto. Anxiety made him eat the steaks he was saving for the weekend. Now he’d have to go shopping again because the leftover rice he’d been planning to have tonight would go bad by tomorrow. This was no good at all. Not that it was bad to have eaten something he was saving for another time; that was the sort of luxury that made him reasonably happy. But doing it the way he’d done it, just like that, for no reason. But really, had there been reasons the other times?
Half an hour later he couldn’t sleep. He always went to bed early, capitalizing on television’s soporific effect, and that night he couldn’t sleep. He’d taken the magazine with him to bed and left it on his nightstand. He picked it up and opened it but then felt ridiculous. It was all Roberto’s fault. In the open wardrobe door, he could see the dark, faint reflection of his fifty-six-year-old body in the glow of the television, projecting tiredness and an obesity that, while not obscene, he had never made a serious attempt to combat. He felt pathetic for having entered into the game Roberto was proposing. How—after so many years of reasonable happiness, of peace—could so blatant a ploy have gotten the better of him? Crumpling it up, he took it to the kitchen and threw it in the trash. Then he tied the bag and left it by the door, hoping that the doorman would not have made his rounds yet. Sleep descended upon him that night serene and unburdened. He was proud of himself.
In the morning the trash bag was gone. He could have verified this simply by looking out the peephole but instead he opened the door. At the bank, they asked him if he felt all right when he arrived.
“I have a little bit of a headache,” he said.
“It’s the flu. People are dropping like flies.”
But it wasn’t the flu. The Coca-Cola sign flashed on and off, as did the Christmas lights. It was Christmastime. How had he not realized? Two years ago he’d felt a slow-burning sadness during the holidays, too, and he hadn’t been able to shake it off until they had taken the lights down. But what he felt now wasn’t really sadness. He was anxious. He made a mistake keying in the number of a bank account and spent almost half an hour arguing with a customer who claimed his deposits were not being credited correctly. At lunchtime he went to get the first-aid kit to take his temperature. But he had no fever. He took an aspirin. But he didn’t have a headache. The ad said:
I’m so alone. Roberto, and then there was a phone number. He couldn’t remember the number. He, who had always been so proud of his numeric memory, couldn’t recall the number. It started 417. It started 417 and then there was something like 4680. It wasn’t 4680 but it was similar to 4680. 5690. 3680. (91) 4177681
I’m so alone. Roberto, and then 417. . .
When he left the bank he didn’t go home but instead walked to the kiosk where he’d bought the personals magazine the other day.
“Check over there,” the newsagent said.
It wasn’t there.
“Don’t you have any more?”
“Aren’t there any there?”
“I can’t see any.”
“Then we must be out.”
He couldn’t find it at the sex shop three blocks down, either, and the clerk hadn’t even heard of the magazine. He thought about filing a complaint but that seemed ridiculous. When he got home the dog was restless because he’d been gone so long. He was hungry and wagged his tail. Any other day he’d have felt relaxed arriving home, but this time he didn’t know what to do, he didn’t know if he should sit down or watch TV. He hadn’t eaten dinner yet. He had to walk the dog. Suddenly every act that, for years, he had performed in a ritual of leisurely contentment seemed an unbearable obligation. He put on the dog’s leash and went down to take him for a walk but didn’t follow his usual route. When he got back, though he had no appetite, he ate dinner and then took two sleeping pills. He dreamed of someone he had loved for three long years, ages ago, but couldn’t see his face; there was only the familiar presence of that body lying beside him, his smell, his saliva.
Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday he went to the bank with a fever. He felt weak but at the same time he wanted to scream. It seemed impossible to him that he had held on this way for so many years. During his lunch break he went out to his usual café-bar for a sandwich and coffee but he felt excluded from everything around him. Wherever he looked, all he saw were couples, kisses, little signs of affection. The cold condescension he once looked on with now turned against him, blowing up in his face with envy and anxiety. He had to find that magazine. Now.
I’m so alone, said Roberto. He was alone, too. He wanted to be kissing someone, like all those couples, holding someone’s hand, buying presents. He could waste no more time on irony.
It was all so easy. He didn’t have to walk more than a block, as he’d expected. He went up to the first newsstand he saw and said “Madrid Contactos” and the newsagent held out a copy of the magazine.
“Three hundred fifty pesetas.”
The elation almost made him mock the scandalized expression an old woman buying the newspaper gave him; there was the woman who looked like his brother-in-law Ramón’s sister, arms crossed to push out her breasts, thin lips made up beyond the lip line like a quick fix for the standard displeasure caused by her body, and there, too, would be, on page 43, at the top, Roberto, above that bisexual named Ángel and beneath the photo of the man with the mask on. He asked for a
bag, slipped the magazine in it and walked towards the bank almost in a good mood, but another fear was born in the remaining hours of his workday. What was he going to do now? Was he really planning to call that number? And if he wasn’t planning to call, then why had he gone through all that? He took a taxi home. He went up to his apartment without greeting the doorman and as soon as he closed the door he turned to page 43.
(91) 4177681.
How could he have forgotten such an easy number? But that wasn’t the problem.
The dog looked at him with eyes watering at his forgotten walk, and he said, “Paw.”
The animal held out a weary paw, like the child asked for the umpteenth time to repeat a once-funny remark, and he decided he would think the matter over on the walk. But there was nothing to think about. Roberto’s phone number began to pound in his head as soon as he got outside; it was now as clear and easy to remember as the jingle from a commercial (91) 4177681, he’d call just to hear what his voice sounded like, that was all, he’d call and then hang up, he’d have a nice tumbler of cognac, watch a movie, yes, there was a good one on that night, he had seen it listed in the paper, it wouldn’t be hard to fall asleep.
He waited until ten-thirty to do it. Ten o’clock seemed too early and he never called anyone after eleven. Ten-thirty was a good time. It rang three times before anyone answered.
“Yes?” Roberto’s voice said.
The voice sounded young, younger than he’d imagined after reading the ad. It was easy to imagine a small apartment, maybe roommates, a narrow hallway, clothes strewn over the bed, the TV in the background, a cheap dinner.
“Hello?”
He thought about someone he had loved once, for three long years, ages ago. He didn’t know why, but that voice had something of the shy, impressionable boy he himself had been when that someone loved him. Roberto hung up, and he thought, as he listened to the intermittent dial tone, about the night when that someone had put flowers in his hair, lipstick on his lips, taken a shower with him. He couldn’t remember his face, but his presence was there. He remembered his hands, his tongue, the messy apartment, the strange feeling of having possessed each other that filled their conversations with an easy tranquility, with jokes, with silence, the world waking up blue and acceptable, the word happiness, the word love, on his lips with a naturalness that had seemed simple and universal.