The Right Intention

by Andrés Barba

  “No, not you.”

  “Do you want to stay over tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  They went into the bedroom. Roberto sat down on the bed to take off his shoes and socks.

  “Stand up,” he said, and Roberto obeyed quickly, smiling. He unbuttoned his shirt, slowly. He helped him off with his undershirt. Every action produced an immediate and identical reaction in Roberto, and although he liked that, for the first time he thought that the boy’s love could never reach beyond the walls of his apartment, that everything that was tender there would be ridiculous or dirty or perverted outside. Soon they were both naked and Roberto jumped under the covers quickly, laughing at having escaped his embrace. He was happy. Radiant. He looked out at him, the covers pulled up to his nose, and his eyes gave away his big, open smile. He gave in to the game of chase eagerly, forgetting his doubts without much trouble.

  Holding Roberto’s naked body filled him with a sense of emptiness. He’d had similar experiences years ago, but those had been unpleasant and this filled him with a curious placidness. He had never encountered a body that was as aware of its nakedness as Roberto’s and yet, at the same time, displayed itself so gaily. Nudity was therefore not what it normally was: a presence that was exhausted as it displayed itself, where the mind was able to progress not towards awareness but towards a void that expanded in free fall toward a world in which Roberto was the only teacher, one of pure and simple perception. He must have been exhausted because he fell asleep right away, one arm around the pillow and the other around his waist. He envied the immediacy with which Roberto’s youth allowed him to get what he wanted and recalled the years when he, too, had only to close his eyes in order to fall asleep. He moved Roberto’s hand and turned on the bedside light. He turned around to see if Roberto had woken up, but he’d barely fluttered his eyelids. His pupils appeared and disappeared in the whites of his eyes like a spoon dipping into a glass of milk. In the room’s silence he could hear his breathing, slow and tired. The world howled at the windows in gusts of wind.

  But the sadness remained. The week and a half of his relationship with Roberto had momentarily hidden but not resolved, it. The most basic uncertainties surged in the most basic, most straightforward ways, into the bedroom, the living room, the bathroom whenever he was alone. What could he do now? Thinking about the future was like poking his head into a dark hole from which he could feel the panting breath of some beast. It was as if he were afraid to live, as if he’d forgotten all of the coping mechanisms, the tricks, the lies that made life habitable. How could he possibly show anyone the love he felt for that boy if he himself didn’t believe it entirely? If Roberto called to say he was going to be a little late, he’d start to panic, thinking he didn’t really want to see him, or that he’d met someone else, and that thought, as ridiculous as it might have been, as ridiculous as even he realized that it was, started a downward spiral, made him uneasy and at the same time unable to do anything but picture him somewhere else, with someone else, laughing.

  Then Roberto would arrive and he could breathe again, he’d feel himself taking the reins little by little, getting hold of the situation. The simple presence of that silent individual would calm his fears once again.

  “Did you think about me today?”

  “I thought about you lots.”

  “Really?”

  “You were everywhere.”

  The silence that formed the normal rhythm of those evenings allowed him to take his place in the world and, simultaneously, to watch Roberto. One of those nights it occurred to him that he would never know the boy any better than he did already. All that was left from then on was to learn his likes and dislikes, his reactions, the way he smiled, the way he half-closed his eyes and, although that was the usual way of getting to know someone, in Roberto those were no more than details that gave a little more definition to his initial impression, which was correct, and just. So on those nights, the coquetry he had intuited spontaneously at first materialized in a colored nail polish collection Roberto used to paint his toenails carefully while he looked on in silence, finding a simple solution to life yet again, lacking difficulties beyond those disdained for being all-embracing or infinitesimal. And what was wrong with that? He needed the presence of that twenty-one-year-old, his dark hair falling over his ears, his uncertain smile—part pained, part open—he needed the love and the secrets of that strange creature named Roberto to escape the feeling that life was going to fall apart at every turn.

  On Christmas Day he went to Marta’s house for dinner in a good mood. Ramón had made sea bass and the meal was pleasant, though the children made a racket the entire time. Marta said she thought he was looking very well, and Ramón’s sister, who had also come for dinner that night—and who every year rather than looking more exhausted or frumpier wore more make-up—concurred. He was delighted by everything. Even Ramón’s jokes. Something was different, and he didn’t realize what it was until the evening was almost over. He had always sat at that table feeling distant from Marta. She, at least, had Ramón. But the closest things he could remember feeling were that summer in Florence, a well in a cortile in Pisa, beside a fountain, a naked boy who looked at him on a beach in Geneva, the smell of oysters in a restaurant while feeling a hand on his thigh, his face in the mirror wearing lipstick, but these were not memories of a specific person, an individual who he missed; rather, they were like passages from a novel you could never return to, a novel whose pages are remembered, reconstructed, inevitably embellished, and, therefore, feel distinctly fictional. After that, the identical years at the bank, repeated in his memory as if they were one long day of routines and predetermined movements, and now Roberto. What to do. What to say. And why.

  It broke the same way as fragile glass, as a thread holding on to a button. He was at home waiting for Roberto to arrive the day after Christmas and the phone rang. It wasn’t Marta, it was José Luis from the bank. Informing him that he had to go to Barcelona. Three years ago, copying the American-style business plan, the group his bank belonged to had begun the practice of sending an experienced employee to every new city where they opened a branch, to hold meetings and talk about his or her experiences. He had taken those trips frequently, even requested them. He’d always liked leaving Madrid for a few days and living someplace else, with his travel expenses and hotel paid for. But now there was Roberto. He couldn’t leave now.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “I’m not asking you if you can; I’m telling you that you will.”

  And he felt, on hearing that, that something was breaking. He took leaving Madrid as an imposed abandonment. He would go, and when he returned, nothing would be the same. Roberto would have changed, he wouldn’t love him anymore (but why wouldn’t he?), he’d say he’d met someone else while he was away, or he’d just gotten bored, young people got bored easily, they changed boyfriends all the time.

  He was almost afraid to tell Roberto when he arrived, but he loved the idea.

  “You’re so lucky,” he said.

  “So you don’t mind if I go?”

  “Of course not. Why would I mind?”

  They talked about their respective Christmas dinners. Roberto’s had been predictable, keeping in mind what little he knew about the family he hardly ever spoke of. Both of his sisters had brought their husbands to dinner and one of them announced what her dress had made obvious a month ago: she was pregnant. Roberto said he was excited to be an uncle. But this was not the conversation he wanted to be having.

  “Are you sure you want me to go to Barcelona?”

  “Of course.”

  That’s what Roberto’s replies were always like, enthusiastic and direct, like blows.

  “Hey, what are you doing?”

  “I want to paint your toenails.”

  “Oh no, none of that.”

  “Come on, please.”

  He gave in quickly and Roberto got out all his little colored bottles. He stroked the boy’s
hair while he was lining them up on the table.

  “How long will you be there for?”

  “Five days.”

  “So you’ll be back for New Year’s Eve.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “No reason. It’s just there’s a party we could go to.”

  “Can’t we stay here that night?”

  “What for?”

  “To be together. I don’t want to go to a party. We can make dinner here. Have a little champagne. Take a shower . . .”

  “But I want to go to this party. We can do those other things any night.”

  “I know.”

  Suddenly, Roberto was twenty-one. Why wouldn’t a twenty-one-year-old boy want to go to a New Year’s Eve party? If he sometimes forgot how old he was, it was because he seemed older, because he half-closed his eyes like an adult, he was quiet like an adult, and he listened. But he was twenty-one. It had become clear, again, and when it became clear he felt as if he was corrupting him, as if the reason he was so afraid to let anyone else know about their relationship was because he himself was embarrassed of it. But he wasn’t embarrassed, he was just scared. Afraid he would stop loving him, or stop being loved by him. Roberto was leaning over his feet. His bangs fell over his eyes and his lips were contorted, like someone concentrating so hard on a task they look ridiculous without realizing it. He looked ugly now. Now he was just a kid who worked in a bar and a Laundromat, who didn’t understand anything, because Roberto did not understand him, how could a twenty-one-year-old boy understand him? He tried to remember what he had been like at that age but all he could muster up was a few fleeting images of Marta, of a boy he had liked at university and who he’d gone out drinking beer with on occasion, of his mother. Roberto had put on the Chopin record. Ever since he’d said that was what he liked, that was what Roberto put on. And now he was getting tired of Chopin, and he was getting tired of Roberto’s expression, his stubbornness over this stupid party, and even the fact that he hadn’t been upset about his trip to Barcelona. Because, really, didn’t his lack of concern about the trip imply some degree of indifference? If he didn’t care about the trip to Barcelona, it meant that deep down the boy was not as interested in him as he’d thought.

  “All done. You like it?”

  His toenails twinkled up at him, yellow, and blue, and red.

  “Now you have to blow on them, like this, so they dry.”

  Roberto smiled as he blew, and suddenly he felt a little fit of rage. But it wasn’t rage, it was pain. No, it wasn’t pain, either. He raised the boy’s head and kissed him violently. Roberto, though at first he played along, was a little confused by that reaction. He began to undress him, quickly, and after the initial doubt, Roberto seemed happy to join in the game and do it right there on the sofa, for no apparent reason. It was different. There was absolutely no doubt now. He pulled down his pants and went down on him. But not the way he usually did, not slowly, not feeling like he saw himself reflected in the boy the way on other nights he’d thought he saw himself reflected in the boy. He was, simply, sucking Roberto’s dick, and realizing this made him feel comfortable momentarily because he knew all about that. Sex was simple, what tortured him was what was beneath the sex; that was why he felt comfortable. Sucking Roberto’s dick was a simple act with no consequences as long as it stopped there. It was the rest of it that made him suffer, the other things: the same Chopin melody, the life Roberto led that he knew nothing of. Roberto would leave him, he was sure, sooner or later, he would get bored, he’d turn up one day and invent some absurd excuse to leave him, and he would have to go back to the bank as if it were no big deal, as if nothing had happened, as if nothing had ever happened. That’s why it was better this way, treating him like a blow-up doll.

  He was so lost in these thoughts that he didn’t even realize that Roberto had stopped playing along. The boy had stopped touching him some time ago, and when he realized he was slowing down, too, he lifted his head. He was kneeling in front of Roberto, who looked down on him with something like compassion from what seemed an impossible height.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  There was no recriminating tone in his voice, just pity, just something that, like pity was slow and difficult.

  “Can’t you see I’m an old man?”

  “Come on, you’re not an old man, you’re only fifty.”

  “I’m fifty-six.”

  There was a long silence, as if those six years, and not the lie, had opened a wound that would never heal, as if fifty-six was, really, the maximum expression of old age.

  “In twenty years,” he went on, “when you are a gorgeous forty-year-old man, a healthy, mature man, I’ll need help eating and getting dressed because it will be too hard for me to do on my own anymore. Did you ever think of that?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s true.”

  “I’ll help you eat and get dressed,” Roberto replied, after a short silence, and he couldn’t help but smile.

  “Don’t do that, don’t smile like that. Don’t make me feel bad.”

  “I don’t want you to feel bad, I just want to tell you what will happen in the end.”

  “But you love me, right?”

  “Of course.”

  The trip to Barcelona was one long replay of that conversation. Why had he said “of course” when Roberto asked him if he loved him? Why hadn’t he just said “yes” or “I love you”? His unhappiness at having to be away from Roberto was compounded by the tediousness of the meetings. He hardly left the hotel out of fear that Roberto might call and he wouldn’t be able to answer the phone right away. If Roberto didn’t call him in the late afternoon from the bar, then he called him at night. Roberto thought the perfect conversation was one in which he said he loved him and missed him to death, over and over and over. He often asked him what he was wearing. Roberto would kiss the telephone mouthpiece.

  “Last night I dreamed that you were here, with me, and we didn’t have to go anywhere and I was painting your nails.”

  “They’re still painted.”

  “I know.”

  It’s not that he didn’t actually miss him, but he realized that he missed him in a different way. Ever since he’d confessed his real age, ever since Roberto’s surprise, since the “I love you” question, he had sometimes felt that the end of their relationship was imminent, and that seemed logical, almost acceptable, but other times, especially at night, the world once again became a complex machine in which it would be impossible to live without the boy’s help.

  The third night, the phone woke him in the middle of the night. It was Roberto. He was calling from a phone booth. His voice was choked and it seemed he was trying not to cry. A group of boys had been waiting for him when he left the bar. He knew one of them by sight. When he walked out they spat at him and called him faggot. He tried to keep moving, but the episode went on for some time, for as long as it had taken him to get to a busy street. The boys had run off when they saw the police car and Roberto stood there, motionless and pathetic like a tree with no leaves. He took off his jacket and wiped the spit from his face and hair. He, who was not violent, recounted this story violently, rabidly, in order to survive.

  “They didn’t hurt you, did they?”

  “No. I would have preferred that. They wanted to humiliate me and they did.”

  “No, no they didn’t.”

  There was a long silence in which he heard a bus accelerate, and the sound of a car horn.

  “Bastards,” said something that sounded like Roberto’s voice.

  “I wish I were there so I could hug you.”

  “I wish you were here so you could hug me, too.”

  “Roberto.”

  “What?”

  “I love you.”

  He’d said it without thinking, it was a logical procession, a necessary one, but as soon as he said it he felt afraid. Roberto didn’t answer and his silence made the solemnity palpable. His eyes passed over the object
s in the room: the towels on the sofa, the television, the mini-bar, the night pushing in through the windows.

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  Again the towels, the television, again the fear.

  “I love you, too.”

  The day after that, which was the last day of his trip, they did not repeat those words although they spoke on the phone. Roberto’s silence at the end of the conversation awaited their repetition without too much insistence although it was enough to make his need for them palpable. And he, in turn, felt as if those words, the recollection of those words, had suddenly drilled a hole in the wall that would now be impossible to repair, and if he felt frightened when he landed back in Madrid, it was because he realized that now there was no longer any doubt, he was vulnerable.

  Roberto was waiting for him at the apartment. He had asked for the day off in order to surprise him, and assured him that it had not been easy, because it was December 31 and they were having a party at the bar where he worked. When he hugged him he felt Roberto’s body with a sense of novelty, his arms, his hair. He tasted like cigarettes and mint-flavored gum and he looked different, too, more filled out somehow.

  “You look gorgeous.”

  “Thank you.”

  He had brushed his hair and was wearing a new shirt, ironed, and nice shoes.

  “I wanted to look good when you got back.”

  Roberto really was splendid in his beauty that afternoon. They talked about everything except the unpleasant incident with the gang of boys and every time he brought up something amusing he felt caught up in the boy’s laugh, felt a part of it, and at the same time contemplated how much of his own life had also been lived by Roberto, from afar. The boy remembered every tiny detail of the collection of anecdotes he’d told about his meetings, the names of all the people, the jokes that had been told, as if he had been there.

  They made love slowly that night and drank cognac naked on the unmade bed. His body smelled of sweat and cologne. He noticed that Roberto had cleaned the apartment and left a bunch of daisies by the mirror and sunflowers in the bathroom.