by Andrés Barba
Marta was home alone. Ramón was working and the kids wouldn’t be home till six.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Why do you keep asking?” he replied, slightly irritated.
“Well, to be honest, because you never come over for lunch on a weekday, just like that.”
“Well I’m still on vacation, and since I couldn’t see you over New Year’s . . .”
Marta, though she looked surprised throughout lunch and kept asking about his health and his job in an attempt to discover the real reason for the visit, finally gave in to the idea that her brother had actually just come over because he wanted to chat. Then when they were having coffee, she suddenly smacked her forehead, as if she’d forgotten something unforgivable.
“You remember Uncle Juan?”
“Yes. Is he okay?”
“Is he okay? He’s getting married!”
“How old is he now?”
“Sixty-three. But wait, that’s not the best part. Get this: the lucky bride-to-be is twenty-eight.”
Marta interpreted his silence as a sign of the same incredulity that she must have felt on hearing the news, and this encouraged her.
“That’s the same reaction I had. Dumbfounded.”
“What does he say about it?”
“Who, Uncle Juan? Uncle Juan says they’re in love, and really, maybe he is, but the girl? Personally, I think Uncle Juan is just rich and horny as hell, is all.”
“Do you think it’s impossible for two people with a big age difference to fall in love?”
Marta pursed her lips as a sign of physical displeasure, but since he didn’t say anything she seemed to feel obliged to go into detail.
“Look, the way I see it, for an older person to fall in love with someone younger, that’s not necessarily bad, because it happens all the time, let’s not kid ourselves, it’s normal, say, for a woman to fall in love with a younger guy, but she doesn’t really fall in love with him, she just gets a crush, you know what I mean, but for a young girl to throw herself into the arms of an old man, that’s just ugly, it’s not natural, I don’t know, just think about the girl in ten year’s time, people will think it’s his granddaughter taking him for a walk.”
Lunch with Marta and especially the story about his uncle gave him a strange sense of peace that confirmed the impossibility of his relationship with Roberto, and then he felt overcome by a coldness that analyzed his relationship not as something disagreeable but something almost immoral, dirty, something he had fallen into as a result of having been lonely for so many years.
Roberto called the next day and he said that he was waiting for him, and to come over. When he saw him walk in, he observed the same signs of worry that he himself had: bags under the eyes, the tired-sounding voice, a contained sadness.
“Hello,” Roberto said.
He had lost his charm; now Roberto was just a defeated boy he looked at, from the stature of his fifty-six years, almost condescendingly.
“Well. Did you think ‘about us’ or not?”
Roberto was so sad that he didn’t even catch the irony in his words.
“Actually, I came for help, for you to tell me what I should do. I’ve been thinking about it so much, but . . .”
“You want to leave me, that’s what you want to do, but you don’t know how because you feel such pity for me. But you know what? I don’t want anybody’s pity, so you don’t have to worry about it. I don’t get you hot anymore, right? Isn’t that how you say it nowadays? I don’t get you hot. I used to get you hot, I don’t know why, maybe it was morbid curiosity, but now you’re bored, you won’t admit it, of course, but I know. I’m not saying you don’t feel anything at all for me, maybe a little affection, because you’re either a very good liar or you feel something, but that’s not enough for me, and if I say you don’t understand me, it’s because you don’t understand me, how could you understand me, you’d have to have spent twenty years alone to understand me, alone, with nobody, for almost as many years as you’ve been alive, that’s how long I’ve been alone. Have you ever thought about that? Tell me, have you ever thought about that?”
“Yes, of course I have,” he said. “Why are you talking to me like that?”
“Well, if you’ve thought about that,” he continued, trying not to lose his line of reasoning, “then you should have realized that you can’t just turn up, the way you turned up, and ask me to become a twenty-one-year old, because that can’t happen, Roberto, you can’t ask me to go to some bar and get drunk as if I might want to do that because I don’t. Before you came along I was used to my life, I had compensations, the little things that made me happy, and that was enough, and now it’s going to take me five years to get over you. What about that? Did you ever think about that? You didn’t, did you? And don’t tell me you need another break and then come back a week later and tell me that you’re leaving me. Just walk out the door and disappear if you want, but don’t tell me you need another break. There. Now I’ve done all your work for you. What do you think?”
“I think you’ve said it all, it’s all about you, and you didn’t even really think about me,” Roberto responded, his voice choked.
“Too much. I thought about you. Too much.”
“It seems like you’re asking me to leave you.”
“I’m asking you to leave me because deep down that’s what you really want to do, Roberto.”
“You’re asking me to leave you because I don’t love you, but really, I’m going to leave you because I’m starting to realize that it’s you who doesn’t love me.”
He didn’t answer. Roberto’s reply had struck him in the face, like a blow. The whole feeling of discursive, argumentative coherence that he thought he’d maintained throughout his speech was brought down by Roberto’s few words. He took out his set of keys to the apartment and left them on the table by the front door. Then he put on his coat.
“I think you’re a sad man,” Roberto said as he turned around and closed the door slowly behind him, without the slam he’d been expecting.
The dog barked. He could hear the second hand of the living room clock tick as the elevator came to his floor, and the door opened, and Roberto got in. He stuck his head out the window and saw him walk out, stop, catch a bus. Outside, winter’s chill cut to the bone.
DEBILITATION
SARA GOT OUT OF THE POOL the same way she always got out of the pool: attempting to quell the greasy feeling, the revulsion that her own wet body produced.
“You are something else. A body like that and you won’t wear a bikini,” said Teresa.
And Sara: “Whatever.”
Luis hadn’t stopped staring since the moment she took off her wrap and dove in, not stopping to rinse off first because she couldn’t take the heat another minute. They hadn’t exchanged a word since their kiss, a week before. It had all been so quick, so odd, that if she stopped to think about it now, it was disjointed in her memory: Luis’s hands, his “I really like you,” her glancing at her watch knowing they were going to be late to Teresa’s birthday, and then the kiss; Luis’s ridiculous, almost unpleasant tongue like a soggy worm wiggling against hers, her own excitement flaring up first like a burst of wonder and then of disgust when she felt him touch her chest. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Luis—she’d always liked Luis—it was the profound sense of repulsion she felt at the unexpected and unfamiliar reaction of her own body, which was a sort of tension and swelling, a sort of pleasure, but unarticulated pleasure, which she felt again now as she got out of the pool that she and Teresa had been invited to, and it almost made her wish she hadn’t dived in to begin with so that she wouldn’t now have to go running—acting like nothing was the matter—back to her towel to shield herself from Luis’s gaze, Luis’s friend’s gaze, even Teresa’s gaze as her friend repeated that if she had Sara’s body she’d wear not one bikini but a thousand, and Luis nodded vigorously while at the same time seeming, perhaps, to reproach her for the fact that t
hey still hadn’t spoken about what happened a week earlier.
She felt the towel around her waist like a welcome reprieve, and didn’t take it off for the rest of the afternoon. Classes were starting in a week and the end of that summer was tinged with a tired pink indolence. She’d spent one month at the beach with her father, and the month of August in Madrid with her mother. Although it had been three years since their divorce, her mother was still inhabiting an emotionally precarious state that, from the start, had led Sara to side with her and against her father, who for over a year she continued to see as a hostile enemy. It was different now. She was sixteen and had been held back a year but it didn’t really matter. Throughout her childhood Sara had been a big girl, which is why—though she had never been overly talkative and her silence, most of the time, concealed plain and simple shame—during that time she took great satisfaction in her own physical strength. But adolescence changed things. Not only did she stop growing, but in a little under a year and a half she also turned into a first-class beauty. She could tell more by others’ reactions to her than by her own. Sara herself felt that by losing stature, or rather by the other girls at school becoming the same height, she was also losing her confidence, her respectability. What for others was a perfect smoothing out of edges that seemed were never going to lose their clumsy shape, she experienced as a sort of debilitation. The emergence of her breasts, the accentuation of her waist, was all a sort of sliminess, a liquefaction, and which is why her pleasure at feeling strong was substituted by the pleasure she took in being rude, in silence.
She took it almost as praise when her mother said that she was unfeminine, and though well-groomed, she never worried about how she dressed, and cut her hair like a boy’s so as not to waste time styling it.
That worked for three years. Until Luis. It had all worked perfectly until Luis, and it’s not that she hadn’t liked kissing Luis, it wasn’t a matter of liking it or not liking it, but of the feeling—almost identical—that she’d experienced again when getting out of the pool, a feeling that wasn’t shame or weakness or disgust, though it contained an element of all three. They’d been talking about what they wanted to study at university, after finishing high school that year.
“What about you, Sara? What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.”
“But isn’t there anything you at least like?”
“I like to draw.”
“Draw,” Luis’s friend said, with a slightly sardonic tone, and she shot daggers at him.
“Yes, draw. I like to draw,” she replied, and the kid didn’t open his mouth again.
Teresa asked her later, as they were getting dressed in the changing room, why she’d been so rude to the guy, and she didn’t know what to say. She was amazed at the ease, almost complacency, with which Teresa, whose body was more developed than her own, undressed.
“The thing is,” she said, “I really like this guy, and if you keep acting like that you’re going to scare him off. He doesn’t seem like it, but he’s shy—what? Are you into me, or what?”
“What do you mean?”
“You were staring.”
“No,” Sara replied almost blushing, because it was true: the white skin under Teresa’s bikini, against her deep summer tan, lent a strange luminescence to her breasts and crotch, and combined with the nonchalant way she’d taken off her bathing suit, it took on a kind of power, a resolve that hypnotized Sara. Teresa wasn’t pretty, but her body, unlike Sara’s, seemed complete; even the curves of her hips and breasts had an architectonic grace that made her attractive.
Luis waited for Sara, hoping to ride the bus home with her, but she asked him to leave, so she could think about things. Think about things was the expression Sara used when, rather than actually think about something, she wanted to sink into a state of semi-conscious vacuousness in which images, words, and plans flew by one after another with no logic, like objects seen from the window of a train.
“So it didn’t mean anything to you,” Luis concluded.
“What?”
“Last week.”
“No,” Sara replied.
“Got it,” Luis said, walking off.
Sara took the bus back and got off two stops early in order to walk through the park. One word was pounding in her temples. It was a simple word, perfect and white. It was in the trees, in the joggers’ breath, in the sudden warm dark of that September night. Several times she almost said it out loud. Her mother wasn’t home when she got in. From beneath their apartment came the sounds of the outdoor café near the door to their building. She went into the bathroom and took off all her clothes in front of the mirror. Before her there appeared a reflection, the figure of a girl who, in the shadow of the bathtub, resembled a white breastplate, an Amazon prepared for battle. The word she’d been dreaming of all afternoon bubbled up, effervescent, from some hidden place, deep down, and Sara smiled at her naked reflection.
“Control,” she whispered.
The world froze stock-still for a few seconds, like a virgin ashamed of a dream. It was September 2.
The line separating the Sara that was from the one she would become from that moment on couldn’t have been finer. It seemed there had in fact been no change, that everything had stopped for an instant only to carry on from another point, Sara still being Sara, like the unthinkable reaction of an acquaintance which, upon reflection, not only stops being unthinkable but actually seems logical, coherent. Control was change, change was control, and both were a void filled with images that led nowhere. And nothingness was desirable. And in nothingness, everything could simply be discovered. And Sara saw that it was good.
She bumped into Luis close to home a week after classes started. He was uneasy, and his uneasiness ended up rubbing off on her.
“Listen, Sara,” he said, fidgeting with his hands, “I’ve been thinking . . . I don’t know, I mean, to me, what happened that day meant something . . . I just wanted you to know.”
“Okay.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Fine,” Luis concluded hastily. “I guess that’s life, right?”
“Whose life?” she asked, and it was Luis, then, who turned strangely solemn.
“Goodbye, Sara.”
It was late and she went up to the apartment to make dinner. She wasn’t thinking about Luis when she opened the door, or when she dropped her books in her room, or when she began peeling potatoes in the kitchen to make a meat stew. Her mother wasn’t home yet. She worked at a newspaper and sometimes got home late. Sara loved her the way one loves a deaf dog, or a bored child gazing out the window at a park.
Suddenly it occurred to her. She recalled a few conversations about it with Teresa’s friends, even Teresa herself. She recalled, also, that she’d felt a kind of repugnance, not for them but for their smugness. She went to the bathroom and undressed from the waist down. Sitting on the bidet, she began to touch herself. The displeasure she at first felt was overcome the moment she realized that it was the same sense of repulsion she’d felt while kissing Luis but now different, because something about it seemed pleasurable. Sara felt a body inside her own body come into being, a body that understood Luis, and her mother, and Teresa—a body she didn’t like. Her pleasure was sharp and sustained for a few seconds and then gradually subsided. She washed her hands and put her clothes back on. She’d left the kitchen door open and the whole apartment was filled with the smell of stew. It was late, and she put on her pajamas after dinner. In her diary she wrote: dear diary, today I masturbated. Mamá still wasn’t home. She was sad. And didn’t know why.
October crept in the way October always creeps in. Having been held back a grade, Sara didn’t know her new classmates very well, and having made zero effort to get close to them the first month of school, she’d ended up in the back row, playing the voluntary outcast, albeit with a little respectability due to her age. She saw Teresa between classes and at lu
nchtime, when they rode the bus home together. That day they did so in silence. Teresa had started going out with Luis’s friend a few weeks earlier, which translated into them speaking less.
“Um, Sara,” Teresa said with the deliberation of a long-avoided pronouncement. “You’re acting weird.”
She didn’t reply.
“You’re acting like you don’t care about anything. I mean, you’ve always been kind of quiet, but now it’s like you hardly even talk. Maybe . . . I don’t know, maybe you think we’re all boring, or maybe none of the other girls are smart enough for you.” Sara’s silence made Teresa change her tone, which became increasingly reproachful. “Or maybe you’re just jealous of me because I have a boyfriend.”
Teresa stopped to gauge her reaction, and Sara forced herself not to smile.
“No,” she said, “that’s not it.”
“Then what is it? Luis?”
She was surprised Teresa even knew about that, but said nothing.
“Plus it’s pretty messed up that I had to find out about it from him and not you. I mean—what? You don’t trust me, or what? I mean, that’s what friends are for, you know? ‘The other day I got together with Sara,’ he says yesterday, and I’m sitting there like an idiot pretending I’ve known all along, obviously, defending you, though I don’t know why if you don’t even tell me anything.”
“You don’t have to defend me, Tere,” she said to shut her up.
“Fine. Do what you like,” she responded, offended.
“Don’t get mad.”
“I’m not getting mad.”
They sank back into silence. Teresa stood when they got to her stop.
“And as for Luis,” she said, getting off the bus, “you should at least call him, or write to him. You can’t just up and leave people like that, all cold-hearted.”
“Okay,” she replied.