We All Loved Cowboys

by Carol Bensimon

  Julia was asleep now. I wasn’t. I had closed the door carefully, as if I had just finished reading a bedtime story, a long, relentless, soporific one. I had crossed the rough corridor in socks, gone downstairs, asked the weirdo at reception for a cigarette, felt his eyes glued to my back on that long walk to the hotel entrance, the way I moved, my hair tangled back with an elastic band that had been forgotten somewhere, the indecent sleep shorts, a pit of worry. I sat outside on the edge of a flowerbed and lighted the cigarette with the match the weirdo had also offered me.

  The glowing ember might have seemed nice on that empty, desperate night in Soledade, but it was only the third time in my life I had smoked tobacco, so I recall having coughed repeatedly until I convinced myself that my throat wasn’t ready for long drags, after which the cigarette became less of a chemical comfort and more of an accessory for my fingers, fingers that were very restless in those wee small hours. In the time I spent sitting by the flowerbed, not much happened outside of my head. A cat climbed into a trashcan and came out with its mouth full. On the street behind, someone stuck their head out of their car, shouted wake up guuuuys, then stepped on the gas. I occasionally glanced through the glass doors and the hotel reception was almost as dark as the rest of the town, that long, wide corridor slumbering in the insufficient glow of emergency lights, the 1970s furniture fitting in perfectly, much more than it did in the mid-afternoon sun, at any rate.

  I thought again about what it would be like to leave suddenly. The idea was tempting, I had already tried it, I had fled my dad’s wedding to Jaqueline, I had fled from the birth of my little brother, why not flee too from a goodbye that was only going to be a disaster? It was without doubt the most cowardly of all my options, but, as far as I could tell, what it saved in drama seemed to compensate what it would gain in weight on my conscience. But no. Not this time. I wasn’t going to leave a note or something for Julia, get the car out of the hotel garage and drive to Porto Alegre in the middle of the night, that was unthinkable, and not because of some strange calculation in my head, but because a drastic measure like that would bury our chances forever. On the contrary, I wanted to keep building up those chances, until they were more than chances, or more than a heap of ambiguities, more than two rather unstable sexual identities that one day might happen to intersect and produce one of those stories you’ll remember your whole life, but which quickly become a kind of recognition that your youth was complete, days that were crazy, sweet and full of adventure—hell, what a phase!—just that, that sweet memory and the conviction that, when it boiled down to it, when that thing that looked very much like love was actually happening, you already knew that recalling it years later would threaten the calm and predictability that were unfortunately part of your destiny. Perhaps that was the purpose of all those confusions.

  No. I didn’t want any of that to happen to me. My cigarette had become an insignificant stub. I crushed the glowing end on the ground and entered the hotel holding on to that stinking remain. Behind the counter, the weirdo was reading a detective novel. I asked if he had a trashcan and, not waiting for an answer, I placed the stub and the box of matches on the granite surface and went upstairs.

  Julia was still asleep. She had rolled into the middle of the bed since my exit, as if no one else was going to lie there that night, her body drawing an uncertain C, the sheet clinging to her like a cocoon. It was stifling in there. The minibar started yet another cycle of hums and hisses. I entered the bathroom and started removing my make-up with one of those cotton wool pads from Julia’s toilet kit. I allowed the black to smear across my temples, transforming myself into a cross between a victim of domestic violence and a supermodel addicted to sedatives. I felt like I was stripping myself. I took another cotton pad, a bit of make-up remover, not from my little plastic pot that looked like a free sample, but from Julia’s, which had writing in English and French, I rubbed vigorously, across my temples, then across my closed eyelids, then along my lash lines, then I opened the faucet, let the water run as if I were waiting for it to turn into something much more interesting, I thrust my face under the stream which, after all, was the same water as ever, and dried myself with a towel, taking care to switch off the light before opening the door.

  Julia moved slowly in the darkness. I stood watching. Her hands found a new resting place under the pillow, then her legs separated in a kind of nightmare spasm to then snap back together as if joined by a pin at the knees. The sheet was long gone. I stayed standing. She opened her eyes. At first, it was impossible to be sure that they were even open, after all I couldn’t see a tiny thing like a pair of eyes clearly, or rather, the difference between a pair of closed eyes and a pair of open eyes, so I was only certain that Julia had woken up when she took her arm from under the pillow and, with a single movement, pushed a few troublesome strands of hair off her cheek. After that, I think everything happened rather oddly. She didn’t say “hi” or “why are you awake?” or “you should try to get a bit of sleep”; she didn’t say anything. She seemed to find it normal that I was wide awake and, worse than that, looking very much like someone who hasn’t even been to bed. She straightened the pillow, sat with her legs stretched out and waited. I sat near her, but in the way that people sit when they’re about to get up. Did she have to go away? I asked in a pleading tone: “Are you really going tomorrow?” Julia gave me the saddest smile in the world.

  “My parents. They’ve been expecting me for a while.”

  “I know. Your parents.”

  “We have to please our parents once in a while.”

  “Mmhm.”

  Then she made a gesture that was an invitation for me to snuggle into her lap. Lying there, my legs interlaced with hers, her rake-like fingers winning a hard battle with my hair, I wondered whether Julia was in some way trying to console me. As if, hell, I was the only unhappy girl in need of consolation in that depressing hotel room. At some point between my unanswered question and the first rays of sun, we both fell asleep.

  The goodbye actually began on the way to the coach station. Once more, the car salesrooms, the mechanics’ workshops, the gas station. Julia looked out of the window like someone looking for the last time. I stopped to fuel up, she didn’t move. The morning brought with it the promise of a tiresome heat, stray dogs were lying in the shadows of verandas, and a swarm of flies fought for space with the sparrows for a sticky morsel of bread. I stood outside the car while the attendant filled the tank. I thought about how long it would take to get to Porto Alegre, perhaps about four hours, shouldn’t I let my mom know that I was finally on my way back? “Miss,” someone said. The car key was practically dangling at my nose. “It came to seventy-four twenty.” I pulled two notes of fifty out of my pocket, put away the change, shot a have-a-nice-day at the attendant and the other man who had cleaned my windows. There was Julia, in exactly the same goddamn position, so distant and wrapped up in her own dramas that I thought it best to keep my mouth shut. There were the squat factories of the precious stone firms, MR Lodi Stone, Colgemas Pedras Preciosa, Legep Mineração Limitada.

  The Soledade coach station could almost have been mistaken for one of those buildings. It was a more precarious version of the same functional architecture, low and square, the only difference being that two sections of the construction appeared to have been removed to facilitate access to the back. In the parking lot, there were very few cars and no shade. I parked. So this was it. We began the tough job of taking out her bags and leaving mine, going to the ticket office, asking for a single one-way ticket.

  “I think I can turn on my cell now,” Julia said, still sitting. It was the first smile of the day. She took the device out of her bag, pressed a button, the screen lighted up.

  “Do you think Mathias spoke to your parents? I mean, after yesterday afternoon.”

  She looked at me as if that question was beneath my intelligence.

  “Okay, I get it. He likes to give the first version of events.”

&nb
sp; “Exactly.”

  There was a short silence. Julia was playing with the Navajo bracelet. I began to speak.

  “I just wanted to tell you that all this, the trip, was just, well, incredible.”

  “It really was, wasn’t it?”

  Her face lighted up.

  “You like this bracelet of mine?”

  “Your Navajo bracelet? Of course, it’s lovely. I’m sure it was the prettiest thing you could have bought on that reservation. And it makes me think about, I don’t know, about the desert. It’s like it brought the whole desert with it, you know?” I laughed to myself. “Sorry, that was really stupid.”

  “It wasn’t stupid. Look, you have to take it. No, Cora, I mean it. Take my bracelet.” She forced the ends over her slim wrist. “I know, it was Eric who gave it to me, so it’s kind of a second-hand present. But I think you’ll be able to see that in a special way.”

  “I certainly will.”

  The bracelet was on my wrist now. Julia began to laugh. At that moment, there was a scatter of bright sparks, lighter than air.

  “Aren’t we just like a couple of teenagers? Swapping clothes and that kind of thing.”

  “I … Thanks, it’s pretty. Really.”

  And as if there was nothing more to be said, we got out of the car.

  While Julia dragged her case towards the only ticket window, glancing up at an old analogical panel full of names of towns and exact timetables, I walked to the back of the coach station. That was where the buses stopped. The backless wooden benches were occupied by all sorts of people and a variety of luggage, including a soft rectangular case that seemed to protect some kind of musical instrument. To my left, there was a bed with a withered palm tree, with more dead leaves than living, struggling to survive. On the opposite side, a Coca Cola mural covered the wall from top to bottom. They don’t do paintings like that any more. That must have been several decades ago. Ironically, below the obsolete slogan, an indigenous family had set up camp. At that precise moment, in the midst of the confusion of scattered clothes and grocery carts replete with unidentifiable items, the indigenous woman was feeding three children, none of them more than six or seven years old. The head of the family must have been elsewhere, rummaging through garbage for aluminum cans.

  “Ready.”

  I turned round.

  “It leaves at half eleven for Passo Fundo. Then I have to catch another bus to the Santa Catarina coast. You think my parents will come and get me in, maybe, Camboriú?”

  I looked at my watch.

  “Forty minutes.”

  “Yeah. Forty minutes.”

  When the time came, she embraced me tightly and kissed me on the cheek. ‘Take care,” she said. And she kept looking back and smiling in that line that never moved forward. The coach’s engine seemed to mark the tragic pulse of our goodbye. I looked at the indigenous family, the snack bar, the palm tree. Perhaps I hadn’t done enough for Julia to stay. But stay where exactly? Apart from anything else, I needed to leave too. I was going to see my mom, my dad, my little brother, to hear that I’d been a naughty girl, and then catch my flight back to Paris.

  Finally, the driver uttered his last unenthusiastic good morning. He ripped Julia’s ticket and gestured for her to get on. After that, the tinted windows weren’t good enough for final waves, and I don’t think I was good enough for them either, I was still thinking I should have done something else, one last thing to prevent her getting on that coach, so that even before the driver began to reverse I was already walking toward the parking lot. It was murderously hot, I had to get used to the blinding light and then to the heat that had been accumulating inside the car, but above all to the empty seat that was now next to me. I turned the key, inspired by the childish idea of driving under the Soledade archway before the coach did. A red car was leaving the parking lot at the same time. I had the impression that I saw Mathias. I was probably wrong again.

  10.

  FIVE DAYS A WEEK, I worked at Monte Cassino, 76, Avenue des Gobelins. It was a restaurant much like any other Italian restaurant that happened to be on a Parisian corner, the orange awning, the word pizza on one side and trattoria on the other, Sicilian landscapes in Indian ink, disposable placemats that would be spattered with tomato sauce and red wine by the end of every meal. From the window you could see the uninterrupted carousel of drivers circling Place d’Italie. We were in October, it was raining, and the drops accumulating on the glass deflected yellow and red lights. It wasn’t a heavy rain, more like a kind of condensation that was so light it seemed immune to the effects of gravity. The pedestrians ignored it completely.

  In October, everyone was still trying to cure their summer hangover. A summer in Paris could be nothing less than memorable. The city was radiant in the sun, as places that don’t see it very often tend to be, so that people needed to be out in it the entire time, drops of sweat on the forehead on café terraces, drinking, walking, cycling, having picnics with real picnic hampers and real picnic blankets, which barely resembled the very thin sarongs we used to spread out on Sunday afternoons in Porto Alegre. I had seen someone with a table on the banks of the Seine. Don’t ask me how it got there.

  But now the patches of grass in the squares were in their winter repose. For each nice day, there were three as bad as this. Parisians were drying out and losing their leaves. At the Vélib’ station, a Rastafarian released a bicycle from the far left-hand side of the stand with a brusque tug, placed his rucksack in the basket and pedaled off without even acknowledging the drizzle. Surely that had to be one of the definitions of a European: someone who isn’t bothered by going out in the rain.

  I stopped watching and turned back to the dining room. Romantic Italian hits were still trickling through the sound system. There was my boss, counting money. I would never know whether the fact that he had dark, slicked-back hair had had anything to do with him being hired, or whether his Mafioso air was constructed and refined a posteriori. There was the table whose occupants, two tourist couples from Eastern Europe, seemed to have nothing to say to one another, except when the youngest man sneezed, which happened fairly frequently; then the others quickly said whatever it was polite to say in their country under such circumstances. There was the guy who had never seen an egg on a pizza. He was eating tiramisu now, the kind that was delivered twice a week in a refrigerated truck. In front of him was an open book lying spine up, like a musty tent. A seriously old volume. Finally, there were the only French folk in the premises, a man and a woman who seemed to have come straight from a business meeting. The man wanted to continue the meeting, unlike the woman, who limited herself to shaking her head at her companion’s excited torrent of ideas, occasionally reaching the point of shutting her eyes between words. She alone had finished the half-liter carafe of red wine. Her hair, scraped back in a ponytail, gave the impression that it had been sculpted in a single automatic gesture that simultaneously took into account its importance in the balance of her face. That was one of the potential definitions of a Frenchwoman: someone who ties back her hair with calculated discipline.

  The fine rain lingered when we closed the restaurant.

  Every night, I walked home, covering part of Boulevard Auguste Blanqui, then climbing Rue des Cinq Diamants from beginning to end, one, two, three blocks that became progressively smaller, until I came out in what was without doubt my favorite part of the journey, the lively and semi-isolated hub of a district known as Quartier de la Butte aux Cailles. This pretty hill was a kind of small-scale Montmartre where tourists never went, and because there were no tourists, no guy from Mali would try to tie a colored cord round your wrist and then demand some small change in return for the charming souvenir. I cut across a triangular square, someone was smoking a cigarette and talking on the telephone in spite of the lacework of raindrops in the air, I turned left into Rue Barrault, then left again onto Daviel. In this area, there were two architectural curiosities that seemed to be mandatory in tourist guides with names like
Hidden Paris or Unexpected Paris. The first of these distinctive edifices was a complex of Alsace-style buildings. Dramatic roofs like you would imagine a witch’s house to have, surrounded a leafy courtyard. Often, immediately after one of the residents walked out, someone would grab the still-closing gate and sneak in to have a quick look. Even I had done that. The second oddity was called Villa Daviel. Villa Daviel was basically a cul-de-sac lined with about thirty two-story houses dating from 1912. As unreal as it seemed to me, and it really did, I lived in one of those houses now. A long story that could be shortened into two words: Jean-Marc.

  Almost everyone on Villa Daviel was in bed when I arrived. The subtle glow of televisions and bedside lamps crept through a few windows. I walked to number 22, opened the gate, climbed the staircase and slotted my key into the door. Inside my bag, my cell alerted me to a message, but I decided to stick to my getting home ritual, hang my scarf and jacket on the coat hook, leave my Doc Martens in their place—which meant next to the environmentally friendly sneakers belonging to the French architect, the ballet pumps belonging to the poet from Rio de Janeiro and Jean-Marc’s worn ankle boots—and then finally go upstairs to my room.

  Judging by the darkness under each door, everyone was asleep. I sat on the edge of my bed with my cell phone in my hand, immediately realizing that I’d be much more comfortable lying down, which I did, falling like a dead weight as I opened the message I had just received. It was from my dad. “Check it out, your brother’s being mischievous.” My dad loved using expressions like “check it out,” “you get me” and “that’s sick!” when speaking to people younger than himself, with all the naturalness of someone who had formulated the phrase half a dozen times in their head before releasing it dangerously in the middle of an unknown territory. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that young people nowadays were no longer saying “sick,” and that when he said “you get me” it sounded more like a poor attempt at a subtitle for a teenage movie.