by David Trueba
That first night in Munich we slept late, even without the sedative of sex. We had the unplugged feeling you get when you’re far from home. Every now and then, her leg broke through the duvet barrier and brushed against mine. And after we ate breakfast in bed, we put the trays aside and took a nap. At my urging, which I thought subtle and affectionate, Marta gave me a hand job, and ejaculation always makes me sleepy, like a fat baby that’s just been fed. When I woke up again, she was just emerging from the shower, glowing and beautiful, with her soaked hair dripping onto her powerful shoulders, more like a swimmer’s than a ballerina’s. I’m going to take a walk, she told me, and then I’ll wait for you downstairs.
I showered for a long time, the pounding water as hot as I could stand, the steam enveloping me. When you don’t stay in hotels very often, you tend to exploit their amenities. The water in our apartment in Madrid was under negligible pressure and came out tepid and dribbling, like an angel’s pee. Actually, the apartment was Marta’s, but I’d moved in with her when she gave up the dream of earning her living as an actress, and it was cheaper to share one rent. The financial crisis had accustomed us all to a pretty ridiculous level of insecurity, in that we accepted degrading jobs and subhuman salaries in order to feel we were still stakeholders in the system and not yet reduced to beggary. She considered herself the dispensable part of the business, but I needed her advice, her involvement, her eyes, whose vision extended beyond technical matters and revisions to plans. Participating in the conference and the competition in Munich was one of the few satisfactions afforded us by our work, which was an experiment on the verge of failure.
The next work we’re going to consider comes from Spain. That’s how I was introduced by Helga, the same woman who’d picked us up at the airport and who greeted us with delighted familiarity when she saw us enter the Gasteig. She’d act as my German interpreter, she explained, in case somebody in the audience had trouble understanding my English. I assure you, I have trouble understanding my English, I admitted. And she laughed, showing a row of strong white teeth behind her barely painted lips. Helga moved between her native language and English easily and naturally when she introduced us to the conference director, a rather eccentric German whose eyeglasses hung from a little cord and who was stooped like the villain in an expressionist movie. Helga warned me that the director was a pretty complicated character: everybody says he’s crazy, she said, but he’s very talented. Two wonderful parks in Munich were preserved through his efforts, and he’s very highly regarded in the city, she explained. And then she led Marta and me to the little auditorium where the presentations were to take place. Marta sat at the computer she’d use to project images onto a screen behind us. In the seats reserved for the jury, I saw some faces that looked as friendly as welcome mats. Some of the other contestants, easily identifiable by their suspicious, bored expressions, were also out there, along with the rest of the audience, a miscellaneous handful of curious and idle spectators. Helga spoke my name into the microphone and turned to me with a gesture indicating that the floor was mine. From the moment we stepped into the convention center, I’d received so many urgent reminders from people connected with the conference about the absolute necessity of limiting my presentation to the allotted fifteen minutes that I thought it would be appropriate to begin with this detail.
Everybody has asked me not to go over my fifteen–minute limit, I said. Figuring in the time required for the German translation, I calculate that I have seven and a half minutes left to present my proposal. If we further subtract this preliminary statement and the conclusion, let’s say I have three minutes. I paused at this turning point to let Helga translate. Then I went on: and that’s precisely what my work is about. It’s about the rush. The rush we live in. The rush. Helga translated rush as Eile. When Marta, whose English was way better than mine, revised my text, she’d chosen the word hurry, which to my surprised ears sounded like Harry. Dirty Hurry?
My garden is an attempt to give our time its true value back, to make us reflect on how we dispose of our time. I noticed the conference director in the audience, taking notes and looking interested in what I was saying. And so, I went on, I call my project “The Three-Minute Garden.” Der Drei-Minuten-Garten, Helga repeated, with a pleased, encouraging smile. She was a mature woman, a little over sixty. Her good cheer and friendliness seemed unforced. She looked at me again, with genuine curiosity, and her interest calmed me down and made me feel confident about the images I was about to present. Marta smiled at me from her position at the computer, the lights in the room gradually dimmed, and a swift movement of her slender fingers threw the first image onto the screen.
I noticed several smiles when the forest of sand clocks appeared, followed by a simulated walk through it. I continued to explain the project and ended with an overview of the whole.
During the question period — all the questions were friendly and indulgent — the conference director intervened and asked something in German. Helga translated it for me in a very low voice, speaking very close to my ear. What did you want to say with your proposal, and to what degree do you consider it particularly Spanish? I smiled. I don’t believe Spanish clocks measure time any differently from German ones, although judging from our very different retirement plans, one might think so. I do believe that the reality of time varies according to each circumstance and each person. I paused now and then as I spoke to let Helga translate. It’s not so much a question of what I wanted to say with my proposal as of what I’d like people in this place to feel. Consequently, instead of giving you my responses, I’d much prefer to hear yours.
(Illustration Credit 1.4)
Once we were offstage, I thought I’d acted too cocky. Marta disagreed and calmed me down. Helga offered congratulations and assured me that everyone had followed my exposition with great attention. I didn’t seem too cocky? Ah, no, no, absolutely not. And the joke about retirement pensions, that didn’t bother anyone? No, no. The next contestant was a landscaper from Denmark whose advanced age made me sad. Who knew, maybe I’d spend my life going from competition to competition without ever seeing my ideas realized, consoled by the potential conferences have and called a young landscape architect until I became a senior citizen. Are you going to take part in the creators’ discussion panel tomorrow? Helga asked me in an aside. No, we’re leaving tomorrow morning. I didn’t want to add a day to our trip. I couldn’t be bothered with those vacuous roundtables, which tended to be dominated by the most conceited person present. And besides, one of the participants was Alex Ripollés, who was something like my closest enemy in competitions, who had already beaten me on two occasions with other projects, and whose clever landscaping proposals always struck me as pretentious stylistic exercises that found favor with the judges. Marta didn’t want to stay too long in Munich either, and later I recalled something she’d said in passing: I’d rather not stay long, I have too much to do at home. I didn’t ask her any questions — too wrapped up in myself and my presentation, I’m afraid.
When we left the little auditorium, we said good–bye to Helga, who was dashing off to the airport to pick up another guest. He’s Spanish too, do you know him? she asked, and tried to pronounce the name Alex Ripollés, but to my ears it sounded more like Alex Gilipollez, Alex Bullshit, which didn’t suit him badly at all. I’ve never met him in person, not that I want to, I said, and Helga couldn’t figure out whether I was joking or my uncertain English was playing tricks on me. After attending a couple of presentations, we escaped, and at the door of the conference hall I looked at the information board, which displayed the location and time of each contestant’s appearance. Through an error, instead of writing paisajista, landscaper, after my name, they’d written pajista, wanker. Beto Sanz, wanker. Amused, I showed my new title to Marta, but she had to read it three times before she saw the mistake. It’s a perfect attribution, because we landscape architects who have no work and devise projects only for our own amusement are closer to wanking t
han landscaping. And pajista’s the perfect blend of artist and masturbator, I went on, already getting carried away. An artist of self-abuse, with no real vocation. Marta smiled and then she said, halfway between a statement and a question, but you don’t masturbate, do you? Of course not, I said soothingly, except for when you refuse to make love to me four times a day.
A few hours after my presentation was when we went to eat at that cheap, glassed-in place just off the big boulevard. It was cold, and we decided to eat some kebab. I was waiting at the bar to pick up our order when the phone in my pocket vibrated, signaling the incoming text message. After reading it I looked over at Marta, and I could see from her expression that she’d sent me the text by mistake. I wasn’t the intended recipient of that message or of the little heart it contained. She knew I hated messages with emoticons and text symbols, irritating substitutes for real emotion. Aware that her message had gone to the wrong address, Marta raised her eyes, saw me staring at her, and bit her lip. The man behind the counter delivered our food, an enormous pitcher of beer, and my cash receipt. I walked over to our table, carrying the tray. It trembled in my hands, as if I were the waiter on duty during an earthquake.
There’s something ridiculous about breakups, because they oblige you to speak in set phrases no one’s able to avoid. Like all the I love you’s when love’s at full tide, departing love has its catchphrases too. There’s no need to repeat them here. Marta broke up with me while we were eating kebab and I wanted to cry, but I concentrated on not getting grease stains on my clothes and not leaving traces of tzatziki in the corners of my mouth. Sometimes I used to joke with Marta or Carlos about the yogurt sauce that came with the kebabs we’d order when we were working at odd hours. There’s still a little semen on your face, I’d say, when they’d failed to wipe the tzatziki off their mouths. Pivotal moments remain immortalized in your memory, associated with a circumstance, a detail, a place, a time of day. It was raining, you were wearing that sweater, a yellow car passed, a pigeon had been run over in the street. I didn’t want my breakup with Marta to get spattered with yogurt sauce. I would always associate the end of our romance with that kebab lunch in Munich; no further details necessary.
Marta’s message was addressed to her ex-boyfriend. They’d started seeing each other again a few months before, and their relationship had been reborn without my suspecting a thing. In Madrid, a week before our trip to Munich, his new CD on the racks in the Fnac store had attracted my attention for a second. I couldn’t then guess that he’d soon be playing his music so thunderously in my life. I’d always been jealous of that guy, the man Marta had been with before I met her, just as I was jealous of her first love, a classmate of hers in ballet school. The only heterosexual male ballet dancer in all Madrid, and you get him as a classmate, I used to tell her, pretending to be indignant about my bad luck while she laughed at my foolishness. I wasn’t the jealous type, given to suspicion, but a happy lover; I regretted the lost years before we met, when others were close to her and enjoying it and I was still unaware of her existence. Maybe such retroactive jealousy was absurd, but in fact Marta’s sadness over breaking up with her singer boyfriend, the sadness she was immersed in when I met her, was the clearest declaration of her love for him. Now my retroactive jealousy was catching up with me, beating me in the race against time. Marta’s past had returned, elbowing my future right off the track.
I was thinking about something to say to her, but she started to cry, and I didn’t want everybody in the place looking at us. Stop it, calm down and eat, we’ll talk later. But chewing turned out to be a ridiculously ordinary activity and no match for unleashed emotions. So we each left half of our kebab, still partly wrapped in silver foil, on our plates. Once we were out on the street, Marta continued to cry, but walking instead of facing each other made it easier for us to talk. I liked the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s movies, with those long conversations in cars, with shots of paths and highways seen through windows, because travel, which generally makes it very difficult to speak face-to-face and inclines you to keep your eyes on the road, is favorable to true confessions. My friend Carlos didn’t like Iranian films; he made fun of them and pretended they formed a separate genre. Don’t get all Persian movie on me, he’d joke. Marta would concede that the films were sometimes boring, but she understood my taste for them, for their slow, painstaking, even frozen tempo. I assured her more than once that agitation was only an attempt to fill the essential void.
I’d fooled around with the notion of becoming a film director. I would have loved to make Westerns about the days when the old West was coming to an end. When the railroad and the automobile arrived, and the solitary old gunfighters faded off into the twilight. However, I didn’t have the strength of purpose required for such a calling. I was never interested in telling stories. I would have shot only isolated moments, moments with no narrative significance. So, condemned to be a maker of art films, one of the very people I found so ridiculous, I chose instead to calm my mother’s and sisters’ fears by getting a degree in architecture. However, I did shoot — without a camera — a film just for me. It was Marta’s face in a luminous close-up that lasted almost five years and came to 3,784,320,000 (three billion seven hundred eighty-four million three hundred twenty thousand) frames, as I calculated by way of amusing myself when she wasn’t there anymore.
I told Marta I thought she was basically trying to amend her past. You never accepted the fact of your separation, but if you think you can correct it now, you may be making a mistake. You can’t change the past. But she kept shaking her head and repeating, really, it’s not that, Beto, it’s not that. I was so happy with you, you were so good for me. All of a sudden I saw myself as an emergency room doctor: he’d treated the patient’s injuries, but now that she’d recovered, he couldn’t do anything but discharge her and watch her walk away. I swear, the past was over for me, Beto, I’d overcome it. I nodded in assent, but I didn’t agree. She kept talking. He’s a new person now, and so am I. It followed, therefore, that the only one of us who’d turned into an old, broken person was me.
The strange thing was that some inner force, some proud, stubborn impulse, prevented me from stooping to recriminations. I had friends whose breakups were full of bitterness and reproach, and so I tried to achieve the only victory my situation allowed. Night fell, and Marta had yet to hear a complaint from me. Not even about the weeks when she’d been carrying on behind my back, about the time she’d dedicated to nurturing her new passion while starving and shutting down ours. I kept quiet about the wounds deception causes, because I could see the necessity of exploring the depths of the new love before taking definitive steps to seal up the well of the old. Actually, I wasn’t fooling myself in those days, I was engaging in self–protection. I understand, I told her, you have to obey your heart, another set phrase that’s indispensable when breaking up. I crossed the line into bitterness only when I declared I was unshakably convinced that she’d never stopped loving him throughout all our years together. You’ve never stopped loving him, I said.
We went to see that night’s movie, for which we’d reserved tickets in the organization’s office. Conferences always include showings of films, usually boring, pretentious stories with architecture or the world of art incorporated into the basic plot. The films that have the most to say about landscaping are the ones that don’t emphasize it; you can hear better talk about it in an elevator or an office. The movie in question was a documentary about the postwar reconstruction of Munich and the recovery of its former splendor. It made me a little uneasy to hear one of the experts interviewed in the film recall the beautiful city and assert that the rise of nationalistic madness was a natural development. Conscious beauty always ends up provoking fascism, he claimed. The possession of beauty could turn you into a monster. Unable to concentrate on the film, I devoted my attention to Marta’s lovely face and its special delicateness. I felt wounded at the thought that she was absorbed in the documentary.
She was able to escape, to withdraw into something that wasn’t us. Her concentration allowed me to scrutinize her skin and her features in the fluctuating light from the screen. When at some point she turned her gaze toward me and discovered that my eyes were fixed on her, she responded with a fairly counterfeit gesture of fatalism.
At the end of the film, Helga, who was surrounded by other conference volunteers, many of them retired people just interested in helping out, plus a couple of students curious about the proceedings and the presentations, invited us to have a drink with them in a nearby bar. The other Spanish landscaper will be there, Helga said encouragingly, trying to persuade us to go with them, but I told her we were tired. He told me he’d very much like to meet you, Helga insisted, and I noted an irony in her tone that seemed to be a response to the dismissive remark I’d made about Ripollés after my presentation. But when I gave Marta a questioning look, she shook her head, she didn’t feel up to it, and I told Helga so. Besides, we have to be at the airport early tomorrow morning, I added. Yes, that’s right, but I won’t be able to drive you, one of my colleagues will, she said apologetically. What a shame. Well, get some sleep. Thanks for everything, I said, and tell Alex Gilipollez hello for me. I’ll do that, she said. She gave us two affectionate kisses apiece and left, walking in her energetic, cheerful way, and Marta wanted to know why I’d said Alex Ripollés’s name that way. That’s how it’s pronounced in German, I explained.
After we got back to the hotel room, I floated the possibility of making love as a tender farewell. I even offered my suggestion in comic terms. Let my body bid farewell to your body. Let my hands take leave of what they’ve caressed so long. My dick will say good–bye to your pussy and my hands to your ass. One last time, I’ll kiss your lips and your skin with my lips. Think about them, our separation affects them too. But Marta refused: Please don’t do this to me now, she said. She viewed my proposal as desperate sarcasm. In fact, when she got in bed she wouldn’t let me see her naked, and her sudden modesty got me more excited than the supposed distance between us. So she was also denying my eyes the possibility of taking leave of her body, of that dear body that had been their favorite daily landscape and their primary source of joy in the past five years.