by David Trueba
My wounded pride — hurt more by her refusal to give our last night together the real value of a last night, by her willingness to prevent our bodies from saying to each other the things they wanted to say, after so many years of mutual pleasure and goodwill — made me vain. It was vanity that led me to turn away, wrap myself in my own private duvet, and announce: I’m not going with you tomorrow. I’m not flying back home, I said, because I had neither home nor city nor country.
We slept fitfully, each of us awakened at times by the unsleeping presence of the other, so near but already on the way to being so far. I was inflamed with anger at myself for having failed to sense her state of mind, her renewed relationship. I thought I knew her, and yet there was so much I didn’t know! I hadn’t even been able to read in her eyes and her behavior the alarm she’d felt on meeting her old boyfriend again a few months before. Eventually I went back to sleep, and memories of the years we’d shared rolled through my mind, images evoked by nostalgia or spite. In the end, our separate duvets made it seem as though a knife had sliced the bed in half.
The next morning I listened to her showering and packing her bag in good time for the flight. Marta packed her bags the way she did everything in her life, with order and precision. For someone who planned things so carefully, our breakup must have been torture. She shook me affectionately and I told her again, you go, I’m going to stay here for a few more days. She made several attempts to persuade me, even after the front desk called our room to inform us that the conference organization’s car was waiting to take us to the airport. I didn’t move. It was early, and I didn’t feel like getting out of bed. My inertia could be understood as petty revenge. Let her return alone from the trip we’d set out on together. I think Marta couldn’t cry anymore, so she made a weary gesture, like a defeated boxer, and bent down and brought her lips close to mine and kissed me good-bye. That was the last time we kissed each other on the lips. I pulled a pillow over my head, but I heard her leave. When the door closed and locked, there was an electronic beep. I guessed it might be coming from the photocells, and this thought, this technological curiosity, struck me as ridiculous and inopportune and out of place.
At exactly twelve o’clock, a maid came to make up the room. The hotel reception had called me fifteen minutes earlier to advise me that checkout time was noon. I had told them I knew and then ignored the warning. The maid said she’d be back in ten minutes and closed the door politely.
In the shower, I found myself crying and aroused. Can you be hard and crushed at the same time? What do songs have to say about that? I stepped out of the shower and over to the bedside table to get my cell phone. Then I went back into the bathroom and sat on the closed toilet seat, scrolling through the collection of photos and short videos in the phone’s memory. There they were, two or three shots of Marta naked at daybreak, part of a memorable visual tour of her body. There would be time to delete them later, but for now, they offered a substitute for what reality was denying me. I rose to my feet, yanking on my cock with my right hand while my left scrolled back and forth between those photographs of a happy Sunday now lost forever. I leaned against the glass door of the shower. The water was still beating down and getting hotter all the time. When I was reaching climax, enveloped in steam, the phone slipped out of my hand and fell onto the shower floor. I was slow to react, but then I rushed to recover my phone from the torrid water. Despite having scalded my hand, I hurriedly took the cell phone apart and dried its components with the hair dryer on its highest setting.
Out on the street, I found a supermarket, bought a kilo of rice, and put my cell phone in the bag with the rice. I’d heard one of my sisters recount how she’d used that method to save her phone after it fell into the toilet while she was answering messages. I was a sight to behold, walking down the street and holding up a bag of rice. The staff at the hotel offered to store my suitcase for me until I could find another, more affordable place to spend the night. The first lunches of the day were already being served in the breakfast room, and so in spite of my hunger, I went without breakfast.
Marta was the light of my life, the force that kept me going, that kept me fighting for projects when nobody wanted any. She was the embodiment of my good fortune, and with her at my side I felt invincible and lucky. I liked to joke about her name and tell her she’d come from Mars to rescue me so we could run away together. Marta, you come from Mars. Marta was my exile, my welcoming planet at a time when we felt vulnerable, expelled from our city, evicted from hearth and home. On stormy-weather days, when the economy was staining everything with winning and losing, Marta was my refuge and my shelter. But now I was outside the solar system, adrift without a compass, freezing with no heat to save me.
Are you all right? Are you crying? When I raised my head, I saw Helga bending over me, like someone peering down a well. I had my head buried in my hands and my elbows propped on my knees, and maybe I was crying or just trying to bear my humiliation. My feet were frozen and my nose red and running, from the cold, I thought, or perhaps from sadness. But you’re like ice, is something wrong with you? Where’s your girlfriend? A long gob of snot like a stalactite was stuck to my upturned face, and Helga handed me a tissue.
No, it’s just that I’m on my own. To my surprise, Helga seemed to understand the ambiguity of my words. Words that were true, no matter what interpretation she gave them. Weren’t you flying home today? Yes, but I decided to spend a few more days in Munich. Come on, get up, don’t stay there. Why don’t you come to the conference? Helga understood the situation without much explanation on my part or probing on hers; accumulated experience and intuitive knowledge enabled her to grasp what was left unsaid. The roundtable discussion starts in twenty minutes. Why don’t you take part in it? Taking part seemed like a good idea. Taking part in anything at all.
And what may I ask is that? Helga pointed at the bag of rice, which I’d left on the bench when I stood up. I picked up the bag, thrust a hand into the grains, and fished out my cell phone. Helga smiled, but then she immediately looked at her watch. Hurry or we’ll be late, she said, urging me on. As I walked along beside her, I tried to reactivate my phone. Nothing. Just the little black screen, reflecting my sad face, my disheveled hair, the collar of my overcoat. If you need to make a call, you can use my phone, Helga offered. No, thank you, I don’t have anyone to call.
By the time they yielded the floor to me, after announcing my happy and unexpected inclusion in the roundtable, I’d been listening for a while as my colleagues, so young and so promising, discussed the answer to the first question, what’s a landscape for? The confusion of languages so sterilized the conversation that it sounded like a discussion at the United Nations, despite the valiant efforts of three interpreters. Alex Ripollés raised his eyebrows when he saw me come in with Helga and join the group at the table. Besides him, the other participants were a young Bengali, so nervous that he never stopped moving, just as if he were sitting in a rocking chair; an intense Nigerian, wearing a loose-fitting buba shirt, sokoto trousers, and a fila hat; and lastly a shy, obese Korean. Alex had just presented his project, Chernobyl Park, which consisted in a re-creation of the day when the disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant occurred, set in a corner of Barcelona filled with characteristic features of that exact time. Apparently the day of the radioactive release coincided with the day of his birth in April 1986, and he explained that the intention of his project was to contrast life and death and the idea of time standing still. At the end of his talk, there was loud applause.
Secure in his indisputable attractiveness, Alex gave me an ironic look when I began to speak. I said: I don’t know what a landscape’s for. Because a landscape is a beautiful English garden, but also the border fence built to keep African migrants out of Melilla. I think it was Robin Lane Fox who asked an undergraduate at Oxford what the purpose of a garden was and got a wonderful answer: kissing, she said. Lives are spent in places, and our profession can’t avoid the fact that
those places are associated with every individual’s personal experience. In the same park, your children take their first steps or your grandfather dies of a heart attack. Sometimes I try to put myself in Olmsted’s place when he designed New York’s Central Park, but the thing is, he was given the opportunity to transform a great metropolis, while we work at a different stage in the evolution of cities, we work on what’s already done, we’re on a rescue mission. I would like it if the places we landscape would encourage people to discover the world that’s hidden to our eyes. Because we need to go back to looking at the real world instead of wandering around in a fiction or erecting a fantasy or choosing to escape. We need a mirror, a healing mirror, we need to fall in love with ourselves again, with the concrete, human fact of us, however imperfect that might be. I hadn’t rehearsed or even thought about my talk, but defending the idea behind my park proposal with a general theory of landscape as archaic referent struck me as the right way to go about it, though the theory itself may have appeared obsolescent, given the technological brilliance and ingenuity of my fellow contestants. We can’t allow — I went on — architecture and urbanism to be entertaining for those who practice them but impossible to appreciate for those who have to endure them. Modernity, true modernity, consists in finding ourselves again and in rediscovering houses, streets, time, dawn, twilight, the sun, clouds; in rediscovering the organic. Maybe I was starting to sound ridiculous, but the interruptions while I waited for Helga to translate what I’d said into German helped keep my strength up. I continued: I always remember something I heard Buñuel say. He was an atheist, he said, he didn’t believe in God, except for the god invented by men, the lie they put in place to comfort themselves with. But if the alternative was science and technology as high-precision solutions for everything, he preferred, by far, the slapdash idea of God.
After I finished, Alex Ripollés joked about my little speech. Sometimes it seemed more like a religion lesson — would you really rather have God than a good cell phone? Everything you said sounded to me like a treatise on gardening as self-help. When Helga translated his words, the audience laughed. I don’t agree with you at all, he continued, but I really love the project you presented in the competition, those sand clocks, the idea of sitting and watching time pass. Nevertheless, he went on, our job isn’t to console the citizenry, public spaces aren’t rehabilitation wards; our job is to shake people up, bounce them around, upbraid them. Not calm them down, never that, just the opposite. We have to challenge and upset people, strike them, make them uncomfortable. Helga’s translation was virtually simultaneous with Alex’s speech.
Oh, really? — I interrupted him — Is that what you like? That’s our task? Let’s give it a try. Let me try it with you, I said, and I got up from my seat and started yanking him by the lapels, shaking him, bouncing him around on his rolling chair. This is what you think we ought to do with people, right? What I’m doing to you now. If I see a cruel film where the characters are humiliated and mistreated, you know what I always want to do? Apply that same treatment to the director and the screenwriter. Helga was late in translating my words, but the audience was no longer paying any attention to what she was saying, they were focused on my inappropriate but so far bloodless violence. She laughed, amid the general discomfort. Alex Ripollés offered no resistance, but behind his neat façade of relaxed superiority, he was tense. Had Marta been there, I wouldn’t have exploded, and solitude’s always conducive to self-pity and tears, but that auditorium was practically an invitation to fury.
So I vented all my distilled rage on Alex Ripollés at the roundtable, which despite its name included no table and nothing round, except for the young Korean designer, whose tone of voice was identical to that of a six-year-old child. At the peak of my angry fit, I unfortunately gave Alex’s wheeled chair a hard push. The discussion was taking place on a platform raised some six inches above the level of the few people in attendance. My push sent the chair rolling across the platform, over the edge, and into the shallow abyss. Alex Ripollés pitched face-first onto the floor, followed an instant later by the chair, which struck him from behind. The room became as silent as a funeral home. Some members of the audience and two of the speakers helped to set the fallen man on his feet. Alex Ripollés calmed everybody down. I’m all right, he said. Somebody retrieved the empty chair and put it back in its place on the platform. The panel’s moderator harshly condemned my attitude, his German words thudding like rocks at a stoning. I’d better stop translating, Helga said to me, and you’d better go. I’m sorry, I said, I want to apologize, I was just trying to demonstrate my point of view. But I decided to leave it there, because I was getting looks of enormous contempt, mixed with a bit of fear, from everyone around me.
I stepped wretchedly out of the auditorium, left the redbrick heart of the convention center, and looked for the street with the most traffic. Meanwhile I tried to turn on my cell phone, but nothing inside it responded to my desperation. I walked along the big commercial street and came upon a nearby cinema, the Kino Rio, which featured two screens. Next to the movie house was a fruit stand, and behind that a telephone store. I went in and waited until the young employee, busy with another customer, could help me. All the advertisements surrounding the cell phone display showed young, beautiful men and women in the blissful world of permanent connection. When the kid was free, I handed him my phone and managed to make him understand I’d had a domestic accident, an accident in the shower, omitting the masturbation part. He shook his head, took out the battery, and confessed there was nothing he could do. So then, in a gesture of survival, I chose the fanciest phone in the place. I want this one, I declared. Eine gute Wahl, he said. Good choice.
With the renewed vigor that only the acquisition of consumer goods can inject, I went back to the convention center. I had to apologize; I had to beg everyone’s pardon. When I entered, the discussion was just coming to a close. Someone had removed my empty chair. I sat down in the back of the auditorium, in the last row. I took my new phone out of its box and inserted the SIM card from my old phone. My bank account had reached zero, but it was urgent for me to start regaining my place in the world. The phone’s battery was nearly dead, so I had to find an electrical outlet to plug into. I looked around, but then the session ended. I waited until I saw Alex Ripollés moving toward the door and went to meet him, holding out my hand. I’m sorry, I said. But he didn’t even look at me, he merely hissed go fuck yourself.
The conference director approached, said something in German I didn’t understand, and moved on. Helga, who’d been observing us, walked over to me. With a gesture, I indicated my failure to comprehend the man’s words. He just said something about your behavior, she explained. Something like, the way you act puts you in the wrong. Die Manieren, deren du dich bedient hat, setzen dich ins Unrecht. Die Manieren are your manners, the way you behave. Recht haben means to be in the right, setzen is to put. So we could translate ins Unrecht setzen as to put in the wrong. A bit complicated, to tell the truth.
Helga’s detailed explanation had a good effect on me. Turning the moment into a German lesson diminished the seriousness of my conduct. She stayed right where she was and asked, you sure you’re all right? I nodded my head and — I think — apologized again. Your lunch vouchers have probably expired. Will you let me take you someplace nice for dinner? My treat. No, no, I said, trying to refuse. The last thing I needed just then was the pity of strangers. Come on, you can’t hang around here all by yourself.
Outside it was dark, and Helga armed herself against the cold with an overcoat. We walked down the avenue, getting farther and farther away from the convention center. If you like sauerkraut, I know where they make the best in the city. I consented to her proposal without much enthusiasm. For the first time, I noticed that Helga was tall and slender, and that though she was past sixty her face retained a childlike expression. She had wrinkles around her eyes and above her upper lip, but she gave her smiles an ironic twist, which combined
with her poise to radiate self-confidence. Her hair was the color of ashes and worn simply, pulled back from her broad forehead and gathered in a long ponytail. She had very thin eyebrows and a strong nose, the crowning touch on a countenance that openly declared her personality. It occurred to me that she must have been really good-looking when she was young, and the thought sounded insulting. Good-looking when young is an unlucky expression, a professor at the university once told me, correcting something I’d said in the course of an informal conversation. What you are when you’re young is young; beauty travels in a different lane. Or it ought to travel in a different lane, he specified. I nearly slipped on some ice, but Helga deftly caught me by the arm. Be careful, the sidewalks freeze over at this time of night.
I appreciated the warmth of the packed restaurant and the beer we drank at the bar while a waiter who’d conspired with Helga sought out an opening for us at one of the long wooden tables. We sat down, surrounded by noisy Bavarians. I fixed my attention on the foreign conversations — sometimes more on the waggling mustaches than on the words themselves — and the magnificent tone of their cordial but heated arguments. I was also interested in avoiding an uncomfortable conversation with Helga, who ordered our food but hardly touched it, while I scarfed down a variety of sausages, unable to suppress the childish thought that they were penises and even straining to imagine the faces of their owners at the moment when they parted company. Sometimes, when everyone laughed, she translated the joke for me, and she explained to someone who wanted to know that I was Spanish. And by the way, where in Spain are you from? From Madrid, I said. Ah, I love Madrid, what a city. The last time I went there was a while ago, but I really enjoyed walking in the area around the Opera and the Royal Palace. I like opera a lot, she said. She told me she’d joined a choral society three years before, and after having spent her whole life convinced that she sang horribly, she was proud that the director had praised her. I had a complex about singing my whole life, she told me with a smile, and in the end it turns out I could sing well all along. Oh, yes? And what do you sing? I asked. Once we went to Madrid to sing Schubert. And without a blush, using a clear undertone, she launched into what might have been a Lied by Schubert, had I been able to identify it. Then she began to speak normally again. There’s always a mime at one side of the Royal Opera in Madrid, she told me. He’s very amusing, he makes fun of people as they pass. She was surprised to see my horrified expression. I explained that I hated mimes. Don’t ask me why, but they upset me, they get on my nerves; that mixture of tragic clown and prancing referee brings out my aggression. And when they do that thing with the glass wall …