by David Trueba
I stopped and imitated a mime’s glass wall routine. She laughed. You do that very well. Yes, I could earn my living as a Spanish mime in Germany. Besides, that way I wouldn’t have problems with the language. Since it’s clear they don’t want unemployed Spaniards around here, they just want engineers. Good, so you’re an architect. Yes, the truth is, for landscape architects in Spain right now, one professional option is to become a street mime, it’s the area where we’re getting most of our jobs. Helga responded to my joking tone. Of course, the mime creates invisible works of architecture. Exactly, just like me, I assured her. Everything I create is invisible, it never gets done. She laughed good-heartedly. You should be an actor, she added, obscurely praising me. Marta was an actress, I said.
Once Marta’s name was spoken, I visibly clouded over as memories rained down on me. Helga asked me some questions about our relationship and our unexpected breakup, and I gave her some rather shameless answers. It wasn’t hard to let myself go a little and tell her about our last hours in Munich; after all, until that moment I hadn’t been able to share my story with anyone. Hiding my sadness was the complicated part. Two or three probing queries from Helga about our mutual past, Marta’s and mine, were enough to set me off, and I segued into an interminable monologue that went all the way back to the beginning of our relationship, to Marta’s sadness at having been left by her Uruguayan singer boyfriend and my efforts to help her recover her happiness, to our working together, our living together, the good days, the bad days. She was obsessed with her age, which was twenty-seven, I said; she’d been gloomy ever since her birthday, convinced that her life was slipping through her fingers, and she freely admitted her distress. I get the impression that our breakup and her reunion with her old boyfriend have more to do with that, with a personal crisis, than with some aspect of our relationship.
Oh, come on, said Helga, who by that point had drunk a goodly amount of white wine. I can’t believe anyone has a crisis at the age of twenty-seven. In that case, what are women who reach fifty-seven supposed to do? Organize a mass suicide? And I’m sixty-three, so how about me? She made me laugh and went on talking about women and the passage of time and the difficulties of living as a couple and then she said, all this sorrow you’re feeling now will help you grow. I don’t want to grow any more, I said, I’m tall enough, but she ignored my joke. It might have been the fault of my limitations in speaking English. It relaxed me to have to express myself in such a rudimentary way, in a language foreign to me. It will make you better, Helga was going on. Sorrow is an investment. I shook my head dejectedly, unable to identify the banking system that would let me speculate with all the sorrow deposited inside me.
Aware of the difficulties involved in extracting me from my self-absorption, Helga talked about practical matters. Where was my luggage, did I have a hotel for the night, had I asked the airline to change my ticket, when did I plan to go back to Spain. The best thing for you right now is to be with your friends, your family, the people who love you. But I had thought that was a club Marta was the president of. Helga and I were gradually getting drunk, and I was talking to her about my family and my siblings, all girls and all quite a bit older than me, because I was a late baby, a boy who unexpectedly arrived ten years after the youngest of the four girls. They could be of little help to me in a situation like this. I told Helga I intended to find a cheap hotel and spend a few more days in Munich before returning to Madrid, where I would have to deal with the separation, moving out, finding another apartment. I said I didn’t have a return ticket, and the first thing I thought of was the cost of my own spite, my stupid purchase of the most expensive cell phone I could find. When the bill arrived, Helga insisted on paying it. I invited you as my guest, she said. But let me ask you a question that’s got me curious. That text message you told me about — do you really think Marta sent it to you by mistake? The question surprised me. I mean, the most normal explanation is that she made a real error, but all the same, that error saved her from doing a lot of explaining, from telling you everything. The message was a strategy. Don’t you think? Don’t you think she sent it to you not by mistake but on purpose, as a way of informing you about what was going on?
I confessed I hadn’t thought about that. I had no response to her question. It wasn’t as though I’d ever seen Marta struggling to tell me the latest news about her feelings. Let’s do this: I don’t live far from here, you can spend the night at my house, and then tomorrow you can pick up your luggage and we can try to make arrangements for your return ticket through the conference organization. Maybe they’ll pay for a new one or at least find you a cheap flight — they have promotional agreements with various airlines. I thanked her, but I refused everything for five minutes. In the street, I continued to turn down all her proposals, but I followed her to the taxi stand and we climbed into the first available cab.
Entering her home obliged me to exercise caution, despite my alcoholic euphoria. Was there something going on between us that I wasn’t processing? Helga looked quite comfortable, but the idea that she was seducing me struck me as grotesque. She was just being friendly. A woman like her had to feel some concern after finding a Spaniard weeping on a bench in the street and then watching him, in the course of a roundtable discussion, push a fellow landscape architect off the stage. From all appearances, she was a spritely retiree who worked as a volunteer at the landscaping conference, and her reaction was rather a friendly offer of hospitality than inappropriate flirtatiousness. An enormous poster for F. W. Murnau’s film The Last Laugh was on one wall of her living room, while two abstract paintings, lost in shadow, were on another.
She invited me to take a seat. Do you live alone? I asked. No, no, she said, pointing to a totally gray cat, which was at that moment rubbing against her shoes. She took it in her arms and stroked it between the eyes. The cat kept staring at me the whole time, with a look that was more than human; it was smart. Helga told me the cat’s name was Fassbinder. She asked if I’d have something to drink, and in the end we both opted for vodka. She’d just received a bottle of Polish vodka as a gift from the girl who cleaned house for her, and she hardly ever drank and didn’t often have guests. After we toasted each other, she explained that she’d lived alone for more than fifteen years, ever since she and her husband separated. I’ve been in the situation you’re in now, she said. I made an effort to appreciate what a tragedy the separation must have been for her, an older woman abandoned by the husband she’d spent her life married to, but sentimentality is egocentric, it’s a nationalism of the self, it always makes you more of a victim, more wronged, more important than anyone else.
They had two children. The older one was Volker, nearly forty, and his little sister, Hannah, was two years younger. Your husband left you for a younger woman, of course. No, no, they worked together, they were the same age. Well, she’s more or less my age, and my husband’s four years older than I am. Their love story was an arduous affair — it took them years to acknowledge and admit it. That was a very sad moment for me, most of all because I was going to be left on my own. She held up the vodka bottle again and shook it, and I saw the blade of bison grass — also solitary — on the bottom. But we get along well, and he always lets me use his house in Mallorca over the Christmas holidays. It used to be our house, we bought it when we were married; it’s on a gorgeous cove. When we divided up the property, he got the house in Mallorca and I got this apartment. But I still spend the end of every year down there. Your children go with you? No, no, they’ve always got other plans for Christmas and New Year’s. They like Mallorca only in the summer, with the sun and the beach. At the end of the year, they go where the snow is. I prefer the beach in winter. Me too, I said, but actually it was Marta who preferred beaches in winter, she’d rather walk on the sand pulling down her sweater sleeves than stroll along in a bathing suit. I’ve got five grandchildren, how about that? I’d lost the thread of the conversation, but I whistled when I heard about the five grandchi
ldren, and the cat, which was lying on the carpet, twisted its neck around and gave me an annoyed look. Do you and Marta have any children?
The question surprised me. Children? There was definitely a time when Marta and I would have had children, when our finances were in better shape and our work more lucrative. I wanted children, but she was a little younger than me, I told Helga, going into detail for no apparent reason. I went on, in my tentative English: when I told Marta that the world needed her to have children as a way of improving the human landscape, she laughed at me and said that was a very childish and romantic idea. Children can’t have children, Marta used to say, just to provoke me. Helga laughed. Love’s always childish, isn’t it? So what? The first person who cut a flower and gave it to someone behaved like a stupid romantic, I’m sure. But being a stupid romantic takes a lot of courage. Although I was looking at Helga, I opened my eyes even wider, surprised by the firmness of the judgment she’d just pronounced. I opened my eyes, even though they were already open. I observed her with growing interest instead of looking through her, which was what I’d been doing since we met. I remember my husband said something really corny on our first date, but I found it charming: Deine Augen sind wie die Karibik. It means something like, your eyes are the color of the Caribbean Sea. I had to agree with Helga’s husband, so many years after that first date, because her eyes were still shining, still a transparent turquoise. I burst out laughing when he said it, but in the end I preferred that corny moment to the many years that came afterward, Helga assured me. The years when the febrility that seemed so ridiculous at the time was gone. Febrility, does that word exist in English? she asked. Helga was often slightly hesitant about pronouncing English words. Of course it exists, I told her, and if it doesn’t, we’ll invent it.
It would be complicated to relate our subsequent conversation. We jumped from topic to topic. I explained the animosity I felt toward Alex Ripollés, how it had accumulated over the course of several competitions; she talked about her first post-separation attack of rage, when she tore up all the photographs her husband appeared in and then spent months trying to recover them from old rolls of film or her children’s photo albums. It’s idiotic to attack your memories, she said, it’s as stupid as it would be to trample on your hand because one day it caressed your lost love. I assented to this observation without much conviction. Everything turns out bad, she declared, that’s a condition inherent in the fact of being alive. She spoke as if remembering the exact words of some book.
Helga was amused, and when she smiled, her tense jaw muscles relaxed. She made a little fun of my state of mind and then said, deep down, I miss feeling as wounded as you do now. She told me that when she found me in the park, sitting by myself on a bench, she’d thought about her father. My father was Russian, he came to Germany before the war, even though he didn’t know anyone here. His hands were like yours. He was always more Russian than German. My mother sort of trained him, she Germanized him. Helga raised her glass of vodka and clinked it against mine in a toast. Na zdorovie! I said, suddenly aware that I had a companion there in the desert.
I ought to stay and live in Germany too, I remarked, after she finished telling me about her father’s decision to immigrate. Don’t even think about it, she said, you Spaniards get all faded here, like plants without sun. Although this country’s very well organized, it’s not so free. Sometimes I feel like I’m living inside a giant clockwork mechanism, but Spaniards — you all float in the air. That has its problems, but it’s more, I don’t know, what’s the word, more euphoric. The Spaniard’s tragedy is that he can’t be happy in any other country in the world, she said. Spanish is his element. I know some people from Mallorca who’ve come here to work, but my father was different, he stayed here for my mother. Because my parents’ love was truly amazing — the way they loved each other made a permanent impression on me. I aspired to be part of a couple like my parents. It was almost a recurring daydream, a steady desire. And although I wasn’t happy with my husband, I thought it was essential for us to stay together, I clung to the image of my parents, which was what I wanted to emulate. The image of my father, playing old Russian songs for my mother on the record player in the living room … Helga subsided into silent remembering. I knew without her telling me that she’d got her eyes from her mother, I was sure of it. And so on the day when my husband decided to leave me, after a long period of deceit and mutual lies, my biggest disappointment was the thought that I hadn’t been capable of living as my parents had, of maintaining a loving relationship like theirs. My ideal world collapsed, but I was lying to myself, no doubt about it. The way you’re lying to yourself now. Because people don’t wound us; what wounds us is seeing our ideals destroyed, that’s what’s so shattering.
And after it was over, you never got together with anyone else? My question hung in the air for a few seconds. It’s complicated, she said, men look to women for sex, but they don’t want our company, our conversation, they don’t want to really share things, they just don’t want that. Right, I said, unable to come up with a valid argument to absolve the half of humanity whose defense attorney, at that moment, I was. Sure, Helga said, I had some typical office affairs. I got involved with somebody, one of his friends, but mostly with the idea of pissing off Götz. Götz was my husband. I laughed. Pissing off Götz, what a great title for a movie. Then it occurred to me that soon I too would always talk about Marta in the past tense. Marta was, Marta did, Marta said. Yes, Helga said consolingly, but don’t worry about that, you’ll speak in the past tense about almost everything. She pointed at a black-and-white photograph on a bookshelf, a picture of a beautiful young woman sitting on the ground with her knees tucked under her chin. Was that your mother? I asked. No, it was me. I noticed the rare expression of past and present in a single sentence: it was me. The aura of that youthful beauty settled over her in a thick, nostalgic silence, that and the light of a lamp standing way off in a corner made her look attractive, and I pressed my lips against her lips in a light kiss. She didn’t reject it, but when I grasped the back of her head and tried to pull her toward me, she stopped me with some force, covering my mouth with one hand and pushing me away. No, no, don’t do that. Can you imagine how ridiculous? Please, no, I’m not out for romance, really, you’ve got me wrong. I’ve said good-bye to all that. I hauled you up here to keep you from lying down in the gutter, not to seduce you. She crumpled a smile at me, the way you crumple an empty pack of cigarettes. Let’s talk, tell me about your work, your projects.
I felt ridiculous and uncomfortable. I shook my head and produced a grin. Then I tried for a while to explain what had brought me to my profession, why I had studied it, what about it appealed to me, until I succeeded in boring myself. I think we should go to bed, she said. We’ve had too much to drink, and it seems to me your judgment’s a bit cloudy. There are enough issues in your life that need settling without adding me to that muddle you’ve got in there, she said, touching my forehead with a fingertip. She sounded to me like a mother giving advice, but with an almost hurtful note of irony, and in a German accent that lent authority to everything she said in English. At a certain point, her detached manner made me suspect she was making fun of me. Tomorrow she’d laugh about it with her girlfriends. So I take a young man home and he jumps on me and starts kissing me, incredible, don’t you think, Greta? These young people today, what can they be thinking, these Spaniards are a cheeky bunch. They’re nothing but Africans, offering sex to German tourists of a certain age, like what happened to Inge in Kenya.
All of a sudden I felt violent, and then ashamed. I followed her to the guest quarters, formerly her son’s room. She pointed out the bathroom, and when I had finished discharging a copious and torrential flood of urine, she was standing outside the door with two folded towels. It pained me again to see her planted there, surely longer than she’d counted on, waiting for the river of piss accumulated in my bladder to run dry. She was wearing a dress that offered a glimpse of her ad
mirable breasts and of the brassiere that presented them like desserts on a tray, and the fine purplish vein visible on one pale mound excited me so much that I kissed her again, but this time I didn’t let her control the distance between us. I drew the towels out of her hands. She put her arms around my waist and pulled me close, so that our bodies made contact. I had on a short-sleeved shirt, and she thrust a hand under one sleeve and up to my shoulder in a caress her fingernails turned into gentle scratching. I stepped backward, half carrying her to the foot of my bed, sat her down, and undressed in front of her, hurriedly, in four spasmodic movements, without touching her except to push her hair off her face.