Blitz

by David Trueba

  When I woke up again, I lay still for a while, interpreting the sounds. All I could hear was the agitation in the street. The open jar of hand lotion was on the night table. I was afraid to go out into the hall and encounter the dragon I’d been imagining. I didn’t want to see Helga, I didn’t want conversation. Maybe she’d try to kiss me or stroke my hand. She might even embrace me or expect to make love again. I thought about breaking into a run and escaping from the apartment, but I wasn’t sure I could find the door, and I thought it would be terrible to make Helga chase me down the hall and around the furniture in the living room. I’d scream, like a coward in a castle full of ghosts.

  Naked, I stuck my head out the bedroom door and called her. Helga? But nobody answered. I opened the door all the way and walked down the short hall toward the other bedroom without turning around. She was probably asleep. Silence reigned in the apartment, except for the song of a canary I eventually discovered in a birdcage in the kitchen. I went naked into the living room, looked for my overcoat, found it, pulled out my brand-new cell phone, connected to the Internet, and left the phone on an arm of the sofa. There was a note on the kitchen table. Call me if you need anything, I have work to do. Helga had written down the number of her own cell phone and ended with a quick signature, indecipherable except for the enormous H, like scaffolding in front of a collapsed edifice of letters. Then she’d added the word Kaffee, with an arrow pointing to the coffeemaker and the clean cup she’d set out for me, and the word Plätzchen, with another arrow aimed at a little plate of cookies.

  I went back to my room, stepped into the shower, and let the water run over my face. Although the scent of the shower gel was too intense for my liking, I soaped my entire body with it to erase the traces of the previous night. The water poured down, I scrubbed away, and with each stroke Helga’s smell — or rather, the scent of her discreet perfume — grew fainter. I dressed quickly. The coins in my pants pockets jingled. I nosed around the place a bit while eating the cookies. I’m always fascinated by coffeemakers, which tend to be examples of the triumph of practical design. Society was advancing, stride after stride, incapable of resolving essential problems, not even the very basic ones, nor those that had to do with human character and its defects, but nevertheless adept at resolving ordinary, minor battles hygienically and precisely, for example, by producing beautiful, gleaming coffeemakers and citrus juicers like Helga’s. I paused for a moment in front of every electrical appliance. Then I looked at the pictures in the living room, which had attracted my attention the previous night. Next to the lamp was a postcard with a reproduction of Munch’s Madonna, and I felt like that monstrous infant in the corner of the painting, a fetal Baby Jesus, gazing neurotically at the ethereal beauty of his mother.

  There were various art books on the shelves, too well arranged to be much consulted. There were also novels, well-thumbed hardbacks with warped covers. Almost all the books were in German, except for some volumes on Goya and Velázquez, whose spines I stroked with patriotic complicity. The cat, Fassbinder, looked at me from the sofa, thoroughly indifferent as long as I didn’t imperil his repose. I didn’t want to spend too much time on the photographs of people I figured must have been her children or grandchildren, in the affected poses family photos encourage. There was a faded picture of a woman in her thirties with two children, both about ten years old, both blond and beautiful. The woman was Helga when she was my age, attractive, resolute, smiling uncomfortably at the camera. If, in another life, that had been a photograph of my wife and children, I wouldn’t have minded. Maybe it was the photo she thought of as looking most like herself, before she was changed by the passage of time into someone who was no longer her at all.

  I was on the point of leaving, I had my overcoat on, and I picked up my cell phone, now sufficiently charged to turn on. I went back to the kitchen to get her note. It seemed like bad manners on my part to leave the offer of her phone number, along with the possibility of seeing each other again, on the counter with the crumbs from the whole-grain, high-fiber cookies, which had performed intestinal magic and caused a final stop in the bathroom. I didn’t want to see her again, that struck me as obvious, but I didn’t want to leave signs of ingratitude either. I tried out my new phone’s camera with a shot of the coffeemaker and took three more until I got one I liked. On the refrigerator door, two magnets immobilized a postcard, a view of a rocky sea cove with several buildings on the slopes above it. I pulled the card off the fridge to look at the back, but there was no writing except for the printed information that the picture showed a nameless cove on the Mediterranean coast of Mallorca. I took a photo of the card too. And I went back to the living room to do the same thing with the picture of the fifteen-year-old Helga. It seemed like a nice souvenir.

  (Illustration Credit 1.5)

  On leaving the apartment I encountered an older married couple, who greeted me with suspicion and gangrenous smiles. Although I ventured a courteous nod in their direction, I preferred to descend the stairs with a certain haste. The apartment was on the third floor, the staircase was enormous, and the door of the building glazed. Out on the street, I felt liberated and sad. Marta made her presence felt again, because calls from her had accumulated on my phone, along with a message: please call me. I didn’t want her to worry about me, and so I thought I’d call her back. There were also two messages from my friend Carlos, who told me she’d called him, asking about me. Another missed call was from my mother and maybe had nothing to do with the breakup. Maybe. The thought of my mother made me think of Helga. But they weren’t the same type of woman. My mother was older. I had four sisters who were making her older and who were themselves much older than me, in age and in their way of life. My oldest sister was eighteen when I was born, and the youngest of the four was ten. As a child I was a toy in their hands and an inopportune accident who grew up with five mothers and a father who died very early, leaving me orphaned of men I could imitate or turn into models. But Freudian dabblers may stop here. I could never visualize my mother naked and panting as I’d seen Helga in the midst of our nocturnal delights. Maybe that was just an instance of the gross denial all children live in, who can’t imagine themselves conceived in turbulent copulation, but rather in a conversation between their future parents while sitting in front of the same boring Sunday afternoon television program every single week of their lives. Helga came across as a more sensual, more modern woman, with the advanced notions that German women have in comparison with their Spanish sisters, who when they get older turn into landscape.

  Marta answered immediately, as if she were glued to the phone. In any case, she and her phone were never far apart, for she was one of those people who are always waiting for the call that will change their life. Are you all right? Yes, yes, I’m fine, I’m still here in Munich. You wouldn’t answer my calls, I was worried. Sorry, I apologized, it’s just that a lot of things have happened. Are you sure you’re OK? Marta sounded alarmed. I couldn’t hear the Uruguayan singer’s guitar or voice in the background. I’m fine, I’m fine, I said reassuringly. I wound up going to the roundtable at the conference and they invited me to participate, and I was pretty good, no kidding. I considered for the first time the possibility that someone with a cell phone had recorded my raging assault on Alex Ripollés, and that the video was now trending on the Internet. Where are you staying? Are you still in the hotel? Marta’s anxiety about continuing to supervise my life offended me. No, I stayed with a friend, a German woman I met. I don’t know if you remember, but at the presentation —

  Helga? The translator? Marta’s powers of detection took me by surprise, and so I made up a girl, a sweet young university student who’d offered to let me stay in her house because her parents were on a trip. I told this story without details, but it didn’t receive the jealous response I’d expected from Marta, who said, when are you coming back? She had a great ability to change the subject when the current turned against her. Soon, I don’t know, it’s pretty nice here.
By which I meant to include my liaison with the German girl. I added something about wanting to spend a few more days in Munich, but then I explained that my phone battery was almost completely down and said we’d talk after I got back.

  This suspended conversation with Marta left me stupidly satisfied. Then, when it dawned on me that the lie about my new romance was having a greater effect on my self-esteem than on her, I felt despondent. Marta was musically happy, back with her old love, and she just didn’t want me to suffer, that was all she cared about. This desire to free herself from guilt resulted in the written message I got an instant later: I have the feeling I’ve done great harm to the person in my life I least wanted to hurt. To which I had to make some reply, and so I did, but hastily and indelicately. These condensed and urgent messages made me yearn for the days when epistolary exchanges involved sealed envelopes and liveried messengers, waiting for a reply. Not to worry, I wrote, these things happen. Who was I trying to fool with the fake indifference? And anyway, I urgently needed to put my affairs in order, change my clothes, recover my suitcase, and book my return flight. Or I could rent a car and drive back to Madrid, stopping in lovely places along the way. What’s between Munich and Madrid? I asked myself in geographical anticipation. But I didn’t have enough money for such unhurried pleasures; the purchase of the cell phone had exhausted my financial resources.

  The sun was shining, and the snow crackled as it thawed. I didn’t recognize the neighborhood or the street names and so had no reference points to help me figure out my location and the way back to the InterContinental or the convention center. I saw a streetcar stop, but the sign that showed the route was incomprehensible. Taking a taxi was a luxury I couldn’t indulge in, and after walking for a while on some not very charming residential streets, I began to think of myself as completely lost. A young man directed me to the nearest subway station. I remembered the name of the stop next to the hotel, Rosenheimer, and I found it on the map next to the ticket window. The train was clean and silent at that midmorning hour, and I was a recently showered wreck. One more Spanish immigrant in search of a promising future far from the tragedies of his country.

  I walked into the hotel and reclaimed my suitcase while the desk clerk gave me a suspicious look. The said look became an uneasy warning when he saw me try to open the door to the computer room, where I wanted to check my e-mail and maybe surf around and find a cheap plane ticket. That’s just for guests, he told me. His English was as foreign as my own, but he’d exchanged any possibility of solidarity for a blue jacket and a nameplate. I felt I’d been driven out of Paradise, which in this case was the hotel. My plans, such as they were, had failed catastrophically, and I found myself out on the street, disoriented, with my wheeled suitcase and my dying cell phone. I couldn’t very well ask the hotel people to hold my stuff for another few hours. When I wandered into a bike lane, a cyclist almost ran me down and then favored me with an insult in perfectly, admirably enunciated German.

  I went to a call center I knew from the day before, when I’d passed it during my aimless wanderings. They assigned me a cubicle, where I started recharging my cell phone and logged on to the Web. Then I started to check my e-mail, but without much enthusiasm. I had a concise message from Carlos that said Marta told me, we have to talk, when are you coming back? Big hug. Carlos was my friend, but Marta always had great trust in him. Instead of writing, I called his Skype number. He was in his studio. Carlos worked for a landscaping firm headed by a well-known architect. In actual fact, the company was a front for a city councilor who was diverting town planning money to his own account, and the architect, a man in obvious decline, served as the councilor’s ally in his corrupt scam. Back in the days when Carlos’s professional prospects, like mine, were fast deteriorating, his very well-connected parents had found this job opportunity for him, an indecent proposal hidden under an umbrella of prestige, and he hadn’t let it pass. He hated to earn money that way, but the more romantic options, such as mine — working for air — had to be ruled out, especially since he was hoping to adopt his first child.

  What’s happening? Where are you? He kept looking around as he asked these questions. He didn’t like taking personal calls at his office. The thing is, I’ve got the boss’s goddamn kid here, they left him with me and I’m supposed to entertain him, and he showed me the child, who was at a nearby computer. Carlos’s seventy-year-old boss had married a very young architect, and they had a four-year-old boy. It was pretty ridiculous to see that old guy exposed to the vicissitudes of a young love and exhausted by the difficulties of raising his young son, apparently an unbearable brat they often dropped off at the studio, where the employees were forced to distract him with little computer games and cater to his every whim as though they were operating a one-child nursery school, except that the nursery school belonged to the child in question. He’s one of those older men who marry their widow, Carlos used to say about his boss. I’m still in Munich, I said, starting to explain. There was a roundtable at the conference yesterday, Alex Ripollés and I were on it, and I whacked him a couple of times and threw him off his chair. I’m sure the video’s already on YouTube. Did you know that Alex Ripollés’s name is pronounced Alex Gilipollez in German? What the fuck does that mean? Carlos asked, sounding more alarmed than amused. Look, Beto, I can’t talk here, but Marta told me what happened. You’re screwed and I’m sorry, man. No, no, don’t worry about me, I interrupted him. I felt like staying here a little longer anyway. Don’t blame yourself, he admonished me. I know how you are. Don’t go around feeling guilty because it’s all your fault.

  No, don’t worry, I’m all right. I even got laid last night. I fucked a girl and spent the night at her house. Well, actually, not a girl, an older woman. A lot older. Yes, a German. A very German lady who lives in Munich. You can’t imagine the spectacle. Incredible. I was drunk, obviously, and I wound up at her place. Man, you should have seen me when I saw her naked, with her tits hanging down to her navel and that potbelly older women have. Fucking scary. And there I was, giving my all. At that moment, the boy’s little head appeared behind Carlos. The kid looked interested, and how, in my story. Who said that the only things capable of capturing the attention of today’s children were video games? I asked Carlos, gesturing at the little boy. After Carlos relocated him, I embellished my account with juicy details.

  Stop, stop, stop, Beto, what the fuck are you talking about? Carlos said, interrupting me in midstream while he turned away and once again placed the boy in front of the other computer. When he returned, he spoke in whispers. Are you sure you’re all right? Why don’t you come home soon? I calmed down and tried to find words that would make him stop worrying about me. I’m all right, totally screwed, but getting used to the idea. Used to the idea, what an innocuous expression. Whipped and beaten would more exactly describe such a state. Marta went back to the Uruguayan guy, the singer, you remember him? Actually, I should have suspected it wasn’t over. Marta doesn’t like losing at anything, including her past, and this was a score she had to settle. Do you remember the time you beat her at Risk, that game at your place when you two were fighting for control of South America? You got into a nasty argument that showed you Marta’s competitive nature and the hidden rage she feels at the thought of defeat. Where are you going with all this, Beto? No, nowhere, I just wanted you to know I’m fine and last night I got laid, which is what I’ve been telling you about. First he made sure his boss’s kid couldn’t hear him, and then he said, laid by who? I was with a lady, I told you, a woman old enough to be your mother, no shit, you should have seen me. But good, uh, I mean, it was kind of scary to wake up and see that lying next to me, but it was also great, I don’t know, I’ll tell you about it, she was nice. She was like the woman in the Woody Allen bit where a character fucks an old lady and says she’s eighty-one but very well preserved, you should have seen her, she didn’t look a day over eighty.

  Carlos smiled, convinced that I was making up a good part — bu
t not all — of my story. She saved my ass last night, I admitted, because I was dead tired with nowhere to go, but this morning I’m practically puking, I swear. I did it with an old lady, Carlos, it’s amazing, man, I’m just bowled over. But is she with you now? Carlos asked. Yeah, you bet your ass she is, and I’m going to move in with her, I’m going to introduce her to my mother, they’re the same age. Come on, Beto, stop all this silly shit. How are you? I’m sure you’re walking around all miserable and fucked-up. Come back to Madrid, come on, you can stay with us a few days until you and Marta decide about the apartment. Instead of having a soothing effect, all his advice and worry just aggravated me, I couldn’t stand it, I preferred my cruel jokes about Helga and my headlong flight. You have to come back to Madrid, Carlos insisted, I’ll tell Sonia you’re staying here for a few days and that’ll be that. Carlos and his wife were always in harmony. I should have followed their example when Marta and I began to sing from different scores.

  I felt enormous self-loathing for not having anticipated the breakup with Marta, for having been incapable of hearing the music of her thoughts until someone else’s orchestra came along and blasted the notes in my face. For having needed one more conversation (that one more conversation’s always one too many). And self-loathing for the way I was talking about Helga, trying to get the scene off my chest, relating it to Carlos like a comic episode or something out of Dante. We didn’t talk much longer. Before we said good-bye, I had to listen to Carlos tell me that sooner or later everything would turn out all right between Marta and me, I’d see, everything, and I went back to feeling furious. I was going to have to tell everybody about Marta, to give my mother and my sisters the news about Marta. The news about Marta. I foresaw the general disappointment, the empty solace. The news about Marta.