by David Trueba
I have to tell you, Helga said, I’ve always hated those sand gardens with the little stones, those Japanese rock gardens people put on their desks. My husband had one in his office to help him relax. When he was nervous, he’d grab the little rake and play with it while he talked on the telephone. I’d be waiting for him to finish so we could go out to lunch together — this was back in the days when I used to meet him at his work — and I’d feel like knocking the whole thing over with one swipe. Sometimes I think I’d like to go into industrial design, I confessed. I may have chosen the wrong career. It seems to me you can contribute more to the landscape by making ashtrays or coffeemakers. I think landscape work’s not so much garden creation or urban development as designing people’s couches or computers or televisions, which they spend their lives in front of.
But doesn’t all this perfection bother you? Helga asked. Don’t you have the feeling that everything’s too perfect these days? There’s something phony in every product. Knives have to look like they don’t cut, frying pans have to be decorative objects, nothing can have any rough edges, and then people come into contact with reality and feel defenseless. I agreed with her, but I pointed out that when all was said and done, it was people who had made themselves like that. Of course, she said, all you have to do is look at women who have cosmetic surgery. You’d think mannequins in shop windows were fashioned so they’d look like women, not so women would end up looking like them. I smiled. Yes, people are stupid, I said. No, she disagreed, they’re not stupid, the thing is they’re afraid. But that’s because old age really is a horror, she went on. Decay frightens us, don’t forget that. We try to postpone our decline as long as we can, but without much success. Mirrors and I have been enemies for a long time now. But, I replied, maybe the problem is we’re not prepared to look in the mirror, we’ve spent too much time refusing to do that, and if we’d admit that we’re simply passing through the stages of life, it wouldn’t seem like such a problem. That’s very easy to say, said Helga, but try living it. I can assure you that no matter how resigned you are to the idea of growing old, when it actually happens it’s a tragedy. You can’t go up the stairs, you can’t drive, and one day you can’t even read. I imagine you keep up the fantasy of winning some younger person’s heart and prolonging your splendor, but the end always comes to meet you.
So that was Helga’s explanation for what had happened the previous night. According to her, it seemed, Marta’s leaving had wounded my pride, and I would have gone to bed with a lamppost just to keep from sleeping alone, just to prove to myself I was still alive. And Helga had acquiesced, succumbing to a fantasy of eternal youth. It was obvious that our behavior afterward — both of us in flight, both rather ashamed — gave no grounds for thinking otherwise. She opened a bottle of white wine and poured out what was our last drink. When my husband and I split up, she said, my first instinct, like yours, was revenge, and it took me some time to realize it wasn’t working, to grasp that you can’t turn bitterness on and off like a faucet, you have to pour it out until it disappears and leaves room for you to feel again, lets you stop seeing fraud and deception everywhere. That’s why I like to spend time with my grandchildren, because they’re young, and they embrace life as something new. Whenever we finish doing something, they always ask me, Und was machen wir jetzt? And what are we going to do now? And that’s the question, that always has to be the question. All right, very good, that’s that, and what are we going to do now?
Und was machen wir jetzt? I made a clumsy stab at pronouncing the words. After correcting me twice, Helga shook her head and gave up. I put my wineglass on the low table. She was holding hers with both hands. I started clowning around, imitating the mime trapped inside transparent glass walls. Don’t make fun of me, she said, not very seriously. Now I understand why you like that mime routine so much, it’s because you think you’re trapped too, closed up in a room with glass walls, a room you can’t leave. You don’t even dare to ask, and what are we going to do now? Und was machen wir jetzt? I struck the nonexistent wall hard, and then even harder and more insistently. I kept repeating the question in a loud voice, in my wretched German, and thus reached the climax of my cheap and predictable work of Absurdist Theater.
Helga was sitting on the sofa, laughing that laugh of hers, which she liked to think of as contained but was in fact explosive. I held out both my hands. Put that glass down and come here. She feigned surprise but placed the glass on the table. As soon as she put her hands in mine, I pulled her to her feet and then closer to me. I embraced her and kissed her. Are you crazy? I’m not crazy.
Something I didn’t understand at all was driving me. Nevertheless, I let myself go. I gave her a long, placid kiss she gravely accepted. Then she shook her head and said no, that’s enough. Why? I asked. After pausing as though to overcome doubts, she said, no, it’s not right. I took her in my arms and pulled her up on me so that she was straddling me with one thigh on each side of my body. Do you want me to wind up in the hospital? she asked. If I break my hip, I’m telling you, it’s going to be very depressing. She laughed again. And I lugged her to my assigned bedroom. I found Helga beautiful, appealing, fragile, and seductive. I wasn’t struggling inside, I felt only excitement at her presence. I kissed her, and when I kissed her, the eyes of other people were no longer on me, their opinions and their conventions didn’t count anymore. It didn’t bother me to feel the roughness of her lips. Maybe, instead of going crazy, I was going sane.
When I pushed open the door of the guest room, she resisted entering it. No, no, let’s go to my room, she said. It’s horrible to do it in the bed my grandchildren sleep in. I realized her sense of guilt was greater than mine. That second night was less given over to blind exploration; its hallmark was unequivocal desire, not prefabricated and not drenched in alcohol. Helga’s bedroom was a less accidental setting than the guest room. Some photographs of her grandchildren and several big novels in hardback, a sign of many nights spent alone in her bed. When we took off our clothes, I noticed that her underwear was nicer, choicer than what she’d been wearing the night before. That could have been just a coincidence, or maybe an intelligent woman’s precaution.
I had no memorable dreams, nor did Marta reappear in my fantasies. Helga fell asleep with her hand on my stomach, and it didn’t bother me that she kept it there a long time. In the morning, I had to wake her up. I was afraid of missing my plane, but at the same time I didn’t want to sound as though I was in an urgent hurry to disappear. She leapt out of bed and ran into the shower so fast that I suspected she didn’t want to be seen in the brightening light of day. Nevertheless, I followed her into the shower, and we soaped each other while I got aroused again and she put up with it.
She refused to call a taxi and insisted on driving me to the airport. She dressed in a hurry and then made coffee, while I got some clean clothes out of my suitcase. It was in the entryway and I had to walk over to it naked, not that I cared. The suitcase and the cat were the two mute witnesses to this spectacle. I stroked Fassbinder’s head. What do you think, mein Freund? I whispered to him. I’ve always considered cats aloof, disdainful animals, but that one appeared to grant me the privilege of his curiosity.
We didn’t talk much in the car. Still half asleep, we stared at the road ahead, leading us out of the city. The airport wasn’t far, and there wasn’t much traffic so early on a gray, rainy holiday morning. Neither of us said we’ll talk on the phone or see you soon or let’s keep in touch. Better if I drop you here, Helga announced decisively, stopping near the entrance to the terminal. I rummaged in my pants pocket, found the note with the locator code for my flight, and read it again. It made me laugh. M4RTA. Can you see this? It looks like they wrote Marta. Helga smiled without much enthusiasm. How stupid of me to show her that trivial detail, which only betrayed my continuing obsession. Auf Wiedersehen, I sang out, keeping myself at a cruel distance from the moment, a distance my fun-with-language bit only increased. Have a good trip, she said.<
br />
The time had come to decide what form this farewell was going to take. The worst would have been a brief peck on the lips, like an unromantic married couple. A kiss on the cheek seemed like a ridiculous step backward and not a very good idea either. Saying good-bye was complicated because gauging the magnitude of our relationship was complicated. We sat there looking hard at each other, but without frowning. Helga raised her hand and placed her thumb on my lips, pressing them delicately. She made me turn my face away so I’d stop looking at her, and then she said, go on, get out, quick.
I stepped out of the car, took my suitcase from the backseat, and started walking to the entrance. When I turned around, she was still looking at me; she waved briefly, started the car, and left the scene. I breathed easy. I was afraid of leaden farewells, and for a moment I suspected she might stop the car and come and embrace me or burst into tears, which turned out to be a rather arrogant thought on my part. When I couldn’t see her car anymore, I felt a pang of wounded pride. What you avoid is what you desire too, I reminded myself by way of consolation. Helga had never lost control of the situation, and however much my preposterous behavior may have surprised her, I’d never had the feeling I was in charge. I remembered the first night in the restaurant, when she told me Marta’s real problem was that she was afraid of death. You start to be at ease with yourself, she said, when you start to lose your fear of death. Maybe this attitude of Helga’s also meant she wasn’t afraid of farewells, those occasional deaths that mark the whole course of our lives, those little deaths that take place at the end of every meeting.
Alex Ripollés was flying home on the same plane. At first we didn’t greet each other, even though we were both hanging around the departure gate. We deliberately responded to different calls to board the plane. But as luck would have it, we found ourselves seated next to each other. He got the window, I got the aisle. We had no choice but to laugh at the coincidence. I beg your pardon again, I’m sorry, I said apologetically. Actually, I had nothing against you, I really didn’t. I had just broken up with my girlfriend that morning, and I was completely out of it and acting stupid. Alex looked at me intensely, as though for the first time. You broke up with your girlfriend? That pretty, pretty girl? Yes, I admitted. Well then, I’m sorry, she was really pretty. The first time I saw her, I noticed that right away. Very pretty, like a sculpture. I agreed again, but I was beginning to wonder whether this wasn’t some kind of cruel joke. I said, I suppose the strangest thing is that someone like me ever had her for a girlfriend. No, no, I don’t mean that, he said, but I remember thinking what a pretty girl, she’s one of the prettiest girls I’ve ever seen in my life. That was about the eighth time he’d repeated that word, and maybe he really did want to humiliate me, despite the friendly expression on his face. So why did you break up? Were you together a long time?
During the flight we also talked about matters other than the details of my breakup with Marta. About our projects, and about my professional future now that I’d decided to give up landscape architecture. I was offered a job in Munich, Alex said, but I wouldn’t like to live there. I don’t like the attitude people have, they think they’ve got it all, they think they own everything. To tell you the truth, I think now is the time when we most need to stay in Spain, well, or in Catalonia, because we’re probably going to break away from you in the end, but right now the main thing is to try to do what we have to do in our own country, no matter how terrible the situation may be. I agreed with what he was saying, but I added, as long as we don’t have to starve to death. I’m patriotic about my stomach. You know what I think? Alex asked after a while. I think I owe you part of the prize. Actually, I believe they gave it to me because you threw me out of my chair at the roundtable. Prizes are always compensation for something. And he pulled the trophy out of his backpack. It was so ugly that we joked for a while about who deserved to keep the trophy in his home, the winner or the loser. To keep this thing on your shelf isn’t a prize, it’s a punishment, Alex concluded.
I didn’t tell Alex anything about my affair with Helga, despite the opportunity the flight presented to fill each other in on our lives. The amazing thing about my German trip is that it ended with this very pleasant conversation. Alex suggested I come and see him in Barcelona someday and gave me his brightly colored business card with his address. Maybe we can work together on some project, he told me. Barcelona was competing to be designated a European Capital of Culture; Alex’s team would be included in the preparations, and that always meant work for several years and a rather larger budget than could be expected from the paltry resources of the ruined city and town councils in Spain.
(Illustration Credit 1.9)
FEBRUARY
Back in Madrid, I got my stuff out of Marta’s apartment. She’d moved in with the Uruguayan singer, but I didn’t want to stay there alone after she left. I didn’t like the prospect of coming across her personal belongings, forgotten under the bed or in the back of some drawer, and crying like a baby. I preferred to get started with my new life as soon as possible. I settled in at Carlos’s place and didn’t put much effort into finding an apartment in Madrid.
The day I got everything out of the old apartment I made a drawing of myself in front of my accumulated boxes shortly before two Romanians carried them down to their illegally parked truck. That was the best résumé of my thirty years of life: twenty-two cardboard boxes, an ironing board, a folding bicycle, and a mahogany office chair. Oh, and a suit valet, my sole inheritance from my father, which my mother insisted I should keep even though I never wear suits and never use the little cuff link drawer. Maybe that’s what your inheritance from your parents comes down to, experiences that don’t fit you, biographies you can’t relive.
Helga’s parents had bequeathed her a beautiful image of married couples, always happy, together forever. And her hidden sorrow consisted in having been unable to imitate that idealized model. There’s no such model in my memory, because my father died before he could leave an imprint on it. His absence was the sign of a void that perhaps, in the final analysis, corresponded to the void inside of me; like my mother, I too formed part of a couple, the part that was chained to an absence.
MARCH
Alex offered me a job in his company, and I ended up moving to Barcelona barely two months after our return from Munich. I met his coworkers in his studio in El Poblenou and set about getting myself up-to-date on their various projects. They gave me my own desk. Every day Alex introduced me to some new person who had dropped by the studio. Actually, the place functioned more like a creative cooperative than a company. And Alex’s introductions almost always included a mention of my hourglasses. You have to see his hourglass designs, he’d say. I remembered how Helga, in the intimacy of our second night, had confessed that she hated hourglasses. I detest them, they distress me, they fill me with anxiety and fear. That falling sand cuts you up inside like a knife, she said.
I’d taken a photograph of the plaza in front of the Royal Palace of Madrid with my cell phone the day before I left the city, and sometimes I’d take out my phone and look at that photo. The light had an orange tint, and the palace in the background stood out like a superimposed model. I tried to feel some connection, a particular nostalgia. But as far as I was concerned, Madrid versus Barcelona was a matter of pure indifference, a match between archrivals in a sport that interested me not at all.
APRIL
I met Anabel at work. Her department was accounting, but she had excellent taste in design. She talked fast, and she had a sharp sense of irony. Sometimes she wore a pair of spectacles, which she treated badly: she’d fling them down hard onto a desk, tear them off her face to gesture with them, use them as pointers, and sometimes even draw with them, stabbing at the paper and using the little arms like pencils. Her ideas and corrections almost always resulted in improvements. She knew I was looking for an apartment in the city, my salary wasn’t enough for a decent place, and so she offered to share hers with me.
Anabel was a lesbian, and she owned an enormous apartment in El Ensanche, which she’d bought in the days when she was earning good money in advertising. She was able to let me have the rear wing of the apartment without either of us causing too much domestic interference with the other. Every now and then she’d hook up with very young, very beautiful girls who’d walk half-naked down the hall and into the kitchen, and I’d observe them from a distance like a ghost peeping at ideal life but unable to reach out and touch it with his fingertips.
Anabel was critical and categorical. To her, ours was a generation of spoiled children unable to face difficulties, accustomed to twisting all the rights won by our fathers and grandfathers in the sweat of struggle and turning them into inalienable privileges. We didn’t want to hear that Europe, to say nothing of Spain, was no longer the center of the world, she told me during office breaks, and now we’re going to be slapped into accepting that fact. She’d point at the youngest people in the studio and say, they’re all depressed and pessimistic and looking for someone to file suit against for psychological mistreatment. And she’d laugh noisily. They’re going to sue Mom and Dad for bringing them into the world, just you wait and see.
One day Anabel admitted that she was a kind of vampire. I am, she told me, a kind of vampire. We were having breakfast together one Sunday morning. She used to steal the international edition of the New York Times for me from a luxury hotel a couple of blocks from the apartment, and that day she’d said good-bye to one of her conquests and returned home with pastries and the newspaper, which I was spreading out like a happy blanket. When she made the vampire remark, I let a corner of the paper curl downward and gave her my full attention.