Blitz

by David Trueba

  I need beauty and youth to feel alive, she said. She was referring to the girls she’d have brief affairs with and unceremoniously dismiss from the premises after a few weeks had passed; the girls were always full of light and energy, and maybe their relationship with Anabel was part of a journey of self-discovery. I listened to Anabel’s growling recitals with some amusement, because she was always brazenly bad-tempered after making love, an attitude she attributed to her masculine side. I have orgasms like a man, she assured me that day. Do you know that sensation of tedium after pleasure, the physiological selfishness that makes you wish the person beside you would disappear after you’ve been satisfied? You wish they’d leave you in peace, because the chief idea in your mind is not prolonging the relationship but getting back in your coffin until you awaken to a new, different adventure. And then another, and another after that. Well, that’s the way I am, a sort of vampire thirsty for young blood. That’s what Anabel said, and she didn’t sound happy.

  MAY

  One day when I was sitting by the bay window, I saw one of the girls leave Anabel’s bedroom, wearing a short T-shirt. She leaned on the kitchen door to drink from a bottle of water and didn’t even notice my presence. When she raised her arm and brought the bottle to her lips, she offered a view of her perfect ass, young and smooth, slender and graceful, like a cat stretching herself. I remember thinking about Helga and her very different nakedness. I heard from Helga twice during those months. The first time was a telephone call I didn’t answer. I’d just arrived in Barcelona, and I was in a meeting to discuss the project for which Alex had taken me on board. When Helga called, I was being subjected to the palaver of some pedantic advertising guy, and I didn’t call her back. Actually, I only guessed it might be her, because the long and unfamiliar number began with a prefix I didn’t recognize: 0044. Before getting on the plane in the Munich airport, I’d thrown away the note with her cell phone number. I’d found it natural to dispose of that little souvenir just then, when I was on the point of returning to Madrid after those strange days. What was I going to do? Call her? I let that piece of paper go with no regrets. You throw away the paper and you throw away the person. As far as I was concerned, Helga stayed in that spotless trash can inside Munich’s spotless airport.

  No message accompanied the missed call, but at work a few days later, I went over to Alex’s desk to discuss something with him. When I saw him at his computer, having a video conference, I apologized and made a gesture that was supposed to mean we’ll talk later. No, no, he said, look who’s here. You remember her? And he invited me to take a close look at the screen. There was Helga. They’d exchanged addresses, she and Alex, and she’d contacted him to ask how he was doing and to send him the photo of him and Nashimira. Hello, I said. In the box on the screen, Helga’s face lit up with a smile. I work with Alex now, I explained. He added some joke I don’t remember and went over to another desk for a moment. So you live in Barcelona now? Yes, I said. With a certain shyness, she asked me if everything was all right with me, if I was feeling better. Yes, I replied, and then I asked about her and if her family was all right, her children, her cat. My cat? I’ll tell him you inquired about him, she said. Well, I said, you know how much I like cats.

  The second night we spent together, Helga’s cat had kept jumping on the bed, and even though we threw him off several times, he’d ended up sleeping at our feet. I told Helga a story from when I was ten years old and I’d do my homework with an obese friend who would sometimes invite me to his house for an afternoon snack. My friend, whose name was Osorio, had a very affectionate cat, and he used to spread jam on the tip of his dick, and the cat would happily lick it off. On the two or three occasions when I joined him in his secret pleasure, in his room covered with Flash Kicker posters, while his mother listened to the radio in the living room, the cat’s tongue caused an instantaneous, pleasurable reaction in me, while the animal licked his lips with decorum. Helga’s response to this childish anecdote was obvious horror, which she expressed by putting her head under the sheets and muttering something like, men, good God, what creatures. However, she spoke in German, so I’m not sure what she said.

  Our computer conversation ended shortly after my cat remark, when Alex came back to his desk and the three of us performed the long good-bye ritual before hanging up. Do you talk to her often? I asked Alex. Nah, every now and then she sends me a photo or an e-mail. You know, she’s one of those divorced older ladies with all the time in the world. Right, I agreed.

  JUNE

  After that January in Munich, I had a few brief flings with girls who always wound up getting annoyed by my guarded attitude. My detachment was absolute, and soon I’d be telling them lies so as not to prolong something that had no future anyway. I preferred going to a movie by myself or just staying home, even though it wasn’t unusual to hear my roommate making love with some young girl, one of her conquests, and then a little while later I’d hear her again, disillusioned and growling.

  I established a kind of routine with a couple of girls, nothing I took seriously, and nothing they considered very significant either, except for when they felt wounded by my total lack of commitment. One of them used that very expression, lack of commitment. Her name was Noemí, and I had no desire to contradict her. Maybe it was lack of commitment, yes, she was right. By the same token, I could have thrown in her face an accusation of overcommitment. A fault as inconvenient as mine.

  Noemí had had her breasts operated on. At her husband’s insistence, according to her, after the births of her two children. She was my age, but her life history thus far had been more fraught than mine, subjected to a husband she’d finally separated from a year before. We’d see each other only on the weekends her children spent with their father, and I think my relationship with her was based on a certain spite she felt toward her bad-luck marriage. Her tits were firm and round at all hours. One day I thought I’d much rather be cupping Helga’s fallen breasts in my hands and returning them to their original height and savoring the feel of real flesh. The memory of Helga lasted for a moment, and then I forgot it. In the same way as the tenuous bond between Noemí and me was destined to be forgotten.

  The second girl I took up with was named Monica. I behaved so coldly toward her that after making love we could have chilled our beers over my heart. She was younger than me. On one of those furtive nights when we made love, I asked her why she wasn’t looking for a steady boyfriend. Monica, I said, why aren’t you looking for a steady boyfriend? I have a boyfriend, she replied. We’ve been together almost a year. We’re thinking about moving in together. What about this? I asked her. This is different, she said. I never again aspired to anything more with her than an opportunity to improve my rudimentary Catalan during our brief conversations as we lay there between the damp sheets.

  JULY

  In the summer I went back to Madrid for a few days, but I discovered that my move to a distant workplace had also put some distance between me and my most intimate circle of friends. The news insisted that the economy was on the rebound, but the youth unemployment rate was stuck at an astonishing level: fully half of the young people in the job market could find no work. Apparently there were many seasonal positions on offer in the tourism and hotel sectors. I thought I would make a good waiter. I thought I’d like to be one of those waiters who memorize the orders of everyone at the table without needing to write them down and who always ask the customers if everything’s all right or if they need anything else. One night, joking with Carlos and Sonia, I said I could serve potato omelets and paella in Plaza Mayor. I told them I could be an excellent waiter-landscaper. Later Carlos told me Sonia had found that remark defeatist. I think Beto’s very depressed, she’d told my friend.

  AUGUST

  Carlos and I planned a vacation we didn’t go on in the end, because he and Sonia had to travel to Ethiopia in a hurry to collect a little girl they’d been trying to adopt for two years. I wished them good luck and wondered, secre
tly and inconclusively, if I’d have children one day. To have been a child but to have no children made me the equivalent of a closed railroad track, not that I cared much about that. What worried me more was the persistent suspicion that I’d lost some of my sense of humor, the thought of which did indeed make me feel like an orphan, and sometimes, for no reason — especially if I was visiting my mother, or talking to her on the phone — I’d fall back on jokes, general buffoonery, double entendres. Not only to make her laugh, but also to remind myself that I could. And then I’d remember the times in the course of those two days in Munich when I’d made Helga laugh out loud.

  During the summer I kept busy with the last project I intended to prepare for Alex’s studio. Commissions had slowed to a thin trickle, and my plan was to quit my job at the end of the year, because the company was going to lay people off anyway, and I wanted to be the first to go; it seemed only just, since I was the newest member of the staff. I tried to make a joke about unemployment one day in conversation with a colleague, a designer, but she’d already received her pink slip and didn’t find me funny.

  SEPTEMBER

  Alex was very interested in my hourglass designs and promised me he would talk to an investor about developing a line of hourglasses — the two or three best models — and offering them for sale. It surprised me that the word for hourglass, in German (Sanduhr) as well as Spanish (reloj de arena), makes reference to the contents, to the material inside. By contrast, the English word focuses on the transparent glass of the container. Hourglass could be translated into Spanish as hora de vidrio, glass hour, a fascinating expression. The Italians and Greeks still use a form of the ancient word klepsydra, clepsydra, which originally denoted a water clock. In an encyclopedia, I found the first depiction of an hourglass in art. It appears in a fresco by Ambrogio Lorenzetti that dates from around the middle of the fourteenth century. A crowned and upright queen holds an hourglass in her hand as a symbol of the virtue of temperance.

  I assembled these pieces of information in my head in connection with some commercial presentation, a process that came to seem as degrading as celebrating the rain because it would wash your car.

  (Illustration Credit 9.1)

  I also remembered a remark Helga made once when I was going on about my appreciation for Nashimira and his projects and confessing my obsequious admiration for him. She said — I don’t remember her exact words — but something about how Asians considered hurrying bad manners. She also said that was the great difference between us. I think I replied that surely that was a cliché, a stereotype we accepted unquestioningly. When Asians were late for a rendezvous, or when they had only a short time to complete some important assignment, I figured they too hurried like mad.

  OCTOBER

  In the end, I developed a line of hourglasses. The models I designed represented ornamental objects without very much relevance. My aim was to strip them of the distressing aspect Helga had pointed out when she told me she hated them and surround them instead with a festive aura. Anabel helped me with the prototypes and showed great skill in manual work. I’ve always known how to use my hands, she told me with a proud and defiant smile. Alex, for his part, proposed an idea. He said we ought to try to come up with a way to associate our hourglasses with cell phones, as mobile apps for decoration or for recreational use, and work to develop them as a business line. Business line, recreational use, and mobile apps were examples of the professional jargon I was learning to splash around in, like a fish that’s taken out of the ocean but grows accustomed to the fish tank in the living room.

  NOVEMBER

  Everybody was amused by the idea of a mobile app that would be activated by each incoming call and display an hourglass on the screen. As the conversation progressed, the hourglass would empty itself graphically, with a little stream of red sand running through the narrow neck between the upper and lower bulbs. The empty space in the upper bulb would grow larger as the sand ran out of it, and Alex suggested that a message might go there, something like, “are you sure this call is so important?”

  Every month, the app would provide the user with a graphic usage summary, in which the sand in the hourglass would be divided into sections whose size would correspond to the amount of time spent in conversation at each of the most frequently used numbers. Anabel proposed selling the idea to a cell phone company. Although it appeared to me that such companies would have little interest in making their customers aware of how much time they’d wasted — since customers’ willingness to waste time was the key to the companies’ success — I bestirred myself, intending to be useful and to contribute to the profit of those who were now my colleagues. The way to free myself from paralysis led through work, which promised to be pathetic, now and in the foreseeable future. I’d be creating landscapes inside cell phones. Like someone building model sailing ships inside glass bottles.

  DECEMBER

  I went to Madrid for part of the Christmas holidays. On Christmas Eve I had dinner at Carlos and Sonia’s and met their recently adopted daughter. She was five years old, an active and rambunctious child, although both adjectives, which her new parents used to describe her, lacked the requisite intensity. She broke a wide variety of objects in the house, bawled when reprimanded, and calmed down only in front of the TV set. About a minute after I gave her the present I’d brought, a pretty hourglass with multicolored sand that formed delicate designs as it fell, she broke it and scattered the sand over the fish Carlos had cooked for us. She was mistreated in the orphanage, a psychologist had explained to them, and they felt obliged in their turn to explain it to me. Right, and now she’s going to get back by mistreating them, I thought wretchedly, unable to ignore the child’s unpleasantly dictatorial attitude and her irrepressible violence. I never knew two people so grateful for the tranquilizing invention of the television set.

  There were news reports on the TV, the year was being assessed as it approached its end, and everybody talked about the economic crisis. In the year in review, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, with her usual stiffness, offered a cold hand to successive prime ministers of Spain, first Zapatero, his eyebrows arching like a frightened baby’s, and then Rajoy, his absence of personality making him look just like a puppet abandoned by his ventriloquist. Both of them seemed to be asking her for more than a handshake; perhaps they wanted her to rock them to sleep, to suckle them at her breasts. But she wasn’t the mother they were looking for. I tried to explain this idea to Carlos and Sonia, but they both declared that they didn’t want to talk about politics.

  At the family meal the following day, my mother and my sisters and I performed the usual gift exchange after they got tired of asking me whether I’d met a girl I liked in Barcelona. Our custom was to organize the gift-giving according to the invisible friend system, where each of us was obligated to give a gift to one of the others, but all presents had to be placed under the Christmas tree without any indication of who the giver was. When my eldest sister opened her present and we saw that it was an electronic book reader, my mother hastened to explain that she’d gotten the idea from my other sisters. I don’t understand such things, she said, but they told me you’d like it a lot because you travel so much. My youngest sister protested, don’t start, if you explain every gift you lose the invisible friend surprise. The same thing happened every year. When each present was opened, someone would say, if it’s not right you can exchange it, or the people in the store told me it comes with a two-year guarantee, or that’s very much in fashion now, remarks that would destroy a mystery nobody considered very important anyway.

  We opened the rest of the presents with the same inertia. My mother received a tablet computer and protested that it was too difficult for her to operate these modern things. These modern things was an expression she’d been using since I was little to refer to each technological novelty. You said the same thing about your cell phone, and look at you now, nobody could possibly get it away from you, my second sister observed, and then op
ened her own present and feigned enthusiasm when she discovered an electronic picture frame capable of holding up to seventy-five different images in its memory and displaying them at measured intervals. It’s fabulous for me, she said, especially since these days we don’t have photo albums anymore, and sometimes it makes me sad to see how big the children are getting. My third sister got a cell phone of the very latest generation and reacted with incredulous delight: this thing must have cost seven hundred euros, are you crazy? To which my youngest sister replied that she’d accumulated a great many loyalty points. My youngest sister was great when it came to financial matters. My mother said she had a good eye, but maybe it was a strong stomach. The company she worked for required her to make enormous personal efforts — her expression — and maybe that was why her present was a heart rate and stress monitor, which measured the distance she covered and her blood pressure when she went for her daily hour-long run. One of my other sisters explained to her in detail how to set the monitor and attach it to her forearm. As for me, they gave me clothes. They always give me clothes, because they know I hate to buy clothes for myself, and I like it when what I’m wearing is old and fits my body like a second skin, and my sisters complain that I wear clothes until they fall off me in pieces. The package I got contained two shirts, a sweater, a belt, and a pair of linen trousers for summer.