They insisted that I hire someone to have the place in perfectly habitable and healthy conditions when I come home from work every day, someone who comes at least once a week to clean. I listened to them, wondering how a bunch of guys who only talk about Formula 1, soccer and women know so much about housework, but in that moment I began to imagine myself like Freddy Mercury in the music video for I Want to Break Free, cross-dressing and vacuuming in an apron and bonnet, and I got depressed, so I said yes.
Published by Felix at 1:43 a.m. * Post a comment
Tuesday, September 18
Another kind of spider web
Even though I have a secretary and more often than not a support team that somehow manages to develop the traceability of my ideas for marketing and sales, I usually make decisions, my own decisions, and I'm not used to someone making them for me.
This morning, word had travelled at work about Manolo from Seville's senseless (or not so senseless) idea to find me a maid, as if I'm incapable of taking control of the maintenance of a one-bedroom apartment, as if it's only a matter of planning. I imagined it: a spider web of rumors that begins with someone commenting that I need help around the house and ends with two hundred people agreeing that I'm a mess at home with senile squalor syndrome.
It happened like this: One of the interns stopped me in the hallway and said, Rosa Diez, the director of Supply, the one who's going to London, just fired her housekeeper, who she says is really good. Go speak with her. Maybe it'll work out. A smile and goodbye.
I continued down the hallway, absorbed in thought, trying to figure out how everyone can know about your life, your needs before you've decided that they even exist, when Joaquin grabbed my arm and yanked me out of limbo. Don't listen to her. I just saw Juan Carlos and he says Lolo is calling the domestic help agencies to find you an "adequate" girl.
And I shuddered.
Published by Felix at 12:14 a.m. * Post a comment
Wednesday, September 19
The most magnificent maid
Yesterday, I didn't see Lolo all day, despite searching for him throughout the entire building, but this morning he was punctual, right next to the coffeemaker. He didn't let me speak. I have her, he said, and the others, interested, stopped talking.
I've found the perfect maid for you. For me? Well, for your house. Fuck no, for you, man. For you. I don't know if she cleans well, but she's good-looking and nice, and has... I didn't let him finish. How do you know she's nice? His explanation was so typical of Lolo in its farfetchedness that I don't know why, but I didn't doubt his words. The guy had tricked his secretary (Mara, a girl so upright that she's the only woman Lolo hasn't dared to flirt with) into calling the agencies so they’d send over a housekeeper. Young, of course. So we listened to the statistics: He had interviewed two Ecuadorians, four blondes, a redhead and a statuesque Colombian who he didn't even ask what she knew how to do.
We only talked about her past, why she came to Spain. Bastard. The girl in question is twenty-two years old, didn't study because she couldn't afford it, worked as a waitress, as a model in Bogota, can play the guitar, and has a tattoo on her right butt cheek of a shark and a star. A Miss Colombia, man, like Shakira, but tan. You can't tell me I haven't picked a winner, Lolo exclaimed, ecstatic.
And everyone applauded.
Published by Felix at 12:20 a.m. * Post a comment
Thursday, September 20
Miss Colombia
One of those difficult dilemmas that men experience in their thirties is learning how to see beyond feminine beauty. It's no small thing. We interview a woman, for example, to be our new housekeeper, and a wall of beauty separates us from the truth, preventing us from seeing beyond, preventing us from coordinating our movements and minds, preventing us from being sensible and logical.
I met with the girl who Lolo had interviewed in my office. Sometimes, I get home at seven in the evening and other times, ten at night, and it was out of the question to meet with a girl at home at that hour for work reasons. So we met in my office. Lolo arranged it, telling her to come to the seventh floor and all those details, because he was so interested that he didn't even let me get her number.
She arrived on time, escorted by a cohort of my colleagues who had noticed her as she crossed the floor, got up and tailed her like shy, stuttering concierges, offering to help her and asking her where she was going. I saw her coming and my legs trembled. Lolo was right. She was a thing of beauty, the beauty that's only possible at twenty-two years old: tan skin, fabulous long hair, deep eyes and a smile somewhere between astonished and amused with which she frightened my pesky colleagues in an effort to dissuade them from following her. I leapt up and left my office, ran toward the hallway, introduced myself, took her by the arm, sat her down and closed the blinds to stop an audience from gathering behind the glass walls of my office.
I introduced myself. The girl in question is named Rosana. I got chills when she pronounced her name. It sounded so sexy in her rhythmic, smooth accent. Afterward, I don't know what happened. I started to ask her questions like a shy, stuttering idiot. I tried to explain what I needed at home, but I messed it up and she explained to me that she has experience and would know what to do. I asked her how much she charged, and she told me a price per hour of work (later I learned that the norm is three euros less, but I had already given her my word), and I asked her to clean while I'm working, and as I work mornings and afternoons she can choose her own schedule. That seemed all right to her, so I wrote my address on the back of one of my cards because I only have business cards from the company, and I gave her a copy of my apartment key, a moment when I heard applause in the hallway. There were still eyes prying through the gaps in the blinds. I stammered the words of a goodbye and went to get up to open the door, but she waved me away with a gesture. Don't worry, sir, she said, You won't hurt my feelings if you stay there. I blushed and didn't know how to respond.
Then, I watched her leave and close the door. I know that the boys followed after her because I heard their footsteps, like a herd of elephants running away. A few seconds later, the usual suspects—Lolo, Juan Carlos, Joaquin, Ricardo and Manolo from Seville—came in pursing their lips, nodding their heads slowly and applauding. Congratulations, they told me, you're a man with a maid.
With a magnificent maid, Lolo stressed.
Published by Felix at 12:17 a.m. * Post a comment
Friday, September 21
Conspirators among us
When I arrived at work this morning, there were still some people who got up as I walked by and bowed or clapped their hands. No, she hasn't started working yet, I had to say various times throughout the morning. Actually, I've asked her to clean the house while I'm working. She makes her own schedule. Morning or afternoon, it's all the same to me. I don't want any more flings with gorgeous girls and even less so with a woman in my house telling me the things I've gotten dirty.
They've almost succeeded in making me forget that on Friday I have the meeting with Laura to sign the separation agreement, lawyers included. I'm only going not to disappoint Laura because there's nothing left to agree on. Everything is separated. We didn't have any big things, except for the loft, which she's about to sell according to her wishes and her conditions, and I'm only waiting for the day I have to sign in front of a notary to receive my 50 percent. Nothing more. The rest of the stuff we shared were feelings (mine) and a ring (which cost me a load of money and which she is probably storing in some box in his house).
In the end, friends, like always, snap you out of your self-destructive thinking, though not in the most brotherly way. When I headed to Juan Carlos's office to see if he wanted to grab a coffee, I found more than ten people there, all surrounding Lolo. The playboy was showing them, cell phone in hand, a video of him interviewing my housekeeper with questions so intimate that I blushed and a seductive tone straight out of a cut-rate movie that made everyone laugh each time they heard him speak. And with that body of yours, you h
aven't found work in something else, I don't know, Spanish cinema, for example? Laughs. Not to say that he's right, but if Spanish cinema had bodies like Rosana's, things would be very different.
There were boos and ohs when I snatched the phone out of his hands. You shouldn't play with something that's not yours, I reprimanded him. More boos. Come on, man. Watch the interview. Look what I got for you. Am I not a good secretary?
I left them to their laughter, but I kept Lolo's phone. As revenge, of course. Though at noontime, when he came looking for it, he managed to drag out of me that yes, I had seen the interview, and the girl is worth it.
The problem is that I have other things to be thinking about.
Published by Felix at 12:29 a.m. * Post a comment
Sunday, September 23
The age of experience
Today I spent all day playing golf with Joaquin. To ask his advice. Guy stuff. Even though Joaquin is now happily married, he went through all of this a few years ago when he divorced a gorgeous blonde, to whom he "introduced" me in his own way one day when we were in a bar: See that blonde in the corner? That's my ex. I wanted to know what to expect, to prepare myself for the final assault in her lawyer's office (I don't know what mine does: he asked for fourteen-hundred euros and told me he'd get back to me) and find out what's lying in wait before whatever's lying in wait hits me squarely in the nose.
So he loaned me some clubs and invited me to the Bellavista golf club. I don't know how to play golf, but the relaxed atmosphere in those places is ideal for the conversation that I wanted us to have. We ate lunch in the restaurant with his wife and kids. Manoli is understanding and nice, with a softer voice than Laura's, and when we finished eating she took the kids to the pool and Joaquin and I went to play a round of holes.
He couldn't help but make a comment, one that I had been keeping to myself throughout lunch. It was weird to eat together without Laura. It's not just me. People aren't used to it either. So we grabbed a cart and teed off. I tried to follow Joaquin, but his golf shoes were a little big on me and I felt uncomfortable. He told me the worst thing is obsessing over how to do it, that you have to break with the past and turn the page, that if you think about it you'll perish in the attempt and that the best thing is to just sign the papers and file them away. I told him everything he already knew, facts and feelings that I had told him more than once and more than twice, and it went on like that well into the afternoon.
There was a moment, while I tried to make the shot on the fifth hole, when he asked me if I knew the other guy. I didn't dare tell him that I had seen him once, in June, so I told him no, that I wasn't interested, that Laura's life was her life, but Joaquin responded that he didn't believe me. He infuriated me so much that I swung badly and the ball hit a pine tree, stopping between two twin roots. I planted my feet and studied the best approach to try to get the ball out of there, but I lacked experience. On the first swing, the club chipped one of the roots, and the second struck the tree trunk. I repeated for him that Laura has disappeared from my life and where she lives or goes doesn't interest me. As I said this, I hit the tree trunk five or six times more before I managed to get the damn ball out of its hideaway. Well, Joaquin snorted, with all those wood chips I thought we were going to have a barbeque. The jerk laughed.
And then he told me the most useful piece of advice I've heard since I've been in the office trying to survive this. You're an idiot if you don't stop thinking about her.
Published by Felix at 10:56 p.m. * Post a comment
Tuesday, September 25
The man of the year
Everyone smiles when they see me pass by, everyone greets me. When I walk into the building at work, everyone looks at me. Even this morning, while talking with a manager from the London branch, he asked me about my Colombian maid. I don't think there's anyone in all of the departments and branches of my company who doesn't know that I've employed a stunning twenty-two-year-old Colombian in my house.
Nobody understands that I spend between ten and twelve hours at work and that she chooses four of those hours, twice a week, to do housework, clean, iron, tidy up, and that we've agreed that I'll pay her once a month, so I haven't seen her again. Nobody understands it. Everyone congratulates me as if I had married her. They act like my dad, who believes that marriage is just that: a woman who does housework for you, and you consummate with her once a month, or was that before retirement and now it's once a year?
Everyone is giving me advice on how to take advantage of our employer/employee relationship, but not only do I not want to get involved with women, but I also think employer/employee relationships never work out.
Still, I keep receiving pats on the back and congratulatory emails. Fortunately, there's a bright side to this: Nobody has asked me again how I'm doing with the Laura situation. In the eyes of the society consisting of my narrow-minded and catty coworkers, I'm cured. Yes. I'm a reformed cast-off.
Even though this Friday I have the appointment with the lawyers to sign the papers.
Published by Felix at 12:16 a.m. * Post a comment
Wednesday, September 26
Of insecurities and uncertainties
I know it's really late, but before I go to bed I have to confess to my computer, dear damn diary, that I'm a moron.
Juan Carlos goes and tells me this morning (in the middle of a conversation about something I don't remember, but it's not relevant) that a guy isn't old until a grey hair shows up in his nose. Women go bad really quickly, all of a sudden they stop being babes (I don't agree, every age has its allure, and mature women...), but us guys, we're still stallions even at two hundred years old. Sure, but the day you see a grey hair poking out of your nostrils, that's the day your old age has begun.
And I, thinking that my life was ending on Friday because of the meeting with Laura to sign the damn papers, got goosebumps and my hair stood on end (body hair and belly button fuzz included), remembering how bad of a time I had when I thought I needed to dye my hair to not feel old and decrepit.
Could it be that I'm finally old and decrepit?
So I've spent the last two hours or so looking for that rare, tell-tale specimen. The damn grey hair. I haven't found it, luckily, but I did take the opportunity to pluck out some hairs that were poking dangerously out of one of my nostrils. It's strange: I had never noticed them before and, of course, I had never imagined how difficult and painful it is to pluck them, especially if you don't have tweezers and you improvise with everything within reach in the bathroom.
Published by Felix at 12:58 a.m. * Post a comment
Thursday, September 27
Hellish wait
The morning after tomorrow is the appointment and I can't sleep. I tried to make myself some dinner with the intention of washing it down with a lot of wine (I even bought some sherry from Montilla-Moriles to see if I could stomach it), but Rosana has the bad habit of throwing out everything she can find that's expired in my fridge when she comes to clean, so she's left me without the raw material for my next culinary experiment.
In the end, I had a chorizo sandwich that my mother had stuck in my suitcase before leaving (Rosana wasn't able to find its expiration date), plus an entire bottle of sherry and a yogurt (I'm starting to take care of myself, okay?). I have a decent buzz, but I haven't been able to fall asleep. Interesting. That's life. You can't always get what you want.
Anxiety is more potent than tiredness and alcohol. If I don't stop thinking about what I'm going to say to Laura, I won't be able to get some sleep. The papers don't worry me. I wouldn't care if she came away with the entire planet. I'm going to sign whatever they put in front of me and that's that. I'm not going to learn anything either because she's not going to want to tell me about her life, but what worries me is what I'm going to say to her when she tells me good morning. The idea of looking her in the eyes and not knowing how to respond is really robbing me of sleep.
Published by Felix at 2:20 a.m. * Post a comment
The day has come
I'm not prepared for this, but I've spent the whole week preparing for this meeting. I don't know what Laura wants, but I don't have any issues signing whatever they give me. What's done is done, and I don't have a problem admitting it. What's the use in trying to do anything else?
Just in case, my "friends" have put me on guard, and the majority of them haven't gotten separated—yet. I've heard all kinds of advice, but the best was a warning from Lolo: Expect anything and everything from an angry woman. Look, if you examine what you blow into a tissue when you have a cold, you can get an idea of what the human body is capable of producing... Well, imagine the mind, which doesn't have physical limitations. That in a woman—multiply it by ten.
Others have praised my decision not to fight Laura, but they recommended that I sock it to her new boyfriend, and even offered themselves up as free muscle.
But that was during the morning, during lunch, during the afternoon and during phone calls to my house. Now it's the pillow that's telling me things and not letting me sleep. The day has come. It's not that I'm harboring even the tiniest hope of getting back together with Laura, of her changing her mind or of the world ending before I have to see her again, but the day has come when we sign off on the end of our relationship, I have an appointment in a few hours and I'm going to show up without having slept.
Diary of an Ugly, Recently Divorced Man Page 9