Senselessness

by Horacio Castellanos Moya

  FOUR

  BINGO: I FINALLY FOUND A good-looking girl. Allow me to clarify: she was no Demi Moore, but she had all her parts in all the right places, was well-proportioned, had fine features and a healthy expression, without that resentment so typical of those ugly doyens of messianic causes who thronged the archbishop's palace, a girl born in Toledo, Spain, who had spent most of her life in Madrid, in the Salamanca neighborhood, which is no slum, and whose father was a well-known military physician, an admirer of Generalísimo Franco, whom he served under, she told me, but not when we first started talking, obviously nobody introduces themselves like that, much less so in the courtyard of the archbishop's palace, full of so many so-called guardians of human rights, where she was reading and soaking up a little mountain sunshine, sitting on the rim of the stone fountain. An apparition! I said to myself, Lord in Heaven! as I walked down the corridor toward the kitchen to get a cup of coffee, but there and then changed my direction toward that apparition, next to which I sat down, introduced myself without any preambles, and immediately asked her where had she been hiding all week, how was it possible that I hadn’t seen her, hadn’t even known of her existence until that very moment. She told me her name was Pilar, otherwise known as Pilarica, a graduate in psychology from the Complutense University of Madrid, for the past five months working under the supervision of my friend Erick in the archbishop’s palace but also in indigenous communities in the province of Alta Verapaz, where she had been the previous week, that’s why we hadn’t met. A few hours later, at noon, we walked together through the large wooden door on our way to a vegetarian restaurant located in front of the bandstand in Parque Central, conversing in a relaxed fashion, the first time I had left the archbishop’s palace with someone else and without the devil nipping at my heels, a pleasure no matter how you looked at it, walking along and chatting calmly with an attractive girl, a foreigner and apparently intelligent, who moreover worked most of the time just a few feet from my office and with whom I could easily establish a closer relationship, too good to be true, as I soon discovered, for we hadn’t even reached the vegetarian restaurant when I began to detect certain expressions that made me suspect that my delightful companion might be a fanatic of that nonsense called political correctness, which put me slightly on my guard and thereafter made me think that the very fact that we were about to enter a vegetarian restaurant already constituted one alarming symptom, for only a mind accustomed to absurd abstractions and fashionable activism could prefer that insipid food to a good cut of tender juicy meat, which is why so far I hadn’t dared ask her why she had chosen that restaurant for our first meal together, hoping she would allege some digestive ailment resulting from her sojourn in inhospitable regions, but no, just as I feared, once we were seated in that environment infused with a certain sect-like air, which I immediately perceived, Pilar began her diatribe against meat, which was not only repulsive to her but also very unhealthy, enumerating the various harmful, even deadly, effects of ingesting meat, with a lexicon and an emphasis appropriate for the daughter of a military physician and Franco supporter turned savior of indigenous peoples, which is what she did on her trips to the countryside, she met with indigenous communities, victims of the atrocities committed by the armed forces, to help them overcome the trauma they were suffering as a result of not being able to go through the traditional mourning rites, she explained to me, for the worst thing was the absence of cadavers for sinister reasons, which prevented people from carrying out any mourning rituals, as a result of which they suffered all sorts of disorders, something I was already familiar with, as I told her, that’s what the report’s all about, so familiar that I proceeded to take my notebook out of the pocket of my corduroy blazer to read her a few remarkable sentences related to the subject she had just brought up, and I placed it on the table, open, next to my plate of soup: My children say: Mama, my poor Papa where might he be, maybe the sun passes over his bones, maybe the rain and the air, where might he be? As if my poor Papa he was an animal. This is sorrow . . . , I read between spoonfuls, and then I looked for a sentence that had electrified me that very morning: The pigs they are eating him, they are picking over his bones . . . , I enunciated as I reached for my glass of myrtle juice, because they didn’t serve beer at that restaurant, a sip of something to soothe my throat so I could continue reading the sentence, I want to see at least his bones, but at that moment I perceived that Pilar was not enjoying my sentences, the astonished expression on her face indicated as much, as did her stillness, so I decided to close my notebook but not before reading, only to myself, the last of the sentences that I would have liked to share with her, which said, While the cadavers they were burning, everyone clapped and they began to eat . . .

  Luck would have it that the following evening after work I went out with Pilar to have a few beers—thank God she wasn’t abstemious—to a bar called La Bodeguita de Enfrente, a rather odd name, for across the street from this bar, per the name, there was nothing besides a barbershop, and in spite of the diminutive ending in the name it was a large bodega whose walls were plastered with hundreds of posters with revolutionary slogans and at night they had live music, either the keening imitators of the so-called New Cuban Song, or danceable tunes in the style of the Gipsy Kings, but when Pilar and I arrived it was still early, only a few tables were occupied, and we found the best possible conditions for conversation under the congenial influence of the beer, I even revealed to her certain aspects of my life, a vice I am not addicted to, like the fact that a month before I had been forced to leave my country because I had written an article that stated that El Salvador was the first Latin American country to have an African president, a statement that was characterized as “racist” and that won me the enmity of half the country, especially those with power and my employers, despite my subsequent clarification that I was not referring to the fact, anyway verifiable, that the president looked like a black African, for the color of his skin didn’t matter at all, but rather to his dictatorial attitude and his refusal to hear the opinions of those whose opinions differed from his, I explained to Pilar, therefore a month ago I was forced to immigrate to this country, my neighboring country, and accept my friend Erick’s offer to edit the report she already knew about and was also working on. “How did you meet Erick?” she asked, as if I were confessing rather than carrying on a lighthearted conversation under the congenial influence of the beer, and after making vague reference to us having coincided in Mexico during my exile and his graduate studies there, I went on the offensive, now she was the one who had to loosen her tongue, come on, and I asked her with full impunity if her boyfriend also worked at the offices of the archbishop, my only intention being to jar her ever so slightly, never dreaming that I had touched her gangrened wound, as I was soon to find out, for what at first was simply a suddenly altered facial expression quickly became an outburst of tears, an inferno, abject discomfort, a human specimen crying because—I was certain—of so-called love, who would proceed to find in me a captive audience she could spill her guts to—still sucking in her snot—about her tragedy: the guy was named Humberto, he had also been working for the archdiocese when they met—how did you know?—but three weeks ago he left for the Basque Country to study for his Master’s in Political Science, none of which justified her tears, I told her rather sharply; nobody in their right mind would cry because their lover had gone away to study, unless he had gone with somebody else and was sleeping with that person, I said, irritated, because the most irritating thing is a crying woman and her nose started dripping even more freely and she demanded I tell her who had told me about it, as if one needed a gossipmonger’s loose tongue to discover what I had figured out using common sense, I explained, already decidedly uncomfortable, with the waiter eavesdropping from behind the bar—we don’t want another beer, you gimp! I would have loved to shout at him, but at that moment Pilar began wailing uncontrollably about how he had betrayed her since the very beginning of their relation
ship, but she had only realized it when Itzel, her victorious rival and, needless to say, colleague had also traveled to the Basque Country, just one week after Humberto, for no reason and without any explanation, she said still sniffling loudly, to which I responded that the reason resided in Humberto’s crotch, speaking as an expert on couple relationships, and then I offered her my best homily: it’s a sign of an intelligent person to be grateful when they manage, without the slightest effort, to rid themselves of a treasonous and slimy partner, in view of the fact that this immediately and without further ado renders them free to initiate a new relationship that will allow them to open themselves up in a way they never could with the traitor who didn’t deserve them anyway. And I smiled at her, so she would fully understand my words. But Pilarica returned to her old ways, sobbing in a frankly grotesque manner, with no respect for me, who just wanted to drink a few beers and explore the possibility of seducing a girl who appeared to be good-looking and intelligent, what a crass mistake, mucus doesn’t exactly enhance beauty nor tears intelligence, so I gestured to the gimp to bring a couple more beers, getting ready to stand up in deference to my bladder, but at that moment and in a quick broadside she muttered that what hurt her most was that she had lovingly loaned her darling Humberto one thousand dollars and he had turned right around and used it to pay for an airplane ticket for that very same Itzel. Damn! I blurted out at the gimp, who nervously placed the beers on the table. Did you hear that? This girl pays for her boyfriend’s lover’s trip, how many of us have got a girlfriend like that . . . ! The victim of her own stupidity suddenly stopped crying, sat rigidly up in her chair, as if she had just woken up from a dream, dumbfounded, perhaps tempted to become indignant, it seemed, and in response I raised my mug of beer and said, Cheers, not thinking precisely of her but rather of Humberto, a clever fellow from the looks of it and with a great future ahead of him, not to mention Itzel, whose total lack of scruples had fired up my imagination, which led me to ask Pilar what kind of creature was that girl who had taken her, Pilar’s, money to run off with her, Pilar’s, boyfriend, such a perfect scheme that it could only have been conjured up by a woman, but my serious and indignant companion didn’t utter a word. For the moment I found myself in an uncomfortable situation, for there is nothing more repulsive to me than a woman who cries as a result of her own stupidity and who in addition asks for my commiseration, but at the same time nothing so stimulates my fantasies as the possibility of fornicating with a good-looking girl recently abandoned because of her own stupidity whom I could delightfully take advantage of during the act of love, so I didn’t know whether to tell Pilar that we should call an end to our tearful date and proceed to pay for the beers we had drunk, or, on the contrary, activate my strategies of seduction so as to move things forward. My razor-sharp intuition told me that she was undergoing a similar conflict, on the one hand very upset that I had made fun of her stupidity, especially in front of the gimp, but on the other needing company and perhaps not wanting to go home right away only to sink into the murky mire of mortification. Fortunately, at that instant, two enthusiastic guys who worked at the archbishop’s palace appeared at our table, very good friends of Pilar’s, apparently, whom I knew only by sight, and without further ado they sat down, ordered beers, and managed to unravel the knot that had tangled up our date, which I interpreted as a sign from the heavens that I should persevere with Pilar because a good romp in the hay, if it were possible, would calm my nerves and gratify my senses after a week of being shut in a room reading about cadavers and torture.

  When, after eleven o’clock, we got into a taxi that would take us to Pilar’s apartment, I already had indigestion from the two hours I had spent swallowing one song after another of the much-lauded New Cuban Song movement sung by a primate with long curly locks who made Pilar a member of the chorus par excellence, for the Toledan screamed her head off as if by doing so she could recuperate the thousand dollars and her lost boyfriend, while I gulped down my beers, already a bit irritated, though I was very careful not to show it, until finally the primate with long curly locks ended his set, and Pilar looked at her watch with a start and said that she had to work the next day, the look on her face like that of a schoolteacher scolding her young charges, then stood up and asked the waiter to bring us the bill, which favorably impressed me considering the quantity of beer she had inbibed and the unsteadiness of her gaze, for I had assumed I was going to have to remove her feet first from that Bodeguita de Enfrente, which didn’t happen, but instead both of us got into the taxi that would supposedly take us first to her apartment, where she would get out, and then to mine, where I would get out, another event that didn’t happen as expected because when we arrived at her apartment it was suggested that I should take advantage of the opportunity to see it and have one last beer, with her consent, of course, it could not have been otherwise. I forgot to say that Pilar was a typical Spanish girl: thin, with a big ass, small bust, thick eyebrows, a turned-up nose, a nasal and rapid-fire voice; in her plaid skirt she climbed the stairs to her second-floor apartment, followed by my greedy eyes on her swaying ass I was tempted to grab, but we weren’t on such intimate terms yet, despite our flirtations at La Bodeguita de Enfrente and one or another inadvertent brush against each other, so I deferred my attack until we were in the kitchen and after she had taken a couple of beers out of the refrigerator, God’s will be done, my mouth on her mouth, which was not open enough for my liking, my hands caressing her neck, her back, then tightly squeezing her lovely buttocks, which would soon have to become meat to sink my teeth into, which I longed to do, while I led her, without releasing our mouths nor removing my hand from her buttocks, toward the sofa in the living room on which we fell horizontally, and I proceeded, directed by logic, to suck on her little tits and then, with one audacious move my palm was on her pubis and my middle finger slid into her dampness, something so natural that her subsequent reaction left me utterly crushed, because suddenly she turned into a teenage virgin who’d been warned that the wolf comes disguised as a cock, my God, and she pushed me aside and sat up and said, “I can’t,” with two thousand years of guilt drying out her cunt, repeating “I can’t” to convince even herself, her face twisted in a grimace of pain, because things with Humberto were so fresh for her that she was incapable of making love with another man, that I should forgive her, that I should understand her, that it had nothing to do with me, that until she had gotten over what had happened with Humberto she wouldn’t be capable of being with anybody else, she insisted, even though she liked me and she felt good with me, she just couldn’t. And then all the listlessness in the world fell upon my shoulders—I had gone to the wrong theater, which was showing a boring old movie I could follow with my eyes closed because I’d seen it so many times—a listlessness so overwhelming and paralyzing that I didn’t even have the wherewithal to stand up and get myself a taxi, which I should have done, but instead crawled into an armchair facing her, clutching my beer, and resigned myself to watching Pilarica act out her melodrama about that clever young man and that perfidious colleague, a whole litany about one’s self-esteem blown to bits, the tears and snot de rigueur, until I had no choice but to return to the sofa where she was sobbing, comfort her, allow her to cry on my shoulder while I sniffed at her hair, because she used a shampoo I wasn’t familiar with, one that had a strong scent, to tell the truth, almost unpleasant, and while I comforted her I could feel how soft the skin on her arms was and slowly I again began making maneuvers, with some hope, to see if I could breach her defenses with a second assault. I must admit this kiss lasted longer, I could even make her open her mouth the way I liked, my hand also lifted her plaid skirt and caressed her thighs, with largesse, delighting in her pubic hairs, even though they were a little thick for my taste, but the moment I approached her cunt and began to encircle it, she pulled my hand away, whispered “no” but didn’t push me away, as if I were going to spend the whole night kissing her and getting hornier and hornier, so I decid
ed to make a radical move and I went down on her to eat her out, and once and for all stick my middle finger up her ass, sonofabitch, my balls were about to burst, but suddenly she got up, a modest young lady at the far end of the couch, better to leave things as they are, she said, stern but without any reproach. I’m leaving, I said. Then she softened up, but not in the way I wanted her to, instead she said, “Don’t go, I don’t want to stay here alone,” she needed company, the girl she shared the apartment with was away, another Spanish girl who worked at the offices of the archbishop and was traveling through indigenous regions, and I could sleep in her bed instead of risking going out so late at night, she said, standing up and taking my hand so that I would follow her, to which I acquiesced because if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again, and in her bed, all the better, for I still wasn’t intending to give up, by the way, that’s why I barely paused in Fátima’s room, that was her roommate’s name, but rather accompanied Pilar to her quarters, where the bed looked wide enough for us to frolic to our heart’s content, the desk was too small and the titles of the books on her shelves rather horrifying, as I told her when she was on her way toward the bathroom, I presumed to get ready for bed, and while I waited for Pilar to emerge in her short transparent baby doll, as sexy as could be, I set about riffling through her belongings, in the beating of a bird’s wings, but the fact is I was waiting for the Toledan to give me a pleasant surprise, which is why when I saw her come out in one of those Franco-style pajamas worn in the convents of bygone eras so that the novices couldn’t get even their own hands onto their own private parts, my astonishment was absolute, I could only exclaim, And that?! never having seen such a garment, a garment she had surely inherited from her mother, or had been given to her by a strict mother superior, pajamas that really looked like a spacesuit, the only thing missing was the astronaut’s helmet, I thought, still amazed, so much so that I asked her if under that spacesuit she wasn’t also wearing a chastity belt, for I had never seen one in my life and she should let me see it, I begged her, but instead of answering me she crawled under the covers, said she was exhausted, and asked me to please turn off the light.