My Favorite Girlfriend was a French Bulldog

by Legna Rodríguez Iglesias

  * * *

  While I watch her, enormous as a tree, I ignore the rust. She is rusty and her paint is peeling, like all of her kind, but she is still beautiful. I would venture to swear that she is the only beautiful thing in the city. The only thing worth seeing in terms of tourism, for example. A tourism based on estrangement, of course. An intelligent tourism.

  It’s important to me to think of you with a poem in your eyes today. With water in your hands. I wish you a new year full of days and places that are beautiful. True things.

  From a city called Havana to an almost rural town called Camagüey—an aboriginal name, very sonorous. The last time I made this trip I did it with my temple resting on your thighs. The bus crosses the bridge over the Zaza River at one forty-four in the morning. At eighty-five kilometers per hour. In the river at that hour, things are not the same. What lives there most certainly has another state that it will lose at dawn. Seat number one of the bus is for me, a river mighty and black that has no outlet. Entertained by my thoughts, I see the digital clock above the driver flash one fifty-three. In the span of nine minutes I believe I’ve interpreted life and death. But once again, I’ve understood it wrong.

  ETECSA announces: Someone misses you so much they could become athingthatdoesnotexist until they are back in your arms again.

  Before midnight I receive the longed for top-up, twenty dollars doubled that will become many minutes of happiness and that I’ll have to mete out with utter sobriety, with impartial care. Before midnight, as well, the various states of mind intensify, the estrangement, terror, euphoria. Situations quite opposed to impartiality. It’s comforting when the terror gives way to euphoria and then to tacit sleep, even if only for four hours. Before the four hours are up, I hear a voice in the Nokia Lumia that is ever less familiar. It’s been nearly three months.

  My opinion of highways is without a doubt a cliché and one of the most commonplace platitudes in the whole field of architecture. Highways are monotonous, and when traveling on them from one set of coordinates to another, a person remains the same. And that’s why I harbor no compassion or affinity for highways, almost always adorned with signage of a political or educational nature, and instead I reject and avoid them, especially if the trip is a return. A return—another atrocious cliché—should not be undertaken on a highway.

  For a while now I’ve seen that she has company. The wall isn’t so high, and if I’m on foot nothing stops me from standing on tiptoe. A double has been placed in front of her and it looks as though they are talking; she leans over, the other does too, in mutual complicity. Ultimately, though my interpretation of reality differs, they are nothing but simple tools, not even intelligent machines. Me, I’m neither simple nor intelligent, though sometimes I’m a little of both. I peer over, turn on the phone, take a poor four hundred KB photo; I print it at a PhotoService for twenty-five cents, tape it to the refrigerator door. A double is placed in front of me, it opens the refrigerator door, and thinks, There’s nothing here, either.

  It’s the end of the year on an island and it’s assumed, like every day and at the end of every year, that one should open the refrigerator and take something out. I open it and take out a can of beer that’s been frozen since the year two thousand four, when the island’s president tripped and fell after giving a speech and was sick like an animal, like a man. The beer froze without us realizing, it went bad, it busted, it died, it disappeared. I hate the end as much as the beginning. I hate you. Give me that. Give me that, or I’ll take this beer and give it to you in your face until I break your nose. An island is violence.

  I understand that I’ll arrive and I’ll start to work in whatever turns up: a corner shop, an old folks’ home, a cash register, a sink, a stoplight. I understand this but I don’t practice for it, and I know it’s an understanding I should rehearse for ahead of time, essay out with hands and feet, with eyes fixed intently on an imaginary point. A written essay wouldn’t work, for obvious reasons. It’s full-on thirty-first, right at twelve midnight. I go outside holding a suitcase to take a turn around the block. To attract the idea of the journey and, above all, the journey itself. A journey to the future. Something I have never done or even rehearsed, and it turns out to be a good walk, just a little dust between my toes thanks to the flipflops, and two or three scratches from the rocks, the barbed wire. A drunk crosses my path. The suitcase wheels don’t acknowledge him.

  Three streets further on, parallel to my street, always stood the building where she lived—a woman I’ve known since I was sixteen, the first to embarrass me with a simple question I answered in the negative. The question was: Do you know how to play? The woman, then a kid six months younger than me, started moving the pieces by herself on the unfamiliar board. She moved black and white and filled me with envy of both kinds, malicious and benign, and she checkmated herself, looking at me out of the corner of her eye to accentuate the humiliation. I hated her from my darkest depths, and I loved her just as deeply. Now she is in front of me, asking me another question that I’ve forbidden myself to answer. Answers in the affirmative are always the most dangerous.

  The authors I’ve been reading lately alternate between Czech and Austrian nationalities, so I can get this off my chest, off my head, off my belly, I can let it fall on my foot so the nail on my big toe falls off, because I know that the character or characters to imitate will not be silly psychologies but quite the opposite, consummate constructions from consummate literatures from consummate authors, the whole deal. With this generalization in mind I’ve lost all interest in the Latin Americans, the North Americans, the Asians, and the Africans. I know, of course, that I’m committing a grave mistake. I will try to correct it in the coming years. It isn’t wisdom that I need.

  They call them brindles, those dogs whose fur recalls a tiger or a kind of badly colored cat. Likewise, brindle, I’m going now to Western Union, an agency that offers strange services to the population. Likewise, brindle, I’m going now to Transtur, a travel agency that offers three main ticket options, differentiated by cost and length of stay. Likewise, brindle, I put one foot on the landing strip, the border; I address the first official I see and I ask for asylum, I want to conform, I am nonconforming. The official’s fur, sticking out above his ears without conforming to the official hat, recalls a tiger or a kind of badly colored cat.

  The worst part of being no one is not exactly, as logic would have it—assuming it is logical to be someone—being no one, but rather knowing, and on top of that accepting, that you are no one here and now. The phenomenon happens all the time, in any society and in any system—one or the other will harbor the individual and at the same time throw him out, in this eternal circle that at times doesn’t even suffer movement. To posit a straight line as a universe, a core, an individual, a heart, in the twenty-first century, winter of two thousand fifteen, would be an optimistic and of course naive cliché. However, to posit a straight line as a classical symphony or an electrocardiogram is without a doubt a better represented idea of anxiety, though not logical.

  There is only one way to know that you are alone, believing you are not.

  I need an array of elements in order to believe I am OK. And the same number of elements to believe the opposite. I need to share in order to lose, and to know in order to scorn. The place is. In spite of its coordinate and circumstance. Not the circumstance of water on all sides, but, in perpetual contradiction, the circumstance of the desert (hunger and filth) on all sides, confronting the circumstance of appearance (family and filth) on all sides. Testimony and chronicle of reality, the west exists on the screen. It is a document and a misleading, painful question. It can be heard and seen, but not touched. I touched it.

  It’s wrong because there are no horses. Western movies start with a horse, then there’s a man, then a bottle, then a snake, then a cactus, then a whistle. Then another man with his bottle, his snake, his cactus, and his whistle. That’s to say the adversaries, or the friends, or the lovers. But
it’s all wrong because the main thing, the horse, is missing. Or someone wanted to play a dirty trick and removed the horse from the scene. Because if you look at it from the angle of signs, ethically and aesthetically, the rest of the elements can be easily taken away. Man, bottle, snake, cactus, whistle. Take away the horse (beauty and work), and we’re left with five heroic elements that in the west are the most ruthless and common of commonplaces.

  It’s also wrong because there’s no love, either. Or hate. Western movies sweat love and hate from their pores, all the time, from the opening credits to the closing ones. If I say that there is love and there is hate, where are they?

  The truth, being relative, outdoes and underestimates itself. North and south, east and west, up and down. Men and women, children and old people in the interminable west that, when captured by an insomniac and intelligent eye, becomes truth. Not the truth about which one says, “Yes, that’s true,” but the kind one only looks down at with a slight shake of the head, or maybe says: “No, that’s true.” This affirmation/negation constitutes the foundation of a truth, and for me it could be the greatest truth in the world, the most enchanting hoax, and the only thing that matters in the field of indiscipline. Yes, this is the west, I live here. I know what’s happening.

  On opening a book and starting—not starting to open it but rather to read it—something happens. My notion of the dayto-day changes, and my obligations to it become less than weak in the face of the new tasks imposed on me.

  ETECSA is a phone company involved in various processes, including some natural ones. In its manual, there are no blank pages. Only regular pages, and yellow ones. Promotions for top-ups from abroad happen at the end of the month, but you can’t get used to that.

  On preferring

  the cheese croissant,

  my French bulldog

  demonstrates to me,

  in the first place,

  that he has

  very good taste,

  and in the second,

  that he will be very hard

  to please.

  PLASTIC

  If I were a man more or less fifty years old, my life would surely go like this:

  Before going into the house, I park the car in the garage. The house cost me forty thousand, and that was with nothing in it, just some wiring and the water tank. It was a sacrifice, but I’ll be compensated down the road. My daughters are happy. The dog comes to greet me. My wife has the table set when I arrive. They would have liked to buy a house closer to the city, but the city is a monster, and we can take the car there anytime.

  First, my older daughter and I moved in. Then my wife and my younger daughter. The dog came on an in-between trip, because the girls love him. He’s a street dog we found years ago. We took him in, cared for him, cleaned him up, and these days it could be said he is the best dog we’ve ever had.

  The girls call me papi. My wife calls me papi. I’m sure that, every time he opens his mouth and barks affectionately at me, the dog is calling me papi. So that’s my name. First and last.

  I was born on September eleventh, nineteen seventy-three, in an unpopulated region; I was given ID number seventy-three-oh-nine, eleven-oh-nine, one-twenty-nine; married, working-class background. My driver’s license number is the same as my ID number.

  Our house is situated to the east of the city. The place is calm, silent, though in times of crisis we can get break-ins, assaults, even murders.

  Before looking at my email, once I’m sitting in my office with the air sufficiently cooled, I take a plastic bag I’ve crumpled up and turned into a ping-pong ball, and I throw it into the waste-basket. I never miss. From my chair to the basket it’s about three meters and change. The plastic bag traces a more or less perfect parabola. In my inbox, seventeen new messages that I must read carefully, interpret, answer. The plastic bag in the garbage uncrumples in slow motion.

  And if I were a serious, stoic, and clever man, my life would surely go like this, or maybe not:

  Every day I drive through the tunnel and travel a rectilinear course down one of the city’s main avenues, relaxing and delighting in the trees, elegantly pruned and precisely distributed. The cleanliness of this area, with its shopping complexes, its embassies and private companies, attests to a better world, a natural order.

  I can see the particles of oxygen flying around a line of cars, all gray and in perfect running condition, just as every one of us men who work here deserve. I observe the friendliness of these men as they let the next guy pass, because they forgot something in their offices and have to turn around. I imagine how hot it must be outside and I give thanks for my vehicle, equipped with an adjustable temperature that makes me smile and drive simultaneously. Sometimes, I even have erections of happiness before entering the tunnel, and once I’m inside, surrounded by the lights of other cars that have also entered the darkness, I ejaculate fleetingly into a plastic bag that I always carry with me for these occasions. The other drivers, perhaps, are happy with life like I am.

  Before parking the car, I have vexing thoughts. I see my daughters from the car and I don’t recognize them. They were so little when they were born. Now they’re big and wide, and each of them has a voice with a different lilt, each has a different way of looking at me, a different way of obeying me. Sometimes they talk to me without looking at me. They say papi and I know that’s me, but it’s not me they’re looking at. I love them a lot and I also love my wife. I worry about their needs and I caress my wife, but maybe they don’t need my love. Maybe they need another kind of love. Something else.

  Lying in bed, I turn my head and I don’t know if this woman is my wife. She calls me papi and I know that’s me and in the darkness I touch her, I satisfy her, but I’m not sure she is the same woman I married. She has shrunk, narrowed. Sometimes I don’t fit inside her. I don’t desire her. Maybe she doesn’t desire me, either. I prefer to read and go quickly to sleep. She reads all the time. The news.

  If I were, moreover, a man who took advantage of every opportunity that presented itself, this would be the course of a spiraling parabola:

  My political trajectory, starting at twenty-six years old, has only taken place in intimate, ultra-secret circles. During the Battle of Ideas I supplied ideas, domestic products.

  Before turning left to head straight home, I stop at a non-state cafe where they sell various pastries of different prices, sizes, and flavors. I order a caramel pastry, a lemon one, and a chocolate one. It’s Friday and I like to pamper my family. Even the dog will get a taste of each of the pastries I’ve bought. Pastries and white cheese. White cheese and olives. Olives and butter. Butter and bread. Bread and ham. Ham and spinach croquettes. Spinach croquettes and plain yogurt. Plain yogurt and small servings of apricot.

  I predict that my wife will choose the lemon pastry, my older daughter will like the caramel pastry, and the youngest will stick her little fingers into the chocolate. Unwittingly, when I think about my daughter’s little fingers, I experience another erection. I place the pastry boxes to one side, start the car, unfold another plastic bag. Now it’s distasteful.

  As a buyer/seller, which is my current profession, I am in charge of overseeing consignment at certain branches of a State Company, and I’ve achieved a significant increase in sales over these three years of work. In two thousand eleven, sales came to four point six billion pesos. In two thousand twelve, there were six point five billion. In two thousand thirteen and through the first half of two thousand fourteen, billing is up to eight point five billion pesos. A record that weighs on my shoulders. Weighs like my daughters’ futures and the well-being I’ve promised to my wife.

  The promises a man makes should be kept to a T. In his work, as well, a man should fulfill his duties. And if he’s someone like me, who buys and sells highly valued products, he should bear in mind specifications, general selling conditions, or the result will be catastrophic.

  For example, I always keep orders in mind. They must be processed in wri
ting, by fax, or by email, indicating code and quantity. The quantity should match the containers indicated in the price. Conditions or clauses included in the customers’ requests will not be allowed except by prior agreement. And most important of all: for custom products, no orders will be accepted without first sending samples. Payment must be made within ninety days, and it must be received in-house. Returns or exchanges must be communicated in writing to our office for approval. Returns or exchanges will not be accepted more than fifteen days after delivery. In the case of returns for reasons not attributable to our Company, a charge will be applied for the handling and re-shelving of the merchandise. Our Company reserves the right to vary packaging and pricing.

  Before the door opens I take a step back, the pastry boxes in my arms. They’ll come running to me like a herd, they will hug me and kiss me, they’ll say, Yum, papi, those look good! I take a step back, and another step, and another. I go back to the car. I’m careful not to make noise. The dog must be asleep because he didn’t hear me pull up, didn’t bark, didn’t wag his tail, didn’t say papi’s home. I back up very slowly; tires make noise, the grass crunches, I am careful.

  Back on the highway, I try to remember. The last time I bought plastic bags was three days ago. I can’t go anywhere like that, without at least a dozen bags. I park the car in front of a gas station. I go into the little market where one can secure the bare minimum of necessities, like soap, toilet paper, spaghetti, plastic bags. I order a coffee and sit down. Six damp arms, covered in sweat, hug my back, shoulders, and chest. Papi, what are you doing here?