Don't Come Back Here Any More

by Pedro Menchén

  1

  Don’t Come Back Here Any More

  Pedro Menchén

  Translated from Spanish by

  David Allen White

  Originally published as:

  Y no vuelvas más por aquí

  Madrid, Odisea Editorial, 2005

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This novel is the third installment of Trilogy of Dark Love, which I began in 1999 with A Distant Beach and continued in 2001 with See you in Casablanca. Independent as to plot (they can be read in order if preferred), I have tried to study in each one of them a different aspect of the nature of love. The text presented here contains some changes from the edition published by Odisea Editorial in 2005.

  P.M.

  June, 2017

  To you,

  who were companions of my life.

  To you,

  who never were companions of my life.

  To you,

  who never shall be companions of my life.

  PART ONE

  LATIN LOVER

  “Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

  Blanche du Bois, in

  A Streetcar Named Desire,

  TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

  CHAPTER ONE

  This tale could be a Christmas story if it had a happy ending. For there is no Christmas story without a happy ending. A sad beginning, very sad; cold, extremely cold; maybe snow, solitude, desolation, fir trees covered with gifts displaying their reverberant profiles through the windows of the houses, colored lights illuminating the streets, branches of holly with red berries in shop windows and all that sort of thing, and, of course, a happy ending around a pretty table with candles, a white tablecloth with a lace, an immense roast turkey with cranberry sauce on a tray and the protagonists elegantly dressed, all set to take their seats for the meal ... However, this story doesn’t have a happy ending. It has just now ended in an atypical and vulgar form, next to a highway, along a ravine. It’s what I imagined. I saw him grab the pistol from the bag that was in the back seat of the car. He walks toward me, crestfallen (he doesn’t like to have to do it, I know, but he can’t avoid it: I’m a troublesome guy, I know too many things about his life) and he’s going to shoot me, he will kill me without the slightest regret (I know it, he’s like that, I’m not the first person that he’s killed) and then he’ll leave me thrown there, at the bottom of the ravine, with my body half submerged in the creek and the blood bubbling from my mouth, dyeing in bursts the cold water a scarlet color that is already swirling over my shoulders and my head, while he gets far away from here in the car, in the same car that I rented for him, leaving no trace, with a slight smile on his lips and that expression of innocence and sweetness, so unbearably beautiful, like that day on the bus, when he looked at me with those stateless eyes of his and that amoral candor of people who have never felt guilty of anything, although they have committed the most heinous acts. So this tale is not a Christmas story. No, it’s not. Although it could be, since it has a sad beginning, very sad, and it’s cold, very cold. In fact, it had snowed that morning and part of the snow had still not melted; it still adhered to the marquees of the boutiques, the windowsills, and the gargoyles of the churches, the euonymous bushes in the gardens and the bare limbs of the plane trees, and there were also lights, many lights all over the city: in the windows of shops and department stores, on the balconies of houses, on the facades of hotels and office buildings, in the trees along the avenues and boulevards. It was the beginning of December, but Christmas was already in the air, and I felt very sad, so sad and pitiful the way everyone always, inevitably feels, who is alone at this time of the year, even though they smile and try to hide it or make out like these Christmas holidays don’t mean anything to them. I was sad because my boyfriend had just left me. Something as simple as that. A few days earlier he had handed me the keys to the apartment, after gathering all his things, and had taken off for good to live with another guy. To tell the truth, we had already been separated for some weeks, since he was no longer sleeping at home. He went only to drop off his dirty clothes and take a shower, almost always when I wasn’t there. Sometimes he’d stay a while watching television, stretched out on the sofa, and I noticed his traces, the cushion where he had rested his head, the blond butt of a cigarette in the ashtray, or some hand-written note where he told me somebody had called on the phone. Still, sometimes, Pedro came to sleep at home, but he got in so late and got up so early, or made so little noise, that I was unaware of his presence. I realized it the next day, in the morning, when I saw his unmade bed and some article of his clothing tossed on the floor. Ours was an unreal situation, very irritating and disagreeable for me. I had already stopped loving him. Although I didn’t want to hate him either. But somehow I was feeding a certain resentment against him. I couldn’t forgive him for telling the truth from the beginning, for being so honest with me, nor for treating me with so much respect and consideration. I would have preferred a fight, a violent scene, with insults and all that sort of thing, to get rid of my anger and frustration. I would have preferred him to storm out angry, and that we never spoke again. But no. Pedro behaved properly with me right to the end. He even introduced me to his new boyfriend. He took us out to eat together a couple of times and pretended that we were getting along. I don’t think he even realized the harm he was doing me. So I was glad when he finally gave me the keys and left. But it was from then that I thought about how much I still loved him, how much I needed him. Or maybe it was only love’s inertia. I no longer saw wet towels in the bathroom or cigarette butts in the ashtrays, I no longer tripped over clothes scattered around nor notes telling me somebody had called on the phone. And still, for many days afterward I kept looking for wet towels, cigarette butts in the ashtrays, and notes with phone messages as soon as I came in the house. My work day was eight to three in some offices at City Hall. I had too much free time and when I finished work I went straight home, as I had always done. Nevertheless, the house was now closing in on me and the days were becoming endless. The silence, the darkness that was taking over every corner and the secure knowledge that he was no longer coming to see me terrified me. But I didn’t call my friends and I didn’t put on music or watch television or listen to the radio. I fell into a deep indolence. I gave up my domestic obligations and quit eating at home. I ate only once a day at a bar near the office and on weekends not even that: I would nibble on a magdalena or open a can of sardines, swallowing with difficulty, and wiping all the oil out of the can with a piece of dry bread. I didn’t want to feel sorry for myself and I refused to believe that I was desperate or that I had fallen into some kind of crisis. So when my friend Pruden showed up that Sunday at my house in the middle of the afternoon and said as soon as he saw me, “Fuck, Ramón, you look like shit! What happened to you?”, I didn’t even realize at the time what he was talking about, nor did I understand what he meant. “Okay, okay,” he went on. “Pedro went off with that other ... ”

  I looked at him with no expression as I stood in the middle of the living room, incapable of responding or reacting.

  “But, fuck, it’s not the end of the world, is it? Or do you think you’re the only guy who ever lost your lover? This new guy would have dumped him sooner or later. How old are you? Twenty-eight, twenty-nine? Don’t tell me you think you’re too old to start over!” he added ironically. “Come on, take a shower, put on some decent clothes, and let’s get out of here!”

  “Thirty-one,” I said. “I’m thirty-one.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, I’m forty.”

  “I was reading ... .” I continued, without much conviction, showing him the volume of Turgenev that I was holding in my hand.
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br />   “So you were reading, weren’t you? Fuck, man, if you could see what you look like!” Pruden looked me up and down with a condescending smile. “This looks like a squatter’s house! I feel sorry for you!”

  I still didn’t react.

  “Wow, I didn’t know it would affect you so much. Go on, put down the book and let’s get you a hustler. It’s just what you need.”

  “Hustler!” I cried with horror. “I don’t want a hustler! I don’t like hustlers!”

  “You’ll like the one I know,” said Pruden. “He’s got a big one. You like guys, right? Well, this one ... .”

  “No,” I said obstinately, “I don’t like hustlers. I want a boy who feels the same as me, who wants me as much as I want him, not a guy who does it for money.”

  “Okay, okay, it doesn’t matter,” said Pruden, snatching the book out of my hand and tossing it on a chair. “Change your clothes and let’s go.”

  Pruden was one of those typical older gay men who live with their mothers. Not very attractive physically, but with money. He didn’t have a lover or pretensions of having one. He owned a ready-to-wear clothing business, a small workshop where six or seven employees worked. From Monday through Friday he devoted himself exclusively to his business and taking care of his mother. However, on the weekends it was his sister who looked after her, and he, freed from this obligation, went out to have fun and stumble around the Chueca district. Pruden felt a special predilection for bartenders, preferably young nelly ones. Because he was a good customer, the boys had no choice but to put up with him. At first reluctantly, as a nuisance, later with resignation, and finally almost with pleasure. Pruden was so persuasive and so patient that they finally came to love him, although only from the habit of seeing him. He waited for bartenders to get off work and he took them for dinner at some of those restaurants that didn’t close all night or to some other gay bar that closed later. He was generous. He always paid for taxis and admission to the discotheques. The boys had fun with him until daybreak, and when he made like he was going to take them to the bachelor pad he had in Malasaña, they simply disappeared. The place where we had just arrived could not have been more sordid and depressing: a tiny bar attended by a little man with glasses who was more than sixty years old and never stopped coughing, three or four drawings of Tom of Finland, photocopied from some book and hung up somehow on the damp and chipped walls, a little stage in one corner, where supposedly, from time to time, some drag queen would have to perform, and where now there were various back copies of Shangay magazine, almost totally dark, stale air, saturated by that odor which is always left behind by frustration and unsatisfied sexual desire, a few hustlers, all of them foreigners in the country illegally, dirty and depleted: Moroccans, Russians, Ecuadorians, Romanians ... and of course the inevitable songs of Cher, Kylie Minogue, Madonna or Mónica Naranjo. At the end of a long and labyrinthine hallway, which led to the toilets, there was a small dark room with a video screen, where they were showing porno films, and two or three booths. All the hustlers seemed quite sad and pitiful. They never stopped casting pleading eyes at the no less sad and pitiful customers. They didn’t dare get close to the bar, since, in all probability they didn’t have enough money to pay for their drinks, and they wandered around the hallways, the toilets, and the back room in hopes that some interested person would apply for their services. I had just drunk the last sip of my beer when the door opened and a boy entered who awakened my curiosity.

  “That one, that one ...” Pruden said in my ear as soon as he saw him, making very expressive gestures.

  The boy passed alongside me without looking at me. He ordered a Coca-Cola from the bartender, paid with a ten-euro bill, and put the change in a slot machine that was next to the bar. Everyone observed him furtively, but he didn’t condescend to look at anyone. A very fat guy, perhaps an old customer, approached him and whispered a few words in his ear, but the boy kept playing, without paying him any attention. Later, when his coins were all gone, he looked casually where I was standing, and our eyes met. Then I saw how extraordinarily handsome he was. One doesn’t meet a boy like that every day. Certainly not. I saw that he was heading back through the hallway to the toilets and Pruden, fearing that someone would get ahead of me, spurred me to follow him. He didn’t have to beg me much. I left my beer on the bar and advanced, timid and nervous, down the hallway. I found the boy stopped by one of the booths. We both looked at each other fixedly in the eyes. Two guys approached that way on the prowl, but when they saw we were ignoring them, they disappeared into the back room.

  “What?” said the boy to me, undoubtedly Spanish. “Aren’t we going to get it on?”

  “Okay,” I answered. “How much?”

  “Depends on what you like to do.”

  “Well, I ...”

  “Twenty euros for a blowjob,” he said. It was my understanding that forty or fifty was usual in these cases, but maybe the local rate didn’t allow for more. “Thirty, if you want me to stick it in your ass,” he added.

  “No, thank you. I don’t want you to stick it in my ass.”

  “Well I’m not going to let you stick it in my ass!” he warned.

  “It’s okay. I don’t ...”

  We saw that someone was coming down the hallway and we kept quiet. The boy then opened the door to the booth and motioned for us to go in. The booth was a meter and a half wide and a meter and a half long with a small ledge on the wall that seemed to serve as a seat, a red light in the ceiling, a roll of toilet paper, and a trash can with a plastic liner. The boy latched the wooden door and we stood face to face.

  “You’re very handsome,” I told him, putting my hand on his face. I got even closer to him and kissed his neck, his eyes, and his forehead. I was starting to embrace him, when he pushed away from me for a moment in order to take off his jacket, which he hung on a hanger. I did the same with mine. I embraced him again with all my might. I put my cold hands under his sweater and caressed his waist and his back. He had smooth soft skin. Then I moved my lips to his, but he repulsed me brusquely.

  “Neither the ass nor the mouth,” he said, irritated.

  I backed away from him, not knowing what to do. I saw him unzip his fly and pull out his penis. Still, I didn’t touch it. I moved closer to him again and kept on caressing his head and his back; kissing his neck, his eyes, and his forehead.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Javi,” he said, dryly.

  “Is that your real name?”

  “...”

  “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Really? You look younger. How long have you been doing this?”

  “Listen, mate, why are you asking me so many questions? Does it take you a long time to come?”

  “Well, I ...” I said, and backed away from him, disappointed.

  “If you want me to put it in you, thirty euros,” he insisted.

  “But can you stick that thing in just anybody?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fuck!”

  I caressed him again, almost without desire. Suddenly he pushed me away and climbed up on the ledge. I didn’t understand why he was doing that until he had his penis exactly in front of my mouth. So that was the function of the ledge, to allow the comfort of the customers when they were performing fellatio.

  “No, no,” I said. “I don’t want to suck your dick. Get down, please.” The guy obeyed me, confused and antagonized. “I want to kiss you.”

  “No, I already told you, not the mouth.”

  “Please,” I insisted. “I’ll pay you more if you let me kiss you. What about forty euros?”

  “No, I don’t like for men to kiss me.”

  “What’s the matter? Fifty euros!” He made a sign of doubt and I knew he was mine. “A kiss is harmless. Besides, it’s your fault for having such a beautiful ... .”

  “Cut the spiel!” he said, repressing a smile. “Why don’t you suck my dick and be done with it?”
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  “No, I want your mouth. Sixty euros!”

  “But ... are you going to give me tongue and all that?”

  “Of course.”

  He let out a deep sigh, whether of anger or impatience, tightened his fists, and I thought he was going to hit me. But to my surprise he said, “Okay, kiss me and let’s get it over with!”

  “Thank you! I promise you won’t regret it.”

  “You’re the strangest guy I’ve seen.”

  I looked at him, embattled, still unable to believe it. I thought that I had no right to kiss that mouth, not even if I paid sixty euros.

  “Come on! What are you waiting for? Kiss me!”

  “Of course,” I said.

  I moved my nose close to his and breathed with delight his hot breath (the breath of a man in heat, I thought). I imagined that we were boyfriends, that the two of us were in love, and I began to kiss him softly, very softly, exploring his tongue and his teeth with my tongue, permeating myself with the taste of his mouth, of that fragrance of his, so intimate and personal, while I caressed with my hand his enormous flaccid penis. I ejaculated in a few minutes, not caring where my sperm fell, if it stained the floor or the wall. The guy, like the good professional that he was, handed me the toilet paper, although a little late, and when I gave him his sixty euros, he ran immediately to the toilets to rinse his mouth so as to erase the traces of my kiss. I heard him spit and gargle.