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Don't Come Back Here Any More

Page 4

by Pedro Menchén


  CHAPTER III

  We were walking through Paseo de Recoletos toward Plaza de Colón. The night was cold, but not as cold as that day when we first met. It was almost twelve, not a very favorable hour for walking at this time of the year, and we met very few pedestrians, most of whom shot us sideways glances. John Jairo told me that he was having housing problems. He lived in a house that belonged to some Colombians, a very friendly family. There were six or seven of them all told. And the flat only had three rooms besides the living room, which turned into a bedroom at night. They treated him well, very well, but he didn’t feel comfortable and he had been wanting to move out for some time. It was impossible for him to rent a flat by himself. If only he could have his own room. He was glad to have his own bed, which was a stroke of luck, considering that he hadn’t paid the Colombian family anything for the last two months! At the moment he didn’t have a job, but things were going to straighten themselves out very soon, when he started working at a job in Torrelodones, a suburb of Madrid. They had promised to call him in a week or two.

  We stopped suddenly halfway along the walk, next to a subway station, although neither of us had shown any intention of taking the subway. We stood there, looking at each other in silence, each one waiting for the other to speak the last word of good-bye. I noticed his face in profile and he no longer seemed so handsome. However, perhaps for that very reason, I felt closer in human terms and it stirred some tenderness in me. I remember the restrained movement of his legs, that almost unbearable sensuality of his. I also remember the warmth that issued from the subway entrance, and on the other side, in the square, beyond the leafless branches of the trees, from which hung colored lights (but no, this is not a Christmas story ...), the stony silence of the Columbus statue, illuminated by the spotlights. An old man was walking toward us, from the Plaza de La Cibeles, with his face covered by a brown scarf. I waited for him to pass and then I said: “I’m all alone and I have room to spare. Why don’t you come with me?”

  “Well, I don’t know ...” he said, doubtful, with his head down. At the moment I can’t pay you.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said firmly. “It’s my house and you don’t have to pay anything. We’ll just share expenses. When you’re working, of course. And you’ll have your own room. The only thing I ask of you is that you don’t bring anybody home. I don’t want to come home and find somebody poking around in my things, understand?”

  “Yes, of course,” said J.J.

  “You don’t have to decide now.”

  “Let me think about it, okay?”

  “The truth is that I hardly know you and that ...” he said with a nervous smile, “but you inspire confidence in me ...”

  “Thanks,” he said, avoiding my eyes. “You do the same for me. Okay. I’ll give you my answer the next time we see each other.”

  A week went by without my hearing from John Jairo again. Could he have lost my phone number?, I wondered. Maybe he started work and was too busy or too tired to remember me. Finally I gave in to temptation and called him myself. It was mid-afternoon, but, apparently he had been asleep, since it took him a few seconds to remember me or understand what I was saying. Clumsily, I asked him to dinner “in a Chinese or Caribbean restaurant ...”

  “Chinese is better,” he said, stretching.

  I suggested for our meeting the same bar where we had met the first time, but he countered that he didn’t like it very much and suggested a different one. I had no objection and we agreed to meet in one hour at a new place.

  “Don’t be so punctual,” he said sardonically.

  “Of course. Take all the time you need,” I sighed, partly recovering my self-confidence, “as long as there’s beer in that bar ...”

  I got ready quickly, although I knew I had time to spare. No matter how late I arrive, he’ll always be later. I was putting the finishing touches on my greasy hair, when the phone rang. It was he.

  “Say, buddy,” he said, “do you mind if I bring a friend along?”

  “No, of course not,” I said, surprised and alarmed, “but ...”

  “About that suggestion you made the other day ...”

  “I’d rather you gave me your answer later when we see each other,” I cut him off curtly.

  I had no doubt what his answer would be and I preferred to enjoy the uncertainty a little longer. Besides, the suggestion of bringing a friend of his to dinner with us had disturbed me so much that I was beginning to rethink everything from the beginning. For the moment, I would come up with some excuse not to take him into my home, I told myself. The unexpected visit of some family member would be a justification from which there was no appeal. I also decided that I would show up with a friend. I suddenly thought of Danny. Danny, of course! He liked this sort of thing. Danny! Of course, Danny! I called him immediately and explained the situation to him. Danny said he would love to accept, but that he couldn’t stay for dinner, only the appetizer, because he had an engagement later. Danny always had some engagement later.

  “Anyway,” I told him, “I only want you to take a look at him and tell me what you think. It’s very suspicious that J.J. now wants to come with this friend of his ... If you like this friend, you can have him. But don’t get any ideas about J.J.”

  There was no possibility of such a thing happening, since Danny and I had very different tastes. We never liked the same boys, so we laughed.

  Danny was tall, blond, and had blue eyes. He looked Swedish or Danish, although, naturally, he was Spanish, of Andalusian parents. He looked to be about twenty-five years old, in spite of being more than thirty. An unredeemed narcissist, immature and self-centered, Danny lived only to take care of himself. He was obsessed with his body and he didn’t imagine himself, nor could he imagine himself in the future, being more than thirty years old. He admired Dorian Gray more than any other character in modern mythology. He even considered himself a type of Dorian Gray. Before I met him he had had surgery on his nose and his chin and they had injected silicone in his cheekbones, his lips, and his buttocks. There wasn’t a single wrinkle on his face, and even so, he was already thinking of having a facelift, another facelift. His dyed blond hair could pass for natural. As for his eyes, I never found out if the blue of his pupils was natural. Danny regularly waxed or shaved the hair on his chest and his arms. He had declared war on hair. His beardless face had undergone hard sessions with a laser in a skin clinic. Other than that, Danny had a certain aristocratic class. He knew how to wear ample and youthful garments of the best brands, not in a rigid dressy way, but with studied carelessness, with charming naturalness, showing at times, even, somewhat disjointed or shabby, like those bohemian students of the upper class who make a show of pretended simplicity and appear to despise all that which life has given them in abundance.

  Many other gifts adorned Danny’s character: he knew how to converse, he knew how to listen, he knew how to smile, he knew how to sit anywhere (even on the floor, on the arm of a chair, or on the step of a stairway) and be the center of attention. In any gathering everyone inevitably liked him. His savoir-faire and his androgynous beauty impressed above all. It wasn’t even unusual for women to compliment him on the street. Danny had no recognized occupation. He had never lifted a single finger to earn his living. And he hadn’t even finished law school, which he started in those distant times when he was an ordinary boy with an aquiline nose and brown skin. He lived off the income of his parents, not too rich, to be sure, and he spent his life showing off his charm from gathering to gathering, party to party, in which he had become indispensable. Danny could presume to have a slew of famous friends: writers, singers, actors, one of which eventually had become his lover. However, alas, Danny was not happy. He couldn’t be, since he was unsuccessful in love. Women liked him, but men didn’t, or not the ones he liked. Somehow or other, Danny was resigned and he made do with liking himself.

  When Danny showed up at the café, J.J. and his friend still had not arrived. But that wa
iting time served the two of us to bring our friendship up to date and catch up on gossip and matters of mutual interest.

  Danny knew that Pedro and I had broken up, but not that he had tried to start over with me. This didn’t seem to surprise him (he knew human nature too well). What he didn’t understand was why I had fallen out of love with Pedro.

  “You seem somewhat changed,” he said, observing me with curiosity. “You don’t seem the same as before.”

  “Yes, it’s true,” I admitted. “I don’t even know why I don’t love him. Anyway, it’s not my fault. He was the one who left me.”

  “Yes, but you’re the type that doesn’t like to change. You always said you hated promiscuity.”

  “It’s not that I don’t love him,” I explained, I simply don’t desire him. I no longer desire him. Especially after meeting J.J. Even you will like him. You’ll see.”

  Danny told me finally that he was hooking up on the Internet, although he still hadn’t found anyone to his liking. He chatted, exchanged photos, and sometimes agreed to a meeting with some boy. He would arrange to meet him in a very high-traffic corner of Sol or Gran Vía, walk by him camouflaged, without being seen, and pass him over, since the boy didn’t appeal to him. He had never liked a single boy! And if by some chance he did like a boy, the boy didn’t like him, of course. No, Danny definitely had no luck in love. He couldn’t stand campy gays. His ideal type was a kind of heterosexual who would quit being one as soon as he met him. Something almost impossible. Besides, Danny couldn’t lower himself or humble himself to the point of trying to seduce somebody. Supposedly there were others who had to make the effort to seduce him or to go after him, even those straight boys that he liked so much, who ceased to interest him the moment they showed their uninhibited heterosexuality; for example, if they casually looked at a girl or if they said they had, or had had, a girlfriend ... So Danny couldn’t stand homosexuals who felt attracted to men, nor heterosexuals who were attracted to women (even when they showed themselves ready, by some morbidity or vice, to have eventual relations with other men). In theory, the perfect boy for Danny was bisexual (he himself often said so), but only when said bisexual had stopped being attracted to women, and had not also converted, in addition, to a homosexual/homosexual, but to a heterosexual/homosexual/bisexual, a species not yet discovered by anthropologists, nor, of course, by Danny.

  Through the window of the café, we saw J.J. coming with his friend, a shorter, darker, and plainer boy than he. J.J. was dressed like the first day and wore a baseball cap. His walk, the grace of his movement, suddenly provoked Danny’s admiration, so seldom given to admire anyone.

  “Wow!” he exclaimed. “That boy is a Latin lover!

  “Yes, but he likes women,” I warned maliciously..

  “But you made a pass at him, and he knows it, right? He knows you’re interested in him. I mean ... isn’t he bisexual?

  “I don’t know. Maybe so, but if he is bisexual, he likes women. He’s in love with a girl. He came to Spain looking for a girl. He told me a very romantic story.

  “Sure, sure. Keep him all for yourself, okay?”

  “No, honey, if you like him, he’s for you too. We can share him. You know I’d do anything for you.”

  “Forget it. I’m not interested.”

  “He says he never gets tired of fucking, women, of course,” I insisted with a naughty grin. “He says he can fuck all day.” He must be a phenomenon. Yes, like you say, he’s a Latin lover. He leaves all the girls crazy.

  Danny observed him now with complete disappointment. That a young good-looking guy would desire a woman or make love to a woman, when there were men as irresistible as he, seemed to him an absurdity and an absolute waste. J.J. had just entered the café when Danny said to me, “You have nothing to fear.”

  “You think? But ... they look like criminals!” I whispered in his ear.

  “Nonsense! Just a couple of poor kids!”

  J.J. and his friend came over to our table. Danny got up to go. He wasn’t about to waste his precious time talking with two vulgar heterosexuals who were even showing off about it.

  “You’re going already?” I asked him, alarmed.

  “You wanted my opinion and now you’ve got it.”

  “Yes, but ...”

  At that moment J.J. and his friend stopped in front of us. The four of us stood looking at one another in silence.

  “Danny,” I said. “A friend. He was just leaving ...”

  Danny greeted the two boys courteously and took off, leaving a wake of ambiguity in the atmosphere. The wake that Danny always leaves behind. Nothing stays the same as it was before where he has been.

  “Harrison,” said J.J., “the friend I told you about. The one who was having problems with his girlfriend.”

  “And are the problems resolved now?” I asked as we seated ourselves at the table.

  “No,” said J.J., he got her pregnant. And she doesn’t want an abortion ... She would rather get married, right, mate?”

  “Is she a Spanish girl?”

  “No. Colombian. He met her right after he got here, a couple of months ago.”

  Harrison nodded his head and kept quiet. He didn’t even dare look at me, I supposed out of timidity. Small, dark, plain ... Yes, just as Danny said, he looked like a poor boy, one of those poor boys with no money and no job, who arrive in a foreign and hostile country, who feel out of their natural habitat and don’t manage to adapt. J.J., on the other hand, not only adapted without the need to mimic, but had taken possession of a territory and had set up a fence around it. Bosses are always bosses and underlings are always underlings, in their own habitat or out of it.

  The café was overflowing with people and the waiter didn’t come over to tend to us, so we placed our order at the bar. Orange juice for them, and beer for me. Now at the table, J.J.’s phone rang. He got up without rushing and went outside to talk. There was really too much noise to talk inside. Through the window I could see him gesticulate and talk somewhat irritated, while he moved his legs nervously and kicked the air. I took advantage of the opportunity to initiate some kind of conversation with Harrison.

  “Have you known each other long?” I asked him.

  “Sure,” said Harrison with less timidity than I had supposed. “We’ve always lived in the same neighborhood in Medellín. We’re childhood friends.”

  “Medellín?” I said with a fake smile. “But isn’t that in Colombia?”

  “Yes. Colombia. Of course.”

  “You’re Colombian?”

  “Yes!”

  “But if he’s Venezuelan ...”

  “Venezuelan? No, no. We’re both Colombian.”

  “I thought he was Venezuelan,” I said, somewhat surprised.

  “José Jefferson, Venezuelan? I don’t think he’s ever been to Venezuela! No way! He’s even more Colombian than I am!”

  “José Jefferson ...” I repeated, incredulous. “Medellín ...? Wasn’t that where that famous drug cartel was from? Wasn’t that the most violent city in the world? But ...” At that moment I saw that J.J. put the phone in his pocket and was entering the café. “He likes to be called J.J., doesn’t he?”

  “Yes,” laughed Harrison. “J.J. ... But that’s in Spain! I’ve always called him José Jefferson.”

  “You have very curious names in Colombia,” I said as J.J. was coming toward the table. “Very American, no?”

  “It’s because we are American,” Harrison pointed out.

  “Yes, right. I meant ‘North American.’”

  “So J.J. ...” Harrison laughed again. But J.J. shot him a sidelong look as he sat down, and Harrison’s expression quickly became more taciturn.

  “He’ll call you in a little while, said J.J., lifting the juice glass to his lips.”

  “Me?” Harrison let out a sigh. He was almost at the point of asking “Why?” but he stopped and said only “Okay.”

  He picked up his glass of juice and took a little swallow. We t
hree remained in silence without looking at one another.

  “About what you proposed to me the other day,” ... J.J. finally said.

  “Now I have a little problem ...” I interrupted him, without knowing exactly where I was going with my words.

  “... the answer is yes,” said J.J.

  “Thanks, but I ...” I stammered. “A family member ... A family member is going to come, a cousin .... He’ll spend a few days at my place and ....”

  “That’s no problem for me, mate,” said J.J., guessing, undoubtedly, my fears. “You don’t have to worry about anything.”

  “No, no, there’s no problem. As soon as he’s gone ...” I said to justify myself.

  Then Harrison’s phone rang and he got up so quickly that he almost turned the chair over.

 

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