And right now I’m on the point of crying contemplating you. Please let me contemplate you. But don’t look at me like that, okay? What dark impenetrable eyes! I never know what he’s thinking. And why are you stopping the car? Oh, yes, there’s some kind of watchtower and the sight must be ... You’re sad too. You’re beautiful, and therefore sad. It breaks my heart every time I look at you. Your beauty hurts me. The hurt that you cause me almost gives me chills. I feel that I could hug you and cry for hours and hours, days and days, and that nothing else in this world could comfort me. Nothing! Not even your kisses could manage to comfort me!
“Let’s go take a look, mate.”
“Yes. Let’s.”
We soon discovered that we were on the edge of a ravine or a small gap, at the bottom of which flowed a creek with cold churning water. It’s a startling vision: snow partly covering the flat ground, some crimson clouds veiling the last sunlight of the afternoon, the wind howling around us, and suddenly, the deep unevenness opening in the terrain, discovered by accident, right here, at my feet. I feel a slight dizziness. I’m almost at the point of losing my balance and falling. I scrape a pebble with my foot and it falls, rolling over the cliff until it shatters on the rock at the bottom. J.J. is right behind me at this moment and watches me in silence. Instinctively, I back up a couple of steps and notice immediately that he has caught my fear.
Without looking directly at him, I know he has gone back to the car, put his hand in the bag and pulled out the gun. It’s what I imagined. 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. Nobody will find my body for months. I’m a sentimental fool. I thought that with me he wouldn’t ... But who am I? The only thing he cares about is my money. I should have stayed in that restaurant. It looked like there was a town nearby. Then I should have gone back to Madrid. But I got in the car, and that was my mistake. I wanted to die. I knew what I was up against. Or maybe I no longer want to die? No. I’d like to know if he was capable ... That’s it ... And of course he’s capable. He is. How stupid I was. But I don’t care. No. I don’t care. I’m tired of suffering and feeling pathetic. Come on, you bastard! What are you waiting for? Go ahead and fucking finish me off! Shoot me! But do a good job, with a little elegance. With that natural elegance that you have. Come on! What are you waiting for? Shoot me now and clear out!
“J.J.,” I said when I saw him coming with the gun in his hand, I know that you’re going to kill me, but let me tell you ...” I really had nothing to say, or rather, it seemed ridiculous to tell him that ..., because this was the only thing I wanted to say. “Okay, in short, it doesn’t matter ... Shoot me and get it over. I’m not afraid of death. You see?” I said with a nervous smile, trying to hide the chattering of my teeth. I’m braver than I thought. Come on! Shoot! What are you waiting for? Let’s get it over with!
J.J. stopped in front of me, expressionless, with cold, vacant eyes. I thought: “He’s not going to shoot me. He’s going to push me down into the ravine so it all looks like an accident.”
“Please,” I said, “Shoot me. Shoot me in the heart or in the head so I die quickly. I wouldn’t like to suffer.”
At that moment his lips drew a grin of mocking or scorn. He raised the gun and made a strange movement with his hand: instead of gripping it, he palpated it again and again, as if he was calculating its weight. Then, unexpectedly, he took an impulse and threw it cleanly over the creek.
“It’s over,” he said. “This story is over.”
“What?” I asked, confused, not understanding.
“I’ve been wanting to get rid of this weapon for a while,” said J.J., looking at the bottom of the creek. Then he turned his eyes toward me and looked at me carefully with a smile. “But did you ever think I wanted to kill you?” he asked.
“Well, I ... You seemed so strange ...”
“Please!” he said with a sigh. “How could I hurt you? How could I hurt the only person who really loved me, after her, the only person that I ...?”
At that moment something started to move under my feet. Two or three small stones rolled toward the edge of the ravine. I was dizzy and I didn’t dare look down. Even so, I lost my balance. The earth kept falling away under my feet and I knew I was going to fall. Even so, I didn’t want to give in to panic. I made a vain attempt to hold on to something. I stretched out my hands and reached for the air ...
“Hey, come on, come on! What are you doing?” said J.J., grabbing me at the last moment and holding me forcefully in his arms: “If you fall and kill yourself, what will become of the vacation that we planned together?”
CHAPTER X
“Look,” I said, “what a tiny hotel! It’s like a one-family home that rents rooms. And it’s open! There’s smoke coming from the chimney! Please, Let’s stay here!” It was the perfectly hideout to spend two or three peaceful days, such as I had imagined, a suitable place in the middle of a remote and isolated valley, covered with woods. J.J. made no comment and I continued: “It looks like one of those enchanted hotels that El País recommends. It couldn’t have more than five or six rooms. And what views!
“It’s probably a hotel for couples,” said J.J., reticent.
“And what are we but a couple?”
“Okay ... what I mean is ... I wouldn’t like for them to figure out ...”
“Look our appearance! How can anybody suspect that we aren’t straight? Besides, at Christmas people are tolerant and friendly. Who’s going to think about that? It’s almost night and we don’t even know where we are! I’m not sure that we can find another hotel very easily. No, at least, one so ...”
“It’s all right. Let’s go there, if you want.”
“No. We’ll only go there if you also want to.”
“Good. Let’s go there.”
“For now, let’s take a look at the bar. I’m sure there must be a bar!”
“Do you feel like a good hot cup of coffee?”
“A brandy is more like it.”
With thick whitewashed walls, rugged windows, and dark varnished wooden doors, strong clay tiles, and high vaulted ceilings, the Hotel Mesana was as cozy on the inside as it seemed from the outside. Some oil paintings, not too bad, with still life or vegetable motifs, and quite a number of gadgets of antique rural life stuck in corners and hallways, served to qualify even more, if that were possible, the rustic atmosphere of the place. As for the furniture, it was from different styles and periods and seemed to come, as if by chance, different periods of antiquity. It was supposed to depict, obviously, an old farmhouse or an old disused mill, converted into a hotel after appropriate remodeling.
There was nobody behind the small reception desk when we arrived. Only a white cat, on a chair, who was pleased to accept my caresses with a soft purr. A girl of ten or eleven passed through the little hall and when she saw us, she said: “My mom is in the bar. Did you want a room?”
“Yes,” I said.
“We don’t have any left. The hotel is full up. Mom, Mom!” she started to shout.
“You don’t need to call her,” I said, horrified by her shouting. “We’ll just go into the bar. Thanks.”
The bar was a much larger spa
ce than one would have supposed. A fireplace at the back, in which crackled the twisted stump of an old knotty vine, eight or ten tables with wooden chairs of different models and sizes, four windows looking onto the valley on one side, and, on the other, at the bend of a backwater creek, a small bar on the left, next to the door, where a relatively young blonde-haired woman was serving, and, at the far end of the room, a pool table!
“Wow!” I exclaimed with enthusiasm. “Do you feel like playing a game of pool?”
“Why not?” said J.J. “But do you know how to play pool?”
“Naturally!” I said, offended. “What do you take me for?”
There were three or four customers at the bar and as many others seated at the tables, most of them young. I saw the blonde woman smiling at us and I went over to her.
“Good evening,” I said. “We were wanting a room, but your daughter told us there weren’t any left.”
“Yes and no ... The truth is that they’re all reserved,” the woman lamented. “This time of the year we never have any openings. Everything has been reserved since October.”
“Wow, what a shame! And you wouldn’t know of any other hotel around here? We left Madrid at noon, we’ve fooled around too much, stopping at different places and now, since it’s night ...”
“No. There aren’t any. You’d have to go to the national highway ... Although it happens ... But I don’t know if you’d be interested ...”
“Do you mean you do have a room?”
“Yes and no. You see, like I said, everything is reserved, but this morning one of our former guests called. His wife is sick ...”
“So he canceled his reservation, is that it? But then, what’s the problem?”
“Well, in that room there’s only one bed. A honeymoon bed with a canopy ... All our guests are couples and ...”
“I told you, mate,” whispered J.J., lowering his head.
“Oh, well! Is that all!” I exclaimed. “But that doesn’t matter to me. What about you? Does it matter to you?” J.J., blushing, avoided looking at me.
“I don’t know ...”
“Well, that’s what’s available,” the woman concluded. “I supposed that ...”
“If the bed is wide enough ...” I added, looking at J.J. sideways.
“Yes, yes it is,” assented the woman and her face lit up with a maternal smile. “But, why don’t you look at the room first and then decide?”
“Okay,” agreed J.J.
“Sounds good to me,” I said. “But first let’s have something to drink, if you don’t mind. I’d like a brandy.”
“For me a really hot coffee,” said J.J.
“Very well.” The woman, business-like, took a glass from a shelf and then headed toward the place where there were bottles of brandy. “It’s a very cold night and you must be tired from your journey, am I right?”
“Yes, you are,” I said, winking an eye at J.J.
When the woman put the drinks on the bar, I paid the bill and ask for change for pool. I quickly put a coin in the slot, took out the balls and began to arrange them in a triangle.
“See how nobody suspects anything?” I whispered to J.J. “Nobody is looking at us strangely. I didn’t know you were so fearful or that you had so many preconceptions. Look at it this way, what could be more straight than playing pool? But it doesn’t matter, even if they suspected something, nobody would dare say anything to us. A honeymoon bed! Fuck! I hope that when we get up there you’re not going to fall asleep! And don’t go telling me now that it’s not a good time for ...!”
“What do you think? asked the woman proudly as soon as she opened the door to the room on the second floor, at the end of the hall. Quite so! There was a huge bed with a canopy. There was also a ewer, a chest, and a mirror in a baroque frame, very old, among curious objects, all of them arranged for daily use and not for mere decoration. The view of the creek almost at the point of overflowing, surrounded by cottonwoods and poplars, was magnificent.
“Ah, very well,” I said. “But this is incredible! More than a hotel, it seems like a museum of manners or something like that ...”
“Every room is different,” continued the woman. “Every bed different. Every chair different. There are no two sticks of furniture alike in the whole hotel. And the sheets, the drapes, the towels ... Everything is made by hand. I did it all and I embroidered ... My husband only restored the house. He plastered the walls and painted them, he put down the floors, he installed the bathrooms ... Now he has taken over the management and the kitchen.”
“You’re not from here, are you?” I said, observing the woman with more and more attention. You came from some city, didn’t you?”
“Yes. How do you know?”
“It shows. It always shows.”
“Well,” admitted the woman with simplicity, supporting her hands on her hips, and it was then that I realized that she was pregnant. “We left the city a few years ago. We were both college students and we wanted to live in a quiet place ...”
“What were you? Two hippies or something like that?”
“More or less,” she laughed. “Like all the kids from that period. Vicente, my husband, received an inheritance from his parents and we bought this house with very little money, because it belonged to an uncle of his, who was already very old. At first we thought about just living here and getting by on what we could raise in the garden ... We were naive and romantic! But before long we realized that it was impossible to live like that, so we decided to convert the house into a hotel. We worked hard for a couple of years until we finished the remodeling and the hotel started to work ... We’ve been at it fifteen years. This is an eco-friendly hotel. Did you notice the panels? All the energy that we use is solar. We like natural things ... No genetically modified food or anything like that.”
“Wow, that’s interesting!” I exclaimed. “Or rather, you’re something like two radical ecologists. You left the madding crowd and settled into this small paradise. How I envy you!”
“Well,” said the woman with a gesture of fatigue, “the country takes a lot of work! And then there are the children! We have three! A woman helps us, but, even so ...! It’s very complicated to raise them and all that! No, paradise doesn’t exist! Besides, there are times when no guest comes to the hotel and we are very alone. When you’re born in the city, it’s hard to get used to the country.”
“I understand.”
“How do you like the room?”
“I like it,” I said. “And you?” J.J. assented with a look. “Of course. We’ll take it.”
“Very well,” said the woman. “Then here’s the key. Room number 5. Dinner starts at 7:30, within a quarter of an hour. Today we have pumpkin soup. Have you ever tried pumpkin soup?”
“Mmmnnn! No, but I’m sure it’s delicious. Are you also vegetarians?”
“Yes. But we understand that not everyone can share our lifestyle, so, if you wish, you can order meat or fish as a second option. We have a large assortment of frozen foods.”
“Thank you. You’re very kind.” I closed the door from the inside and stood looking at J.J. fixedly. “And now ...” I said, moving closer to him, “now I’m going to kiss you violently.”
“You must mean ‘urgently’.”
“No. I mean ‘violently’. Although I’m also going to do it ‘urgently’. And it’s because I think that love can only be made to you violently. And no excuses count! No, J.J., not now!”
“We’ll fuck all night if you want,” said J.J., taking my hand and putting it on his fly, while I contemplated his mouth. “But now I have to go for the luggage. I don’t like to leave things outside in the car.”
“What things?” I protested, hiding a spasm. “I didn’t bring anything! And the only thing that could implicate you, you threw into the creek, didn’s you?”
“Yes, but there are still some things out there that I would prefer to have with me. I’m just going for a moment to get the bag. I’m com- ...”
<
br /> “No!” I said, choking off his words with my kisses. “Don’t go now! Later!”
In a few minutes we were naked, making love like crazy men. I had a rapid orgasm as soon as I stroked his ass and felt his penis rubbing against my leg. J.J. bit my ear while he grabbed me forcefully around the waist and I licked his neck. That and the taste of his skin is the last thing I remember, before falling sound asleep.
I awoke with a start at two thirty in the morning. I groped blindly all over the bed with my hands and didn’t find J.J. Alarmed, I turned on the light. No. He wasn’t there. I jumped out of bed and ran naked to the bathroom. No. He wasn’t there either. I looked out the window and saw in the shadow the waters of the creek and the trees. I went back to bed and wrapped myself in the sheets completely stiff with cold. I couldn’t believe that J.J. would have left. No, not yet. A little while later, I got up again and dressed. I opened the door of the room and took a look out in the hall. Everything was quiet and dark. I crept down the stairs and got to the reception hall. No one was ther. Through the window I scrutinized the place where we had left the car and it wasn’t there! “So he has gone,” I told myself with resignation. But I couldn’t believe it. No, not yet! I went back upstairs to my room. I sat down on the bed. And then I had a presentiment. I put my hand in the pocket and ... the money had disappeared! However, there was something in there. There was a paper, a piece of recycled paper with the letterhead of the hotel, on which was written, in clear determined letters, the following text:
Don't Come Back Here Any More Page 13