This Is Not America

by Jordi Puntí

  At this point, the narrator would like to skip the details of Ibon’s enervating wait. The hands of the clock keep dawdling all day long, filling his afternoon with doubts. What to wear? Shall I take a novel in case she arrives late? Should I start talking about Orange Juice immediately? Do I need to mention Emili? (Definitely not!) It’s all unnecessary anyway, because destiny does its job of shepherding the hours and the meeting is definitely arranged. So let’s go.

  It’s nearly six and Ibon is more than punctual when he arrives at the address he’s been given. All day long, after hanging up the phone, he’s planned with the meticulousness of a movie director (and some hysteria) how the first instant of his life with Anna will be played out—the looks, the gestures, the angles from which the cameras will film the imaginary scene; but, as it happens, Anna ignores the script and improvises. Ibon is looking up and down the sidewalk, gazing at the faces of passersby and expecting to see a woman coming toward him with an air of knowing what she’s doing. Then he hears the street door of the building opening behind him and a voice saying hello.

  “You must be Ibon,” says Anna. He turns, startled, flabbergasted, says yes, and shyly holds out his hand. She’s finally standing there before him, alive, complete, defined, and their eyes meet for the first time. Once he’s over the initial astonishment, he relaxes—from her saleswoman’s experience, she’s silently grateful for this—and now, for an intense tenth of a second, Ibon contemplates the whole Anna in all her splendor. Yes, in essence it’s the same face he divined at home outlined on marble, but with one small difference. The real Anna has her hair pulled back, which is probably required for her saleswoman’s image. Ibon lets the momentary dissonance melt away into the agitation of the present and asks how come she was upstairs in the apartment. She says she went up to open the windows and air it, as it’s been closed up for a while and is a little stuffy, as he’ll notice. Then she invites him to come up. She’s not sure if she told him by phone, but it’s on the sixth floor and very sunny.

  For Ibon, the elevator is a decompression chamber. Locked inside it with Anna, the two of them in that tiny space, he soon understands that he mustn’t rush things, that he has to play his part, be guided by her, and see what happens. He asks her about the neighbors, how old the building is, and if anyone else has a dog (he has a six-month-old pup called Whisky, an adorable little fellow). Inside the apartment, the ceremony of walking around empty rooms begins. Anna, very professional, first shows him where each one is and draws attention to their qualities: spacious dining room, practical kitchen, very quiet bedrooms—two of them—and a fully fitted bathroom. They go out for a moment onto the small terrace, where two flowerpots full of dry earth have survived and, using the same words, they both praise the view of the city and the green of the trees in the nearby park, just four or five streets away. Some people would pay a fortune for this view. Then she leaves him so he can look around by himself and think it over. Meanwhile, she sits on the only chair in the dining room, a wobbly bit of junk that someone separated from its family, and consults her agenda to organize her appointments for tomorrow.

  For all his excitement, Ibon immediately sees that the apartment is pretty ordinary, but he pretends he likes it so he can spend a little longer with her. He goes back into every empty room, listening to his footsteps echoing in the silence of the evening. A vague melancholy floats around the apartment, slipping through walls where dust has framed ghosts of former furniture, mirrors, and pictures. Yet he doesn’t think it’s a gloomy melancholy. Maybe that’s why he starts humming “A Place in My Heart,” his fetish song by Orange Juice, and he can’t help filling up the emptiness with snippets of his future life. He’s totally unembarrassed about fancying that he’s living here with Anna. He goes into the kitchen and clearly sees the two of them having breakfast in the morning before leaving for work. He’s in somewhat of a hurry and playfully dunks his muffin in her latte. She pretends she’s annoyed. He laughs until he’s got globs of wet muffin shooting out of his nose. Then they both laugh even more. In one of the rooms, their bedroom, he witnesses the final touching notes of a scene where they’re sitting on the bed, making up after a ridiculous squabble and, all of a sudden, he feels like a little boy, the son who doesn’t quite understand but knows he’s happy because Mommy and Daddy love each other again. He returns to the dining room and, from the passage, seeing the real, physical Anna outlined against the slanting evening sunlight, stops humming Orange Juice. He sneaks up closer and leans in the doorway without going into the room. You could say that here, too, Ibon is mentally starring in some corny video. He watches her concentrating on her papers, radiant, her hair tied back. A movement of her lips, which he finds sensual, seems to promise many things. She’s not aware of his presence. Carried away by the mystery of the scene, he spontaneously closes his eyes as if asking for a wish, constructing a fantasy in the space there before him. Look, here we are and we’re feeling cold. We’re on the sofa, snuggled up together. We’re watching a silent movie on TV, giggling more and more because it’s so funny. From time to time you whisper things in my ear, you tickle me, and I tenderly caress you. I wish you could feel how my heart’s beating for you, a metronome you set off . . .

  “So, what do you think, Ibon? Do you like the apartment?”

  Anna’s words jolt him out of his reverie and back into the real world. He opens his eyes. Still daydreaming, he babbles, Oh, yes, I like it very much and I’m sure that with a coat of paint and new furniture it would gain a lot. Anna agrees. She’s convinced of it, and she’d even go so far as to say that in the last few days she’s thought more than once that she’d like to buy it for herself, because it’s ideal for an independent person like her who lives alone. Alone or with a partner or, yeah, sure, with a dog, too, and she laughs. Ibon’s so pleased, he shivers inside and he also laughs. He realizes that it’s been a while since he laughed like that—really laughed. While Anna closes the windows again, they talk about the price. It’s expensive but negotiable. He says he wants to think about it for a while, ask his bank about a mortgage, and all the rest. She says of course, certainly, and if he wants, they can talk about it again. “Yes, we’ll talk about it,” she says. “Phone me when you’re ready. I can see you’re quite tempted.” These words, containing the essence of Ibon’s future life and almost sounding—almost—like a proposition, spark off in him an amazing flash of self-confidence. So, when they’re going down in the elevator (a second decompression phase) he dauntlessly dives in the deep end and asks if she has time for a beer—no big deal, just five minutes—because he wants to know a couple more details about the apartment. Hearing this, she accepts without hesitation and, you might even say, with some enthusiasm.

  * * *

  The five minutes multiply into more than an hour. They find a place nearby and go inside. Ibon points at the bar, but Anna says she’d prefer to sit at a table, as she’s tired after running around in high heels all day. They ask for a couple of beers and she, wanting to feel more relaxed, loosens her hair. With the same movement as an actress in a period movie, brushing her hair before going to bed, Anna ripples her wavy tresses as if combing out fatigue, and the next thing she does is send an extremely calculated look Ibon’s way: brief, stabbing, a whiplash of a look. He finally discovers the dive-into-me, slightly misty green of her eyes and tries to hold her gaze but soon desists. He feels light-headed, so, trying to cover up, he takes a sip of beer and she follows suit. They start talking about the apartment and both of them repeat what they’ve already said up there. Anna realizes this and tries to steer the conversation onto more personal ground, thus prompting Ibon to try to find a propitious moment to make some reference to Orange Juice. Slowly they start opening up cracks, increasingly trusting, as a whole heap of innocuous and revealing details about their past lives start coming to light. Bait set for mutual attraction.

  Things are going well, yes, and Ibon even has the impression that maybe he won’t have to raise the subject of Orange
Juice—not yet—not today, but then the meanderings of chitchat present the occasion. They’re talking about friendship, getting older, and Anna is telling him that she still sees some of her friends from her high school days a couple of times a year. Their lives are poles apart, and the distance between them has grown with time, but there’s something—she doesn’t know what exactly, but something related with the past they shared—that keeps them united in their distance.

  “The same thing’s happened to me with a couple of friends,” Ibon lies, “but the difference is that we know what keeps us together.”

  “And what’s that?” Her curiosity is piqued.

  “Music. We’ve got the same tastes and we went to a lot of concerts together. Our favorite band, I’d say, was Orange Juice.” Ibon finally pronounces the two words, feeling sure of himself and believing it’s time to show his cards. “Sometimes we still meet up in someone’s place for retro music sessions. It’s embarrassing even to think about. We drink, dance, and we can be really pathetic . . .” He leaves the sentence hanging to see how she’ll react, to seek some generational connection, and then he asks, “Do you know them? Orange Juice? Did you like them, by any chance?”

  “Yeah, pfft . . . ,” she says with surprising indifference. Ibon picks up his empty beer glass and, unaware of what he’s doing, nervously fiddles with it. “There was a time when I loved them,” she says. “I was mad about them. But one day I stopped listening to them and that was that.”

  “Why?” he ventures, in a barely audible voice.

  “I don’t know how to put it. Well, maybe I got bored with them because of a boyfriend I had. He was always a clingy pain in the neck. Or maybe I just grew out of them—simply that. Tastes change over the years. Something inside me, but now I can’t identify what, made me forget about them. Who knows: if I listened to them again, I’d most probably want to relive that time of my life, but only for five minutes. I’m not at all romantic about these things. Now I tend to like the new Van Morrison records, for example.”

  Anna smiles, shrugs, and takes a sip of beer. Ibon doesn’t say anything. He puts his empty glass back on the table and thinks about what she’s said. He’s not sure whether he should feel shattered or not. He’s done what he wanted to do, she’s sitting there opposite him, and he feels good about it. He tells himself that this is what counts. He prepares to look up and gaze at her very honestly. He’ll do it in a moment. Meanwhile, Anna decides she wants to know more about this stranger who has so self-assuredly walked into her life one run-of-the-mill evening—this stranger who’s capable of calling an adopted dog Whisky and openly abandoning himself to his thoughts and feelings, or whatever, with his eyes closed and leaning in a doorway. So when he looks up and into her eyes (right now), she says it’s getting late and she must go, but if he likes, they can meet tomorrow. Same time, same place. Ibon smiles, nods, and then says yes, sure.

  In the street they say goodbye with cheek kisses and head off in opposite directions. They’ve taken only a few steps when Anna turns and calls his name as if in the final scene of the video or even a movie, one with a happy ending. Ibon turns, too, right on cue, as if he was waiting for this.

  “Hey, now that I think about it,” she says, “that song you were humming upstairs when you were walking round the rooms . . . that was Orange Juice, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” says Ibon. “To tell the truth, I don’t remember.”

  MY BEST FRIEND’S MOTHER

  The same artificial plants are still there, half-hidden in their corners, leaves made of fabric in greenish tones, and the earth dry. I’m sure that if I went and ran a finger over them, I’d find that they’re covered in dust and feel like parchment, because they’re so steeped with old smoke, but the green spotlight shining up from underneath makes them gleam with a gush of chlorophyll that looks tremendously authentic. But the carpet’s different. They must have changed it a few years ago in one of those hopeful attempts to renovate the place and its clientele, but now it’s shabby again, full of stains and pocked with cigarette burns. When I first came in, the stink of wholesale air freshener almost knocked me out; but now I’ve recovered from that, and everything’s giving me a sense of security as if my senses are drugged again after all these years. I have no trouble at all recognizing the smells, the strategic angles, the dark zones where you can lose yourself in company. I turn around from my spot at the bar and confidently take in the whole scene, slowly scanning it, sweeping over it, looking for the points of warmth (her). After all these years—it must be more than twenty—the waiters have changed, the music has changed (but not a lot), and me, too. I’m married, I have a daughter, and I’ve stopped smoking.

  Even after all this time, right now I could close my eyes and move around the place without crashing into anything. I know I’d instinctively start walking toward the dance floor with a long drink in my hand, swaying in time with the music (let’s say I was a little cocky), and on the way I’d stop to light a cigarette and so on, but no, no, I haven’t come here to revive those falsely dizzying years. I’m here, in the Peculiar, the old pub near Passeig de la Bonanova, at six in the afternoon this Sunday to meet up with her again, Senyora Elsa, her skin, so soft and golden from skiing, the Nordic blue eyes, the straight (and later, when it was in fashion, permed) blond hair. And while I’m looking for her—because I know she’ll be here, I know she will—I pray, I hope that we haven’t changed much in these two decades, not her and not me, and that one smile will be enough for her to blow me away, as she did then, that one and only time, in another more private place.

  Her smile—debauched, as I decided then—topped up my erotic tanks for months on end. They never got depleted. On the contrary, it was a lewd image engraved in my brain where, once installed, it kept growing, flourishing as if my devotion turned her on, too. When I needed her to add some color to my uneasy adolescent’s fantasies, Senyora Elsa was always there, delicate and obliging, never protesting, always ready to welcome me and satisfy my desires. Did I want her to take me by the hand and lead me to the bedroom, shedding her clothes along the way? No problem. Inside my head she always did it, and every movement she made was so sexy. And did I want her to caress her nipple and look at me with eyes burning with desire? Of course she would. Delighted!

  In fact, it was only the nights in this pub that, with time, managed to make that private Senyora Elsa, my best friend’s mother, fade away. Yet, when I came out of the Peculiar with some girl and we got in the car to head off to the Arrabassada road and park in some out-of-the-way flat spot to get into some necking and petting—and even when I finally managed to get laid (because sometimes I did)—Senyora Elsa’s voice echoed inside me, slinky, velvety, automatically reminding me, OK, go ahead, but she was still first on the list, number one, the foundational fervor. And that’s why—and because my wife is too real to figure on any list (at one point she did, of course, and in a good position)—I went out this Sunday afternoon with the lame excuse of watching a soccer match with friends in some noisy bar and why, when it still wasn’t quite dark outside, I came into this pub thinking I had three hours, more or less, to find Senyora Elsa and top up my fantasy tank again, because recently I’ve needed to.

  Sitting at the bar, then, I check out the groups scattered round the pub. There are more spotlights than there used to be, but it’s a fake light and the clients look like waxwork figures. The music helps, too: they’re playing songs by Billy Joel, the Eagles, and Dire Straits. On closer scrutiny, it seems I’m still the youngest person here. Prostate-challenged old guys, necks swathed in silk cravats, dodder up to the bar asking for colorful cocktails. Separated women with bone-dry hair sashay their way through the tables with great poise as if they were at home in the dining room, or they sit in the bamboo chairs emanating fairly expensive perfume that is befouled by the air freshener. Some women look at me as if I’m an intruder, peeved because I’m lowering the average age, but others—and I can tell—who are more practiced are instinct
ively gauging the real possibilities and they’re not letting me out of their sight. From time to time, clear, ringing laughter, the conspicuous kind that can catch fire, rises from some group, or I see slim fingers mechanically playing with the pearls of a necklace and, all at once, I think they belong to Senyora Elsa. Like now, at a table where five women are seated, one of them stands up to show the others some detail of the dress she’s wearing today. She’s slender, smiling, and she passes her hand over her belly, smoothing out the fabric. Then, saying something I can’t hear (but which makes the other ladies laugh), she pulls up her skirt just a little to show muscular thighs that have benefited from the tanning bed and the gym, and her gestures are so pitch-perfect, so loaded with sensuality, that I’m in no doubt that I’ve found Senyora Elsa, my Senyora Elsa. Then she, as if she’s sensed something, raises her eyes, looks in my direction, and for four seconds—count: one, two, three, four—we stare at each other until, for purely strategic reasons, I close my eyes.

  I don’t know if she’s recognized me. We’ll see. Now, with my eyes closed, the music’s echoing inside me, going deeper, a single bass sound repeated more and more slowly until it finally stops to envelop me in the darkness of a room in some hotel I’d never heard of before, only two weeks ago, with my best friend, Senyora Elsa’s son. And I have memories.

  * * *

  Two weeks ago I went to the annual class get-together. Let me say at the outset that this kind of sentimental event annoys me more than anything else. I studied at a private, Catholic, boys-only school run by priests, and over the years my memories of that time—both good and bad—have turned stale and futile, old baggage that does absolutely nothing to help me understand why I am the way I am today. Every year when I come home from the reunion, I have the same feeling, a replay of military service and barracks, which roils unhappily in my entrails, and I tell Tonia, my wife, I’m never going again. But the months go by and, when the date’s announced around mid-February, I don’t really know why but I hasten to reserve that day in my agenda. I’m aware that this mixture of reluctance and excitement is general and, in fact, people only drop out for really important reasons: heart attack, depression, cancer, prison . . .