This Is Not America

by Jordi Puntí

  The reunion, and I don’t mind recognizing it, is guided by a more or less traditional script, maybe because the organizer is Rovirosa, the always-willing, levelheaded friend of everyone, the one who was frequently chosen as class representative and who’s now a judge in Madrid. We normally meet on the city outskirts, without wives and kids, midmorning on a Saturday to play a game of soccer. Then we go for lunch in an expensive restaurant on the Maresme coast. We eat fish and shellfish, and liqueurs and cigars draw out the after-dinner conversation. That’s when the same old anecdotes are repeated, harmless gripes aired, funny nicknames used, and jokes that seemed hilarious when we were schoolboys retold. Reviving all this is mixed with recent news, which we all handle with care. Sometimes one of the guys knows more than the rest, and disagreeable items can suddenly take on disproportionate importance, as if we all still inhabited the small world of the school. Occasionally there’s some loathsome teacher who’s died all alone, and we make no effort to hide our pleasure at that. It’s a kind of revenge served cold after all the fear and slaps on the head. As the hours go by, we gradually leave, one by one, saying we’re very busy, real life calls, and what always happens is that, by the time we get home, the whole comedy is completely forgotten.

  If I’m recalling that last alumni meeting now, it’s because, two weeks ago, things took quite another turn. Since he was caught up with a complicated trial involving political corruption, Rovirosa couldn’t organize it this year, so Boix, who’s in the meat trade and an exuberant fellow, suggested a change of scene. Why don’t we all go to Cantonigròs? It’s only an hour and a half from Barcelona. He knew a very good restaurant where we’d be treated like congressmen. Either because we didn’t want to complicate matters, or out of mere inertia, the fact is that no one objected, and on the Saturday in question we all met up in Cantonigròs.

  We soon saw that things weren’t going to go as planned. We had to cancel the soccer match because of the bad weather. The previous day there’d been a downpour, and when we got to the soccer field, which is normally used by some local amateurs, it was so muddy that the ball kept getting bogged. We did a few halfhearted passes near one of the goals, lumbering moves observed by a herd of cows in the adjacent field, but we soon called it a day. Then we went into town looking for a bar where we could have an appetizer till lunchtime. We sat down by a large window overlooking a landscape of forests and gullies, a view that took in all the immensity of the sky and the world (as Vila-Frau, who’s keen on poetry, put it), and after a while, as if watching an apocalyptic diorama, we were treated to one of nature’s shows: furious waves of clouds suddenly went still and the sky was gravid with a storm, turning gray and then a menacing nuclear white in just a few minutes. Ten minutes later we were a bunch of kids gleefully watching an army of snowflakes falling, but after an hour, when we were on our way to the restaurant and everything was covered in snow, we started praising the stability of our big cars and some survival instinct made us check to be sure we had cell phone coverage.

  The food was splendid, the cigars and liqueurs bore us away from the real world, and by the time we left the restaurant, all the roads in the region were cut off. A couple of the guys weren’t resigned to being snowbound and tried to leave, but ten minutes later they were back, tails between their legs and confirming that it was impossible to get out of town. We called home to say we were fine but had to spend the night there, after which, as if we were all on a spiritual retreat, we went off to find a room in Cantonigròs’s best hotel.

  Once installed, two per room, and our families reassured, we started thinking about how to while away the hours. Some dozed on the sofas in the lounge and others watched the news on TV. We played cards, read newspapers, and condescendingly poked fun at Boix because he got us into this fix. Someone said, “Now, who on earth would think it was a good idea to have lunch in heartland Catalonia?” Someone else added, “We look like a soccer players’ jamboree.”

  I got to share my room with Ingmar, who for many years, when we still believed in these childish things, was my best friend. Ingmar Miralles, son of Senyora Elsa, was born by chance in Gothenburg, where his father was employed at the Spanish consulate, but when he was very small the family moved to Barcelona. At school we were friends from day one because our names were consecutive in the roll call. We did our projects together, went to the same tennis lessons, and described for each other our first experiences of jerking off. Our parents were acquainted and used to go out to dinner as a foursome. At weekends he sometimes slept over at my place or I at his. Life has many twists and turns, and Ingmar, making the most of his knowledge of Swedish as a mother tongue, now lives in Stockholm and we never see each other. This year, though, the alumni meeting coincided with the fact that he was taking a brief vacation in Barcelona, which meant he could come along. Hence, a couple of weeks ago we caught up on what had been happening in our lives. We showed each other photos of laughing children and attractive wives, bad-mouthed some of our classmates who, with the years, have become ridiculous, and planned a trip together to the Land of the Midnight Sun, which we’ll probably never do. We also asked after each other’s parents, and that’s how I found out that Senyora Elsa had separated from her husband quite recently, just a few months earlier. Actually, he ran off with a thirty-year-old secretary and now dyes his hair, wears white sneakers, and has had to learn how to change the diapers of a baby that cries a lot, and all the other clichés you might care to imagine. Oddly enough, Senyora Elsa got over it quite well and was happier than ever: the separation was rejuvenating, she was playing tennis again, had started a course on feng shui, and went out with her women friends on Sunday afternoons (and, at this point, the name of the pub was recalled: the Peculiar). Sometimes, when she’d seemed a little low, Ingmar and his wife had urged her to start over and get a boyfriend, at which she laughed politely but with an edge of irritation.

  As if in the grip of coyness, neither Ingmar nor I said anything about our teenage adventures until we were up in our room, about to go to sleep. After watching TV for a while—channel surfing got us a porn channel and we joked about the Scandinavian actresses—we said good night and turned off the light. But the darkness must have been cozy enough for us to start reliving old times, those long-gone Saturday nights at the Peculiar. We fished in our memories for names and nicknames, the girls with whom we’d both writhed on dusty sofas, sometimes only a week apart. We worked through our old wish lists in some detail and, tittering away, got back to the tennis coach who looked like Farrah Fawcett. She wore little white panties, which, we thought, had to be sweaty: they got scrunched between her buttocks and revealed the most fabulous backside. We deliberately hit the balls into the net so she’d squat down to pick them up, and a few hours later we summoned up the image for our private pleasure.

  Now that I think about it, that hotel room in Cantonigròs resembled the setting of our adolescent exchanges of confidences—two beds in the dark—so we both felt displaced, as if we shouldn’t be there. In our sniggering, which was perhaps exaggerated, there was a nervous attempt at feeling at ease, at getting around the absurdity of the weekend, and I’m sure that, reliving those nights, we managed to move into another place, another time. Maybe that’s why, when we stopped talking and I closed my eyes, instead of going to sleep, I saw, there in the dark of the darkness, the figure of Senyora Elsa taking shape, as if in one of those Magic Eye pictures that were fashionable in those days, and she took me back to a long-ago weekend and the night that she and I sealed our pact in silence.

  So there we were, fifteen years old. Franco had died of old age. The cinemas were starting to show movies with actresses who stripped off at the drop of a hat, but we were still minors, so we couldn’t get in. Ágata Lys, Nadiuska, Susana Estrada—we knew their names because we saw them seminaked in the magazines we leafed through in the barber’s or at newsstands. Sometimes Ingmar slept over at my place on Saturday nights. With the light turned off, talking very quietly so my parents wo
uldn’t hear, we’d get horny telling each other what we liked best about the actresses and then we jerked off in the dark. We said: Nadiuska’s got slutty eyes. We said: Victoria Vera’s always asking for it, you can see. We’d never seen real live breasts—those of our respective mothers didn’t count—let alone pubes. We fooled around with a revolutionary idea. We’d buy some X-Ray Specs by mail order and then go out and look at the underwear of all the girls in the street. We discovered that our fathers had smutty magazines hidden away and when they weren’t around we’d get them out, copy the photos of naked girls as accurately as we could, and then exchange them. We said: I want to marry a nympho. We’d never seen any picture of a woman with a shaved pubis, but one day, at Ingmar’s place, we found a Swedish magazine in his father’s office and there we discovered two things that impressed us even more because they were so daring: a white girl being sodomized by a black guy and, on another page, the compact whiteness of cum splattered on her breasts. We imagined that our tennis coach led a double life and made porn movies with a monitor at the club. We read movie synopses outside cinemas, a lot of them disguising eroticism with histrionic stories of older women falling in love with young gardeners, or gullible foreign girls coming for a holiday by the sea and meekly submitting to the desires of an unscrupulous man. They were so unreal, even for us, that we were both amused and disconcerted. We said “virginity” and “deflower,” and the word “perversion” turned us on but we didn’t know why.

  As I say, we were fifteen and we thought we knew everything about sex, that we were theoretical experts waiting for the practical exam. Then one Saturday night when I slept over at Ingmar’s place, I discovered that things weren’t quite like that. Locked in his room, we’d been amusing ourselves with the usual fantasies until we got sleepy. After we’d been asleep for about an hour I woke up with a dry mouth and went to get a drink of water. I wandered round the house half-asleep until I found the kitchen, opened the fridge, and instead of water I took a swig of Coca-Cola, straight from the bottle, because no one was watching. Luckily the cold drink must have woken me up—luckily—because when I was going back to the bedroom, past the living room door, I noticed that a floor lamp was switched on and so was the television. I was disoriented and didn’t know what time it was, so I peeped round the door expecting to find Ingmar’s mother watching TV. Her husband was away on some business trip and my simple imagination figured that she was lonely and sad. I’d say good night, like the well-mannered boy I was. What I saw, though, left me paralyzed and mute. Monotonous drifts of snow shimmied again and again across the TV screen, casting their flickering light over the figure of Senyora Elsa, who’d dropped off to sleep on the sofa.

  She lay with a cushion under her head and her skirt rucked up around her waist, showing long, long legs. On tiptoe, without making a sound, I went over to the other end of the sofa to see her better. If she suddenly woke up, I could pretend I was looking for something, a comic book, or whatever else I invented. I stood still, looking at her from above, lying there. Her tousled blond hair fell across her face, and with her eyes closed she looked like one of the actresses we worshipped. Beneath the white blouse her breasts rose and fell in time with her slow breathing.

  Having recovered from the first shock, I realized that there on the floor, next to the sofa, lay the tights she’d taken off and, next to them, a scrap of white cloth that could only be panties. I had to smother a squeal of shock. My first instinct was to go and get Ingmar to come and see this, but I immediately realized that it wasn’t a good idea. I bent over a little and reverently gazed at that liberated pubis, the first I’d ever seen: the triangular shape; pale, crinkly hairs; thick, plushy fuzz in the center . . . I was dying to touch it, sink my hand into it, but I stayed where I was, unable to move, holding my breath . . . and then, as if she’d sensed my desires, the sleeping Senyora Elsa moved slightly, opening her legs a little more, revealing fleshy red labia. I started panicking, thought she was going to wake up, but the sight of her held me like a magnet. I was rooted to the spot. Suddenly—I don’t know whether it was induced by the thick jizz that now smeared my pajama pants—but I thought I saw a kind of tremor, almost imperceptible, shivering through Senyora Elsa’s body.

  Scared, I took a step, two steps back, seeking the protection of darkness. The rug muffled the movement. If I left, she’d hear me and would almost certainly wake up. In any event, the sight before me had me too transfixed to think about anything else. It wasn’t even half a minute before Senyora Elsa moved again on the sofa, and just when I was certain she was going to get up and see me, just when I was busy finding an excuse, I was astounded to see that, no, this wasn’t going to happen. With leisurely movements, one of her hands was unbuttoning her blouse, seeking the breasts inside, caressing them, and making the nipples emerge, just poking out from her bra. Meanwhile the other hand had traveled down to her pubis, found the clit, and started rubbing it in rhythmic waves. Now this was fieldwork! I, that fifteen-year-old boy, understood that Senyora Elsa was pleasuring herself. A few minutes went by and her features were changing into a composition of all the faces of enjoyment, but at no point did she open her eyes. And finally, pressing her lips tightly together, she suppressed a long howl of fulfillment that only I could hear. There in the shadow, an eternity after I’d come without even touching myself, one more surprise awaited me. Senyora Elsa opened her jewel-bright eyes and glanced very briefly at my corner. Then, as if she hadn’t seen me, she stood up, pulled down her skirt, picked up her underclothes, turned off the floor lamp and television, and went off to bed, prolonging forever more the mystery that united us.

  Now, from other protective shadows in the pub, I realize that, when all is said and done, I know next to nothing about Senyora Elsa except for a few vague biographical details her son told me. Quiet in my past, her presence is empty inside, her personality escapes me, and the fact that I still think about her in that teenage way only shows that I’m fooling myself, because I’m seeing her without the burdens of life that, like everyone else, she’s accumulated over the years. The suffering, joys, hopes, and letdowns of aging: everything that has made her who she is, everything that has fledged her existence.

  Yet, I don’t want my naïveté to be understood as an extenuating circumstance, because in any case I don’t believe that my escapade this Sunday is cheating on my wife. No, I’m never going to tell her. It would be doing us no favor and, moreover, it’s as if all this stuff isn’t really happening . . . So many negative formulations. Maybe all this is upending my sense of reality, and accepting that every decision I’ve made so far to the point of coming here, to the Peculiar, comes from this Sunday morning; but, then again, maybe it’s been growing inside me—like a chrysalis that refuses to leave the cocoon —for a good part of my life.

  I love sleeping in, and I suppose the busy hands of my daughter, Roser, aged three and a half, had been trying to get me to open my eyes for a while before I finally woke up. From behind my eyelids, still half-asleep, I could hear my wife wishing me “Good morning” in a singsong cartoon-movie voice, and Roser’s voice repeating it in the same tone. Smiling, I pretended to keep sleeping, waiting for her to make me open my eyes again. When she did, I suddenly sat up and started tickling her. Roser expected this and, somehow, played her part in all innocence, because recently this is her favorite game: getting into bed with us early in the morning, between the two of us, and fooling around till we wake up and play with her.

  Today, after the tickling attack, we made a tent under the comforter and the three of us took refuge in it because there was a raging storm outside and we had to seek protection together. I puffed and swooshed, imitating the sound of wind and rain, but Roser suddenly went quiet. She was frightened because it was difficult for her to understand that we were only playing. Then Tonia lifted up the comforter in time—“Hey, we’re fine!”—when Roser was already screwing up her face to cry, and I grabbed her and hoisted her up with my feet so she could be an airplane, whi
ch I know she likes, and her loud, clear, contagious giggles rang out again. A few seconds later some movement of hers—silky feet caressing my back (I don’t use pajamas) or her arms hugging my thigh—aroused some nerve I didn’t know about and brought on an instant erection. I realized what had happened, of course, and looked at Tonia, wordlessly asking her to distract Roser while I covered the inappropriate festival with a pillow trying to make it subside.

  “It’s all OK, I say OK,” I sang pretending everything was fine. “It’s just me, just physiology.”

  “It’s all OK, as you say,” Tonia repeated soothingly, “except that you men are a bunch of animals. What a waste . . .”

  Then she took Roser off to the kitchen to get breakfast together, but the mists of resentment hung over the bedroom. I know where all this is coming from, but it needs some explanation. About six months ago, Tonia told me she wanted another baby, a son. In the past, before Roser was born, we’d agreed that one was enough, so at first I tried to talk her out of it. Roser’s keeping us busy and entertained enough, I argued and, even if money’s not a problem, another kid would mean losing a bit more of that freedom we cherished so much when there were just the two of us. Had she forgotten? All those trips, holidays, dinners, and movies. Maybe it was just physiology again, but, no, she didn’t get my reasoning at all. She thought I was being selfish and even mean, so I gave in. All right, then, let’s try for another one. Everyone says the second kid is easier, I tried to convince myself, rationalizing that, when the time came, I’d even be happy about it. But the months went by, the periods came, and there was no sign of a pregnancy. With all the pressures of hitting the bull’s-eye, sex was getting more mechanical, more predictable, more boring. We no longer fucked when we felt like it but on the days decreed by the fertility calendar, and our postcoital pillow talk turned into an ongoing biology lesson. Tonia joined a yoga class for women who were trying to conceive, and I was finding it more and more difficult to get a hard-on. One failure was the prelude to another, a mental state in withdrawal, everyday love turned into a retractile appendage. That’s why, when Tonia saw the glory of my useless erection this morning, she confirmed yet again that the world is unfair and held me responsible by default. The psychologists call it passive aggression.