This Is Not America

by Jordi Puntí

  And here comes part two of the difficult situation that has led me to the Peculiar. When breakfast was ready, Tonia called me and I went to the kitchen. As usual, Roser’s happy little presence calmed us down. Croissants, still warm from the oven, swaddled us in that Sunday morning fragrance, and we did justice in silence to the perfect family scene. Then Roser sat on my lap—no mishap, don’t worry—and Tonia even made some flippant comment about my rampant libido. We laughed again. Flipping through the Sunday magazine, I spotted an interview with a Rolling Stones guitarist who, about to turn seventy, had recently married a girl who could be his daughter or granddaughter and they had a baby. The story reminded me of Ingmar’s father and his new life as a granddaddy-daddy, and I told Tonia because I thought it would move things out of our own terrain. The old tactic of projecting your shit onto someone famous. Error.

  “You see?” Her tone had a ring of sarcasm, which is something new. “You men are all the same. Physiology, as you say. You see some young girl and you can only think with your dick. It’s revolting.” She went quiet for a few seconds, pensive as she flicked through the magazine, perhaps waiting for me to answer, but I was careful not to open my mouth and only nodded. Then she added, “Please don’t ever do that to me. If you’re going to cheat on me someday, please let it be with an older woman and not with a twenty-year-old who knows nothing about life. I can’t think of anything more mortifying. Imagine what it was like for that woman, the mother of your Swedish friend. What a drama.”

  I said I couldn’t agree more, gave her a conciliatory kiss, and changed the subject, but her words kept floating in my brain, instantly linking up with Ingmar’s words two weeks earlier, his amused account of Senyora Elsa’s new life, her Sundays at the pub, and I put it all together to conclude that I had to find her and the sooner the better. Sometimes you have to take a step backwards in order to advance two ahead. Maybe it was callow, but somehow the solution to the problem involved making me feel like a teenager again, as pure as I was at the age of fifteen, let’s say. Then I got it. It was so obvious. The soccer match in a bar with friends was the perfect excuse.

  I went to take a shower. At this point, inspired by my faith in the turn of events, I could pretend that I closed my eyes to keep the soap out, and when I opened them I was in the pub, leaning on the bar and flirting at a distance with Senyora Elsa, my best friend’s mother . . .

  So I open my eyes again in the Peculiar and see that Senyora Elsa has sat down again with her friends. The lingering look we exchanged a moment ago contained all the information necessary, the coded message both of us are looking for this Sunday afternoon, and I’m certain she knows how to interpret it. I see a waiter going over to her table with another bowl of peanuts and to ask if they want anything else. Then, with an awkward movement of his arm, he knocks over Senyora Elsa’s drink of whatever-and-whatever. There’s a clatter of glass, the ladies cry out in surprise, and she stands up in the middle of the group to inspect her wet skirt. The waiter apologizes and she tells him not to worry, but then she says goodbye to her friends. She comes toward the bar and, walking past without looking at me, tells the waiter in a confidential tone that she’s going home to change and she’ll be back shortly. I give her a lead of a few meters, pay for my drink, and also leave.

  Outside, it’s already dark, I’m disoriented, and at first I don’t know which direction she’s taken, but finally I see her. I move a little faster until I’m about thirty paces behind her. We walk along Passeig de la Bonanova for a while, its sidewalks now reviving in my memory. I know we’re going to cross Ganduxer, and when we get to the corner with Escoles Pies, we’ll turn left and go downhill. Now she turns and I lose sight of her, but I’m not worried, because I know that her place, Ingmar’s place, is the fifth or sixth door along that sidewalk. I also turn and walk down the street. I see her stop, open the door, and go inside. For a moment I expect a knowing look from her, some recognition of the situation that will tell me I’m on the right track. But no. As I go over, I try to recall which apartment she lived in—lives in—because I’ve made up my mind to ring the bell, but when I get to the street door I see she’s left it ajar. Desire tells me it’s an invitation to go up, but in any case I look at the mailboxes to check which apartment it is (and see her Swedish surname beneath the name Miralles, which has a black line drawn through it) and then go out again and ring her doorbell. She opens without saying a word. Now there’s no doubt. I go up in the elevator, knowing that when I reach her landing, I’ll find her door slightly open, that I’ll slowly go inside without making a sound and, with the shyness of a young boy, I’ll look for the living room.

  Meanwhile Senyora Elsa has taken off her stained dress and is lying on the sofa. When I go in, I see that everything is the same as it used to be, twenty years ago. The rug, the floor lamp, the TV. I go over to her and see that she’s looking me up and down and smiling. I’m slightly unnerved by this very candid reception but understand it’s part of the game. Her breasts are heaving inside her bra, the nipples standing up, chafing to escape. I see that she’s wearing black tights today with white panties underneath. They instantly turn me crazy. As if making up for my timidity that first time, I go over to her, kneel by her side, and do what I didn’t do then. I put my hand inside her panties and plunge it between her thighs. She gasps and her hand comes looking for me. She undoes my zip—I’m on fire—and fondles my cock. I take off my shoes, socks, and trousers and climb onto the sofa so we’re in sixty-nine position. Things happen, but I won’t go into detail, because I’m not fifteen anymore. I realize that I so badly wanted this to happen, that I needed it so much, that I could be here many Sunday afternoons until I grow up again and yet still miss her in the same primitive, calculated way as I did this morning. She, however, looks me in the eyes for the first time, asks my name, and tells me to get my clothes off.

  So all the clothes are flung off and I’m riveted by her bronzed tennis player’s body as if she’s still that young mother. (I shake my head to get rid of the image of my wife, Tonia, who, from home, rebukes me for the thought.) She’s my best friend’s mother, I tell myself, and now, with dazzling insight, I understand that the debauchery I saw in her as an adolescent, the apparent wantonness, was actually unique sexual honesty, a liberation that came from the north of Europe and, in that uptight Barcelona, in that well-heeled part of town, must have been extremely rare. Despite everything, her free, sexy spontaneity has come through the years as a secret, all the way to the present, reached today, reached here in this feast of two strangers. Now I’m the one lying on the sofa letting her have her way with me. She’s in charge, she’s Senyora Elsa, and I swear I feel like a kid who has everything to learn. We’re entangled wordlessly, using only the language of moans. After a while we know we’re close to the climax, our bodies are plummeting, spinning, and she lets out a cry from the depths of her soul, a joyful groan, and collapses on top of me. I’ve grown up very fast. Then Senyora Elsa opens her eyes and, looking at me so tenderly it almost hurts, asks, “What did you say your name is?”

  SEVEN DAYS ON THE LOVE BOAT

  If life had treated him well, he might have been one of those capricious billionaires with a mansion on the French Riviera or the Adriatic coast: a cute palace surrounded by gardens where he’d collect crazy things like a swimming pool shaped like a grand piano, a huge bed shaped like a grand piano, and—in the most select part of the living room, next to a picture window presenting the sea as a continuation of the cliff top—a perfectly tuned grand piano in see-through glass showing off its intimate workings of strings and keys.

  If life had treated him well. But, in fact, it didn’t treat him well enough, at least until the day I said goodbye to him forever and left behind a slow, unsteady week, always about to be wrecked in a labyrinth of too-narrow passageways, obliging barmen and cabin stewards, karaoke championships, and cocktails at unearthly hours.

  I met Sam Cortina, alias “Tap Dance Fingers,” alias “Velvet Voice,” du
ring a Mediterranean cruise. It was May, a May so shaken up by climate change that the weathermen were salivating at the mere prospect of the historic heat wave records that were soon to be broken. Bet and I had been married seven years. In order to celebrate this—and without telling her—I’d booked us a week in Paris, in a spectacular hotel recommended in a Sunday magazine. It was supposed to be a surprise, even a deliberately schmaltzy surprise, as these lovefests often tend to be; but a few days beforehand, one Saturday afternoon, she freaked out over something, and all hell broke loose. We fought for three hours, going round and round the same old recriminations, and then out they came, the fatal words—“Let’s take a break, Mauri, at least for a couple of weeks, and then we’ll see what happens”—setting my future alight and, with that, those days in Paris, which became a prematurely carbonized memory. The passage of time burns memories, too, first turning them into dry parchment, after which the combustion starts at the corners, but at least it grants us the illusion of experience.

  The fact is that things between us hadn’t been good for a while. We squabbled over all kinds of stupid issues and had built a castle of mutual rancor too weighty and too hard for us to bear, but I saw the trip to Paris as a chance to fix things, like those peace talks between enemy countries that are held on neutral ground. We didn’t make it in time. It must be said, though, that for the first time our argument took a civilized course without shouting, slamming doors, or crying, and maybe that’s why I didn’t dare to mention our little trip at any point or wave it in front of her face as a token of love she’d unwittingly ruined.

  Although it was a civilized temporary separation, I got mad after a couple of days. I know myself, and there was no way it wasn’t going to happen. That Saturday night we agreed that I’d sleep on the sofa bed in the guest room. The next day, just as it was getting light, she woke me up with a friendly, almost conciliatory smile (and swollen eyes after all the crying) to tell me she was going to stay with one of her friends and would call me in a few days. I watched her leave with a suitcase and a duffel bag ridiculously stuffed full of clothes and books as if she were going to the ends of the earth. I heard her close the door, and, now fully awake, the only thing I could do was to run my eyes over the walls of the guest room. That impersonal decoration of chipped vases, faded cushions, and framed posters we’d got tired of looking at in the dining room, and those shelves lined with old college books no longer said anything about us. I felt like a total schmuck.

  Sunday went by swathed in mindless calm like a toothache relieved by a painkiller. I didn’t go out all day, didn’t even change out of my pajamas, and, as well as a schmuck, I felt like a useless imbecile. So I started hating my wife. Looking back, now that everything has changed, I can see that the word is too strong. It’s not too difficult to understand that, if this really was the case, I hated her as a simple defense mechanism, so as not to hate myself even more.

  On Monday the hatred started taking shape. By then I was operating in a primal, instinctive mode and had made no real effort to work out what it was that had led us to this temporary separation. When I tried to think it through, the frustrated trip to Paris—sure, without her even knowing about it—took up the whole scene and blinded me to anything else. As soon as I could, that morning I called work and told the secretary I wouldn’t be coming in, as I was ill. I don’t think it was a lie. Then I showered, made some coffee, and went to the travel agency. Since the week in Paris was already paid for and had cost a small fortune, I decided to reinvest all the money against my wife, which is to say to extract some kind of sexual yield from it.

  I admit that I was probably being an idiot reacting like that, but now, with the perspective of some months, I see it as a kind of forward regress. And this might sound cynical, but I was doing it out of fidelity. I told the guy at the travel agency that we couldn’t go to Paris because Bet had an inescapable work commitment. “Basically we’re twenty-first-century slaves,” he confirmed. I also told him that I had to take my holidays then because I was exhausted. Since I hadn’t stinted and money was no problem, I’d thought about a trip to some distant exotic place like Thailand or Vietnam. The travel agency guy immediately understood what I was looking for. Moving closer to gain my trust, he told me that this was impossible because of the limited time, and I had to understand that you can’t do anything in a week. Then he started telling me about a Mediterranean cruise, the excellent weather forecasts for those dates, and all the people who, after the dreariness of winter, wanted a high-seas experience to take it easy and have some fun. “It’s another world,” he said and, confidently driving home his point, added, “You’ll like it.”

  Hence, on our seventh wedding anniversary, instead of celebrating it with Bet over dinner in a restaurant in Paris, with soft candlelight and jazz playing in the background, I was wandering around like a soul in torment through the passageways of a transatlantic liner with a ridiculous name, Wonderful Sirena, with smoked salmon and Roquefort ravioli clumping in my stomach and about to hear the voice and piano of Sam Cortina for the first time.

  The Wonderful Sirena was a hulking great thing sailing under an Italian flag and with pretensions of being a floating metropolis. The travel agency’s information leaflets said it could accommodate as many as twelve hundred passengers in its cabins, but I never saw it full in the week I spent on board. Its route through part of the Mediterranean traced a circle, and passengers boarded and disembarked in every port. The day I embarked, the ship was sailing for Alicante, and from there to Tunis, Valletta in Malta, Sicily, Naples, Marseille, and back to Barcelona. If you followed the itinerary on a map, tracing it out with little red lines, it was as if the sea were an immense blue canvas, a circus tent, and the ship was stitching it up at every port. We, of course, were there inside: toothless lions, ancient elephants, and mournful seals.

  When we docked in any port, always before midday, the passengers had almost a whole day to disembark, get on a bus, tour the city, and buy souvenirs in shops indicated by a local guide. Then, when everyone was back on board again, now joined by new passengers, the ship put out to sea once more—at dusk—and the Mediterranean coast disintegrated into thousands of specks of light as we returned to the lunar weightlessness of the night sea.

  In the whole week I didn’t leave the ship, not even once. I heard the names of cities and was paralyzed by disinclination. Sometimes, lying in bed in my cabin and staring fixedly at the ceiling, it seemed I’d never left the guest room at home. I only cheered up when I went up on deck to look at the profile of the city we’d been to that day with the racket of the port in the foreground and streets climbing away from it. Sometimes I imagined that I was going down to terra firma, diving into one of those narrow winding streets, never to return, but this temptation to start over in another corner of the world was too literary, too fabulous, for someone like me. Now I think that, if I didn’t leave the ship to walk around the cities, it was because it wouldn’t have made sense without Bet. My years with her had made me realize there’s not much pleasure in solitary tourism.

  That first day, a Friday afternoon, I boarded the ship an hour before she set sail. Once I got through the reception formalities, a Filipino cabin steward, speaking a mixture of Italian, French, and Spanish and smiling all the while, took my bag and showed me where my cabin was, on deck three, starboard side. As I followed him, I counted five identical passageways, carpeted in cardinal red and lined with dozens of doors. He opened the door of cabin 3014, first class. A square—no, not round—porthole gave a view of the end of the port breakwater and, beyond that, the open sea. “Buonasera, signor,” the steward said from the door, and left without waiting for a tip. Alone in the cabin, I unpacked my luggage, hung clothes in the wardrobe to get rid of creases, and lay down on the double bed, waiting impatiently for the boat to leave, finally leave. I closed my eyes, imagining that on the other side of the door an erotic festival in my honor was being rehearsed, a parade of lovely, accessible, voluptuous women w
inding through the passageways. And they’d be available after midnight, as if by paying for my ticket I’d been guaranteed that one or another of them would make my dream come true.

  It was pure fantasy, of course. I must have dropped off to sleep like a little kid tired out after all the turmoil, but then I was woken by three long deep blasts of the ship’s horn announcing that we were leaving. I looked out the porthole and saw that Barcelona was still just a stone’s throw away. With sham nostalgia, I gazed at the two Olympic towers, the tidy containers in the cargo port, the bulk of Montjuïc. Until it all dissolved into night. Now I know: traveling round the Mediterranean on a cruise ship instills in the passengers a liking for staring at the horizon, which is often artificial.

  But never mind. I don’t want to get sidetracked by that. The point is that I was unable to leave my cabin that night. I’d woken up feeling drained and semicomatose, immediately aware that no one on the ship was going to miss me. More than once, hearing footsteps and cheerful voices in the passageway, I feared someone would knock at the door and try to come in. All night long I tossed and turned in a shallow, clammy sleep, as if I were in a bathtub full of lukewarm water and had to be careful to get my head up every minute to breathe.