by Susana Aikin
“I’ve been thinking, Anna, that you might want to take time off, travel for a while.” His fingers fidgeted over the flowery fabric of the armrest. “I feel I might have pushed you too hard all these years. I should have insisted on your going off to college, it’s not too late if you still—”
“You didn’t tell me he had two children.”
Father froze. I slid down farther into the bed and waited.
“I told you he was married, and it follows that if a man marries. . .” He faltered. The last ruby glow of dusk flashed through the windowpane before the air dissolved into cold indigo. Everything turned into inky silhouettes against a darkening sky.
“Still. You didn’t tell me.”
A few seconds passed. Father pulled himself up in the chair. “We don’t have to work with him, if you’re not comfortable. I can secure similar equipment . . .”
I switched off the bedside lamp. “I need to sleep now.” He left the room.
I had already decided to put myself far away from his reach.
* * *
Another gust of wind pushes against the window, rattling it. Invisible streams of air sift through the cracked frame and swirl into the room. The door opens and Julia walks in with her cell phone in her outstretched hand. “It’s for you.”
“I can’t take this call.”
Julia pushes the phone into my hand. “Deal with your shit like everyone else. And ask him not to call my phone again.”
I walk out of the room and down the stairs. “Hello.”
“Can we talk for a minute?” Marcus’s tone startles me. It sounds close, intimate.
“Please, don’t insist. I can do nothing today. Can’t you contact someone else?”
There is a silence. Marcus is waiting. Waiting for me to turn it all around in an instant and whip out a brilliant solution. His silence exasperates me, like a mute metronome browbeating me into action. All of a sudden, the fact that I’ve never turned down any of his urgent requests shames me. I’m always there for him, bending over backwards in ways I wouldn’t even dream of for my own business deals. Like a good old doormat, happy to be gratified by the mere weight of his feet on the unshorn surface of my undying allegiance.
“Listen,” I say. “I always back you up. I can’t continue to function this way. I’m rethinking our teamwork. I’m not sure it’s working for me anymore. I want out.”
The stillness at the other end of the phone intensifies for a beat. Then Marcus says, “All right. Let’s pretend I accept what you’re saying. Let’s pretend we don’t work together anymore. Still, I think we need to have a conversation about what’s been hanging over us for a while.”
“I don’t think we need to have any conversation at all.” I’m trying hard not to raise my voice. “I think it’s time we accepted that this”—I falter for a second, my mouth is dry and the fog in my brain is whirling—“that this—whatever it is we’re doing—isn’t working. Particularly for me.”
“Particularly for you?”
“Yes, for me, Marcus. I think you understand who’s the weakest party here when it comes to—”
“You, the weakest party?” I am detecting traces of indignation in his tone, and I’m fuming, fuming like I haven’t for years, but my voice, instead of delivering my words like a deft knife, begins to break up as I say, “Like you don’t know how I’ve cornered myself into this charade.” What am I doing? How long is it since I’ve allowed myself to assail Marcus with emotional language?
Another moment of silence. “Are you okay?”
“I’m totally fine. It’s just that”—I’m beginning to stammer, I’m beginning to shake—“I’m realizing how many years of my life I’ve poured down the drain.” But I can’t say anymore. My temples throb, my chest aches.
“I could probably say something very similar,” he starts, but I cut him off in a breathless rush. “Please! I’m not listening to any of this. I just want you out of my life for once and for all, all right?”
“Okay, Anna. I’m boarding a plane to Madrid as we speak. The moment I arrive, I’ll drive right over there, ’cause it might be over, but we’re still going to talk.”
“You won’t dare! Besides, you don’t know where I am.”
“Yes, I do. I know exactly where you are. And nothing’s going to stop me from coming.” He clicks his phone shut. I stifle a sob and throw the phone at the wall, where it breaks apart and scatters over the floor.
Julia’s face appears around the wall at the top of the stairs. “You won’t believe how Delia’s handling this,” she says, and then sees her phone. “What’s your fucking problem? You think everyone can afford a new phone every month like you?”
I raise my hand in her direction to indicate I can’t deal with anything right now and walk away. I hear her run down the stairs behind me and pick up the pieces. “Stupid crazy bitch! You’re just like your father. An arrogant asshole incapable of holding back your rage.”
I feel the sting of her words, they lance me right in the lungs, freezing my breath for a few instants. I want to lash back, engage with her as I haven’t done since we were girls, but I can’t go there. Her assault seems trifling compared to what has just happened. The pain from my exchange with Marcus is still throbbing inside my chest, unabated, and I just can’t explain why it’s thrown me into such agony.
CHAPTER 16
I walk into the darkness of Father’s studio. I push away the piles of books and papers that clutter the sofa and lie on its parched leather surface. Why on earth would I walk in here at a moment like this? But I just did, right into the belly of the beast. I close my eyes and fold my arms over my face, while the strange dead air of the room envelops me and I drift away from the madness upstairs, from Marcus’s voice.
How long is it since I’ve been working with Marcus in the farcical capacity of business partners? Maybe five years? Six? Is it already six years since he returned? I’m always confused about time when it comes to him. But yes, that’s more or less when I left Father’s company. The time I finally challenged my father, conjured enough cold blood to abandon him, to quit the business and leave the house. The time I moved to downtown Madrid to start my own life over.
At first, Father was furious. “Who would think of moving back into the smog and clatter of downtown? It’s a ridiculous idea! Reverting to the old grunge, to the squalid quarters. People lived like rats in those buildings when I first arrived in Madrid.” But the part he couldn’t stomach was my leaving the company. “Why would you leave something that’s yours? Why would you throw away something that has taken me decades to build? You can have it all, the premises, the client portfolio. I’ll transfer everything to you.”
I ignored his pained, flustered look and ordered another dry martini. A delicious April sun tickled my face as we sat on a terrace café in my new neighborhood, where he had been humbled into visiting. I didn’t need any of what he was throwing at me. I already owned the essentials. And much, much more. He had fast-tracked me into a soaring business career and now I was like one of those martial art disciples who has surpassed their teacher and stands strong and invincible in the presence of an aging, once proud and unassailable fighter.
I had made quite a lot of money in the last years, so I bought a large duplex apartment in the same neighborhood where Julia and her artist friends lived. The space belonged to a young architect who had connected two old apartments through a wide, sweeping spiral staircase. On the second floor, the master bedroom stepped onto a terrace, from which sprawled a landscape of terracotta roofs, a maze of tiles in russet, sienna, copper, titian, and any other imaginable shade of red and brown. The flat skyline of the old Madrid extended infinitely toward the south under clear blue skies. A puzzle of architecture condensed by history. No mountains in view, no plush gardens packed with larks and nightingales. Just narrow cobbled streets and small uneven piazzas populated by famished sparrows, under a canopy of ceramic crisscross patterns sprinkled with church steeples. It was like movi
ng into a different country.
The neighborhood had been one of the old popular enclaves of downtown Madrid where artists like Julia and her friends had moved to some years ago, but was now being taken over by young professionals, gays, and hip groups looking to reinvent the ancient quarters of the city. There was still a contingent of modest dark-clad senior citizens coexisting with the buoyant newcomers. Small boutiques were sprouting all over out of the tiny, seedy shops that were once grocery stores or five-and-dime dens. Old bars and tascas, some of them over a hundred years old, filled up on the weekends with beautiful, rowdy, young people. The same went for streets in the spring and summertime months, when carousers stayed up late drinking and chatting in outdoor cafés. The gay movement had taken hold in these streets and their annual parade was beginning to attract followers from all over Europe and the rest of the world.
It was a fun place for me to live in. In the evenings after work I’d hang out with Julia and her friends at the outdoor cafés in the Plaza de Chueca, a small, irregular-shaped square that was the focal point of the whole neighborhood. We would chat and drink cañas, or small glasses of beer, basking in the lazy mood of the long summer evenings, watching the pink twilight glide above the plaza’s earthen roofs, over the white façades with ornate balconies, while swallows darted overhead calling frantically at each other. Later, when deepening shades of blue encroached around the small square, and illumined windows popped up in shops and overhead apartments against the indigo air, the plaza would still be swarming with its picturesque population. Pale, gothic-clad youths, loud troops of swank transvestites, and old neighborhood women dipping croissants in their coffees while engrossed in malicious gossip.
It had been a long while since I had felt lighthearted and upbeat again. What better moment to start anew, to put away the past?
But I wasn’t done with the object of my affection.
I got hold of Marcus on the phone. “I’m leaving MBE and starting my own company. I hope we can modify the contract to include this change. I’ll take up any extra legal expenses.” We had finally negotiated a contract with the German company Nordemex for the distribution of their wind turbines in the Spanish market, and I had decided to take it away from Father’s company and represent the merchandise myself with Marcus as a business associate.
I paced around my new empty living room as we talked, sliding across the white marble floor speckled with gray. Tall windows with wrought-iron balconies looked at other windows with balconies across the narrow street. Net curtains were in order here. And the beautiful French-style fireplace with ornate scrolls and leaf carvings at the end of the room would not be used as such, it would just remain as a prop.
“Anna, the guys at Nordemex don’t care how you organize it. They want to work with you, not with MBE,” Marcus replied. For a moment, I wanted to laugh. It all sounded like a game, he and I talking serious business.
Marcus added, “But are you sure you want to do this? I mean, on the trip to Düsseldorf—”
I didn’t let him finish his sentence. “I think we’re both adults and we can do this. In fact, I’m sure we’ll be great partners,” I said. “I’ll fax you the new contract tomorrow so you can review it before I send it over to Nordemex.” I hung up the phone. Yes, this was the tone. And this was the game. We would be adult children playing business instead of house.
Father was dismissive. He couldn’t accept that his pride was under the doormat. “It’s not going to work with the Germans, you know. They’re very self-serving as I’ve found out through the years. One always has to be on the watch-out with them.” He didn’t dare mention Marcus. He knew I would have just gotten up and left.
Despite his predictions, the association with the Germans worked. And the affiliation with Marcus proved to be a great success. We became good business partners, developed substantial projects together, got amazing contracts, made money. Strange how effortless, how easily we moved through this dense, insidious world of heavy machinery. Sometimes it felt like a dance. We didn’t really need each other at all. I could work alone, or for anyone I chose to and represent anything I wanted, my reputation was so established all over. He could keep pumping German machinery into the Spanish market, where the demand was unwavering. But we stuck together. Sometimes we split commissions at a loss, other times we failed to secure deals because of our joint venture, but the projects and contracts kept coming our way. We each worked out of our own space and although we only lived thirty minutes away, we didn’t see each other for weeks or months at a time. Most of our communication was done through telephone, fax, and later email, messengers, deliveries, and whatnot. But most days I got to hear his voice on the phone, that husky, intimate sound in perfect English tinged with the slightest trace of German inflection. That was my daily dose of paradise.
* * *
“You’re soooo fucked up!” Julia stared at me through narrow drunken eyes across the low glass table. We were sprawled on facing sofas in my huge, elegant living room. “You could have anyone you want, you could create whatever life you wished for yourself, and you’re still holding on to this son of a bitch like there’s no tomorrow.”
I wanted to say, “Look who’s talking,” but decided to let it go. I wanted to avoid the old dispute that always arose when we started on our third bottle of wine, while hanging out together late at night. Julia was living with another girlfriend, but still thought of Alina. When confronted, she often said, “At least I’m not having a perverse affair through the retailing of awful machinery,” and never ceased to admonish that “It would be much healthier if you had a proper fling. That way you might have a chance of getting him out of your system.” But that was precisely what I didn’t want. The point was to make sure Marcus stayed in my system. He was already an indelible part of me. I thought of us like those braided trees whose trunks have fused together after years of growth and now are just one single inseparable column.
I refused to listen to Julia over and over again.
But who was I fooling?
Although the business collaboration with Marcus was going strong and we were consistently on friendly terms, not all was well on my front. Soon my old restlessness crept up on me again, taking me to long hours in the gym, keeping me out at night partying and drinking, driving me into bouts of desperate dating. It was when I started going out with men again that I saw how much I had changed. I had become entrenched in loneliness, my heart had surrounded itself with a hard, airtight sheath. I found myself treating boyfriends and lovers with indifference, knowing ahead of time I couldn’t love them, using them to buy time toward a stupid, imaginary moment of deliverance that I knew would never come. I felt like a grand harlot when I turned them away after they confessed their affection, or when I wanted them to leave my bed in the middle of the night after they had satisfied my desire. Later, I would lie sleepless for hours, loathing my emptiness. Not all was well.
Then there was Helga.
In the beginning, Helga had made innumerable efforts to befriend me, inviting me to dinners at their place, to birthday parties, to outings with her children. I always gracefully declined. She had whined about it earlier on: “Anna, I would be so happy if we could be friends. I hardly know anyone in Madrid. And I like you so much!” But she had finally accepted our casual, distant relationship, and now on those rare occasions when we happened to meet, she would be her usual discreet, sweet self. My attitude was one of polite deference; I tried to interact with her as little as possible. For a long time I was in denial of the fact that I was as much a part of her life as she was of mine. That there was no escaping our entanglement.
Once in a while we had to entertain visiting German clients who traveled to Madrid for business. They were crazy about flamenco and always wanted to be taken to a tablao, an establishment where cantaores and bailaores, singers and dancers, got together and put on a show. One of their favorite places was the Café de Chinitas, a touristy but well managed restaurant that had flamenco shows
. I disliked these outings, but they were a must in the realm of business hospitality. Marcus usually brought Helga along and I would show up escorted by one of my ephemeral boyfriends. This one time, I had enticed Marion to come instead, since she was a flamenco pro and good company to help stave off the pesky client we were entertaining for the evening, a guy by the name of Wolfgang Viehmann, who had a crush on me and kept asking me out each time he came to Madrid.
We sat at our table in the dark, narrow dining room under large windows decorated with elaborate iron lattices that faced the street. Ahead of us stood a small wooden stage, decorated with a tapestry of antique embroidered Manila shawls associated with flamenco dancers’ dresses. Underneath the bright-colored birds, roses, and carnations knit into the silk stood a row of simple wooden chairs where the performers sat. They would start by handclapping and singing, until one of the women with hair in a bun and a tight dress layered with ruffles stepped forward onstage and broke into a round of dramatic heel tapping. Then a wiry man with a ponytail and a black tuxedo undershirt would join in and they danced together to singing and guitar playing.
After a heavy supper of grilled suckling pig—where I only ate cheese and salad—we sat sipping wine and listening to the featured singer of the evening, El Niño Candela, as he stood on stage and sang in a broken voice to soft handclapping and emotional strumming of guitars. “Aaaay, aaaay! El castigo que te mando, es que cuando estés durmiendo con otro, estés soñando conmigo.”
Wolfgang drew close to me. “Please, translate what he’s singing.”
I had been distracted and now struggled to listen to the words again. “Your punishment will be,” I translated, “that when you’re with another you’ll be thinking of me—or something like that.” It was an old Spanish poem that had been reworked into different genres of songs, although this was the first time I had heard it in flamenco.
