A Prison in the Sun

by Isobel Blackthorn

  The cake was still to come.

  In case it was time, he ran into the dining room where his aunts and uncles and grandparents sat and stood around drinking little cups of this and that. Then his mother's elder brother, the pompous José Diaz, drew José aside and said, 'What do you want to be when you grow up, young man?' as though the question had been burning in his mind the whole time.

  'He's too young to answer,' his mother said.

  Yes, he was.

  'Nonsense. He's reached double digits.' Uncle José was tall, plump and overbearing. Young José stood beneath him, nonplussed in his neat suit and making every effort to keep still. Enrico stood in the doorway, waiting and panting.

  'He has very neat handwriting,' someone said.

  'He'll never be a farmer, with those hands.'

  'A farmer! Since when did anyone in our family become a farmer?'

  He must be a lawyer, like you, José.

  He's too shy to be a lawyer. Look at him.

  They all looked.

  Does the birthday boy speak?

  'I'd like to be a waiter,' he said, recalling a friendly face in a café the other day.

  Everyone laughed. His mother sputtered on her drink.

  'He'll be a teacher or a scientist,' she said, covering her embarrassment. 'Something like that. Now tell me, Maria, how is your health?'

  José snatched a sweetmeat from the table and ran off back to Enrico. Cake was coming, and it was all he could think of. We'd all have cake! When Maria came downstairs with Dolores and the rest of their cousins, they'd have cake, and he would have had the best day ever.

  Back then, I had no sense that I was different to any other boy. That's because I was in no way different from any other boy. My mother disliked my sensitivities, the ease with which I would cry. My father thought me too fragile for the world of men. They thought, they knew, I needed to be tougher, harder, louder, more robust. They compared me to other boys my age. To Enrico. I didn't compare well to Enrico.

  I was saved from languishing at the bottom of the reject pile by Antonio, my mother's elder sister's youngest, who was scrawnier than me, wore glasses, and was prone to ailments. He would break out in bright red rashes too, which were unsightly. I always came out favourably compared to him. My parents would reassure each other that I'd turn out all right in the end. That is more or less what I understood at the time.

  It is odd that I was not ignored. That I so troubled them. But they were the fussing kind of middle-class parents and aunts and uncles, and that might be because they had to fit into our lopsided society, lopsided because there were too few at the top who owned the land, and too many at the bottom who attempted to survive off it. This left an area in the middle, made up of small businesses, shopkeepers, managers, teachers, all the usual professions, people who lacked power but didn't suffer the vicissitudes of that lack. My parents understood the world was in turmoil, and no one knew what was to become of anyone. And therefore, they fretted. They fretted for they feared what would happen to me. That I would realise their suspicions and suffer the consequences. The entire situation in the Canary Islands at that time weighed heavy on their minds. That, and of course they never told me about my father's Uncle Alfredo, who never married before he died.

  My family owned, and no doubt still own, one of the old houses in a terrace of similar abodes near the centre of La Laguna. While not on the scale of the grand rural and urban houses of the nobility – the landowners, including those descended from the original conquerors five hundred years before – the family house denotes moderate wealth and prestige with its two storeys and its Juliet balconies. Poorer families live in houses with only one storey, and my family has nothing to do with them, except for my father, on a professional basis and not necessarily in their favour. The even poorer, the underclass, crowd into smaller houses still, and they live much farther from the city centre and I never saw any of them close up.

  I learned about these divisions of wealth and poverty later, much later. Growing up, all I knew were my own narrow cobbled street, the other narrow cobbled streets around the cathedral, and to and from my school; and I only knew what my family knew and what they wanted me to know. I only knew goodness and kindness and a narrow morality.

  I was protected and pampered, and my belly was always full. I went to school without knowing my father paid for me to go there. I was innocent. I only existed in the moment. I had no cause to dwell on the past because I had no shame, despite my parents' anxieties. The future was a mystery I didn't concern myself with. I existed in the blissful present. Although glimmers of that other insidious, repressive and punitive reality broke into my halcyon existence at school.

  José was sitting straight-backed, his attention, full and complete, on his teacher, whose big desk brushed his own little one. He sat in the centre of the front row, on the left side of the classroom. The teacher, Doña Vasco, bedecked in black, top to toe, with her hair pulled back tightly revealing a stern, no-nonsense face, was her usual uncompromising self.

  They were learning sums. They were learning subtraction, and José concentrated hard, eager not to make a single mistake, struggling not to let his pen slip, or his mind falter.

  It was no use. His attention drifted to the map pinned to the wall, and he wondered what it was like in the lands far from his own.

  He could understand removing five buttons from a jar of ten left five remaining because he had counted them and seen the number taken and the number of buttons left. That was easy to comprehend. What was harder was when there were no buttons and the entire operation took place in the abstract realm of the number alone. He kept asking himself, five what?

  Mistakes were tolerated but idleness was not and incomprehension was too easily mistaken for idleness and the consequences stung. From five buttons to five lashes of Doña Vasco's wicked cane, and José's hand smarted for the rest of the day. Nine minus seven. It occurred to him to write down any number, but he stretched out his hands beneath his desk and bent each finger in turn, and then he wrote down two.

  The sums got harder.

  Soon the bottom number was larger than the top.

  What did his father say to do?

  He looked up, not at his teacher, for she was at the back of the class, but at the little statue of the immaculate Mary, and at the portrait of General Franco square in the centre of the wall.

  It was the same portrait, wherever he went.

  Not a bad-looking man with his thinning pate and martial brush moustache. His eyes followed you around the room.

  José wished he could ask his friend Enrico, who had a talent for mathematics, but he sat in a different row. The boys walked home together at lunchtimes, and at recess they played in the shade, but it was now that José needed his clever friend.

  Doña Vasco approached José from behind and took him by surprise as he used his fingers to answer the next sum. He felt the weight of her presence bearing down on him and anticipated another lashed palm.

  His teacher had a different punishment in mind.

  He could have had no idea she had been watching him for weeks. She had heard rumours. She noticed his preference for pinks and yellows when the children were painting pictures. And when the class painted pictures, he painted pretty princesses in long flowing dresses. He had no idea there was anything wrong in that.

  'José Ramos, on your feet,' Doña Vasco said.

  Stricken with fear, he did as he is told.

  'Now, stand on your desk.'

  'My desk?'

  'Do not question me, boy.'

  José clambered onto his desk and looked down at his classmates, their shocked faces. Somehow, the whole class was terrified. No one knew why he was being singled out, and they all thought it could be their turn next.

  'Class,' the teacher boomed. 'This boy behaves like a girl. What do you think of that?' She singled out Carmen with her gaze.

  'I don't know, Doña Vasco,' Carmen said timidly.

  'You don't kn
ow. Well, the others know. What do we say to a boy who behaves like a girl?'

  'Marica! Marica!' the other children cried as if on cue.

  'Mariposa! Mariposa!'

  And along came a string of insults.

  Doña Vasco watched on with a sly smile on her hardened face.

  José blushed crimson. He almost wet his pants.

  I swing my legs back and forth and dislodge a small rock. I lean forward and watch it bounce its way down the rock face and disappear. The sun faces me, scalding my skin with its rays. Below, the ocean beats against the rocky outcrops. I lean back, putting my hands behind me and using my arms as props. I am alone. The raven has left in favour of filling its belly. My own belly needs filling, but I have no food.

  There's a farm further south, in an elevated valley. It's where I was last shooed from. If I wait until sunset and head back in the gloaming, I may steal some tomatoes. There's prickly pear in fruit growing by the roadside. And if I'm lucky, I might raid a chicken coop.

  My problem is the dogs. It's always the farm dogs. Their owners let them roam at night. I have learned to fill my pockets with rocks. I hold my knife, sharpened on a stone, poised to kill if a threat turns nasty. I am a petty criminal, a thief, a vagrant, a nomad, an out and out low life. I am no one my family would want to know. Not now. No more. The day I was sentenced put paid to any hope of redemption I might have had.

  Shoulder Day

  I pulled my eyes away from the translation on my screen, marking my place on the script and closing the laptop. So much for literary gold. The writer seemed fixated on José's childhood. I felt cheated, cheated into translating all that verbiage when what I wanted was the meat of the story of the hostel. The more of that this Spanish script provided, the less I would need to research. As it stood, I faced the onerous task of doing most of the work myself.

  I've never been one for backstory. Slows the pace of the narrative like a ball and chain. Readers these days want to forge ahead, gripped by events unfolding in the here and now. Although I can appreciate the building of the character. The importance of depicting the reality of being gay back then, even as a child. The stigmatisation. And there I was, toying with my own masculinity, turning myself over like a pebble in the palm of my hand.

  Is a childhood really as defining of character and identity? Am I the result of the boy crafted by a careless father, a stricken mother and an overbearing aunt? Was I made by them, or am I who I always was, right from birth? I stopped short of thinking about Vince.

  It was late afternoon, and I still hadn't eaten any lunch. The Clen had reduced my appetite to near zero, and I could already see the signs of a shrinking paunch. But I needed to re-fuel if only to have enough energy for the gym. The script could wait. Especially since there was every chance it would offer me little other than a background tale. I was stiff and edgy after being cooped up all day. I need to get some air around my head and some heat into my muscles.

  After straightening the bed, I put the script and the laptop under my smalls in the top drawer of the dresser. Then I went downstairs to the kitchen and fried up a couple of eggs and wedged them into a stale baguette. It wasn't like me to display such a disrespectful attitude to food, but my lack of appetite had rendered me indifferent. I regretted my attitude the moment I bit into the baguette and found I had to wrench the bread apart as the omelette slid out the other end.

  It was late afternoon when I set off. Crossing the patio, I glanced in at the living room but, as seemed to be often the case, there was no one about. Paco and Claire appeared to prefer the other rooms in the house. As did the dog. Or they were still clearing up after the wake.

  The only downside to the apartment was having to pass by those living room windows. They might have thought of that when designing the extension. Not everyone wants to feel exposed, their comings and goings there for all to see. A door facing south into the garden, with a path leading away from the house would have been ideal – something to allow privacy when coming and going. Either one of them could be watching me from an upstairs window, come to think of it. I glanced up, but my gaze met only shutters closed against the sun. Even so, I felt naked and stiff in my skin, sensations that only began to leave me once I was out on the pavement. My sense of being watched faded entirely once I was clear of the house.

  I drove with a steely resolve. Shoulder day was not a favourite of mine. Was any day a favourite? They were all hard on various parts of my body. Punishing in every respect. My determination to get fit was being eclipsed by my muse now I had committed myself to writing about the gay prison, but I needed to incorporate balance in my life going forward, create good habits. I reminded myself I was a single man, and I needed to give my body a chance to transform and become attractive once more to the opposite sex. No pain, no gain. Besides, I had bought a membership, I had steroids pumping through me and I was downing a fat burner – the larger part of me would not countenance all that waste were I to go back to my old habits. And it was obvious the exercise was doing me good. I already felt toned.

  My exchange with Mario had put my mind at rest as far as being the object of suspicion regarding the rucksack. However, as I parked in the street outside the gym, I still hoped to avoid Juan's uncle and his mates who seemed to have a preference for exercise earlier in the day. Although they might turn up at any time. Who could say?

  I pushed open the door and inhaled the air-conditioned cool, the not-so-subtle scent of male sweat, the perfumed air the gym used to disguise it and as I inhaled, I steeled my resolve for the ardours ahead. I went and slung my gym bag on the floor, mounted the exercise bike nearest the door, and commenced my ten-kilometre pedal.

  Luis appeared behind the counter and smiled at me in the mirror. He seemed genuinely pleased to see me. He came over as I was reaching my first kilometre and hovered near the handlebars. He didn't seem to want to leave me alone. I had no idea why. I pedalled and panted and pedalled and panted, not wanting to slow my pace.

  'I was worried you weren't coming back,' he said.

  'Why would you think that?' I said between breaths. I could feel the anger rising. This routine he had put me on was hard enough without him stealing my energy with conversation.

  'I thought maybe I made your fitness plan too hard. That was what I thought when you didn't show.'

  'I had a couple of rest days,' I said, cooling to him as I spoke. 'That's all.'

  He still wouldn't go away, and I wouldn't stop pedalling while he watched, even though I knew I would soon be gasping for air. What was it with this guy? Did he have the hots for me, or what? It was a thought that prompted sudden disgust. Thankfully, a patron strode over to the counter, and Luis went to serve him.

  I pedalled furiously and dismounted the bike on ten clicks just as puffed and just as wobbly as I had on the first day, but the time it had taken to complete the task had reduced by twenty seconds.

  The weights routine was no easier than the first time around. I could not lift heavier weights on the military press, and with my shoulder still playing up, I struggled through the sets. On the final heave, I resented spending precious euros on the steroids. The military press, lateral raises, dumbbell front raises and dumbbell shoulder press might only amount to four sorts of exercise, but they targeted certain muscle groups that had no interest in participating. With each set the reps grew harder, and I struggled to meet the target. Yet whenever I felt the impulse to stop, I countered it by recalling Luis's humiliating comment about his fitness plan being too hard for me, and my strength would increase on an upsurge of anger. Too hard, indeed!

  I was halfway through the last set of dumbbell front raises when a man came into the gym, a man I hadn't seen before. With his bag and his towel, he seemed like just another gym freak, but as he came closer, came into the light, I caught the curve of his calf muscles, the solid, sculpted thighs, the six-pack beneath his tight singlet, the polished skin of his arms, the biceps, the pecs, the curve of his neck, and then his face, his perfectly
proportioned and astonishingly handsome face. I had to stop my jaw from falling open, my eyes from gaping wide. In a surreptitious manner, using the mirrors as my means as I raised the dumbbells to the horizontal, I began to drink him in. I drank him in like ambrosia, and as I did, I was awash with the strangest of desires, an animal lust that weakened me even as it made me want to charge at him and smother him in kisses. I could have devoured him, devoured that perfection there and then in full view of the entire gym. At least in theory. At least in my head. And in the very next moment, as I raised the dumbbells for the last time, the entrance door opened and in walked a woman, and the woman approached my Adonis, and he smiled at her, a smile that could only be a lover's smile, and I was angry, angry at him, angry at myself, and above all, I was angry at her, whoever she was, for stealing away my fantasy at a critical moment. And besides, unlike him, she was plain. She was, next to him, astonishingly, unbelievably, unjustifiably plain.

  'Javier,' someone said loudly, and my Adonis looked up, and my spell was broken.

  It was in that moment of disbelief that I realised my arms remained outstretched and, looking around, I felt everyone had their eye on me. Self-conscious and flustered, I quickly lowered the dumbbells and returned them to the rack.

  Then I realised I needed the same dumbbells for the shoulder press and went and retrieved them. As usual, the first set was relatively easy. The second set that much harder. When I came to the third, I had to use all my determination to continue.

  I tried to focus on the reps, on the steady count to twenty, but I got to ten, and my mind fogged over, and I couldn't focus. I lifted the dumbbells, felt the agonising pain in my shoulders, but I was momentarily elsewhere, my body mechanically going through the motions. When I realised I had zoned out and had no idea the number of reps I had completed and therefore how many I needed to perform before I ended the set, I was aghast. I did what I thought might have been an extra three reps just to be sure, gritting my teeth, straining, pushing my arms up with all my might.