The Empty Family (v5)

by Colm Toibin

  As the old dictator began to die, we three tried to meet again. A few times I turned up at the apartment and rang the various bells and was let in by an electronic switch, only to find a stranger on the top floor. A few times I left a note. Once, the guy I had fucked came to my pensión and left a note for me. My landlady was curious about him, made nods and gestures as if to say that an interesting man had called for me. Once I met the painter on the Ramblas; he signalled that he was in a hurry but would see me at the apartment later.

  I wonder if the next time I found my friends in residence was the first night of the orgy. In any case, in my memory now the painter’s room expands and there are suddenly other beds and mattresses on the floor and maybe twenty young guys. No one that night was drunk and there was no alcohol in the flat, which surprised me. In Ireland, were an orgy to take place – and this was unimaginable in 1975 – then everyone would have had to get drunk first and begin by pretending it was not happening. In this orgy, in the flat on the top floor of the building in Plaza Real, the twenty of us were very quickly and rampantly naked. There were no drugs; there was a great deal of easy laughter. In my innocence, I believed that there were no rules in an orgy. You took who you liked for as long as you liked and then discarded him when you got fed up with him and then you took someone else, or indeed several someone elses at the same time, if the occasion should arise.

  I took the first guy who came towards me. He was friendly and large-framed, with brown eyes and soft skin. As soon as I touched him, his dick was erect. We found a bed to the side of the big bed and started to play. Bit by bit, a set of rules began to emerge. No one in the room fucked or sucked cock. Everyone kissed and fondled one another. It was as though a strange modesty had broken out. Everyone was in a couple; no one disturbed another couple, or moved from the guy of their choice to another guy of their newer or greater choice. After half an hour of pleasurable monogamy, I realized that I had misunderstood everything. I should have waited. I had made a big mistake.

  That mistake was smiling at me now as we kissed. I smiled back. He was a nice guy. But across the room, alone, was another guy who was even nicer. He was watching the orgy with considerable engagement but he was still wearing his underpants. He noticed me watching him. He was not tall, but he was strong without being too muscular. He could have been a runner or a swimmer. He had shiny brown hair that hung around his head untidily, and dark eyes, but he did not look Spanish. He could easily have been Dutch or from Eastern Europe. I wished I had waited for him and slowly it became obvious that he wished I had too. The problem was how to get away from the guy I was with, who was increasingly passionate and eager.

  If I made the guy come, I wondered, would I then be free? But he did not want to come, nor did anyone else in the room, it seemed. This was another of the secret rules. That loss of serenity, as the Pope once called it, was not part of this orgy. Coming would be a moment of self-exposure and no one wanted to do it in public. I would have to wait. It took time before my loss of interest became clear to my partner. He was good-humoured about it. He stood up and walked out of the room, signalling that he would be back soon. I realized that there were other rooms off the corridor with other beds. I followed him to find the toilet. As I passed the guy whose underpants were still on, I nodded to him and he nodded back. I soon found an empty room and an empty bed and I waited.

  The new guy was shy and hesitant when he came into the room. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at me. He already knew that I was Irish, someone had told him. He spoke very good English, but often waited between sentences and phrases to think. I noticed how smooth his body was, how tightly packed and coiled he seemed. I wondered what he wanted and I wondered what it would be like to kiss him. There was something almost remote about him. His sexuality was more hidden, more cared for than that of the other guys in the room. He held himself apart.

  Suddenly, without warning or excuse, I put my hand on his chest. He looked at me gravely, remaining still. Before this, he had smiled as he spoke, and a few times as he grew silent we had smiled at each other. Now this was too serious for smiling. He sat and looked at me. It was as though his blood were changing its colour or its nature and it was going to take time. He could do nothing until that was completed. For five minutes then we were like statues. But I knew that it would have to end in him coming towards me, and once I knew that I was happy to watch him as he prepared himself for it.

  I stroked his back and his chest as he lay down. He touched me as though every touch would be remembered and would come to mean something. He left his underpants on. I judged that as a reticence that mattered to him, so I did not touch him there. He kissed with an astonishing seriousness. Soon we were joined in the room by the guy I had been with earlier and the painter, who was, I suppose, the host of this event. The painter was now dressed up with a mantilla on his head and a brassière on his chest and nothing below. He was wearing make-up. Both of them were brazenly discussing my brazenness, my nerve at having moved so quickly from one guy to another. My new friend translated for me, and we both laughed, but I realized that I had broken a rule and that this was a house of rules, even though it did not seem like one.

  I don’t know when I first let my new friend fuck me. I had been fucked for a few seconds the year before, but it was so painful I had made the guy take his dick out forthwith and keep it out. Another guy, the summer before I left Ireland, had tried more successfully, but it was better when I fucked him. So when my new friend asked me if I liked fucking or being fucked, I said I liked fucking. He said he did too, and in fact he hated being fucked and couldn’t do it. He was shy about saying all of this, but still he left me in no doubt. We had a problem. So I gave in.

  We would never have done it while others could come in and out of the room. I think we waited until the early hours, when there was peace in the apartment and most people had gone home and the rest were sleeping. I was nervous. He had a way of suggesting an immense inner life in which outward actions were considered first as theory and then gradually and deliberately put into action. His dick took time to harden and then it stayed hard. It was very beautiful. Long and lovely to hold and not too thick or unwieldy.

  I began to wish to be fucked by him as he held me and kissed me, assuring me that there was no hurry, we could do it another time. But I knew he wanted to do it now and for me in those years there was never another time. I wanted everything now. So in the night in this strange room, I turned around, my face down, and he moved with his mysterious slowness, touching my shoulders, and then moving his hand down to my arse and testing my arsehole with his finger, probing it gently. I could hear him breathing hard, as though this action, more than any other, had made him very excited. I was excited too, but I was tense. The thought of being fucked was much sweeter than the awkward, fumbling and painful mechanics of really taking another guy’s dick right up inside your arse.

  At first it was panic. I thought I was going to shit and I wanted to warn him. He had put his hands under my shoulders and was gripping me tightly, not moving or thrusting, just letting his dick slide in farther. I could not hear his breathing. He was absolutely still, and holding me still too, calming my panic with a fierce and stable energy. Eventually, I began to relax and, having wanted to make him take it out, I now began to want it there. Slowly, he started to fuck me.

  The poet Don Paterson, in The Book of Shadows, a collection of aphorisms, writes: ‘Anal sex has one serious advantage: there are few cinematic precedents that instruct either party how they should look.’ My friend looked, as far as I could imagine, as though the mysteries of the universe were close to being solved by him. I imagine he kept his eyes wide open. At times he would turn my head and we would kiss as passionately as we could, considering the angles. When he came, he held me for a long time without moving. Then he put all his energy into making me come. On a later occasion, when his dick slipped out five or ten minutes after he had come, he said ‘Goodbye,’ but I don’t think that happe
ned the first time.

  The city was a vast distraction. I found a restaurant I liked; a few bars; a few English-speaking friends. I got some hours teaching. I signed up for Spanish classes. Like everyone else, I followed the news about the failing health of the old dictator. And now and then over those months, a crucial time in the history of Spain, I noticed how generally indifferent people were to anything except the private realm, which was inhabited by the young with great intensity. The books you read, the friends you met, the lovers you slept with, the music you listened to, the new identities you took on, these were the things that mattered in that autumn in Barcelona. The disintegration of the old man and his regime was like an invisible undertow. The surface of life was too exciting for anyone to do more than shrug at the possibility that this undertow would begin to pull us elsewhere.

  I called around to Plaza Real whenever I felt horny. Sometimes, my friend was there and we would make love. We would arrange to meet and make love again, often in different bedrooms in buildings elsewhere in the city that were owned by friends of his. I never introduced him to anyone I knew. I never told anyone about this secret life. A few times, when I called and he was not there, I stayed if there was a party. The parties were good. I realized that the painter, with his elaborate mantillas and costumes and fans, was slowly becoming a personage in the city. He moved up and down the street, cheeky, full of mockery and wit, with one or two friends, dressed like a young Spanish girl at a fair or a religious ceremony, but wearing two or three days’ stubble.

  He was, I realized one night, very funny. I had stayed over in his room, sleeping with some others on a mattress on the floor. Early in the morning he began a monologue, imitating accents, putting on voices. I had no idea what he was talking about, but everyone in the room was howling with laughter. It might have been that morning, or maybe it was another, when a woman, who seemed to have a room in the warren of rooms on that floor, arrived with her child, a little boy less than a year old, who could crawl but not walk. She left him with us, twenty half-naked, half-sleeping men. Our friend the painter set about entertaining the child, and we all joined in. Everyone was jealous of whoever had the child’s attention. The baby crawled on top of us all, laughing and making us laugh. We made faces, did voices, played in whatever way we could with the little boy, until his mother came back. The baby cried at being taken away from us.

  I discovered that my lover could read English with astonishing ease and fluency. When he spoke he was hesitant, but then I realized that he was also hesitant in Spanish and in Catalan. A few times at night I lay beside him and watched him reading late Henry James novels, amazed at his sharp grasp of the most complex sentences. Once, when the painter was out, and my friend had a key to his door, or it had been left open, we made love on his bed. I knew where the Vaseline was kept. It was the first time that he fucked me from the front, my legs spread out, my ankles on his shoulders. At first, this was even more painful than before, but soon it was easy. I loved looking at his face as he fucked, his gaze so intense, as though he might eat me. When the painter came back and saw us on the bed and the Vaseline on the table beside us, he put his hands in the air and said: ‘Por favor!’

  My lover was not there the evening the dictator died, nor was I. He later told me that he had heard the party that night was the best of all. Outrage after outrage was committed, and, I supposed, many new unwritten rules were devised. I was sorry I had missed it. I was drifting away. The painter had got tired of me sitting on his bed listening to the Triple Concerto. I was very interested in those years in taking my clothes off; putting more of them on, dressing up as a señorita, was not my style.

  So I did not go to the opening of Ventura Pons’s film about the painter in the Cine Maldà. I read about it in the newspaper. By this time, the painter’s name was a byword for the new freedom and all the youthful happiness that came in its wake.

  I stopped seeing my lover. Six months later, however, when I got a flat around the corner from Plaza Real, I discovered that he had moved to another flat on the same floor of the building where we had met. If he was home, the lights were visible from one of the streets between Escudellers and the Plaza Real. Sometimes when I walked home I would check the light and if I was feeling in the right mood I would call in to him. He would play his old game of talking and listening as though there were no sexual charge between us. And then I would move towards him and touch him, and, just like the first time, he would remain still, in his lovely old trance. This transformation from the social to the sexual, which I could do in a split second, took him time. And then he was ready.

  All these years later, I can still take pleasure in the tight, hard shape of him, his tongue, the knob of his dick, the glitter in his eyes, his shy smile. I always knew that if I did not keep him, he would go. Someone else would claim him.

  One night, towards the end of my time in the city, he hesitated for even longer than usual when I touched him and then he told me that he could not make love with me. Someone else had come along and wanted him, he said, and he could not fuck anyone else. He was sorry. I nodded. It was my own fault. I should not have wandered off as I did, coming to him only when I felt too horny to keep away. I walked down the stairs of that flat in the Plaza Real for the last time and into the shining city. I was ready, once more, for anything.

  The Street

  Malik stood in the corner by the drawer where the cash was kept while Baldy counted the day’s takings. He tried to look humble but also alert as Baldy, without once looking up, spoke to him for the first time since his arrival. He told him that he could have a half-day free every week until he was trained and then maybe a whole day. Malik nodded and stayed still and then nodded again in case Baldy turned in his direction, or in case one of the other barbers in the Four Corners was watching. They all claimed to dislike Baldy, but Malik did not think he could trust any of them.

  Baldy was gruff. When they had met at the airport in Barcelona a few weeks earlier, he had not even said hello to him. When Malik had tried to explain the long delay in Madrid, Baldy had not paid him the slightest attention, he had turned and walked away, having brusquely indicated that Malik should follow him. Then he had walked impatiently out of the airport building towards the car park. As he drove into the city, Baldy had talked business into a tiny mobile phone that he attached to his ear and in front of his mouth and had not said a word to Malik.

  Malik remembered how dark and frightening the city seemed. Baldy had eventually pulled up outside a tall old building in a narrow street and motioned to Malik from the front seat that he should take his bag out of the car. With Malik standing on the pavement beside him, Baldy rang a bell beside one of the doorways and shouted a name when someone answered through an intercom. Then, without a word, he got back into the car and drove away. Malik had waited alone in the street until a man came down and accompanied him upstairs to his quarters. The time waiting had frightened him even more than the arrival in Madrid.

  Malik was surprised at the idea that Baldy thought he would ever prove himself as a proper barber. Although he was becoming more confident at the practice sessions, the others still laughed at his awkwardness. He found the machines difficult. One night the previous week, for example, they had let him give a full haircut using the electric shears and Salim had taken photographs of the result to amuse everyone. Some of the cut was far too tight, but in places Malik had left tufts of hair uncut.

  Malik began sweeping until the floor was clean and then moved towards the door and stood close to it. He found a newspaper on a chair and folded it neatly. He wondered if he should do something else and tried to look busy, even though it must be obvious, he thought, that he was not busy. Baldy, he saw, was adding up the number of customers who had come to the Four Corners that day and what each had paid. When he had finished this, he put the euro notes into his back pocket and left the coins in the drawer. Then he walked out of the Four Corners without speaking.

  The atmosphere changed as soo
n as Baldy left. One of the barbers went to the cassette player and turned up the sound. Malik thought for a moment that he might go and sit down, but then he worried that Baldy might suddenly return and catch him doing nothing. He went into the back room and checked the towels and then came out again into the shop, where there were still two clients having haircuts. The other barbers were chatting and cleaning up. He leaned against the wall and watched them. He thought that some of them resented his sullenness, his silence.

  He wondered what they all did with their day or half-day free. He had never heard anyone saying that they went anywhere or did anything. It struck him that the only thing he could do was spend his free half-day sitting beside Super at the cash register in the supermarket a block away on the same street as the Four Corners. He had met Super on his second day in the street, when he was sent to get tea. Super was the first person to call him by his name and ask him questions about himself. If Super was busy, he thought, he would help him out; if the supermarket became quiet, he would sit and listen to Super’s commentary on those who passed in the street, or on his regular customers, or on what was happening in the world.

  Later, as the shop was getting ready to close, he was glad when no one suggested that he continue his training. He waited with them until the last customer had gone; then he joined them as they walked back to the house, being careful to say nothing, and not seem to listen too closely to any of them, in case they picked on him or laughed at him. He looked forward to getting into bed and feeling alone there in the darkness; the very thought of that pleased him and made him feel almost comfortable and happy.