by Jojo Moyes
‘England.’
‘To train? You have changed your mind? You’re going to be a doctor?’
‘No, Mother, I’m still going to be a midwife.’
‘You’re going to work in a private hospital? To advance your career?’
‘No. Another state hospital.’
Milagros had stopped all pretence of cleaning, and stood still in the centre of the room to listen.
‘You are going to the other side of the world to do the same job that you do here?’
He nodded.
‘But why there? Why so far?’
His answers had been rehearsed so many times in his head. ‘There are no opportunities here. They are offering good jobs in England, proper wages. I can work in some of the best hospitals.’
‘But you can work here!’ There was a rising note in his mother’s voice that spoke of panic or hysteria. ‘Is it not enough that I lose one child? Must I lose two?’
He had known it was coming but that did not make the blow any lighter. He felt the vaguely malevolent presence that he always did when Estela was discussed. ‘You’re not losing me, Mother.’ His voice was that of a doctor speaking to his patient.
‘You’re moving ten thousand miles away! How is that not losing you? Why are you moving so far away from me?’ She appealed to Milagros, who shook her head in sorrowful agreement.
‘I’m not moving from you.’
‘But why not America? Why not Paraguay? Brazil? Why not Argentina, for heaven’s sake?’
He tried to explain how English hospitals were short of midwives, how those from other countries were being offered substantial financial rewards to fill the gap. He tried to tell her that it would be good for his career, that he might end up working for one of the famous teaching hospitals, how the neo-natal care was among the best in the world. She was always going on about their European ancestors – it would be good for him to experience Europe.
He considered telling her of the three babies he had watched handed over at birth because Argentina’s economic collapse meant their parents were too poor to keep them, of the anguished cries of the still-bloodied mothers, the painfully set j aws of the fathers. Of the fact that while he had chosen to work with the city’s dirt poor, to witness the mind-numbing misery that occurs when poverty and disease grasp hands, nothing had prepared him for the lingering sorrow, the sense of unwilling complicity he felt at the handing over of those children.
But he and his father did not talk to her of babies. They never had.
He knelt and took her hand. ‘What is there left for me here, Mama? The hospitals are dying. I could not afford to live in a slum on my salary. You want me to live with you until I am an old man?’ He regretted the words as soon as he had spoken them, knowing she would be perfectly happy with such an arrangement.
‘I knew you doing this – this thing would bring us no good.’
When he had initially gone into medicine, his mother had been proud. What professions were of a higher status in Buenos Aires, after all? Only plastic surgeons and psychoanalysts, and there were one of each in the family already. Then, two years in, he had returned home to announce a change in career: he was not at home among the doctors, he had realised. His future lay elsewhere. He was going, he said, to work in obstetric care.
‘You’re going to be an obstetrician?’ his mother had said, faint concern creasing her brow.
‘No, I’m going to be a midwife.’
It was only the second time Milagros had seen her mistress faint clean away. (The first was when they told her Estela had died.) It was not a suitable profession for the son of Buenos Aires’ most prominent cosmetic surgeon whatever he thought his so-called calling was. It was no profession for a red-blooded man, no matter what was said about equality and sexual liberation these days. It certainly wasn’t the kind of thing she felt comfortable discussing with her friends, to whom her son was only ever described as being ‘in medicine’. It wasn’t seemly. More importantly, she believed it might be, she confided to Milagros, the real reason why her beautiful son never brought girls home, why he didn’t seem to display the arrogant machismo that should have been shot through the first-born son of such a family. His male instincts, she confided to the maid, had been corrupted by repeated exposure to the more brutal side of feminine biology. Then, even worse, he had chosen to work in the state hospital.
‘So, when are you thinking of going?’
‘Next week. Tuesday.’
‘Next week? Next week coming? Why so much hurry?’
‘They need staff immediately, Mama. One has to take opportunities when they come.’
Shock had made her rigid. She held a hand to her face, then crumpled. ‘If it had been your sister who wanted this profession, who wanted to move continents . . . that I could have coped with. But you . . . It’s not right, Ale.’
So what is right? he wanted to ask. Isn’t it right that I have chosen to spend my life bringing children safely into an unsafe world? Isn’t it right that my professional currency is in emotion, real life, real love when the whole country in which we are living is built on secrets, and celebrates what is false? Is it right that, no matter what you choose to believe, the second most common surgical procedure my esteemed father carries out is supposedly to make a woman’s most private parts more ‘beautiful’? As always, he said nothing. Alejandro closed his eyes, and braced himself against his mother’s hurt. ‘I’ll be able to come back, two, maybe three times a year.’
‘My only son will be a visitor to my house. This is supposed to make me happy?’ She didn’t look at Alejandro but appealed to Milagros, who sucked her teeth. There was a lengthy silence. Then, as he had expected, his mother broke into a noisy burst of sobbing. She reached a hand across to him, her fingers waving vainly in the air. ‘Don’t go, Ale. I promise I won’t mind where you work. You can stay at the Hospital de Clinicas. I won’t say a thing.’
‘Mama—’
‘Please!’
She heard the certainty in his silence, and when she next spoke her voice held an edge of bitterness. She blinked against the tears. ‘All I wanted was to watch you succeed, get married, look after your children. And now you don’t just deny me this, you would deny me yourself!’
Their impending separation made him generous. He knelt and held her hand, her jewelled rings cold against his skin. ‘I will come back. I thought you might see this as an opportunity for me.’
She frowned at him, pushed his hair back from his eyes. ‘You are so cold, Ale. So unfeeling. Can’t you see that you’re breaking my heart?’
Alejandro was unable, as ever, to answer his mother’s forceful logic. ‘Be glad for me, Mama.’
‘How can I be glad for you when I am grieving for myself?’
And that is why I am escaping from you, he said silently. Because all I have ever known from you is grieving. Because my head is full of it, always has been. And this way, finally, I might get a little peace. ‘We’ll talk later. I have to go out now.’ He smiled, the patient, detached smile he reserved for his mother, and left her, with a kiss to her brow, sobbing quietly in the arms of her maid.
Considering that their sole purpose was to facilitate sexual excess and impropriety, the Venus Love Hotel, like other such establishments, was excessively bound up in rules and regulations. While any number of sexual aids might be ordered along with the room-service menu, and any kind of debauched proclivity catered for on the many adult videos available for private hire, the hotel was curiously prudish when it came to maintaining its code of conduct, its air of respectability. The building had the sober façade of a private house; its name was not even advertised on a hoarding outside. Neither man nor woman was allowed to wait in a room alone, despite the inconvenience caused to illicit couples forced to rendezvous in nearby cafés, not so safe from prying eyes. A smoked-glass screen at Reception meant that neither receptionist nor visitor could accurately gauge the identity of the other.
Except that one particular cus
tomer was known to the man behind the screen now, had paid him generously on more than one occasion to ensure discretion. This customer had appeared in the gossip magazines enough times to be recognisable even from behind the twin barriers of smoked glass and sunglasses.
This meant that, with only a nod to the silhouette before him, Alejandro was able to skip up the stairs two or three at a time and, at the appointed hour, knock on the discreetly numbered door that had been a private haven two or three times a week for almost eighteen months.
‘Ale?’ Never anything romantic. Never anything like amor. He preferred it like that.
‘It’s me.’
Eduardo Guichane was one of Argentina’s highest paid television hosts. On his chat show, which aired several times a week, he was flanked by several near-naked South American girls who made frequent, badly scripted references to his legendary sexual appetite. He was tall, dark, immaculately dressed, and prided himself on a physique seemingly unchanged since his years of playing professional football. Argentina’s favourite gossip magazine – Gente – repeatedly featured ‘stolen’ pictures of him squiring some young woman who was not Sofia Guichane, or speculating as to whether, as was the case with his previous wives, he was being unfaithful to the former Miss Venezuela finalist. All planted by his publicist. ‘All lies,’ Sofia would mutter bitterly, lighting one of her omnipresent cigarettes. Eduardo had the libido of an armchair. Although his most frequent excuse had been exhaustion, she was wondering if his interests didn’t lie in other directions.
‘Boys?’ said Alejandro, cautiously.
‘No! Boys I could cope with.’ Sofia blew smoke at the ceiling. ‘I am afraid he is more interested in golf.’
They had met at his father’s surgery on a day after rioting when Alejandro had come, at his mother’s request, to check that his father had made it to work safely. Sofia was on one of several visits: having been celibate for four of the six years of her marriage, she had laboured under the belief that a smaller, higher backside and several inches off her thighs might reignite her husband’s passion. (‘What a waste of American dollars that was,’ she said afterwards.) Alejandro, struck by her beauty and by the shining dissatisfaction in her face, had found himself staring, and then, leaving, thought no more of her. But she had bumped into him in the foyer downstairs where, staring at him with the same curious hunger, she announced that she never normally did this sort of thing, then scribbled her number on a card and thrust it at him.
Three days later they met at the Fenix, a spectacularly lascivious love hotel, where intricate prints of the Kama Sutra decorated the walls and beds vibrated at will. Her mention of their meeting-place had left him in no doubt as to her intention, and they had come together almost wordlessly, in a frenzied coupling that had left Alejandro dazed for almost a week afterwards.
Their meetings had gradually achieved a pattern. She would swear that they could not meet again, that Eduardo suspected something, had been quizzing her, that she had only got away with it by the skin of her teeth. Then, as he sat beside her, comforted her, told her he understood, she would weep, ask why she, as a young woman, should have to endure a sexless marriage, a life free of passion, when she was not even thirty. (Both were aware that this was not strictly true – the age at least – but Alejandro knew better than to interrupt.) And then, as he comforted her again, agreed that it was unfair, that she was too beautiful, too passionate to grow stale and dry like an old fig, she would hold his face and announce that he was so handsome, so kind, the only man who had ever understood her. And then they would make love (although that always sounded too gentle for what it really was). Afterwards, smoking furiously, she would pull away and tell him that this really was it. The risks were too high. Alejandro would have to understand.
Several days, or occasionally a week, later she would call again.
His own feelings about the arrangement had often verged on the ambivalent: Alejandro had always been discreetly selective when it came to sexual partners, uncomfortable with the idea of falling in love. While he felt a sympathy for her predicament, he knew he didn’t love Sofia; he wasn’t even sure he always liked her. Her own protestations of love, he sensed, were a way of legitimising to a good Catholic girl her illicit actions: while her view of her religion might just accommodate romantic passion, carnal lust was clearly stretching things. What they shared, and what neither had ever been quite brave enough to acknowledge, was a fierce sexual chemistry; it ratified Sofia’s enduring belief in her own desirability, and lifted Alejandro out of his habitual reticence, even if his exterior did little to suggest it.
‘Why do you never look at me when you come?’
Alejandro closed the door quietly behind him, and stood over the prostrate figure of Sofia on the bed. He was used now to these abrupt opening gambits: it was as if the abbreviated nature of their meetings left no room for any kind of nicety. ‘I do look at you.’ He considered removing his jacket, then changed his mind.
Sofia rolled over on to her stomach so that she could reach the ashtray. The action caused her skirt to ride up her legs. A pornographic film was playing on the television; he glanced at it, wondered if she had been watching it while she waited for him.
‘No, you don’t. Not when you come,’ she said. ‘I watch you.’
He knew she was right. He had never opened his eyes to any woman at that moment; no doubt his uncle, the psychoanalyst, would have said it betrayed something ungenerous about him, some determination not to reveal himself. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t thought about it.’
Sofia pushed herself upright, lifting one knee so that a long expanse of thigh was clearly visible. Normally this would have been enough to elicit powerful waves of desire in him; today he felt curiously detached, as if he were already thousands of miles from here.
‘Eduardo thinks we should have a baby.’
Next door someone opened a window. Through the wall, Alejandro could just make out the dull murmur of voices. ‘A baby,’ he repeated.
‘You’re not going to ask me how?’
‘I think I understand the biology of it by now.’
She wasn’t smiling. ‘He wants to do it at a clinic. He says it will be the best way to make sure it happens quickly. I think it is just because he doesn’t want to make love to me.’
Alejandro sat on the corner of the bed. The couple on the television were now engaged in an orgiastic frenzy; he wondered whether Sofia would mind if he turned it off. He had told her several times that such films did nothing for him, but she would just smile as if she knew better, as if repeated exposure to them would change his mind. ‘I don’t think making babies is something you can do by yourself.’
She had kicked off her shoes in separate corners of the room: Eduardo liked things to be neat, orderly, she had told him before. When she was with Alejandro, she liked to scatter her clothes about, a kind of secret rebellion. ‘It doesn’t bother you?’
‘If it bothers you.’
‘I don’t think he really wants a kid. All those diapers – plastic toys everywhere, baby puke on his shoulders. He just wants to look virile. You know he’s losing his hair? I told him it would be cheaper for both of us if he got hair plugs. But he says he wants a baby.’
‘And what do you want?’
She looked at him sharply, smirked at his psychoanalytic tone. ‘What do I want?’ She pulled a face, stubbed out her cigarette. ‘I don’t know. Some other life probably.’ She pushed herself off the bed and walked up to him, close enough for him to breathe her perfume, and placed a cool hand against his cheek, letting it slide slowly over his skin. Her hair, which was loose around her shoulders, was slightly matted, as if she had spent some time lying on the bed before he arrived. ‘I’ve been thinking about you,’ she said. She leant forward and kissed him, leaving the taste of lipstick and cigarettes on his lips. Then she cocked her head to one side. ‘What’s up?’
She surprised him like this every now and then: he had believed her so spoil
t and self-absorbed, and yet occasionally she would pick up on some subtle change in atmosphere, like a dog.
He wondered whether there was any way to soften it. ‘I’m going away.’
Her eyes widened. The woman on the screen had contorted herself into a position that made Alejandro uncomfortable for her. He was longing to turn off the television.
‘For long?’
‘A year . . . I don’t know.’
He had expected an explosion, was still primed for it. But she merely stood very still, then sighed and sat down on the bed, reaching for her cigarettes.
‘It’s work. I’ve got a job in a hospital in England.’
‘England.’
‘I leave next week.’
‘Oh.’
He moved closer to her, put a hand on her arm. ‘I shall miss you.’
They sat like that for some minutes, vaguely conscious of the sound of muffled lovemaking next door. There had been a time when he would have found it embarrassing.
‘Why?’ She turned to him. ‘Why are you going?’
‘Buenos Aires . . . is too full of ghosts.’
‘It has always been full of ghosts. Always will be.’ She shrugged. ‘You just have to choose not to see them.’
He swallowed. ‘I can’t.’ He reached for Sofia then, perhaps because she had not reacted as he had expected, suddenly desiring her, desperate to lose himself inside her. But she extricated herself from his grasp, twisting nimbly, and stood up. She lifted one hand to her hair, smoothed it, walked to the television and flicked it off.
When she spoke, her eyes were filled with neither tears nor infantile fury, but a kind of resigned wisdom he hadn’t seen before. ‘I should be mad with you, leaving me like this,’ she said, lighting another cigarette. ‘But I’m glad, Ale.’ She nodded, as if confirming it to herself. ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever seen you do something, make a real decision. You’ve always been so . . . passive.’
He felt a brief discomfort, not knowing if she was disparaging his sexual technique. But having lit her cigarette she took his hand, lifted and kissed it, a curious gesture. ‘Are you running to something? Or just running away?’ Her hand held his firmly.
