Twin Truths

by Shelan Rodger

  So, it was the English girl next. It had taken time to break down both her reserve and her reservations about being in therapy. He felt that they had finally begun to make progress and yet there was still something uncomfortable about the sessions.

  Ignacio was used to breaking down reserve. It operated at different levels and it took time for most patients to let go of the need to project some kind of image, be this self-made, imposed by someone else or simply what they thought the therapist would expect or want to hear. The therapist developed an ear for untruths, like a musician for an off- key note, and much of his time was spent peeling back the layers of self-deception in a patient’s discourse. When this started to happen some people couldn’t cope and stopped coming. Others never really wanted to be there anyway and resorted to mind games, not realising they were only fooling themselves, but most had a genuine desire to understand and did what they could to help the therapist help them.

  At first Ignacio thought that the English girl was playing games, like an adolescent sent by her mother who boasts to her girlfriends later about the stories she has told. At times he had wanted to tell her to go home and stop wasting his time, but she kept coming back and, even if he never got beneath the lies, he reasoned that the sessions must be helping her.

  The door opened and in she walked. Her face had a set look about it, as if preparing for the wrinkles that would slowly take root over time, but her eyes flashed with the confidence of youth. She crossed the room resolutely – almost defiantly – as if this were some form of community service she had been sentenced to. She sat noisily on the leather-cushioned armchair positioned discreetly just to one side of his direct view and, without a word from him, began the session.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about anything that happened today.’

  ‘OK, what do you want to talk about?’

  ‘I don’t know, you suggest something.’

  ‘Well, tell me about your Spanish.’

  ‘Haven’t we done this one before?’

  ‘Let’s do it again. You say you can escape in Spanish. When did you learn to speak it?’

  ‘My mother was Chilean. She was only nineteen when she met my father, an Englishman who worked for the United Nations, and within six months he had whisked her off to married life in England. He loved her exotic, Latin tones when she was young and beautiful, but when she grew middle-aged and fat he grew impatient with her inability to shed her accent. He never wanted me to learn Spanish, but she would speak to me in secret, and build strange and beautiful pictures of her native land. I never learnt to speak it fluently, but it was always special. I used to keep two books, one for my dreams – my real night dreams in English – and one for my day dreams, in Spanish.’

  ‘And when did you stop keeping those books?’

  ‘When my father found the Spanish one.’

  ‘Go on. What happened then?’

  ‘He couldn’t cope with the revelation that she had been speaking Spanish to me in secret. He had never made the effort to enter into her previous life, expecting her to leave it all behind. She lived in a no man’s land – not English, not Chilean – and when her roots broke through the cracks he started to hate her. They got divorced.’

  ‘So why didn’t she come back after they got divorced?’

  ‘She was too scared by then.’

  ‘Do you see her now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is that a conscious decision?’

  ‘Look, can we go for a drink? I can’t do this stuff in here. And that’s not true about my parents, or at least it could be, but I wouldn’t have a clue. I don’t know who my real parents are.’

  Ignacio flinched for just a split second when she asked him to go for a drink. This was not the first time she had hinted at meeting outside, but it was the first time she had been so blatant. He ignored her suggestion.

  ‘Is any of what you’ve told me true?’

  ‘My nanny was Chilean and she used to speak to us in Spanish.

  That bit’s true.’

  ‘Us? Who is “us”?’

  ‘Me and my sister.’

  ‘You have a sister?’

  ‘Look, I need a drink. Do you want one?’

  Her eyes dared him to look at her. When he did, desperate to keep his response detached, professional, discreet, her eyes held his and it was he who looked down at his notes. Still, he could feel her staring at him, challenging him, perhaps mocking him.

  ‘Off the record?’ she coaxed, mischievous now.

  ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea.’

  ‘Oh, please!’ This was not a plea. And then, with more sarcasm, ‘What? In case you forget that you’re a psychotherapist and we fall in love and live happily ever after? In case you find out something real about me, like the way I fuck? In case you turn out to be a real human being, too?’

  ‘Jenny,’ the name sounded strange to him, ‘you must realise that it would be totally unprofessional to meet outside. It wouldn’t help either of us to do the work that we are doing here. This is really just about projecting some of your feelings onto your therapist, and this is quite normal, so don’t worry about it, but please try and avoid asking me again. Now, I think it’s time for us to end the session for today.’

  Ignacio felt inanely proud of his short speech and did not bother until much later to ask himself why.

  ‘Fine!’ The English girl’s response was strangely vehement. In fact, it occurred to Ignacio that she seemed strangely un-English. ‘You stay in your precious little asylum for the non-living and leave me to the street. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. Jenny is always fine.’

  And in the moment when Ignacio should have said something as a professional, or could have said something as a man, she was up and gone.

  Chapter 4

  Café con leche y media lunas de manteca. Breakfast. Sitting outside at a pavement café in fresh Saturday sunlight. Alone with coffee and papers. This was the cleanest mental moment I had savoured for a long time. Unusually, I had not partied on Friday night and I was up long before normal. I watched with interest the people who inhabit early Saturday morning in Buenos Aires.

  An early-bird shopper, mid-twenties, made up to try on the latest fashion and eager to please. A blind date that night, and needed a dress that would stun, determined that being on the rebound wouldn’t get in the way. I watched a dog walker approach her from the opposite direction, a muddle of dogs in tow, poodles hobnobbing with Rottweilers, all expertly held on one master leash. The shopper sidestepped to avoid them, proudly carrying his eyes on her to the other side of the street. Yes, the right dress would do the trick!

  I browsed through the newspaper and learnt that the world continued. I wondered how to hold this feeling. The feeling was hesitant, but real, a flower just on the edge of opening up. I wondered how to hold it, but couldn’t. I fought and fought to keep memory out. I tried to use a meditation trick I had once learnt, to visually close doors any time an unwanted thought tried to come in. Sorry, no visitors today. Please don’t come back. Thank you. Goodbye. But the visitors came again and again . . . words of a phone call that would live on inside me forever:

  Hey, how are you doing? When do you get back?

  11.55 Sunday, the BA flight to Gatwick. You’ll be there, won’t you?

  I’ll be there.

  OK, Tootlepips. I’ve got to go. There’s a seriously good-looking man, quite obviously chilling out after a very messy divorce, lying by the swimming pool.

  Glad to hear this trip has changed you! Off you go then, I’ll see you Sunday.

  Till Sunday.

  Click. That was then, this was now. Then and now. So little in it really, a random transition which changes everything.

  So today was Saturday. What was I going to do tonight? It was a while since I had seen Pablo, but his mood swings were becoming an irritant. One moment he was happy to be the Don Juan with the lady of the night who asked for nothing, the next he seemed to resent the fact I wa
sn’t asking him to love me. Sometimes he would try and make me jealous, telling me about some woman he was growing interested in, thinking of having a real relationship with. So why are you still here? I would ask him calmly. That infuriated him. Yes, it looked like I was going to have to give this one up. Damn, why do people agree to a set of rules and then try to change them? Perhaps I would say yes to his suggestion of a weekend in the mountains. Decisions with a view are usually more reliable. That was my sister’s excuse anyway.

  That still left me with tonight, though. Nick was in love again and it was definitely a case of ‘time of the month’ when this happened. I couldn’t face the Henry and Sally crowd. I thought of my therapist. What would he and his wife be doing tonight? Would they watch a Woody Allen film and then skirt around the problems in their own relationship over coffee and brandy? Was I too cynical? Perhaps he wasn’t married. Perhaps the insight he had into other people’s lives was enough.

  I flicked through a mental address book and felt empty. Ana, I might try Ana. The first time we’d met was at a birthday party, milling with people, but there was something that drew me to her. She seemed to have everything and yet there was something haunted about her. You could only see it if you caught her unawares. Laughter was her drug and when she was without it she looked years older. We’d met for coffee a few times since then and a tentative friendship was growing in the pauses between the laughter. Yes, I would try Ana.

  ‘Look, why don’t you come round to us? We’re having an asado with family and an old friend of Daniel’s. Go on. It’d be great to see you!’

  A barbecue en famille, not what I’d had in mind really, but this was the kind of thing that happened on a Saturday night if you were married with kids.

  ‘Great. I’ll see you this evening then!’

  * * *

  Kids in Argentina stay up till all hours. By the time the youngest had gone to bed, we were mixing wine with grass and stars. I had cantered over and around the usual first hurdles: what had I done in England, why on earth had I come to Argentina, was I planning to stay forever, why wasn’t I married, what did I do here, did I have a man? In England a new acquaintance would settle for your job title to give them context. Here they needed a whole life description! I told them I had met an Argentine on holiday in Egypt, fallen in love and followed him to Argentina, only to find that he was married and hadn’t meant me to take him literally when he said he wished I was by his side.

  ‘Hijo de –!’ burst out Ana.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I added quickly, in response to the looks of concern. ‘I realised fast that I had been infatuated with an arsehole, but I liked it here so much I decided to stay for a bit.’

  ‘You English women are very strange! I would kill my wife if she was as independent as you!’ Ana’s husband, Daniel, must have broken a few hearts in the past.

  ‘Well, maybe you should keep a better eye on me then!’ Ana, laughing.

  ‘And what about your family? Are they in England?’ Juan, Daniel’s paddle tennis partner and old school friend.

  ‘Basta!’ I choked. ‘This is turning into an interview! I’m going to charge you for this.’

  ‘You ignore them, Jenny. They’re just not used to single women!

  Who’s for more coffee?’

  I followed Ana into the kitchen. It was a lived-in kitchen, with a cork noticeboard proclaiming the pursuits of each member of the family. There were half-read magazines and children’s drawings on the table and chewed up tennis shoes by the dog basket.

  ‘You’re pensive.’

  ‘Yes, I am, aren’t I? I’m not used to seeing kids around, that’s all.’

  ‘You’re running away from something, aren’t you?’ The haunted look was there again, but disarmingly gentle. ‘Don’t worry, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’

  ‘What makes you so sure?’ I was nonplussed by her quiet certainty.

  It was as if we had been friends for a long time.

  ‘You are too brittle. It’s as if you are always acting. I don’t mean to offend you in any way, but that is what I feel.’

  ‘No offence, don’t worry.’ I looked around desperately for a legitimate subject to latch on to. My head was spinning with the wine and the joint, and the burden of playing ‘question time’ was getting to me. My eyes stopped at a family photo on the noticeboard and, in desperation, I fell upon a personal question I could ask someone else.

  ‘Why did you wait so long between having Silvina and the other two?’

  Ana turned from the sink to face me and explained very gently and simply. ‘Silvina is not my daughter. She was my sister’s daughter. My sister and her husband disappeared when she was two years old. Silvina was found by some neighbours in the street, wearing a label with her address around her neck. We were lucky she wasn’t sold for adoption. So I brought her up as my own daughter. When I met Daniel, he accepted us both.’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ I could hardly speak. ‘And your sister?’

  ‘We never saw her again. I go to the Plaza de Mayo every Thursday with my mother and all the other mothers who have lost their children in the dirty war that nobody talks about . . . but this is just a ritual now. None of us have any hope left.’

  Then she looked at me. I fought against the rising panic in my stomach. ‘Hey, are you alright? Listen, don’t worry, we’ve had a long time to learn to cope with this. Are you sure you’re OK?’

  No, I wasn’t OK. I would never be OK. How could Ana know that the story she had offered me was quite literally something I could not stomach. She searched my face with a look of pity on hers, but I couldn’t get beyond the nausea. I couldn’t find the words to help me spell it out.

  After I was sick, they called a taxi and Juan dropped me off on his way home.

  Chapter 5

  ‘Clara, who’s next?’

  ‘La inglesita, Jenny Patterson.’

  She hadn’t been for three weeks and Ignacio had wondered whether the strain of her own game-playing had been too much in the end. He had always felt that it had to go one of two ways. Either she would just stop coming one day or she would start being honest and run the risk of letting the demons surface. He hoped she wouldn’t just stop coming.

  Clara showed her in and brought coffee.

  ‘So, you’re back. I wondered if you had decided to stop coming.’

  ‘Would you have minded?’

  ‘I think it would have been a mistake. I think you were doing well. How do you feel?’

  ‘Radiant! I’ve been in San Luis for a long weekend.’

  True, she looked radiant. Fresh air was obviously good for her.

  ‘So, tell me about it. What was it you enjoyed most?’

  ‘A blow job in the hills on two different men.’

  So, it was going to be one of those sessions. Ignacio was an old hand at dealing with shock tactics, but there was something particularly provocative in the way that the English girl did this, not so much trying to shock him as make him look at her.

  ‘Is that something you want to tell me about?’

  ‘Yeah, why not? I had been having this affair with a guy called Pablo. Well, not really an affair, we just met for sex really, on and off, but he was getting impatient with me and I was thinking about putting a stop to it. But I agreed to a long weekend with him in the hills, just to make sure I was making the right decision. Anyway, when I turned up at the coach station he was with a friend. He hadn’t said anything about a friend coming along and I thought, typical, this is just another ploy to try and coax me into some semblance of a normal relationship with him. I was angry with him and then angry with myself, because that seemed to be exactly the effect he was looking for. So, I ignored both of them for the duration of the journey.’

  Was this just story time again, Ignacio wondered, yet she did genuinely look refreshed. He held his tongue.

  ‘Anyway, we stayed in this run-down old hotel, in the low hills outside the town, with an old cracked swimming poo
l and tea tables on the lawn. There was hardly anyone there and we had adjoining rooms, me with Pablo and the friend next door. And on the first night, after a dinner during which I barely directed a word in the friend’s direction, Pablo was ruthless in bed. If I hadn’t been so wet he would have hurt me, and he kept whispering, “You be nice to Ricardo, you bitch.” That’s when I realised.’

  ‘Realised what?’ Despite himself, Ignacio was finding it difficult to control his interest.

  ‘Because I wouldn’t agree to see him on a normal basis, because he thought I was playing with him, he wanted to humiliate me, to teach me a lesson.’

  ‘And did he?’

  ‘Depends what you find humiliating, doesn’t it? I decided to play along. The next day we went walking in the hills, with a picnic and wine. When we were on the third bottle, I said to Ricardo, “Hey your friend Pablo says I’ve got to be nice to you. How do you like your women to be nice to you . . .?”’

  ‘And then what happened?’

  ‘Hey, I think you can imagine the rest!’

  Yes, he could imagine the rest. The problem was he couldn’t stop himself imagining the rest . . .

  ‘And how do you feel about it now?’

  ‘It helped me make the decision.’

  ‘You’ve decided to stop seeing him.’

  ‘No way, I’ve decided to keep seeing him!’

  She was laughing at him and he had no idea what she had really decided.

  ‘So, how about dinner to celebrate?’

  ‘Only if you agree to cut the bullshit.’ The man in him had spoken before the therapist. Shit! It would take a lot to get back to the therapist now. Just once then.

  ‘Way to go! When and where shall we meet? Oh and what should I call you? Shall I just call you Doctor?’ She was laughing now.