Everything You and I Could Have Been If We Weren't You and I

by Albert Espinosa

  And all these big events have happened while you were sleeping. In those two seconds that are really eight hours, or nine or ten, depending on what you need and what you can get. And sleeping is never the same.

  I’ve always found it amazing how sleep, when done right, passes in the blink of an eye.

  I’ve always believed in sleeping and in traveling to the future, maybe that’s why losing what was so much a part of me, those nocturnal trips, frightened me.

  I’ll tell you a secret: sometimes, if I fall asleep quickly without thinking about it, I wake up suddenly, afraid, deathly afraid; it’s as if my body slept but my brain didn’t. Suddenly they both wake up at once and my most primal fears make me feel like a helpless little boy. And that is when I hug whomever I have by my side, and I would give all my love and all my sex in exchange for being taken care of.

  Over the years, I’ve realized that it’s a fear I can control if I am aware that I’ve only fallen asleep and woken up quickly. It’s a primal fear, instantaneous, but easy to get under control if you diagnose it promptly. But the weird part is that I don’t really want to control it, I like seeing myself so incredibly weak.

  And there I was, about to do something that I had sworn I wouldn’t. Many, many people had already stopped sleeping, but I still felt it was important.

  My whole philosophy had gone up in smoke when I found out that my mother had left me.

  And I knew that once I did it I’d get a raise immediately, and a new mortgage. Because they say that life changes when you don’t sleep. That your work schedule is different, that you experience time in a whole new way. I don’t know, I guess it’s true. Although people are such liars… Hardly anyone complains about an expensive trip or a concert ticket that cost an arm and a leg. We have to like expensive things or, if we don’t, we refuse to admit it. Nobody is stupid enough to take a load of crap and on top of that to pay good money for it.

  I decided that I’d had enough of my fears; it was time to inject the medication. I looked out at the plaza and brought the needle to my arm.

  But just as I was about to feel the liquid in my veins, the unexpected happened…

  5

  VOCAL CORDS IN THE SHAPE OF A GRAMOPHONE NEEDLE

  It happened. I saw her. She was in the middle of the crowded Plaza Santa Ana. Right smack in the middle. She couldn’t have found the exact center better if she’d tried.

  She was waiting for someone; her gaze searched and searched in hundreds of directions. Her eyes traveled over bodies, over skin, followed footsteps… She was anxious, waiting for her date to arrive. From up on the seventh floor, I couldn’t keep my eyes off her.

  There was something in her waiting, the way she was waiting, that drew my attention powerfully. I’m not the falling in love type, I told you that already, I’d never done it.

  I don’t believe in love, I believe in sex. But there was something about that young woman, something so strange in the way she was waiting, how she positioned her legs, how she moved, how she searched, that awoke a new feeling in me. Maybe I was being too epic.

  There, barefoot, in the middle of the night, I felt like a junkie with that strange injection a millimeter away from piercing my skin. It was like the side effect of that medication before ecstasy.

  Suddenly, an accordion player and a guitarist started playing a jazz melody. A very young boy, who couldn’t have been more than fourteen, with his hair slicked back, started singing songs in a style so passé that it seemed like his vocal cords were prolonged gramophone needles.

  The song wouldn’t have meant much to me if it weren’t for the fact that those jazzy melodies were my mother’s favorites; she played them all day long when I was a kid.

  I had breakfast, lunch and dinner with the jazz greats. Parker, Rollins and Ellington were the soundtrack of my childhood. My mother always sang them in a low voice, whispering the lyrics. She never sang at full voice… She believed in the whisper, in whispering.

  “There isn’t enough whispering in life,” she used to say to me. “I’ve probably gotten a total of three to six minutes of whispers. Very short sentences from men at very specific moments: “I love you… I’ll never forget you… don’t stop… don’t stop…” Whispers are so powerful that they should be outlawed in bed. Everyone tells lies in bed, absolutely everyone. You should never whisper in bed, and especially not when you’re having sex,” she repeated in a whisper in a taxi on the way to the Beijing airport.

  Yes, I think it’s about time I told you: my mother talked about sex. I’ve been lucky in life, from the age of thirteen she talked to me about the subject that most every parent wishes would never come up in a conversation.

  At first I was overwhelmed. At thirteen you don’t want to talk to your mother about anything, and least of all about sex. But my mother was always very liberal. Well, I don’t like the word liberal, and neither did she. She considered herself “free.”

  She referred to herself and to many of the people she admired as “free people.” I don’t know if I’ve managed to be free.

  I remember that when I was fourteen we went to a hotel that was a skyscraper. We were staying on the 112th floor; it was the first skyscraper I had ever set foot in. It was amazing, it was really like being up in the sky. It was a strange and intense sensation, although later I set foot and spent nights in so many skyscraper hotels that that moment got diluted and I forgot all about it.

  That’s why, sometimes, when I’m in an airplane and I sense that someone is flying for the first time I don’t take my eyes off of them. You can tell that they’re enjoying it so much: feeling the takeoff, how routine flying at 11,000 meters becomes and then the panic at landing. I try to fill myself with their passion, their fears, their first time. Yes, I can admit it, I’m a bit of a vampire of primal emotions.

  Well, that day, in that hotel in New York, the only room left was one with just a double bed. I was almost fifteen years old, so there was no way I wanted to share a bed with my mother, it was very embarrassing. And that was what I told her. She looked at me as only she knew how to do. She only put her eyes on me for ten seconds, twisted her mouth and already I was feeling intimidated.

  “You don’t want to sleep next to me?” She twisted her mouth and I swallowed hard.

  “I’m almost fifteen, Mom.”

  “I was fifteen too when I had to sleep next to you for the first time. And I did it for nine months even though you made me want to vomit and you wouldn’t stop kicking me. But if you’d rather, you can sleep in the chair. We are free, free people and we can decide.”

  That left me almost breathless. She put on one of her old jazz records and she smoked a cigarette.

  She didn’t look for a reaction in me; she didn’t believe in coercing or convincing people.

  I got into the bed, beside her. I listened to the music and I smelled her cigarettes.

  She always made me feel like a special teenager.

  The song that was playing the first night I slept with my mother in that skyscraper was the same one I heard on that terrace overlooking the Plaza Santa Ana, the night that I was about to quit sleeping.

  The boy with the slicked back hair was singing it a rhythm so syncopated that it was as if I could feel my mother’s presence nearby. Maybe it was a sign, I don’t know, it must have been something.

  She was still waiting. Her passively active face had me spellbound.

  She hadn’t noticed my presence, she hadn’t felt how my eyes were glued on her, not shifting for even a second.

  My gaze, my presence, my intermittent heartbeat were foreign to her.

  And just as she had arrived to the middle of the plaza, she left, with slow steps.

  She headed toward the Teatro Español. She kept staring at the poster for Death of a Salesman, the wonderful Arthur Miller play that was showing there then.

  Suddenly, all hesitation left her steps and she went right up to the theater entrance.

  And I was imagining a whole story in
my head. She had been waiting for someone, they didn’t show up, the play was about to start and she had made a decision.

  If you get stood up at three in the morning and you want to see a play, you have to make a decision. I think that in that moment, her pride won out over her sadness.

  She went quickly into the theater. I had the feeling I could even hear how the ticket taker tore her ticket and the usher whispered to her, “Row 6, seat 15, follow me.”

  I felt that she was disappearing from my world and I didn’t know what to do.

  I would have loved to just go into the theater. My mother used to say that no one should discourage you. Nobody. Ever.

  But her absence from the plaza hurt. It was as if I’d lost something. It is horrible and creepy to miss something you’ve never had.

  The sound of the telephone brought me back to reality. I knew that it was serious because of the long rings and the cadence between them. I’ve always believed that phones have an intelligence and they know when they’re bearing bad news, so they try to warn us with an appropriate tone so that we know what’s imminent.

  I picked it up on the sixth ring.

  Leaving the terrace was like leaving behind my destiny. The wooden smell of the linoleum floor brought me back to my daily life. Seeing my living room made me forget for a second what I’d experienced outside.

  “Hello?” I like to get right to the point when I answer the phone.

  “You should come immediately, something unbelievable just happened,” said my boss, in an irritated tone that signaled something extremely serious was going on.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “You didn’t hear?”

  “No, I was… sleeping.”

  “Well, turn on the news, you’re going to freak out. The media just found out ten minutes ago. Come quickly, we need you here.”

  My boss didn’t sleep anymore. You could tell by the tone he was using at three in the morning. People who didn’t sleep always had a ten o’clock-in-the-morning tone, no matter what time it was. I felt stupid having to tell him that I’d been asleep.

  I turned on the television. I was prepared for anything, except what I saw. It was as freaky as my boss had warned me it would be.

  So I decided to change from one channel to the next to make sure what I was seeing was true.

  The headline of the news on the first channel was extraordinary and spoke for itself: “Confirmed arrival of the first extraterrestrial to planet Earth.”

  The headlines on the other channels only varied in style, but they all contained the word extraterrestrial.

  There were no pictures of it. There was only a newscaster reporting from a studio and archive images taken from famous films.

  I sat down, well, I collapsed onto the sofa. I stared at the headline for many minutes, spellbound, and watched the circus that had sprung up around so little information.

  There were no other facts, no image, not even an eyewitness or expert to confirm what they were saying. An absolute void that sucked you in.

  They had just gotten the news barely ten minutes earlier and you could already sense that they would spend the whole day twisting and distorting that disturbing headline, without having anything more to report than they had at that moment.

  And it would probably get record audience ratings.

  My grandmother told me that she’d watched man landing on the moon on television. She always remembered that my mother wouldn’t stop crying because she was teething and that it was an incredibly hot day, as if the sun was resisting the event with all its strength.

  Who would have thought that another hot summer would be the setting for the arrival of the first extraterrestrial to Earth. I pricked up my ears toward the street in search of children crying over mouth pain but all I heard were a couple of soft barks.

  I decided to get dressed; I knew what was waiting for me at work. I knew it right away, because they’d called me and that made me feel nervous, but at the same time tremendously special.

  I chose dark tones. I drank a liter and a half of milk in a couple of gulps, straight from the bottle.

  I took the stairs because I needed to think. I don’t know why, but brief, intense physical exercise always helped. All sorts of daily activities, like dishwashing, riding my stationery bike or walking down stairs strengthened my ideas and my imagination.

  In the Plaza Santa Ana I noticed that people were starting to hear the news.

  From mouth to mouth, whisper to whisper, as if the air itself were conveying the news and carrying it to everyone sitting at the outdoor tables.

  The barmen passed it to the waiters, the waiters to the customers, and the customers to the passersby. Gradually, they left their beers on the tables and they gathered around the television, hypnotized. Their daily routine or their big meeting were put on hold by this disturbing fact that was changing everyone’s lives.

  I went to catch a taxi, but just as my hand was lifting to hail a free one… I stopped it.

  The Teatro Español, there in front of me, impassive at the big news, was calling to me.

  Suddenly I thought, did she know what had happened? When she went in did the usher mention it while he showed her to her row and seat? Or was she completely oblivious as she watched Death of a Salesman? I thought how at that very moment, Willy Loman would be explaining his car trouble to his wife or maybe he’d be criticizing Biff. Poor Biff…

  I approached that mass of stone. The theater looked like a bunker. All the doors were closed. I went over to a poster that showed in small type the cast and the length of the performance. A play’s exact length is never clear, but it said, “Approximately 120 minutes.” I thought that for two whole hours she would be caught up in the death of that salesman without knowing about the arrival of the visitor from another planet, who might be bringing about the end of life as we know it.

  “Do you want a taxi or not?”

  The taxi driver that I had hidden my hand from had noticed, slowed down and was looking at me anxiously. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that he already had the meter running. I’ve never liked taxi drivers; I don’t trust them. My mother took so many cabs that she used to tell me that there was no choice: “Taxis are like members of your family. They’re the mother-in-law or the uncle you know will turn against you, but that you have to love.”

  “If you don’t want a cab, don’t hail one.”

  I hated taking that taxi, but that plaza was either overflowing with cabs or completely devoid of them. I couldn’t risk it.

  I slowly got in as I listened to the theater’s buzzing energy, that sound that’s almost imperceptible but filled with intense power. You can hear it by almost every theater; it is the sum total of all the very slight sounds during performances, the sighs of audience members and the soft movements of the stagehands.

  That is the sound of my childhood, since I grew up in the theaters of hundreds of countries around the world. My mother was a theater woman. If she heard me say that, she’d kill me, because she was a dancer.

  “Where to?”

  “Torrejón. Block E.”

  “Really?” I could feel the cabdriver’s heart beating in time to his meter. His whole being was excited, maybe he even had an erection thinking about how much money he was going to make, since Torrejón was quite a ways away.

  “Really. And if you don’t mind, turn off the air conditioning, I’ll roll down the windows.”

  He did it without complaining. The taxi took off, leaving behind my plaza and that young woman that had had such an impact on me.

  I closed my eyes, pretending to be tired, so the taxi driver would get that I didn’t want to chat. The way you act in the first five minutes is what marks the whole ride in a taxi. I felt him watching me in the rear view mirror; then he turned on the radio and forgot about me.

  I kept my eyes closed for a while, knowing that in a few minutes I would find myself “face to face” with the extraterrestrial who had captivated the entire
world.

  6

  THE DANCE OF THE ESOPHAGUS

  Gradually, kilometer by kilometer, I opened my eyes. It was the first time I had left the house since I found out about my mother’s death. Going to the bank, since it was in my entryway, didn’t count.

  Everything was the same out on the street. People meandered, cars circulated nervously and the night continued as dormant as ever.

  Who had to die to make the world stop completely and for us to cease our daily activities? Who is important enough to shift everything so viscerally?

  As we made our way through the intense traffic of that Sunday at four in the morning, inside that taxi I was thinking about the life I had spent with my mother.

  She had always wanted me to be creative. She had never said it in those words, but I knew.

  First she taught me dance. I had always enjoyed watching how the dancers fulfilled her choreographies. She was very hard on them, she didn’t think of them as her children, or even as friends. I believe they were simply the instrument she used to achieve what she wanted. Knives and forks that brought the food to her mouth.

  How can I describe her dances? They were a different kind of choreography, filled with life and light. She hated all things classic. In dance and in life.

  “What is dance?” I asked her one cold winter in Poznań where the temperature never went above -5 degrees Celsius.

  “Do you have time to listen to the answer, Marcos?” was her icy response.

  How I hated that she never thought my fourteen years were enough and having to hear that darn response every time I asked her anything the slightest bit grown-up. It really, really bugged me. It made me feel like a boy who couldn’t concentrate; it made me feel that she was questioning my interest.