Learning to Lose

by David Trueba

  FOR CRISTINA, HUETE

  FILM PRODUCER

  Canto a noite até ser dia

  But in my arms till break of day

  Let the living creature lie,

  Mortal, guilty, but to me

  The entirely beautiful.

  —W. H. AUDEN, “Lullaby”

  CONTENTS

  part one

  IS THIS DESIRE?

  part two

  IS THIS LOVE?

  part three

  IS THIS ME?

  part four

  IS THIS THE END?

  part one

  IS THIS DESIRE?

  1

  Desire works like the wind. With no apparent effort. If it finds our sails extended, it will drag us at a dizzying speed. If our doors and shutters are closed, it bangs at them for a while, searching for cracks or slots it can slip in through. The desire attached to an object of desire binds us to it. But there is another kind of desire, abstract, disconcerting, that envelops us like a mood. It declares that we are ready for desire and that we just have to wait, our sails unfurled, for the wind to blow. That is the desire to desire.

  Sylvia is sitting in the back of the classroom, in the row by the window, in the penultimate seat. The only kid behind her is Rainbow, a Colombian kid who’s wearing the official tracksuit of the Spanish national soccer team and dozing through the day’s classes. Sylvia turns sixteen on Sunday. She seems older, rising above her classmates with her detached attitude. Those same classmates whom she now scrutinizes.

  No, it’s not any of these. None of these mouths is the mouth I want brushing against my mouth. I don’t want any of these tongues tangled in mine. Nobody here has the teeth that are going to nibble on my lower lip, my earlobe, the bend of my neck, the fold of my stomach. Nobody here.

  Nobody.

  In class Sylvia is surrounded by bodies that aren’t fully formed, incongruous faces, ill-proportioned arms and legs, as if they were all growing in haphazard spurts. Carlos Valencia has appealing tan forearms that stick out powerfully from beneath his T-shirt, but his arrogance is off-putting. Sepúlveda “the Dullard” has the delicate hands of a draftsman, but he’s goofy and spineless. Raúl Zapata’s body is flabby, definitely not the one Sylvia wants to receive onto hers like a wave of flesh. Nando Solares’s face is overtaken by zits and sometimes blends into the stucco wall. Manu Recio, Óscar Panero, and Nico Verón are nice, but they are little boys; the first one has a peach-fuzz moustache, the second only speaks in fits and starts, and the third is now shoving two pencils into his nostrils to make his buddies laugh.

  “The Tank” Palazón goes out with Sonia and puts his arm around her waist and smacks her ass with his sausage-fingered hand in a possessive gesture that Sylvia abhors. “Skeleton” Ocaña is malnourished, has grown rampantly, and has a lisp; Samuel Torán only thinks about soccer, and she’d have to turn into a ball to attract his foolish brown gaze. Curro Santiso is already, at fifteen, obviously the property registrar, drab accountant, or financial adviser he will become, completely uninteresting. “Blockhead” Sanz is out of the running because he doesn’t just tend toward homosexuality, he oozes with it. He’s got enough problems sidestepping ridicule from the macho kids who exaggerate his swishiness, hounding him and pushing him with their shoulders every time they cross paths. Quelo Zuazo lives on an unexplored planet and “Cocky” Ochoa treats high school with the same passion a nuclear engineer could muster up for studying in elementary school. Pedro Suanzes and Edu Velázquez are both Goths, loners with long hair and black clothes, given a wide berth due to the suspicion that they’re plotting to murder the rest of the class in some painful way. “Hedgehog” Sousa is an Ecuadorian with spiky hair and a wall lizard’s laugh. And then there’s Rainbow, nicknamed for the many different colors he wears, almost the full spectrum.

  The sun that comes in through the window and rests on the desks is sometimes more interesting than class. Sylvia would love to pole-vault over her age. Be ten years older. Right now. Get up without permission, move through the rows of desks, reach the door, and leave her life behind. In spite of everything, Sylvia still hasn’t achieved Rainbow’s perfect indifference. Sitting behind her, he sometimes plays with his pen cap among the thick jungle of Sylvia’s curls, as if he dreamed of finding a toucan or some other exotic bird beneath the mat of black hair. Sylvia doesn’t like her hair. She’d rather have the adopted Byelorussian Nadia’s blond locks or Alba’s straight hair. They were two of her best friends at school. The good thing about hair is that at least you don’t have to see it all the time. Unlike your breasts. Two years ago, Sylvia secretly prayed they would grow; she now suspects that her prayers were answered, to an extreme. As if wishing for rain brought floods. She doesn’t dare take a step without her 38C bra, a garment that she’s always found orthopedic. On the street, she puts up with constant lustful stares focused on them, in gym class she listens to Santiso and Ochoa joke about their uncontrollable bouncing, and in every conversation there is a moment where they monopolize all the attention, space, and time. When she chooses a T-shirt or a sweater, she is competing with her tits. If they take center stage, the rest of her is ignored. Sometimes she jokes that it’s a drag to always arrive a minute after her boobs. Her friend Mai reproaches her for buying loose shirts instead of form-fitting ones. Would you rather be flat like me, no one can tell the difference between my chest and my back. But Sylvia suspects that Mai pretends to be envious just to make her feel less self-conscious.

  Others had sat at that same desk before her, enveloped in the same bittersweetness, that desire to desire. The Instituto Félix Paravicino was founded in 1932, expanded in 1967 with an impersonal concrete extension that insults the beauty of the original brick one, and in 1985 went from being an all-girls school to coed. In the old building, the staircases are wide with intricate braided patterns on the floor and a wooden railing with an addictive curve that thousands of young hands caress each day. In the new building, the stairs are narrow and have a terrazzo floor, like you’d find in a bathroom, and a handrail made of cheap pine with a glossy varnish. The old building has wide French windows, where the glass is set into wood with iron latches that turn with a pleasant friction. In the new building, the windows are aluminum, with handles that creak when you pull them. The hallways of the old building are spacious and light-filled, with art nouveau tiles. In the new one, they’re tight, dark halls punctuated by tiny hollow wood doors. When someone goes from one building to the other, it’s like an aesthetic slap in the face; if the world’s progress were judged solely based on the expansion, we are clearly headed in an appalling direction.

  On Fridays Sylvia finds the succession of classes even more unbearable. Doña Pilar, history, first thing. Nicknamed “I Was There” because no matter how distant an event she describes, she seems old enough to have lived through it. They say she managed to suppress her death certificate to make it look like she’s still alive. In the family vault, they’ve given her an ultimatum: they’ll hold her spot for a couple months more. And Dionisio, the English teacher—his eyes shine brighter than the students’ do when the bell rings, even though he doesn’t seem to have anything more exciting awaiting him than the sports section, or maybe one of those Internet sites where chicks get it on with horses. Carmen, the Spanish teacher, has a nervous problem with her jaw and can only speak for ten minutes; the rest of the class is devoted to syntactical exercises. During class she brings her hand to her jawbone as if it were about to detach from her face, and even though she seems to be in constant pain, her students insist it’s all due to her voracious oral sex practices. Don Emilio, physics, tirelessly travels down the aisles between the desks like he’s trying to break an Olympic record. His students imagine him arriving home proudly
: honey, today I did four and a half miles in four classes. Octavio, math, has a bushy moustache and neck paralysis, and leans to the right stiff and unstable, as if an intense wind were blowing from the other direction. He is the only one who sometimes gives them the pleasure of interrupting class to talk about real life, commenting on a TV show or a curious news item, or helping them to calculate what inflation means when applied to their teen interests. Any chance of a second’s break from classwork feels like a party. Last year they used to leave the newspaper on his desk to tempt him into commenting on it and squandering class time. Sylvia has the feeling that her teachers have given up any other existence beyond being teachers. When she sees them on the street, they are unrecognizable, like a doctor out of his office. Like once when her mother told her about going to the theater and being greeted in a friendly way by someone in the next row, not realizing until the third act that it was her dentist.

  But Sylvia doesn’t have a much higher opinion of her classmates. The class is a chorus of yawns. At the breaks, they rush off into groups, as if they were afraid of being alone for even a second. In the cafeteria and the schoolyard, they congregate in front of a magazine or a cell phone screen and exchange short text messages between loud off-key laughs. And then there’s the jocks, for whom class is intolerable bench time before continuing the never-ending game. In the schoolyard, six simultaneous soccer games are being disputed, one of them played with a tennis ball in a shrunken version of the game unfit for the nearsighted. Sylvia and her girlfriends can’t let their guard down, because someone is always practicing their aim by kicking a ball at their asses or bellies, and they have to pretend it doesn’t hurt while the others laugh. Those who haven’t managed to infiltrate any of the main cliques wander invisible through the school grounds like chameleons concealing their loneliness. And there are the ones who take their schoolwork seriously, exchanging materials in the library and often staying in the classroom during recess.

  Sometimes, when a teacher finishes an explanation and asks if anyone has any questions, Sylvia has a desire to raise her hand and say, yes, could you start all over again from the beginning? I mean from the very beginning, from birth, because I don’t understand a thing from any of these almost sixteen years I’ve been alive.

  Summer is over. A couple of weeks ago, on the first Saturday after school started, Sylvia went out with her friend Mai. She met a guy and they got drunk on beer. She had started drinking just three months earlier. They danced together sweatily in the heat of the packed club, and Sylvia ended up with her back against the bathroom wall, her gaze fixed on a broken tile the color of cinnamon, his saliva near, his breath, and his nervous hand that after failing to open her bra forced its fingers into her panties. The bathroom was dirty, the boy was named Pablo, and it was impossible to understand what he was saying into her ear in damp whispers because of the deafening music. It wasn’t easy to get away and run through the bathroom, dodging puddles of piss, to get some air on the street. When she looked up, he was watching her, stock-still, from the opposite sidewalk.

  He wasn’t gonna be the one, either.

  Luckily Mai took her home and managed to erase the trail of smoke, beer, and confused desire. Don’t obsess. Virginity is all in your head, said Mai. You lose it by thinking, and by jerking off, honey. You’re not a virgin, Sy, you’ve just never been with a man.

  Mai lived six blocks from Sylvia, although they’d only started hanging out in high school. She was a year older, but they shared the same corner in the cafeteria, which was like a sort of bunker Mai kept people out of with lashes of her sharp tongue. Only a select few had access to her world. Sylvia had modeled her own taste on Mai’s firm criteria. Thanks to Mai, she’d worn her first short skirt and her first black tights and thick-soled boots, although she still hadn’t dared to wear T-shirts without shoulder pads because of her scandalous bust. They had bought a silver ring together in a craft market and Mai had placed it on Sylvia’s thumb. She started writing her name with a y like Mai had suggested and listening to decent music. For Mai music was divided into decent and all the rest. Mai had drilled a small silver hoop through her nose, peed standing up, and had been smoking since she was thirteen.

  Last summer Mai had hooked up with a guy she met in Ireland, while she was there studying English. She spent all of July fucking, as she declared to Sylvia in laconic e-mails. “Sy, I’m a new woman. Yes, a new woman!” she wrote one day. When they saw each other again at the airport, Sylvia felt that Mai was indeed a new woman. The pimples on her chin had disappeared, she had streaked her black hair with red, and her new bangs covered one eye, the one she called her ugly eye. She had tattooed a vine with razor-blade leaves around her left ankle and now she showered almost every day. It seemed to Sylvia that Mai’s mouth was more fleshy, her lips more voluptuous. But the real transformation was in Mai’s laugh. She no longer laughed with her typical twisted contempt. No. Now boundless chortles bubbled up from deep inside her, a true, open laughter that to Sylvia smelled of sex and satisfaction.

  It’s as if my pussy had finally become a full-fledged part of my body. Not like before, where it was more like a subletter in the apartment downstairs. Then she told her about Mateo. He’s from León, so I didn’t practice much English.

  Sylvia listened to Mai talk about her relationship and she felt something strange. She hadn’t yet identified it as desire whistling beside her ear.

  In the pigsty, which was what Mai called her room, filled with CDs and clothes bought at street markets, there was no space for romance. But now every Friday she hopped on a bus to spend the weekend with her guy in a big old house in Bierzo. You’re going to turn into a red-cheeked village girl, Sylvia would tell her, the joke covering up her fear that they would grow apart.

  Dani joined them at the cafeteria table. He was in Mai’s class and their friendship had sprung up spontaneously. One day Mai was tirelessly humming a song, backed up by her made-up English lyrics, and Dani touched her on the shoulder and held out a worn sheet of paper. In the margins, he had written the words to the song. Up until then, she hadn’t spoken more than two monosyllabic words to Dani, with his thin silver glasses and evasive gaze. The song was by a group from Denver headed by a sinister guy who performed sitting in a wing chair surrounded by his musicians. It was called “Let’s Pretend the World Is Made for Us Only” and Dani joined just that world Mai claimed to live in, the one she had built up around herself.

  That Friday Mai cuts her last two classes to catch the three-thirty ALSA bus for León. Sylvia sees her walking away from school with her headphones beneath her hair, her butch swagger, and her big black boots that match her exaggerated eye shadow.

  At the end of the schoolday, Sylvia bumps into Dani. Actually, she had been waiting to bump into him, after pacing nervously in front of the bulletin board in the lobby. Satur, the porter, reads the sports news and nods his head to each teacher who leaves; to the students, he gives only a considered disdain. At the back of the hallway is an enormous painting of the monk the high school is named after, a reproduction of a portrait by El Greco, with a slogan engraved in stylized letters: “Be neither so arrogant as to presume to be liked by everyone, nor so humble as to give in to the discontent of a few.” The students’ eyes had run over the sentence a thousand times without really getting it, or even paying it much attention.

  Sylvia fakes running into Dani by accident and he looks up from the magazine he is reading, one of those bibles of teen taste.

  Hey, Dani, Sunday’s my birthday. Oh, yeah? Happy birthday. I’m having a little party at my house … Mai’s coming. And a few other people. You wanna come? Dani doesn’t answer right away. Sunday? Yeah, in the afternoon, on the early side. Around four-thirty, five. Um, I’m not sure if I have plans.

  They walk along the street. Cars two rows deep and the sound of honking horns. The northern exit of the school has traffic jams on Fridays. The junction of avenues is presided over by a Corte Inglés department store, triumphant like
a modern cathedral. A blond American actress with a suspiciously perfect nose encourages autumnal spending. Dani’s jeans fall from his waist, their bottoms frayed at his heels. Sylvia is convinced that her lips are too thin and she tries to make them look bigger with an expression she’s practiced in front of the mirror two thousand times, the slightly open mouth.

  Will there be potato chips, Coca-Cola, sandwiches? he asks. Yeah, of course, and a clown that blows up dick-shaped balloons. Sylvia adjusts her backpack on her shoulder. Are you gonna come? Dani nods. Sixteen, right? he adds. Yup, sixteen. An old lady.

  Sylvia’s hair floats up over her shoulders as she walks. She is wearing it down and as she steps off the curb it rises weightlessly and then drifts back to its original position. Dani heads toward the metro. As they say good-bye, she’s about to tell him the truth. There is no party. It’s all just a stupid tactic to get him alone. But she just answers his ciao with an identical one of her own.

  Sylvia walks toward her house. There is a slight breeze that hits her back and pushes a curl toward her cheek. As she always does when she’s nervous, Sylvia chews on a lock of hair, walking with it in her mouth.

  2

  Aurora broke her hip in a completely unspectacular way. Getting out of the bathtub, she lifted her leg over the edge and suddenly heard a small crunch. She felt a slight shiver and her legs turned rubbery. She fell slowly, with time to brush the tips of her fingers along the wall tiles and prepare for the impact. Her elbow hit the fixtures, causing a cold pain, and a second later she was lying down, naked and overcome, on the still-damp bottom of the bathtub. Papá, she wanted to shout, but the sound came out weak. She tried to raise her voice, but the best she could do was emit a repetitive, well-spaced-out lament.