Learning to Lose

by David Trueba

  Papá … Papá … Papá.

  The murmur reaches the little back room, where Leandro is reading the newspaper. His first reaction is to think that his wife is calling him for another one of her ridiculous requests, for him to get down a jar of spices on a too-high shelf, to ask him something silly. So he answers with an apathetic what? that gets no reply. He leisurely closes the newspaper and stands up. Later he will be ashamed of the irritation he feels at having to stop reading. It’s always the same: he sits down to read and she talks to him over the radio or the ringing telephone. Or the doorbell sounds and she asks, can you get it? when he already has the intercom receiver in his hand. He goes down the hallway until he identifies where the monotonous call is coming from. There is no urgency in Aurora’s voice. Perhaps fatalism. When he opens the bathroom door and finds his fallen wife, he thinks that she’s sick, dizzy. He looks for blood, vomit, but all he sees is the white of the bathtub and her glazed, naked skin.

  Without exchanging a word, in a strange silence, Leandro prepares to pick her up. He takes her old whitish body in his arms. The flaccid flesh, the melted breasts, the inert arms and thighs, the veins that show through in violet lines.

  No, don’t move me. I think I broke something. Did you slip? No, all of a sudden … Where does it hurt? I don’t know. Don’t worry. In a gesture he can’t quite explain, Leandro, who has been married to Aurora for forty-seven years, grabs a nearby towel and covers his wife’s body modestly.

  Leandro notices the bottom of the bathtub. It’s worn down by the water’s chafing and repainted in some stretches with white enamel that doesn’t match the rest. Leandro is seventy-three years old. His wife, Aurora, is two years younger. The bathtub will soon have served them for forty-one years, and Leandro now recalls that two or three years ago Aurora had asked him to replace it. Look for one you like and if it’s not too much of a hassle we’ll have it put in, he said to her without much enthusiasm. But why had he stopped in that moment to think about the bathtub?

  What am I doing? he asks, lost, unable to react. Call an ambulance. Leandro is overcome by an irrepressible shame. He thinks of the commotion it will cause in the neighborhood, the explanations. Really? Yes, come on, make the call. And get me dressed, bring me my robe.

  Leandro calls the emergency number. They connect him with a doctor who recommends that he not move her and asks for information about the fall, the pain symptoms, her age, general health. For a moment, he thinks the only attention they are going to get is over the phone, like any other kind of customer service, and then, terrified, he insists, send someone, please. Don’t worry, an ambulance is on the way. The wait is more than twenty minutes. Aurora tries to dress herself, she’s managed to stick her arms into the sleeves of her robe, but every movement is painful. Put a nightgown in a bag, and a change of clothes, Aurora asks him.

  The EMTs bring noise, activity, which is somehow comforting after the tense stillness of the wait. They take Aurora downstairs on a stretcher to the ambulance. Leandro, disoriented and out of place, is invited to accompany her. His gaze searches through the ring of neighbors for a familiar face. The widow from the first-floor-right apartment is there, the one they locked horns with over her no vote on the installation of a communally funded elevator in the old building. She looks at him with curiosity in her miserable little eyes. He asks Mrs. Carmen, who lives on their floor, to go up and close the door that he left open. On the way to the hospital, beneath the high-pitched blasts of the siren, Aurora takes Leandro’s hand. Don’t worry, she tells him. The nurse, in his ridiculous phosphorescent jacket, looks at them with a smile. You’ll see, it’s nothing.

  Call Lorenzo from the hospital, keep trying, he usually carries his cell phone. Sylvia will be in class, but don’t frighten them, okay, don’t frighten them, warns Aurora. Lorenzo is their only child and Sylvia is their granddaughter. Leandro nods, holding Aurora’s hand, uncomfortable. I love her, he thinks. I’ve always loved her. He doesn’t say anything because at that moment he’s afraid. It is a paralyzing and menacing fear. From inside the windowless box, he senses the speed at which they are moving through the city. What hospital are we going to? asks Aurora. And Leandro thinks, of course, why didn’t I think to ask, I should be taking care of these things, but his head is a confused static of a thousand jumbled feelings.

  3

  Lorenzo listened to the morning arrive, as if on tiptoe. The rhythm of the cars increasing. The garbage truck. The first hums of the elevator. The metal gate of a storefront opening on the street. His daughter’s alarm clock, with those three minutes of respite it grants her before ringing again. He listened to her shower quickly. Eat breakfast standing up and leave the house. The police helicopter that crosses over the city at that time of day. Some horn, a car that’s having trouble starting. His hands tensely grip the top of the sheets. As he releases them, he notices his fingers are stiff; they’ve been clenched for hours, grabbing the bedspread like a mountain climber would his rope. The autumn sun has started to beat against the blinds and warm the room.

  He runs his hand over his head. He’s lost so much hair in the last few months … When he was younger, he’d had a receding hairline, but now it was devastating. He took Propecia and bought an anti-hair-loss shampoo, after less conventional methods failed. At first Pilar laughed when she saw him counting the hairs left in the comb or meticulously placing a lock. Then she realized what a big deal it was for him and avoided the subject. Fuck, I’m going bald, Lorenzo said once, and she had tried to ease his mind, don’t exaggerate. But he wasn’t exaggerating.

  His hair was the first of a long list of lost things, thought Lorenzo. His hands gripped the sheets in a protective gesture, trying to hold on. As if losing everything wasn’t an abstract fear but rather something that was happening to him right here and now.

  What have you done, Lorenzo? What have you done?

  It’s almost ten a.m. when the phone begins to ring insistently. He had turned off his cell phone and put it away in the bedside table. But the landline kept ringing and ringing. In the living room and in the kitchen. Each with its own ring. The cordless in the living room, more high-pitched, more electrical. He wasn’t going to pick it up, he wasn’t going to answer. He wasn’t home. He heard it ring for a while and then stop. A short pause and it rang again. It was obvious that it was the same tenacious person calling repeatedly. Weren’t they ever going to get tired? Lorenzo was afraid.

  What have you done, Lorenzo? What the hell have you done?

  The night before Lorenzo had killed a man. A man he knew. A man who had been, for several years, his best friend. Seeing him again, in spite of the unusual circumstances of their meeting, in spite of the violence that was unleashed, Lorenzo couldn’t help remembering the last time they had seen each other, almost a year ago. Paco had changed, a bit fatter. He still had his hair, with the same pale wave as always, but he seemed slower, heavier in his movements. We’ve both changed, thought Lorenzo, crouching in the dark. Paco had a placid face. Was he happy? wondered Lorenzo, and the mere suspicion that he was could extenuate what would later happen. No, he couldn’t be happy; it would be too unfair.

  Lorenzo had fled with Paco’s gray eyes still fixed on his. It isn’t easy to kill a man you know, to fight with him. It’s dirty. It has something of suicide to it: you are killing a part of yourself, everything you shared. It has something of your own death in it. It’s not easy to remain motionless in front of a dying body, either, trying to tell if it has stopped breathing or just fainted. Then go over every mistake, every movement, thinking of the person who will later arrive to figure out what happened. Prick up your ears to make sure no one is listening, prepare your cowardly getaway. Is there such a thing as a brave getaway?

  Lorenzo went out the same way he had come in. Over the rear fence, after running his hand along the back of the dog, who had licked his boots. He had left the hose in the garage running, to flood the place. Turning it into a fish tank would help to eliminate prints, make r
econstructing the scene more difficult. He raised himself up, looked both ways, and jumped over the fence. He could be seen by a neighbor, recorded by a security camera. He walked to his car, taking his time. Someone could be watching him, jotting down his license plate, remembering his face. It wasn’t an exclusive neighborhood, but in that area of Mirasierra, filled with single-family homes and buildings with few apartments, strangers attract attention. It wasn’t dawn. It was eleven-fifteen on a Thursday. A normal, workaday hour, not a criminal time of day in the slightest. He had killed a man in the garage, a man he knew. It had all been an accident, a mistake fueled by the grudge Lorenzo held against Paco. Men shouldn’t listen to their resentment; it gives them bad advice.

  Lorenzo didn’t consider his crime something cold, something calculated. It wasn’t what he intended to do. But when he was taken by surprise by the car’s headlights, when he raised the garage door and hid behind the barbecue grill wrapped in its green cover, he already knew what was going to happen. He didn’t hesitate.

  Lorenzo had brought a machete. When he bought it, just in case, he was thinking more about the dog than about Paco. Even though he knew it was a friendly dog, who barked at first but then was thrilled to have visitors. But that dog could have since died and been replaced by a different one, a really violent one. So the dog had justified the machete. But when Lorenzo extended his hand and grabbed the handle at the bottom of the sports bag, he knew the machete had always been meant for Paco. He remembered being in the mountaineering store, feeling the sharpened blade. What had he been thinking of then?

  Afterward, Lorenzo followed his established plan. After changing in his car, he sprinkled gasoline over his clothes and the boots two sizes too big. He left them burning in the dumpster at an out-of-the-way construction site, but anyone could have seen the flames, even though it was on the other side of the city, and made a connection between the man who started the fire and the murder. They would describe Lorenzo as a stocky man in his forties, bald, yes, they’d say bald, who drives an old red car, and if they were someone who knew about makes, they could even specify it, an Opel Astra. The time that it would take for them to put the evidence together is the time that Lorenzo took cover between the sheets, with an aching forearm from the night before. He still hadn’t seen the intense bruises that his friend Paco’s fingers had left on his forearms, a sign of the struggle. When he sees the oval-shaped marks as big as coins, he’ll recognize the physical stamp a man leaves as he’s trying to cling to the life slipping away from him. The telephone rings again. Like a threat hanging in the air.

  4

  Ariel is the kind of person who never could’ve imagined himself crying in an airport. As moving as he finds other people’s tears in those bastions of farewells and reunions, he had been convinced that embarrassment would keep him from ever shedding them himself. Now he’s glad that he’s wearing sunglasses, since his eyes are flooded.

  The head of security for the soccer club, Ormazábal, told him to ask for Ángel Rubio, the airport commissioner. The officer at passport control heard his boss’s name spoken and looked up. He recognized Ariel behind his sunglasses and let him pass with a complicit smile. So Ariel was able to accompany his brother to the boarding gate. At that time of night, on a Saturday, the airport was quiet. At check-in, he had been struck by the sight of his brother’s suitcase, metal, enormous, covered with stickers, dragged along by the conveyer belt. The suitcase, the same suitcase that had arrived with them a month and a half earlier. It was leaving. And Ariel was being left behind in this city he still hasn’t conquered, in an enormous house where he would only be greeted by the echo of his older brother Charlie.

  Charlie was the noise and the euphoria, the ruckus, the decisions, the temperament, the voice. In Buenos Aires, when the murmuring about some Spanish team’s interest in him went from rumor to reality, Ariel didn’t hesitate for a second. You’ll come with me, Charlie. His brother was evasive. I’ve got my life here. My wife, two kids, I’m not a guardian, a babysitter, a chaperone. He never said yes, but during the negotiations there was talk of plane tickets for both of them, three trips for two per season, the house where they would live, the day they would arrive, their best interests.

  At the Ezeiza airport, when Charlie’s two children hugged him good-bye, Ariel felt selfish. He needed his brother to go with him, to have him close, someone who could solve everyday matters. But he also knew he was doing Charlie a favor. He was suffocating in Buenos Aires, work and family life were crushing him, as he used to say. Although he heard him comforting the boys, don’t worry, it’s Uncle Ariel who’s leaving, I’ll be back real soon, he knew that Charlie was glad to escape, that he longed for Madrid. He was dragging his older brother along because he knew that he was enjoying the adventure. Ariel’s soccer career had always been an experience Charlie lived vicariously, even more so since his brother had become a professional player.

  They left their parents behind, he with his job as a municipal engineer and she acting tough, although she quit the act the day they left and warned, I’m not going to the airport, I’ve got to protect this heart. Their father did come, remaining on the other side of security, holding tight to his two grandsons’ chests and with Charlie’s wife at his back. She was crying. She might be losing a husband, thought Ariel then. But their old man wasn’t crying. He was witnessing, with a mix of pride and tension, his son Ariel leap into adult life.

  They knew other players who left Argentina to try their luck in Europe traveled with an entourage. Family members, nannies, and friends became professionals in the business of creating an intimate circle. Fair-weather friends, as “Dragon” Colosio would say, the kind who disappear when a storm blows in. Club and cabaret friends who manage to make closing hour less abysmal. One had to protect oneself from the void, from the unknown. When Ariel suggested he come to Madrid, his father had answered him, don’t be like those morons who let the people around them burn up their cash and their life. Take this chance to get to know another country and face up to it like you should, for yourself. When he found out Charlie was going with Ariel, he just shrugged his shoulders.

  With Charlie by his side, Ariel could close his eyes on the plane and sleep for most of the flight, his brother restlessly nearby, watching all the movies at once on the channels of his screen, asking for another beer when he still had half of one left, speaking loudly, flirting with the flight attendant, So are all the chicks in Spain as pretty as you? He radiated the confidence of an older brother, the same confidence he’d had when he had taken four-year-old Ariel by the hand and walked him to the Admiral Curiel Preschool on the first day. When they stepped onto the run-down playground, Charlie said, if anyone touches you or gives you any shit, get their name and tell me later. Don’t you get into it with anyone, okay?

  Ariel felt like that same kid on the first day of school when he landed at Barajas Airport on a soupy summer day in July and found himself cornered by a troupe of photographers and television cameras shooting questions at him about his expectations, his favorite position to play, what he knew about Spanish fans, and the supposed controversy surrounding his jersey, that Dani Vilar didn’t want to give him the number seven. Charlie guided him toward the exit with a lopsided smile, repeating, there’ll be plenty of chances for questions, gentlemen, plenty of chances. Then he met up with the club’s representative, the first time he had seen Ormazábal, and said authoritatively, where the hell is the car? He was the same brother who, at ten years old, had convinced Ariel on his fifth birthday that he would always be twice his age, just as he was then. When you’re ten, I’ll be twenty, and when you’re fifty, I’ll be a hundred. And even when math denied that forced logic, Ariel had never doubted his brother was always twice what he was, in everything.

  But now Charlie was leaving. That’s why Ariel hadn’t taken off his sunglasses, even in the VIP room where they waited for boarding to start. He didn’t want anyone bothering him for an autograph, but he also wasn’t sure he’d be a
ble to hold back his tears, even though his brother was downplaying the separation. It’s time for me to be getting back. It’s a bit sooner than I had thought, sure, but these things happen.

  Charlie reviewed with Ariel all the things that were organized and in order. The house rented by the club, on the outskirts of town, in an exclusive housing development where there were retired politicians, successful entrepreneurs, a couple of television stars, a place where a soccer player didn’t turn anyone’s head. Emilia and Luciano were the couple who took care of the house. He did the gardening and repaired anything that needed fixing; she cleaned and cooked. They both disappeared at three in the afternoon. When Ariel apologized one morning for the living room table filled with empty beer bottles, ashes, and butts left by Charlie, Emilia told him not to worry. These past two years we had a British executive and, honestly, I’ve never met anyone so disgusting. Suffice to say that Luciano had to repaint the walls and even change the toilet bowl lids. And this guy was the head of a multinational company that makes cleaning products. But then, the shoemaker’s children often run barefoot.

  Emilia, Charlie told him, will treat you like a son. You’ve already seen how she cooks. The car issue was solved twelve hours after their arrival in Madrid. The club had offers from all the manufacturers, and Charlie chose a platinum Porsche Carrera after visiting the dealership with the publicity manager’s assistant. Charlie’s response to Ariel’s hesitations was categorical: it’s a bold car, to make it clear to everyone that you’ve come to be seen. On this team, you have to earn your spot even in the stadium parking lot. And if you get tired of it, you’ll just switch, the brands are all dying to have soccer players drive their cars. At the airport, Charlie warns him, now don’t go changing your car for a SUV, I know how you can be. Only moms drive that kind of car here, to feel more protected in their little tanks.