Learning to Lose

by David Trueba

  She met her mother’s new love in an icy scene at a restaurant in Madrid. Later Sylvia was embarrassed about her stingy, ungenerous behavior. She saw him again when she traveled to Saragossa to help her mother settle into another city, another apartment, another life. But Sylvia maintained an unshakable loyalty to her father. He needs me more, she would say.

  One day, suddenly, the objects in the kitchen were organized differently and the various elements of the house seemed to be rearranged. The remote control for the television slept on the sofa, and no one put it back on the little side table. The cordless phone never awoke on its charger, the washing machine didn’t sound with the same noise as its drum turned, the fruit bowl on the counter wasn’t always full. Her mother’s shadow hadn’t completely disappeared, but her hand was no longer felt in every detail of the house.

  Sylvia spoke with Mai on Saturday afternoon. She was with her boyfriend, far away. The conversation was short. Sylvia didn’t say anything about inviting Dani to her fake birthday party. She locked herself in her room to listen to music and her father asked if she was going out that night. I’m going to take a walk, he announced. Sylvia imagined him as one of those middle-aged men she sometimes sees in a club or a bar who seem to be flying low, like sad predators, out for the night without a partner, exposed. In bed Sylvia strokes herself with hands she imagines are someone else’s. Mai’s advice had been that she should sit on her hand for a good long time. Until it goes numb—then it seems like they’re someone else’s fingers and it feels better when you touch yourself. She had fallen asleep having decided to cancel her plans for the following day, feeling guilty and ridiculous.

  Dani brings two wrapped packages, which he hands to Sylvia as they exchange a kiss on the cheek. Am I the first one here?

  Didn’t I tell you? feigned Sylvia. In the end I canceled the party because Mai was going to León and it wasn’t a good day for people. No shit, should I leave? he asks, somewhat uncomfortable. No, no, how stupid of me. Dani hesitates before entering, how embarrassing, me here by myself. Well, we can celebrate it just you and me. It’s not like we need a lot of people to have a party, right?

  Sylvia leads him to her room where the music is still playing. She closes the door behind her. My father went to the soccer game. Sylvia opens the smaller package. It is a Pulp CD, with an almost plastic blonde on the cover, naked and upside down on velvet as red as her painted lips. A reduced price sticker. She can’t manage to open the plastic wrapping, absorbed in her effort as she notices her face reddening. Someone calculated that on average each person wastes two weeks of their life just getting the fucking plastic off CDs, says Dani. While he talks, he unwraps the second present, a bottle of Cuervo tequila. I thought there would be more of us, but now we’re going to have to drink it ourselves, he says.

  Sylvia gets two small glasses and sits on the bed. Dani looks over the walls of her room while the new CD plays and they nod their heads to the beat. Sylvia reviews the decorations in her room in search of inexcusable mistakes, something she should be embarrassed about. There are photos of her with Mai, some posters, and it’s pretty messy. They each drink the first shot in one gulp and then toast with the second one. Sylvia opens a bag of potato chips and puts some pistachios in a bowl. They start unshelling them and every once in a while one of them comments on the music. “Why do we have to half-kill ourselves just to prove we’re alive?” It’s good, right? Yeah. The shots burn in Sylvia’s throat and then lodge themselves in her stomach like a bubble of fire.

  Can I mix it with Coca-Cola or is that a sin? No, it’s a good idea, says Dani. And then his eyes land on the photo of a singer on her wall. You think that guy is good-looking? Depends on who you compare him to. Yeah, of course, if you compare him to Lelo, says Dani, referring to Don Emilio, the physics teacher. Did you have him as a teacher, too? As a teacher is overstating it. He spent a semester taking hikes around our desks while we stuck our pens out on the edge so his lab coat would get ink lines all over it. The guy was a real mess.

  Later he translates for Sylvia while the singer drags out each syllable: “It’s the eye of the storm. This is what men in stained raincoats pay for but in here it is pure.” Fuck, it’s strange, right? says Sylvia. And then she feels ridiculous about her comment. She moves a step forward and Dani brings a hand to the nape of her neck, beneath her curls. Sylvia feels like he takes forever to bring his mouth close to hers and kiss her delicately. The first thing she notices is the thin frames of Dani’s glasses brushing her cheek. His mouth tastes of tequila and when their lips separate they both take another drink.

  They lose all sense of time, but they spend forty-five minutes kissing, caressing each other’s backs, drawing themselves toward each other. When Dani brings his hand to her ass, on top of her pants, and then scrabbles under the waist to plunge onto her bare skin, Sylvia sucks in her stomach because she feels fat and then she leans against the wall. She unbuttons his plaid shirt slowly and strokes the line of his ribs with the tip of her finger. I’m really drunk, she announces, and his only response is to fill up their glasses. They kiss with their mouths flooded with tequila. It spills down their chins and they laugh. He unbuttons her pants, she feels Dani’s excitement when she places her hand over his pants. She stops him from releasing the clasp of her bra. She fears that her breasts will spill everywhere, taking over. Aren’t you going to let me take off your clothes? asks Dani. No, it’s my birthday, says Sylvia.

  She is aware that her fear will ruin the moment. It will come to nothing and she shivers. She’s going to waste it all. She seizes the initiative as her only means of escape. She pulls down Dani’s pants. They are standing close to each other. She pushes his hands away when he brings them to her breasts. She feels him beneath his underwear and for a second she avoids thinking that this is the first time in her entire life that she’s touched a dick. She lowers his waistband so he’s naked, but she doesn’t look down. They continue locked in a kiss that seems to fill the moment, a kiss they focus on so as not to notice all the rest. Sylvia runs her fingertips over his naked body. On the table, she reaches for the wrapping paper that had covered the bottle and, amused, she wraps Dani’s penis in it. This is another present, isn’t it? Dani laughs. She starts to jerk him off with her hand underneath the gift wrap. Will this distract him or will he know it’s just me running away, a display of panic?

  Dani comes with a spasm and the wrapping paper dampens and two drops slide to the floor. Sylvia stops and the moment is filled with a cold stiffness. They separate cautiously after a kiss in which she gives more of herself than he does. Their salivas, suddenly, start to taste different. Sylvia lets the wrapping paper fall into the metal wastebasket. Dani pulls up his pants.

  They drink a couple of shots without knowing what to say. The sexual nature of the moment appears to have passed. Sylvia feels small, even though she smiles. She doesn’t want Dani to come near her or touch her, she would understand if he just left right then. I wrapped his dick in gift paper and jerked him off, she says to herself, as if she needed to enunciate her actions in order to realize the embarrassing spectacle she staged. If the floor sunk into the apartment downstairs, it would be doing her a favor.

  The conversation dies out, even though she changes the music and goes to sit on the bed. He makes himself comfortable, straddling Sylvia’s swivel chair. They avoid looking at each other. Maybe I should go, huh? says Dani once enough time has passed. Sylvia checks her alarm clock and she brings it to her eyes as if she were nearsighted. My father’s probably coming back pretty soon. They say good-bye at the door to the apartment, with a kiss on each cheek, avoiding their lips, irritated by the friction of their exchange. Sylvia sees him go down the stairs without waiting for the elevator. She lies down on her bed, grabbing a cushion, her back against the wall. She feels like crying or screaming, but all she does is write a text message on her phone to Mai asking what time her bus gets into South Station. “11:45,” she answers.

  Sylvia needs to talk
to her, tell her everything, find out if what she did was the lowest expression of stupid immaturity or if there is any way to salvage it. She needs to tell her how suddenly she knew she didn’t want to make love to Dani, that she felt like she couldn’t take off her clothes for him. She suspects that if he had insisted or if he had taken control of the situation she wouldn’t have been able to refuse him. Her fear of looking ridiculous would have won out over her modesty. She wanted to laugh with Mai, for her to say it had been a “pathetic sexy” moment, as she sometimes says, for her to repeat her motto of how the pitiful and the glorious are only separated by a fraction of an inch. She wants to hear Mai downplay what happened with her usual bluntness, like when she shouts, wipe those cobwebs off your pussy! Or, stop being so chickenshit, what do you think, that dicks are like those drills they use to bore out metro tunnels? She wants to share with Mai her fear that Dani will talk about it at school or that from now on he’ll think they’re a couple or the opposite, that they’ll never speak again. She’s confused and she needs her friend’s advice.

  But Mai gets off the bus with a tired expression. The fucking shoot-’em-up movies didn’t let me get a wink of sleep, she says. She hadn’t slept the previous nights, either. She tells Sylvia that she spent the four-hour ride sending messages to her boyfriend’s cell phone because she missed him from the moment she got on the bus. Sylvia decides not to take the metro with her and watches her descend the stairs. Mai turns before disappearing. Happy birthday, girl, I owe you a present, she says.

  Sylvia, alone on the street, walks quickly to release her rage. Mai’s happiness is a betrayal, her tiredness a personal affront. She steps down onto the street to avoid any unpleasant encounters on the sidewalk, some pimp or pervert pushing her into a doorway. It is Sunday night and the city empties as she walks. People gather in their homes to shield themselves from the end of the weekend. The ground is dry and the streetlights barely reverberate on the asphalt. The lace on one of her black-rubber-soled boots has come untied, but Sylvia doesn’t want to stop to retie it. She takes aggressive strides, as if kicking the air. She is oblivious to the fact that, crossing the street she now walks along, she will be hit by an oncoming car. And that while she is feeling the pain of just having turned sixteen, she will soon be feeling a different pain, in some ways a more accessible one: that of her right leg breaking in three places.

  6

  Leandro walks at that vague hour between day and night, on Sunday, when some are returning from Mass or the theater, when couples are headed home, when the streetlights are beginning to warm up and slowly gain intensity, when young people share the last kisses of the weekend, kisses that taste of farewell, tedium, or passion. Relatives are leaving hospitals and old folks’ homes, and the droning results of a soccer lottery, which no one’s won, are heard from distant car radios or some apartment with its windows open. Leandro continues along a residential street, among yellowing trees, a street with barely any traffic, with no people except some neighbor being walked by his dog. In a few hours, it will be Monday, and an early gray mist spreads.

  Leandro looks for number forty, but from the odd side of the street, to keep a certain distance. The houses are low, with small backyards and narrow entrances. There are apartment buildings with four or five stories that defy the old buildings with their new bricks, their aluminum terraces, and their uniform ugliness. Number forty is a two-story chalet, the high fence obscuring everything but the tops of the trees and the walls of the upper floor, cream-colored but so worn they look gray. The roof is made of slate slabs and the façade is the victim of a renovation that robbed the chalet of what little charm it had. All the blinds are lowered. Beside the plaque with the house number is a light illuminating the doorbell.

  Leandro passes without stopping.

  He gets a few feet away and waits on the other side of the street. He doesn’t dare look at the chalet for too long, as if it were human and he wants to avoid locking eyes. He lowers his gaze. He looks up again. There is nothing threatening. Why is he being so careful? No one ever suspects anything from a seventy-three-year-old man. Everyone knows that his steps lead nowhere.

  He chooses not to prolong his prowling. He decides to cross the street and walk up to the door. He feels a coldness that sets him on edge, that tempts him to abandon his pursuit. He makes sure no one is watching him from the sidewalk or some nearby window, waits for a car to quickly pass, and hides his face so he can’t be recognized. He rings the bell and the only response he hears is a lengthy electrical buzzing that invites him to push the fence door open. There is a path through the grass of flat stones that ends at a small porch and a white door beneath a yellow fluorescent light. The walk is barely fifteen paces, but it leaves Leandro exhausted.

  The two previous nights, he had slept intermittently. The extra bed he set up in the hospital room with cushions from the armchair is hard, short, and uncomfortable. It gives him a sharp pain in the kidneys. At midnight a nurse comes in to change Aurora’s catheter and the bustle of cleaning starts before seven. Leandro is worn out from the last few days. The emergency admittance on Friday, Aurora’s operation, the anguish of getting her back from the operating room asleep and fragile. The visits the next day, Aurora’s draining sister with her senseless cheerfulness, and two pairs of friends who had heard about the accident, including Manolo Almendros and his wife, who spent Saturday afternoon in the hospital. Leandro had a lively conversation with him, but his friend’s energy was more than he could match. He walked through the hall with such intensity that he could have left grooves in the terrazzo. Almendros thinks aloud, he is witty, tireless. Ever since he retired from his job as a pharmaceutical sales representative, he reads huge tomes of philosophical theory that he later feels obliged to share with Leandro and with the world. He writes letters to the newspapers and once in a while he tracks down old college classmates.

  Manolo, did you come to see my wife or to give me a lecture? said Leandro in an attempt to shut him up.

  Yet he could see how Aurora was cheered up by the visits. She got some of the color back in her face, and although she didn’t take part in the conversations, she looked around her gratefully. Leandro went by the house to change his clothes and let Luis, his Saturday morning piano student, know that they’d have to postpone class. His wife had had a mishap. The walk through the hospital floor, the snippets of other patients’ and relatives’ conversations, curiosity about other people’s pain, the bustling of the medical staff, that was how he whiled away the day.

  On Sunday he ate lunch with his son, Lorenzo, and his granddaughter, Sylvia. Leandro envied the caress of the girl’s hands over Aurora’s face, running over her forehead and cheeks. Those spotless hands, with barely any signs of wear, with everything ahead of them. It was Sylvia’s birthday and she toasted during the meal with her can of Coca-Cola. Leandro remembered her birth, the joy at the arrival of a baby, Aurora’s willingness to take care of the girl often. The dizzying speed at which time had passed, sixteen years already. The fruitless piano lessons he had given her, which were ended in silent agreement. She inherited her father’s bad ear, not much musical talent, Leandro said to himself. On the other hand, she showed her mother’s sensitivity in everything else. Through all those years, they watched Lorenzo’s marriage to Pilar wither, once so full of life and complicity. Leandro witnessed his son’s loss of status, his hair, his work, his wife, and even his daughter, the way one always loses kids in the teenage years. As a father he, too, had felt that irremediable distance, the displeasure at seeing Lorenzo quit school and devote himself to a job that gave him stability for a long time, but was now gone. He had seen him become an adult, husband, father, build a normal life for himself. He couldn’t deny that that normality was a few notches below Aurora and Leandro’s expectations. But all parents expect too much of their children. With time they come to believe that normality may be the recipe for happiness. But that wasn’t the case. Or it was for a while, until everything started to fall apar
t. Their son doesn’t like to talk about his problems, so they maintain a loose relationship, not seeking out what’s missing. They ate together on Sundays and at the table they talked about everything that wasn’t painful.

  Esther, Aurora’s sister, showed up with a small bag of clothes at seven p.m., ready to spend the night at the hospital. Go home already, don’t wait until the last minute, Aurora told Leandro. She felt uneasy about keeping him occupied, away from the house, distracted by the visits; she knew how allergic her husband was to the unexpected and the unplanned, how much he adored routine. Esther’s husband offered to give him a ride in his Mercedes. There was no love lost between them. His brother-in-law worked as a facilitator of official administrative matters and made big bucks smoothing the progress of licenses, speeding up or conquering bureaucracy through his contacts and bribes. He was trained in the art of fake cordiality. I’d rather walk, declined Leandro.

  Something that happened early that morning had awakened a dampened instinct in him.

  He had been awakened by the commotion in the hallway, the metallic squeaking of carts, some voices, but he was still lying down in bed when the nurse on the morning shift came in like a gale. She was in her late thirties, with her chestnut-brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. Her face was cheerful, well laid out, moisturized, and friendly. She placed herself between Aurora’s bed and Leandro’s and she leaned over to change Aurora’s catheter and check her dressings. As she bent forward, Leandro’s eyes crept up her bare legs beneath her white coat and managed to see her thighs rubbing together as she moved. Tanned during her recent vacations, they rose powerfully from her knees’ back fold. Beneath the nurse’s uniform, he could make out the lines of those teensy panties that made Leandro think of the old pinup girls and that girls today showed above the waist of their pants. In that furtive instant, Leandro felt the excitement of desirable flesh close by and looked on from a privileged position.