Learning to Lose

by David Trueba

  Tuesday morning when the doctor came by the room, he was calmer, but still had the same chorizo stain on his white coat. He took Leandro to a nearby room and showed him some X-rays. The cleaning ladies had just left and it smelled of disinfectant. The doctor opened the windows as wide as possible. He spoke while he moved the pen like a pointer. Let’s see, a broken hip isn’t anything serious, as I told you. It’s a common thing, we consider it an epidemic of old age. Every year in Spain we treat forty thousand broken hips in the elderly, particularly women. So that’s incidental.

  Leandro felt fear. He feared the moment the doctor would start to talk about what wasn’t incidental. The problem is that with these type of fractures sometimes they’re the first clue to a general debilitation. We are going to send your wife home, but we are going to do some serious tests on her, aside from the fact that she has advanced osteoporosis she was already being treated for … Leandro stuck his hands into the pockets of his jacket. He was cold. I had no idea, he said. The doctor smiled, opened the folder with Aurora’s information. You know how women are, they keep their problems to themselves.

  Yeah, replied Leandro. The doctor talked to him about densitometry and degrees of mobility, he named other tests that he was going to perform, but he never seemed to get to the point. Leandro asked him about rehabilitation after leaving the hospital. The important thing is to not let her get too frustrated, was all the doctor said. It’s just part of old age.

  The conversation languished. Confused, Leandro walked through the hall on the way back to Aurora’s room. His ineptitude for domestic tasks infuriated him. Up until that point, Aurora had taken care of the house. For Leandro the washing machine may as well have been a refrigerator that washed the clothes. He took care of the financial stuff, the bank’s itemizations, paying the bills, buying the wine, attending the miserable building meetings, but he didn’t attend to the inner workings of the house. He knows that on Sundays Lorenzo and Sylvia come for lunch and there is almost always rice soup and batter-fried hake. And that on Thursdays when Manolo Almendros shows up at midday Aurora always invites him to stay and offers him his favorite chocolates for dessert. But he doesn’t know how she manages to have them on hand. It upsets him to think of his wife disabled in a house that isn’t prepared.

  In three days, we’ll be at home, he announced to Aurora, who was reading in bed. Then he sat close by her and opened the newspaper. They were both silent, reading almost in unison. Perhaps they were asking themselves similar questions, but they didn’t say anything to each other. Mugshots of Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. The death of Yasser Arafat. The recent elections in America.

  Osembe had come down to find him. Leandro sees her through the glass. She smiles and they kiss on both cheeks, yet she conveys the same absent air of their previous encounter. She brings him upstairs to a different room, somewhat larger. The window opens onto the backyard and the blinds are not completely lowered. The afternoon light streams in. Different room, he says. It’s better, she says. The bathroom is bigger, with pale yellow tiles. Above the sink is a fixture with three oval mirrors. Leandro notices that it is almost identical to the one in his apartment, which unnerves him. She sits over a bidet and soaps up. Leandro feels a stab of disgust at the idea that she was underneath another client just a minute ago. He runs his fingers through his hair and looks in the mirror at the blotches on the skin of his forehead and cheeks. His is the face of an old guy. There’s a Jacuzzi, you want to go in? asks Osembe. Maybe later, replies Leandro.

  When he sits down to undress, he looks out into the back garden. He sees a half-filled pool and a white seesaw with rusty axles. Take off your clothes, Leandro tells Osembe. She places herself in front of him and undresses, without adding any intention to the purely mechanical act. She is slow to take off her last pieces of underwear, as if she wants to seem modest. She looks at herself and tenses the muscles in her thighs and buttocks. For a moment, she seems to forget that Leandro is in front of her. She chews gum. Leandro gets up to kiss her and gets a strong waft of strawberry breath. She doesn’t move her mouth away, but she kisses him without passion, hiding the gum between her teeth.

  Leandro hugs her and finishes undressing her. She laughs, without arousal, distant. I’ll do it, lie down. Leandro obeys, going over to the bed. She is in control of the situation. Leandro tries to defy her authority because he finds no pleasure in her series of mechanical caresses. Do you want to fuck? she asks. Leandro feels ridiculous. He wants to make the encounter intimate, but he realizes that she refuses to break with her routine. She would rather everything be predictable, flat, professional. Leandro senses there could be a more distant, hidden pleasure, but he is forbidden access to that place. She chews gum, her thoughts far from there. It is obvious Leandro isn’t managing to excite her as he rubs her sex, more like industrial than erotic manipulation. Come on, grandpa, she says. As if that’s going to encourage him. A bad mood overtakes Leandro. That’s okay, forget about that, she says and sits on the bed.

  He wants to leave. What am I doing here? he asks himself. Her eyes look empty, as if nothing matters much to her.

  The situation is then uncomfortable for them both. I suck, she says. No, says Leandro. He sits behind her and hugs her tightly to his chest. He caresses her arms and stomach. She tries to move, to change position and get back to the routine, but Leandro doesn’t let her. She only wants the client to come. It is the only way she has of understanding her job. Like a craft. She doesn’t aspire to get into his head. In fact it makes her uncomfortable to know Leandro is after something more than just an orgasm.

  Leandro buries his face among Osembe’s bands of hair. She laughs as if he were tickling her. She doesn’t understand how he can find pleasure in running his hands over her back, her shoulders, in traveling the entire length of her body with his fingertips and resisting penetration. He, on the other hand, knows that that is what brought him back.

  Early that afternoon, he had accompanied Luis, his student, to a store that sells used pianos where he knew the owners. It was an appointment they had scheduled a while ago. The owner was very friendly and the boy didn’t dare try out the pianos. Leandro did it for him. They had a price limit. My parents won’t let me spend more. Don’t worry, Leandro told him, we’ll find something good for that amount. They went to another store and there Leandro noticed a perfectly restored black upright piano that was less than thirteen hundred euros. He played it for a moment. It sounds wonderful, he said. As he ran his finger over its smooth black wood, Leandro knew that, as hard as he fought his desire to meet Osembe again at the chalet, that very afternoon he would go there again. And then he was overcome with an enthusiasm that his student and the salesman misinterpreted. Ah, Don Leandro still has the same passion for music as he did when we met. And it’s been almost thirty years now, hasn’t it?

  Leandro had lost some of the enthusiasm he’d had earlier, even though now he was touching the skin he craved. He noticed a long scar beside the crease in Osembe’s elbow. The wound intrigued him. Perhaps an accident in the village, a wild animal. Her dangerous childhood in Africa.

  I got caught in an elevator when I was a little girl, she explained. In a department store.

  And he busies himself with the rough skin on her elbow for a long while. Then he puts his fingers on her shaven sex. He feels the sandpaper of her pubic hair and how she tightens her strong muscles to impede his access. You want to fuck? Time’s running out, says Osembe. Leandro notices she’s uncomfortable with being touched. And he doesn’t want to do anything but touch her. He discovers her ugly feet, with twisted toes and deformed toenails badly painted with white polish. He strokes her legs and arms, touches her nose, which flares when she breathes. I just want to get to know you, he explains, but she can’t understand. Osembe gets up and shakes her ass comically up to Leandro’s face. She moves her gluteal muscles up and down just by changing the muscle tension, happy as a girl who’s proud of being able to wiggle her ears. You like my ass? Lean
dro studies it in front of his face, high, weightless, muscular.

  No. I like you. And then he kisses it and she laughs and pulls away.

  You want to pay more? asks Osembe when the time is up. You can pay for another hour. Osembe fondles her breasts, sticking her hands under the bra she hasn’t taken off. Whitish stretch marks peek out.

  Okay, says Leandro.

  11

  Lorenzo had painted the kitchen when Sylvia was seven years old. He remembers this now, sitting in front of the cordless phone. The wall is tiled halfway up and crowned by a blue braided stencil. The rest is painted by him. Salmon, said Pilar. But as Lorenzo made the first brushstrokes, she said, that isn’t salmon, it’s orange. They argued about the tones and the true color of some salmon slices they had eaten days before. They were like this, said Lorenzo pointing to the wall. No, salmon is salmon, she said. Then Pilar went to pick Sylvia up from school. The little girl went into the kitchen and saw her father up on a ladder, brushing a second coat into a corner. The kitchen looks so pretty painted orange, Sylvia said to him. Pilar smiled. I swear I didn’t tell her anything. He never knew if Pilar had mentioned something about it to her on the way home. He does remember that they laughed. Those were other times.

  The orange color had faded somewhat, as had the kitchen. A tile was still chipped from the day he had tried to screw in a hook to hold a rack for pots and pans. On the floor, a piece of the terrazzo was broken where Sylvia had dropped the flour tin while helping her mother make a cake. The door to one of the cabinets had been replaced, and the new one wasn’t the exact same shade of white as the others.

  Scars.

  In the phone book where they kept frequently called numbers, many had accumulated that they had long since stopped calling frequently. Sylvia’s pediatrician, various offices, the home phone number of a secretary, the babysitter they used to call when they went out for the night, three or four deceased relatives who remained in the limbo of the phone book, someone completely forgotten, some friend of Pilar’s whom they didn’t see anymore, the number of the school Sylvia used to go to, and there, under the letter p, were Paco’s numbers. Home, cell, in-laws, and the summer place in Altea. Lorenzo inhaled before dialing the digits into the telephone.

  The previous days had been intense. His mother in the hospital, his father fearing she’d never walk again, Sylvia’s accident, Pilar’s arrival. He spent two days in a row with her at the clinic. He offered to let her stay at the house. No, I can stay with a friend, she told him. Pilar asked how everything was going for him, if he was still looking for work, if he needed money. No, no, I’m fine, he lied. And then he said, did you hear about what happened to Paco? He was killed at home, it was in the newspapers. Pilar was silent. The news seemed to affect her. Lorenzo had decided that he could talk about it, that he should. He mentioned it to his father, to his friend Lalo; he told Sylvia about it.

  Tuesday around noon, he had found a message on the answering machine. A detective named Baldasano identified himself as a part of the homicide team and left a phone number. When Lorenzo called, the man was very brief. I just want to ask you a few questions, he said. We know that you were Mr. Garrido’s partner. Yes, of course, I found out from the newspapers, said Lorenzo. You understand that we want to have a little consultation with you. The word sounded ambiguous, worrying. Lorenzo explained that that afternoon he had to pick up his daughter from the hospital, he told him about the accident, asked if it would be possible to postpone the appointment until tomorrow. Everyday life, normality, was the best evidence in his defense.

  A policeman led him into an office where he was received by Detective Baldasano, who was drinking coffee from a short brown plastic cup. He offered Lorenzo a coffee as he opened a file. No, I just had breakfast, thanks. Lorenzo was nervous and thought that the best thing would be to admit it. I’m kind of nervous, to be honest. There’s no reason for you to be, the policeman reassured him. Look, it’s very simple. Everything points toward a robbery by one of the regular gangs that operate in the city, the violent ones, Colombians, Albanians, Bulgarians. But there are some things still up in the air. We asked Mr. Garrido’s wife to give us an update on her husband’s business dealings, to tell us about people he might still have unresolved conflicts with, and I’m gonna be honest with you … your name came up.

  Lorenzo nodded, without allowing himself to be surprised. Paco and I had a relationship, well, we were friends and partners and the whole thing ended terribly, that’s true, said Lorenzo. We know, the detective reassured him, but his tone wasn’t reassuring at all. It happened a while ago and we hadn’t seen each other in a long time. We stopped being friends, but that doesn’t mean we were enemies. I don’t hold any … Well, I don’t know, Paco was a slick operator, the term had slipped out casually, lightly. Lorenzo was glad he had said it. It was effective. The detective chewed out a yeah.

  Paco cheated me. We set up a small business together, I lost my money and, well, he didn’t lose as much as I did, and, I don’t know, that made me feel ripped off. We’re talking about two or three million of the old pesetas, we’re not talking about amounts that … Lorenzo stopped himself. He didn’t want to talk about the murder. Paco had his wife’s family money and, well, for him the business going under wasn’t such a big deal. I’ve tried to remake my life elsewhere and I’ve never made any claims on him. The detective didn’t speak; he was waiting for Lorenzo to add something more. He did. When I read the news I felt sad, I wasn’t pleased at all. I felt sad for her, Teresa, more than anything.

  Lorenzo thought he shouldn’t talk too much, but maintaining the flow of words calmed him. Lying so naturally surprised him as much as it soothed him. It gave him the strength to confront the detective’s silences. Did he have many enemies? asked Baldasano. As the detective lifted his face, Lorenzo saw that he had a wound on his neck, covered by his shirt, a pink scar, not very long. It looked more like a burn than a cut. Enemies is a strong word, said Lorenzo. He didn’t make a good impression on people, that’s for sure. The detective asked him about Thursday night. Do you have anyone who can testify they were with you? Lorenzo thought for an instant. My daughter. I live with my daughter. I’m separated.

  The detective nodded his head, as if he already knew those details. He lifted his eyes toward Lorenzo. I’m going to ask you a question that you have every right not to answer. This is just a consultation, though.

  There it was, that word again. Outside the door was such a wide variety of telephone rings that you could mistake them for carousel music. Above the detective’s head, on the ceiling, was a gray, moldy, damp leak.

  Do you know anyone, from your professional relationship, who might have enough motive to murder Mr. Garrido? Lorenzo pretended to be thinking, going over the list of Paco’s acquaintances. For a moment, he tried to find someone and the exercise calmed him, transporting him to a distant idea, making him innocent in the simplest way. No, he said. And, without really knowing why, he felt the need to add that Paco was a person you couldn’t hate.

  Lorenzo didn’t say anything more. He looked up at the leak on the ceiling again. The detective also looked up toward the stain. Can you believe it? It’s been like that for six days. It’s the bathroom upstairs, in the passport department. I can assure you it’s quite unpleasant to sit here all morning knowing you have a puddle of piss over your head. Well, I won’t take up any more of your time. I will ask you to jot down all your contact numbers. I’d like to have you always on hand, in case I need to consult you on anything.

  He was in love with that word. Question must have sounded too threatening to him. Tricks of the trade. He held out a sheet of paper to Lorenzo, for him to write down his phone numbers. The last one is my parents’ house, just in case. Then he thought maybe that was being too solicitous. He left the office and was grateful that one of the policemen came up the stairs right then, shouting because someone had vomited on his shoes. Goddamn it, even my socks are soaked, fuck. Amid the laughter and joking of the oth
er cops, Lorenzo looked for the door.

  He left the station calmer. Lying had given him the same feeling of freedom as telling the truth. A false confession is still a confession. Talking about it, putting himself in a different place, had helped him get distance. Sometimes a lie fits perfectly over the truth. When he said Paco was someone you couldn’t hate, he said it because it was true. He thought that that’s where his mistake lay, from having crossed the line. Actually hating him. Paco was the one to blame for his work situation, for his inability to give Pilar what she needed, for his parents’ commiserating look when they lent him money, for his fall from grace. Paco was the one to blame for his daughter no longer falling asleep on the living room sofa so he could carry her to her bed. To blame for his having blanked out in a job interview, there in front of some young slick-haired executive who had just asked him, why do you think a professional like you hasn’t achieved job stability in all these years? To blame for the fact that he shares the streets at midmorning with housewives and old folks. To blame for pushing him off the path, a path he now has to find again without anyone’s help.

  In the kitchen, Lorenzo dials Paco’s home number. The same number he called so many times to hear his friend’s voice, the voice that arranged to meet him at a restaurant or said, see you tomorrow at the office. The same voice that one day told him, Loren, I think we’ve lost it all, and he was lying because only one of them had. The phone rang once, twice, three times, before Teresa answered in a whisper. That lifeless, silent presence, that woman whose reserve compensated for her husband’s expansiveness. The same one who had pointed Lorenzo out as a suspect. The police often work like that, they have no leads, they have no clues, they have no indications, but they pressure a suspect, they pressure him until he crumbles, and then they work the investigation back from the conclusion, they solve the crime with the criminal. But it wasn’t going to be so easy to defeat him.