Learning to Lose

by David Trueba

  They talked about the concert, about the previous days, about the state of the country, about general things and impersonal matters, about his life in Paris. So much mediocrity, we’re so far from those exciting years where everything was ahead of us, right? Joaquín lit a Cohiba that inundated the room with bluish smoke. He leaned back and his pant legs revealed the tops of his socks. He stroked the cigar, giving it small turns with his fingertips, made space between his lips to house the smoke for an instant before exhaling it gently.

  I guess you’re retired from such competitions.

  Seeing Leandro’s puzzled face, he felt obliged to finish the sentence, women … Leandro lifted his shoulders and smiled. I’ve got Jacqueline on top of me all the time, it’s not healthy. Listen, if some day you need to use the apartment all you have to do is ask, the doorman has keys and is completely trustworthy, if you want to come by and play the piano, although I suppose you have more interesting things to do, and he let out a guffaw like a complicit whiplash. I mean if you want to impress some woman don’t hesitate, eh. We’ll talk to Casiano, the doorman, his father used to be the doorman of this building, imagine, it’s an inherited post, isn’t that sad? He’s a very discreet guy.

  Joaquín had no children. His way of relating to his wives had always turned him into the object of their caretaking. He was the son and husband to women who accepted the role of mother, lover, and secretary in equal parts. During the long hour they were alone together, Jacqueline called twice to remind Joaquín about his next appointment and some other triviality.

  They went down to the street in a painstakingly maintained elevator. It was a portal into the old Madrid, built in that short period when the city aspired to be Paris. The doorman sat in a booth, the radio spitting out advertising jingles. Casiano, I want to introduce you to my friend Leandro, my childhood friend. He is also a pianist. The man greeted him with humble eyes. Once they were out on the street, Joaquín gossiped about the doorman with amusement. He explained to Leandro that he had a son in jail for belonging to a Nazi party and having been involved in the murder of a Basque soccer fan. And all of a sudden, with a cloud of cigar smoke, he changed the subject. Do you still teach piano? I’ve got the odd student.

  In the bar of the Wellington, the pianist spotted Joaquín and a second later dedicated, with a smile, the chords of a Falla piece with clumsy execution and bad taste. You remember when Don Alonso used to say to us, keep it up like that and you’ll end up a pianist in a hotel? Well, there you have it. A nervous young man waited, sitting at a table, with a bag that looked almost like a schoolboy’s resting on the carpeted floor. This is the boy I told you about, my biographer, as you say. They sat around the table and Joaquín announced he was going to commit the eccentricity of ordering a whisky before noon. Since you guys are the ones that have to talk …

  There was a tentative attempt at conversation, during which the young man took out of his bag a notebook that he opened, searching for a blank page. Leandro realized he expected something concrete. The boy asked a question to lay the groundwork. I’d like you to tell me about your childhood together, you were both children of wartime. Oy, who can understand that today, right, Leandro? Joaquín smiled. Leandro started to talk about his origins and the building where they lived as boys. The young man put on his glasses and resolutely jotted a heading: childhood friend. Then he underlined it. Leandro felt bad.

  He tried to not be too precise. He talked about the enormous social difference after the war and he remembered the generosity of Joaquín’s family toward his. It was a moral obligation, interjected Joaquín. Spain was divided into victors and vanquished and the victors were divided into those who had a heart and those who were just scoundrels interested in lining their pockets.

  Any special, memorable moment from your adolescence?

  Leandro and Joaquín exchanged a look. Leandro’s expression was eloquent. It seemed incredible that someone could ask you to sum up a life in two or three anecdotes. The best thing would be if you two could get together one day, without me around, today the idea was that you got a chance to meet. Leandro can tell you things about me even I don’t remember. Let’s see, there are things that shouldn’t be left out, those first piano lessons we shared, then our first jobs and my leaving for France, you came to Paris and lived with me for a year. It was barely three months, clarified Leandro. We had a piano teacher who was a harsh old guy, fun, serious, very serious. You can tell him about all that. Things about the neighborhood, I don’t even want to try to remember them. My father, for example, was someone from another era, a model military man, conservative, authoritarian, but more nineteenth-century than of the new fascist Spain.

  I think you came to hate your father, almost as an essential stance for your ambitions. Leandro’s words shut Joaquín up for a second. You always were very clear on what you wanted to be. It’s strange. But I think it’s a very important detail. You were a young man who knew what you wanted. That’s rare. You molded everything around you. And perhaps your father was a victim of that. And others, maybe myself included, benefited from it, because you were building something that only you were clear on how it had to be constructed. For example, I was your friend, but with a type of friendship that you had created in your mind.

  There was a silence. Joaquín ruminated over Leandro’s words. He wasn’t offended by them, but he didn’t understand where they were leading. Then he added, unaquaeque res, quantum in se est, in suo esse perseverare conatur. The young man looked at him with eyes big as plates. Spinoza, each thing, insofar as it is in itself, strives to persevere in its being. It’s from Ethics, my favorite book, one I always keep beside my bed. Don’t overthink it, I was something and I could only persevere in being that something. The young man took notes at a furious pace.

  Deep down, in the world of children and women that we lived in during the war, without adult men, just the old and unfit, the return of your father was something unexpected and annoying for you, added Leandro.

  Joaquín smiled. He agreed. When a boy overcomes the loss of his father and gets used to his absence, you are right that what he least expects is a resurrection, a return to the beginning, I rebelled against returning to the early authority. You will agree with me that the war was for us a very strange moment of total freedom, strange and cruel but freeing, something that was lost with the victory. Leandro nodded and Joaquín continued. It’s true, in the image that I wanted of myself, being an orphan was essential. Perhaps that’s why, and maybe it was unfair, I never accepted him back again.

  The young man took the occasional note. Leandro suddenly remembered a cruel game they would sometimes play during wartime. They ran from the street to a doorway, they called up to an apartment, and a mother would answer and they would announce dramatically, your son, your son was found dead, a bomb went off. And then they’d run off, unaware of the pain they were causing and that their joke would unleash a tragedy until the truth was discovered. Why would we do something like that? Joaquín wondered aloud. I don’t know, it was the cruelty of the war, transformed into a fun game by kids. The young man put on his glasses in a shy tic.

  Kids are always like that, said Leandro. Then he talked about something else. A hazy memory of the return of Joaquín’s father and the evening he took them to see a newsreel at the movies because he could be seen among the people at the back of a shot featuring Franco’s elite in Burgos. The movie playing afterward wasn’t approved for minors, but they forced his father to let them stay and watch it. Leandro didn’t remember the title. But he did remember Carole Lombard was in it, wearing tight elegant gowns that showed off her breasts, and that years later you confessed to me that her presence had awakened desire in you, as it had in me.

  So what you’re saying is that my father took us to show himself off and politically indoctrinate us and we tended more toward carnal desire, kids are wise. Yes, yes, I remember now. Joaquín took obvious pleasure in hearing about his past. He was attracted to the re-creation of his l
ife by a third party, as if he could situate himself as a spectator.

  I think that during our childhood, said Leandro, we create the unmentionable challenges of our lives and the answer to happiness consists in the achievement, or inability to approximate, those childhood goals, maybe not fully articulated or clear, but evident to yourself. Although now you are listening to me as if what I’m saying was nothing more than an obscure memory, I know that you remember very clearly how you were and how you thought as a boy. Leandro continued dispassionately in the face of Joaquín’s smile that seemed to say, this all seems too complicated of a psychoanalytical game for the time and the place. Would you believe, I’m the same way, sometimes I surprise myself by feeling that I’m being observed by my younger self.

  And? Do you find yourself loyal to what you wanted? Do you think there’s anyone who achieves that? asked Joaquín as he stared into Leandro’s sunken eyes.

  Well, this gentleman didn’t come here to hear me talk about myself, just about you. I’m not important at all.

  Joaquín laughed, satisfied with Leandro’s evasive reply, it was enough for him. They could now focus again on what he was interested in: himself.

  Leandro returned home leisurely. He had taken the metro and gotten out at Cuatro Caminos. In his pocket, he has a piece of paper with the young man’s phone number. They had made a date to see each other some other day and work in a more methodical manner, and without Joaquín present. But recalling those years had awoken in Leandro the feeling that he was at the end of a journey, that there was nothing left ahead of him. Meeting Aurora had been his salvation from an uncontrollable bitterness, a renewed strength to go forward with a life that wasn’t the one he had dreamed of. He feels a sudden flush of tenderness and appreciation for her. And in that same moment he imagines her dead in bed, not breathing, he sees himself enter the house to find her paler than ever, with her eyes veiled and her chest lifeless. He doesn’t know if he should quicken his step or just stop. He’s afraid, but he continues. Leisurely.

  11

  He finds his mother sleeping, drugged by tranquilizers. She is never left alone now. If his father has to go out, he calls the cleaning lady or waits for Sylvia to arrive to spend some time with her grandmother. That afternoon Lorenzo called him, I’ll come by. His father had gone out a little while ago after a very brief conversation between them in the hallway. How are you? Here, stuck. Lorenzo had been surprised by the answer. Even when his mother was in perfect health, he never felt that his father had much need for the world outside. It more seemed that he found pleasure in the solitude of his room. As he remembered it, his father had always been a homebody annoyed by a weekend excursion to the mountains, relatives visiting, or a commitment that required leaving the house. But it was clear that Aurora’s illness was enslaving him and Lorenzo understood that as the reason behind his wanting to get out, to get some air.

  He was upset for a few days now, since he had come back from his walk and found Aurora on the floor. You don’t know what it was like, he told his son, I thought she was dead. Aurora hadn’t been able to control her sphincter, she had dirtied the bed and had been crazy enough to try to stand up. She didn’t break any bones in the fall, but the feeling Leandro described of picking her up off the floor, her embarrassment, had been a horrific moment, you have no idea, how terrible. God, it’s intense what’s happening to your mother, he ended with his eyes flooding with tears.

  When the doorbell rings, he knows it is Daniela. She comes up to the apartment and Lorenzo opens the door for her. My mother is alone, but sleeping. Daniela takes off her coat, her workday ended. Lorenzo hangs it on a hook in the entryway. I spent my whole childhood in this house. Daniela looks around with curious eyes, but she’s unable to imagine Lorenzo as a child playing on his knees in the hallway near the kitchen door.

  The previous Sunday, they had gone to church together and chatted with other couples on the way out. That day there were a lot of children and the pastor talked to them about the possibility of renting a space in another neighborhood with a little yard, so the little ones could enjoy it. We’d have to gather the money between all of us, of course. Later they went to the Retiro to eat. They sat on the grass. Lorenzo’s hemorrhoids were really acting up and it took him a while to find a comfortable position. When he finally did, he was almost leaning on her thigh. I’d like to introduce you to my parents, he then said.

  Saturday night they had had dinner in an Ecuadorian restaurant, El Manso, that’s what they call Guayaquil, she explained. The owners took away the tables to transform the place into a bar with a little place to dance. They were a friendly couple and they accepted Lorenzo without any prejudice. They knew Daniela well. I come by here and pick up their packages of leftovers that we leave at the church for the needy, without the shame of those soup kitchens, where they have to stand in line right on the street, Daniela explained. It was there, in that restaurant, while some danced and Lorenzo and Daniela made themselves comfortable in a corner, that the police burst in, forty agents for no more than a hundred customers. Those that were standing were forced to line up along the bar. Without the music and with all the lights on, it seemed to have suddenly become dawn. It must have been two in the morning. The few that were seated were forced to stay in their chairs. The policemen demanded documentation, residency permits. As he handed over his ID, Lorenzo said to the agent, this is an outrage. The man lifted his eyes toward him. Are you going to tell me how to do my job? he said in a challenging tone. With a nervous gesture, Daniela begged him not to answer, but Lorenzo did. I don’t understand this harassment, these people are having fun, they’re not doing anything wrong.

  Daniela searched in her bag, as if she were trying to find her wallet. Lorenzo and the agent locked eyes again. Forget it, the policeman said to Daniela. And he continued his inspection at the next table. The result of the raid, of almost forty-five minutes of paralysis, would be a few deportation notices that, in practice, would probably not be enforced. As the police left, the place was plunged into a loaded, sad atmosphere. The scene reminded those present that their stay in the country was provisional and fragile; it spread a stench of uncertainty. We only have a permit as a restaurant, explained the owners, so it’s probably best if we shut down for tonight.

  They don’t want us here, but we’re not going to leave, Daniela told him on the street. But now a period of legalization is open, you have to get your papers, insisted Lorenzo. Yes, but it’s difficult, the couple I work for still has to be convinced.

  Lorenzo came into her entryway with her, to the foot of the stairs. There he embraced her. He searched out her mouth and Daniela gave him a kiss. Lorenzo placed his hand on her back and held her very close. Daniela hid her head on his shoulder. Lorenzo felt her bra strap beneath her clothes.

  The walls were of filthy stucco and the mailboxes were bent, several of them broken. The staircase was dirty with peeling paint and the light gave off an annoying buzz. In the dimness, Lorenzo kissed Daniela again, but this time they were long kisses. He sank his fingers into her hair. He mussed it up and caressed the nape of her neck.

  They’re all up there, it’s better if you don’t come up, she said. Lorenzo nodded, he wanted to kiss her, but she preferred to leave. Lorenzo accompanied her to the landing. They kissed one last time in silence. He stayed on the other side of the door when she went into the apartment. Daniela smiled at him.

  Lorenzo wanted to introduce Daniela to his parents. He could feel their tenseness when they asked him about his work, about how he was feeling, he didn’t want them to imagine him alone and depressed, like those recurring images of the unemployed, heads lowered, hands in pockets, the out-of-work as gray victims. I’m dating a girl, he told them suddenly, I’ll introduce you to her. His father’s surprise, and his mother’s, immobile in bed, made him think that they harbored a fear of seeing him alone forever.

  He didn’t tell them that Daniela was Ecuadorian or that she worked in the apartment above his. Nor that he
went with her to a church on Sundays where the pastor spoke intimately with them about life as sacrifice, about renunciation, about happiness, about abstract concepts brought closer with everyday metaphors. At first Lorenzo thought the service was something that she and others like her needed out of some sort of lack. Later, he watched them sing, respond, and laugh when the pastor broke the seriousness of the sermon with something funny, and he realized it was more than that. Daniela talked about God, what God thought, what God would do. God was a companion, but also a watchman.

  Lorenzo’s parents had never been religious, even when that was the norm in a submissive society. After doing his Communion, Lorenzo doesn’t remember having gone back to church with them, and the few times he had asked his father about God or faith, he had always given the same answer, that is something only you can discover, when the time is right.

  In religion, as in so many other things, his parents had given him absolute freedom, waiting for Lorenzo to work it out on his own. That was why he felt that what Daniela devoted to God was a measuring stick, the doctrine of behavior. And he wondered, puzzled, if it hadn’t come to him, finally, the moment in his life that his father always referred to, the moment of truth, not like something imposed by society, but more like an inner voice.

  In church, that last Sunday, Lorenzo had also wondered if the lack of sex in his relationship had something to do with it. Was Daniela one of those women who compartmentalize sex as dark, dirty? Maybe we have to be married, thought Lorenzo with a smile. It didn’t seem that the rest of the couples showed any renunciation or imposed chastity. Quite the opposite: the girls wore tight clothes and showed open smiles. Lorenzo thought that his sexual possibilities might be resolved amid those messy banquets, the euphoric chanting, the mischievous kids, and the parents in their Sunday best with serious, profound expressions.