by Val
I walked into the bar like a zombie. Jaime was so astonished it took him several minutes to react. I felt terrible, with the strange sensation that I was an unwelcome intruder into the privacy of a couple who had nothing to do with me. Carolina pushed a chair towards me, and asked Jaime if he knew who I was. He did not know what to say. He turned green when he realized that for the first time in his life he had been caught out, that someone had stripped off his mask. He tried to get up several times, as if to escape from our little triangle, but each time I pulled him back down. The other people in the bar didn’t know whether to be amused or shocked at the soap opera they were witnessing, but none of them intervened. Jaime finally managed to run off, and Carolina suggested I went with her to her house, situated in a famous residential development about twenty kilometres outside Madrid. She wanted to show me where they lived. She said I could even spend the night there, as Jaime was unlikely to put in another appearance.
Despite still feeling like an intruder, I accepted, partly because I thought she probably didn’t want to be on her own. It was as though there was a kind of involuntary complicity between us. I owed it to her, I felt, as a way of thanking her for her attitude towards me.
When we got to the chalet, we proceeded to get drunk on gin. Then Carolina wanted to show me the bedroom.
Perhaps I accepted her offer to stay over because I wanted to see how Jaime lived, in order to try to understand him a bit better. But what exactly was there to understand? I had no idea. The house was full of photographs of Carolina and him.
‘Memories of happy moments we spent together,’ she said nostalgically. ‘Of course, it’s been years now since I felt good with him, but I can’t get rid of him. I can tell him on the phone I have had enough, but as soon as he reappears I fall into the trap again. This isn’t a life. At least, it’s not the life I wanted for me or for my children.’
At some point, while we were still drinking to help us bear the pain of so much love for such a perverse creature, Jaime called Carolina’s mobile again. He wanted to beg her forgiveness. He did not know of course that we were both in his house. All she said was that she wanted him to move out once and for all, but Jaime kept begging her not to throw him out, not to abandon him, saying he had never loved me. That I was nothing more than a mistake. Ten minutes later, he phoned me. He tried exactly the same story with me: he said he’d never loved Carolina, she was a poor widow left alone in this world with her children, he felt sorry for her, but he wanted to get back together with me. He asked me to forgive him for all the hurt he had caused me. I couldn’t even listen to half his excuses, and cut off the call. Carolina and I were drunk by now, but that did not make us any less indignant. How low could anyone go?
‘I’ve got an idea,’ Carolina said, a malicious gleam in her eyes, just as I was about to fall into a drunken sleep. ‘The worst thing anyone can do to Jaime is to touch his things. Come and look . . .’
She led me to their room, where Jaime had left all his things. In his wardrobe I was surprised to find the same wooden boxes he had in our Barcelona flat for storing all his watches. So he had recreated his Madrid house in our apartment. We were so angry we took out his clothes and Carolina started cutting them up with a pair of scissors. I did the same with his silk ties, which he had carefully hung on several hangers. We put all the pieces into plastic bags, then Carolina got out a suitcase to put them all in. She wrote Jaime’s name on a label. Despite ourselves, we had just become accomplices in an act of vandalism.
Carolina called a hotel and reserved a room in the name of Rijas. She told the receptionist that a suitcase would arrive for him, and that it should be given to him as soon as he arrived. We got out the car and drove straight to the hotel to drop off the case. Then she sent him a text message telling him the address of the hotel where she had left all his things. Jaime did not have the nerve to reply. I’ll never forget that moment in all my life. Because of the tension we had felt for more than twenty-four hours, Carolina and I started to laugh hysterically at the thought of Jaime’s face when he saw what we had done to his clothes.
An Unhappy Ending
15th February 1999
I SAID GOODBYE to Carolina, asking her to forgive me for having burst into her life in this way. All I was trying to do was to understand Jaime in order to break free of the love spell he had cast on me. I had no wish to harm her in any way; she was no more than a poor slave to a selfish monster who felt only anger towards all women.
I suppose that, as time goes by, Carolina will end up hating me.
3rd March 1999
I have to get out of the apartment. I can’t go on paying the rent and the heavy expenses, and besides, I can’t live here any more. Every room reminds me of Jaime and his crazy behaviour. I wrote to the agency, telling them we were going to hand back the apartment because we had separated. According to the contract, I have to pay them compensation because we have not been here a year. I’m responsible because I was the one who signed. I’m finding all this kind of thing extremely difficult. At night I can hardly sleep, and I’m in a nervous state the whole time. I’m still in touch with Carolina. She calls me frequently to tell me Jaime follows her to work every day, begging her to forgive him and take him back. Up to now, she has refused. But I know she will end up falling into his arms again. It’s hard to resist Jaime. She’ll go back to him because she’s afraid of ending up alone, and he needs her because he’s completely lost, and Carolina is the only person who really knows him.
April 1999
I have moved fairly rapidly to a much smaller flat on the other side of town from the Olympic Village. I called the removal firm to come one morning, but the previous evening Jaime got in while I was out and took all the valuables from the apartment. In other words, he’s left me with next to nothing. I was almost grateful, because in my new place there is hardly any room. I’ve gone from an apartment of a hundred and twenty square metres to a flat of about fifty square metres, hidden away in the city. I came across it by chance on one of my walks around Barcelona.
To get revenge, Jaime also destroyed the marble worktop in the kitchen. I don’t know how he did it, but it’s caused me a huge headache with the owner, who obviously is asking me to pay for it to be repaired. My situation could not be worse. I have no savings, I have debts everywhere because of Jaime’s wrecking of the apartment, and on top of all that, I’ve left my job with Harry. I resigned because I knew I couldn’t do it properly feeling as bad as I do. It would not have been professional of me to carry on. Above and beyond all this, I feel completely destroyed: all I have left in the world are the bitter memories of being in love with someone who never loved me, who simply laughed at me, took advantage of me, and who cheated me in every sense.
Strangely, I don’t feel at all jealous of Carolina. On the contrary, I think we felt a certain solidarity from the moment we met. She never called into question what I told her about my relationship with Jaime, and I’ll always be grateful to her for the way she opened her house to me. In the end, I’m nothing more than a stranger to her who burst into her world and brought part of it crashing down.
Jaime has tried to speak to me several times. He knows where I’ve moved to, because he followed me as well. One night, he rang the doorbell. I felt such a pang of the love that I still feel for him that I let him in. He was drunk. He begged me to forgive him, and told me he had ended everything with Carolina. I knew this was a lie, because Carolina and I are still in touch. He also told me his business was on the rocks, and that he needed money. He was trying to pull the wool over my eyes once more, but finally I managed to throw him out into the street.
I still do not really understand why Jaime had to do this to me. He has lots of women at his feet, and many of them are far richer than me.
I discovered that the jar of powder he said was from a pharmacy, for treating his ankle, was in fact pure cocaine. Even over this, I tried to find reasons to excuse him. Because I still love him. From now on I have to
fight against two enemies: firstly, against him and the memory of him; and secondly, against myself, and falling back under his spell.
August 1999
Several months have gone by while I have felt lethargic, incapable of doing anything. I can hardly remember what has happened. I shut myself up in my flat, without even bothering to move my furniture from where it was stacked against the walls. I haven’t been eating; I simply let myself float along. I want to annihilate myself. I’m letting myself die; one night I prayed with all my remaining strength that the end would not be long in coming.
The Brothel
A place where the vulnerability and frailty of human beings are always on show
I WAS THIRTY when I decided to enter the brothel. It followed my break-up with Jaime. I could not forgive him for leaving me with an empty bank account and lifelong debts, or the fact that he had left me for a bimbo who could never grow up. I was devastated, because all my beliefs about true love had suddenly evaporated.
I had been considering the possibility day and night for at least six months. I had thought of it before over the years, but never got round to doing anything about it. I suppose I needed something extra to give me the courage to take the first step. Women of all social classes (I know this from talking to friends) have considered prostitution at some point in their lives. We rarely act on the idea, however, because it seems as though it is no more than part of our erotic fantasies. I certainly had experienced fantasies along those lines, but I was always scared when I saw the women involved. I thought they lived in a grey, violent world, victims of a pimp who kept watch on them twenty-four hours a day.
Immediately after my separation, I had wanted to die. But I found it so hard to commit suicide in peace! For whatever reason, there was always something or someone who, usually without even realizing it, got in the way of that most intimate act, our right to die when we want.
Once when I tried to throw myself out of a window, Bigudi, who was back with me, started to meow to be fed. She was so insistent with her cries, and the way she scratched at my trouser leg, that I had to give up.
On another occasion, when I tried to take two boxes of sleeping pills, the water to my flat had been cut off. I searched desperately for some mineral water or a sip of alcohol, but there wasn’t so much as a drop in the whole place. I decided to put it off to the next day, but the old saying ‘don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today’ proved true yet again.
Gradually my desire to die wore off. In its place I felt only apathy, sadness, and a deep, deep depression.
Six months went by. I literally shut myself in my flat, with the shutters closed, going from my bed to the bathroom, the bathroom to my bed. I was never hungry, only thirsty, because I got into the habit of getting drunk with the excuse that there was nothing wrong with drinking: it helped you find another reality and did no one else any harm.
I had always been a strong, resolute woman, but after I left Jaime I resigned from my job in Harry’s company. And because I had no money, I had to move to a part of Barcelona I had never frequented before. I left my beautiful loft in the Olympic Village, and before I moved in to my new fifty-metre-square flat, I spent a week in a cheap boarding house in the Paralelo district, living out of my suitcase. I had Bigudi under one arm, a case full of memories under the other, and a medical certificate from an abortion clinic in my pocket. Women only have crises through love or the loss of a child. The rest, they can cope with. And now because of love I found myself lost and alone in the world, living next to some very shady characters and with cheap prostitutes in the street outside, in an area full of bars and homeless people.
I watched all this teeming life from my window. I was particularly fascinated by the prostitutes, and felt glad each morning when I recognized one of their faces. I got to know them – without ever speaking to them (I would have died of shame) – and came to feel they were keeping me company. At some level or other, I could understand them. I had always believed that to make ends meet it was better to sell your body than to work every weekend like a slave in a bar, twelve hours a day for a pittance. When I was doing Business Studies at university, a lot of my fellow students nearly killed themselves working as waiters in order to pay for their studies and live decently. I was lucky: I had a scholarship, and received economic support from my parents each month.
Now, as the days went by, I grew tired of living like a sewer rat in the boarding house. I started very occasionally to go out into the street. As I went downstairs, I could see the real world opening before me. I never took the lift, because the pink plush paper lining it made me feel very claustrophobic. I was scared of getting stuck inside, unable to breathe, and being trapped by these chewing-gum walls, flailing with my arms to try to free myself from the sticky mess entangling me.
In the end, I succeeded in the goal I had set myself after my break-up with Jaime. I killed somebody. I killed the well-behaved, studious, ambitious person I had inside me. I killed her because I instinctively knew that if I did, I would set free another much more human and sensitive being, one with far more curiosity about life.
There’s Always A First Time
1 September 1999
THE FIRST CONTACT I had with the brothel was the result of a final instinct for survival, or perhaps for self-destruction, depending on how you look at it. I’m not sure, but I think we human beings always try to preserve ourselves. So I prefer to believe it was the first option that took me there.
What I found was very different from the glamorous picture I had in my imagination. The girls turned out to be little Cinderellas, except that they never lost glass slippers, but a part of themselves. There was a huge contrast between how innocent some of them were and the way they made love to their clients. This physical contrast stupefied me.
I was one of the oldest, and knew what I was doing. A lot of them worked in the brothel to earn as much money as possible – not because they needed to, but because they hated the idea of being poor and thought you could buy happiness with banknotes. Above all, I was looking for affection and to try to recover my self-esteem, but deep down we all had the same wish: to find love.
Two thirty in the afternoon.
At last I had got out of the boarding house. I was walking along the street, counting the slabs of pavement, incapable of thinking straight about anything.
This morning I bought a newspaper and cut out an advert for a luxury establishment offering the most beautiful and elegant girls in the city. I didn’t think twice about it, but called at once to see if they needed any new people, because I was interested in working with them. They told me the address and asked me to come in the afternoon.
I wanted to get there was quickly as possible, to see this world I had so often imagined. I visualized myself in a luxury apartment filled with silk drapes, dressed in a transparent nightie, with themed bedrooms and jacuzzis in every bathroom.
Ten to three.
When Susana opened the door, I excused myself, saying I must have come to the wrong address. She said no, I had come to the right place, and showed me in.
Susana was a small, fat, ugly redhead. She was holding a cigarette in nicotine-stained fingers. Worse still, all her teeth looked like jagged black rocks about to fall out.
‘Surely that scares the clients off?’ I thought.
‘Do you smoke?’ she asked straight out, without so much as a ‘hello’.
‘Yes, thanks,’ I said, taking a cigarette nervously from her. My hands were trembling, and this was the first and only time she offered me a cigarette, because I soon became the person who supplied her need for tar and nicotine.
In spite of the fact that I knew exactly where I was, I still did not know for sure whether I was there out of a sense of vengeance, because I was so disgusted with men and what they have dangling between their legs, or because I needed affection and a boost to my self-esteem, not to mention my money worries. I suppose it was a mixture of all those reasons, and in addition I�
��ve always thought of myself as a liberal-minded woman, so the idea of becoming a prostitute did not cause me any great trauma or frighten me.
‘If you just wait a minute,’ Susana said, looking me up and down, ‘the boss will be here. Then she can meet you personally. I’m Susana, the day manager.’
I suddenly noticed something on the floor by the door to the apartment. It was a lemon, with matches and a lit cigarette sticking in it.
‘It attracts clients,’ Susana explained, laughing. ‘It’s a bit of witchcraft. Cindy taught it me.’
‘Cindy?’
‘A Portuguese girl who works here. I’ll introduce you to her. She’s got all kinds of tricks, and they all work.’ Susana seemed very convinced of this.
When she showed me into a small room where the only furniture was a bed and an oval mirror surrounded by lights, I suddenly began to feel afraid, as if something dreadful might happen to me. I had a knot in my stomach, and a strange feeling that I could not breathe. My mouth was dry as dust.
‘You wouldn’t have a glass of water, would you?’ I asked Susana.
‘Yes, sweetheart, you just sit on the bed and wait for the boss, and I’ll bring you the water, OK?’
She seemed a good sort. She looked awful, but there must have been some reason why she was in here.
The room was ghastly: the complete opposite of what I had imagined. The walls were covered in a peeling yellow wallpaper, while from the ceiling hung a pink curtain presumably intended to give an air of intimacy and old-fashioned luxury, but failing to do either. Several of the lights around the mirror had gone out, but I could not help staring at myself in it. I suddenly felt myself falling into a kind of mild schizophrenia that was taking me to a different world, one where the language of words had no meaning, where everything was measured by the body and its sensations. The woman reflected in the sad mirror was someone I did not know. I saw the face of a woman who has landed somewhere she was not meant to, but is determined to make it on her own in spite of everything. The stubborn face of a woman who wanted to justify this choice to herself at all costs.
