by Pablo Tusset
Not a Kodak moment, exactly.
‘Listen, I didn’t put a condom on,’ I said, once we had assumed a certain degree of verticality, and she had recovered the dignity required to say something coherent.
‘That’s all right. I won’t get pregnant, for sure.’
‘And AIDS, and all that?’
‘Don’t worry, I usually use a condom. Tonight was an exception.’
‘I’m not saying it for your sake: I’m kind of promiscuous, that’s why.’
‘And when you are being pretty promiscuous do you use a condom?’
‘Yes. Always.’
‘Well, then …’
Right.
‘Hey, I have a favour to ask,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘I’d like to take a look at your tits. After all that, I never did get to see them up close.’
She was into it, and so she showed them to me. With pride, I would even venture to say. I took the right one in my hand and kissed it, and then took the left one and kissed that, too. Then I helped her back into her bra, and that was when she planted a transversal kiss on my Errol Flynn moustache. It’s a shame that I’m so very fundamentally a bachelor, because there certainly are some very lovely things about life when you are part of a couple – like that bit about chimpanzees taking out one another’s lice. That sort of thing.
‘You know something? I actually find you to be tender,’ she said, as she finished rearranging her clothes.
‘I’d be better off if you didn’t let that one out.’
‘I don’t plan on telling anyone.’
‘People would probably have a tough time believing it, anyway.’
My legs continued quivering, as if they were made of gelatin. Then she said that a bathroom would do her a world of good, and I told her to follow me along the upper terrace until we reached the entrance to my room. I pointed the way to the toilet.
‘There must be towels in some closet around here. Under the sink, maybe.’
I closed the door behind her and looked for someplace to sit down and calmly have a smoke. Only when I lit up, sitting on my old bed, did I realise the gravity of my transgression. And I realised it precisely because I suddenly found myself wanting to kiss her tits again, the tits of that presumptuous Bohemian Girl who was currently taking care of her personal business in my bathroom. Yes: my bathroom, in the end. It’s one thing to go chatting up hookers – as soon as you feel like kissing the girl-of-the-moment again, the taxi has already transported you far away from the scene of the crime, and so you run no risk of succumbing to temptation. But this individual, this beautiful individual whom I was dying to hold again in that delicious, quiescent abandon that had flowed down my balls (I could still feel, in fact, the tickle of a tiny droplet behind my scrotum, and I had to shimmy my package a bit so that the cotton of my boxers might soak it up), was going to emerge from the bathroom at any given moment, and I … I could not risk exposing myself in her presence.
So I went to hide in my Magnificent Brother’s old bedroom.
It was empty. Wherever The First goes, he takes his entire past with him, piano included. The bed was still there, though. And so I lay down for a moment, confident that the quivers would subside in no time.
WELCOME, MR CONSUL
Fast asleep on The First’s bed, I started to notice how much my shoes were annoying me – they were comfortable but they were also brand-new, which is the worst thing a shoe can be, and so for the brief duration of my extemporaneous siesta, I dreamt that I was floating along with the burbling current of a turbulent river, sitting astride a tree trunk, my legs danging in the buoyant rapids beneath me. That was when the piranhas started to appear: little piranhas, with little borzog teeth. To make matters worse, as I woke up I realised that had made a mess of the mattress, which was now all wrinkled and dirty from some massive scuffing by my new shoes.
I looked out at the night sky, filtering in through the terrace window. I entered the bathroom. As soon as I lowered my zipper to take a piss, a brief reminiscence wafted up toward my nose, bringing me back to the recent scene out on the terrace: it was her smell, mixed in with the scent of the perfume she wore, and, I suppose, my own smell as well, which was slightly more difficult to identify given that it was so familiar to me. Boom: an adolescent-sized erection. The scent of a woman is so goddamn good, there’s nothing comparable to it, except maybe the aroma of a good pipe, delicious and ever-so-slightly acidic. ‘The Nectar of the Gods,’ I called it, in a momentary bout of lyricism. Of course, this line of thinking was not going to help calm my erection and despite my best efforts to get a decent angle, I ended up pissing on the toilet bowl lid. Naturally, I denied myself the pleasure of jerking off in memory of Carmela: to err is human, but to err twice, in rapid sequence, is dubious at best. And so instead I doused my prick with extremely cold water as a form of penitence. As a result, it subsided somewhat, though the technique hadn’t liberated the juices, now slightly dried-up, that Carmela had left behind on the little hairs on my balls. Now, I don’t particularly like bidets, but I found myself with no other choice than to sit on the thing and wash myself a bit more carefully. As I completed the manoeuvre, shamed by the serious violation of one of my most basic survival codes, I began to whistle something, anything, to cover it up. I frequently do this: hide things from myself – by whistling, humming, anything to distract myself. The worst part, however, was yet to come, the acid test of my inevitable re-encounter with Carmela. I couldn’t remember how one was supposed to treat a woman one has just recently fucked – was I supposed to act especially friendly, attentive, silent? Would we exchange conspiratorial looks? Would our elbows brush up against each other at the table? Would I have to take her to the movies on Sundays? I was suddenly overcome with stage fright – I would just get out of there without saying goodbye. But I didn’t.
‘Fuck it. Chin up,’ I said to myself as I left my Magnificent Brother’s quarters and went downstairs.
In my parents’ house it is customary practice to savour the second round of after-dinner drinks in the living room, but everyone was still seated at the table, which meant that I couldn’t have been sleeping for very long. Well, everyone was at the table minus Her.
‘Pablo José, darling, where on earth have you been?’
‘In my bedroom. I went inside for a second and got distracted looking through all my old things. It’s been years since I last … looked at … my things.’
Way too much explaining. Very rarely do I trip up when telling lies, but when it happens it is dreadful – there’s nothing more painfully obvious than an expert tripping all over himself. But as long as money isn’t involved, people are pretty easily foolable.
‘Well, Carmela just left. She had a show at ten, and it was getting late. She asked us to say goodbye to you.’
‘Oh … great.’
‘She was out on the terrace alone for quite a little while … you didn’t even have a coffee with her,’ MH stated.
My mother’s comment was aimed directly at me, but she said it in a such way that included the rest of her coconversationalists, which effectively aborted the group’s previous conversation – that is, if there had been one at all. Her tone wavered somewhere between reproachful and saucy, an attitude that was reflected in the faces of the other seven souls sitting around the table. Clearly, I was not to be let off quite so easily.
‘I què, Pau, com va la feina?’ That was my Convergent uncle Frederic, inquiring after my well-being in Catalán. Uncle Frederic, who can’t stand to be addressed in Spanish as Federico, and who always addresses me as Pau, my name in Catalán. The usual routine: he starts in with an innocent question like that, and ends up trying to tempt me with various executive vacancies in some or other official institution of indecipherable nomenclature and always with some previous affiliation to our own little cosa nostra. It took me years to figure out how to interpret this absurd insistence of his, but after a while I finally realised that those ridiculous
job offers were just his way of making an oblique joke at my expense.
I answered the question as laconically as I could, to see if I could nip this one in the bud. Nothing doing: I only blew wind in his sails and Uncle Felipe, coming in from the rear with heavy artillery, didn’t give me second to turn the bow around.
‘What you need to do is find yourself a girlfriend and get married. It isn’t very healthy to be a bachelor at your age,’ proclaimed his Excellency the General. At least he refrained from emphasising this admonition with the customary ‘At ease!’ His military airs have gotten weak with age, I guess. But the crossfire continued for a while, and my lower decks began to accumulate water. For the moment I held tight, but as soon as FH entered the fray, I had no other choice but to let air into the sails, and when my Mother’s Highness joined in, I had already said something scandalously inappropriate and was fully prepared to weather the rest of the storm by letting loose every last rope I could. Even the Magnificent Mother-in-Law candidate entered the skirmish. Only Aunt Asunción and the Father of the Bride remained neutral, which means they didn’t try to help me, either. Aunt Salomé, as usual, was the most difficult of the group. With the intellectual airs she had acquired as an avid reader of so many pseudoscientific magazine articles, she insisted on questioning me at length about my ‘romantic disappointments.’ According to my well-informed Aunt Salomé, it was obvious that my patent misogyny could only be attributed to a clearly neurotic reaction to the premature frustrations of my romantic experiences. She was so insistent on this point that I had to sabotage her notions by letting out my blunt lines with an equally convoluted analysis which I couldn’t possibly reproduce here. In short, I stated that perhaps my problem was not a question in misogyny but rather one of garden-variety misanthropy. No dice, though. The more people get caught up in these scientific theories, the less common sense they seem to have. It was quite the topic. In any case, the coffee hour finally ended, concluding the regulation courtesies required by the family dinner event. I managed to say my goodbyes with the regulation kisses and handshakes, after which my Father’s Highness, in a wholly unprecedented move, insisted on walking me to the door. I knew I was in for something, though I didn’t know what – maybe he wanted to finish off the conversation that had been interrupted in the Contemporary Art wing. At that moment, however, I was still pretty pissed off and kept my distance from him. Just after we had opened up to each other in front of that painting, he had to go and start in with me at the dinner table – conspiring, no less, with two of our most despised common enemies. This was not very nice of him, I thought. My father can be a real pain in the arse, but even I have to admit that he has a kind of noble character that puts him in a league of his own. And so I attributed his fair-play routine to the whims of old age. Nevertheless, a twinge of resentment still gnawed away inside of me.
‘Wait. I have to change my clothes. I left my shirt in your dressing room.’
‘Don’t forget to take that jacket with you, though.’
‘I’m sorry, if you want to liberate yourself from that thing, you’ll have to include it in your last will and testament, along with the 12.5 million I’ve got coming to me.’
The old fart seemed to have forgotten he’d done wrong by me and was confused by my cool attitude. His face did break into a half-smile, though, as if politely acknowledging a joke he didn’t quite get. I can be a bit hard on him sometimes – though that is definitely the sentimental softie inside me coming out. A sentimental softie: that’s what I am. Anyway, I went into the kitchen to say goodnight to Beba and as I came back out to the vestibule, I almost felt sad as I saw him waiting there for me, clinging pathetically to his crutches. I even gave him a conciliatory pat on the shoulder, not very hard, so as not to tip him over.
‘Take care of yourself, okay?’ I said.
‘You take care. I’m not going to ask you to come over again, but at least ring us on the phone. And don’t even think of mentioning a word of all this to your mother.’
I got into the lift feeling horribly guilty for something, and I thought about what I might do to remedy this bad head scene. I didn’t feel like getting drunk – I can only get truly drunk when I am completely happy – but I couldn’t think of anything else to do with my mortal body. Only when I was sitting behind the wheel of the Beast did I decide that the next two hours should be spent breaking speed records with the aforementioned car. I tooled down the Diagonal, heading for the A7 motorway, keeping my eye firmly fixed on the rearview mirror. I stopped at the Molins de Rey petrol station so that Bagheera could fill up to her heart’s content before getting the hell out of there. Right behind me, a white Opel Kadett, an old GSI model, followed me off the road. I asked the attendant to fill the tank and went into the shop for cigarettes. One of the two guys in the Opel entered the shop as well and bought a bottle of water. Around thirtyish, slightly tough-looking though definitely not the law-breaking type, he carefully avoided looking me in the eye. I went to the toilet and when I emerged the Opel was still there, with the tough guy pretending to check his tyre pressure. Shortly after I returned to the motorway they followed suit – I could still see them in the rearview mirror – and I cruised for a while at about one hundred kph but they didn’t pass me. There was no doubt now that these were the guys my FH had hired to follow me. Now they were going to get theirs.
An hour and a half later, fully mesmerised by the joys of making tracks on the motorway, I suddenly found myself approaching the cupolas of the Basílica del Pilar in Zaragoza, and decided it was time to start heading back to Barcelona.
I was concerned about the precise extent to which my father had had me followed. In addition to the simple decorum/propriety issue, had they seen me the night that I had stood guard on Guillamet, in the Beast with Fina? And if so, what had they made of it? Had they discovered my interest in number fifteen? Thousands of little circumstances for which I had no answer.
In retrospect I know that I had been smart to think these things through, but at the moment I couldn’t help but feel a bit ridiculous. Obviously these people had kidnapped The First with the intention of demanding a ransom – it was just a matter of hours before someone made contact with FH. Even so, as I approached Barcelona, taking the long way around so that I could enter the city via the Meridiana, I decided to swing by Jenny G’s. Clearly, this had everything to do with my reluctance to give up my newfound adventure, but I fooled myself into thinking that I only wanted to solve the mystery and say my farewells to Bagheera and the cash card with a bit of a bang. Before long I would once again be Pablo Baloo Miralles, cash-free pedestrian. And that was when I made the painful realisation that, if I had to choose between eternal life on the Internet and the ephemeral pleasures of driving a Lotus Esprit, I most definitely and infinitely preferred the Esprit. But it was too late to change my life for another one.
I drove down Villarroel and found a car park whose yellow billboard said it was open all night. I went inside the car park and took out The First’s mobile. Right there I dialled the number in question in The First’s directory. According to the clock on the digital display it was 3:04 in the morning.
‘Jenny G, good evening.’
Strong English accent, just like the time before.
‘Hello. Listen, I’m a friend of the house and I was thinking of coming by for a drink, but I wasn’t sure if it would be a bit late for that.’
‘Not at all.’
‘Marvellous. Now, I don’t think I remember the exact address …’
Some number of some street in the far reaches of the neighbourhood of Sarriá, where the city fades off into the mountains. I hailed a taxi as I exited the car park. Crowded House ballad on the radio, the remains of some woman’s perfume on the upholstery, well-mannered driver. On the way over I checked my pockets and located six hundred ninety-three wrinkled euros among my keys and smoking paraphernalia. A bit close, I thought, and so I asked the driver to stop at a cash machine in the Sarriá plaza and withdrew th
ree hundred more as backup. I got back in but we still had a little ways to go. Once we arrived at the probable location of the number I had memorised, I got out.
I had to walk a bit, but I quickly identified the building. It was a massive neoclassical mansion about five or six stories high, encircled by gardens. Despite its imposing bulk, the resulting volume was harmonious, balanced, and well-turned-out. The white-and-yellow facade was enhanced by the green ivy and the lilac colour of the sprawling bougainvillea. The place could have easily passed for an old-age home or one of those private universities where they teach people how to earn large quantities of money, and for the second time that evening I regretted having donned the Hawaiian number back at my apartment. I walked past a hut with a couple of guards who were there to check in whoever came by car – ‘Yep, right, hello’ – and went through the front part of the garden. As I stepped up the small marble staircase I felt my thigh muscles call out in protest, tired of so much extra work. At the top I found myself facing a glassed-in wrought-iron gate, behind which was a breezeway which must have been used in the olden days for letting horse-drawn carriages through. Beyond the glass wall, two sets of steps lay before me, one of them leading upstairs and the other downstairs, both profusely decorated. I pressed the bell that was ensconced in a hard golden casing. It said ‘Jenny G’ beneath an etched-in adornment that looked like a rod of tuberoses, although maybe they were magnolias or something – I am a bit uneducated in the area of flowers. I was tempted to search the outer premises for a red rag, but I exercised restraint when I saw someone come forward to open the breezeway door, a girl in a jacket and suit, sort of a not-too-aggressive executive look. I couldn’t get rid of the déjàvu feeling until much later, but in any event it was a false déjà-vu, because I was actually eminently aware of its origins.
