That was my welcome on completing the climb to the apartment, so I’m not troubled by what you wrote back when Doctor Bicente sent you a detailed report on his conversation with the good Carlos. This time you can’t deny that you replied, that you were thinking of me when you did it:
You’re a lost cause, Joan-Marc, and you’ve lost your mind. I won’t even bother reminding you that there are over 3.5 billion women in the world, because you are like a goat, and when it comes to goats (ask any vet), you just can’t reason with them.
I could answer you. Do you think I couldn’t? But I’d rather use the hints of personal investment I can make out in your short message (I’m sure you remember when you never sat down at the keyboard to type anything less than two full pages in Word, those furious letters that swept along all kinds of emotional debris, and I warn you that if you ever publish them, people will say that no one writes such long e-mails) to shine a little light on the bony structure I keep hidden under the flesh and blood of my tale of woe with Helen: I got to marry you, but I haven’t managed to keep you.
What kind of husband am I, if I didn’t even realize when I went to bed that it was the night you were going to leave me? I believe I took off my socks thinking it would have been a good night for you to be traveling—I could have continued my game of Age or stayed up late drinking. Instead, I deferentially fulfilled my tender obligation to lie down beside you, because you were supposedly no longer able to get to sleep without that contact.
I was rather annoyed when I turned on the light and found you gone. I felt like taking a lazy turn around your body, with one foot still in the world we build (and let crumble) while we sleep. I would have watched how your lips move, noticed the fine creases left by the pillowcase seams in the skin of your cheeks. I would have waited patiently for your eyes to open and reassume their natural fullness, return you to the quotidian abundance, the spectacle of the everyday.
I’m not fooling myself, I know that day wouldn’t have been that special. I would have taken off my pajamas and showered in a hurry, I would have made you toast and warmed the coffee while the sounds of you washing reached me from the bathroom. I would listen to them with a sense of loss, of irrational sadness, because you were the one leaving the house to go to work, and I was the one who’d stay home. I would have dangled some scandalous sound bite in front of you, something about the advantage of using babies with serious brain injuries in medical experiments instead of adult pigs. But you would dominate the conversation: what others thought of you, what they thought of us, of me through you. I never told you that your thinking was too fast for such slow hands.
I would try to guess what sort of meeting you had by the clothes you chose, what kind of men and women you were going to meet with. You’d look a little funny in those high heels, those stockings, the boots; not that they looked bad on you, just that they didn’t suit the señorita who doesn’t wear makeup, who leaves the house with bare eyes, whose ear piercing—made with a needle when you were a little girl—is closing up. Were you dressing up for someone? I can’t believe you’d dress like that just because that Diego guy was in the same building, but who knows? Very intelligent women of your caliber are like aliens, trapped between your less gifted sisters and your male equivalents, who are so much stronger. It must be complicated to live like that. The relief I would feel at hearing the door close and being left alone wouldn’t have lasted long; I was ashamed to go out in public like the common unemployed to buy bread, take a walk, head for the plaza. It bothered me that you questioned (with your eyes, with your annoyance) how my situation was any different, when I’d never really worked in my life. Why was it so hard for you to understand that no one ever expected me to sit in front of a computer for hours? The plan was always for someone else to waste their time earning money for me.
I’d spend the middle of the morning however I could, and then I’d make something fast to eat: spinach wrapped in filo; scrambled eggs with tuna, onion, and lime. But I couldn’t summon you at noon even by cooking up your favorite dish. So I would have restarted my game on the computer; I would have watched an episode of one of the series you downloaded and that I watched out of order since we couldn’t find the time to watch them together. Around mid-afternoon I would start to miss you, and I’d imagine you on your way out of the museum, your little handbag under your arm and wearing flat-soled shoes (a day without meetings), in jeans and the baggy red sweater, a tall dark girl with a refined beauty that you made an effort to tone down, who liked to be embraced while she slept, who read with a discipline and tenacity that made use of props—highlighters, pens, and adhesive page markers I spent five years trying to put into some order—and whose kisses were rushed because there was almost always something tugging at her curiosity.
But you had fled, and what I actually did all day long was try to work out when you would return. Of course I’d read your note, but it was too literary, excessive even for you. So I sat down at the little kitchen table, projected my mind into the future, and started to explore how our pairing would end. Who would get ill and be the first to go, things like that, as if what we were going through weren’t already an ending.
I tried to keep my cool, though no one would believe it if they calculated the frequency of my e-mails (technology makes everything far too easy). I was guided by a principle of economy—what good would it do me to expend all that emotional energy? Who would want that now? You’ll meet someone, and it will be such a natural thing I won’t even be allowed to complain; then you’ll forget me. Of course, you won’t really forget me, that’s just a figure of speech, because if we were capable of truly forgetting someone, we would wipe clean our shared existence, leave and be ready to try again. What you will do with me is reduce me to a cuddly size, to something comic and insignificant. What you’ll leave imprinted on me will be like a watermark; I won’t be able to erase it.
But don’t think I spend all day licking the raw edges of my wounds. Though the streets are a bit faded as they stretch before me, it’ll be no time at all before they recover their old intensity. My health sometimes seems a mess, but don’t let my tendency to exaggerate confuse you—the old organ of optimism is still beating, oozing the stuff of enthusiasm. I’ll grant you that my fling with the young girl doesn’t lend itself to a sentimental journey, but you know how it works: you feel you’re lost, but life (for lack of a better word) always catches up with you. You get interested by something that creeps into view, and the next day, though you don’t know how you got there, the landscape has changed completely. You’re OK as long as you don’t stay still, and staying still is impossible; you always move at the speed of time, even if it’s toward a dismal experience.
The fact is, I’ve spent my time looking for Eloy. I was intrigued, and I couldn’t think of a more exotic sauce with which to season the present. Plus, I was enchanted by the suggestive powers of phonetics; I let the sharp edge of his alias roll around (Larumbe, Larumbe, Larumbe). What a wonderful world, where a man can be seduced by a combination of fricatives.
I was resolved, but he wasn’t easy to find. They’d taken down the page with his contact information, so I dialed the agency’s number. I don’t know what men say when they’re making that kind of transaction (I didn’t even understand the services offered on the page, it was like a weather report to me), so I practiced putting on a perverted voice that was male but with effeminate touches.
The pimp who answered informed me that Señorita Larumbe didn’t work for them anymore, nor could he help me find Eloise; she’d “settled down.” I pushed harder; he hung up on me.
I wasn’t expecting anything grand from my reunion with Eloy, but after that setback the thing felt personal. I looked in the Web cache, and hidden in the electronic trail I found Eloy’s rates (eight hundred euros for two hours) and mobile number. It turned out to still work.
“Yes?”
“Hi.”
“Yes?”
“I’m a voice from your past.”
“Rolando?”
Rolando? What were you thinking, parents, when you named us? I recognized Eloy’s soft timbre immediately, though his retreaded body produced a new, pretty voice now. I felt a playful spirit of camaraderie awaken in me.
“Chicle.”
“You don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve heard that. Now there are no more than ten people you could be.”
“Nine. Antolín went to live with the Uros on Lake Titicaca. He sleeps on an artificial island made of straw, sunbathes naked, eats dried fish, lives without a roof.”
“Shall we rule out the ones who didn’t have a sense of humor?”
“Caballero. Perales. Zurrias. That’ll leave you with an initial five.”
“You’re not Pedro, either. Did you know he got in touch with me recently, and that we’ve seen each other?”
“The past travels in twos. It’s like a pick and roll.”
“It’s not a coincidence? Does the voice from the past know anything about what I’m like now?”
“You look marvelous in the photos. I wouldn’t be surprised if it asks for your photographer’s number.”
“This was a risky joke, Joan-Marc.”
“I’m sure you recognized me from the start. Everyone does, don’t think you’re so smart. I’ve just got such a recognizable voice.”
“Pedro told me about you and the state of your arteries.”
“The dirty little rat. That’s a prank I played on him. I didn’t want to intimidate him with my good health. When can we get together?”
“Another one who wants to dig around in the past.”
“Don’t get the wrong idea, I detest all that nostalgic crap. I’m interested in the present you. You’ve got to admit, some people have a pretty impressive here and now.”
“Are you dying of curiosity? It’s terribly entertaining to hear your voice. I’ll call you.”
“No, absolutely not. It has to be this week. Then I’m going to Montana. Fuokville is the best-kept secret in the United States—we’re repopulating the migratory routes of vultures. They’re splendid animals, and I’ve been invited to a carrion fest.”
“Are you an ornithologist?”
“Cold. I still don’t have a label. I just write the checks. I had a lucky streak on the markets. Don’t tell Pedro, it’d break his heart, he thinks I’m practically broke. It’s good for him to feel superior, to pay for my food, my coffee. Charity is a good painkiller.”
“I don’t believe a word you’re saying, spirit of the past. Are you free on Wednesday?”
“You took the words right out of my mouth. What do you think about meeting in Bonanova? You won’t believe it, but the Madri is still open.”
“I live in Sants now.”
“OK, you can catch the 75. Not that I travel by bus much, but I have, well…I had, and hope to have again, a girlfriend with family around there.”
“I’d rather you came to my house. You’ll like it—it belongs very much to the present.”
I jotted it down, something like Violant d’Hongria. We agreed on a time, neither too late nor too early.
“A stupid question: What should I call you?”
“Me? Eloise. That’s my name, I don’t have any other.”
I went out wearing a gabardine raincoat and gloves because the sky was black. I reached his street under gathering lumps of tar, but no rain was falling. I was very aware during my last twelve, ten steps, that I could have turned around at any second, disappeared without explanation, but I rang the bell of a house sandwiched between two apartment blocks, and I waited.
“You can come on up, I’m on the second floor.”
I went directly into a foyer. The light that the clouds let through concealed as much as it showed, and I felt a pinch in my chest when I confused a strange object with Dad’s Australian clotheshorse. I made out a staircase at the back, and I started up while slowly peeling off my gloves, finger by finger. Through a window halfway up I saw it was finally beginning to rain, weakly.
I don’t remember the pleasantries we exchanged. Eloy received me in loose white pants that weren’t very tight on him, billowed out like a woman’s, and an open-necked blouse. I don’t think we ever shook hands; he darted smoothly behind me to help me with the raincoat.
On a clear day, that enormous living room must have been luminous; now, the recessed bulbs were turned up high. He sat down on a three-seater sofa and crossed his legs, directing me to a leather armchair; it was very fashionable, like the rest of the furniture (my eye is still just as sharp, perfectly suited to a different walk of life). Through an alcove I could see more stairs; three stories—upstairs must have been the bedroom or a studio.
He smiled at me as he pointed to the small table between our chairs: ham, spelt crackers, and a bottle of Evan Williams.
“Impressive place.”
“You like it? It still doesn’t feel like mine. The upstairs is a disaster and downstairs needs a more modern touch. It’s a modest neighborhood, but there are people who pay a fortune to live in a matchbox in the center of town.”
He’d straightened the hair that fell in abundant reddish locks. It wasn’t just the implants, his entire body seemed polished from the inside: cheekbones, lips, back, the tendons of his neck, everything molded in a feminine register. It’s true that what the rhinoplasty had left of his nose seemed a bit ridiculous, but Eloy—Eloise—compensated with an energy that hadn’t come across in the photographs. A splendid specimen of a fully developed woman, thought out to the very last detail.
“Do you live alone?”
“I have the place to myself. I don’t bring anyone here, either.”
And she said it flirtatiously while pouring the first glass, bourbon over crunchy ice with a slice of lime. Her eyes grew damp with the same hunger they’d shown when, as a teenager, Eloy had taken the Star Wars figures out of their box, a collection the rest of us could only dream of. They’d probably be worth a fortune now.
“I already heard you don’t work where you used to work, doing that.”
“Did Pedro tell you?”
“I did my own research. He doesn’t know I’m here.”
“Secrets between boys? I like it. What would become of our social lives if we didn’t monitor what we say, and to whom? People are such schemers.”
“More like comedians. I’ve been thinking for a while that people are only worth what their secrets are. Show me your secrets and I can measure your quality. Of course, no one ever listens to what I say.”
“Do you like the drink?”
“It’s a luxury I shouldn’t allow myself anymore.”
“Aren’t carrion fests lucrative these days?”
“Touché? I’m sure you’re up to date on my separation, and my temporary ruin. I’m the favorite subject of my ‘best’ friend’s digital avatar, I lead a parallel life on his Facebook wall. But look at this place, the furniture, it’s not cheap. Did you win the lottery? Inherit a fortune?”
“Let’s say I did. It was a gift from a man I spent years with.”
“Will you introduce me? You never know.”
“He died.”
“Damn, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. Me, too. This is too dry for me, I’m going to get the wine.”
She got up slowly, emphasizing a very human bounce. I averted my eyes: an ashtray, a Nelson chair, and a Barceló worth much more than my little Miró, Dad, much more. And when she came back I wouldn’t know what on earth to say to her, not even with the bourbon giving me courage. Why should the life of Eloy-with-tits matter to me? If she started flirting with me, would I dare jump out the window? The rubble of ice in my glass reflected the lines of my snout: a man growing old in a happy world, a disastrous man with disastrous plans.
“What do you think about when you look at me?”
“Sorry?”
“It’s not easy for anyone. There are some things you just take for granted, things that won’t be problematic. You know, like the
oak is a tree, the rose is a flower, the deer an animal, Catalonia our nation, and death inevitable. Boys are boys and girls are girls. Some boys like each other and that’s already an issue for some people, but they don’t stop being men because of it. Most of you are petrified, blinded by your morals: a gender should be fixed, a reliable border. I’ve found the best way to get past that is to ask you guys what you think when you see me.”
“What did Pedro think?”
“He tried to kiss me.”
“That lizard.”
“Are you avoiding my question?”
“I’m stubborn, you should know that, we’ve played together a thousand times. On the court. Under those lights. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Do you ever think about that? Don’t look at me that way. On the IPSI court, their homecoming, the gym was packed and cold enough to flay your knees. 79–78. Their defense was like a steel trap. I missed the shot because someone pushed me, and you came out of nowhere to grab the rebound and sink them with a slam dunk.”
Divorce Is in the Air Page 30
