He often falls asleep during the movies. Sometimes he’ll spend two or three days awake, then sleep for 24 hours, in the living room. But today, with his friends, he keeps his eyes wide open.
He casually mentions that they’re looking for someone to work the front desk at his theatre. ¿Te gustaría?
I talk enough now that I can endlessly repeat the same phrases. And I decide that they’ll like my cereal box accent.
The overheated room smells like waiting human flesh. I join the pack and sit next to a blonde girl who looks about my age. Her name is Anke. She’s German. Second time dancing the old visa waltz. The first time around, she waited five hours just to be told they couldn’t accept her birth certificate. Not certified by an official state translator. Please come back with the official documents, miss. Thank you and goodbye. Looking over the papers they’ve given me, I see that I’ll also be needing a police certificate and a copy of my fingerprints.
I look at the people stuffed into the waiting room, with their ears pointed toward the hissing speaker. After a long silence, dos cientos cuarenta y uno, ventanilla B. I barely understand the mumbled, massacred number and already, I know. I know that I’m a future illegal alien.
Anke spends her days wandering around, people-watching, drinking coffee. At least she goes out. She liked the botanical garden. Do you know the Romanof? Obviously not. What do you think of Martinez’s last decision? We dive into this zig-zaggy conversation, making ridiculous, laboured efforts not to speak English. She studied cultural management, she’s always dreamed of coming here. When she asks where I’m from, I say Canadá without thinking. I regret it immediately. I should have said Quebec, maybe she would have thought it was some distant land, somewhere near Uzbekistan.
My ice cream is slowly melting, dripping down my fingers. A peach-caramel stream, another one that’s chocolate. I lick up the liquid spill. Around the cone, down the back of my arm.
Everyone’s obsessed with ice cream in this country.
That’s one thing they really get. Given the number of ice cream parlours here, and the number of crazy people, I can conclude that ice cream is no cure for madness. Might madness be proportional to the number of ice cream parlours per square inch? Warrants further investigation.
Saturday afternoons, at exactly 2:30 p.m., the neighbour upstairs blasts the Goldberg Variations. The same piece, at the same time, every single week. I hear the footsteps go into the living room, then stop when he presses Play. Four steps. Then nothing. The music invades my apartment. And I picture him on a faded green suede recliner. I try to follow his steps and stand right underneath his feet. Then I sit down too, cross-legged on the floor, and close my eyes.
From time to time, the wind blows little red flowers onto the floor, and the bed. They come from the plant I bought myself. It’s romantic, these little polka dots everywhere. I enter a palace of petals, scattered under my feet by an imaginary lover.
Emilio catches me on his way out to teach a class. Come, he says. You can ask about the job. He told them about me. They said they’d have to see. Which, here, means nothing.
I’m curious to see where he works, and where I might work, so I follow him. I wasn’t expecting an industrial bunker. The ceilings are incredibly high. Most of the inside walls are concrete. All the dust makes it look like spotlights are cutting through the air with a knife. The paintings hanging crooked all over the walls add to the ambiance. The contrast is remarkable.
Emilio shows me around the auditorium and backstage. It’s taboo for me to be invading this sanctuary reserved for seasoned pros. Only people who aren’t afraid of their own shadow are supposed to be behind these walls.
The dressing room looks like any other room, and yet, I’m hyper-aware that I’m in a dressing room, where actors get ready to perform on stage. You have to carry yourself differently, breathe without disturbing the air.
I’m scared to move. Actors have this amazing ability to slide into someone else’s skin. To play, to expose themselves, and to believe in it. They become this other person for the duration of the play, then go back to who they really are, without losing themselves along the way.
It sticks to their skin, it overflows. I wish I was like them. I trip over my words. When they ask what I’m doing with my life, I don’t know what to say. Nothing. Nothing as small or as big as what you’re doing. I don’t do anything.
That guy’s the boss. The boss, it feels weird to call him that. He isn’t much older than me. He talks really loud, which makes the hairs of his mustache tremble. Tied to a bed, dressed up like a wrestler straight out of a carnival, he must cry out under the whip of dominatrixes in leather corsets.
The more he talks, the more I see the whip leave marks on his ass with hard, dry slaps. I hear his supplicant cries, alternating between Mercy and Again. He looks me up and down. His mustache quivering above his lips. I pull out my arsenal of smiles. He ends up saying Alright, you start Saturday. He feels the need to add that if it doesn’t work out, we’re not keeping you. I’m mesmerized by his mustache hairs.
When I was 6, I didn’t dance. No ballet recitals, no pink tutus. I played rugby with my Playmobil. Dancing was for the weak. I impulsively push open the door of this dance studio that advertises Talleres de danza contemporánea, ¡Ingresa ahora! The colour, maybe? I’m not dressed for movement, but I don’t look totally out of place either. I set my bag down in the room, still riding this strange high. But as soon as I drop it, I freeze. Fifteen or so girls of all ages say hi to each other.
I start to beat a strategic retreat, but then the instructor crosses the room and aims right for me. Please don’t come talk to me. I answer primera vez before I even hear her question. She grabs my shoulders and leads me to the middle of the pack, making my escape even more difficult. Confronted by my silence, she relents. Anyway, the class is starting. For a warmup, improvisational dancing around the room. That’s what I gather, anyway. I try to melt into the background. I pretend I’m a tree, a kangaroo, a kite, someone who’s paralyzed in one leg. They all throw themselves onto the floor at once. I’m the only one left standing, so I get down, too. No doubt just to embarrass me, they all jump back up at once. My wrist hurts, I keep going. I’m not sure if it’s a choreography they’ve all rehearsed before or some intuitive fusion with the dancing gods.
She catches me before I can manage to disappear. Carmen. You’ll be back, she says.
Naming things, or people, sort of makes them belong to me. The more I stick words onto the things that surround me, the more their outline becomes clear to me. I call Anke- my-New-German-Friend. The Raval, tonight at 11?
It’s funny, I do manage to forget, sometimes. It’s always the stupidest, tiniest little thing that brings everything flooding back.
I throw a paper airplane out the open window. It nosedives and falls to the ground. Crumpled up with all the others.
On TV, a documentary about moose, in Sweden or Norway, that kill drivers. And the poor rangers that have to put them down. Footage of elk getting too close to cities, others that cross the street where they shouldn’t. I can’t seem to empathize. I can’t seem to inflate my heart with sadness, the way I should, for these poor innocent beasts being slaughtered by poor innocent men. I force myself to watch, like self-flagellating with despair, to punish myself for existing.
I examine their pots, their spices. I try to do the same and fail. They aren’t mine. There’s something missing. Always something missing. How did I use to do this? I try to cheer myself on, tell myself that today, maybe, I’ll do a proper grocery run and cook myself a real meal. But there’s never anything there. I go up and down the aisles, no cheese, no bread. I leave empty- handed and dejected.
Boil some water. More pasta à la nothing.
How do flies fuck? Seriously, how is it possible? Don’t flies only have asses?
Matías doesn’t give
a shit about my moods. He doesn’t look at me like I need to be entertained, kept busy. Not like you, Betty. Reminding me once again that if you were me, you’d be doing just fine. Other people’s problems always seem so simple. Even a stain knows that.
The rubber duck that was in the bathroom is gone. It’s flown away to a beautiful, promising, distant land. If you’d asked me, little duckie, I’d have told you that’s not the best move. It’s like Luz’s daughter. She collapsed in my arms when she told me about her, no one knows where she’s ended up.
In memoriam del ducko, I light some candles and take a bath with tons of bubbles. The tub isn’t big enough for my shoulders and knees to be in the water at once, so I alternate. I add more water just to see the steam escape into the air, put my feet under the boiling stream coming from the faucet, leave them there till they’re raw. And then do it all over again.
Adriana has evaporated. I shoot a few smiles at the strangers at the vernissage as I hesitantly wander through the exhibit. I’ve lost my only pillar. Superimposed filters at weird angles give the pictures on the walls a mystical aura. The photographer named his exhibit “Improbable Spaces: Dreamy Cities and Veiled Nightmares.” I recognize some of the places in the pictures. The abandoned buildings, the port, the factory near the river that blows purple smoke. Even my neighbourhood market, floating in the middle of red fabric.
I stop in front of a black and white one. A chair in the middle of an industrial wasteland. I feel naked. The photographer is standing next to me. That one’s my favourite too, he says.
We stand there suspended, him and I, contemplating, maybe the same things. The picture is infinite. Full of a void that scratches away from the inside, that sucks me in and, strangely, soothes me.
Later, at the bar, the photographer comes up to me. He tells me that he just got back from Iraq. And that after illegally crossing the border, he spent some time in Kurdistan to document the war. He talks to me about Abdul, about the lack of water, about the kids who play in the ruins and the tea they keep on drinking. He would have stayed longer if he could have.
These places I’ve never been to but that I’ve heard so much about, I have a hard time believing they exist. It’s like they’re loaded with meaning that isn’t their own. The pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, I’d never be able to go without feeling strangely absent and removed. These places have too much history, and we’ve killed it by telling it, over and over. They no longer live. We fabricate this nostalgic past that has no basis in reality and we lie, over and over, selling these stories to poor innocent souls—but it’s too late at night to be talking about stuff this complex. The photographer thinks so too. He isn’t listening to me anyway.
I’d almost managed to forget that we’d reached that time of night, this inevitable moment. Do I have a boyfriend?
What should I say? I don’t feel like anything anymore. He acts like he didn’t hear, takes my head and moves it around in his hands. How do I get him to understand? Don’t be fooled by my rosy cheeks, it’s the drinks. Just the drinks.
They should rent out arms, bellies, shoulders, and necks to cuddle and hold the people who need it and don’t have anyone to care for them. An affection business. The prostitution of tenderness would really take off.
Deep down, I’m fine with thinking my pain is unique and special, that I still have my own identity, that it hasn’t all dissolved.
If you wanted a girl in heat, you should have picked someone else. I warned you.
I’m unhinged. There’s nothing you can do about it, nothing you can say. I can pretend. I can forget myself, try to make him think I’m having fun. I must remember a little of what works. Bitterness pinches the sides of my tongue as though I’ve bitten into a rancid lemon. Stay, stranger. I can’t handle another failure.
Do you usually like this? Please, don’t rub it in. I should never have followed you. I end up telling him my life story. I can’t help it. Poor guy.
It’s always the same, every time. Every time they like me and I might like them too, I shove my issues down their throats like I’m the only one who’s got any. There’s no point, who wants to be stuck with someone else’s baggage? I always end up at the same place.
And yet I keep hoping that someone might save me from myself.
I order an espresso. The coffee may be better three doors down, that place may even be more welcoming, but I keep coming back to the same café and sitting at the table in the corner, by the window. They give you little chocolates with your coffee. Just one, usually, but me, I get two.
I like the cups here. Little china cups with doilies. There’s a smell of perfume, of powder, that makes me think of antique stores. Old photos covered in dust. Faces that no one recognizes anymore. A girl in a wedding dress who looks about fifteen. The waiter looks like a retired sailor in his little suit. I’ll have to check if he has epaulettes the next time he comes by.
I pretend to read the newspaper. I try to get the gist of it. I only read the headlines. I get mixed up between all the politicians and their scandals. The president’s wife who said something controversial. Siempre apoyamos a los agricultores. On the next page, his main opponent accuses him of saying the opposite. My predecessor left some English books behind in the apartment. I’ve been bringing them along with me for days when the paper is too heavy-going. I pull out The Catcher in the Rye.
I don’t want to have to try to live up to someone else’s expectations. Why does the photographer want to see me again? I have nothing to give.
He’s decided he’ll leave me in a better state than he found me in. I don’t have the energy to try to discourage him.
He’s only here for a little while. He likes sculpture, girls, guys too. He takes my hand and pulls me onto a bus without even knowing where we’re going. We see the city and watch the people. He takes shots out the open window whenever the bus stops. He talks to me about lenses and exposure and how much he hates digital cameras.
I listen. It’s the sound of his voice, mostly, that I like. He seems like someone who’s found happiness. Or peace, at least. And it’s that serenity that I hear through the stories he tells. I think it must make him feel good to believe that he’s saving this crippled soul.
A bunch of seven- or eight-year-olds are running around all over the place. In the middle of the night, the city buses are full of kids playing, laughing. I feel like picking one up, sitting her on my lap, rocking her in my arms until she evaporates.
Sometimes, we sleep together. It isn’t unpleasant, but it’s empty.
Anke likes trains that arrive on time. She speaks in broken Spanish and plays in her submarino with a long spoon to make the chocolate bar melt faster, looking delighted. She hates the bus system, I love it.
I imagine that the two of us are in the same boat. Both of us, uprooted. Exit the stable, airtight social circle, where it’s fine to judge a book by its cover. The two of us, reduced to having to beg for friends, to look for people who will put up with being followed around.
What if we’re trampled in a riot because we didn’t think to get out in time? What if we die here, what if we end up in tomorrow’s papers? Hooligans. Anke hops up and down excitedly, talks about the star players, the coach who won gold at the Olympics once.
The sound of our feet reminds me of a military march. At every new level, more of our compatriots abandon us. But on we go, in solidarity, up and up toward the sky.
The players enter, tiny little pawns, and the crowd begins chanting back and forth. Cannons shoot giant confetti and red smoke. I wish I had a scarf. I could pretend I’m in England. It’s cold and rainy in England. I’d need a thick wool scarf. Electricity in the air. Anke will be hoarse tomorrow.
The players run, sometimes. I have a hard time telling where the ball is. Did you see? Did you see that? She doesn’t seem offended by my paltry performance.
Glasses overflowing with beer appear right over our shoulders. For the ladies, carried by hairy hands. For once, they’re not trying to drag us into their beds; they’re too busy. I have a fleeting thought about the photographer that quickly dissipates. The beer is sort of warm, the glasses sticky.
At halftime, I don’t bother braving the crowd to look for the bathrooms. I spend the break squeezed between a kid eating a hot dog covered in mustard and his screaming mother. Still so much noise. The mustard stains the sides of his mouth, his shirt. When the game’s back on, everyone stands up on their seats, a signal they all know. I have no choice but to get up too or I’ll be left staring at the calves of the crowd in front of me. I can still smell the mustard.
There’s confetti left in the sky and I’m reeling from all the people jumping up and down, stamping their feet on the rickety seats. I’m vibrating. I could almost fly away. They score a goal.
Far off in the distance, you can see the city skyline.
I scramble. I scramble so he’ll think I’m happy. Kind of lifeless, no more no less. He doesn’t know me any other way. I need to convince him. Not let him down, not make him feel sorry for me.
When he takes my hand, my heart beats harder. With anxiety.
In the End They Told Them All to Get Lost Page 4
