August

by Romina Paula

  Vanina says she’ll bring me a pad or something, that she’ll check to see what she has in the office, that she definitely has something. She comes back with one of those ones with wings and superabsorbent or ultra-absorption gel or whatever, which is a serious abomination of an innovation because it doesn’t even have any cotton anymore, and that whole synthetic thing/material does nothing but collect odors. And the wings, what a terrible idea, I—whenever I have the bad luck to come across them—always cut them off. Not only did I never understand their function, but also I very quickly realized their obvious disadvantage: they lend themselves to spillage. So, when that happens, even though it’s true that your underwear remains immaculate, the stuff goes straight for your pants or your legs. All I say, obviously, to Vanina is thank you. It’s also not like I am in any position to reject her pad, regardless of how unfortunate I find it.

  I splash some water on my face. Some girls come in, very excited, and one of them, the one that’s furthest gone, shouts to the other, a girl with curly hair, neither of them’s over fifteen, she says, did you see him, did you see him, and the other one says, he’s so gorgeous, it’s unbelievable, I just can’t even handle it, I’m dying, I’m the most in love with him, bitch I liked him first, okay we can share him, okay let’s share him, which is when I exit the bathroom, I leave. I assume I hardly need to add that I know who they’re talking about. I play it down in my head: I couldn’t care less about him. I want to not be able to care less about him. I’ve been going out with Manuel for two years, I think I’m in love with him, or I don’t know, I don’t even know if I care at this point, really, about being in love, I don’t know what it means; we get along well, we have a good relationship, we’re friends, we have a lot of laughs together, I don’t know, it’s nice. I can’t let myself be affected by some random thing and let it all have been for naught. There was a reason why I left, I remind myself, there was a reason why I left back then, if Julián and I had been in love I would have stayed, wouldn’t I have stayed? Just think of all the things I didn’t like about him. Just think of all the things I didn’t like about him: he was, well, he was selfish, temperamental, that was what it was, he was difficult and despotic, such a despot, always ended up having his way. I see him, he has his back to me, he’s seated at the bar with his back to me. He has his hat on. Vanina sees me coming, she’s talking to him, you can really see her with the light on her and everything. Standing beside her is a guy with a beard, must be her man, I can’t even remember now what she told me his name was, what the hell was his name? She sees me coming, and I see that she says something to him, she loves it, I see that she loves being present for this moment, I see her face full of pleasure, of malicious glee. Julián turns around, he’s wearing his gray hat and a very ugly T-shirt, it has like wolves on it, kind of heavy-metal style, like a Rata Blanca T-shirt. He spins around on his stool and let’s me approach him. He smiles. Oh, but he is so painfully reminiscent of himself. Hey, I say to him, stretching the ey part out, like clinging on to the y in it, while I’m walking up and in the first moment of the hug. He stays there seated on his barstool, so that the height difference makes it so that he practically wraps his legs around me, I mean, of course he doesn’t, he doesn’t wrap his legs around me, but I can feel the inside part, the pressure of the inside of his legs, of his thighs against my hips while he hugs me, and I smell his scent, and I start to feel, to really feel, like crying. That would be the hormones.

  The hey is absolutely false, and its only purpose is to slightly conceal my perplexity and to make the moment, the meeting, less important. Accompanied by a couple of slaps on the back, my will to desolemnify, to make it lighter, is negated as soon as my nose makes contact again with his scent. Fuck me. It smells so much like Julián. Immediately after the first few seconds I want to get rid of him, get out of this, get away; I want to back away, and at the first minimal movement I make I feel that he has a pretty tight hold on me, I can’t go now, nor do I want to, and I relax and hug him and put my head on his shoulder, and he says, Hi, a very long hi, stretched out, sickly sweet, a hi like it’s been so long, and I, instead of crying or of leaving or of at least just saying nothing, I say, Jackass, you had kids with someone else, that’s not cool.

  Juli laughs; “Every Breath You Take” comes on. And I just smell him. Just smell, nothing else.

  I can’t stand for this to be this way, I can’t bear that he lucked out so that this moment, this encounter or reencounter, has gone so perfectly, that it has made him look so great, that the stars aligned and everything came together with such perfection. I can’t even blame him for it. For having the bad luck that that song was the one that played right at this moment, like our moment that Sunday night, set to Synchronicity, when I’d burst into tears, to have my crying on his shoulder now coincide with that song in particular, given how uneven that CD is, that is fate.

  That moment, of course, is completed, over and done with, doesn’t exist for anything except itself, it has no past, no future. I can’t believe I’m here. I could and would prefer to die right now. “Every Breath You Take” is playing, there are a lot of parts of my body making contact with his, I start to relax, leaving/resting my weight against those points of contact, transmitting everything to him, my weight, inhaling his scent, there’s something of everything there, it’s him, and at the same time there are a couple of new textures, something child related, he has a bit of a child-related scent about him, vomit, or something else, and a food scent, a little bit of a food scent too. Resting against my hair, on the left side of my head, there’s the right side of the brim of his hat, of his gray hat. We are in silence, and he follows the rhythm of the song with his right leg, against mine, and he moves mine too. He said nothing in response to my reproach, what could he have said, he just let me cry, which was the best he could do, the only thing he could do. I keep crying, but now I just can’t believe this moment, I don’t understand if I’m experiencing absolute fortune or absolute misfortune. I don’t know. I want it not to end, for it to never end, for it to kill me but kill me suspended there, on him, get inside his wolf shirt, his ugly wolf T-shirt, and have them tear me apart, first tear my clothes off, so that I look sexier being dead, and then me, my flesh, with their teeth, the parts of my body, I want them to devour me, rip me to shreds, to devour me completely and then sleep afterwards, full under the moon, but I don’t want any hunter ever to come and open up their stomachs and put stones inside them to replace my parts because I will already be rent into a thousand pieces, because in any case no one could put me back together.

  “King of Pain” comes on and the shift in the rhythm disrupts the moment. I return to the bar, I return to Esquel, and I find, much to my great disappointment, that I am whole, completely whole, exactly as I came in, at least in appearance. He looks at me, but not in my eyes, he looks at my body, he says, that jacket isn’t yours, I tell him no, that in fact it’s yours, and he adds that my boobs have gotten bigger. I laugh, I laugh a lot, it’s true, it’s true that they got bigger in the last few years, especially last year, and I think it’s funny that he’s noticed, not only that, but also that he has the tact to point it out to me, as he does in this moment. It goes without saying then that I’m going to wait awhile to take off your jacket, as observed as I feel, intimidated as I am. Yes, I tell him, I don’t know what happened to me, the good life, he says, the good life, I say, and then, you’re looking handsome, I say to him, that too, I say that too.

  We have a beer. For a while I had forgotten where we were, and I’m going to keep doing it over the course of our stay in Vanina’s pleasant bar, which kind of makes me feel like I’m in Texas, because of how pathetic it is, how grating, how fluorescent. Because of my jacket, because of the drunkenness, because of Manuel, because of the absence of prospects, because of how enchanting he is, because it’s unreal. It makes me feel like I’m in Esquel, then, what am I saying Texas for, what am I doing, why am I trying to sound all sophisticated. Vanina introduce
s me to her husband, husband or boyfriend, I don’t know, she calls him my husband, but I think they didn’t actually get married. Omar comes across as pretty nice, she got herself a pearl of a fellow, a real man with a real smoker’s voice. She’s excited, you can tell, to be present at this moment and to be not only witness to it but also instrument of the encounter, of the reencounter. Every so often our eyes meet, she’s circulating, and everything in her face suggests impishness, complicity. It makes me uncomfortable, it makes me a little uncomfortable that she is, that she assumes she is, or that she wants to establish herself as being, complicit, I mean, and that she—furthermore—assumes that it’s so important to me to be sharing this moment with Julián. So that every time she smiles at me with that impish smile I look at her with no expression, neutral, conveying something like what a nice bar you have here, or how neat that I was able to come by and meet your dude/husband, something like that, something along those lines.

  At first Juli and I don’t talk about us. After the question I asked him and once I had calmed down and stopped crying, we started drinking beer, and he asked me about you, I mean, about your family, about your parents; he said he saw them from time to time but that he didn’t really know much, that he thought they were doing fine, that they had put their lives back together, but who knows, that was just what it seemed like from the outside. And then I tell him about my impressions of these last few days, and I find myself obligated to think, I mean, to do a sort of summing up, to report my observations on how I thought your parents were doing, how they seemed, and I tell him, I tell him about the ceremony and your mom’s little notes and your sister’s frugality, she’s kind of a bitch, Julián says, and I tell him no, that I didn’t think so, that I understand her and that everybody does what they can and takes it how they can, and that Valeria is like that, a pragmatic lady, and thank god, that thank god she is, because she was able to keep going, make a life for herself, leave your house and everything and that besides all that she’s a really cool chick, as harsh as she might be. So that no, that they don’t seem depressed at all to me, that they’re handling it well, actually, because it’s also not like they don’t mention you, maybe your dad mentioned you a little less, but that’s his style, he’s someone who talks little but that nevertheless strikes me as very communicative, with gestures, with stuff. Then Juli started asking me about my dad, and we burst out laughing talking about that new look of his, he’s been seeing him around, he says that it’s been ages since he’s looked that good, that he really struck gold with the girl, and we talk about Carmen. She’s kind of hot, the swine says, but it’s true, it’s true she’s hot, I’m happy for my dad. Everything turned out great, didn’t it? he says, and I hear the bitterness in his voice, and I realize that now I don’t want to ask, that I don’t want to know, that I don’t want him to tell me, that I want this moment to be ours, and for there to be no freckly blonds or brats or complications with pregnancies or, especially, fatherly love. I want to talk about things I know, not attend the becoming of someone else, of the other. By this point in the encounter we are both a bit tipsy, and I’m already sweating. I still have your jacket on and decide to conquer my shyness. I take it off and hand it to Vanina, who’s already standing there on the other side of the bar ready to receive it as though tonight existed only for us, a supporting character, as though we were her only guests, which we probably are, which is not good for us. Then Julián takes up the assault again. Seriously, they’re bigger, girl. Yeah, well, a lot of time has passed, I say, and before I can even finish my sentence he asks if I have a boyfriend. I tell him, I tell him about Manuel, and his face is transformed, it seems to really bother him, and I can’t believe it, I can’t believe that he has the nerve to make a scene, to be jealous. I immediately realize that he doesn’t want to know any more, and not because I’ve said much, in fact it doesn’t really interest me either, for him to know, I’m not dying to talk to him, to argue with him, about my relationship with Manuel. He looks like a kid having a tantrum, he looks conflicted, wounded, like a child, and he cuts me off, saying, I have kids, you know? Ah, straight for the heart, a rhetorical question. But he knows, he knows that I know, but that was how everything started. Clever, on the ball, malicious, he always was, all of that. Yeah, I know, I say, refusing him my eyes, I know he’s turned mean now, I understand that he feels hurt, which is why I don’t get upset, his irritation doesn’t upset me, but I stop looking at him, I would rather not look at him, I drink my beer and look at the glass. I get rid of the foam that’s stuck to the inside of the glass, turn around, and suck on my finger. He says, let’s go, I feel like going, I say okay without looking at him, assenting and licking my lip. I ask for my jacket back, Vanina says the drinks are on the house, she’s pleased, I don’t know if it’s because we came or that we’re leaving together, probably a little bit of both. We leave her a good tip, Julián puts on his sheepskin coat, and we walk out. He walks behind me with one hand on my back. I don’t understand his impunity, but I endorse it, that is more than clear. I try to walk faster to get out of it, but I can’t quite pull it off.

  I didn’t want to put on my clothes today, I wanted to wear somebody else’s clothing, something else. I have a lot of daydreams, fine, and I don’t know if they’re good. I don’t know if they’re good for me, that’d be more like it. Now I’m a little sad, basically sad, and that makes me sleepy. I should write, I’m still excited and nervous, but right now I kind of feel like it would be hard. I have to get over it, I have to get over it, I have to get over it.

  16.

  Are you going to the Hilbs’ place? Well, yeah, where the hell would I go otherwise? No, dummy, I’m asking because maybe you could be staying with your pops. No, my dad doesn’t have space for me. He converted my room into his study. I’m glad, it’s a good fate for a room, I’m glad that that’s where he chooses to go and be alone. I’ll take you, I have my truck. I haven’t looked at him again. We cross the street, and Juli walks towards a truck I don’t recognize, they must have traded it in, traded in the F100 for something more modern. I follow him, he opens the passenger-side door for me, we don’t say anything else to each other. Inside, of course, besides being cold as fuck, it’s full of snot and traces of child, and in the back seat there’s a car seat scattered with crumbs, one of those seats that you buckle the child into. Oh. A real family man. The worst part is that little seat, just that little seat, which being as dirty as it is, full of life, gives me an idea of the extent of the damage. This, this seat and everything that it represents, is irreparable. I don’t say anything, I move some multicolored cloth dice and a little bottle of Coke, empty, from the space I manage to sit in, I don’t say anything, I hold the dice, I look at them, and in the end I put them in the rear window, alongside other things: a pacifier, a cassette tape, papers, cloths. Julián turns on the heat and the music; he starts singing Bob Marley. Midway through, he starts singing midway through. How funny, it’s good to know that some things never change. Bob Marley survived it all, I see, my absence, yours too, of course, as we all did, and the adolescent mother, the difficult pregnancy, the child, the children, fatherhood. And he’s still there, singing, like nothing’s changed, like no time has passed, reclaiming those same things as though reclaiming everything. It soothes me that it’s like that, this welcome agrees with me, it strikes me as a harbinger of good things to come, I don’t know what things, but it brings something back, it brings back something good, it returns it to me. I know this song, I know by heart nearly all Bob Marley’s songs, I’ve listened to him almost to the point of getting tired of it, although that’s just a manner of speaking, because I never really got tired of it, ever. At first passively, I listened to them passively, until the only option that remained was to appropriate them, and it wasn’t very difficult, I have to admit, he’s easy to love. I’m a fan, I like Bob, he’s a good egg, and particularly in this moment he makes everything seem a little less hostile, foreign. Juli lights a roach that he takes out of his
pocket, I find it redundant, but I also think that Bob had been on before, so it’s not like it’s a mise en scène, particularly. In fact I like seeing how they go together, how well fatherhood and pot allow themselves to be combined, and fatherhood and reggae. He offers it to me, at first I don’t want it, I think I don’t want it, really I don’t even reach thinking about it, it’s like I had already decided the matter beforehand, I’m hardened, or I was, and now I don’t even know why, I don’t even remember what had offended me, so I recant, I accept the offer, I tell him that actually I do want some, and I take a nice, big hit. It’s very strong. I start coughing like an idiot, I choke, Julián laughs. What the fuck is this, shithead? I say to him. Is it bad? No, I don’t know, the last stuff I got is really crappy, what happened was that one of the ones at home got bugs in it, and now I don’t have any. I don’t have much of this left either. It’s really bad. Yeah, it’s fairly bad, but it seems to get you high all right. Does your wife smoke? No. Does she know you smoke? Yeah, honey, I have the plants at home. And she doesn’t lose her shit? No. Your boyfriend? What? Does he smoke? Yeah, but not that much. He always has some, but he doesn’t smoke much. Lately, really, he used to smoke more. You? I practically don’t smoke at all anymore, I don’t know, I stopped liking it. Slowly but surely. There was a time when every time I smoked I got high as a kite and it was good, it was good weed, but it gave me an irregular heartbeat or I would fall asleep or I would eat whatever, so now I hardly smoke at all. It must not be the same in Buenos Aires, he says. Well, no, I say, it’s not the same. We get to the door of your house and he says, okay, okay, I say to him, and for the first time we look at each other again since the moment when I decided to be offended even though I don’t remember why now. I realize then that really I was hoping or wanting him not to take me straight home, that it was just a manner of speaking, I’ll drop you off, but that really we were going somewhere else, I don’t know, to the river, to Trevelin, or just to drive around a little, or at least he could have parked the car for a while in front of your house, turned off the engine or something, to talk a little bit, there was so much to talk about. Wasn’t there? But the fact is he neither made any move to park, nor to turn off the engine, he gives me a kiss on the cheek, very unambiguous for my tastes, and he says, take care. Take care, he says, what the fuck does that mean? Not even a see you, or it was so good to see you, or see you around, or at least a hey, I’d rather us not see each other—no, take care, he says, and in the moment it’s as offensive to me as if he had said kill yourself. That’s what I hear him say, kill yourself. You too, I say, and I get out of the car. No sooner do I set foot on the sidewalk than I hear him start up the truck, I don’t turn around, I’m indignant. Or bothered. And besides I’ve become dizzy. I can’t believe it, I’m confused. Did something bad happen? At what point, exactly, did that break happen, that shift? We were fine, we were communicating, or at least that’s what it seemed like, I thought so, it wasn’t that we were going to fuck, I wanted us to talk, I don’t know, I wanted to know how everything had happened, his life change, or okay, I don’t know about the life change so much, but there was still weed left, Bob Marley, hats, and fantasy T-shirts, but fine, he was a dad, he’s a dad now, and a husband, he’d have something to talk about, he must have had something. Wouldn’t he? Or did he not want to anymore? He probably doesn’t want to anymore, he has no desire left. This sucks, I feel so stupid, I thought we had had a connection, how ridiculous, I can’t believe it. And with Vanina there, I must have made such a fool of myself, I must have looked so ridiculous, I must have looked like the spiteful ex-girlfriend, resentful, how pathetic, everybody must have realized: the kid with the family that put his life back together, or not back together, just together, given all I was was his high-school girlfriend, we were kids, how stupid, it’s probably not even as significant to him as it is to me, like he just slept with me, it’s very clear, I can’t believe it. Right now he’s probably telling his wife about the encounter, and he must have told her that I’m still in love with him, poor thing, and they must be laughing about it together, how awful, with the baby, with the baby in between them in their full-sized bed and him kissing her stomach, the stomach that holds his next child, and I’m here alone and drugged like a teenager, how fucked, how sad. I have to go to sleep, I have to sleep, I want to switch off, I must switch off.