by Andrés Barba
“We can have dinner whenever you want, your father’s going to be a little late tonight, he just sent me a text,” she said.
“Why do you like these historical documentaries so much?” she asked.
She was not skilled at being skillful. She was nervous. She wanted her mother to watch documentaries forever, to sit there in exactly the same position she was in now. She no longer felt any rancor toward her, just a vague sort of fear, that of something approaching. She looked at her in that silly dress, with her lack of beauty, her boundless knowledge of pharmaceuticals, her new haircut that didn’t suit her. Why did she feel guilty?
“I don’t know,” she smiled, “they soothe me. I like seeing images from the past.”
Marina was embarrassed by the way that every time she was nice to her mother, she responded immediately with affection. She felt there was something bovine about her, something dim. On vacations, she liked to take long siestas and always awoke with the same scatterbrained expression, as if she had no idea who she was or what she was doing there.
“They said on the news that someone found a fetus in a trash can, wrapped up in newspaper. A human fetus,” she said, glancing over at her for a second before turning right back to the priests’ and nuns’ faces. Suddenly, on the screen, there was a nun who’d been made to wear donkey ears, with a strange expression on her face as though she herself were trying not to laugh. “I didn’t think that kind of thing still happened.”
They ate in silence, gazpacho and charcuterie. Marina thought that if she told her mother then and there that she’d seen her father out with a girl, she probably wouldn’t even make a face, might even finish her gazpacho with those slow spoonfuls she took, only half full. All of a sudden, for the first time in her life, her naïveté pained her. Suddenly she registered mortification, as though she’d just remembered something.
“How’s your novel going?” she asked. “Have you started yet?”
“The requirement for journalism got raised, now it’s a 6.5. I’d have to get at least a 7 on the exams to get in . . . Where did you say your father was?”
“At the paper.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
Anguish endowed Ramón’s face with a strange beauty, a frozen, cosmetic look. In the last three days, they’d made love two times, the fifth and sixth for each of them. That time, Marina had experienced it like a succession of vibrations and pops after which she’d found herself in a dense, lush landscape. Sometimes Ramón got a look on his face while staring at her when she was naked that made things happen inside her, things she couldn’t subject to examination, things that simply occurred, perplexingly, for a few moments—a feeling of vulnerability that seemed to form part of courtship and of sex itself.
Now that Ramón was lasting a little longer, she had come for the first time. It was an abrupt experience, something akin to an enormous ball bouncing against her, but also penetrating her, then remaining inside her, a huge ball of air that deflated as it entered, slowly, a delicious, enduring sensation. She suddenly had the urge to cry. To cry and to take Ramón’s face, his slightly unusual face, in her hands, to hold it the way you hold something unique, a marble head, and caress it, but knowing all the while that her caresses would never reach him. She liked the way Ramón, at those moments, would let her gaze meticulously at his face, in silence—his eyelids, his nose, his eyes, the thin outline of his mouth—a human face allowing itself to be examined up close, open and uncalculating, a face finally free from the posturing that protected it, like a brother’s face. The closer she looked, the more Marina felt she was slipping down the steep slope she’d been slipping down for the past week. Then, a simple sentence shattered everything.
“I am royally screwed.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The entrance exams, I couldn’t get a seven in my dreams.”
For a second, she’d been tempted to tell Ramón everything. She wanted to see what effect her words would have on his face, or how she would feel saying them. It seemed incredible that twelve days had gone by already, almost two whole weeks since the first time she’d seen her father with that girl. It seemed incredible that she’d been able to see him and not say anything, not put on a phony expression, and that there was nothing outwardly different about the way he acted or looked, nothing different from the way he was every other day. If she took stock of all the things she’d felt since the first time she saw him, it made it seem as though she’d been almost catatonic for the past two weeks. She’d had the same dream three times: she and her mother were at home, and her father had just left. The phone rang, and her mother answered somewhat theatrically. He left me, she said, sobbing, and this time it’s for real. Then she pretended to swoon, and Marina had to run to her aid. But the dream took a strange turn at the end: when she went to help her mother, as she bent down over her, she suddenly saw that her face bore a more immediate panic, as though the first phony attack had brought on a real one, and suddenly, she was dying in her arms. Marina would wake up drained and distressed, feeling like her head had been inside a plastic bag. Her father’s face, in the mornings, bore an expression she associated with the nightmare, which made her want to imitate her mother’s theatricality from the dream, start sobbing maybe, or even hit him, suddenly hit him squarely in the face, hard, and then when he grabbed hold of her to deflect the attack, stare into his eyes as furiously and fixedly as she could and say simply, You ruined my life, Papá. That, thought Marina, would be a sort of veiled way of letting him know that while he might have ruined her life, he couldn’t ruin anything else, that he’d lost all the power and influence he’d always had over her. And that was what was really tragic, couldn’t he see that?
She’d seen him once more, in the same place. She was in the Plaza Callao enlightening a forty-year-old couple as to how guilty they should feel if they compared their good fortune to that of her (far superior) family of Sri Lankans, when she saw them in the distance and darted behind the couple for refuge. Her father was wearing the same clothes he’d had on that morning, a white shirt and blue jeans, and the girl was wearing a different dress from the first time. They were walking further apart this time and may have been more tense than the first day; from the distance she began following them at, it was impossible to tell for certain whether or not they were speaking. They stopped in the same doorway as the first day and went in without saying a word to each other.
That time, she waited until she saw him come out. She stayed on the corner, squatting in the shade so the heat wouldn’t kill her, her back against one of the walls of the Plaza de las Descalzas Reales, reading—in fits and starts—a book of Sylvia Plath poems she’d begun with enthusiasm and now found quite boring:
The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
Her father was in the building a little over two hours, and when he came out, he bore the same determined look, had the same austere, slightly stiff walk that had surprised her the first day. Her heart was racing a mile a minute. She knew what she wanted to do, but didn’t know how to go about it. Her wish was an abstract, slightly asphyxiating thing. It stopped seeming like a good idea the moment she stationed herself at the door to wait for someone to come out. She very nearly gave up several times during the fifteen minutes she waited. She didn’t know what she was hoping to see. Something stark, something shocking, something domestic, the landscape after the battle. It was like she was constantly calibrating her emotions in an attempt to deduce what she felt for that girl. She wanted to see the object of desire, wanted to learn her name so she’d know if it was meant to be spoken in a gruff voice or a rapt one. She knocked on two doors with no luck, and on her third try, at apartment 3B, the girl she’d seen with her father opened the door. She looked like she’d just thrown on a robe to answer the door and a second earlier had been nak
ed or in her underwear. She had a disturbingly naïve face, it was like her mouth was the starting point of everything on it; she was very pretty, but only in a—how to describe it?—submissive way, as though her beauty were simply the result of some intermittent reflex, something unrelated to herself and that she had no control over. Perhaps she was just ordinary. A pretty, ordinary girl, no doubt not too bright, Marina thought, with a shapely albeit imperfect body. It both distressed and excited her that she was naked beneath that robe, as though she, too, like her father, had the indomitable urge to violate her in some way, defile her, as though something had grazed a miniscule but intimate membrane.
“Are you familiar with Doctors Without Borders?”
She went through most of her initial spiel on autopilot. The girl seemed more concerned that the neighbors might see her dressed like that than about listening to her.
“Would you mind coming in for a second?” she asked, in an accent that suddenly struck her as provincial—Galician, maybe?—but faint, and with such a show of good faith that it was clear she was not from Madrid. “I was just getting dressed when you knocked . . .”
“Sure,” she said stepping inside. The girl walked toward what appeared to be the bedroom, assuring her once more that she would only be a second. Marina hardly had time, during that almost literal second, to walk into the living room, a small room with several bookshelves but few books, a sofa, and a coffee table, on which sat two teacups and an ashtray with three cigarette butts. The simple fact that she’d gained entry into her home had all of a sudden disarmed her. Everything felt strangely provisional. It was the home of a loner. Marina had never been in a place like it in all her life. A loner, just passing through. It was as though this person’s life lacked the energy required even to scratch the surface of those walls. She returned quickly, in the same dress she’d seen her wearing the first day. Now, seeing her like that, she seemed to have regained her initial mystique, to have grown in some prodigious way within that dress; it was dizzying. She got nervous the moment the girl addressed her.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch a word of what you said.”
Her voice began to tremble as she repeated her speech on autopilot once more, asking whether she knew that for the price of just one cup of coffee a day, a family of three in Sri Lanka could eat for a month. In the woman’s presence (How old was she? Thirty? Early thirties?), even her unassailable family of Sri Lankans lost their gravitas, became absurd, were too grimy and too nice, there in their traditional costumes, on their sugarcane plantation. She tried to smile and felt her chin begin to wobble. Why did she suddenly feel such anguish? It was as though, with no warning, something had whipped her around inside, something akin to fear.
“Are you OK?”
“No.”
They both smiled then, a bit stupidly.
“Would you like a glass of water?”
“Yes, please. I think I’m just light-headed all of a sudden, I’ve been outside all day.”
“Here, have a seat.”
She sat before two empty teacups on the table. More than two specific, empty cups, they seemed a naked, abstract thing. One of those cups had been her father’s. She repeated that to herself, under her breath, trying to force a reaction, but the thought seemed to add nothing. She didn’t know what she’d been hoping to see before entering that apartment. Things had certainly gone much better than she’d envisioned, not even in her wildest dreams had she thought she might actually make it inside the apartment; at best, she saw herself standing at the door, peering between the girl’s shoulder and head, trying to grasp some shred, some sliver of something that would enable her to start conjecturing. Reality proved different. She’d gotten there and not only strolled into the house without the slightest bit of difficulty but was now sitting in the living room, probably on the same sofa they’d made love on, waiting for a glass of water to be brought to her. And yet she didn’t know how to process the things around her. It was all so stark and seemingly inoffensive that it disarmed her entirely. How much tedium, how much wisdom, how much life, how much love was contained in those empty teacups, those half-filled bookshelves, that nervousness, that dress the girl wore? An unbearable heat was coming in through the open window when she returned with the water. Marina gulped it all down at once, not even stopping for a breath.
“Would you like another one?”
“No, thank you.”
She was ashamed that the girl was treating her with such gentility, was being nice to her, was a bit shy. She had waited, standing there in front of her, watching her drink, like a kindly nurse at the bedside of a hospitalized patient. She looked sad.
“Sometimes when I’m walking by,” she said, to break the silence, “I see all of you out in the plaza, and I wonder how can those kids stand out in that sun all day long?”
“I’m only there in the mornings,” she said, and stood—because it was awkward to be seated and speaking to someone who had no apparent intention of sitting themselves—and when she did, the girl quickly placed a hand on her arm. The contact was electric, made her hair stand on end, as though her skin were unexpectedly youthful.
“No, don’t get up, it’s OK.”
“Oh, I’m fine, I’ll be going now, thank you, though.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“You can stay as long as you want,” the girl said, most unpredictably.
“I have to go.”
She walked her to the door, and as she did, Marina instantly got a faint whiff of something vaguely sexual, just for a second, a sort of jumble of masculinity, as though taking just one step had somehow moved her into an intimate space, and that had changed the shape of everything, made the walls of the house bow in around her.
“Well, bye.”
“Aren’t you even going to leave me a pamphlet?”
“Oh, right, of course.”
The girl smiled. Did her hands tremble as she reached into her bag to pull it out? She thought they did. She remembered that the girl’s dress had fluttered and that after she took the pamphlet, she stood looking at it for a minute. Her expression had an odd quality about it, as though her eyes weren’t taking in the meaning of the words written on it but simply gliding over them.
“I’ve always liked Doctors Without Borders, maybe I should make a donation.”
“We’re there every day, in the Plaza Callao, thanks for the water,” she said, taking a step toward the staircase. Her whole body feared that the girl was going to give her a goodbye kiss on each cheek.
“What’s your name?”
“Marina.”
“I’m Sandra.”
She couldn’t think of anything to do but repeat her name, before rushing down the stairs three at a time.
“Sandra.”
It occurred to her afterward, a hundred yards or so from the house, her legs still trembling slightly: Sandra didn’t want her to go, she wanted someone to talk to, anyone, about anything. Little by little, she was able to recall certain things that she hadn’t been overly aware of while she was there but that had made an impression on her retinas, like the fact that Sandra wasn’t wearing a bra under her dress, the silhouette of her possibly too floppy breasts, the smell of her body—an impulsive, sexual smell—her submissiveness, her friendliness. Once outside again, she was back in real time, people once more took on the somewhat languorous, sweaty elegance of a June afternoon. Then she was struck by something she hadn’t thought of before: she already existed in Sandra’s consciousness before stepping into her apartment, her father would have already talked to her about her. How would Sandra have pictured the abstract seventeen-year-old girl that was her? And what about her mother? Something else came to her, too: the image of her father on top of Sandra, his face buried in her floppy breasts as she stroked his hair and told him he could stay as long as he wanted, that he could do whateve
r he wanted to her. She’d heard that phrase in a little porn clip she’d seen on the internet, home videos—this was in her pre-Ramón phase, when she was still investigating. It was a fleeting image, the man leaned over the woman and penetrated her, and she threw her head back and said, Do whatever you want to me. Hearing that, she’d been immediately turned on, just as she was now, envisioning Sandra’s mouth pronouncing those words. She was turned on against her will, as though there were something animal, something female contained in them, a disturbing surrender. In some dark way, she herself wanted to be able to say those words, to feel her own body surrender, pliant and available, to the will of another. To feel insignificant. To let herself be controlled by the force of someone else. But the scene had been too absurd, too concrete—the coffee table, the empty teacups, each with its little teabag shriveled up inside like a dried fig, the impudence of those near-barren bookshelves, the Madrid heat streaming through the window, Sandra’s breasts, floppy and insipid, jiggling a little with each thrust, the conviction that she could hurt her, there, on that very sofa, that more than likely she was longing for that pain, the idea of gripping her face in one hand and squeezing it. What could you do to a person who’d just said do whatever you want to me? Do whatever you want to me. Do whatever you want to me. Do what-ev-er-you-want to me.
Ramon got fried on his entrance exams. They took place over two days, and she went to meet him both days when he finished. He was furious when he came out. He kicked a trashcan over and over, destroying it, and said that the whole thing was fucking bullshit and that he didn’t give a fuck. Just two hours later, his fury had turned into a sort of limp humiliation. He seemed like a little boy, and when he told her that he’d made up his entire response to one of the essay questions, start to finish, he almost started to cry. Marina was mortified thinking he might. He was sitting on one of the parterres in Ciudad Universitaria, smoking a cigarette, and his chin began to quiver. She almost wanted to stand up and slap him and say, Alright, that’s enough! She couldn’t muster any pity for him, especially not as she watched his throat constrict just because he was going to fail his exams. She’d fantasized about making love to him that afternoon, but now, seeing him in that state, she had lost all desire for him. She fidgeted, keeping a certain distance, unable to help herself, staring intently into Ramón’s face, which now looked strange and a bit unfamiliar, and his arms, and his pinched mouth. She was experiencing a sort of sangfroid.
