Breathless (26 page)

—

It had been a summer to remember, water sprinklers going all night in the district.

Fire ban and watering ban, but this was a village for the quietly lawless, so everyone watered anyway, though no one got it into his head to start a fire, except for Lukas. Born under a falling star. He could have been prosecuted. If you start a fire in a house it is always considered arson, and what was worse . . . Gábriel was still lying inside, in the innermost room. Admittedly in a part of the house that escaped the flames, but there still had to be an inquiry and a postmortem to establish the cause of death and to rule out the possibility of his being killed by the smoke or the heat.

Even Mama had to make a statement about what she knew.

“But I wrote about that in my letters. I can't understand why you didn't come when I asked. You could definitely have given information that would have exonerated him—you were there when Gábriel died, weren't you? I assumed that you would want to help Lukas, but suddenly you seemed to be deadly enemies.”

Mama put in a good word for him with the police, more than she really should have done—she didn't know how much he was to blame in all of this. Only that he must have been in despair that afternoon the fire started. For some people hell seems to have more than nine circles: Lukas lost his papa and me and his home and all his possessions and his car, and not long after that his job at the leather factory too. At that point, if not before, he should have left.

If it was anyone's fault, it was mine, but my crime carried no penalty. The worst seldom do. In the end Lukas was cleared of suspicion—he must have defended himself successfully, or else he wasn't considered responsible for his actions when he let the fire burn. Still, the fine for negligence was a minor disaster, destitute as he was. The only asset Gábriel had left behind was a house that had now burned down, without insurance. Lukas owned nothing. All he had was an installment-plan debt for the funeral, and his life, but who could call it a life? There was no collateral.

I
planned to leave, never to return. I haven't told anyone that. I was going to take what was left of Yoel's money and buy a ticket to somewhere. Where was less important. The main thing was that it should be far away. Mexico, perhaps. I'd heard it's so lovely.

I had a passport. Yoel must just have forgotten that he had helped me to fix that. As if all he did was fix passports for girls he thought hadn't seen enough of the world. You have to have a passport or you aren't free. Passport, money, car. Once I had set off, the rest would sort itself out, as it always had before. I had the sense that I could do anything at all as long as I was alone. As long as I didn't have to fulfill someone else's needs. I could manage my own, they were simple—just to live, that was the only thing I wanted. With no other weight to bear than my own.

—

I bought New York boots and a New York cap. Played
Porgy and Bess
. Took Yoel's money and went with the hope that the skyscrapers, dollars, and smell of frying would heal me. Heal me? That wasn't what I hoped for, exactly. New York is just a city. But if forgetfulness wouldn't come to me, I had to search for it, cross the river of oblivion, whatever it was called. I wasn't fully conversant with the geography of hell, just knew that I was right in the middle of it.

The city of dreams must also be the city of forgetfulness.

I had heard about the underworld river that formed the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead, and I had a vague idea that you had to be able to cross the other way around, against the flow, back to the living—it had to be possible. I was in limbo, between life and death, the remarkable state you end up in if you deserve neither heaven nor hell.

I got on the plane and crossed the river of oblivion with a suitcase full of clean clothes and unread books. Nothing that smelled of him, or him, nothing either of them had even come into contact with or that could remind me of someone I knew. On the way in from the airport it was snowing. I felt a reluctant, frightening, provocative defiance. This city would make me forget, and I might as well start at once.

—

It's only a town. The leap to New York can't be any greater than the leap to Stockholm from the village where I grew up, and yet the first glimpse of the city takes my breath away. It's not particularly beautiful at the spot where I come up out of the ground, but it is New York. Exactly as you imagine it: even the street is belching out smoke and the dark façades push the sky so high up that you can hardly make out what time of day it is. I've been warned about strange forests where I don't recognize the dangers. You should stay close to home, know what's what, understand the rules. Here I have no notion.

A perfume. I try to visualize a face that matches the aftershave emanating from behind my back, where I'm sitting on a bench to regain my balance. A bitter aroma, something Yoel would never have used. But I recognize it, perhaps from one of Papa's brothers, their various bottles in a row on the bathroom windowsill. The advantage of old aftershave, I heard a friend of Yoel's once say, is that a girl feels safe with someone who smells like her grandfather.

When I stand up with my map to ask for directions, he doesn't look at all as I had thought. With his back to me on the bench, a slender-limbed Latino is sitting, not much older than me, deeply engrossed in his music. Long legs stretched out in front of him, T-shirt and jacket, gold chain. Eyes fixed on a far-off point. He shifts his attention from the distance, straight into my eyes, not so much as a muscle in his face moving. If it had been a competition, I would have lost.

As I open up my map of Manhattan, he continues to focus on me, not a single glance at the object I'm holding out between us. Map reading is a Swedish specialty, Yoel always said. Americans can scarcely decipher a map of their own city, but they are completely at ease with streets, districts, subway lines, bus numbers.

Who are you? Brut? Jicky? Équipage? Eau Sauvage? Hypnôse?

When he makes no attempt to help me, I start to fold up the map. Then:

“Where do you come from?” he asks, without removing his earphones. He looks surprised at my reply, as if he didn't really believe me. “You don't look Swedish. Swedes are usually tall, cold, and beautiful. I mean . . . well, you're not tall or especially cold.” I give up folding the map and stuff it like a crumpled concertina into my bag, then ask for directions to the Lower East Side, having no sense of what is even north and south here. Now he says that he's going to tell me something I need to know to get my bearings:

“You see those towers over there, the two high ones, the highest in the city? You can see those from almost everywhere. As soon as you come out of the subway, you look for them. They mean downtown. The opposite direction is uptown. People would never find their way in this city without them.”

When he finds out that I've just arrived and it's my first visit, he suggests a beer to celebrate landing. One beer won't be enough, but okay. I'm floating above the tarmac as I follow him along the wide streets, farther and farther from the station, as if he is trying to get me lost. Every neighborhood here is as large as a small town. Finally he stops at a surprisingly simple and anonymous place, the same as dozens of others we have passed on the way here. My eye wants to travel beyond the window to catch a glimpse of the pulsing streets out there.

“The New York sky gets electric just before it starts snowing. Do you know that?” he asks, lighting a cigarette. No. But I realize I have a certain weakness for people who tell me things like that. When I ask him what season this is, actually, he hesitates. He doesn't believe in seasons, he says—at least not in New York. It is mostly a question of weather.

“So you're one of those . . . reading types?” he asks then, with an eye on my bag, where a couple of travel paperbacks are sticking out. As though reading types would be a mutation of an otherwise sound human race. My response is a little evasive, as if it were an accusation I was trying to wriggle out of.

“I am too,” he says unexpectedly. “Your favorite?” In his smile a gold tooth flashes like a portable life insurance. A gold tooth as well, I'm thinking, and pretend not to hear his question, but he asks again. I squirm, say cagily that I don't have one. I've read far too little to have any favorites, still reading everything for the first time, and anyway it is a very personal question.

“Sure you do. Come on, tell me.”

Okay, Bukowski, I say in the end. He's the only one from whom I have read two books.

“Bukowski? You mean
the
Bukowski? Like
Charles
Bukowski?”

I nod, embarrassed that I feel embarrassed. Normal people don't find it more personal to reveal their favorite authors than their favorite cornflakes or their favorite air freshener. I'm quick to throw the question back at him.

“Plath,” he says without hesitation.

“Plath? You mean like
Sylvia
Plath?” I say, because I know her name.

“Yeah.” He smiles. And then we start to laugh.

We laugh until he wipes the froth of beer from my upper lip with his thumb. And then we stop at once.

W
e went back to his place. Or, to be exact, we took a taxi, because it was too far to walk to Spanish Harlem. On a street full of litter that was called Pleasure Avenue, Pleasant Avenue, or something, he asked the driver to stop. The air from the East River had an oily raw river stench, and the staircase reeked of mold, cement, and burned tostones. In the doorway a young woman stood as if on guard, half dressed, glaring at me when he said hello. Behind us as we were going up the stairs I heard her say something about
chica blanca,
coño blanca,
white girl, white cunt. He leaned over the banister and hissed a warning to her.

“
Culo!
Desgraciado!
” we heard her voice from below.

“
Puta!
” he shouted back.

“
Puto!
Pato!
” she echoed, like cracks of a whip.

He clearly decided that could not be tolerated, and when he turned on the stairs I managed to grab hold of him and whisper:

“Come on, let's go, it doesn't matter, I don't understand Spanish.”

“Yes you do! Do you think I'd let her insult us however she wants?
Carajo!
She'd never dare say anything if I was alone. She knows exactly what I'd do to her.”

I recognized the swear words from Yoel's neighbors. When they thought their children were asleep they could stand on the balcony arguing for hours in a mixture of Spanish and Swedish. It was a nuisance, but at least I learned all kinds of foul words in the Spanish language.

Unsteady from the beer and his mood that exploded from one second to the next, I feel inclined to leave. Can I trust him? Do I have to trust him, is it at all possible to trust another person, or should you just make a practice of assuming the worst every time? If Mama had seen me now she would have said I was mad.

“Crackhead!” he screams at her once more, before we continue up the narrow stairs out of earshot of her filthy invective.

There's an elevator, but you can be trapped all night in it between two floors if you're unlucky, and he seems to assume we would be.

“This isn't a prime neighborhood, you know . . . But you don't need to be afraid of the rats, they're not aggressive, there's plenty of food here.” We pass a floor in darkness. Sense how they move along the walls.

The rats never scared me at home. I had no feelings for them, neither fascination nor loathing. Lukas on the other hand never got used to them. Intelligent eyes, he said. “Do it quickly, for God's sake,” he said, looking away as I drowned them. It was an act of love, I did it so that he didn't have to, but I don't think he could love me as much afterward. He may have been grateful that I did it instead of him, but he could never understand how I could do it at all, when it came to the crunch. “They're only rats,” I said. “And you're only an idiot,” he answered.

Thirteen flights I count, the lactic acid building up in my legs. He doesn't offer to carry my suitcase. I may have packed light, but it still feels heavy by the end. I don't have time to see much of his apartment before we reach our final destination, the moment when the whole world begins and ends in his narrow bed and the only air he lets me breathe is the air he has in his mouth.

“What's your name?” I whisper when he finally allows me some oxygen.

“Don't talk so much.” He is in a hurry to pull off the dusty clothes I have been traveling in and his own. Kicks off his sneakers, wriggles out of his T-shirt and jeans, and bores his way in with no caresses or frills.

Smells are like memories, they merge with one another and create new variations. Lukas merges with Yoel who merges with Luiz, who merges with Lukas again. Like the smell of water mixing with sandalwood, cement, African myrrh, geranium, iron, smoke. He smells of . . .

“Brut?” I breathe in against his smooth brown jaw as I sample a little bite. He nods. How could I guess? My tongue runs along the nape of his neck, which is one of the most beautiful I have seen, and I am after all a collector of beautiful necks. I have Rikard's, Lukas's, Yoel's, and some others whose names I have never asked, and now Luiz's.

He doesn't object when I slide my hand into the gap between his groin and the mattress where his penis is resting semisoft and spent, and immediately it hardens again at my touch. Asks why I am here, in New York, and I tell him the truth: on the run. He looks surprised, a little worried almost.

“A jealous sucker?” he asks, as though he took it for granted it was a man. From far away I can hear how sad my laugh sounds, like an out-of-tune piano in a cold room. Jealous . . . if only it were so simple.

“
Dámelo duro
,” I whisper. Somewhere in my dubious Spanish vocabulary I find the phrase, and he looks at me in astonishment as if I don't know what I am saying.

“Forget it, kid,” he whispers disapprovingly. Rolls over onto his back again and in the same movement slides me up onto him. “I really like you—inside and out.” In Swedish it would have sounded impossible, but when he says it, it sounds completely right. This city, everything that is new . . . it is so unreal that it doesn't even make me think twice.

We roll another half turn, our stomachs sticking together.

“You're such a beauty, do you know that?”

I nod.

And cocky too, I can see in his eyes that he likes that, as his long sinewy body presses me halfway through the soft springs of the bed, before we go quite still.

—

In the kitchen some time later he strikes a match and lights the gas stove:

“Be honest . . . when you were doing it with me, were you actually thinking about him? The one you're on the run from?” he asks, revealing his gold tooth.

“Yes,” I lie, though for the first time in ages I had managed to forget him for a little while. “And who were you thinking about?”

He had no time to think, it was so quick. I was like a tropical cyclone in the middle of winter in Manhattan. Libido, the instinct for life. Thanatos, the death drive. Loving or dying.

In quick succession he breaks four eggs into a frying pan, the sizzling oil splashing up on his naked chest. He doesn't flinch. A liberal American layer of mayonnaise goes on eight slices of spongy bread, while with a practiced hand he flips the eggs over and fries the other sides. Salt. Tabasco. A few familiar movements. And the four egg-mayonnaise sandwiches are ready. Am I sure I don't want some? I shake my head. What he himself does with that amount of fat is a mystery that is solved when he tells me he only eats once a day. Mostly eggs, and eggs are practically vegetables, aren't they? I have no appetite; my mouth tastes a little of blood.

“Four double sandwiches a day, and I haven't been ill since the day I was shot in the shoulder on the staircase five years ago.” I had felt the scar against my lips earlier in bed. “Women with guns . . .” Luiz mumbles and examines me closely as he opens a beer for each of us. “You're far too thin. Far too thin.
Flaca
 . . . But it's okay. I like thin girls.” I look at my reflection in the night-dark window. Thin? This was a new accusation. But he's right, I hardly recognize myself, alarmed by how starved I look—lack of sleep perhaps, giving me that intense, slightly swollen look.

After the food he can't make love again. Doesn't even try. We just fall asleep together.

—

When I wake up he is no longer lying beside me. Out in the kitchen there is a woman with an intricate hairdo and a torn coffee-brown dressing gown, sorting out small change.

“
Gringa . . .
” she says when she catches sight of me in the doorway, giving me a measured look, as if I were an exceptionally pale specimen. Feeling awkward, I ask where he is.

“Luiz? He's up in the Bronx, of course. Where else would he be?”
Bronx?
Why there? And who is she, his mother, sister, pimp, spider woman—his fate? No, his ex, I realize. I try to cover myself, though she has already seen my winter-white nakedness. “He went out an hour ago. He'll be in his apartment by now, with his wife, and who are you, his new whore? How old . . . let me guess, seventeen?”

My cheeks red with shame, I scramble all my things together as I hear her say that Luiz, the dog, only sleeps here when he's had a fight with his wife and comes crawling back, has nowhere else to go when he's hit her and she's thrown him out. Then he comes here, and each time he has another slut in tow from the nearest bar, as if he thinks that will make him feel better. She gives me a look full of contempt, still counting coins with her two-inch nails.

“When he's calmed down—and the poor woman calls and forgives him—he goes back to her. He should be very grateful that I don't dish the dirt about his little comfort-fucks, then he'd find his bags packed outside the door when he came home . . . She has her limits. Just like I had once, when I still loved him. Now I don't care anymore.”

—

The bastard, bastard, bastard . . . the stairs down will never end, and as I run I remember the sound of the telephone when I was half asleep. His wife must have called, forgiven him for hitting her, and then he went back to her without a word to me. Perhaps he liked sleeping with two different women within a few hours. I emerge onto the deserted street in pitch black at three o'clock in the morning, the worst possible time. It is snowing now as he predicted. The weather will protect me, I think—not even dogs are out in this. I just have to walk, start moving—fast enough not to get stuck, but slow enough to keep my balance.

I hurry down the wide avenue, speed up past the dark side streets without glancing in. After a while I discover that he has left a note in the pocket of my jeans. A telephone number on one side. On the other: “I never leave my number. Don't make me regret it.”

I probably ought to sleep on it, but what you sleep on, you never do. I stop at the first telephone booth I see, and I call.

When he answers, it sounds as if he is on the other side of the world, not the other side of town. He doesn't apologize for his disappearance, doesn't even sound contrite, not a word of explanation about why he let me wake up in an apartment alone with his ex-wife. When am I going to see you again? he asks.

“Not as long as you're married,” I reply.

“Married . . . Okay . . . to a certain extent married,” he qualifies, after a few moments' silence. “A marriage of convenience. Haven't you heard of it?” He has lowered his voice a little now . . . Certainly, he is married, and certainly, they do live under the same roof, but they don't live as man and wife, they just keep up a front.

A front—for whom? I ask.

The authorities.

But how do you live so close together without something starting? That I have never understood. How . . . Luiz is silent on the telephone, and when he finally answers he speaks even more quietly. Not with her, he says. I only married her to help her.

It could have been a fictitious sob story, but if that were the case, he was very good at it. There's nothing wrong with her, he says, she's a great girl, at least when she's not being a pain in the ass—but she has come here in the hope of getting treatment for HIV; the marriage is just to help her and her two daughters. He tries to think of her as a sister—not easy, but he tries. You don't have to fancy your brothers and sisters to love them. That's how he feels about her. But lately . . .

He doesn't know if it's the illness, but recently she's changed. Has become temperamental and jealous, as if she believes he is thinking of leaving her. And he's certainly had that thought, increasingly. But he can't. It's not he who hits her, it's she who hits him, so they are doing their bit for equality of the sexes in this country. He says:

“Women know that men are stronger. But men know that women are harder.” I stand with the receiver in my hand, my back against the glass, blue with cold. It has stopped snowing and now the wind is blowing instead, as cold as only wind in towns can be, through the wide empty streets. I'm obliged to ask, insensitive, but it has to be direct. And what about him?

“What?” he asks.

“Infected?”

“Of course not.”

“You're sure?”

“Quite. And anyway we took precautions.”

Did we? Not that I remember.

“No one in this city has unprotected sex, for God's sake, especially not with a Swede,” he bursts out.

But the violent kissing, blood on blood . . . I drop the receiver. Go out into the cold. His words don't reassure me at all. I've been in New York for less than twenty-four hours and I'm sure that I have already exposed myself to a fatal disease.

—

You're mad, Lo, Mama would have said. It was also what Luiz said, as he distractedly caressed me.

“You're mad, girl. I thought that as soon as you started talking to me on the street, I could see it in your eyes. I know what mad girls look like, they look exactly like you,
nena
,” he said and turned me over onto my stomach. “And I was even more sure that you were nuts when you came home with me without any persuasion . . . You must never—I'll say it one more time—you must NEVER go with strange men in New York, you should know that, for Christ's sake, didn't your mom teach you anything? You definitely must be kooky, babe, I was thinking, but okay, I like crazy girls, so why not? And if you hadn't come home with me, you'd only have gone with someone else—and you don't know what maniac
that
could have been . . . so it was better that you came with me. I happen to be a reliable guy, one of very few in this city. Then you got right into bed with me, when you were completely sober. I thought I'd have to waste at least half a bottle on you, but no, no . . . right into the bedroom, like a wildcat. I was speechless, and it takes a lot for me to be speechless, you understand, but that's the way it is with mad girls and me, they're attracted to me, I knew that before.”