Learning to Lose (16 page)

They talk about Pilar. Is she happy? Are things going well? Sylvia thought about her during much of her trip back. Her mother is fine. Her mother is happy. Santiago arrived from Paris and brought her a very thin cashmere wrap. Then they all three
ate dinner together. The next morning, Pilar took her daughter to Delicías Station. Don’t go down until the last minute. There’s a terrible draft on the platforms. The fall was colder and more unpleasant than usual. The winter is in a rush, Sylvia heard an older gentleman say as he boarded the train, loaded down with bags of vegetables. Old people often talk about the weather; she’s never been the least bit interested in what temperature it’ll be the next day. Through the train window, Sylvia watched the continuous metal fence that blocked access to the tracks. It was as if someone had put boundaries on the countryside. The fence, mile after mile, conveyed something demoralizing, as if every inch of the planet were condemned to be fenced in.

Your father is really thin, does he still eat? Aurora asks her. Boy, does he ever, you should see his potbelly. Sylvia asks after her grandmother’s pains, if she gets bored all day in bed. I’ve got visitors all the time, I have more of a social life now than when I’m healthy. It exasperates your grandfather; you know he doesn’t like people. That reminds her of something. She asks Sylvia to get her some tickets for the Auditorio. Do you know how to do it over the phone? Of course. Because I get mixed up with those things and your grandfather’s not going to do it, I know him.

Grandma Aurora asks her how she’s managing with the cast. Fine, the worst part is showering. She tells her how she sits in the tub and wets a sponge and runs it over her body so as not to get the cast wet. She doesn’t tell her that she got aroused doing it the other morning, so much so that she was embarrassed. She imagined the sponge was someone else’s rough hand, which gave her goose bumps of restless pleasure. What made Sylvia most nervous was identifying that hand as Ariel’s. My child,
I bathed that way for years. In a washbasin. And your grandfather used to go to the bathhouse on Bravo Murillo before we built the bathroom in the house. You want me to read the newspaper to you? asks Sylvia. No, no, your grandfather reads it to me in the mornings. I know it annoys him to read aloud, but I like to see the faces he makes over the crime pages. Have you seen the things that happen? It’s all husbands killing their wives. And today, what a shame, some pilgrims coming back from the sanctuary of Fátima were killed in a bus accident.

Sylvia offers to read her a book. I started it on the train. That morning, before leaving for the station, Santiago had given it to her. Now you’ll have more time to read. I wonder if you’ll like it, he had said. What’s it called? asks Aurora. Sylvia shows her the cover of the book she’s just pulled from her backpack. It’s not new. It’s been read before. Sylvia likes used books. New books have a pleasant smell, but they’re scary. It’s like driving on virgin highway.

Sylvia tells her grandmother what she knows of the plot up to that point. There are five daughters of marrying age. A rich heir arrives in their town, and their mother wants to offer them in marriage. There is one, the smartest one, who feels scorned by the rich nobleman’s best friend, after hearing him make a disparaging remark about her. And you know that they’re going to fall in love, those two. So you are liking it, says her grandmother. For the moment, yeah. Sylvia doesn’t admit that several times on the train she had to go back over the pages she’d read, starting again. She’s not used to reading, it’s a challenge for her.

When she was a little girl, she didn’t like her grandmother to read her stories, but preferred she make them up. Her grandmother knew what she wanted to hear. Princesses, monsters,
villains, heroes. There was always a little girl with black curls who had a million and one misfortunes before finding love and happiness. Sylvia reads aloud to her grandmother: “That is exactly the question which I expected you to ask. A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony, in a moment.”

When her grandmother falls asleep, Sylvia remains lying beside her for a while, relaxed by the rhythm of Aurora’s breathing. Then she gets up and leaves the room. The house was like a refrigerator. Her grandmother’s room was at least somewhat warm because of a small electric radiator. The door to her grandfather’s room was ajar. She approaches the upright piano. She touches a key without sitting down. She remembers the rigorous classes her grandfather used to give her. He was strict about the posture of her hands, her back, her head. Once he covered her eyes so she would play without looking at the keys. It’s a piano, not a typewriter, he used to say. It’s not taking dictation, it’s listening to someone else’s imagination. But her grandfather didn’t have the patience, and it seemed she didn’t have much talent. One day she asked her mother, please, Mamá, I don’t want to study with Grandpa anymore. Let’s see when we can catch up on your lessons, he had suggested one Sunday after lunch, but they both knew the classes were over forever.

Her grandfather arrives around eight in the evening. He comes in immaculate as usual, his expression serious, irritable. Did the heating guys call? Nobody called, Sylvia tells him. Through the intercom, Lorenzo says, I’m parked on the sidewalk, ask Sylvia to come down. She goes in to say good-bye to her grandmother, who’s awake. I heard a beep from your backpack. Sylvia checks. Oh, it’s a message. Her pulse starts
racing, but she doesn’t say anything. I’m leaving. Her grandfather helps her down the two flights of stairs. I don’t know what we’re going to do without an elevator here.

“How’s that leg?” The message isn’t very telling, but at least it’s something. And it’s from Ariel. Many days have passed. She was sure he’d erased her from his life after visiting the hospital. And what more could she expect? She has the cell phone on her lap as her father drives, but she doesn’t know what to write. Have I fallen in love with him? she thinks. Could I be that stupid? She hadn’t mentioned his visit, their meeting, to anyone. She hadn’t been able to talk through what she was feeling and thinking, she couldn’t make light of it. Like everything you keep bottled up, it was growing, growing like an untreated infection. He’s handsome, with a baby face, seems like a good person. I’m sixteen years old. He’s famous, a soccer star. I didn’t ask him. Maybe he’s married and has three kids. Soccer players are like that. They seem old at thirty. She’d have to ask her father.

I could talk to Mai about it, she’d think of something clever. But she’s obsessed with Mateo and wouldn’t be able to put herself in Sylvia’s place. She’d have to explain so many things to her. Besides, last weekend her trip to León had just gone okay. We went out with his friends and they didn’t pay any attention to me, like my being around bugged them, Mai complained to Sylvia. I’m not going back there, let him come to Madrid if he wants to see me.

Finally she wrote a message: “The worst part is having to drag it around all day.” She sends it, biting her lip. She regrets it almost immediately. She should’ve written something more brilliant. More daring. Something that forces him to respond, that draws him in, something that creates a chain of messages
that eventually brings them together. When the phone’s beep announces a message received, Lorenzo turns his head. You kids spend all day doing that, what a hassle, you’re going to forget how to talk. It’s cheaper, Sylvia explains. A second later, she’s disappointed as she reads Ariel’s response. “Don’t let it get you down.” Sylvia wants to laugh. Laugh at herself. She looks into the side mirror, searching deep into her eyes. It’s broken, cracked. The mirror. It’s broken, she says to her father. Yeah, I know, it’s been like that for a few days, some son of a bitch.

Ariel’s reply brought Sylvia back to reality with a slap in the face. She reminds herself of who he is, who she is. Feet on the ground. She’ll have to avoid Ariel slipping in through the cracks of her fantasies. She’ll have to watch that he doesn’t intrude on her dreams, her musings. That he doesn’t find his way into her reading, into the music she listens to. That her free time isn’t filled with longing for him to call, for contact that will never happen. She knows that the only pleasure available to her comes with a stab of pain, a sort of dismal resignation. She’s sad, but at least the sadness is hers. She created it with her expectations, no one brought it on her, she’s no one’s victim. She’s fine with that suffering, it doesn’t bother her. She lies back. To wait. She doesn’t know for what.

Leandro sat down in the kitchen. He’s helping the boiler technician with his work. He doesn’t feel like talking. He’s mad. The man ignores his discomfort and jabbers on incessantly. He
took the metal top off the boiler, revealing the sickly, malnourished belly of the motor, along with the burners that refuse to light. Leandro admires his rough, damp, greasy hands, which move skillfully. He has never known how to use his hands for anything besides extracting music from pianos, correcting his students’ positions, sometimes marking a score with a pencil.

He moved his things to sleep in the studio. He cleaned the bedspread of record jackets, papers, scores, and books. He pushed the old newspapers he hadn’t finished reading under the bed. He’d rather Aurora slept alone. He’s afraid of rolling over in the night and hitting her. He wants her to be comfortable. Also he’s ashamed, though he doesn’t say it, of grazing her clean body with his, just back from spending an hour or two with Osembe’s sweaty and acrid-smelling skin. He has always had respect for Aurora’s body. He’s watched it age, lose its firmness and vitality, but it has never lost the almost sacred mystery of a dearly loved body. Which is why now, when he brushes against it, he feels dirty and evil.

In recent days, his bad mood has gotten the better of him. Friday night the house was cold and he wanted to turn on the boiler. He couldn’t. He called the repair service. They didn’t work until Monday. That meant spending the weekend without heat or hot water. They suggested he call an emergency repairman. So he did. A hefty guy came, with a black leather jacket. It was almost eleven at night. He took out a Phillips screwdriver and knocked on various pipes. It’s a question of spare parts, you should contact the manufacturer. Leandro explained to him that he had called, but they weren’t working until Monday. The man shrugged his shoulders and handed him a bill as he checked his watch. He wore his cell phone on his belt like a gunman.
When Leandro saw that the man was billing him 160 euros, he was shocked. The guy itemized the amount. Emergency house-call, at night, on a weekend, plus the half-hour minimum for labor. Leandro was seized with indignation. He gave him the money, but as he led him to the door he murmured, I’d rather be mugged, you know, I’d rather have a knife put to my neck, at least those people need the money. You guys are the worst. Come on, man, don’t say that, the repairman said in an attempt to defend himself, but Leandro refused to listen, slamming the door on him. Aurora’s voice was calling out, and he had to explain the situation to her. Okay, don’t get upset, there’s an electric heater in the attic, see if you can reach it, she said.

The next morning he tried to shower with cold water. He stood inside the bathtub awhile, his hand in the freezing stream, waiting for his body to get used to the temperature. Then he gave up. Somewhat devastated, he sat on the edge of the tub and studied his naked body. Old age was a defeat that was hard to bear. It was disgusting. His whitish skin trembled with cold. His flaccid chest, diminishing body hair. The dark patches on his skin, his arthritic fingers. His bony hands like a sickly person’s, the calves, the flabby forearms, as if someone had let go of the cables that kept the skin taut. He recalled those paintings he had always thought little of, where Dalí paints the passage of time as melting viscous matter. Now he was seeing his skin slip away like that, toward the floor like old clothes, leaving only a corpse’s skeleton visible.

He thought of Osembe’s tender flesh, young and exuberant, of the repugnance she must feel at licking his pale decrepitude. He held up his testicles for a second, his pink, fallen penis, useless, languid, poultry skin. He couldn’t explain the power it still
held over him. Who had said that it was the faucet of the soul? It wasn’t the erection, now intermittent, unexpected, random, that dragged him toward Osembe all those afternoons; it was something else. The contrast of their bodies, perhaps the escape through physical contact, the feeling of abandoning his own body to possess the body he touches and caresses.

He left the chalet with dismal regret; seized with guilt; later he was flooded with pleasurable memories; then anxiety came over him again, as much as he resisted. Leandro accepted the moment his finger rang the doorbell on number forty as a defeat. But it was such a short gesture, so quick, that it didn’t give him time to think, to run away. He felt compelled. He, a man trained in loneliness, used to monotony. He was able to beat the urgency for a day, two, to say no, an emphatic no, to put his mind on other things. But he always ended up succumbing, kneeling before Osembe’s black nakedness, before the reflection of her white teeth, before her absent gaze that now, as he studies his own body, he understood as a necessary barrier against disgust.

Leaving the chalet, he despised himself. He considered the female body coarse. He thought of Osembe and told himself she’s just a mammal with breasts, muscular and young, a mass of flesh that shouldn’t attract me. He denied her all mystery, any secrets. He found her folds dirty, her orifices despicable, he visualized desire as a butcher does a piece he’s flaying or a doctor the tissue through which he traces his incision. But that rejection mechanism collapsed under another, a higher order. And so he returned to visit the chalet on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

Contemplating his own body turned Leandro’s morning into a sad one. He immediately threw himself into pleasing Aurora,
tending to her. He read her the newspaper supplement with its absurd leaps in stories, from the painful subsistence in Gaza to a feature on the benefits of chocotherapy, illustrated with photos of models slathered from head to toe. He prepared her a tea and sat with her to listen to the classical radio program. He avoided the news so it wouldn’t leave its violent, sinister fingerprints in its wake. As his friend Almendros, who came to visit Aurora often, would say, we old folks tend to see the world as hurtling toward the abyss, without realizing that really we’re the ones headed toward the abyss. The world goes on, badly, but it goes on. Leandro often delights in the fact that he’ll die before seeing total hate unleashed, before violence swallows up everything. All signs point toward inevitable destruction, but when he expresses his pessimism aloud his friend smiles. It’s us, we’re the ones on the way out, not the world, Leandro, don’t be like those old guys who stupidly console themselves by thinking everything will disappear along with them.