She never said anything to hurt me, not once in all those years. Never said anything or did anything. Do you think that’s usual with couples? I don’t know if it was love that she felt for me, although I was crazy about her, I still am, but she must have loved me a little to have treated me with such respect for all that time. The fact that she did the kind of work she did is another matter, irrelevant. She would go out each night about her business and come home afterward, just as I went about
my
business and came home afterward. I know it must seem strange to you, but I never saw it as anything other than a job; and I think she saw it that way too. I suppose you want to know if she ever felt attracted to her clients, if any of the men she had sex with ever gave her pleasure? I never asked. I don’t think I was interested, to be honest. It was like the background noise on the radio when they’re broadcasting a match. It’s not important. I felt attracted by some of the women who came to fill up their gas tanks, I would watch them bend over to get in their car or to pick up their purse or their handbag from the passenger seat, their tight jeans revealing half their bottom or their mini-skirt revealing most of their thighs. No, I don’t deny it, I did have the odd fantasy, I would smile and make suggestive remarks. But I never cheated on her. I never said to any of those women, go into the toilet and take your panties off, go into the backroom, and I’ll be right with you; or wait at the exit for me to finish my shift, and we’ll find a quiet road somewhere and do it in the car, or we could rent a room for a couple of hours in the Hotel Parada, just down the road. I never did that, and I don’t think she met up with any of her clients either. I’m quite sure that she never had sex for free with anyone—and that’s what matters. Why would she, when she could charge for it? Or, rather, and this is the main point, if she wanted that, why stay with me when she could be with other men who were happy to pay her? No, what she did was her job, and I was her home: me and her son (who I treated better than if he’d been my own son), we were her home. The furniture, the sofa, the smell of coffee and toast when she woke up at midday—that was her home. I don’t think that’s so very difficult to understand. At home, she never misbehaved, she was never moody or angry, she never raised her voice. And, whether she really wanted to or not, I don’t know, but she would let me have sex with her, and I would melt into her arms: yes, she’d have a shower, dab on some perfume and lie back on the bed, and I knew then that she wanted me to fuck her that morning, even though she must have been tired—even sick to death—of doing what she’d been doing with other men just a short while before. But like I say, she never got angry with me, she never raised her voice, she never sulked; probably because she was fed up with the loud voices, the noise, the sound of glasses smacking down on the bar or the clinking of glasses, tired of pretending to pout and flirt, of saying the kind of things whores say: buy me a pack of Marlboros, give me a coin for the jukebox, buy me a drink before I show you the color of my G-string tonight, the kind of things whores say to put you in your place, so that you know it isn’t simply a question of turning up and paying, but that you have to earn them and play the part of the man seducing the woman, even if it’s all lies; a way of disguising what’s really going on and that everyone takes for granted, that going up to a woman’s room is nothing to do with liking or disliking, with feeling attracted or repelled, it’s purely a matter of money—the only bulge in your trousers she’s interested in is the one made by your wallet—but she likes you to pretend to believe that she just happened to be there, in that bar, because she got bored at home, or she didn’t want to go to the movies with her girlfriends, that she’s there because she’s been waiting for you for months. It’s probably because of having to put on a show all the time that she had a loftier idea of family, because she knew what that other life was like, experienced it on a daily basis, was accustomed to living with lies and pretense, and knew what it means to be cut off from family, at the mercy of the first man who comes up to the bar; having no protection, being somehow exposed to the elements. She was already thirty when I met her, no longer a girl, but there’s a market for the kind of woman whose looks are just about to fade, men imagine that, because such women are experienced, they’ll have stored up inside them everything they’ve learned from many hours spent with many men, and imagine their cunt to be a kind of warehouse of unsuspected vices, and they fantasize that, in some way, they’re going to benefit from part of that accumulated capital. It’s not easy to live under the same roof with anyone, and yet we were together for eight years.
He draws the back of his hand across his eyes and then leaves it there for a moment, held up, like a visor, hiding his gaze, expressing a sorrow you might describe as pensive, as if a painful thought had suddenly occurred to him, while I glance at my watch and see that it’s getting late. Joaquín will have put the little one to bed and may even have gone to bed himself, watching one of those National Geographic programs he’s so keen on. Obviously I miss her terribly, he says with a kind of moan. He isn’t crying, but he wants me to feel the emotion in his voice, in his expression. He’s saying to me: I could easily burst into tears right now, or I’ve cried so often just thinking about her, or I just can’t cry any more, I’m all cried out, but I’m offering you this pretense of crying, just as actors repeat with complete sincerity words written long ago by someone else, and they do so with real feeling, as if this were the very first time they were acting out to an audience their grief at being abandoned or their anguish at a loved one’s death. He’s acting out an old grief for me. In the theater, that capacity for making one’s feelings seem real is called getting inside the character. But how can I trust his version of events? I try to imagine what she was like, this woman who for ten or twelve years prostituted herself in roadside brothels: no, she was never a high-class whore, maybe she started too late for that, she always said she didn’t like the pretentious clients you get in private clubs. Business executives are just riffraff, she used to say to me, far worse than the usual poor losers, soldiers, drivers, workmen, who pay to have sex with me. She was a whore in a club heaving with immigrants who go there in order to squander the little they’ve earned that week, drunken workers or temps, and drunks pure and simple, that’s what he’s telling me, he’s describing the streets, the atmosphere, I don’t know Madrid, I’ve only been there once in my life when Joaquín and I went to see the musical
The Beauty and the Beast.
What this man is telling me can’t be true. I try to find out what the woman was like, to get some physical image of her. What was she like? I ask. And he: What do you mean what was she like? Me: Was she tall, short, dark, fair, did she have a long face or a round one? I even wonder if perhaps she resembled me, if she was the same age I am now, and that this is what triggered those memories and his need to confide in someone: although I’m not convinced by the dress he’s busily stitching together to clothe the body of that woman whose character I can only deduce from what he’s telling me. Such sweetness, such serenity. It just doesn’t ring true. The world she inhabited is just the complete and utter pits. Human traffickers, drugs, gonorrhea, syphilis, AIDS. And there he is describing a kind of flower opening in the dawn light. Spending her thirty-first birthday, her thirty-second, her thirty-third, her thirty-eighth at his side. And every night opening her legs in some miserable little room on the outskirts of Madrid. It’s just not credible. In places like that you learn to shout and fight, to hurl insults, to attack and to defend yourself. You learn how unstable everything is, how time is eaten up in the few seconds it takes to knock back a drink or stick a needle in your arm. Besides, a woman doesn’t just stumble into that world, she must already have fallen into some pretty bad company, have led a certain kind of life. To sink that low. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand what kind of woman this is he’s telling me about, a woman who never once raised her voice in all the time they lived together; and the child, the child who, to hear him speak, seems never to have said a word, a child who ages along with them, seven, eight, eleven, doing his homework at the table in the living room, having a piece of bread and chocolate or a doughnut and a glass of milk when he gets in from school; asleep in his bedroom, hugging his teddy bear or whatever. The cozy family portrait he’s painting can’t be true. Or perhaps it is, perhaps they were both so weary that they were like a comfortable piece of furniture to each other, the other person’s body a sofa on which they could collapse after an exhausting day, a long journey, the welcoming silence of the siesta; or in their case, the whispers of some morning dream, because their life in common began when she returned home wearily just as the sky was becoming edged with mother-of-pearl, or when she made her way unsteadily home in the broad light of day, the first rays of sun gilding the furniture in the living room, the kitchen and the bedroom with the sweet, honeyed light of early morning. Was he working in a gas station then too? Did he choose the night shift so as to be able to spend time with her during the day, or did he try to have his timetable coincide with the boy’s, so that he could pick him up from school and make him an afternoon snack? The woman returns from work feeling weary, she closes the shutters in the bedroom, she showers, dries off, and he’s there waiting for her with two steaming cups of coffee on the table, with some crisp, slightly burned toast made from yesterday’s bread, which she nibbles at indifferently; probably the boy had been treated so appallingly before that he thought it best to stay with this man who never raised his voice or, more importantly, his hand to him, not like other men he’d come across before; better the silent man who, when he came home, unwrapped the shiny silver foil from the slices of cold meat, mortadella or turkey or whatever and put it on a plate with some olives and some chopped red pepper; perhaps a bar of chocolate too. No, that can’t be how it was, human beings are worse than that. Nothing can be other than it is. All the colors of the spectrum come together to form one murky stain. Why did I stop to talk to him? What am I doing here? I only popped in for some gas, or so I thought, then straight home to bed: I’ve just finished the late shift at the warehouse, and I’m in a hurry to get home, I’m too tired to do anything more than grab a bite to eat, have a shower and go to bed; or rather, I was tired, but his words have made my tiredness evaporate. Joaquín will already be asleep or else listening to the radio on his headphones; it’s the sports program now, it’s wall-to-wall soccer at this time of night. I’m utterly exhausted. Why did I begin this absurd conversation with a man I know by sight because he’s pumped the gas so often, but who I’ve never really spoken to, just smiled at perhaps when he gave me the card machine so that I could tap in my PIN. He’d hand me the receipt, return my card and I’d say thank you and put the receipt in my purse. On my way to the door, we occasionally exchanged a few words, then I’d say good night and he would repeat this back to me as if his deeper voice were an echo of mine. Today, though, he didn’t let me serve myself, but rushed to grab the nozzle from me, so I had nothing to do, and while he was filling the tank, he looked up at me a couple of times and smiled, a kind of bored smile, but that was enough, it was as if he had hypnotized me, we went back into the shop so that I could pay, and instead of remaining silent while I put in my PIN number, somehow or other we got talking, and he came out from behind the counter, sat on a stool and asked about my job, because you always come in about this time, he said, he asked about my family, no, no one’s waiting up for me, the children and my husband will be asleep, I said, or else he’ll be listening to the soccer on his headphones or watching a nature program, now that he’s unemployed, he spends all night with his headphones on, and I laughed a nervous laugh, no, he’s not much older than me, we’re more or less the same age, there’s just three years’ difference, I said, although I’ve no idea why, and he told me that he lives alone now, but that he had been married to a woman who was older than him, and who had left him, that he’d had a son too, or almost a son, or more than a son, he said, but he hadn’t heard a word from them since, then he began telling me this incredible story about his life with the prostitute and her son. Since I always stop by at the same hour of the night, the man probably thinks I’m lying, that I don’t work in the fruit warehouse at all, but in some late-night club or other and, in telling me his story, what he’s really saying is that he doesn’t care what kind of work I do, nor that I’m a bit older than him. I have the feeling he’s trying to draw me in with his story, that he wants to do with me what he says he’s never done with anyone and which is probably what he tries to do on the night shift whenever he gets the chance, showing me to the small back room he mentioned, alongside the toilets and the storeroom for the cleaning products, giving me the key to the door and telling me: get your panties off and I’ll be right with you, then, once he’s back, bolting the door and putting his arms around me, slobbering all over me, shoving me against the wall, hurriedly removing my clothes, grasping my head with his two hands to keep me crouched there until the very last moment, and then quickly zipping himself up again and saying: you can’t stay here because the guy who does the cashing out comes on at one o’clock and it’s already half past midnight. Yes, that’s obviously why he’s telling me his story, and yet I feel drawn to his sadness, which could be either real or fake, and although I think his story is a lie, his sadness is real enough, as is the fleshy hand crisscrossed with black lines that he clenches into a fist and raises to his eyes to wipe away a possibly phony tear, and the air of hopeless resignation he can’t hide, and which I feel suddenly tempted to find out more about, to find out if that sad, serene body is the real him or if it conceals a predator calculating his every move as he eyes his prey. I can’t bear not having her, not having the boy, he says, but they just left, and now his voice has groan hoarse, and almost cavernous. You don’t know what it’s like to go home and find no one there, you’re lucky, you have your husband, your children. I feel as much attraction as fear, and I get up and place my hand on his shoulder and he sits there, still and contrite, his hand covering his eyes; between us stands a glass of water with ice and lemon in it, the ice slowly melting, while I wonder why I told him about the problems I’ve been having since Joaquín
lost his job, about the distance that has grown up between us now that we spend more time together. Why did I tell him about my home, my private life? I think that, I, too, am a predator, although what I’m mainly thinking is that I’m completely lost. I want to know more about him.