“Yes, the old man told me that if you make a complaint, they’ll give you Spanish citizenship.”
“Liliana, you had the chance to leave him and the kids in Colombia and make a new life for yourself here; you could have started over. Your parents would have looked after the kids, because
he
certainly wouldn’t have, after all, your Mom was still alive then, and he’d soon have lost interest in you when you stopped sending him any money, you could have vanished and started all over. You’d been through the worst and could have started to enjoy life, but no, you paid for their airfare with the sweat of your you-know-what: you paid for your own misery, you little fool. Your husband didn’t want to know how you earned your money and so he pretended he didn’t know and never even asked. He pretended not to know because it suited him that way, but he must have known, just as he knew that his brother used you as a drug mule when you first came to Spain, how much did you bring in, by the way? And Wilson said nothing, because you were still sending him money, no, he said nothing and didn’t even tell you that, when he came to Spain, he had a few grams of drugs up his ass too, he kept you completely in the dark about that, and I bet he never said anything to you about how much he got for those drugs either. He kept any money to himself, for his nights out, for those Friday nights when no one knows where he’s been, but which he returns from smelling of sour sweat and other women’s perfume. And now he has you scrubbing stairs and wiping old men’s bottoms. You poor little girl. Come here and let me comb your lovely hair, let me touch it, it’s so soft, what a shame you’ve given it to a brute who doesn’t even appreciate it, let me unpin it, that’s it, let it cascade down, the way those femmes fatales do in soap operas, let me just fluff it out a bit so that it falls on your shoulders like shiny, curly, black water, and it smells so good too, hmm, let me bury my face in your hair, let me kiss your soft neck, what do you mean, it tickles? Doesn’t he ever kiss you there? The old man must have kissed you while you were working for him, I mean, he gave you those earrings and that lovely necklace, which you told me your husband got rid of in a matter of days, and how the old man kept saying he wanted to see you wearing them and you had to keep making excuses because you didn’t have them any more. Even the old man dumped you in the end, he obviously wanted to have sex with you too, but then he just got rid of you.”
“I can come and see you whenever you like now, because there’s no work any more and every bit of money helps, that’s what I told him on that last day, when the old man told me he couldn’t keep me on. I can’t pay you a wage, he said, and, please, call me Esteban. You don’t work here any more, so now we can be friends. I said: in Colombia we tend to address older people as Don or Doña. And he: I mean we can still see each other, just come by whenever you want, so that we can see you, so that we can see each other, I wouldn’t expect you to do any work, I can’t afford to pay for that now and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to again, but that’s all I want, Liliana, just for you to pop in now and then for a chat and a coffee, a
tintico
, that’s all: it’s my turn to cry today and your turn to console me. You see, I’m bankrupt, I don’t even have enough money to pay my mortgage, well, that isn’t exactly how it is, it’s a long story; but I’d be so grateful if you could come and keep me and my father company sometimes, now that we’re going to be so alone. Of course, Don Esteban, of course, I understand, but you know how busy I am and that I barely have time for me or my husband and my children, so it’s quite hard to find time for anyone else. I have to earn a living. I can’t come here if you don’t pay me. That’s what I said, and he opened his eyes very wide as if he was going to have an attack or something. The look on his face really frightened me. I thought he was either going to hit me or be ill, and then, suddenly, out of nowhere, came this hard, gruff voice: Well, you’d better be off then. You don’t want to waste your time with me. Go somewhere where they’ll pay you. It really shook me. Did the soft old thing really think I’d go on wiping his father’s bum and chatting to him for no money? That’s what he expected, but I summoned up the courage to say: You just be thankful I never told my husband about you touching and kissing me, you know: give me a hug, give me a little kiss, go on. That’s between you and me. I left then, and he slammed the door behind me so loudly, I bet the whole street must have heard. The old fool started weeping when I said that. He probably just wanted me to feel sorry for him and make sure I didn’t say anything to Wilson, although I do understand how lonely those two old men are, but tough. I’d already pocketed the money he gave me as a kind of bonus for firing me, because he really wasn’t a bad old guy, and as for the money he lent me before, well, he’s in for a long wait before he gets that back.”
“You mean he lent you money? A lot? You must have done something in return. If you had told Wilson about the kisses and the money, he’d have killed him, but then he would have killed you too.”
“Oh, I doubt it. When I brought home the earrings and the necklace, he just grunted: Why did he give you those, then? If that old bastard comes on to you, I’ll kill him. But a week later, the earrings and the necklace were gone, and I still don’t know whether he sold them or gave them away. Kill me? After what I’ve had to put up with. He’s drunk as a skunk most nights. When he does come home on a Saturday, because often he doesn’t get back until Monday, I have to take off those great clodhoppers of his and lift his legs onto the bed, where he lies snoring for hours, like a very noisy corpse, no, it’s certainly not the pale pink and green tulle they wrap you in on your wedding day, damn right it isn’t, and then there’s that sweetish, sourish smell that kind of creeps under your skin if he happens to come home feeling horny and wants to kiss you, the god-awful stink of sour saliva, tobacco and alcohol, and him filling your mouth with his hot, disgusting saliva and that sour waft of indigestion. Sometimes he gets up in the early hours and drags himself off to throw up in the toilet and when he comes back to bed, he licks your face, thrusts his tongue in your mouth, as hard as a muscle, and then his saliva tastes of vomit too, because he hasn’t even had the courtesy to wash his mouth out, and this happens night after night. When I first met him, he smelled of shaving lotion, eau de cologne, and his mouth smelled of toothpaste and his saliva and his breath of fresh mint. Of course, at the time, you see him as a suitor, as a fiancé, who bathes and shaves and perfumes himself before coming to see you, and you see this radiant man and you’re fool enough to think things are bound to get better, that he’ll mature and soften and won’t fly into a howling rage as he sometimes does, you think: he’s still young, but when he sees his first child or, rather, when he holds his son in his arms, when he holds in the palm of his great big hands that little scrap of warm flesh moving and laughing and crying, he’ll mellow, he won’t have those worrying tantrums, he’ll be the handsome, perfumed, affectionate man who touches you gently as you dance. But no, the child who he finds captivating at first, who makes him laugh, the child he plays with, later on, just seems to annoy him. He says brusquely: Can’t you shut that brat up or change his fucking diapers, because he stinks, I’ve never known a child whose shit stank like that, it’s like an old man’s shit—as if he himself wasn’t related to the producer of that shit. And you answer back and say: How would you know what an old man’s shit smells like? I do, because of the shit I have to clean up every day so that you can go out drinking, all you care about are those good-for-nothing friends of yours at the bar, that’s the only smell that doesn’t seem to bother you, because you even find it disgusting when it’s my time of the month, you get angry if you touch me and find your fingers all sticky, but that’s how it is with women, and if you don’t like it, go and find yourself a man, who doesn’t have a period, and give it to him up the ass and then see how your cock smells when you take it out, you bastard, well, that’s what I wanted to say to him, but I didn’t dare, because I knew he’d smack me in the face.”
“Pink tulle, the loving bridegroom, that’s straight out of those trashy daytime soaps you have time to watch now that you don’t go and look after the two old men at the workshop, and that’s what’s feeding your fantasies. You’re going mad.”
“It’s true, Susana, when I’ve got a free afternoon, now that I don’t go and see the old men, I listen to the radio and watch TV, and that’s how I know more about what’s going on. I think I heard that stuff about God on the radio and heard it again in the fish shop or the shop where I buy limes and chillis for the
ceviche
, yes, while I was waiting on the line, I heard a woman say it, and, according to her, even the Pope agreed. She’d read it in some newspaper, she said, and the Pope had stated that there was no hell, and if there’s no hell, then there’s no heaven either and no God, and that’s why all these bad things are happening.”
“What a thing to say! I mean, in that case what are you doing talking to the dead? Where do you think they are? If the Pope agrees that God is dead, then he should give him a decent burial and join the line at the unemployment benefits office.
After all, isn’t he God’s representative on Earth? Anyway, as you well know, gods don’t die, they’re immortal. Our gods back home and the ones the Blacks brought with them on the boats from Africa are all immortal, yes even we are: we die for a while, as if we were having a long sleep, but in time, we wake up. We will wake up.”
“But how? Where will we wake up? Will we wake up here, surrounded by all these damn Spaniards, or will we wake up in Quindío or in Caldas or in Risaralda, on the banks of the River Cauca, or in Magdalena? We’ll probably wake up downstream, in Cartagena de Indias, in one of those discotheques full of rather pathetic, lukewarm Spaniards looking for a bit of Caribbean fire, or else in the middle of the ocean. Will we wake up one warm spring afternoon, lying in the shade of a big mango tree or among the flowering coffee trees or the guamo trees, and will we wake up to be confronted by the faces of those same bastards who drove us out?”
“How should I know? But we will wake up. I know we will, because the gospels say so. It’s a matter of faith. If it’s not true and there’s nothing after death, then what’s left for us? After all our suffering . . .”
“But who’s going to wake up those half-eaten bodies, the ones the vultures tore the guts out of probably a hundred years before? No one comes back from the dead, no one ever will.”
“I feel sorry for you, you know. You may have your head stuffed full of TV soaps, but you’ve no imagination, that’s why you can’t believe in God, only in your ugly old dead people, you can’t believe that this life will change one day, that life can be different. I believe that one day I’ll get lucky and win the lottery, and I pray for that to happen and praying comforts me. I would pray even if there wasn’t a God. Just in case.”
“No, you just don’t want to admit that what’s happening to us here in Spain is even worse than that. We don’t even wonder any more if miracles are possible or not, whereas we used to in Colombia, or if we’ll ever see justice or understand the truth or if you can achieve happiness simply by doing your duty; we don’t even ask ourselves now what the meaning of life is, only if any of this makes any sense at all. There’s no time, we can’t be bothered, we just can’t do it. Those questions have grown too big for us.”
“But, in that case, you can’t even have the consolation of a good cry. People cry over something they’ve lost or something they want. Neither of these applies to you. Do you see what I mean? So why are you crying? You’ve suffered a lot, I don’t deny it, and that’s what’s troubling you: all that past suffering. But so what if you had to work the streets in order to bring over your husband and son? There’s no shame in that.”
“Don’t be cruel, don’t remind me of those things. It’s water under the bridge. It happened. Necessity made it happen, but it’s over. It no longer exists. OK, a new life will come along, but we also have an old life that’s been and gone. All right, I agree, I too believe that we’ll wake up after we’re dead. It’s a matter of faith. A better life. Otherwise, what else have we got? We’ll all have suffered for nothing . . .”
“I know, Liliana. For the moment, on this damp, misty afternoon, when the cold really seeps into your bones, God is a good, hot, aromatic cup of coffee, made with freshly ground and roasted beans; in summer look for God in an ice cream cone—one of those turrón- or chocolate-flavored ones; or else papaya or mango, because the Spanish do make papaya and mango and guayaba ice cream now, and one day they’ll have durian-flavored ice cream too, although I think they find the strong smell a bit disgusting. Not that I like the smell much either, but the fruit itself is delicious. Just think of the ice cream shop on the square as a little piece of the heaven we dream of or a heaven that is at least within our grasp and hasn’t yet been taken away from us. Sit down with your kids on the chairs outside as the sun is going down on an August evening, and order a lovely creamy mango ice cream and you’ll find the God of summer right there, just as, in winter, he’s there in a hot cup of coffee. When the Spaniards came to occupy our country, we knew there wasn’t only one god, because there are lots of them, one for every thing, for every day, and we tried to teach them that, but no, they were so pigheaded they had to frighten the other gods off so that theirs was the only one left, and what did we gain from that?”
“And yet why do we ask ourselves when will we meet again and where and how? Do we want to suffer and suffer and go on suffering even once all the suffering is over? I mean why go to Mass? Death brings rest, it frightens us because it’s the unknown, because we can’t imagine what it means not to be, but you just have to think of it as a chance finally to rest, and that’s that. I don’t want to find myself back inside this same body in a million years’ time, Susana, a body that makes so many demands and that allowed itself to be deceived by the useless twat who has ruined my life. All this stuff about heaven is so relative: spending all eternity with God; think of the number of people up there, and you don’t get to choose your neighbors either, you know, they could be anyone, it must be even more of a jumble there than it is down here, everyone with their own language and food and peculiarities, and every day for all eternity, they’ll all be jostling for a chance to see God.”