“Juanito,” said Damián, coming up to him with his arm around the woman’s waist,“I’d like to introduce you to a friend of mine. Conchi, this moron is my elder brother.”
Nicanor sniggered, and even Juan smiled.
“Yes,” said Conchi, tugging at Juan’s shirt as if she wanted to straighten his collar. Her long crimson talons turned this gesture, which his mother made when seeing him off at the door every morning, into something worrying, alien. “You can say what you like, Damián, but he’s a lot better-looking than you, you know.” She turned suddenly as if wanting to trap Damián, who was grinning.“Now I know why you haven’t brought him here before.”
“Who, him?” Damián pointed at Juan, then waved a hand dismissively. “He’s always got his nose buried in a book, the idiot. He’d drown in a glass of water.”
“Fine.” She stroked Juan’s throat with the edges of her nails. “Whatever you say. But he’s going to have another drink. My treat.You know I have a weakness for nice young men.”
It was the second time that day that a woman had called him “nice” and Juan Olmedo felt tempted to answer that he must have a weakness for bad women. He watched Conchi as she headed back behind the bar: she was too old, too like some gargoyle on a Gothic cathedral, to remind him of Charo, yet it was Charo who had spoken these words on the phone, ruining his dessert that day, and the following day, and the day after that, and many more to come.Their conversation still stung his ears, and he couldn’t get rid of the suddenly bitter taste of the strawberries that had frozen in his mouth as he held the phone to his ear for seconds that felt like years. “Too nice”—a couple of syllables to chew on, but ones he’d never fully managed to digest. Too nice. Nothing and nobody in this world was too nice, nothing and nobody, he repeated to himself, nothing was too good, too nice, nobody except him.
Even his second whisky didn’t clear away the bitter taste, but it did promise to dull the endless looping of those two words inside his head. Now accustomed to the gloom, Juan examined his surroundings and saw in greater detail the faces and bodies, the hunters and dogs, the knots and anchors on the walls.The bar was small, and fairly empty.To his left, Nicanor was shaking his head rhythmically, as if he couldn’t decide between a skinny girl with long dirty-blond hair and eyes furiously ringed with black who looked like a junkie, and an older woman of about thirty, with short hair, who looked healthy and experienced, and who was leaning against the wall smoking. Juan would have chosen the second girl, but he didn’t intend to compete for her with Nicanor, because he didn’t like her enough to prove to himself that Charo was wrong. Nor did he much like the look of the two girls his brother had chosen to joke around with on the dance floor, or the sad-looking woman with frizzy hair who was chatting to a grey-haired man at a nearby table. Damián was soon fed up with dancing and came back to the bar with his two companions. At the far end of the room, Juan suddenly caught sight of two magnificent, perfect, endless legs, extending between a red patent miniskirt and a pair of black stilettos. As he continued to stare, the owner of the legs uncrossed and stretched them briefly before standing up, as if she wanted to display the full range of their possibilities to her admirer. She headed towards him, walking around the raised dance floor, taking her time. Juan ran his eyes over the rest of her body and concluded that, on the whole, it was up to the standard of her amazing legs. She wasn’t exactly young, but she wasn’t middle-aged either. She had a slender waist, full hips, a slim torso with narrow shoulders, and round breasts squeezed into a tight, black body stocking, that made them look like ripe fruit, tempting, almost edible.
When she was halfway across the room, the woman with the frizzy hair put out a hand to stop her, as if she wanted to say something; the owner of the amazing legs leaned in to listen. From that angle, her cleavage would have driven any man crazy, but by then Juan had been able to see her face—it was angular, tired, and beautiful in a difficult, unconventional way. Her hair was dyed mahogany, and there were dark circles beneath her eyes; she had a large nose, and something else, something he couldn’t quite capture, a familiar air that toyed with him, masking its origin. He couldn’t possibly know her, yet Juan had the feeling that he did, or that he knew somebody very like her.
“Hey!” he said to Nicanor, who was still shaking his head to left and right.“Who’s that girl?”
“Oh, yeah, Gogo—her real name’s Carmen, but they call her Gogo because she used to dance in a club. She’s hot.”
“Yes.” It was true, she really was.
“And she’s bloody good. I’d recommend her, seriously.”
But just then, Juan realized without a shadow of a doubt who she was.
“She’s the wife of that locksmith in the Calle Avila, the one who cuts keys, isn’t she?”
“Correct,” answered Nicanor, nodding. “The very same.”
Juan had seen her many times before—the same tired face, the same dark circles—enveloped in baggy, green overalls covered with metal shavings, her right hand on the lever that kept the keys in place, her eyes on the saw cutting the outline of the copy. He’d often spoken to her, an ordinary woman, with a scrubbed face and hair tied back in a ponytail, almost always alone in the shop because the locksmith was out opening locks or fitting them in people’s homes.
“But she works with her husband! I see her all the time, we always take our keys there.What’s she doing here?”
Nicanor stared at him as if he didn’t understand the question, and took a few seconds to answer:
“What do you think she’s doing? Earning cash, like the rest of them.”
“Cash.”
“Yes.Things are pretty rough and ready here, they’re not professionals. Conchi—” He broke off suddenly as Juan took out a thousand-peseta note and placed it on the bar.“What are you doing?”
“I’m leaving.”
“What?” Nicanor curled his lip in a mocking smile.“Come on, Juan, get back here.You don’t want to prove your brother right, do you?”
But Juan left anyway, although he wasn’t fast enough to avoid hearing the woman’s voice as she called out to him.
“Hey!” she shouted. “Hey, boy!” (‘Right, this is ready,” Juan heard.) “Where are you going?” (‘If it doesn’t fit the lock, you tell your mother to send it back and I’ll file it down.”) “Come back!” (‘No need to pay for it now, your mother can pay me when she sees me.”)
Outside, he realized that his cheeks were burning. He didn’t need a mirror to know that he was blushing, but he couldn’t tell whether it was because he was ashamed of himself, of his nervousness, of running away, or of the locksmith’s wife who worked as a prostitute in her spare time. Perhaps he was simply ashamed that places like this existed, one metro stop away from his home. In that moment, he knew only that he felt uncomfortable in his own body, that his arms and legs seemed heavy, as if they didn’t belong to him, that his cheeks were still bright red despite the cool evening air, and that he never, ever should have let Damián talk him into going.
He headed down Bravo Murillo, no particular destination in mind. He would have carried on walking to the ends of the earth, but he knew himself, and he knew that sooner or later he would head home, walk past Charo’s front door, open his own, go straight to his room, take out his books and start studying with the same ferocious determination as ever. He knew it, this was his personality, his nature, the best of him, the worst, the punishment he rewarded himself with when he was alone, the prize for which others tormented him; the hard shiny rock of a difficult but burning ambition that the verdict of a local princess had crushed to a pile of dust.
“Look, Juan,” she’d said, and he knew that something bad was coming. “The thing is, I . . . I think it’d be best if we left it, you know? Because, it’s not that I don’t like you—you’re good-looking, you’re sweet and all that—but you spend all day sitting at home studying. I hardly ever see you, and then when I do . . .You don’t like parties, or discos, or any of that stuff. The thing is I need something else, something more lively. I like going to the cinema, and I like sitting around chatting, but really what I like most is going out with a gang of people, dancing, having a good time. But you don’t like my friends. You’re always saying they’re arrogant and childish, and well, maybe they are, but they’re my friends, you know? And, OK, we’re going out together, so it’s normal for us to kiss and cuddle, but I don’t want to spend the whole afternoon in a bar doing that . . . It’s not that I’m bored, I like kissing you, but I can’t explain it, I just want something else. I think you’re too nice for me, Juan, that’s what it is. It’s not that I’m bad, but I like guys who think about more than just passing their exams. Guys who know how to have fun. I don’t mean that you don’t know how to, it’s just that you’re not even interested in having fun, Juan, that’s the truth.”
This was what she’d said, and if Damián had been listening, he would have agreed. He might even have applauded.This was what Charo had said and Juan hadn’t even defended himself, because all he could think of saying was what he always said:“But if I don’t get good marks in June I might lose my grant.” Charo knew this, she’d heard it a thousand times, but she didn’t care, it didn’t matter to her, the way it didn’t matter to his father, who still made him work shifts at the bakery at weekends even when he was in the middle of exams; the way it didn’t matter to his brother, who came home and put his music on full blast and said that if Juan didn’t like it he could go and do his homework elsewhere; the way it didn’t even seem to matter, deep down, to his mother, who was always telling everyone how proud she was but then did nothing to make his life easier.And that evening, when he reached Cuatro Caminos, saw from his watch that it was nine thirty, and kept on walking, he started to think that maybe they were right, because that’s how things had always been, right from the beginning.
The beginning was in Villaverde Alto in a tiny flat next to a park, over an hour away, first by van and then by metro, from the bakery in Calle Hermosilla. The bakery was what had brought his parents to Madrid only a few months before Juan was born. Juan’s only memory of Aunt Remedios, a fat, clumsy, and sour-faced old lady, was of her shaking a finger at him and saying she’d cut off his hand if she saw him take so much as one piece of bubble gum without paying for it.Yet it was Aunt Remedios who had asked Juan’s father, her youngest nephew, to help her with the shop when she became a widow. He was newly married, and as the only alternative open to him was laboring on a farm, he didn’t hesitate. So Juan’s parents ended up in Villaverde Alto and with the prospect of inheriting the business in a few years, not even the exhausting routine of early mornings, endless journeys there and back, and even working on Sundays made them lose heart. By the time Damián was a year old, their father was staying at home on Mondays, and it was their mother who did all the work at the shop while Aunt Remedios barked orders from her chair behind the counter. But Juan had no memory of this, although he clearly remembered his great-aunt’s funeral, because it was pouring with rain, and the cemetery was awash with mud. His mother, in the early months of pregnancy, was very pale and had to put her hand in front of her mouth every so often. Damián, holding their father’s hand, wouldn’t stop crying, and their father was carrying their little sister Paquita, who had just learned to walk and couldn’t keep still.The gravediggers were cursing under their breath because their boots kept slipping on the slick mud. Eventually Mama moved away a few paces and vomited, holding onto a tree. Everything was sad and dirty and wet. But Juan was happy, because the bakery now belonged to Papa, and before setting out that morning his parents had explained that he could be happy but he mustn’t let it show.
The rainy morning of the funeral, Juan was five and Damián was almost four. A few months later, when Trini was born, they all had their photograph taken, and their mother placed it on the sideboard in the hall. His mother was in the middle, holding the baby wrapped in a shawl that trailed over her skirt. Damián was sitting on her left, looking very serious, wearing short trousers and resting his hands on his thighs.Their father was standing behind, resting one hand on his son’s head and the other on his wife’s shoulder. To their right, beside the bench and also standing, was Juan, grinning at the camera and carrying a very blond and smiling Paquita in his arms. Alfonso was born three years later, and they had a new photograph taken; this was also placed on the sideboard in the hall. The two photographs were very similar: Damián was again sitting on the bench, between Mama with a baby in her lap and Paquita, more serious this time, and with darker hair. As before, Papa was standing behind them, and this time Juan was next to him, but not smiling, perhaps because he was carrying Trini who was crying. By then, Damián was seven, but he never—either then or later on—appeared in a photograph carrying any of his younger brothers or sisters.
And he never went to the hospital. It was Juan who went with his mother and the baby to the teaching hospital, where a team of specialists monitored Alfonso’s development every two weeks so that they could give a definitive diagnosis. He would always recall those trips with horror. They began with tense expectation, punctuated with smiles and erroneous predictions—“This time, Juanito, you’ll see, I’m telling you he’s fine. He follows my finger with his eyes, I’m sure he does, haven’t you seen? You just haven’t noticed, but he is focusing, really he is. I should know, I gave birth to him”—and ended with stunned, angry weeping, his mother clasping the child to her breast and covering his head with kisses. Juan would hurry out after her, holding on to the hem of her coat, suspecting that she wouldn’t even have noticed if she left him behind or he became lost in the crowd on the way to the metro.While the doctors were examining Alfonso, Juan waited outside on his own in a room full of photos of chubby healthy babies, and it was here, one afternoon, that he decided he would become a doctor, but that he would never look after sick children.The news that Alfonso’s impairment was irrevocable confirmed his decision. By the age of nine, Juan Olmedo felt an imaginary duty, born of guilt, to love his younger brother and to somehow compensate his parents for having a child who would always be defenseless. Since then, he had been both the cleverest and the stupidest member of his family.