He sat down to rest on a bench, resigned to the fact that he’d have to go home on foot, and suddenly felt scared by just how much he missed her. Charo hated benches, and long walks, but the only money Juan had was what he earned working in his father’s shop on Saturday and Sunday mornings, and it didn’t go very far. Even-handed when he told his sons off, their father was obsessively careful when it came to their weekly pay, and he was not distinguished by his generosity as a boss.Things had been different in the beginning, when he and Charo first started dating—he’d still had his small Christmas bonus and the money he received as gifts. Charo had already turned him down twice, always with the same excuse, that she was too young to have a boyfriend, but always with the same inviting smile that compelled him to try again, in early March, when she turned seventeen.This time she said yes, and he felt as if he was walking on air.The first time he kissed her on the mouth, he found an unexpected softness and sweetness, like caramel. He’d never been as happy as he was then, during the early days. She showed him off proudly to her friends and laughed at anything he said, and kissed him at traffic lights, and put her arms around him out of the blue in the middle of the street. But the time came when he had used up all his savings, and his exams were getting closer, and it occurred to her to wonder why he didn’t have a car, and why he shut himself up in his room every afternoon with his books, and why, at the weekend, they spent all their time just sitting on park benches or going for walks, and having no more than one drink each. She never complained to him about any of this, but Juan could tell what she felt from the weary look in her eyes, the impatient curl of her lips, her curt, lazy answers, and he felt that the prestige of his age and status was quickly deflating, like a balloon whizzing around the room before it emptied completely. This was why, the previous Saturday, in one last desperate attempt to keep her, he had asked Damián to lend him five thousand pesetas so he could take her to one of the biggest and most expensive clubs in town.
“Get off me! For fuck’s sake!” Only a moment before she’d seemed dazzled, delighted by the lights, the mirrors, the dark velvet upholstery, the gilded boxes, and the majestic foyer of the converted old theatre. But now she pushed him away violently, almost as soon as they sat down on one of the sofas. “It’s unbelievable.You’re so serious but then you can’t keep your hands to yourself. Unbelievable.”
“It’s only because I like you so much.” He always gave the same response, and it was terrifying because it was true. He liked her so much that when he wasn’t with her, he saw her everywhere—on the library ceiling, in the windows of cake shops, in his coffee at breakfast every morning, in the section of sky that he could see from the balcony of his room. And when he was with her, he couldn’t take his eyes, or his hands, or his mouth, off her, he was all over her, he couldn’t help it, he just had to touch her, kiss her, hold her in his arms until he could feel the shape of her ribs beneath his fingers. He liked her, more than a lot, more than anything else in the world.
“OK, I like you too, but I don’t smother you. I’m not on top of you all the time like a bear,” she said, rearranging her clothes. She moved away slightly and looked at him. “Just control yourself and don’t paw at me, not here.”
Juan moved a little way from her, grabbed his glass, put his feet up on the table in front of them, and with his shoulders hunched, sat in a pained silence befitting his offended dignity.When Charo got up and asked him to dance, he just shook his head, and did so each time she came over and held out her hand to him. At midnight, the lights were dimmed to a cool white like a misty moon, to signal the start of the slow dances. Charo came to him once more, taking him by the hand and dragging him on to the dance floor, where she let him put his arms around her.
“I’m sorry, Charo,” he whispered in her ear, feeling the shape of her body against his.“It’s just that I like you so much, seriously, I don’t know, it makes me crazy. I can’t help it when I’m with you. Please don’t be angry with me, Charo, that’s all it is, I just like you so much.” He paused and waited for a word, a movement, a signal from her, but he could feel no change in the body moving against his, and impatience prompted his first mistake: “I couldn’t bear it if this ended, if you left me.” She still didn’t react, so he abased himself further:“You’re not going to leave me, are you? Tell me you’re not.”
He’d received his answer that afternoon, on the phone, just as the family was eating dessert. Juan Olmedo glanced at his watch—it was almost eleven. He lit his last cigarette, got up and set off home. It was a very long way, too long for him to be able to sustain the fantasy of a possible future—quiet years of transition until he’d finished his degree and begun work in a hospital, swapped his wages as a part-time baker for a doctor’s salary, and could buy himself a car, and a house; until his real life began and he was somebody at last, no longer the rough draft of a person that he seemed to have been for years.Then she’d realize she’d made a mistake, and she’d come for him, and everything would go back to the way it was before.This thought cheered him for the first stretch of the journey, but he was still a long way from home, his legs weighed a ton, he didn’t even have enough money to take the underground, and Charo had left him. Defeat, like a clean, absolute horizon, crushed all his dreams.
Once, he’d had the world in the palm of his hand. He remembered its weight, its size, its perfect spherical fullness. He remembered the heat of that first June morning, the furious blue of a sky that was a furnace even before the sun had fully risen. He could feel the heat of the pavement, which hadn’t had a chance to cool during the long, sultry fly-ridden night, through the rubber soles of his trainers. That morning, the ten o’clock bus was full of tired, sweaty people, who looked more bored than ever at having to go to work when the holidays were only a fortnight away. But Juan didn’t pay them any attention. Freshly showered and very much awake, he was so nervous he didn’t even notice how stiflingly hot it was inside the packed bus. Holding on to the rail with one hand, a full head taller than most other passengers, he went over the exam questions again and again, wavering between the memory of his euphoria as he handed in his script, and fear of possible disaster, the same deep ambivalence that had been eating him up for weeks.
He wasn’t the last to arrive at the school, nor was he one of the first, though the office door was still shut.Their tutor smiled when he saw them all—a dozen teenagers, rigid with nerves, some on the verge of hysteria—and muttered, “It wasn’t too bad, not too bad at all,” before going into the office with three or four other teachers. Handing over the exam results was no more than this, a simple formality, so quick that Juan was almost surprised to find himself standing before his tutor’s desk.
“Congratulations, Olmedo,” his teacher said as he handed over a small white piece of paper bearing Juan’s name, his registration number and another number—an unbelievably, inconceivably, patently absurd, high mark.
“Is this my grade?” Juan asked in disbelief, pointing to the magical number. The teachers all nodded, laughing at his bewilderment. “Nine point seven two? I got nine point seven two?”
“Yes, the second-highest mark in the entire province of Madrid.” His tutor looked even more happy and proud than Juan himself.“That’s why you were given the second decimal place, to distinguish you from a girl at the Lope de Vega School who also got a nine point seven. In the end, they gave her the higher mark but hers was in Arts subjects and, whatever they say, well, you know . . . Anyway, we’ve never had anything like it in Villaverde. You deserve it, Olmedo. Congratulations.”
“Shit!”At last Juan looked up from the piece of paper, glanced round at the other teachers seated at the table and then looked at his mark again. “Shit! Shit! I knew it had gone well, but not this well! I really wasn’t expecting it. Shit! I don’t know what to say. I still can’t believe it!”
He was even more lost for words when his teachers all stood up and started clapping.Their uncharacteristic behavior attracted the attention of the students waiting behind him, and the first one to see Juan’s results started shouting. Soon everyone knew his mark as his classmates carried him out of the office on their shoulders and around the garden of the school. They took off his T-shirt and trainers, and sprayed him with a hose, and he just let them, delighted, stunned, drunk with joy and pride, his faith in himself finally confirmed. He could never have imagined that life would feel as good as it felt when he held this little piece of white paper, with his name on it and the second-best exam results in all of Madrid.
“Olmedo!” Waving another piece of paper in her hand, his favorite teacher called to him as he was leaving. “Here. I have a friend on the board of examiners and I asked him if I could have this—you can keep it as a souvenir.”
It was his biology exam script.At the top of the first page, in the middle, somebody had written “10” in red felt tip, surrounded it with exclamation marks, and underlined it three times.
“Thanks!”
“No, thank you.” She leaned forward and kissed him on both cheeks. “It’s been a pleasure teaching you, Juan, a privilege.We’re going to miss you.”
On the journey home, Juan Olmedo felt a new serenity, a new command over himself and others, an utterly new feeling of control over his present and his future.That perfect ten defined him—perhaps even more than his own name. He’d achieved this all by himself, and he was determined to go even further.This was what he was thinking as he got off the bus, opposite his house, and he smiled as he remembered how anxious he’d felt on the outward journey.As he crossed the road, the ground somehow felt more solid beneath his feet.The entrance to the building, like a cool dark cave, welcomed him.The elevator was at the top floor, and any other day he would have walked up to the third floor, but this morning he was in no hurry. So, he pressed the button and waited. And then he heard the music.
The labored, monotonous rhythm of that summer’s hit song seemed to bounce off the walls of the building, its absurdly festive chorus and tinny percussion ringing in Juan’s ears. Suddenly curious, Juan Olmedo followed the trail of music along a corridor that he’d been down only a couple of times, until he reached the inner courtyard of the building. Square and not very large, the residents used it only for hanging out clothes and storing useless bits of old furniture. There, amongst the junk, he spotted the cracked mirror from his parents’ wardrobe; he’d put it there himself when they’d bought a new one. In front of it, staring at herself in the glass, a dark-haired girl was dancing.
When he saw her, Juan Olmedo moved back a few steps and hid behind the door that opened onto the courtyard. Standing close to the wall so that she wouldn’t catch sight of him in the mirror, Juan could see a portable record player on the ground, with a single on the turntable. The girl was fairly tall, dark-haired, lithe, and young. She was wearing black high-heeled shoes that were too big for her, despite the woolen socks she was wearing that must have been stiflingly hot in the midsummer heat, a tiny checked skirt and a white shirt that she’d tied in a knot around her middle, leaving half her back exposed.
For the moment, that was all he could see. But then the song ended. The girl crouched down beside the turntable to put the record on again, giving him a glimpse of her perfect profile. She had eyelashes that were so thick they looked false, a small straight nose, and a large mouth with full lips; there was something indefinable about the harmony of her features which meant that Juan couldn’t take his eyes off her. She stood up, moving in time to the opening bars of the music, wiped her hands on her skirt and returned to her position in front of the mirror. Before she began to dance again, she pulled something that looked like a ballpoint pen from the untidy knot of her long black hair, and it fell, glossy and straight, down her back. She gathered it up again, twisting it like a freshly washed sheet and pinning it skillfully to the top of her head in a bun, exposing the nape of her neck.This movement sent a first shiver down Juan’s spine and he gazed, transfixed, at her shamelessly bared skin, following the trails of sweat running down into her shirt. He was still vaguely conscious of what he was doing, but then, when the girl began to swing her hips from side to side, when her long bare legs quivered, electrified, as she released a sudden furious burst of stamping, when she started to rock her pelvis in time to the movements of her arms, Juan lost all sense of who he was, his own name, even the dirty, crumpled piece of paper in his hand. She brought her hands to her body, caressing it, circling her hips lower and lower to the ground in a suggestive, almost obscene movement. From time to time, like the dancers on TV, she would suddenly turn and dance with her back to the mirror, as if she were dancing for him alone, and he felt a sharp, delicious stab in the chest that left him breathless.
“Chariii!” somebody shouted, loud enough that it could be heard above the music.“What are you up to? Have you borrowed my black shoes again? Come back upstairs right now!”
The girl didn’t answer and went on dancing, tracing with her body the most magnificent sequence of figure eights that Juan had ever seen—this was one math problem he would never be able to solve.