“Why didn’t you open the door to Marina this morning?” Tamara asked, aggrieved, one lunchtime in July. “We’d agreed to meet up, and when she couldn’t find us, she had to go shopping with her mother.”
“Because I was bloody sleeping!” yelled Juan, getting up and lunging at the little girl like an ogre in a fairy story.“Because I’ve been working all bloody night and I was asleep! Because I’m fed up with you not letting me get any sleep!”
Maribel leaned across the table, put a hand on his arm and squeezed it.
“I’m sorry,” said Juan.“I’m sorry. But it’s true.You never let me sleep.”
That afternoon, the children left together right after lunch and didn’t come back till half past six. If they saw Maribel’s bag and shoes in the downstairs cloakroom, neither of them remarked upon it, or asked why she hadn’t left yet.They just took the sandwiches that were ready on the counter in the kitchen and rushed out again. The following morning, Andrés made a sign with a white card and colored pens:“Please don’t ring the bell, Juan is asleep.”A week later, the sign was lost and the bell began to ring incessantly once more. On top of that, Alfonso’s daycare center had closed for the holidays.These were all banal, predictable setbacks.The fact that in the Bay of Cádiz the sky had clouded over at three in the afternoon on the last Thursday in July was unusual, but not extraordinary. But when it turned a dark, dirty grey more reminiscent of a November afternoon, Juan Olmedo took it to be a sign of pure spite on the part of the elements.
“I don’t fucking believe it!” he muttered to no one in particular.
“It’s going to rain!” yelled Tamara.“It’s incredible!”
“I don’t fucking believe it!” said Juan again, and Maribel laughed.
“It’s already raining,” yelled Andrés, getting up from the table and running out into the garden.
Tamara and Alfonso joined him there, and they all started shouting like a pack of happy savages, running about in the rain. Maribel stopped watching for a moment and leaned towards Juan.
“If I were you, I’d go and get some sleep,” she said, smiling. “This doesn’t look good.”
“I know what we can do!” said Andrés, standing in the middle of the garden, his hair,T-shirt and swimsuit all dripping wet. “Let’s go and ask Fernando for his Scalextric! We can connect it to mine and Alvaro’s and set it up on the porch.What d’you think?”
“Yes!” cried Alfonso, waving his arms about enthusiastically.
“And we can ask Juan for his too!” said Tamara.Then, delighted with her brilliant idea, she ran to the sitting-room window and shouted much more loudly than she needed to: “You’ll lend us your Scalextric, won’t you, Juan?”
“Of course I will,” he said, laughing resignedly. “That’s just what I fancy, playing with the Scalextric all afternoon.”
“Great!” shouted Andrés.
“Go and get some sleep,” insisted Maribel.“I mean it.”
Then Juan, not thinking what he was doing, turned towards her and discreetly brushed her fingers under a napkin.
“Have dinner with me tonight, Maribel.” He whispered it, but he knew very well what he was saying.“I’ll pay.We can go wherever you like.”
He’d thought about it before, many times. He’d even picked up the phone on a couple of occasions, just before leaving work. In those instants, it suddenly seemed so easy, so obvious—Maribel was at his house and in his head, she was ironing his clothes, tidying his wardrobe, making his bed, and she was touching him, caressing him, placing a hand on his face, stroking it with timid, hesitant fingers, as if she could hardly believe he was still there, hadn’t melted away, disappeared like a warm, welcome ghost down the passageways of a pleasure fulfilled. But he was still there, he continued to exist outside the house on days when he went to work, in the routine of his daily commute to Jerez and the smell of disinfectant in silent corridors. He had a phone on his desk and he knew the number by heart, and she’d answer at the other end—it was easy. He’d taken a long time to admit it, but he wished he had more night shifts. While he was wandering about the development at weekends, bumping into Sara on purpose to ask her if she had any plans, suggesting to Tamara at breakfast that she ask Andrés to stay for lunch, listening out for the doorbell and the phone, the process of plotting kept him busy, although sometimes he didn’t even get to see her and went to bed on Sunday nights feeling the same disappointment that used to ruin his evening when he was a kid and Atletico were playing at home and lost.At weekends he had no control over Maribel’s life, no control over where she went and when. But the rest of the time he did, so he began to see her occasionally, always at one, two, or three in the afternoon, and these sporadic, fleeting encounters became more regular as spring progressed.While he spoke to patients, read their case histories, and examined them, he pictured her cleaning, moving about the house, cooking, eating, opening windows and closing them; he could see her, and he could count the pores, glistening with sweat, on her face like a freshly washed apple, and even her ribs when she arched her back like a majestic wild beast. He could hear her voice, her peculiar way of asking him something,“Please.”And over her voice, another one urging him on: “There’s a phone on your desk, you know your home number, call her, she’ll say yes.” He knew she’d say yes, to everything, anything, whatever he liked. He’d thought it over many times.Too many. He’d even picked up the phone on a couple of occasions, as he was about to leave work. But he’d always put it back down again, without dialing.
He wasn’t trying to behave like a gentleman. His attitude was cold, thoughtful, calculating. It wasn’t in his interest to rush things, to extend this rather surprising relationship—a surprise that he was enjoying—into other areas beyond those where it had originally blossomed. He didn’t want to be Maribel’s boyfriend—he wanted more. He wanted to continue fucking her in secret, with the windows closed and the blinds down, in a place with rules but no name, the private refuge of his bedroom. But it wasn’t enough, he wanted more. He knew he couldn’t have it all, that it was impossible, and that is why he was hooked. Without realizing it, he’d become obsessed with this mysteriously common woman—the more common, the more mysterious she was—who, when she took off her clothes, shed a skin, her name, her memory, everything that she knew and everything she would rather not have known. He’d become addicted to a Maribel who didn’t really exist. She needed him so that she could emerge, new and radiant, from the lusterless armor that kept her hidden from the eyes of others and kept her intact for him, because she was simply a part of him, the best part. She couldn’t save him, but she could occasionally make him forget what he knew. Because he was hooked, he was convinced the best thing to do was endure, so that’s precisely what he did. He forced himself to imagine the kind of conversation he might have with Maribel at a hypothetical dinner, where he might take her afterwards, the kind of horrendous bars she’d like, how many meters she’d stay away from him while she checked the tables for anyone she knew who might tell her mother, the look of terror on her face on hearing the word “hotel” (one of those places where you had to give your name, address and identity card number before they’d give you a room), the sad, ugly way they’d part without having found each other, him returning home irritated and with his nerves jangling. Juan made himself imagine all this, and put the phone down again. He put it down, even though he didn’t want to, even though the persistent voice of the obvious whispered a different story in his ear, an account of the evening that awaited him—helping Tamara with her homework, dealing with Alfonso, cooking supper, eating supper, watching TV, going to bed early. Even though that same voice asked whether he wouldn’t rather see Maribel, drive her somewhere far away, stop the car in the middle of the countryside, throw himself on top of her, he hung up. He hung up, and went home feeling irritated, his nerves jangling, still wrestling with his indecision.
But the first time he invited Maribel out to dinner, he forced himself not to think about anything, either what would happen or how she would interpret it, the consequences of his invitation. Nothing. He didn’t even try. It was the last Thursday in July, it was raining, and he couldn’t stand it any longer.
“Have dinner with me tonight, Maribel.” She was still smiling, quietly enjoying his anxiety.“Please.”
“OK,” she said at last.“But what can I do with Andrés?”
That afternoon, Juan Olmedo had only a very short siesta.Afterwards, he drank two cups of coffee and spent almost three hours designing and assembling the largest Scalextric track the children had ever seen.At nine o’clock, when he came downstairs, showered and dressed to go out, the children were still organizing their first serious competition. Juan had a couple of test runs and when he’d finished, he looked at his watch, then at Andrés.
“I’m going out for dinner,” he said in a tone that progressed from casual to conspiratorial. “Your mother asked me to drop you off home on the way, but I’m thinking that would be a bit of a bore for you, wouldn’t it?”
“A big bore.”
“Well, why don’t you stay here tonight? Give her a ring.” Andrés’s eyes lit up as if a hundred-watt light bulb had been switched on behind them, and Tamara rushed up to give Juan a big hug. He kissed her back and tried to look serious.“The babysitter will arrive soon. Maribel made a potato omelet before she left, it’s in the kitchen. Be good and don’t go to bed too late.You can carry on playing tomorrow, OK?”
A quarter of an hour later he picked up Maribel at a petrol station about three blocks from her house.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“To El Puerto, to eat crayfish.”
But instead of pressing the accelerator, he turned to look at her in the fading light of the summer evening, the afternoon’s rain now a distant memory. He was used to seeing her dressed up, but when they’d gone out for a meal before, they’d always had the children with them, and Sara had often come too.That evening, Maribel looked much more extreme, more vampish. She was wearing a dress he’d never seen before—tight and black, with a long, split skirt and a neckline that was dangerous rather than daring, a deep V that showed off her admirable cleavage. She was wearing dark red lipstick that seemed familiar to Juan, even though it was nothing like the shade Charo used to wear, and thick black eyeliner.
“What’s the matter?” she asked after a moment.“Why are you looking at me like that?” She knew why. “We agreed that I could choose where to go, didn’t we?”
“Of course.”
El Puerto de Santa Maria was packed full of cars, people, children yelling and chasing each other, carousels with their music at full volume, street mimes, clowns, and stalls offering all sorts of items from the mundane to the extraordinary. Maribel walked slowly, looking at everything with a radiant smile, her eyes shining like those of a little girl. But Juan observed from the start how she was also keeping a scrupulous tally of the men looking at her as they passed, although she pretended not to notice. He enjoyed this little performance, although he wouldn’t have been able to explain why. He also liked to watch her eat, closing her eyes for a moment before her first bite, as if she sincerely wanted to be reconciled with the crayfish she was about to devour, sighing with satisfaction as she ate, discreetly sucking the heads although it wasn’t a very elegant thing to do.
“You can say what you like about grilled sardines,” she insisted after she’d finished the last crayfish,“but there’s no comparison.”
“I’m a man of simple tastes, Maribel.”
“Yeah, right,” she said, looking mischievous, knowing.
Juan could find no answer to this, and simply laughed.
“So what are we going to do now?” she asked, rummaging around in her bag.
“Well, I don’t know. Go and have a drink somewhere?” He didn’t dare go any further.
Maribel opened a small, golden compact and, holding it in one hand, she reapplied lipstick with the other.
“Would you like to come back to my place?” she said, not looking at him, her eyes focused on the reflection of her lips in the tiny mirror.
“Of course,” Juan heard himself say in a tiny, stifled voice.“Of course I would,” he said again, more firmly.“Your place or wherever.Wherever you’d like to take me.”
But she wouldn’t let him drive right up to her house. She made him pull up a few meters from the petrol station where he’d picked her up earlier.
“Park here,” she said and started to get out, Juan stared at her, confused. “Wait ten minutes and then walk there.You know the way, don’t you?”
“Maribel,” he caught her arm and she turned. “Are you serious? There’s no one around.”