A Working Woman Read online

  Originally published as: La trabajadora by Elvira Navarro

  © 2014 by Elvira Navarro

  Published in coordination with Casanovas & Lynch Agencia Literaria S.L.

  Translation © 2017 by Christina MacSweeney

  Two Lines Press

  582 Market Street, Suite 700, San Francisco, CA 94104

  www.twolinespress.com

  ISBN 978-1-931883-66-5

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017940025

  Cover design by Gabriele Wilson

  Cover photo by Adam Voorhes / Gallery Stock

  Typeset by Sloane | Samuel

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  I recognize the universe in every face, be it beautiful or ugly, sublime or grotesque, exalted or common; I have no illusions with regard to what is ridiculous, comic, or anodyne: at the right distance, everything is. In contrast, for you, who claim to be a delirious realist, behind literature there is only literature.

  LUIS MAGRINYÀ

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  PART TWO

  PART THREE

  NOTES

  PART ONE

  FABIO

  [This story is based on what Susana told me about her madness. I’ve added some of my own reactions, but to be honest, they are very few. It goes without saying her narrative was more chaotic:]

  I’d just come back to Madrid, the Internet didn’t exist, and I had to depend on newspapers. I’d focused all my desire on finding someone to suck my pussy while I was having my period, and the moon was full. For no particular reason. I think madness had hidden there, in that extreme but also tiny ambition, like swallowing a centipede tossed in the salad. In the beginning, I didn’t give it much thought, unless I had a newspaper in front of me open to the section of men and women hatching three-line conspiracies; then the mania would grab hold of me, and I’d call and turn up any old how for the date. I kept a record of my periods, and would ask for the next meeting to be on the full moon, in my apartment. Most of them responded with a nervous negative, and the reason wasn’t that they considered my proposition peculiar; it was because I blurted it out as if I was playing Russian roulette. And because of my bulging red-faced blondeness, my coming-apart-at-the-seams way of speaking, and a pair of eyes whose futile, terrifying shipwreck said it all. I know what my eyes were like; with the fogged clarity of my five senses, I used to measure the level of absurdity in my dumb, doped-up expressions, seemingly more attentive than I was actually capable of, my face tossing around on convulsive currents, creating unexpected grimaces. They all looked at me in disgust, and when added to the fact I was ugly, and clearly mad, my proposition didn’t help matters. Don’t get it into your head I cared. Yes, I was careful about the venue, and in the end did the rounds of all the bars in Huertas that had a coffee-shop ambience, with hands cradling hot cups in the dim light. I liked to contemplate the street through a window that linked the cold outside to the patina of dry heat within, that muffled-up heat of water on top of radiators and cigarette smoke, when we all still smoked. I call it a coffee-shop ambience because I didn’t want the venues to actually be coffee shops. Old ladies used to go to coffee shops for afternoon snacks, and in their eyes I was always guilty. I’m talking about the times when coffee shops oozed women in mourning with backcombed hair. Those sixty-year-olds couldn’t forgive the flat, reheated croissant dunked in Nescafé at 6 p.m., and I used to arrange to meet the advertisers at seven. I managed to find a slightly unwelcoming green-walled bar that always had a table available by the window. I wasn’t particularly interested in the age of the men I arranged to meet, or their appearance, just as long as they didn’t have stains on their clothes, long grimy nails, or bits of salad stuck between their teeth. That wasn’t normally the case; they inevitably turned up looking neat to the first date. On the second, given my requirement, some didn’t make the same effort. Then I’d see the thought draped on their bodies: Why bother for her? If that’s her idea, well…But they still used to try it one more time, you never know your luck. They wanted me to take them up to my attic, saying: Oh of course, my pleasure, no, ladies first. But I’d already seen their faces. People who have lost respect for themselves soon lose respect for others. I’ll be honest, very few came back for a second date. Just the ones who’d been single for so long that their jackets were a testament to their pasta etiquette. That’s what I meant about the stains. Desperation doesn’t usually go that far. Madness is frightening, and the men used to push back their chairs as soon as I brought out my calendar and pointed a bright red finger to the phase of the moon, as if summoning the tides. The ones with a bit more delicacy waited long enough to finish their beers before they left. Finding someone who would agree to fulfill my desire got to be so important that, when I realized not a single one of the men who didn’t frighten me was willing to consider it, I moved on to women. I’ve never liked them much because it’s like kissing myself, but for what I wanted, they were just as useful. Well, almost just as useful. And they didn’t find it shocking, even if they did think it a pretty unusual first course. I cottoned to the fact that responding to someone else’s requirements made me feel less powerful, so I began placing my own ads. They’d taken me off Risperdal and put me on lithium by then: I’d been recategorized from schizophrenic to bipolar. Lithium has fewer side effects, and that meant I could follow a conversation. A part of my energy leaked away in the placement of the weekly announcements—addressed to both men and women, because I’d learned my lesson by that stage—in all the newspapers. Now, when I look back, I don’t think I wanted to replicate my pre-drug madness, just find a simple obsession that would keep me amused. I had nothing to do at that time. And when I say nothing, I mean, read my lips: nothing [Susana enunciated the two syllables, almost spitting out the first], and you can’t imagine how depressing it is for reality, or your head, to be a piece of dull, broken glass thrown on the sidewalk. That objective centered me. It gave me a kind of Amazonian air, and the illusion I had a compass in my hand. I also placed an ad directed at gays: “Heterosexual woman seeks homosexual men.” After six months, I’d lost all hope, because I hadn’t managed to find anyone to suck my pussy while I was having my period, on a second date, when the moon was full. I hadn’t even found anyone I liked. The lesbians who answered my ad all looked like dykes: short hair, broad shoulders, volleyball-champion arms. I’d never in my life dated so many people, but, like I said, having an objective gave me stability. I’m not even sure now if it had to do with sex, because I spent most of my time in a haze. If the other person talked a lot, and I had to listen, I used to fall asleep. And when I woke, there’d be no one there.

  Then one fall day, Fabio turned up. He was Mexican, though no one would have guessed it, given his Irish looks. I had kind of an obsession with anything blond. [She made a vague gesture, like a Thompson’s gazelle lying in wait for a camera in a wildlife documentary. I was about to say something, but…] One day my psychoanalyst said I was looking for the child I used to be in all the blond men I fell in love with. A second shrink, Jungian this time, came out with the idea that I worshipped the Aryan race. [I looked at the floor; if Susana wanted me to believe her, these ridiculous observations weren’t helping, but on the other hand, the part of me that curiously observed and envied her freedom in constructing an image of herself gave a faint signal of delight. I was accustomed to her exaggerations, even to her lies, although not when they were so out of proportion. The fact that her fantasy was so over the top gave me hope of being able to separate the wheat from the chaff, and even that Susana might tell me what I was anxious to hear; something made important only by the greed of deferral. On the other hand, being doped up myself made me doubtful, as if what I was hearing could be absorbed naturally into my cells without chemical intervention.] Fabio replied to my ad for homosexuals. He presented himself as a tracker of what was behind those announcements. He knew what requests were hidden there, even if they were brief. He could smell them. He spent his whole day smelling newspapers and magazines. According to him, the source of the scent lingered on them. [It may be I fell asleep for a few seconds at that point, like a student in the front row whose eyelids droop for just a moment because her desire not to be caught by the teacher is taking a nap. Perhaps I used sleep as a way of excusing Susana, or forgiving myself. Suddenly her nerve began to annoy me. I passed from enthusiasm to suspecting she was taking advantage of my drug-induced stupidity. Or maybe I didn’t really understand her, and she was talking in that delirious way because her medication hadn’t taken effect yet. Did I miss something essential when I dropped off for those few moments?] To give me some idea of his sensory abilities, he asked if I was aware that words have colors. Hope, he said, was blue. A car falling off a bridge was white, and if there was water under the bridge, it was the color of downpours in what was once known as Indochina. And the same thing happened with smells: they all gave off a subtle aroma only to be found inside our brains, not on the outside. He wasn’t certain if physical objects corresponded to this model, he said, but he couldn’t find any other way to explain the stuff about his nose to me. Everything I’m telling you happened before we had cell phones, and we used to record calls on those automatic answering machines. I loved the beep, and then my voice on the cassette—I always tried to make it sound husky and sensual, like in movies, but it never worked. You know what my voice is like: it’s as if I’m wiping my vocal chords with a Kleenex. It was a
Tuesday, I’d been taking my anxiety out for a walk in the Sabatini Gardens, and when I got back to my hole in the Plaza Mayor, I found the red light on the machine blinking overtime. It was always like that, because I put in ads every day. Despite the messages being exasperatingly similar, that time, when I saw the light flickering in the darkness like the eye of the Devil, I had a premonition, and ran to the answering machine like one of those heroines in made-for-TV movies. I’d never before had that sense of being so happy in taking the leading role. Fabio was the last to speak, after five men between thirty and fifty who sounded as if they were chewing on licorice sticks, and two twenty-something women with difficult-to-pin-down interests. Just like Fabio with his sense of smell, after six months of meeting strangers I’d only heard before on the answering machine, I could tell almost everything about them from their voices. I never hung up, just let them go on murmuring their desires and telephone numbers; later on I used to listen to them compulsively, over and over, until I started to distrust my intuition, which always told me: No, there’s nothing for you here, Susana. My intuition was so devastatingly accurate, I had to crush it. This time I listened, and was alone with a voice stammering: You smell of blood. I turned up at the bar feeling frightened; at the third table on the left, always reserved for me, sat Fabio with his white skin that, in the oblique light, looked gray.

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  He was so short. I thought I must have at least half a decade on him. If he’d told me he was playing hooky from school, I wouldn’t have blinked an eyelid. But Fabio gave a sigh, and I understood; there was nothing adolescent—not even postadolescent—in that sigh; anyway, he accompanied it with an identification document giving his age as twenty-six.

  “Same as me.”

  “It says that in your ad.”

  I’d suddenly forgotten all about the blood. I’d also forgotten why I’d agreed to meet a person who looked like that—as if I’d ever seen the others’ faces. Fabio resembled Mr. Galindo, the dwarf from The Martian Chronicles, that late-night talk show no one ever missed back then. [I couldn’t help but laugh, imagining Fabio, and gave Susana all the credit for that, although “credit” isn’t exactly the right word. What I mean is I stopped speculating about her intentions, maybe because I found her story unsettling, and after that I was just thinking about him. What’s more, if I was going to let her continue talking, there was no point in getting defensive. Fine, I told myself, just watch where’s she’s heading. And if she doesn’t head anywhere, you can cut her off. But, no, I wouldn’t have the courage to do that.] The thing is that, for long moments, I had no idea what was going on; I just sat across from Fabio and let the side effects of the lithium take over. They’re like viruses and bacteria: they invade you when your defenses are low. My vision went blurry, I started having palpitations, felt I needed to piss, and an unpleasant sweat was trickling down between my breasts. When I touched it, I realized that the sweat was slimy, but my sense of touch was probably affected too.

  “Excuse me, I have to go to the restroom.”

  I could hardly manage even a few drops. I splashed water on my face, considered taking a couple of anxiolytics, but discounted that idea because I wasn’t sure if they would counteract the effects of the lithium. When I came back, I was as white as Fabio. And I was also in some way just as short as him, even though I’m six foot. I knew he had me hooked.

  “My mother didn’t let me grow,” he told me.

  I was in no mood for guessing games or metaphors, so I just said, “What?”

  “I mean I’m not even five feet tall because my mother didn’t want me to grow into an adult.”

  “But you are an adult.”

  “You’ve seen my ID.”

  “Yeah.”

  I still couldn’t believe it. In spite of his dwarfism, Fabio had long bones, which right from the start made him a contradiction. It was like the effect glass figurines have: they always seem bigger than they really are. I don’t enjoy feeling three heads taller than a man, and I felt so conscious of my height in his presence, I ordered a whiskey on the rocks to stop myself from thinking about my proportions. He opted for an instant decaf.

  “So?”

  I was filling space, nothing more. Like I just told you, I’d forgotten my objective. All I knew was my reason for meeting around a hundred other people over the course of the previous months wasn’t the same reason that had me there at that moment.

  “I know you want me to suck your pussy during your period, and if possible, when you’re bleeding most heavily, which is when the moon is full.”

  Here I should say something like: I looked at him in astonishment. I allowed the whiskey to take effect without worrying I’d forget things, because I knew Fabio was going to remind me about them. That afternoon, we talked about his life, mine, and—due to some intricacies of the conversation that are hard to reproduce—how off-putting we found the El Almendro nougat commercial. [I remembered that commercial, remembered seeing it from the warmth of a green sofa with scratchy upholstery, my feet like a rubber doll cuddling a circular electric brazier, and the sweet smell of nougat, oranges, candies with cherry brandy filling. I think what first appeared on the TV screen was the silhouette of a village, glowing in the light of Christ’s coming. That light was kaleidoscopic, it might break down into fleeting images, but they took up residence in perception because of their familiar connotations: wood piled up in carports standing next to false doors, or chicken runs; the comforting smoke from chimneys lulling household gods; the snow falling with the promptness of one of those glass spheres whose snowflakes produce miniature, manageable beauties that can be put on a vanity table. A boy rushed into a room that had the proportions of a kitsch fantasy, because that town, whose silhouette made you think of Extremadura or Cádiz, didn’t have wooden tables with heaters installed underneath or whitewashed walls, but those large La Moraleja villa sort of windows, a fir tree, the sort of hearth you see in an American movie. Then the mother came in, her hair rigid with spray, her dress buttoned up to the neck and an air of religious services, hats, and face powder. I don’t know how many years they showed that commercial for, or maybe they made a new one each year; I haven’t watched TV since going to college. And due to that commercial, whenever I visited my hometown in Andalusia to celebrate Christmas, I always had the impression something wasn’t there—something just out of reach the grown-ups hadn’t done. It seemed to me reasonable to express a certain sense of disappointment.] Was it El Almendro or El Lobo nougat? I get them mixed up. I haven’t watched TV for ages. Fabio told me he hadn’t been back home for Christmas since his father died. He’d been in Spain for seven years, his mother lived in Santander, and if he was going to spend his dough, he’d prefer to do it on a trip to some latitude where Christmas didn’t exist. There was no such thing as budget travel in the eighties. He was very insistent about how much money you spent on long journeys. And he hadn’t gotten citizenship yet. But thanks to his sense of smell, he did have a good job. He was employed by the National Intelligence Center to smell murderers and terrorists in letters and other documents. The information revolution was just beginning, and he was very worried: his sense of smell didn’t work with screens. He also got paid for letting two groups of neuroscientists in the Research Council investigate him. And the people at the Grupo Hepza, which looks into paranormal phenomena, did experiments on him. [Heard from my cloud: the consistency of dreams, but I’d swear I wasn’t dreaming. I don’t think I’ve made it clear that it was the mixture of antidepressants and anxiolytics that made me sleepy. Susana’s story was weird enough to keep me awake, but sometimes tiredness got the better of me. However, I’m positive this didn’t affect my hearing, and even when I was almost dropping off, her words fixed themselves in my memory, because I have a clear recollection of them, with scarcely any gaps. I was motivated by irritation and confusion, by what I’d have liked to inquire into, but which remained in the shadows; I didn’t close my eyes on more than three occasions, and those blackouts lasted no longer than seconds. Susana didn’t notice.] And he was there in the bar because he was willing to do what I wanted. It was, he said, one of his favorite sexual practices, something impossible to do with men. He reiterated that he was homosexual.