A Working Woman Read online

  “I’ve only got a single requirement: I want a mirror on one side.”

  Like I said, I had an attic apartment in the Plaza Mayor. Now I think my living conditions in that attic were precursors of what has happened to housing over the last twenty years. I refused to inhabit a larger, more comfortable space because of my thing about money. It was one of the manias that got their hooks into me after my psychotic episode: I’d never find a job that paid enough to live on. And though I still had my inheritance, I thought it might run out any day, figures in the red while I was putting on my shoes and taking my lithium, so that’s why I rented an attic where you could only stand upright in the center. The toilet and shower were in full view. The owner said if I wanted partitions, he’d increase the rent, which was ridiculously low, especially compared to what we pay now. I could have rented a five-bedroom house in the Salamanca neighborhood for the price of my room in your apartment [I looked away], but I was terrified, and so accepted living that way, not being able to go to the bathroom when I had a visitor. I could also have bought a proper apartment, or even a rundown building. I’m trying to say I wasn’t rational about money. And buying a rundown building would have meant I had to work, which in turn would have meant I couldn’t keep such close track of the people who answered my ads. And that was the basis of my life then. I kept it secret from my psychiatrist and psychotherapist. I was afraid they’d disapprove. [I thought about my own new psychiatrist, about how people believe shrinks are no use, but they do have a special talent for interpreting gestures, hesitations, omissions, unsuccessful acts.] For a year and a half, I was incapable of breaking my routine of medication and ads, and so also unable to look for work or sign up for a college course, which is exactly what I did when I felt better. The thing is that Fabio landed in my attic one Saturday on a full moon, on the second day of my cycle, and then, when I was lying on the floor, and he was at the point of getting to the nectar, I closed my legs. I suddenly saw clearly that it wouldn’t come free, that it wasn’t the sort of sexual activity he’d like. When I closed my legs, I accidentally cracked Fabio in the jaw: he cried out in pain. After he stopped howling, he told me he had a bone condition that affected his mandible. He lay there for a while on one corner of the mattress, naked, tiny, and very still. He’d put on my bathrobe because it was cold, and instead of him sucking me off we fucked. My orgasm was so intense I felt faint. We did it many more times over the following months, despite him being gay, and in theory not liking women, just as I didn’t like men who were that puny. You had to admire the fact that, though my libido was sluggish—almost nonexistent—because of the medication, when Fabio touched me it was as if his fingertips contained some kind of potion, and that’s how it was for as long as our relationship lasted. When we finished, he’d walk to the window, as if he wanted to escape, and I’d go back to not feeling anything, and that made me wonder about the nature of my desire. If the memory I have of sex with him didn’t refloat my desire, what was it that made me open the door to him at seven every evening? Why had I stopped taking my daily constitutionals in the Sabatini Gardens when they did me so much good? The year before I met Fabio, the authorities had decided to abolish daylight savings, so the evenings were shorter, which explains why, in spite of the heat, people were still using duvets, and why in the tree-shaded darkness of the palace gardens the buckles of leather jackets glinted in the half light. Leather and wide belts were in fashion then. Remember? Of course, it was a really strange phenomenon, but my life was already weird enough, and it was no consolation to know that, in the middle of August, the capital of Spain was behaving as if it was suffering a rainy spring. Just like you now [I looked away again; I was aware of how closely Susana had observed my habits, and I felt as if she’d started unbuttoning my blouse], something in my nervous system was compelling me to be on the move, especially at night, and that movement wasn’t simply something my tense muscles needed; it was as if the day that was walled in by my attic and my head was seeking the breadth of open spaces. I’d walk along Arenal to Ópera, and from there to the Palacio Real, where I allowed my eyes to linger on glimmers so distant and fragile they seemed like fairy lights. Beyond the Paseo de Extremadura and Carabanchel, the residential areas were still made up of buildings that seemed to be apologizing for themselves, and the streets weren’t as well lit as they are now. If I concentrated hard enough on moonless nights, I lost all sense of distance. The lights of Somosaguas became twinkles scattered along the hillside, just like the ranchos in Caracas. Have you been to Caracas? Imagining I was somewhere else, or thinking of childhood journeys in the car with my parents and siblings, gave me a kind of gloomy tranquility, as if I’d bottled myself up in a boring but welcoming vacuum. [This was the first time Susana mentioned her parents and siblings; I managed to look as if I hadn’t noticed, which was a waste of effort.] Then I’d go down to the Sabatini Gardens, where I set about brushing my hands along the turgidity of the boxwoods, the thorns of the rose bushes without roses, the dry black soil, and then, if I was feeling daring, the hair and long-sleeved tracksuit tops of passersby. I’d be wearing a red leather bomber jacket, and could feel the sweat pouring down my back. I remember the few babies being breastfed by mothers all had little hats. Sometimes there were concerts, and you could hear balalaikas, didgeridoos, and Movida groups; on those evenings, I’d pass through the crowd and the music with a degree of longing for the sounds of crickets and harvest bugs, and especially for silence, because that was also essential if I was going to get back to my attic with a sensation of space: the sound field. I could only experience a wide sound field if there was a significant amount of silence seeping strangely out of the flowerbeds, with moths flying noiselessly so as not to disturb the dreams of the queen ants. The way I see it, a lot of noise, a lot of voices, produce the same sensation as canned laughter, and there’s a reason why they call it canned and not, for example, stored. I’d sit next to the artificial pond, with its timid but definite dampness rising to evoke great lakes, and look at the statues, even now I don’t know who they represent, but in any case they act as guardians of the night, creators of those boxwood mazes it was impossible to get lost in. Not even children could lose their way among those leafy walls. I don’t know if it’s all still the way I remember; don’t know if parks change. Contemplating almond and monkey-puzzle trees isn’t the way I learn.

  During the day, I didn’t think about Fabio. I carried on with my routine of putting ads in the newspapers and listening out for the calls, attentive to the voices on the answering machine’s tiny cassette. I started a collection, because something had to be done with those voices if I wasn’t going to arrange to date them. What better than listening to them three times a day, enjoying the possibilities they presented? Pressing play was also a way of putting myself on guard, as, in the beginning, I didn’t really believe in Fabio. And what else could I do with that drug-induced lethargy, and having spent two delirious weeks in a psychiatric clinic, and six months arranging to meet strangers so they’d suck my pussy while I was having my period? As the weeks passed, and the tiny grasshopper’s lovemaking settled into a docile pattern, the voices began to sound different, much more attractive. I started to get attached to them, not out of mere curiosity, or fear of having nothing to do during the long mornings, but because I suddenly couldn’t manage without what they suggested: the promise of perfect bodies, a tone that seemed to belong to the person destined to understand me, love me, and feel himself loved by me in the way he’d always imagined, which would never happen now because Fabio was dropping by at seven every evening, that is to say, at the exact same hour as my dates at the Huertas bar. I didn’t owe him anything, or at least that’s what I told myself, but I didn’t go any further. Sometimes I’d wait for him in my bathrobe, having just taken a shower. It didn’t occur to me to use soap; I don’t like odorless sex, and neither did Fabio. He never missed our date and, while he wasn’t in the habit of saying anything tender to me, and even talked about the men he slept with, he seemed wrapped in sadness, and I know there was nostalgia in his eyes, anticipation of loss, and that anticipation sometimes pained him. Even though I didn’t feel very much for him, I appreciated his daily visits and the regular sex, something that hadn’t been part of my life for a long time. Before that, I’d been fucking in bathrooms for fear the men who came on to me in the club would repent in the taxi home. Regular sex stopped me from being obsessed with sex, and it was a shame I didn’t think of anything special to do with that time. I could have set myself to any task without getting distracted. It’s also true that the impression of not loving him kept me hooked on the voices, and that before Fabio I’d theorized less about them. But doubt had set in. Why didn’t I think about my lover? Why was I so detached? Was detachment good or bad? Maybe it was the medication blocking any strong emotion that made me unsure of what I was feeling. I sometimes tried talking about it with Fabio, but he shied away from putting into words anything he thought would hurt him. I think he had a blind faith in facts and routine, and believed he could win out by not failing me for a single day. He also knew the kind of movies I liked—then, as now, that was almost everything—and would sometimes bring videotapes for us to watch together in bed. From time to time I forced him to go out to the gardens with me, and then he felt even shorter than ever, and wouldn’t say a single word. He had such a complex about me being three heads taller than him that he froze, and apparently he’d never been to a park before. I once took him to a restaurant, and he sat there all hunched up, sniffing the menu, because the only thing that made him feel he was on safe ground was being able to tell me how the Asturian chef was feeling when he wrote it. I used to encourage him to talk about his work. I imagined it must be interesting to sniff out murderers and terrorists, but Fabio had a really boring way of telling things. The tone of his voice was like an echo in a ceramic pot, and he was always constructing interminable analogies to help me understand, to a depth we never plumbed, how crucial certain investigations were. He’d get tangled up in complicated State strategies, talking about them in enormous detail until he noticed how bored I was. Then he’d feel hurt. I’d feel sorry for him, and offer to let him spend the night, though I wasn’t playing fair in that, because the offer was based on guilt, and, to be honest, some nights what I wanted to do was read, not fuck or sleep beside anyone.

  Fabio told me he often asked himself how a pint-sized body could have extraordinary abilities, and had come to the furious conclusion that the greatest power lay in paradox. He could make use of the instantaneous excitement his touch produced in others to sleep with anyone he wanted, but that ended up being so easy there was no fun in it, and he preferred to show himself as he was first, the way he did with me. I didn’t tell him that, in my case, he’d had an advantage because he was offering to do something no one else would do. When I think about Fabio these days, I know he’s the person who has loved me most, and just as I was, with all that flab he knew how to enjoy; with my butt like a barrel and my kitchen-table legs, and all the edginess of my personality—I suppose the medication softened those edges, though never to the point of eradication—every one of my facial expressions, my freckles, my pale complexion, and the threads of spittle in the corners of my mouth, a for-the-time-being that was more hopeless that anyone else’s for-the-time-being, because I had no hope that anything better than what was happening could happen, and I didn’t even want what was happening. I only considered the possibility of those kind of big hopes when I was listening to the voices on the answering machine, but as I said, I didn’t think there was much chance they would become reality for me. I’m not looking for pity—I’m just saying all this to make the contradictions in my story clear.

  We very quickly established a routine. The first thing was always going to bed; then I’d make dinner in the small kitchen that was so awkward to work in: I usually opted for salad and fried hot dogs. We ate the sausages with our fingers; sometimes my conscience rebelled against ingesting so much fat every day, and then I’d buy the soya kind. Fabio never noticed the difference, which seemed odd to me, given his powerful sense of smell. Perhaps he didn’t want to mention it. He’d sit on the bed—it was a mattress on the floor—flicking through magazines, but really spying on me, recording my awkwardness on his retina. Maybe what Fabio saw was clear and precise, like an old print: my hands opening a can of tuna, the golden sunflower oil shining on my fingertips, my tongue licking the oil, conscious of the futility of the gesture, because after the oil from the can came the olive oil forming a creamy scum on the outside of the pourer. I’ve always known exactly what I have in my kitchen. I can’t bear disorganization there, as you’re well aware. [I was indeed, but I’d already disordered our kitchen, and she hadn’t noticed.] I don’t want to stray off point: I was saying Fabio used to watch my curved back, my clenched buttocks like projectiles—they’re my allies now, but then were way over the top. He’d watch all my different postures out of the corner of his eye, and I was just as conscious that his indolence was a pretense, because otherwise I would have felt hurt. We watched each other too much, placed too much importance on each other’s reactions. To remedy this situation, he tried concentrating on matters that had nothing to do with me. He’d plug in headphones and listen to major-league soccer games. The commentary was only audible when someone scored a goal. I’d hum to relieve the monotony. There were nights when, after sex, we didn’t look at each other again, although that didn’t seem to affect the covert attention we paid each other.

  One day I stopped pretending. To be honest, I’m not really certain I’d planned it. I’d been strict about our privacy for a few months, and by the time May came around, everything was making me uneasy. What if the people who called after seven didn’t try again in the morning? At first, when Fabio arrived, I disconnected the telephone so my meetings with him weren’t disturbed by it ringing with enticing but exasperating insistence; the relative novelty of my dates with Fabio meant I didn’t mind missing the calls. But after that day, as my belief I was losing out on something grew, instead of unplugging the cord, what I did was turn down the volume on the telephone and the answering machine. That way, all the voices were taped. This involved the minimum of interruption: the click of the record button automatically switching on, and the poltergeist sound of the tape running, like the creaking of the old wooden beams and dried-out parquet when we laid on the floor. Did I say the bed was a mattress on the floor? There was no room for anything else. We were very close to the answering machine, to the jittery record button, to the blinking red eye stuffed full with messages. I eventually covered it with a black dust cloth. And to hide what I’d done, I started to put on music, which mingled with the voices of the tourists who went to the San Ginés chocolate shop to dunk churros. We never mentioned the fact that I continued to place the ads with the peculiar request Fabio had already satisfied on nights with and without a full moon. Sometimes I thought about him going through the newspapers from Monday to Sunday, and coming across the ad, with my repetitive, hurtful words, and I could see his face fall as he imagined a morning routine not dissimilar to the one I had with him later in the day, but with another man, with a lot of other men, maybe with a woman. Who knows if he thought I went to the bar in Huertas alone, without having arranged to meet anyone, because I’d often told him I missed that outing, not for the meetings, but because of the vacuum between them. What I’d been exploring during that time was the simple, but equally mysterious emptiness I was projecting onto the future, that “specter of thought.” His nose must have told him I wasn’t meeting anyone, but he couldn’t help being suspicious, because smell is only an indication. And deep down, Fabio was jealous, so attempting any clarification was a waste of time.

  When May came around, with the addition of a heat wave—an explosion without the consolation of night—I had an indefinable but definite sense of unease: the machine needed me; the light, blinking with a new frenzy, held a message I had to listen to that very moment. One night Fabio, who could usually read my mind, turned up the volume so we could listen to the voice of an old man, a deceptive voice saying, Hey angel, how much for a date with me? I’ll pay for anything you want. My phone number is 333–4119. I relaxed ipso facto and turned down the volume. That night, I didn’t give another thought to the telephone; and I was also calm the next night, but on the third, and the fourth and fifth, it was me who turned up the volume. On the sixth, I didn’t even respect our daily coitus; when the phone rang for a second time and a woman’s voice spoke, Fabio’s hard-on wilted. It was unreasonable for me to get annoyed, but I did. Or rather, I became aware of the potential my annoyance had for allowing me to do what I really wanted: listen to the messages in Fabio’s presence without feeling guilty. And in addition to that, there’s a third issue I haven’t mentioned: I’d gotten accustomed to the answering machine starting up early in the morning, and interrupting my dreams with voices. Although many hours closed in by the darkness, and the answering machine with its buttons at the ready reminded me of the Columbian room where my hallucinations had been conceived, the fact is I only ever received two or three calls in the early hours, normally from drunken men; their slurred, foul-mouthed calls scared me, but never enough to stop me from listening to them. Thanks to those voices, I had the impression the people who were lining up to get into my apartment via the machine were ghosts. That idea came from being half asleep when I heard them. I’d feel cold breath running over my body; but even then I didn’t want to discount the possibility of experiencing something from the other side. I thought I’d given up believing in spirits forever, but there was a sensation, sometimes very distinct, of a ghost coming out of the answering machine. In my drowsy state, I seemed to understand the power and inevitability of the conversations, and also of miracles. A Lazarus-stand-up-and-walk sort of logic. When Fabio started sleeping over, something that happened more frequently as June came around, there was absolutely no way I could justify the phone waking us three or four times a night. Like I said, at that hour it was almost always men who showed an interest in my limp-lettuce words. Some called, and then hung up when they got the answering machine. I’ve always thought they called back, because after the machine clicked off, hardly a moment passed before the next tring, tring.