Learning to Lose (2 page)

Last summer Mai had hooked up with a guy she met in Ireland, while she was there studying English. She spent all of July fucking, as she declared to Sylvia in laconic e-mails. “Sy, I’m a new woman. Yes, a new woman!” she wrote one day. When they saw each other again at the airport, Sylvia felt that Mai was indeed a new woman. The pimples on her chin had disappeared, she had streaked her black hair with red, and her new
bangs covered one eye, the one she called her ugly eye. She had tattooed a vine with razor-blade leaves around her left ankle and now she showered almost every day. It seemed to Sylvia that Mai’s mouth was more fleshy, her lips more voluptuous. But the real transformation was in Mai’s laugh. She no longer laughed with her typical twisted contempt. No. Now boundless chortles bubbled up from deep inside her, a true, open laughter that to Sylvia smelled of sex and satisfaction.

It’s as if my pussy had finally become a full-fledged part of my body. Not like before, where it was more like a subletter in the apartment downstairs. Then she told her about Mateo. He’s from León, so I didn’t practice much English.

Sylvia listened to Mai talk about her relationship and she felt something strange. She hadn’t yet identified it as desire whistling beside her ear.

In the pigsty, which was what Mai called her room, filled with CDs and clothes bought at street markets, there was no space for romance. But now every Friday she hopped on a bus to spend the weekend with her guy in a big old house in Bierzo. You’re going to turn into a red-cheeked village girl, Sylvia would tell her, the joke covering up her fear that they would grow apart.

Dani joined them at the cafeteria table. He was in Mai’s class and their friendship had sprung up spontaneously. One day Mai was tirelessly humming a song, backed up by her made-up English lyrics, and Dani touched her on the shoulder and held out a worn sheet of paper. In the margins, he had written the words to the song. Up until then, she hadn’t spoken more than two monosyllabic words to Dani, with his thin silver glasses and evasive gaze. The song was by a group from Denver headed by a sinister guy who performed sitting in a wing chair surrounded
by his musicians. It was called “Let’s Pretend the World Is Made for Us Only” and Dani joined just that world Mai claimed to live in, the one she had built up around herself.

That Friday Mai cuts her last two classes to catch the three-thirty ALSA bus for León. Sylvia sees her walking away from school with her headphones beneath her hair, her butch swagger, and her big black boots that match her exaggerated eye shadow.

At the end of the schoolday, Sylvia bumps into Dani. Actually, she had been waiting to bump into him, after pacing nervously in front of the bulletin board in the lobby. Satur, the porter, reads the sports news and nods his head to each teacher who leaves; to the students, he gives only a considered disdain. At the back of the hallway is an enormous painting of the monk the high school is named after, a reproduction of a portrait by El Greco, with a slogan engraved in stylized letters: “Be neither so arrogant as to presume to be liked by everyone, nor so humble as to give in to the discontent of a few.” The students’ eyes had run over the sentence a thousand times without really getting it, or even paying it much attention.

Sylvia fakes running into Dani by accident and he looks up from the magazine he is reading, one of those bibles of teen taste.

Hey, Dani, Sunday’s my birthday. Oh, yeah? Happy birthday. I’m having a little party at my house … Mai’s coming. And a few other people. You wanna come? Dani doesn’t answer right away. Sunday? Yeah, in the afternoon, on the early side. Around four-thirty, five. Um, I’m not sure if I have plans.

They walk along the street. Cars two rows deep and the sound of honking horns. The northern exit of the school has traffic jams on Fridays. The junction of avenues is presided over by a Corte Inglés department store, triumphant like a modern
cathedral. A blond American actress with a suspiciously perfect nose encourages autumnal spending. Dani’s jeans fall from his waist, their bottoms frayed at his heels. Sylvia is convinced that her lips are too thin and she tries to make them look bigger with an expression she’s practiced in front of the mirror two thousand times, the slightly open mouth.

Will there be potato chips, Coca-Cola, sandwiches? he asks. Yeah, of course, and a clown that blows up dick-shaped balloons. Sylvia adjusts her backpack on her shoulder. Are you gonna come? Dani nods. Sixteen, right? he adds. Yup, sixteen. An old lady.

Sylvia’s hair floats up over her shoulders as she walks. She is wearing it down and as she steps off the curb it rises weightlessly and then drifts back to its original position. Dani heads toward the metro. As they say good-bye, she’s about to tell him the truth. There is no party. It’s all just a stupid tactic to get him alone. But she just answers his ciao with an identical one of her own.

Sylvia walks toward her house. There is a slight breeze that hits her back and pushes a curl toward her cheek. As she always does when she’s nervous, Sylvia chews on a lock of hair, walking with it in her mouth.

Aurora broke her hip in a completely unspectacular way. Getting out of the bathtub, she lifted her leg over the edge and suddenly heard a small crunch. She felt a slight shiver and her
legs turned rubbery. She fell slowly, with time to brush the tips of her fingers along the wall tiles and prepare for the impact. Her elbow hit the fixtures, causing a cold pain, and a second later she was lying down, naked and overcome, on the still-damp bottom of the bathtub. Papá, she wanted to shout, but the sound came out weak. She tried to raise her voice, but the best she could do was emit a repetitive, well-spaced-out lament.

Papá … Papá … Papá.

The murmur reaches the little back room, where Leandro is reading the newspaper. His first reaction is to think that his wife is calling him for another one of her ridiculous requests, for him to get down a jar of spices on a too-high shelf, to ask him something silly. So he answers with an apathetic what? that gets no reply. He leisurely closes the newspaper and stands up. Later he will be ashamed of the irritation he feels at having to stop reading. It’s always the same: he sits down to read and she talks to him over the radio or the ringing telephone. Or the doorbell sounds and she asks, can you get it? when he already has the intercom receiver in his hand. He goes down the hallway until he identifies where the monotonous call is coming from. There is no urgency in Aurora’s voice. Perhaps fatalism. When he opens the bathroom door and finds his fallen wife, he thinks that she’s sick, dizzy. He looks for blood, vomit, but all he sees is the white of the bathtub and her glazed, naked skin.

Without exchanging a word, in a strange silence, Leandro prepares to pick her up. He takes her old whitish body in his arms. The flaccid flesh, the melted breasts, the inert arms and thighs, the veins that show through in violet lines.

No, don’t move me. I think I broke something. Did you slip? No, all of a sudden … Where does it hurt? I don’t know. Don’t worry. In a gesture he can’t quite explain, Leandro, who has been married to Aurora for forty-seven years, grabs a nearby towel and covers his wife’s body modestly.

Leandro notices the bottom of the bathtub. It’s worn down by the water’s chafing and repainted in some stretches with white enamel that doesn’t match the rest. Leandro is seventy-three years old. His wife, Aurora, is two years younger. The bathtub will soon have served them for forty-one years, and Leandro now recalls that two or three years ago Aurora had asked him to replace it. Look for one you like and if it’s not too much of a hassle we’ll have it put in, he said to her without much enthusiasm. But why had he stopped in that moment to think about the bathtub?

What am I doing? he asks, lost, unable to react. Call an ambulance. Leandro is overcome by an irrepressible shame. He thinks of the commotion it will cause in the neighborhood, the explanations. Really? Yes, come on, make the call. And get me dressed, bring me my robe.

Leandro calls the emergency number. They connect him with a doctor who recommends that he not move her and asks for information about the fall, the pain symptoms, her age, general health. For a moment, he thinks the only attention they are going to get is over the phone, like any other kind of customer service, and then, terrified, he insists, send someone, please. Don’t worry, an ambulance is on the way. The wait is more than twenty minutes. Aurora tries to dress herself, she’s managed to stick her arms into the sleeves of her robe, but every movement
is painful. Put a nightgown in a bag, and a change of clothes, Aurora asks him.

The EMTs bring noise, activity, which is somehow comforting after the tense stillness of the wait. They take Aurora downstairs on a stretcher to the ambulance. Leandro, disoriented and out of place, is invited to accompany her. His gaze searches through the ring of neighbors for a familiar face. The widow from the first-floor-right apartment is there, the one they locked horns with over her no vote on the installation of a communally funded elevator in the old building. She looks at him with curiosity in her miserable little eyes. He asks Mrs. Carmen, who lives on their floor, to go up and close the door that he left open. On the way to the hospital, beneath the high-pitched blasts of the siren, Aurora takes Leandro’s hand. Don’t worry, she tells him. The nurse, in his ridiculous phosphorescent jacket, looks at them with a smile. You’ll see, it’s nothing.

Call Lorenzo from the hospital, keep trying, he usually carries his cell phone. Sylvia will be in class, but don’t frighten them, okay, don’t frighten them, warns Aurora. Lorenzo is their only child and Sylvia is their granddaughter. Leandro nods, holding Aurora’s hand, uncomfortable. I love her, he thinks. I’ve always loved her. He doesn’t say anything because at that moment he’s afraid. It is a paralyzing and menacing fear. From inside the windowless box, he senses the speed at which they are moving through the city. What hospital are we going to? asks Aurora. And Leandro thinks, of course, why didn’t I think to ask, I should be taking care of these things, but his head is a confused static of a thousand jumbled feelings.

Lorenzo listened to the morning arrive, as if on tiptoe. The rhythm of the cars increasing. The garbage truck. The first hums of the elevator. The metal gate of a storefront opening on the street. His daughter’s alarm clock, with those three minutes of respite it grants her before ringing again. He listened to her shower quickly. Eat breakfast standing up and leave the house. The police helicopter that crosses over the city at that time of day. Some horn, a car that’s having trouble starting. His hands tensely grip the top of the sheets. As he releases them, he notices his fingers are stiff; they’ve been clenched for hours, grabbing the bedspread like a mountain climber would his rope. The autumn sun has started to beat against the blinds and warm the room.

He runs his hand over his head. He’s lost so much hair in the last few months … When he was younger, he’d had a receding hairline, but now it was devastating. He took Propecia and bought an anti-hair-loss shampoo, after less conventional methods failed. At first Pilar laughed when she saw him counting the hairs left in the comb or meticulously placing a lock. Then she realized what a big deal it was for him and avoided the subject. Fuck, I’m going bald, Lorenzo said once, and she had tried to ease his mind, don’t exaggerate. But he wasn’t exaggerating.

His hair was the first of a long list of lost things, thought Lorenzo. His hands gripped the sheets in a protective gesture, trying to hold on. As if losing everything wasn’t an abstract fear but rather something that was happening to him right here and now.

What have you done, Lorenzo? What have you done?

It’s almost ten a.m. when the phone begins to ring insistently. He had turned off his cell phone and put it away in the bedside table. But the landline kept ringing and ringing. In the living room and in the kitchen. Each with its own ring. The cordless in the living room, more high-pitched, more electrical. He wasn’t going to pick it up, he wasn’t going to answer. He wasn’t home. He heard it ring for a while and then stop. A short pause and it rang again. It was obvious that it was the same tenacious person calling repeatedly. Weren’t they ever going to get tired? Lorenzo was afraid.

What have you done, Lorenzo? What the hell have you done?

The night before Lorenzo had killed a man. A man he knew. A man who had been, for several years, his best friend. Seeing him again, in spite of the unusual circumstances of their meeting, in spite of the violence that was unleashed, Lorenzo couldn’t help remembering the last time they had seen each other, almost a year ago. Paco had changed, a bit fatter. He still had his hair, with the same pale wave as always, but he seemed slower, heavier in his movements. We’ve both changed, thought Lorenzo, crouching in the dark. Paco had a placid face. Was he happy? wondered Lorenzo, and the mere suspicion that he was could extenuate what would later happen. No, he couldn’t be happy; it would be too unfair.

Lorenzo had fled with Paco’s gray eyes still fixed on his. It isn’t easy to kill a man you know, to fight with him. It’s dirty. It has something of suicide to it: you are killing a part of yourself, everything you shared. It has something of your own death in it. It’s not easy to remain motionless in front of a dying body, either, trying to tell if it has stopped breathing or just fainted.
Then go over every mistake, every movement, thinking of the person who will later arrive to figure out what happened. Prick up your ears to make sure no one is listening, prepare your cowardly getaway. Is there such a thing as a brave getaway?

Lorenzo went out the same way he had come in. Over the rear fence, after running his hand along the back of the dog, who had licked his boots. He had left the hose in the garage running, to flood the place. Turning it into a fish tank would help to eliminate prints, make reconstructing the scene more difficult. He raised himself up, looked both ways, and jumped over the fence. He could be seen by a neighbor, recorded by a security camera. He walked to his car, taking his time. Someone could be watching him, jotting down his license plate, remembering his face. It wasn’t an exclusive neighborhood, but in that area of Mirasierra, filled with single-family homes and buildings with few apartments, strangers attract attention. It wasn’t dawn. It was eleven-fifteen on a Thursday. A normal, workaday hour, not a criminal time of day in the slightest. He had killed a man in the garage, a man he knew. It had all been an accident, a mistake fueled by the grudge Lorenzo held against Paco. Men shouldn’t listen to their resentment; it gives them bad advice.