Learning to Lose (60 page)

Ariel hired a boat to take them to the island of Burano. Supposedly this is where I come from. At least that’s what the club made up. The houses are painted in pastel colors around the canals; it looks like the set of a musical. The skipper explains to them that the colors help you recognize your house on foggy days and then he makes a gesture meaning drunkard, it helps them, too. They were only planning on spending a little while on the island, but they are there almost the entire day. They end up eating in a restaurant with outdoor tables that serves a fish-of-the-day special. They stroll beneath a portal of a virgin surrounded by flowers. It reminds me of La Boca, he says. There’s a school where kids play basketball and two old guys greet each other in the street. They must be your relatives.

Maybe I could come to an Italian team next year, says Ariel during lunch. Would you like to live here? Sylvia shrugs her shoulders. Too pretty, right? The waiter shows Sylvia how to use the oil, he pours it on a plate for her and then sprinkles a handful of
fleur de sel
over the olive-green puddle.

In two months, the season will be over. They both fear the end. Sylvia wants to ask him, what will I be to you? but she doesn’t. She knows it will be difficult to leave this whole life behind. Husky is really nice, why didn’t you introduce me to him earlier? I thought he would scare you, he’s insane. And that voice, at first I thought he was faking it. It’s because of nodules, Ariel explains, he told me that as a kid they took out a ton of them from his throat and he couldn’t talk for weeks, he just wrote in a notebook. Sylvia looks toward the canal: fishing boats are moored all along it. She’s not hungry anymore. Maybe we should separate slowly, bit by bit, so it’s not so sudden.

What do you mean? asks Ariel.

I don’t want to say good-bye on the last day at the airport, turn around, and see you’ve disappeared forever. Ariel looks at her and wants to hug her. It would be better if we started doing it in installments. Like a countdown.

Why do you say that?

Sylvia has a knot in her throat. Her eyes suddenly fill with tears and she lowers her head in embarrassment. She runs her hand over her cheek. Ariel touches her knee. He is ashamed of his inability to hold her in a public place. Why are you thinking about this now? We came here to enjoy ourselves, right? Look at this. Don’t think about anything else.

Sylvia nods her head. She’s sixteen, Ariel seems to be thinking, she’s just sixteen. He tells her, you are the best thing that ever happened to me. Aw, man, she replies, as she bites her lip to keep from crying, with that Argentinian accent you have to be careful what you say. And she wipes away a tear. I’m sorry, I’m spoiling the trip, I’m an asshole.

Maybe Venice wasn’t a good idea. Venice is a place where lovers the world over come to swear eternal love. There are other places, many others, in which to later betray the pledge. But not Venice. Sylvia looks up, refuses the grappa Ariel sips. In two days, she will be gone from this place, back to the poorly ventilated classroom where her schoolmates slap each other on the back and talk loudly. Don’t forget that all this is just a car accident, it’s about surviving it, that’s all.

Every night she called home from the hotel. Her father gave her the report from the hospital. Grandma is still there, without much hope of leaving. Lorenzo spends the nights there, so her grandfather can rest a little. Sylvia asks about him, he’s seemed
depressed the last few days. She asks about Daniela, everything okay?

Yeah, yeah, everything’s fine.

When Lorenzo returned home the day of their frustrated introduction, Sylvia was watching a movie where a woman trained in martial arts gave her ex-husband a beating. He explained the situation to Sylvia, before she had a chance to ask. They had fired her from her job when they found out she was dating Lorenzo. Some neighbor had seen him go up to the apartment. Did you go into their apartment? A couple of times to talk to her. Lorenzo didn’t tell her about what took place in the guest bathroom. I’m going to go up there, it’s a misunderstanding. Sylvia held him back. Papá, wait, don’t get involved. Even though Daniela had spent the whole evening saying she deserved to be fired, that she had betrayed the couple’s trust, that she should have told them about it before they found out from some nosy neighbor, he insisted it was worth the effort to clear it up. Papá, Sylvia told him again, don’t get involved. She takes care of their son, you’re a neighbor, it makes them uncomfortable, and that’s that. Don’t keep thinking about it. Lorenzo grew pensive, sat on the arm of the sofa. A viscous monster was now attacking the girl in the movie. It’s not fair.

Papá, it’s after eleven, don’t go up there now. But Daniela does her job well, that’s how she makes a living. The person who takes care of their damn kid can’t be in a relationship? They need a virgin maid to wipe their kid’s ass? Sylvia leaned back on the sofa. When her father talked like that, he seemed like a pressure cooker about to explode. He didn’t usually curse in front of her, and when he did it was because he had lost control. She’s very pretty, Sylvia said to deactivate his rage. You
think so? She’s Ecuadorian, right? Yes. I’ll tell you something, Papá, it’s better for you, too, that she doesn’t work upstairs, she’ll find something else, for sure. Lorenzo seemed to calm down. Sylvia smiled at him. I should have gone up to meet them before, obviously. Knock on the door and say, I have come to ask for the hand of your maid. What kind of a country do we live in? This country is springing leaks everywhere. Do you really think she’s pretty?

Desperation.

Why did Sylvia look at her father in that moment and see a desperate man? It could be the nervousness, the agitation, the guilt. Also his inability to soothe Daniela. She had wanted to go home, we’ll talk tomorrow, I want to calm down alone. Frustration, maybe. But Sylvia didn’t have the feeling it was a momentary desperation. No. Sylvia saw her father as a desperate man. He had found a woman in the stairwell. That’s how reduced his field of action had become. He seemed like a shipwreck survivor clinging to a plank, worn out, overwhelmed, fragile.

Ariel and Sylvia go up early to their room. The hotel is filled with boisterous Americans with white-white skin. They don’t feel like having dinner. In the huge bed, beneath the art nouveau lamp, they watch television. There are game shows and a biopic about Christ, with a long beard and a languid gaze. Ariel whispers into her ear and she smiles. Then he tickles her and she tries to get away as she laughs, until she clumsily falls off the bed to the floor, unable to grab the bedspread. Ariel sees her fallen pale body on the red carpet and he leaps to pick her up, take her in his arms, and place her on the sheets. Where does it hurt? Everywhere, she says. Ariel starts to kiss her on each part of her body.
Sylvia lies still, the nape of her neck and her back against the mattress and their clothing all in a mess. You are a very dangerous girl, did you know that? A very, very dangerous girl.

The days in the hospital are exhausting. Aurora is separated from another patient by a green three-piece folding screen. There are two chairs by the bed, their seats sunken from use. In one usually sits Leandro, who crosses and uncrosses his wiry legs. He holds vigil over his wife’s unconsciousness as well as the periods when she wakes up and is a little more lively for company, or pretends she’s listening to the tiny radio placed on the bedside table, or thanks the nurses for their visits from the country of the sane and vital. They come in like a whirlwind, carry out their tasks, change the IV drip, inject her with painkillers, take her temperature and her blood pressure, change the sheets, as if their job were some gymnastic routine.

Leandro knows every inch of the hallway’s mosaic floor, the sound of the elevator doors opening at the end of the hall, the moans of some patient dying in a nearby room. Dying is a ritual interpreted with the cadence of a musical score on that floor of the hospital. The doctor brings him up-to-date on the illness advancing through Aurora’s body. There is a word that sounds horrible and that Leandro identifies with the shape of death. Metastasis. She isn’t suffering, we have the pain threshold controlled so she won’t suffer and can maintain consciousness for the longest possible time. But Leandro is left with the desire to ask him
about that nonlocalized pain, which doesn’t appear on graphs or in specific complaints, but can cut through you like a knife.

Sometimes he studies Aurora’s face to see if that profound illness has taken over. She had always been a brave woman who looked toward the future. When she was about to die after giving birth to her son, when she had to be moved urgently because she almost bled to death, she still had time to warn Leandro, remember to lower the blinds before too much sun can get in, that way the house stays cooler, because it was summer in the city. Aurora’s sister came to help her take care of the baby boy in those days of uncertainty. Leandro went to see her at the hospital and she reassured him, you don’t think I’d die now, when we have such a beautiful boy.

Is it now? wonders Leandro. Is now her time to die? Is there no longer anyone to hold her back? At nights her son, Lorenzo, who is a now a middle-aged man, beaten and bald, comes to relieve him and he lies down to sleep on the sofa, which opens into an uncomfortable bed. Leandro has some dinner in the café near his house, which he prefers to the hospital cafeteria, filled with comments about funerals and sorrowful gazes. At home he had begun to put his belongings into boxes. He was preparing to move into Lorenzo’s apartment, he still didn’t know how they would arrange it. Bring only the essential, his son had told him. He organized the records he would listen to again and the books he still needed for his classes. They aren’t many. He stored his notes, study scores, reports, and student files in boxes for incineration. He will give away or destroy the essence of what has made up his life. He still hasn’t gone into Aurora’s room, he doesn’t dare go through the photo albums, the old correspondence, the objects of sentimental value, her clothes. He
will travel, when this is all over, with the least number of things possible. The essential? Is anything? He will be a nuisance for his son and his granddaughter, in the way. Life without Aurora looks leaden and empty.

The first night, his son arrived at the hospital and in the hallway he said, I didn’t know you mortgaged the house. I’ve been by the bank. Leandro was silent. He listened to Lorenzo ask for explanations about the amounts of money squandered in a constant drain. There was no rage in his son’s words, no indignation, he wasn’t scandalized. I guess he’s lost respect for me even for that.

I’m not going to ask you what you spent those thousands of euros on, Papá. I’m not going to ask you.

Leandro felt weak. He walked to the little waiting room, where there were some empty seats at that time of day. A nurse at the back made a shushing gesture. Leandro let himself drop into a chair, beaten. His head in his hands, his gaze at his feet. Lorenzo approached him, but he didn’t sit down; he preferred to watch from a distance.

Don’t say anything to your mother, please, don’t tell her anything. Or to Sylvia, either.

How could I tell them anything, Papá? What do you want me to tell them, huh? You tell me, what do I tell them? Leandro sighed deeply. Nothing, admitted Leandro. Fuck …

The silence extended for so long that it was more painful than any recrimination. Leandro wanted to say, I don’t know what got into me, I lost my head, but he didn’t say anything. Lorenzo bit his tongue, paced around the room to release his rage. Finally, the financial matter came to his rescue. Lorenzo spoke to him. And you let the bank talk you into signing a
mortgage that’s a rip-off? Don’t you understand? They pay you until you die, but they scam you. If you put your apartment on the market, you’d get twice what they’re paying you, and on top of it all they act like they’re helping you out.

They didn’t tell me that.

And what do you want them to tell you? That they’re bastards? Have you ever seen a bank advertisement that says, come see us and we’ll suck you dry?

Lorenzo seemed satisfied. He calmed down. We’ll work it out, but you’ll have to move in with me. We’ve got to stop it, I’ll figure out how. Leandro nodded. He didn’t want to say some typical nonsense like, I don’t want to be a bother. It would be more honest to say: I accept being a bother. He stood up. When he started to walk along the hallway, Lorenzo said something to him that hurt him deeply, shouldn’t you see a doctor?

So that was it, thought Leandro, I’m sick. Nothing a few pills and a horrible-sounding diagnosis can’t cure. Maybe it would be better if he went to a psychiatrist, a rehabilitation cure. Get over his addiction to life. There was something else, learning to be old, passive, a shadow. Leandro wanted to reassure him, he wanted to tell him it had all been a fit of insanity, a transitory stupidity, and he would learn to respect himself again. But he only said, it won’t happen again.

In the hospital hallway, he had met another old man who was there with his wife. I was sure I would die before her, the man said, as almost always happens. Leandro hadn’t ever thought about their departing order. In the last few months, he had time to prepare himself, to get used to the idea of being alone, of losing her. A number of times he heard Aurora say to her granddaughter, when they chatted, will you take care of your
grandfather? Will you take care of him? And the girl promised that she would, of course.

Will I reread Unamuno or Ortega to repeat the same old conversations with Manolo Almendros? Perhaps the poems of Machado or Rubén could be some comfort? And the flesh that tempts us with its fresh bunches of grapes, and the tomb that awaits us with its funereal branches. All of Bach, what about Mozart? Or give them both up? And Schubert? What would be his measuring stick? Undoing the tangled web of a life, taking what had gotten twisted up over the years and now undoing it, walking backward. Taking only what I brought to this house when I came to live in it? This last idea amused him. But he soon realized it canceled out what had given Aurora pleasure, what they had shared, bought together, listened to together, both read. Retracing the steps of an entire life. His threw out his retirement plaque that read “for your years of devotion and training, to our teacher,” because the only thing he did during all those years and with all those students was to try to bring Don Alonso back to life, to maintain his rectitude, his polite manner, his rigorous challenge to the most promising students, even intoning some Latin phrase that he now wouldn’t dare say out of a fear of sounding pedantic like Joaquín.