Learning to Lose (64 page)

Lorenzo waits with Wilson’s other close friends for permission from the central morgue to pick up the body. They will be able to bury him only after the autopsy has been performed. They won’t let them cremate in case they have to examine the body further. Nancy cries, she’s talked to his mother, who wants them to send the remains back to his country. That will cost a lot of money. He must have been carrying all his money on him, as he always did, it was too tempting to see him pull out that wad of bills, says someone. It could have been any crazy person. It was scum who slept there, the worst. I’m surprised, Wilson knew how to defend himself. The conversations overlapped. Once in a while, one of the women would interrupt them with a cry or a sob. I’ll take care of sending the body to his family, whatever it costs, says Lorenzo. Daniela still doesn’t know anything about it, Nancy tells him, she works outside Madrid now and only comes home on Saturdays to sleep.

Lorenzo asks Chincho about the van. The previous afternoon, Wilson had picked it up at his house. Lorenzo has an extra
set of keys on him, but nobody knows where it’s parked. He shrugs his shoulders. It must be somewhere near the place.

Lorenzo goes into Wilson’s room and looks over the space. There is barely a mattress, a small wardrobe, and a nightstand. Resting on a lopsided lamp is a postcard of Chimborazo covered in snow. Lorenzo opens a drawer and doesn’t find what he’s looking for. In the wardrobe, his meager clothes are lined up. Lorenzo goes through his things. Chincho watches him from the door. If you’re looking for this … He holds out two notebooks filled with jottings, I took them off the body, just in case. Lorenzo flips through and keeps them. His name appears on several occasions. When he goes back to the living room, Chincho approaches him. You can count on me for jobs. Of course, of course. The man leans his odd neck forward, life goes on, he whispers.

Lorenzo takes the metro downtown. Standing at the back of the car, he goes over Wilson’s notes. The jobs already done are crossed out in pencil, but you could still read the information. The pages are overflowing with sums and divisions, street addresses and details, all gathered in an organized mess. There are also telephone numbers jotted on the final pages. In the second notebook is more of the same. Lorenzo gets an idea of Wilson’s frenetic activity in recent days. He noted down details so he wouldn’t forget them, wrote down things still to be done. Lorenzo could reconstruct his life based on the order of his notes. Once in a while, there was another telephone number and beside it he had written, Carmita, neighbor. Suddenly Lorenzo sees his name, often appearing next to some figures, the division of money, the amount owed, always as an explanation of accounts. But on one page the note has a rectangle around it and
isn’t related to any business. In his schoolboy’s hand is written: “June 10, Lorenzo’s birthday. Watch.”

Surrounded by strangers in the metro car, by a woman who sits clutching her purse tightly with both hands, by a couple of Brazilians who speak loudly, two women from Eastern Europe, a mother with a baby in a stroller who could be Peruvian, a man studying a city map, Lorenzo stands, in spite of the empty seats, and feels a shiver run up his back. The texture of the notebook, its rough black cover, the rubber band that holds it closed, brings back memories of Wilson, lost but nearby. He remembers that once Wilson had noticed Lorenzo always checked the time on his cell phone. Don’t you have a watch? I never wear one, Lorenzo had answered. My mother always said that a gentleman should carry a clean handkerchief in his pocket and wear a watch on his wrist. After the note, that minor conversation was now transformed into a moving detail.

He met Wilson through Daniela and now there was no trace of either of them. Wilson had filled a significant spot in his life, with that frank smile, his intelligent conversations, and that crazy eye. He had seen Daniela for the last time on Saturday. She had gone out with some girlfriends and they met up downtown. He was surprised to see she wasn’t alone. We’ve taken a step backward in our relationship, thought Lorenzo when he saw her surrounded by friends. Can we have a drink alone? They went into a cafeteria on Calle Arenal with mosaics of Andalusian motifs. She seemed happy. The pastor had offered to help her find work, he often lent a hand to people in the neighborhood in exchange for the first month’s salary.

What is happening to us, Daniela, are we not a couple anymore? I don’t know what to think.

At first, when I met you, the way you got to know me, without acting superior or disrespectful, I thought, this is a brave man. Daniela sipped her juice through a straw. Is this about the children thing? You want us to have kids? Look, Lorenzo, I can’t have children. One day if you want I can tell you the whole story, it’s kind of complicated. Let me just say that a year ago they took a myoma out of me the size of a soccer ball and they completely cleaned me out. Does that make you feel more relaxed?

Lorenzo lowered his head and tried to reach Daniela’s hand, but he only got halfway across the table. She was the one who placed her hand over his. She was wearing a little gold bracelet on her wrist. Lorenzo didn’t remember ever having seen it before. Suddenly he had a pang of jealousy.

When I met you, you were a strange man. I had the feeling you were lost, alone. I felt very sorry for you, but it was a happy sorrow, because I thought you were someone who could be saved, that I could save you and it made me happy. I’ve seen you soar into flight, like a bird that gets his strength back. But that’s it. Now that you can fly, you don’t need me, don’t cling to me. Go if you want. I can’t give you what you’re looking for.

Don’t be silly, I don’t want to go anywhere. Lorenzo suddenly thought, with cruel clear-sightedness, that the mentality of these young women raised in the warm glow of television soap operas was perversely deformed. He looked up at the lovely composition of Daniela’s eyes. In that moment, she seemed more beautiful to him than ever. But she was talking about salvation, about wounded animals. She seemed to want to end their relationship.

I need help, too, Lorenzo, don’t think I’m so strong. I’m very weak. What are you talking about, that’s nonsense. Daniela, let’s be straight with each other, please … Nonsense? Maybe. Daniela smiled. Nothing you say makes sense.

But the worst of it all is that Lorenzo did think she was making sense, which is why he didn’t add anything. Daniela’s smile was a challenge. Her friends were looking through the window from the opposite sidewalk. They smiled and made comments to each other. Maybe I’m just the butt of some jokes I don’t even get. Daniela gave him a kiss on each cheek before standing up. And that had been the last time they spoke.

Lorenzo had a terrible Saturday night. It wasn’t a good idea to go out late with Lalo and Óscar and their wives. He drank too much and sank into an uncomfortable silence. He didn’t have anything to say to them. He could tell they were relieved when he left. At the hospital, that night, on the uncomfortable sofa bed beside his mother, his hemorrhoids tortured him again. In the bathroom, up on a footstool, he applied a cream the pharmacist had recommended. In a position where it was impossible for him to see his ass, he rubbed the ointment into the painful area. It was horrible to do it alone, half drunk on beer, but it managed to calm the burning.

He barely slept and in the morning on Sunday, as soon as his father showed up to relieve him, he headed to the church. Lorenzo saw Daniela’s hair in the first rows and he could make out her figure, as always stuffed into tight clothes. The pastor was talking torrentially with his professional sweetness. It took Lorenzo a while to pay attention, to absorb his words.

When one looks at the world in which we live, the society, the life that goes on out there, if one could talk with God they
would say: Lord, save us, convert this Sodom and Gomorrah into dust, destroy us, send a flood to cover it all, and from the ashes may a civilization more just and more faithful to your image arise. He pronounced it
sivilisation
, without the peninsular
c
and
z
sound. If it were up to me, I would tell you that destruction and disappearance are the only hope for our race. But I have God’s consolation. He tells me wait and you will see. We have to know that in this life there is only one thing we all deserve: death. Everything given to us, all the small joys, the everyday, the tiny good and evil of each day, and the big Evil and the big Good that many of us cannot even reach from our tininess, all that is a gift while we await the Big Gift, death. Our only liberation. But before, from our ashes, perhaps we will manage to mold a new man, a new woman, a new girl, not as some cosmetic exercise, like those sick people on television. No, as a moral exercise.

Lorenzo dropped his head. The stocky man with the guitar played an old Dylan song with the lyrics changed. Oh, it’s me, Lord, it’s me you’re looking for. Lorenzo stayed there almost half an hour more, inside the Church of the Second Resurrection. One resurrection wasn’t enough, he thought. Perhaps, yes, perhaps the pastor was talking about him, too. Then he would be able to make a new man from the tattered remains of the old one.

But it was the pastor’s words that made him leave without speaking to Daniela. Why? Now, with Wilson dead, he knows. Now he understands better why he took advantage of one of the songs, before the service was over, to sneak out onto the street, to escape that place. Why was death so essential? Why give it so much power? Lorenzo rebelled against what he had just heard. Now he understands, knowing that Wilson is dead, his head bashed in with a brick.

I killed a man, he says to himself. And the worst of it all is not how I’m suffering or how I’ve had to pay for it, or if I’ll be forgiven or reconciled, or if I’ll be able to save myself. None of it has any importance, in the face of the incontestable fact that I took a life, as if I were a god. That’s why he couldn’t believe in God, because he had supplanted him so easily.

As Lorenzo goes down into the metro car, he thinks Wilson also died at the hands of a murderer, in a stupid fight over a ridiculous amount of money or for a drunk’s violent craziness. So should Wilson celebrate his absurd end? No, thinks Lorenzo, as he goes up the stairs that lead to the street, life is that sun, that light I walk toward, all that I am. You have to walk, keep moving forward.

Thoughts and feelings crowd Lorenzo’s head. He knows that he is a murderer and he walks down the street. Maybe Wilson’s death was liberating for him as well, because it added to the daily senselessness. I killed a man. I was God for him. The God that some pray to, asking for a ending, a way out, a hope, that they devote themselves to in joy and in pain, that dominating force, the holder of power. That was me.

He reaches the place, cordoned off with plastic police lines. On that floor, Wilson died not many hours before. No one can bring Paco or Wilson back to life, no matter how hard they try. Nothing better will grow from their ashes. They will no longer be anything, ever, just what they were.

No one would believe, passing Lorenzo on the street, that in his head raced confusing, atheist conclusions, which worked for him. He’s an angry man, who trusts life, its accidental nature, its energy, who cries over a loss, a man’s broken continuity. He also cries over the power of murderers. He doesn’t confess or turn himself in. He looks for a white van parked nearby, a van
with tinted back windows. He finally sees it at the top of a hilled street. He walks quickly toward it. And he finds it with a green ticket that he takes from beneath the windshield wiper. He tears it up and throws it to the ground. That’s the order of men; an absurd ticket for failing to comply with the parking schedule is the only mark of his passage through life.

He has a set of keys in his pocket. He gets into the van and starts it. But he doesn’t know where to go, he doesn’t have anywhere. He bursts out crying over the steering wheel. He cries bitterly, bowing his head. When he rests his forehead against the wheel, it makes the horn sound and he gives himself a start and someone turns in the street and everything is ridiculous for that moment.

A little while later, he drives along the highway toward the airport. He has a pickup at two-thirty. He found the flotation ring Sylvia used as a girl, he found it at the back of the junk room, and he was using it to sit on because his ass was killing him. Along the highway, he passes the old folks’ home. He understands his visits to Don Jaime as his particular way of comprehending sacrifice, or penitence, or maybe something else. He has time to spare and he swerves off to go in and see him. In that neighborhood, it’s easy to find a parking spot.

He finds the man sitting in front of the window, absorbed in the rumble of some plane taking off. I’m not disturbing you, am I? Don Jaime shakes his head and Lorenzo sits on the mattress, near him. They don’t look at each other.

The day after tomorrow is my birthday, says Lorenzo suddenly. I don’t think I’m going to celebrate. My mother is in the hospital, dying. And I think my father has lost his mind. He spent almost sixty thousand euros on prostitutes. Lorenzo sees that the note with the phone number is still in the same place it
was last time. A triangular-shaped calendar from a drug company is now beside it. I’m going to be forty-six. And I’m not going out with the girl I was going out with before. You remember her? But the man doesn’t seem to be in any shape to respond. They remain in silence for a moment and then Lorenzo adds, do you believe in God?

The man moves his head from side to side, as if he is about to speak, but he says nothing. Some time later, he only asks, is lunchtime soon?

Lorenzo takes his cell phone out of his pocket and checks the time. No, I don’t think so. As he puts the cell phone away, he misses not wearing a watch on his wrist. The man opens the drawer on the desk and takes out some magazines and some scissors. The pages of the magazine are cut out. Don Jaime cuts around the edges of the photographs with the scissors. He’s doing it again, thinks Lorenzo. In a little while, he has cut out all the photos of women who appear on the pages as if it were an assignment he must finish.