Sleight of Hand (2 page)

I said automatically, “I want to go home,” and Ricardo, assuming that I meant to Federico's beach-house, downed the last of his drink and, with a nod and a weak smile, stood up. I chose, for the time being, not to explain further.

Ricardo took the coastal path back to the house and I didn't argue. The route through the forest was shorter but felt, if you were in a particular kind of mood, more menacing.

The path was pretty narrow, so I followed him – a little numb from the adrenalin aftershock – watching his buttocks move up and down, his shirt slowly sticking to his back, and then glancing left at the brochure-perfect beaches and right into the long shadows of the forest, and back again at the perfect beach. I thought about the contrasts of Colombia, so beautiful, so friendly. And yet …

Ricardo only turned once to speak to me during the walk. “I'm sorry about that,” he said, as if it had somehow been his fault. But I knew what he meant. It was his country. He had brought me here. I knew how he took such things personally.

As we walked, I wondered if this feeling – that I had had it with Colombia – was a new permanent state of being or simply a momentary reaction to danger, and I decided that I needed a trip back to Europe to find out. I hadn't been back since we moved here over a year ago. It was time.

But if I told him how I felt, would it damage our relationship? That would be the last thing I would want.

Faithful, good natured, straightforward Ricardo – the man I thought I would never meet.

A part of him, the Colombian part, will always remain alien to me. It's hard to explain what the essence of that difference is … Perhaps a coldness that enables him to sigh as someone machine-guns a dog to smithereens is what best sums it up. Maybe a lightness of being that means that these things don't get to him the way they do to me – an optimism that is entirely unaffected by murder, rape or natural disaster. I know that all sounds contradictory, and really that's the whole point. The fact that I can't decide whether to describe it as solid and unshakable, or courageously optimistic, or cold and unfeeling, says it all: alien. Simply.

But other than this undefinable otherness, we are the most perfect fit I have ever found.

Back at the house, Ricardo said, “You just relax Chupy and watch the sunset and I'll make dinner,” and I knew that the business of the machine gun and the dog – the most violent thing I had ever witnessed – was now over for him. For Ricardo it required no further discussion.

I checked my email to make sure my translation had reached its destination (it had), and was just about to shut down the computer for the evening when a rare email from Jenny popped up. Her mother had died, she said. She felt incredibly sad and alone, she said.

And my first thought, my very first shameful thought, was that
here
was the perfect excuse for a trip home. And then, I thought,
“And you reckon Ricardo is the cold one?”

So here I am, staring at the booking screen. “Tu ne l'as pas encore réservé ?” Ricardo asks me. –
Haven't you reserved that yet?
He leans in and nuzzles my neck.

We converse in either French or English, apparently randomly. In French because France was where we met, and in English because Ricardo needs the practice. Despite the fact that
I
need the practice most of all, we
never
speak Spanish together. Ricardo's reaction to the slightest mis-pronunciation on my part is a shouted correction. It's something that's just too irritating for our relationship to repeatedly survive, so we avoid it by speaking any other language.

“I can't decide how long to go for,” I tell him, peering at the booking screen. “Plus I can't work out whether to do just England or whether to go back to Nice as well.” Part of the reason I can't decide how long to stay is that I'm not sure how Jenny will react to my presence. Being her oldest friend
and
the man who stole her boyfriend complicates things somewhat.

“I suppose leaving the booking open costs too much,” Ricardo says. “Have you looked?”

“A fortune,” I say. “Nearly two-thousand extra.”

“Book for two weeks then,” he says. “Or three. And then if you get bored buy a flight, with … you know … the one you use before.”

“Easyjet?”

“Yeah, if you get bored in London you can still book a return to Nice.”

“I suppose,” I say.

“You could check my flat for me, check they haven't wreck the place. If you need to put it on my card …”

“No,” I say. “Thanks, but it's fine.”

Ricardo straightens and rubs the base of his back, and then saying, “Well, only you can decide,” he heads back through to the bedroom.

I flick back and forth between two itineraries and chew the inside of my mouth and wonder if it's OK to bring up Jenny's potential reaction with Ricardo. For obvious reasons, she isn't a subject we tend to discuss.

The phone chirrups so I swipe it from the cradle. “Aló?” I say.

Ricardo's nephew Juan is on the line. He sounds unusually grave.

“Ricardo, c'est Juan,” I shout.

“Je le rappelle,” he answers. –
I'll call him back
.

“I think you'd better take this one,” I tell him.

Ricardo reappears in the doorway. He has the five ironed shirts that Maria left over one arm. He frowns at me and reaches out for the phone with his free hand.

“Juan?” he says. “Sí … Sí …” And then he takes two steps backwards, glances behind to check his position and sinks onto the edge of the bed.
“Sí,”
he says again, more definitively.

I look at his rounded shoulders and his glazed expression and at the darkening sea behind the window, and I shiver and wonder who has died.

When he hangs up, Ricardo says, “You should book that flight.”

I nod. “What's happened?”

“Maman est morte,” he says. Then he snorts and smiles and says again, “Aujourd'hui, maman est
morte,” – it's the opening line from Camus
L'Etranger
.

“Oh babe,” I say. I think how strange it is that both Jenny and Ricardo's mothers should die on the same day, and then discount the thought as too banal to be vocalised. “Oh God, I'm sorry.”

Ricardo shrugs, which is unexpected.

“How?” I ask. “How did she …” It seems to me to be something one might ask at such a moment, but then as I say it, it seems cold and unnecessary.

“In her sleep,” he says. “Lena found her.”

“The maid?”

“Yeah. You
know
who Lena is,” Ricardo says.

And it's true. I'm not really sure why I asked, except perhaps, to buy time. “Are you OK?” I ask – another stupid question.

Ricardo shrugs again. He looks strange: kind of blotchy and pale at the same time. “I think so,” he says quietly. “I'm not sure. It was hardly unexpected.” And then he stands and vanishes from view.

I listen to the sound of him slowly hanging the shirts in the closet and then stand and follow him to the bedroom. He caresses the sleeve of the final shirt and then slumps back onto the bed. “I have no parents now,” he says. “That's strange, huh?”

“I suppose it is,” I say, tears welling up on his behalf. I take a seat beside him and slip an arm around his shoulders. I think he will either shrug it off or start to cry too, but ever-unpredictable, he turns and kisses me.

A little surprised, I remain impassive as his tongue darts in and out of my mouth, and then I think,
“It's his mother … whatever he needs,”
and kiss him tenderly back.

But tender isn't what Ricardo has in mind. He grabs my t-shirt and lifts it over my head. “Take your jeans off,” he says. “I want to fuck you,” and so I do. And he does.

Under the circumstances, which are bizarre to say the least, I don't particularly enjoy it … He's rough and direct. He pushes in before I'm ready and without enough lube – it hurts. It's like being shagged by a stranger, apparently more to do with a need for release, a yearning for closeness than anything else, but I shut up and fake it: I shut up and take it.

The death-fuck is quickly over, and as I dry my chest with a hand towel, I expect Ricardo to say something about his mother.

He reaches for his box and starts to roll one of his occasional joints and with a nod towards the door says, “You should go and finish booking that flight.”

“Surely, I should stay … I mean … don't you need me to stay, babe?”

“Pourquoi ?” he asks, sealing the joint, and then, picking the flakes of grass from his chest and putting them back in the box he adds, in English, “I have to go Bogotá tomorrow. There's no point you stay here.”

“But don't you … I mean, shouldn't I come with you?”

“What for?” he asks, lighting the joint, and taking a deep hit. I'm not sure if he's on the verge of tears or if it's the smoke that is making his eyes glisten.

“Well to help with … stuff.” With my pitiful Spanish, I'm not sure what I could help with, but all the same.

Ricardo shakes his head. “No need,” he says. “And you can't come to the …
l'enterrement …”

“The
funeral,”
I tell him.

“Sure. You can't come to that. You know this.”

“I know you don't want … I mean … I know you
didn't
want her to know. But surely
now?”
I can feel my anger rising.

“It's a family thing,” Ricardo says. “A latin thing. Trust me.”

“I'm not family?”

“You know what I mean,” he says, offering me the joint. “It's for cousin and nephew and …”

“Husbands and wives,” I say.

“Well yes.”

“But not boyfriends.”

Ricardo shrugs.

“Juan knows I'm here,” I say. “He must have spoken to me at least twenty times. Federico does too.”

“But they don't know who you
are
,” Ricardo says.

“Well, who do you think they
think
I am?” I say. “The cleaner? The
gardener?”

Ricardo shrugs. “I don't know. It's up to them. That's the point. You have to leave people the space to understand what they want to understand. It's the latin way.”

“The Catholic way,” I say. “The closeted way.”

“If you want,” Ricardo says. “Look. We've already …” He turns to look out of the window and sighs.

I blow out a column of smoke. If I go any further this will now turn into an argument – an argument we have indeed had repeatedly. And I think that this really isn't the right moment.

Ricardo takes the joint from me and says, “And you don't really want to win this anyway. You want to go see Jenny.”

I shrug.

“You need to decide, Chupy, if you want to win this argument or be happy,” he says.

I take a few seconds to think about this and then decide that he's undeniably right. “Sure,” I say. “Whatever. If that's what you need. Really. It's fine.”

He winks at me and then pushes me gently towards the end of the bed. “Go book the flight,” he says. “And book one for me for tomorrow as well. Use my card. We can take the same.”

“As far as Bogotá?”

“Yes, to Bogotá”

“Return?”

“One way. I don't know how long.”

“Sure,” I say standing. “Are you sure you're OK?”

Ricardo shrugs again. “I told you. I don't know,” he says, flatly. “But I have to go to Bogotá tomorrow – this I know. So do the booking for me.”

“Right,” I say. “Sure. Oh, and the cat?” I ask. “What do we do about her? Where is she anyway?”

“Under here,” he says, pointing down at the bed. “I'll call Maria. She can spring-clean and feed Paloma.”

“Autumn-clean.”

“OK, Autumn-clean …” Ricardo repeats, then, with an almost quizzical expression, he says again, “So I have no parents now.”

“I'm sorry,” I say.

He shrugs. “I suppose it is better than visiting them in an old person home.”

At first sight, I decide that my neighbour for the flight to Madrid is a transexual. She's taller than me (even without her platform soles) and has Pete Burns cheekbones, Angelina Jolie lips, and “surprised” eyebrows. She looks like the subject of a documentary on cosmetic surgery catastrophes.

I squash my legs against the bulkhead as she slides into the middle seat beside me and think about just how much longer the flight is going to seem with so little legroom. I wish that the four-foot-not-many-inches guy now sitting down on her right was my neighbour instead.

She glances at him, then smiles at me but says nothing. As she rolls towards me in an effort at extracting the seatbelt from beneath her buttocks I get a retch-inducing whiff of perfume.

I turn to look out at the Bogotá rain and think about Ricardo heading off to his mother's house. He seemed fine of course. He was positive and effervescent during the drive to Santa Marta, and then warm and smiley for the flight to Bogotá. When the fifteen-seater went through a white-knuckle patch of turbulence, he even quipped,
“He died on the way to his mother's funeral.”
But I remember only too well from when Tom's father died, how quickly “fine” can turn to “breakdown.” But if he doesn't want me there – and he clearly doesn't – then there isn't much I can do.

Lolita Jackson, as I nickname my six-foot beauty, doesn't speak to me until the Iberian trolley dollies arrive with our first meal. Given the choice of
chicken or fish, I half expect her to reply, “Neither – I'm a tranny actually,” but she plumps for
“pollo,”
and hearing her voice, I think,
“God, she's a woman.”
I can't help but wonder if “tranny” was the look she was aiming for when she embarked on the surgery path all those years ago.