The Faint-hearted Bolshevik (9 page)

“A nice little story,” I observed. “Especially for the pig with the moustache. He must have had a great time huddled in the bushes.”

“Don’t you believe it. I was only a child then. It wasn’t a big deal.”

“You were?”

“My bikini fits much better now.”

“I wouldn’t mind seeing that.”

She smiled. She had a knockout smile, with dimples and all and her teeth were absolutely perfect.

“That’s what I like about you.”

“What?”

“The fact you don’t hide in the garden like the jerk with the moustache. You would have asked my permission to watch, bold as brass.”

“We Bolsheviks aren’t allowed to hide. Our beliefs don’t allow it. What isn’t, isn’t and what is, is there for all to see.”

“Do you want to see me in my bikini?”

“I already told you that.”

“Take me to the swimming pool.”

“Now?”

“This afternoon. I always go to the pool with my girlfriends on Saturdays. My parents don’t have to know I’m going with you, and if we go to a different one my friends won’t find out either.”

“It’s been years since I’ve been to a swimming pool in Madrid. I don’t even know where there is one.”

“Well, find out. That’s what cops are for.”

There was something strange about the way she’d said that, and something even stranger about the way I came to the conclusion that I had to tell her what I told her next.

“If I’m going to take you to a swimming pool, there’s something I need to tell you.”

“What?”

“I’m not a cop.”

“I’d already worked that out.”

“I’m not a maniac either.”

“Aha.”

“It’s as if you didn’t care.”

“Of course I do. What’re you called? Really.”

“Jaime,” I lied.

“I liked Javier better. But I like you better than the cop. So, are you going to take me to the swimming pool or not?”

“Yes, if you want me to,” I gave in.

“Yes, I do. Pick me up here at half past four. Now I’m going to work up a bit of a sweat. They think I’ve gone out for a run.
Ciao
.”

She went running off, her hair blowing in the wind, and I was left trying to unravel something confused about Dante and Beatrice and heaven and hell and the fucking certainty that no pain could be worse than remembering happy times when you’re down on your luck.

Going to the swimming pool always reminds me of my childhood. And that doesn’t mean that going to the swimming pool makes me happy. In spite of what thousands of simpletons maintain (perhaps in their eagerness to recoup the physical and psychological effort that having children entails), children live in an uncivilized and morally inferior world. Abuse, violence and gratuitous cruelty reign amongst them. One of the few things I appreciate about being an adult is that I don’t have to be constantly afraid that people who are taller than me might decide to send me sprawling to the ground and twist my arm until I burst into tears. It might happen on very rare occasions, but in the school playground it’s very rare that it doesn’t happen. In school playgrounds it’s always the biggest brute who rules the roost, and the rest, among whom there may be highly spiritual children or precocious talents, have to resign themselves to doing his coarse bidding or become martyrs, or perhaps becoming martyrs in spite of having done his bidding, depending on how bad a mood the relevant beast is in. In childhood, the crudest and most brutal characteristics of humanity prevail. When I was a child surrounded by other children, I used to hate the human race and regretted having landed among members of such a dangerous and primitive species. I don’t exactly consider myself a philanthropist nowadays, but the adult riffraff, who form the backdrop to my daily life, sometimes offer the counterpoint of exhibiting a certain intellectual merit. I may be mistaken, but I prefer Lorenzo de’ Medici to a bully with his shirt tails hanging out, his shoelaces undone and a dirty face, beating his chest surrounded by a group of intimidated little kids.

I had a powerful opportunity to experience the fact that childhood is a state at odds with intelligence, sensitivity and all the other characteristics that differentiate man from other primates thanks to the one and only time when I was about to believe the opposite. When I was seven or eight years old, I managed to get the dumbest boy in school, an individual capable of fighting eight other boys at once and beating them all, to blindly obey any orders I gave him. For a while, I lived under the illusion of submitting brute force to the plans of a superior mind. In this way, my circle of friends, who did not partake in the sterile pastimes that occupied most children but instead preferred the practice of all sorts of industrious activities (like making explosives, constructing miniature cities and organizing fantastic story-telling competitions), were able to dedicate themselves to them without wasting time fighting with other boys. When anyone tried to bother us, I would set Lisardo (that was my invincible slave’s name) loose on them and he would deal with the troublemakers comprehensively, breaking noses, fracturing skulls and knocking out teeth like a veritable war machine. Such was my control over him that after each scuffle Lisardo would sing a little ditty of my invention that combined his name and surnames with the word “willy”. The result was grotesque, and Lisardo himself was the first to raucously applaud it.

Anyway, one day when Lisardo seemed a bit surly, I took the unfortunate step of submitting my power over him to a test from which it didn’t come out well, and which convinced me to watch out for tall guys for the rest of my childhood. Nobody had attacked us and so there was no reason for Lisardo to sing his little song. But, to impress the others, I ordered him to sing. Lisardo seemed reluctant. I began to sing it to encourage him. The giant looked at me and I realized, too late, that something was stirring, perhaps for the first time, inside his thick skull. Without a word he came over to me, lifted me up in the air and gave me a tremendous beating, right there, in front of everyone. I can still feel the blows and my reputation, based for the most part on my influence over Lisardo, was completely destroyed. Ever since, I’ve never believed that a child will respect any authority except that of whoever can hit harder than he can. Everything else is a waste of time.

Another thing that puts me off swimming pools is that there, the suntanned airheads who do somersaults off the diving board are at the top of the food-chain. I’ve never been able to get a suntan and I’ve always been loath to accept that the best thing to do with your skull is risk smashing it to bits against the end of the board or the side of the pool. As a consequence, swimming pools have never been a place I’ve had much success in. To tell you the truth, my life at swimming pools has been for the most part a life of silence and solitude. One of the few activities that helped me while away the time at swimming pools, other than swimming and going on reconnaissance walks, was reading. Even though it takes all sorts, I prefer to do those three things best silently and by myself.

The swimming pool was the place where hot chicks were hotter than anywhere else: the problem was that they were always fawning over the kings of the diving board and didn’t even see the sallow-complexioned peasants like me. This developed my imagination and gave me a complex soul, for which, as I believe I’ve written in these very pages, I am not ungrateful, but the price of all this was a certain sadness I didn’t much enjoy at the time. When I got tired of my book (which happened frequently since a pool is a pretty uncomfortable place to read a book) and I got tired of swimming (which was even easier since swimming physically tires you out) and I got tired of walking around (inebriated by all the suntanned flesh on display that sooner or later would fall under the sporty caresses of the springboard kings), I had no place left to hide. At that point I would go and sit at the edge of the pool and twilight would fall, and twilight was in a way a luke-warm type of humiliation.

With all this in mind, and for other reasons that I am neither willing nor able of summarising, I experienced a mixture of curiosity and unease on thinking about the possibility of going to a swimming pool with Rosana that Saturday. My curiosity was piqued by the idea of not being alone at the swimming pool, but in the company of Rosana. My childhood aside, from time to time I’ve been to a swimming pool with someone, but never with somebody like her, whom, although she wasn’t as tanned as her sister Sonsoles, I could identify with the girls who used to ignore me in my younger years. The unease sprang from the prospect of returning to that world I had always found so hostile, full of diving boards and guys whose complexions were invariably less pale than mine. Sure, you can meditate to your heart’s content to try to come to terms with what makes you different, even to turn it into a source of pride. After all, who doesn’t try to overcome their shortcomings by turning them into a virtue? That’s all fine and dandy, but sometimes, when you’re least expecting it, it slowly dawns on you that one of the biggest wimps in history, that ungainly Czech called Franz Kafka, told the tale of a poor bloke who turns into a cockroach one morning and is rejected by his family, who go off on a daytrip when the cockroach finally dies. As is well known, two of the things we featherless bipeds most desire is not to be rejected by anybody and that nobody should go off on a daytrip after we die.

At four-thirty, give or take a minute, I arrived at the park bench where we had agreed to meet and found Rosana already waiting for me with her swimming bag and her beautiful, disturbing little face. She was wearing a short, printed dress, one of those dresses where the waistline is really high, starting just under the curve of the bust. When she got up from the bench to greet me, I realized exactly how short it was when I saw for the first time her naked legs up to the middle of her thighs. Although admittedly younger and much more fascinating, she was the girl from the holiday ads you never come across when you decide to go on holiday somewhere with a beach, where there is always an abundance of less dazzling options, more abundant and less dazzling the nearer it is to the end of the month and the further from the last pay packet. It’s not like the most important thing in life is to be with beautiful women, but it is true that when you hang out with a beautiful woman you tend to admit more freely that someone up there’s looking out for you. It’s an unavoidable, base genetic or biochemical phenomenon for which there is no need to feel personally responsible.

“Have you decided which pool we’re going to?” was Rosana’s eager greeting, as she swung her torso from left to right.

“I’ve had a look. There’s one near the Ciudad Universitaria campus. I think I went there once when I was a student. It’s a long way from here. I don’t think your girlfriends would go there.”

“What did you study?”

“Philosophy.”

“Are you a philosopher?”

“No, just the opposite. I work in a bank.”

“That sounds great, surrounded by dough all day.”

“I don’t get to see the dough. I add it up, multiply it and divide it. That’s all I do now, although I once wrote a thesis on Leibniz.”

“On who?”

“Nobody. He’s much less important than James Dean, for example. If anyone ever talks to you about Leibniz, you can forget it. Knowing who he is won’t be at all useful. It’s not done me any good. Shall we go?”

We crossed the park and went to pick up my cousin’s car. It would have to answer my transport requirements until the following Wednesday, according to the random estimation that, somewhat put out by my demands, the clodhopper who ran the garage where I’d left my own car had given me. A guy who, from what I’d seen and heard during our little chat, didn’t need to know anything about Leibniz, James Dean, or the correlation between customer service and the level of demand for car repairs.

“My, what a small car you’ve got,” declared Rosana.

I was on the verge of saying it wasn’t mine, that my car had a sixteen valve engine and ABS and alloy wheel rims all standard features nowadays in any proper car (which mine was, in fact), but not in my cousin’s. It’s incredible what a jerk a person can become, just because they have a few credit cards in their wallet, I told myself. I said, “The only big thing some people have is their car. Not me, that’s not my style.”

Rosana made herself comfortable in the passenger seat and resignedly wound down the window. She didn’t complain about this, or the lack of air conditioning, or the absence of a flashy stereo system. She was an angel, after all.

We crossed a conveniently deserted Madrid. We went first up and then down the Gran Vía, Rosana telling me little things about her family, related to the fact that the swimming pool was near the university campus.

“My brothers and sisters all went to university. All the boys are engineers of some kind. Leticia is a doctor and Sonsoles studied law. But she’s not a lawyer because she passed the civil service entrance exams. Sonsoles was the best student. Distinctions in everything.”

“The Law School was opposite my faculty,” I told her. “I knew some girls who must have been a bit like your sister. They used to take notes in perfectly rounded handwriting and underlined things with coloured pens. They could hold ten different coloured pens in one hand at the same time. They knew everything by heart and they wouldn’t have known what to say if someone asked them the difference between statutory rape and leasehold.”

“What is the difference?”

I’d repeated the line I’d picked up from an old friend who’d studied Law, without thinking what I was saying and especially that I was saying
rape
. It was an inappropriate term to use in that situation, to say the least. However, I decided to carry on as if nothing were amiss, hoping that Rosana didn’t know what it meant and that it wouldn’t cross her mind to look it up. I delivered the punchline my old friend always used to use: “For statutory rape you need cunning but for a leasehold you need money.”

Rosana seemed lost in thought and I didn’t like it. She finally shared the conclusion she’d reached. “The problem here is that I’m much more cunning than you. You’ll have to pay me somehow.”

I had no option but to play along. “I can’t afford to pay much.”

“I’ll give you a discount. Or, better yet, I’ll make you rob a bank. Wicked women always make honest men rob banks or steal the worker’s monthly wages. Honest men are left to wallow in despair, while wicked women disappear into the sunset with handsome scoundrels who beat them up.”

“Where did a girl your age learn all these things? I can’t believe it’s just from watching TV.”

“I listen to people talking and once in awhile I read a book. It’s easy to find out what adults don’t want you to know. I read
The Complete Encyclopaedia of Married Life
when I was ten. I was curious as to why it was on top shelf of the bookshelf. I balanced two chairs on top of each other and found out why. I used to find all that stuff a bit disgusting until one day I remembered the pictures and then it didn’t seem so gross. I also know where my father keeps his dirty money. First I had to work out that it wasn’t called dirty money because it was covered with filth or something but that it was money that daddy takes out of his company illegally. Aren’t you going to ask me where it is?”

“I don’t really care about your father’s money, dirty or laundered. I’m sorry to disappoint you. Perhaps you thought I was a thief.”

“No, you don’t look like one. But just in case.”

I had worked out in advance that Rosana would pay a reduced entry, not out of stinginess, but due to some kind of belated scruple. But from the age of fourteen you can’t tell the difference, or rather, they all have to pay full price. It was stupid and it was no consolation because God would either approve the fact that I was more than twice her age and there would be nothing to worry about or he would not and I in that case I was in deep shit even if I managed to get a waiver from the Vatican. But I consoled myself that at least she was old enough to pay full price at the swimming pool.

We separated after the ticket office. Rosana went into the ladies’ changing room and I went into the men’s, with its permanent smell of ripe feet and rancid sweat, two of the many undesirable side effects of sport activities and poor hygiene. I was wearing my trunks under my trousers so I rushed through that revolting place as quickly as I could, dodging the puddles that splattered the floor. The lawns on the other side were not too crowded. I waited for ten minutes or so and Rosana appeared, in her bikini.

There have been various high points in my wretched existence. One was a Christmas when I was given two Madelman action figures: the deep sea diver and his archenemy, the black pirate. The highlight of my teenage years was in my last year of High School when I finished my final biology exam and we burned all our books and notes along with an effigy of the teacher. The highlight of the rest of my life was the afternoon when Rosana appeared before my eyes, as if coming out from a shell that had just floated up from beneath the waves. She looked more like Botticelli’s Venus than ever, although thinner, less fleshy, since Venuses in Botticelli’s day ate great chunks of lard and whatever junk food there was at the time, instead of low-fat yoghurt. If I make an effort, I can remember that her bikini was pink and that I hadn’t done anything to deserve her. I’ve always been of the opinion that the best and most valuable things in life are those you don’t deserve. Things you deserve are too imbued with your sense of self and are totally useless.

“How do I look?” her crystal voice tinkled.

“Do you want the truth?”

“That’s why I asked.”

“I understand how your sister’s boyfriend felt. But you already know that. Does the name Botticelli ring a bell?”

“No. Should it?”

“Not necessarily. In another life you forced him to include you in all his paintings. But if you remember all the people who love you, you won’t have any room left for your own thoughts.”

“You’ll make me big headed.”

“You already are, but you’re right to be. One day you won’t be as pretty as you are now and you’ll have cancer and you won’t be able to believe anything anyone tells you.”

“That’s spooky.”

“Carpe diem
. If Garcilaso de la Vega prettifies it everyone thinks it’s a nice idea. If you describe it exactly how it is, they say you are spooky.”

“I studied Garcilaso in eighth grade.”

“You studied everything in eighth grade.”

“Not everything.”

“Let’s leave it. Sun or shade? I hate the sun.”

“I don’t mind. I haven’t come here to get a tan.”

We found a spot under a tree. Rosana spread out her towel and then stretched out on top of it. I took off my trousers but not my T-shirt and sat down on a folded towel.

“Do you go swimming in a T-shirt?” she asked.

“I don’t think I’ll swim. Swimming pools are full of piss and bacteria.”

“Don’t you like anything?”

“I like ice-skating and rhythmic gymnastics. Watching, not participating. I also like to sleep soundly, when I can. And I like you.”

“Thanks. I like you too. It must be because you’re not like Borja.”

“It must be. But there could be other options. Have you ever seen one of those pumped up guys with slicked-back hair and a mint-green Burberry polo shirt who wear hi-tech watches like you’d wear if you were going deep-sea diving?”

“Nacho, Leticia’s husband. He also likes skydiving. He always checks himself out whenever he sees a mirror.”

“And?”

“He’s a dick.”

“You’re not supposed to say things like that.”

“I’m not supposed to go to the swimming pool with a stranger who is so much older than me and likes me so much,” said Rosana, turning over lazily.

“Of course not. I didn’t mean to correct you, you just surprised me. I like you better like this. I can’t stand the little miss goody-two-shoes types.”

“Everyone thinks I’m a good girl. At school I get prizes for good behaviour.”

“All teachers are mentally atrophied. It comes from being surrounded by people who know less than them. They stick to the basics and don’t even realize when their students start to know more than them. You must find school a waste of time.”

“I have to study. I want to go to college.”

“What will you study?”

“Business administration.”

“It takes ages. Take my advice, save yourself all that bother, forget maths and exams and notes and become a top model, you’re made for it. You’ll be a millionaire while your girlfriends are still underlining their notes. Then hire someone to play the stock market for you, study the courses you best like and laugh at those poor sods slaving away, renting out their brain cells at so much an hour.”

“Like you?”

“Yes, I rented out my brain cells. Now I don’t know what I rent out any more, nor do I think about it.”

Rosana sat up a bit. She lay on one side with her head resting on her hand as if she were in a swimsuit ad. I wasn’t complaining.

“You must be some kind of executive,” she said, “based on the tie you were wearing. I don’t understand why you’re not happy.”

“Do I have to be?”

“Everyone wants to be an executive. Travelling, having a pretty secretary and expensive suits, earning loads of money.”

I closed my eyes. I had ended up getting involved with a minor, I had taken her away from her neighborhood, I had managed to get her to take almost all her clothes off and instead of taking advantage of her by doing some other abominable act that would give me some release, which might fit the bill, there I was surrounded by families, talking to her about the ins and outs of my job. It didn’t matter how, but I needed to put a stop to it.

“Look, Rosana,” I started to explain. “I don’t know what nonsense your father or someone else has been filling your head with. In my experience, travelling means getting on a plane to fly to another city where it’s always either raining or cold. On the outward flight there are guys with dandruff and on the return flight there are guys with dandruff and who sweat non-stop. Sometimes you have to stay overnight in that rainy city and you zap through the forty satellite channels on TV three times before turning out the light and cursing the whole damn world. Expensive suits are nice in the beginning. Something one looks forward to, I’ll admit it. And if you go to a den full of executives, as you call them, you’ll see that the young ones are all wearing new, neatly ironed clothes. Almost all of them still live at home with mommy and enjoy her loving ministrations, or perhaps those of her maid. But if you look at those who already have a few gray hairs, who have surrendered to their fate, or rather to their wife or her maid, who are much less skilled and much less willing than mommy and her maid, you’ll see that their suits are rumpled and shiny, their trousers show seven creases and their ties have stains on them. There’s no point in buying more new suits. Before they realize, after about six months or so, they’re done for and suits, like everything else, no longer matter. As for the money, the only person who can say he’s loaded is the one who doesn’t put up with any shit nor with other people’s problems, unless they amuse him. Fun and work are incompatible. And there’s no such thing as a sexy secretary who lasts more than two and a half months. Mine didn’t even manage a week. My current one is about sixty and looks like Edward G. Robinson’s twin sister.”

“Who?”

“An actor. American. From a thousand years ago.”

Rosana thought it over, but not for long.