The Man of Feeling (9 page)

It was not an act of instantaneous despair or of basic spite, nor was it dictated by the impossibility of satisfying my desire for Natalia Manur (I would like to believe that there was nothing in the least compensatory about my decision), rather, I was resorting to a swift, sure way of giving vent to the agitation provoked in me by my hanging up the phone and of filling the sleepless hours that awaited me because I had hung up straight away. The idea of calling a prostitute on the eve of a first night performance was really most unusual, so rarely did I use their services, despite what I said earlier. (And never on special days.) I decided that it would be best to sort the matter out in person, so I went down to the night porter at the reception desk and, very discreetly, although, at the same time, placing some money on the counter, I asked the well-turned-out, respectable-looking fellow who was on duty what chances there were of finding some pleasant company at that hour of the night either on the street or elsewhere. This is a neat way of not involving a reputable hotel in such services by making offensive assumptions, but, equally, giving its employees the opportunity to provide them (I know from experience that even the most venerable hotels, in terms of clientele and years in the business, can provide such a service, which is, indeed, much sought-after by the potentially suicidal or homicidal traveling salesmen who occasionally stay in them, not to mention businessmen like Manur when they are alone). The night porter looked at me entirely unconspiratorially, recognized me and, with the same care with which he would have explained to a tourist how to get to the Royal Palace, he immediately dissuaded me from going out into the streets ("May I be frank? If you don't know the area and you don't have your own car," he said, pausing slightly to give me the chance to shake my head to both these things, "you could waste a lot of time walking up the Castellana," and, taking out from beneath the counter a map which he kept there already unfolded, he pointed to the Paseo de la Castellana and ran one impeccable finger all along it, "before finding anything worth bothering with, apart from transvestites and drug addicts, because I don't imagine you want anything too central or too popular, do you?" I was struck by his use of the word "popular," which was a polite way, then and now, of referring to the riffraff in the most central part of the city center) and suggested that he might be able to get one of the
staff
masseuses (he emphasised the word "staff" as if that provided some kind of real guarantee, and added "if, of course, you are agreeable") to come up to my room in fifteen or twenty minutes, if I could wait that long. I said, "Yes, I'll wait," and asked him if I should pay for the service separately or if they would add it to my bill, forgetting that the second option was impossible, since it was not I, but the organizers of Verdi's
Otello,
who would be paying. He, more on the ball than I was, opted for the first solution and informed me that the young woman (that was what he called her now—"young woman") would herself furnish me with a bill. Only when he said the word "bill," did he finally pick up the note I had placed on the counter and which had remained there during the whole of our brief conversation, like a mark on the wood—polished, indelible and ancient, and which no one even notices any more. I went back up to my room.

Today, while I am writing this with barely a break (although, driven by hunger, I have just paused at last to have breakfast, thus risking abandoning for ever the nocturnal realm), I very much regret not having behaved in a more relaxed and gentlemanly fashion with the woman who knocked at my door a quarter of an hour later, just as the night porter had told me she would. Perhaps if I had been more attentive and less fussy, things would have turned out differently, with her and with the Manurs. Today (but it's too late now) I offer her my arm when she comes in, I introduce myself, giving my name, surname and profession, I help her off with her coat, I ask her to sit down, I pour her a drink from the so-called minibar in my room, I compliment her on her dress and her smile and the color of her eyes and, when she leaves—perhaps not, as really happened, only ten or fifteen minutes after her arrival, but half an hour or an hour later—I give her two tickets for the first night of Verdi's
Otello
at the Teatro de la Zarzuela and insist that, at the end, she must drop by and see me in my dressing room with her companion, who might well, I think, have been the highly efficient night porter-cum-emissary. In fact, I feel far more curiosity now than I did then about that willing prostitute who had left her sleep or her work (the latter, since she had put off an engagement) to satisfy the whim of a poor anxious, enamoured guest, although, of course, she knew nothing of my enamoured state or of my anxiety.

I remember very clearly that the first thing I noticed when I opened the door was the black coat she was wearing. It seemed odd to me, because people were no longer wearing overcoats at that time of year in Madrid, where, as everyone knows, one passes effortlessly from winter cold to almost summer warmth. Under that overcoat, the prostitute was wearing a minuscule mauve dress which looked as if it were made out of satin, but which might well have been just rayon, and the shortness of the dress may well have explained the coat: you couldn't go walking along the corridors of a venerable hotel in a brief, clinging garment like that. She took it off and put it down on an armchair (the coat, I mean) while I looked her over and asked her straight out, without even offering her a seat:

"What's your name?"

"Claudina. What's yours?"

"Emilio," I lied, absurdly, since the night porter not only knew my name and doubtless my status, he also had all my details at his disposal, including my Barcelona address: if he wanted, he could even blackmail me on my return home. And what would Berta say if she found out? Then I remembered that Berta was no longer going to be part of my life.

I looked more closely at the face emerging from the mauve. This prostitute was rather attractive at first glance, with large, sinuous features and a suitably dissolute, somewhat salacious look on her face. To judge by the little attention she was paying me (she was not looking at anything in particular, and certainly not at me), she did not, however, seem overly enthusiastic; I mean that she did not seem prepared to pretend an enthusiasm for her job which some clients expect and for which they are extremely grateful. She was the type, I thought, who thinks it enough simply to be. I closed the balcony doors and then the silence grew still longer.

"Where are you from?" was the next thing it occurred to me to say, or the next thing I wanted to know. This is the kind of question one can only ask in capital cities.

"I'm from Argentina. What about you?" asked Claudina the prostitute without the slightest trace of an Argentinian accent.

But I was the one who was going to pay and I wanted to direct the conversation, and although I was in the mood to ask questions, I certainly wasn't in the mood to answer them.

"Ah, I see. From Buenos Aires?"

"No, I was born in the pampas, in the province of Cordoba."

This statement, just in case there was any doubt, was made in an unequivocally "popular" Madrid accent, which is why it began to seem pointless to continue a conversation in which the person being questioned was not only systematically lying (which was perfectly normal), but was not even making the slightest attempt to lend verisimilitude to the deception. Nevertheless, I wanted to see how this undeniably Spanish prostitute with her modest fantasies would cope. She had an acceptable figure, and her face—as I was able to confirm on somewhat closer inspection—was quite attractive, although, as is often the case with women in that profession, it was spoiled by the exaggerated mouth movements she made each time she spoke.

"And what does the Cordoba over there think of our Cordoba over here?" It was an idiotic question, of course, but precisely because of that a particularly difficult question for a Madrid girl who had probably never been out of the country and, therefore, an excellent question with which to test her imaginative powers. It bothered me that she did not want to answer it: hiring a prostitute also means, in large measure, acquiring the right to dictate a performance, and her reaction annoyed me in exactly the same way as, when I was child, it used to annoy me if, during our games of make-believe, my playmate did not stick to the plot and to the dialogues that I had thought up for each occasion.

"Look, Emilio," she said, "I haven't got much time, you know. I'm already running late for another appointment I made earlier. Don't get me wrong, but I only made time for you because Cespedes asked me to."

So Claudina the prostitute called the night porter-cum-emissary "Cespedes," I thought, and I immediately wondered what Natalia Manur would call me, by my first name or by my surname, when she mentioned me to Dato or to Manur himself. The hum of cars became audible again, once our ears (mine) had grown accustomed to that longer silence. However, all my agitation and my vitality were draining away after only a few minutes' exposure to the indifference and conversational ineptitude of this other person. My discourteous attitude had been a mistake, but, after all, I thought, it is usually women who set the tone in any encounter or conversation. Even Claudina the prostitute was capable of disarming me and dissuading me from my initial intentions simply by not looking at me. I was glad that I had not forced a second encounter with Natalia Manur that night: if she too had failed to look at me, I might very well have ceased to desire her, just as I no longer felt the slightest desire for Claudina the prostitute after only five minutes of her indifferent, lying, unimaginative, weary, and (my fault this) still standing presence. Nevertheless, I tried to make my position clear.

"Well, in that case, at least allow me to decide how I fill the time," I said sourly.

"All right, I've got twenty minutes." And she looked at her watch just as Manur had looked at his on the one occasion when I had spoken to him. "What do you want me to tell you about? Not my childhood, please."

No, that wasn't the way. Now I really did feel offended, and the fact is that I did not want her to tell me anything, just to entertain me in my own way, to change personalities for a while, to act, perhaps to play. I should not have treated her like that, she had taken offence and had proceeded to treat me coldly and precipitately. Any possibility of a novel conversation or drama and the harmonious and fair distribution of roles had been spoiled from the start.

She had sat down at last when she said "all right" and now—legs crossed, her gaze still distracted, wandering here and there—she was revealing the whole of her thighs, so I sat down in turn on the left arm of the chair and touched them lightly—full frontally—with my fingertips. She immediately uncrossed her legs to make it easier for me to do so, but there was nothing provocative about this movement, it was made out of sheer indolence. Her thighs were softer than they looked, in fact, they were too soft and had a scar-like texture that did not make them exactly pleasant to the touch. At that same moment, I noticed that Claudina the prostitute was not dark-skinned enough to wear the color mauve. She should have waited a little longer, until the summer, to wear that dress, but she probably didn't realize that. Prostitutes are not educated in colors. I continued touching her, with my whole hand this time, and her pale, soft thighs, firm and smooth, artificially taut, suddenly reminded me of my own thighs when I was a boy (a fat boy) and when I had no option but to see them all the time, because my godfather did not allow me to wear long trousers until I was sixteen years old, on the pretext that the continual rubbing of my plump legs would wear the trousers out. And although Claudina the prostitute's thighs were slim and shapely, I had the feeling that I was touching the thighs of a former me. I found the thought troubling. Claudina the prostitute opened her legs slightly, offering me her inner thigh, but she did so lethargically and hastily, if those two qualities can coexist.

"No," I said, and she, slightly bemused, finally fixed her grey eyes on me. I closed her thighs and got to my feet. I picked up her unseasonable overcoat from the other armchair: it was a gesture that brooked no appeal. "It would be best if we just take this time as filled and you get off to your next appointment. Have you got the bill? The night porter said you would bring one."

"There's no need to be like that, I can always be late for an appointment," said the prostitute, still seated, with a touch of amour propre and a tone that bordered on the conciliatory, just the bare minimum of conciliatoriness to allow money to change hands, however well or ill gotten that money might be, however it was obtained.

But there was no point in starting all over again. I had absolutely no wish to remain with Claudina, especially if I couldn't have a quiet conversation with her and ask her, for example, how it was that she had such a strong Madrid accent, if she had been born in Argentina.

"You haven't even got an Argentinian accent," I said as I handed her three or four (I can't quite remember) of the same notes I had handed to the night porter for the favor.

"What do you mean?" she replied with genuine surprise. "I've done everything I can to get rid of my accent, but I just can't do it. I should know, I've lost several roles in the theater and on TV because of it."

I did not sleep well that night. I had murky dreams that this morning's dream chose not to reproduce. But at least I managed to get to sleep as soon as I was alone, tormented in the midst of the ever longer silence of the city by the belated doubt which I will now never be able to resolve, whether Claudina the prostitute was, after all, a real Argentinian and a magnificent actress, who had managed miraculously and unwittingly to suppress all trace of her origins, or if, on the contrary, she was an extremely stupid girl from Madrid doing her level best to disguise her accent and thus give some verisimilitude to her lies, although, if that were the case, only she would ever know. When I closed my eyes, after looking briefly at the empty wall and thinking, as I used to then, that this would be yet another night spent with no one watching over my sleep, the whole room still smelled of Claudina the prostitute, and the truth is, it smelled good.