…Tempo Primo…

I’m going to name the daughter I never have Manuela. She’ll grow up with the eyes of a stray dog, unaware of the reason behind the hordes of cars, the pedestrian stampedes during sale season, or the shouts of the dogcatchers. I’m going to abandon the daughter I never have in the early hours of the morning, on a mountain, by the broom bushes the, or on the doorstep of some rich man with a palace and a pre-purchased burial plot, a man who’ll take care of her and keep her barren past under wraps. That, or the dogcatchers will come and take her to some social center, to the big house where people wear white coats. Or maybe she’ll be a foul-smelling nomad. I might name the daughter I never have Olivia instead of Manuela. I’ll conceive her during the few moments of lucidity my addiction allows me. I might abandon her after her baptism, so that I can miss her so, so much…so that I can die of sorrow and give my life meaning by re-upping on grief. Olivia won’t cry or point fingers. Olivia won’t look for me. She’ll hate her mother and grow up swathed in failure. She’ll be the fruit of neglect, she’ll be a whim. The light of day will show me my mistake, and I’ll batter my stomach with closed fists in the fifth month to abort her. I’ll stick a needle deeper than my uterus and inject myself with fistfuls of heroin. The only thing I’ll have to leave her is my unmistakable DNA. And with anxiety kicking at my heart, I’ll dream about her living in a little palace with jasmine on the balcony, with a garden where mockingbirds sing…I’ll dream about her having hair like Juliet. Her father would probably rather call her Juliet than Olivia or Manuela. I’ll have the name embroidered into the blankets of the crib we abandon her in. Even if we throw her into a garbage bin, she’ll have those initials embroidered in gold by her grandmother for the day of the baptism. J.G.D. Juliet Goddamned Daughter. She’ll go through life with eyes full of fear and desperation, the eyes of a stray dog without an owner or a home. My darling, my little girl, my sweetheart…She’ll be as wiry and tough as the rugged feelings of sailors in Terranova. As hardened against solitude as she is against tides. Far from the present-tense pastel of shop windows in spring.

I’ll follow her close, spy on her from behind, make up a game to ask her age at a bus stop and give her a candy. What a beautiful little girl, I’ll say to her fake parents, though she won’t be beautiful, she’ll be ugly like the father I guess about and can’t remember, she’ll be tall and ugly like me. Her back bent from all the suffering she’s had to bear. And they’ll nickname her after that Dulce Pontes song, they’ll call her Lela, Leliña, the one I die for…

Thirty years later, once I, her mother, have gotten all those relapses, all that methadone, and a bit of whoring around out of my system, I’ll have a thousand kisses to give her. But, by the time she’s thirty, she’ll probably already have grown into her bitterness-steeped life.

A life without lullabies, without stories, without affection…

…lento…

Hi, my name is Chechu and I have depression. He introduced himself shamelessly, like the moment the flash goes off in a photobooth. I wasn’t impressed by his sadness, and it didn’t make me feel bad for him. I went on ringing up bread and pre-cooked meals at my station in the supermarket. He was a freezer aisle stocker. A Saturday at two in the afternoon: rush hour in that part of summer when the sun hadn’t yet turned brutal. Alcampo, the last stop for food before a trip to the beach or the mountains. Hi, my name is Chechu and I’m a vegan. I didn’t think much of his non-consumption of eggs, milk, or other animal products either. I’m stuck in indifference, not a way of being that runs perpendicular to the world—weightless bodies standing at the edge of alienation, former warriors for causes that no one cares about, like the procreation of mosquitoes in western Africa. I’m not interested in good causes; they seem too far removed, and I’m already struggling to get by on this ridiculous salary month to month as it is. Hi, my name is Chechu and I’m number 25. He ordered a loaf of ciabatta, a Russian potato salad, and a coconut cake. He passed me a note he’d folded four times over, evidence of the extent of his anxiety. Hi, my name is Chechu and I’d like to get to know you, he’d written, among other sincerities. It scares me that watching him go downhill doesn’t feel like a breath of fresh air, that it has been causing breakouts on my skin and fast-forwarding me into old age, my biggest fear of all. Of course, I’d like for some Chechu, Toñito, or Basilio to bring some spark to my monotonous life, to pick me up, squeeze me against his waist, and carry me, like a provincial Superman, to that other world, the world of routines with baby-on-board bumper stickers, shopping carts with no lonely microwave food, and frequent calls to babysitting agencies when we’re swamped with business dinners. All I want is to dutifully trade in my routine for that one, the one society designed for us. Drugged to the marrow from the smoke filling the streets. Achieving our life goals as a couple so that other people won’t call us failures…But Chechu probably isn’t a worthy suitor, his anxiety feels like life without advertisements, real life, the kind without sponsors, like skydiving without an instructor. I’d rather take shelter in the money I earn and spend it on anti-aging creams and trendy things. I’d rather keep my eyes closed.

Hi, my name is Chechu and I don’t do well in crowds. Chechu is blinded by his sanity, he’s doomed to sadness. That’s why I need someone like Toñito or Basilio, to blind me with their stupidity, to make me believe that the images on TV are the sole truth, that our neighbors fighting and shouting on their balcony at night are just the people at the San Cosme flea market, that the partisans were pre-Roman heroes, that the only hunger in the world is when you go on a diet, that violence only happens in judo classes…and that all deaths have natural causes. But Chechu isn’t going to be the one to color in my conformist world, a world without statistics, a world with individual loans and none of the mid-morning ferocity of the line at the bakery. No, this real man will remind me, every passionless sunrise, about the eight hundred million people going hungry, and he’ll drive to anti-globalization protests, anti-European meetings, and other acts of solidarity that will make me look like an asshole, dressed in peace and love, which is in fashion but doesn’t look half as good as Gucci. Chechu should definitely find someone like Itziar, Edurne, or some woman with a war goddess’s name, someone who knows how to fight. I’m going to stay here, waiting for an eligible bachelor, a crude, standard man with forty channels and a sports magazine addiction. I’m going to stay here, working my job at Alcampo’s bread and pre-cooked station, stupefied by the opium fumes that limit my brainpower to holding Vogue in one hand and writing the check for my boob job with the other.

…presto vivace…

I tattooed a thorny heart on my neck, a gorgeous rose on the arch of my foot, and a pin-up right above my left breast. I decorated my body to the rhythm of hope and disappointment. When Raquel left me, when I went crazy for Paula, when I burned for Marta. One by one, life’s emotional turns imprinted color onto the sublayers of my skin in this sub-par world. Their twenty-first century, aseptic one-use needles were like two therapies in one. I used the pain to snuff out my agitation, and the tattoo artist used me as an object for his fury. It’s all about exchange at this rage store at the foot of the street. Insults, sirens, tires screeching, secular art, demolition, construction, re-re-modeling, crowded concerts, curves and ramps, animals in heat and seagull screeches, children playing during vacation and a ball hitting your back at the beach, alternative guys and piercings…tattoos on my skin screaming out their garishness, their gaudiness, their kitschiness because they’re proof of change. After making my way through the three tattoo artists in the city, two amateurs and an endearing one, I ran off to another province. I started to try vintage looks: anchors with a woman’s name—Pamela—American cartoons, a Viva Las Vegas!, and a classic Jesus Christ with the crown of thorns around his head, on my chest. Little by little, I colonized the surrounding areas. The entire region pierced by the empire of my tattoos of tribal, childlike, and warlike patterns, of manga and dragons, of Aztec symbols, of anything you can imagine…and now they’re in the books in people’s parlors. Thanks to the empires that turn the wheels of globalization, we live in a hyper-connected world where your clit piercing can make you famous in Alabama.

…allegro giocoso…

Smoking kills. So does getting caught up in your indifference. Both of my needs come from the gut: the sleepless buzz of tobacco, and you. I’m hoping someone with West cigarettes—soft, blonde, German—will pass by and sweeten my wait, for who else but you. Except that the streets are full of Chesters and Marlboros in between the fingers of fast-moving, made-up women, office women with children whose kids go to schools with cafeterias. There’s a Ducados between the lips of the foreman overseeing the construction at 21 Gran Vía. I’m waiting at the corner by the produce store. But at this point I’m not sure whether I’m waiting more for the tobacco, or for you. Smoking’s going to cause abstinence syndrome in the kid I’m expecting. Every time I feel the little kicks, I assume they’re out of pleasure, or asphyxiation. Either way, I’m not going to deprive myself of the cigarette that would dull the time I spend waiting, for who else but you. Smoking gave you oral cancer. You kept doing it anyway, inhaling so many a day that the metastasis in your pharynx and larynx, in you, couldn’t keep up. I’m tense from the craving. It makes me inhale frantically at the slightest whiff of tobacco. It makes me wish I had even just a pack to chew on. Health workers are no in no place to be giving me advice, and neither are my family or friends. I can’t stand it when they fuss about the way I choose to while away my days. How many of those workers smoke? How many? They’re out there getting paid to warn us about something they do too. I score a Davidoff Black and feel more ready to walk down this pedestrian street that’s covered in shoes, trash, and discarded cigarette stubs from a thousand different mouths. Rushed cigarettes in hospital waiting rooms, leisurely ones at bars, forgotten ones on the floor, stubs on terraces, half-smoked ones in theatre bathrooms, just-started ones at bus stops, the last bit of one after an orgasm, and some tossed away triumphantly after a coffee. We and our stubs. The smoke scraping at our lungs as we inhale to help us scrape by in our everyday lives.

Helena smokes, María smokes, Jordi smokes. Non-smokers have no place in our asthmatic stampede through rooms bathed in that disgusting, rancid, nauseating cloud, with ash all over the floor, on the soles of our shoes. I wait; I smoke.

Smoking kills, sure, but what really kills me is the thought that you died, meanwhile I’m still here and can’t even afford a fucking cigarette!

…allegretto…

1.

Most of the time, you intoxicate me. Your pedantry, your arrogance, and the nicotine on your fingers rile me up. Your wife’s pregnancy eats away at me. The image of your mother, who I’ve never met, pains me. Everything about you makes me crazy because you’re what my weekend weakness craves. You’re what I can hide from Tuesday to Friday, between lunch and a siesta, between showering and deodorant, between one man and another. I’ve organized my entire existence into strict schedules to keep myself from thinking of you. But when Friday comes, oh! And Saturday night, oh, and Sundays with birds getting married, oh! Oh my god! Monday night is coming, the night I light the candles in the Aztec altar I keep above my TV, the one I bought during the “Corte Inglés Latin America Week,” which cost me an arm and a leg (but money’s nothing when it comes to you), and I praise you in between prayers and litanies, only whispered because I want you all to myself, every Monday from ten to twelve at night, after the Telecinco news. You’re the prince charming on my screen.

2.

I searched desperately for an email address I could use to convey to you, with no scent, skin, or good sense, the story of my life. I want to be your muse, the prologue to your next book, the treble clef at the start of your musical comedy, I want to be in the credits to your culture show, which are unfortunately very long. I searched frantically on the web pages of your TV channel, of medieval singers, and even the most recent batches of Mediterranean bachelors. I couldn’t find any traces of you on the internet or in the trash, where I threw away that copy of Lecturas magazine that mentioned you a few times. All I could find was that plastic slut you had a summer fling with on your yacht, while the boat was docked and you were together on the prow. God, you looked terrible there, my hairy-backed, black-toothed king, but god did you like that girl, Inma, who wasn’t glamorous enough to be a muse or truly enjoy you. It made such a big scandal in the tabloids! They said you were too old, a pervert…You said you were leaving, they gave you the boot—from the party you chaired, from the state TV network, from my Aztec altar, from here, from there, all because a sex shop employee had receipts to prove that it was there that you’d bought Inma, with her open mouth, plastic like strawberry chewing gum.

3.

After all the noise from the after-dinner conversations, you wanted to clear your name, so you donated your belongings and your nineteen-seventies, including Inma, so that they could be auctioned off for charity, for something like Hurricane Mitch or the Hiroshima bomb, one of those planetary catastrophes that wreak havoc in places that seem light years away. I called the telethon’s number: mercenary 906. I wanted to buy Inma so that I could prostitute her and live off the money, but she was too expensive, your CDs were terrible, your clothing for men, and you had too many of the same fountain pen. So, I bid on a letter you had handwritten on cardstock from the Hotel Bahía de Vigo, without a return address or postage, and I got it cheap, ten euros, because no one else bid. The host told me it would arrive soon. Nope. It took fifteen days. God, the wait! It came in a padded envelope. I opened it, and there was the paragraph I had been waiting for twenty years ago. I read it, unable to believe my eyes, forgetting that my heart was still beating in my chest, and thought back to when María, my dear accidental friend, called in to your show and asked you to send some letters to one of your fans, me, for her birthday. I was in my first year of high school at the time, and went on to become a deliverywoman for HEARTBREAK, though now I’m enrolled in FAITH.

4.

I click past all the pop-ups on my screen and keep on surfing in search of an address I can use to respond to such a bitter gift.

…ad libitum…

Her Christian name is Lonely, which hurts much more than Solitude. Her last name is Monotony, which is much more claustrophobic than Routine. Lonely Monotony lives on 20 Danger Street, the same number as her age, her failures, and the amount of lives she’s lived. The twenty lives she thought she lived in the skin of twenty different women. She’s played Delilah, Ophelia, and Scheherazade, and failed twenty times. She’s a ballerina at a company with no money, but lots of dreams, in a provincial city that hardly has a sewer system. Her dangerous street is infested by junkies overladen by their syringes, but she’s more afraid of the merciless passing of the seasons in the crumbling attic where she lives and practices. Un, deux, trois, demi, plié, arabesque. Because time has no concern for art. Because everything happens at the wrong moment. The company with no money but lots of dreams embroider their leotards with fabric from the fair, their accessories are from the everything-for-the-same-price-as-bleach store, and the place they practice is an unused wine cellar that belongs to the brother of the uncle of Miguel, stage name Maikel, one of the four dancers. Two men, two women. They live off the existence of their bodies and their hopes for the future. Lonely Monotony has gone through a thousand and two doors with antique locks, only for the projects and ideas in her hands to be filed away by a civil servant, and then tossed out. Either they were never educated in hopes and dreams, or they prefer not to remember to keep the bitterness off the taste buds in the shell around their hearts. She became a member of three opposing political parties. She sold her services. She was a ballet mercenary who starred in renowned productions. All so that she could get her company out of diapers. The year before, they had been invited to a dance marathon in the capital. They had to go on stage at four in the morning. There was an audience.

Lonely Monotony works nights at a rank-smelling pub to cover the expenses for their shows. Sometimes she gets drunk, stretching out the recent past by giving herself a massive hangover, not letting it slip away. One of the other dancers works in Barreras as a fireman, Maikel is a salesperson, and Whatshername Silverspoon’s parents still pay her bills. Lonely Monotony is the mule pulling the cart, but she’s running out of energy. Her solitude in this struggle, and she herself, are starting to compact more with each passing day. All she sees around her are dead ends, which has guaranteed that she won’t find a lick of good sense about her profession. That’s right, she’s a professional, whether she gets paid or not. She choreographs new steps in off-hours, sews the fabrics from the fair during the two o’clock break on the Televisión Española, and she refuses more socially acceptable jobs that would keep her from committing herself to dance.

But then she moves to another country, one with four-hour days and twenty-hour nights. Tired of wading through a sleepwalking population, she leaves. She leaves to dance, to have fun, to live for once and for all. She’s another cog in the wheels of emigration. Lonely Monotony emigrates. Someone else will fill the gap she left, someone like Constant Anguish, a painter, who will also emigrate, is emigrating, has emigrated…

It’s that past tense of emigration that’s drowning us…

…prestissimo…

Punk Patri has moved in with Indie Ramón. They fight over the sound system, trying to play the collector’s singles they bought on Piccadilly—the Sex Pistols and Ramones blaring while the Spanish omelet with mushrooms gets undercooked in the middle, the way Patri likes it, with the egg running down the left corner of her lips, cracked from the cold in Lérez, where she goes looking for insects for the city’s biological research institute. Cracked even though Ramón is always telling her not to forget about the bar of Neutrogena lip balm that they sell at the pharmacy where he works, the one owned by his grandmother, who votes for the right-wing Popular Party and knits to keep her eyes down and not see that her husband is running around with the girl who works at the herbalist’s on the same street. The Clash and Los Planetas blaring as the washing machine spins, still wobbling because they haven’t put a book under the leg, and the alarm clock screaming that it’s eight in the morning and not eight on a Friday night. Before opening the pharmacy, Ramón does fitness, spinning, and stepping and arrives to work very tired, and since he’s part of the family, he might as well leave the work to the other employees who aren’t the owner’s grandsons. But Punk Patri doesn’t like all this Falcon Crest nepotism, and always pushes Ramón to give up his job and his future inheritance of the apartment on Juan Flórez so that they can buy a truck with worn tire treads that have seen several lives and make it a few hundred miles away. The stocks of Patri’s life are starting to weigh her down: routine, appearances, and lunch with the in-laws at their house and its octagonal garden. Ramón doesn’t see that his lady is alright with a nomadic life, making their way as they go, without organic products, spa mesotherapy, or Devor-Olor anti-odor patches.

Indie Ramón’s black Sonic Youth shirt blended in the washer with Punk Patri’s red tartan pants, which she brought back from Amsterdam when she was thirteen. Meanwhile, Ramón already has his predictable, pre-scheduled beach vacation in Benicàssim booked, and Patri feels like her life is falling apart, fading away. But she’ll make Ramón happy and go camping with him in happy colors, standing close to the stages, waiting for the rebirth of a post-punk that has them going to festival after festival, like the one where they met, right at the foot of the stage.

I ran into her the other day as she was leaving a chain clothing store and she showed me a knee-length skirt, a serious blouse, opaque stockings, and low, open-toed shoes. She tried them on so that I could tell her what I thought. They looked good on her, but they didn’t look like her, and that’s exactly what I said. Submitting to Ramón’s sedentary lifestyle and turning a deaf ear to her aspirations, she’d decided to remain on solid ground. His family of politicians had gotten her a job at a very modern travel agency—computers with flat-screen monitors and revolutionary touch keyboards. Virtual resignation. I couldn’t bear to tell her. I couldn’t bear to disappoint her, to tell her that…that touch keyboards never work right and have a terrible warranty.

…andante…

I’m thirty-five years old and I’m about to have my second root canal. I have a Social Security number and a twenty-digit savings account number. I have memories, though not many, and some feelings, though they’re repetitive. I still have the Scalextric toy cars from my childhood and the Spanish national soccer team stockings from eighty-two. I have a car with worn-down tires that gets me to my home in the countryside. I’m pissed at you because you lost my favorite record and I watch the dog as it runs on the beach. I have a lot of birthdays to wish people well for and a few friends’ weddings to attend. I have to change my toothbrush and put the fresh fish in the fridge. I have to buy ripe avocados. I have to throw out the trash and renew my ID card. I have back pain, alopecia, and a collection of Rolling Stones posters. I have bills to pay.

I’ve been shopping, renting, observing, listening, filling up, going through environments that won’t help you when you have to leave for good because they’re going to charge you extra for excess baggage at the airport to heaven. But I still take pains to hold onto and collect objects, numbered papers, betrayed pacts, firm beliefs, desires, and a dream. That’s a lot of extra weight for such a little life. I never have any leisure time. I never have time for anything because I’m too busy bringing home stupid shit like a plan-obsessed worker ant. All this premeditation makes me desperate, because I don’t have time to see all seven continents, or even A Coruña, or Madrid…or any malls. I have to get a pedicure, I have a Fary cassette, I have so much fear…I have so much dread. I have a doll dressed in blue, some plants to transplant, and a pile of kitchen rags from the market in Valença. I have liquor and sugar cubes. I should go to the protest. I have to.

I have everything. Everything but you. I have the comfort that I’ll have you in another life, because in this one, when I put my things on the belt at the airport to heaven, they aren’t going to let me bring you: my bag will be too heavy.

…pesante…

Today, I went outside at two-thirteen in the afternoon. Today, I forgot to put on the straw raincoat I hang in my room every night, in case it rains anguish in these dream-scarce times. And so today, I cried. I cried because of the blinding light of a cello in a metallic red felt case on the back of a herculean girl climbing a hill, I cried because of the old woman in the tiny flower shop selling withered bouquets, and her leathery skin, and her black clothes on that summer day, and her dearly departed and the paltry pay she lives on, I cried because of the heart-rending cries of the people in the market, because of the absence of music and the three dissonant chords played by a street musician, I cried because of the lack of sensitivity, because of the envy of poor mothers glancing at rich babies in Chico strollers in front of them in line at the grocery store, I cried in order not to lose hope, I cried over the boy driving the latest two-seat BMW, who had never looked up the word “hunger” in the dictionary, over sparkling water and the sparkling waters being drilled beneath for oil, over the bankrupt store where my grandfather used to shop, I cried over the buses that used to be trams, over the traffic fines that meet quotas, over the committees with their hands tied, over the Roma man on his knees begging God for bread, I cried over the dodecahedron and the equilateral triangle, forever limited, over markets without fish and garbage cans containing waste that won’t fit in our landfills, I cried over the kindness of fools, and the virtue of certain whores.

I also cried because I forgot my straw raincoat and can’t bear the thought of all the misfortune in the world.

…poco espressivo…

I couldn’t find my Montblanc pen because I’d left it on top of the keys to my Petrof piano and not on top of my Carrara marble table. All these labels just to launch a heap of insults at you in my notes and over the telephone: Asshole. Fucker. Son of a bitch.

Not satisfied with that, and even less so with your savage indifference, I called you and asked if we could get together at the coffee shop where we met. The same place you’d gone so far as to ask me for a grandchild. When I got there, it had relocated and there was a 24-hour cybercafé in its place. The city had really modernized fast. Inconvenienced, I waited for you outside, without the comfort of being able to empty my sugar packet the moment I saw you so that your arrival would lose its intensity. You were late, the storm came an hour early, and the hellish winter weather caught us without umbrellas. You couldn’t shake your whimsical attitude and offered no apologies. Our relationship had relocated too, it was a delusion, a journey through hell. Property speculation having left us without coffee or glamour, I sat you in front of a computer in the cybercafé and had you enter the channel badvibes, 30 and up. I sat down at the computer beside yours. I found you on the channel. We created a private chat. With the cables as our intermediary, you confessed that you’d wanted to leave me but hadn’t known how. In the meantime, you began to hate me more and more, little by little, in crescendo, all because I couldn’t figure that out. That you were with someone else, that you said awful things about me, that my calls to you were dropped. And I never picked up on what you never told me. Because of all that, your days at the office lasted fifteen hours, the beer at the bar lasted four, and by the time you came back for the last five, I was already asleep.

Anyway, I hope you have a wonderful life, eight children, and don’t fuck out of fear of having more. I paid the guy at the counter three euros for the session and walked out. November 22nd. The street was even emptier than my heart.

…allegretto agitato…

Every day, I do fifteen minutes on the stationary bike, twenty on the treadmill, and work my triceps, back, pecs, and abs, then go home and devour a chocolate nutrition shake. I’m getting so bored of gyms—full of Nike shoes, Nafta sportswear, wet towels, and locker rooms that smell like chlorinated showers and sweat caked on the bodies of people wearing nothing but sandals. It’s such an embarrassing sight when I walk in every morning: the framed photo of my fitness instructor nearly naked in a skimpy speedo, showing off bulging muscles that are impossible in real life and incompatible with tenderly embracing your girlfriend, appearing innocent in a lie, driving a ridiculous Smart car, squeezing the apples at the store to see if they’re ripe, or being a believable civil servant on the Civil Registry floor. All this non-functional, Greek Atlas muscle in this anorexic life full of toned, skinny, feathery people. Gregorio Sánchez is happy with his muscle man narrative. He goes to every weightlifting competition there is and then hangs the newspaper cut-outs on the corkboard on the wall in the entryway, beside the certificates in physical education and intensive training courses on bodybuilding.

I started out doing aerobics, moved onto step, then wu-shu, tai-chi, and ended up just going to the sauna. I relaxed so much I went to ogle the kung-fu teacher who gave lessons to black belts. I would go to the showers feeling tired and lost, then spy through the crack of the door beside the women’s locker room, as he gave his instructions to the students and lazily demonstrated the taos. I would always run into him after my shower, on my way out of the locker room. Accidentally on purpose. That’s when I got obsessed with using the machines that make your muscles huge. At one point, I even bought one of those glossy-catalogue workout machines with a ton of pulleys and weights, and it cost me a fortune, but I bought it on credit, of course. All so that my hyperflexible Hulk would like me. I thought about signing up for his classes, but that would have meant looking perfect every time—hair combed, eyebrows waxed—so I stuck to my deliberate encounters and mustered one more word every day: see you tomorrow; Wow, I’m so tired; how did your class go?; my class was really great today…

Tired of all the ceremony and all the sinewy muscles on my body, I decided to pounce on the object of my desire. I made my moves. I meticulously prepared the pick-up, rehearsed it in front of the mirror, recorded it on my walkman to study it on the street, and ran into him at the door to his class, or the entryway to the locker room…but I didn’t make a peep. The next day, I tried it again, I had to get it right. I changed my hair color but didn’t get any collagen in my lips because I didn’t have time. I went red again, this time he was talking to a student as he walked out. Standing my ground, I pursed my lips and puffed out my chest, even though you came in with a kid in your arms the other day…Pablo, buddy, say something to the lady…this is my son…you hadn’t met him, right?

After doing some digging, I went to a pawn shop and traded in the muscle machine for a camera: the photography teacher didn’t have kids.

…pomposo…

I didn’t spread his ashes into the sea from atop a bridge, or across a picturesque landscape with rhododendron and dead leaves. I dumped them in the toilet and flushed four times to make absolutely sure he’d gone down to hell. It was what he deserved. He was a shithead. So elegant, so suited-up, such a son of a bitch. He’d made me go with him to pick out an urn and settle all the end-of-life procedures, which are always necessary at some point. He was always such a planner. An urn with Greek motifs of horizontal lovers. It was all so shiny…like his life: no clumsiness, misspellings, or virtual addictions. He had been skin and promises, skin and promises. A mirage, an untouchable man. But he had me pegged, and didn’t leave me much to complain about. He bought me roses, not thorns, and passed me emails, not scorn. But because I’m insecure, unstable, and lots of other antonyms of qualities he exalted, I had trouble enjoying our punctual Sunday lunches at his parents’ villa, the absurdly meticulous penetration and icy pulling out of our sex life, his coworkers from his up-and-coming job and promising future, the amazing car that would mean traffic jams on the N-4, and all the confidence of a man hitting his stride. He killed me with the control he thought he had over me—“thought” being the operative word. After eight years and a few hundred dizzy spells, he started talking about marriage. I married him by accident, absentmindedly. I must not have had anything else to do that day. Of course, the apathy in my actions (getting married, having kids, living life without ambition) made him think of me as a prosthetic sewed onto his body, one he would never remove. Time flew by. I put up with the flirting, the phone calls, his invitations to his three lovers, and the Lladró presents they would leave on the shelves in my living room, in my own home. It was an unspoken agreement. A man hitting his stride needed those phonebook contacts where he could come, then go. Meanwhile, I maintained my frigidity, the only thing that kept me out of the world, helped me stay anorgasmic, and gave me the blessing of not missing men one bit.

We went to buy urns for our ashes the way people go out to the movies. His masculine coldness killed me. He did everything with the same intensity: kissing, eating, arguing, existing. All of it with the passion of a minister with a fixed salary, no fight left in him. This pattern of controlled emotions drove me to despair. He could even control death when his time came. He called in and said his thanks like a notary: spread my ashes into the sea, from the Rande Bridge. He made time for everything, but this time, the last word was all mine.

…dolce con sentimento…

I’d like for this story to be a song, for it to speak of a country, of a faraway place, of cold weather, of two lovers walking on down a street on a Tuesday and to end with them growing apart, with an agitated, vengeful, jealous break-up. It would be an intimate and somewhat rootless composition, grounded only by the sound of a piano or a guitar, a bass or a viola. The words would be almost pained, with the broken voice of a woman, or a male soloist who works as a welder. I’d like this story to be written quickly, impulsively, in one go, on the streets of the same Gijón as always, after taking the trash out, and not at my home near the city’s industrial area. It would mention the lover’s name after waxing poetic on the infelicity of love and rooms enveloped in a nightlong frenzy. I wouldn’t forget to bring up being lost at dawn. The story would be stale, but still very purposeful…I’d make up the temperature of the air and their passion, the place where they met, the entire plot. I’d write the harmonies too, with a bit of painful dissonance. There would be whisky on the bars that would help push the protagonists into flight, into oblivion. I’d give him a brown corduroy coat. I’d give her sheer tights and messy lipstick. I’d find them beside me, at their last meeting point of the night. I’d watch them from my table and leave thinking that they’re the characters to a piece of music, to the lyrics of a song.

I’d like for this story to be a song, and not a police report on a cold Tuesday, on a street far from my country full of industrial blocks. I leave, bottling up my sorrow, because they saw me, because I saw them: she slowly falling apart, he digging the knife into her belly.

…più lento…

What ever happened to the bumper car boys? The boys who would arrogantly maneuver the rebellious metal at the Carme festivals with a glint in their eyes. Where did that suffocating, teenage cockiness and virility go? It left with the bumper car boys. There I was, blushing when one of them winked at me. Touched and sunken, watery. They would dance on top of the tires, the little cars in a flood of festivity. Stepping foot onto the rink was like falling into the open sea. Everything outside of that balsa rink was awful, like in the forests of Indiana Jones. Your foot taking a wrong step, the invitations of the other drivers, the gaze of that Roma bumper car boy…and the gaze of that man from the neighborhood. How about a ride, on me? I’ll even let you drive. And there I was, crazy with immature love, so certain about the first man to take me in a car. The disappointments came not long after.

What ever happened to the talkative nomad from the raffle where I won the retarded doll, or the hundreds of little shreds of losing tickets on the ground, or the cotton candy that smelt like the 7th of July? I stuffed my face with candied almonds and glanced around for the bumper car boys. Meanwhile, the orchestra’s screeching sounds interrupted the first adolescent flirtations. The groups of neighborhood girls were always showing off in front of the bumper car boys, and I was so embarrassed that I didn’t even feel protected by the cruel monkey wearing a belt, silvery sandals, church clothes, and eighties fashion.

Now that I don’t go to fairs, now that I’ve regurgitated my taste for cotton candy—sticky on the roof of my mouth—I’d go back to my homeland, to the place where the gross domestic product was sensations, to the land of brazen adolescence.

At this point in life, after so much overdone romance, I’d only let myself fall for one of the bumper car boys, for the boy who, at this point in life, already has three children and a grandchild.

…scherzando…

Desire takes up less than one square meter inside me. I spoke to an interior decorator, an architect, a wall remover, a remodeler and builder, a plastic surgeon, a window display maker, a façade cleaner who restores friezes…

I still have no desire, but now there’s a thousand men as far as my eyes can see who desire me.

…pressez jusqu’à la fin…

“Bless me father, for I have sinned.”

“When was your last confession?”

“Ten years ago. For ten years, I’ve been stumbling along the wrong path. All that time veering away from shortcuts, not letting myself get anywhere, and avoiding engraving my name on a mailbox in a place with a few dozen postal codes. Ten caramelized years in steel cans pressure-sealed with the Galician Quality stamp, preaching about the healthy face of failure. Failure can cut deeper than a northern winter. The failure of being a peasant in life, way up in the scaffolding of the middle class, with no harness, soldering the holes in your routine without a mask to protect your face, or the hope in your eyes. One day, you fall asleep next to your income tax, your mortgage, the sales tax, and the rising gas prices. One day you realize that you’re buying the newspaper out of family habit, that you’re just afraid of losing the custom, and anyway, you’ve never understood the financial section or the stock market, you don’t like handball or skating, the obituaries send a shiver down your spine, you don’t recognize the world’s presidents, and the rest of it is mediocre, rapid-fire columns by cocky writers, things happening on the weekend, and human interest stories, which you could have just as easily found about from María Teresa Campos on TV. Ten idiotic years. Ten years broke, recycling plastic, glass, and paper, instead of recycling your awful days. The same credits at the end of every minute, season, era. Three thousand coffees spread out over a thousand places with two thousand conversation partners. One hundred recurring conversations. Two dozen thongs at the back of the dresser drawer while you wait for your anti-aging cream to kick in. One thousand four hundred Q-tips to clean your ears, unable to prevent the deafness of those who died from war, from living in ghettos, from hunger, of the match saleswoman who dies every Christmas without anyone being able to stop it. Half a million cigarette butts, every one your last before you quit tobacco. Fifty stamped resumes in the trash cans of business owners. Ten years switching from one plane to another at airports, never on direct flights or in business class. Not even on the regional train, with twenty stops at twenty ghost towns. Ten years waving goodbye to the people who leave, waiting for them to come back to the world and show me how to go on adventures. Like Willy Fogg, around the world in eighty days (eighty business days for the servants of the State). I’ve been sinking into the sofa of poverty, of disappointment for a long time now, the sofa with Warhol’s painting of Einstein cracking up that I got from a traveling market in Valencia. Ten years in the stagnant locker of anonymity, coming up with an epitaph that would outdo Groucho’s, dying slowly, ever so slowly, of boredom. Ten years with music as the choreographer of my nightless days. Ten years fighting with myself at grocery-store refrigerator aisles, over one brand of margarine or another, over bananas from Ecuador or the Canary Islands. Ten years of rooting for you, and for that other guy. Ten years of marriage, divorce, and a lover. My identity card, driver’s license, and passport all expired, and thirty prescriptions for foot fungus, hemolytic anemia, and the gigantic scar on my shoulder.

“Ten years waiting in line at doctor’s offices, at shops, in the road, and in churches when it’s time to consecrate the host. Lines. Ten years of people lining up in front of me because they’re convinced that their time is gold, the poor idiots. And all that just to arrive a bit earlier at the offices for Life’s Procedures, that merciless corporation.

“Ten years stumbling along the wrong path…”

“Recite four Our Father’s and don’t let anyone line up ahead of you for the next ten years. Not at the butcher’s, or at the soccer team’s box office, or even in the anxieties of life…”

…strigendo…

You make me forget that Benavente is in Zamora province and that my direction in life dies every afternoon as I stand by the panini press at Sandwiches, lost between hamburgers and hot dogs. I don’t know much more than what’s in Larousse encyclopedias. You love my ignorant self anyway. My most international task is to go check you in at Santiago airport every May and cry upon your arrival every November. This year it’s Mauritania. You’re out with the tides two hundred nights in the year. Nights I spend with the bitter taste in my stomach, from the fear that you’ll want to marry me or from the mistake of feeling like your life partner. Your scent makes me nauseous—it’s the smell of a protector, not a lover. I know that my father, your colleague in tides and port town whores, told you to look after me when the cancer spread to his spine. I know that you’ve liked me since I was thirteen, with my budding breasts, my hairless vagina, and the uncertainties I chewed up at the speed of my lemon-lime gum. I know that I’m your last stop on that definitive day when you dock on the coast and no one will buy any more scraps of life from you, when there’s no more life in the tides and all you have left is the sea’s phlegm in your throat, which you’ll cough up on land, from the pier.

But I’m still thirty-five and want to see Paris. I want to study painting and enamor other men. I want to be a port town whore and not someone who waits around, pregnant with fried fish, for you to finish your fucking card game at the bar. I don’t want to be touched by your hands, which are sewn together with the material of another life, and have you kill the three hopes that keep me going.

You’re going to come look for me today, like every day, after you finish work, and your combed, conditioned hair with its anti-hair-loss-serum smell is going to make me want to vomit, along with the distinguished black of the clothes that foreshadow the color of my noons with you: eating, devouring the repetitive news on the TV. You’re going to come pick me up today and I don’t know if I’ll be able to fake my satisfied expression well enough. I rehearsed it over and over so that I wouldn’t hurt you, and ended up killing myself. I’ve planned my escape so, so, so many times. Getting lost among the crowd in the capital and being reborn like a wave in the flowing crowds of people. Being an urban flame. Letting the days go by at other sandwich-shop panini presses, with the imbalance of not having you at the end of the day when you leave work, unprotected but peaceful.

I don’t want any more sailors that receive welcomes at faraway ports. I guess it’s because I’m the fruit of one of those desperate stop-ins at a humble port and I have the last name Jameson. It was probably that woman’s scent that reeled my father in and anchored him. That’s how I know about the madness of tides, about growing up with the intuition that the person bringing you presents is your father, about meetings with tutors but not him, and how my father’s at sea. God knows how many siblings I have along the world’s coasts. God knows how many cousins my kids will have.

You’re going to come find me today with the tranquility of knowing that soon enough your ass will find a place beside mine on the also-black leather couch from the Suárez furniture store that you liked so much. And then time will go by: they’re showing a movie at five, change the channel, I want to see what’s on Three, we’re eating at Mom’s house this Sunday, tomorrow is Luísa’s wedding—Luísa, the one from my hometown…

Flowers are going to show up for me at work today, dandelions not violets, just like every Monday—yours, no card, complicit in the proud virility that thinks it has won me. But today, I won’t go to work, I won’t come back, won’t come back, won’t come back. I’m going to go get gas by the cliff, the marker and the tomb of the last of the sunken oil tankers, and who knows, maybe I’ll sink in with the shit, ever so dense, so dense, so dense.

Text © Iolanda Zúñiga

Translation © Jacob Rogers