The Englishman and I were ever so slightly in love, if you can know what being in love means or the circumstances required to say you are in love. Place was important in this whole affair, where we met and where we’d get to know each other even better later on: the factory’s fermentation room. I used to clean out the dry dough balls that had dropped off the long chain of rimmed platters where they put them before they came out of that stifling heat and were flattened into pizza shape. The heat meant nobody liked going near the fermenting, but I preferred it to being by the oven with the stone bases that kept circling around. Whenever I’d thought of that brand of pizza I’d imagined the country farmhouse on the wrapper, not the grandpa and the children in the advert, but the farmhouse itself. And the oven was definitely made of stone, but it was an enormous machine where pizzas went in and then came out a few minutes later, close to each other, on square pieces of stone. The entrance to the oven was what I really loathed, where the dough piled up and was as dry as anything, all mixed up with tomato, and covering the light green cables we had to pull out by hand, that we couldn’t get really clean even with the hoses. I liked the fermenting room because it was so warm and because we only had to remove the dough balls and sweep up, there was never ever any water inside there. Plenty of flour though, that fell on your face when you got under the production line with all those balls patiently waiting to inflate.
You always sweat in the fermenting rooms. That’s why you always go in wearing only a blue overall with nothing underneath and green wellington boots that made your toes go plopplop. The day I met the Englishman, I didn’t know he was inside. There was a silence that absorbed all the other noises in the factory though, from a distance, as if the dough was really isolated from the rest of the world, as if they’d padded the walls so the dough didn’t take fright. A line manager told me that without that silence the pizza bases would go hard, dry and lifeless, that the noise outside would frighten them. That wasn’t true, there was silence because it was one of the few places in the factory that was sealed, like an endlessly long room. I walked to the back to start clearing out the dough that had stuck to my soft boots that I usually wore without socks because I’d be in a rush and leave them in a tangle on the sofa. That was why it wasn’t at all odd I didn’t see the Englishman until I was right at the back, lying on the ground wearing steel toe-caps, blue trousers and a shirt. That was the difference between a mechanic and a cleaning lady: we wore an overall and they wore two items of clothing, though all in the same colour. I don’t know if the Englishman was a mechanic or engineer or something of the sort: I could only see his legs.
Nobody knows what makes that fermenting smell, as if it’s something alive, that’s rancid and living at the same time, if you get too much it smells like something rotten. And that day it came mixed up with the black grease from the machine’s cogs and the smell of the guy underneath whose face I’d still not seen. Anyone who gets in there with someone else was bound to feel turned on, anyone would. I kneeled down next to the guy, who still hadn’t seen me. Till I got tired of skulking and cleared my throat. My memories are a blur from then on. How did we make first contact? Did we say hello? Did we shake hands? Did he come out from underneath and bang his head he was so surprised like in a gag in some awful farce? Did we look deep into each other’s eyes as if it were love at first sight? I don’t remember, but you can bet it wasn’t the latter. I only retain flashes of what happened: the taut sinews supporting the weight of his body when he still didn’t know I was there, stretched out on my front under the machines, struggling to prise off dry dough that gave off that stench of fermenting, of rotting when it came away, and him walking over me in that narrow corridor to fetch his tools, stooping because he was so tall, and me splattered with flour that he tried to wipe off my cheek, without saying a word. I do remember that, his caress and his excuses. Sir, if only you knew the times I’ve been caressed by men who weren’t even aware of what they were doing, weren’t staking any claims. Caresses escape your control, though you try to put the brake on, your hands are insistent, need to do it.
Then there was supper on Friday with all the other workers, though not the personnel that made the pizzas, only the casual labour, the mechanics and cleaners. Fridays spent racing with trolleys full of cheese and ham, sharing pizzas we couldn’t eat during the rest of the week. What sweet revenge on the managers who threw them away when they’d just been packaged if they fell on the ground but wouldn’t let us eat them. Or did let us, if we asked their permission, like dogs waiting outside the door to be thrown scraps. Such subtle, invisible humiliation. It was also one of those Fridays when we went to a bar that opened early and drank and drank, he more than me and he was so huge he wrapped all around me. And then we walked to my place and, in the middle of a square, stared deep into each other’s eyes in a scene that could be straight out of a film. His eyes were bloodshot and watery, and he pretended to be very emotional, or really was, who knows? We were on the point of kissing when he stopped me, his mouth close to mine, turned my chin towards the sky so we could see the moon and said in Spanish ¡Mira todo! Look at all that! You only have a first kiss once and I want you to remember every detail forever. Our first kiss was a heavy, sultry effort, our legs went this way and that as the sun began to make us realize how pathetic we must seem. We went into my bedroom, closed the shutters to keep out the light of day and let the weight of our bodies crash down.
Sex with the Englishman was also perfect, pity it was a swindle, an illusion, because it wasn’t ever really him and he acted as if it was a great love affair. Obviously, you’ve guessed that I didn’t see it like that at the time. I could only laugh at his bouts of drunken romanticism. I love you, he kept repeating in English, I’ll always love you, and he went on talking though I didn’t understand a word. Perhaps we did love each other a bit by virtue of repeating the word so often. Or perhaps not, because by this time it’s quite obvious that however much you repeat clichéd words it doesn’t make an event as improbable as love actually happen. That first night that had turned into day I was surprised the Englishman kept at it so long. He was at least twenty years older than me and was very drunk, but it didn’t seem to affect him. He knew all about rhythm, and that made him a better lover than others, he knew about ritual and took it step by step, but I just felt like a good sleep after a whole evening at work and an early morning round of drinking. The bed didn’t have a head board at the time and I missed not being able to hold on to one. They say beds without one aren’t a good idea, probably because you have nothing to hold on to when you need to. I gripped the bedroom wall knowing I’d leave finger marks while I felt my head spinning and wanted to tell him to stop once and for all, that I’d had enough. But the Englishman, like so many others, also wanted to impose pleasure on me. You, sir, must know that lots of men are like that. And it’s as if they do what they’ve always done with women but in reverse: instead of not worrying about us coming they now force us to have orgasms, in part to satisfy themselves, I suppose. That night I felt his snores and body next to me, an almost transparent white body where you could see the blood in the veins under his skin.
The Englishman only visited occasionally from another factory, in a country the name of which I don’t remember, and lived in a hotel when he was staying in my city and luckily it wasn’t the hotel where I had worked that had a small bedroom for train ticket inspectors. It was a different one with rooms with a small kitchen where the Englishman cooked Thai food for me on a Saturday when I slept over. It was sad living in a hotel, with the clothes he’d washed in the bath hanging on a small clothes hanger on one side of the bedroom, with that sort of curtain at the foot of the bed to separate the living room from where he slept. I had more than one nightmare there. I remember his big, white tongue that he stuck everywhere, his eyes that every so often looked like a child’s, his arms that were very long like the Ghanaian’s, his fingers as well and the unusual way his back curved. Did you know that backs curve differently depending on which country you come from?
The Englishman started to distance himself gradually, without making a fuss. It was like a normal relationship, going for a drink together, sleeping together on Saturdays, dancing and all that, having breakfast together on Sunday, and me so used to doing that by myself. However, he had a melodramatic side that I discovered was triggered by alcohol. You are afraid to say I love you, he’d keep saying, upset because I’d never actually told him I did. No, I wasn’t afraid, I just didn’t love him. Perhaps he thought I did from the way I gave myself up to him, from the caresses I let escape, that my hands were to blame for, from the way I gazed at him when he was falling asleep, but they are things I’ve done with every man I’ve ever been with. You will probably think it rather trite if I tell you how the need to love slips from my fingers however much I try to put the brake on, you’ll probably think it absurd if I tell you I put the brake on because, deep down, I didn’t believe in that whole affair. I’m not sure, that’s how I see it now, but at the time I just didn’t feel like saying I love you, and wanted to laugh when he did.
I found a bottle of small blue pills in his bathroom and saw he was desperate, suddenly impotent, the day he had none left. It’s harder to get them here, because he didn’t have a local doctor. Maybe these blue pills have sorted lots of problems for you older men, but I can tell you now that I felt let down. However, it was no big deal, sometimes you don’t even have to finish an affair: they sometimes end all by themselves. He went back to that country in Europe that wasn’t his or mine and we never exchanged another word, not even on New Year’s Day when you send a message to everyone on your list of contacts.