David
She was talking, but I couldn’t hear her. Well, to be honest, I could hear her, but I was only able to catch a few words here and there. What she wanted to say had become clear in the first few sentences, so as I often did, I lost the nuances of the discussion, spellbound by her features. Jesus Christ…she was so beautiful. She was incredibly beautiful. She had a special magnetism, the aura of a femme fatale who could cause emotional suicide. She had it all. To me she was the most incredible girl in the world.
I had always liked the pointy shape of her mouth because it seemed to kind of match her character. Suddenly, a word would get snagged on a corner and reject calm in favor of the storm. She was a storm. With her platinum-blond hair and her asymmetrical shoulder-length haircut, somewhere between French black-and-white films and hipsters at music festivals. She was a girl with an explosive body. I’d be lying if I said the first thing I noticed was her eyes or her style. Crazy curves. The day I met her, excuse me, but I fell in love with those two perfect nipples showing through her shirt.
This babe always knew what to wear to drive anyone crazy. Her outfit was never the most logical option… She’d wear something totally outlandish to have a beer in the most tucked-away place in Lavapiés and then wear baggy jeans full of holes to her business meetings. She was like that with everything… Nobody understood her, and it’s lame, but that’s what I fell in love with (besides the nipple thing, which Freud would probably say points to some childhood trauma).
How many tangos have been written about women like her? How many dudes like me have fallen at her feet?
“David, are you listening to me?”
I bit my bottom lip and felt annoyed. I was much happier in my daydream than answering her.
“Of course I’m listening to you, Idoia, but there’s been nothing for me to respond to for a while.”
Her red-painted lips froze in a smile, but…it wasn’t a smile that put you at ease…more like one that had a bite. There are few things that bother me more than condescension, and coming from her, it was even less tolerable hearing all the “you’re so young, David” or “you’ll learn that in the years to come.” She had thirteen months on me. Call me crazy, but I don’t trust the wisdom accumulated in that year and thirty days of difference.
“We agree then, don’t we?” she said finally.
At this point in the film, I had very few options. One was to be honest and confess to her that, even though I hadn’t been paying attention to her little speech, no, I didn’t agree. That would involve debating each point with her, one by one, that she had been putting on the table and…we were standing on a corner, in the middle of the street. I didn’t feel like airing my dirty laundry there; it wasn’t the time or the place. It would be really embarrassing. I never liked to grovel, but I suspected that I’d been doing that a lot ever since we started our thing. Plus, after everything she’d said to me, I didn’t want to give her ears the gift of hearing that it was a unilateral decision that hadn’t taken me into account, as an equal.
“Totally agree,” I declared.
I went to take a step back to leave before I gave myself the chance to beg. My mind flashed to an image of me on my knees, whimpering and licking her legs and…it disturbed me. I had my pride, but I was very hooked on Idoia, and it could probably happen. Maybe licking her in the middle of the street was a product of my imagination being overly prone to drama, but let’s be honest: we (her, me, the kebab guy on the corner, her yoga teacher…) all knew that I was capable of begging for her. I wanted to leave with what little dignity I had left after that talk so I could still imagine cool music playing as I walked away, the rest of the passersby watching me in slow motion, not even blinking while everything exploded spectacularly behind me. But the screening of that particular mental film would have to be canceled for now because Idoia clutched my wrist and pulled me to her. I looked at her mouth and her breasts, bulging out of her black shirt, pressed against my torso. I closed my eyes for a nanosecond; she wasn’t wearing a bra. Not that she needed one. Those glorious tits stood up perfectly on their own… Her surgeon made sure of that. DearGodPleaseDon’tLetMeGetABoner.
“What are you doing?” I let myself ask with a smile but a furrowed brow.
“Giving you a kiss goodbye.”
I should have refused, I know, but I told myself she was the one who proposed it. I couldn’t deny myself. It was too soon to accept the truth: that for her, to keep her by my side for five seconds longer, I would have thrown myself on the ground and let her walk on me like a carpet. Dudes are proud idiots, but at the moment of truth, we would bow down to the first evil villain who scorches our hearts.
And we kissed. We kissed how everyone should kiss. Like a goodbye at the train station. Like in songs that people dedicate on jukeboxes. Like the protagonists of an award-winning drama who fell in love off-screen after the film premiered.
Fucking Idoia. Nine months together and she waited for that moment to give me the best kiss, incredible but short, like all the good moments with her. That’s probably what got me hooked on that relationship: the ups and downs, the intensity, the feeling of free fall.
I didn’t feel her pulling away from me, but when I opened my eyes a few seconds later, she was already touching up her lipstick, looking into a little mirror she had taken from her bag.
“I’m going.”
“Bye,” I responded, my voice cracking like a nerd’s.
“I’ll call you so you can pick up the stuff you left at my house.”
“You can keep it.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Good luck, Idoia,” I persevered.
“Same to you.”
She smiled, tucked away her lipstick and mirror, and, with a flip of her hair, turned to go, nothing else to say.
“You know where to find me if you ever need anything,” I heard myself call out, just to see her turn around.
Come on, come on. Come back. Come back and I’ll crawl if you want me to crawl. And I’ll buy a dog collar so I can follow you around at your feet. Come back, look at me.
“If she comes back, she’s yours, dude.”
But she didn’t.
Her platinum hair vanished into the crowd bustling around Hortaleza Street. At this time on a Friday in June, there were thousands of people. Even so, I waited like a dope for a few more minutes, forcing myself to pick out her figure from the throng, hoping she would come running back, throw herself on me, wrap her legs around my hips, and stick her tongue in my mouth again. No one’s as big a dumbass as me. Or a romantic. Or a pig.
In the movies, the guy is always shielded from the harsh reality by a glass of some very strong liquor, which he drinks without wincing while a middle-aged bartender, armed with great advice, listens to his sorrows.
But in real life there was no glass for me… I was the bartender, and, I swear, the last thing I wanted was some drunk telling me his whole life story.
I sighed and checked the time on my old cracked phone. I was late for inventory, and Ivan would already be at the bar.
“Dude!” Ivan greeted me from behind the bar as I ducked in under the half-open shutter of the club where we both worked on the weekends. “A sight for sore eyes!”
“Sorry I’m late. I was with Idoia. We had to talk.”
“Blessed Idoia. She’s like human evolution: she turns monkeys into men.”
Normally, I would have laughed at that, but this time I emptied my pockets next to the cash register and grabbed a notepad without saying a word. I had spent the short twenty-minute walk to the bar reviewing the shreds of the conversation that I could recreate in my memory…a pretty difficult task because I had disconnected mentally during the first cascade of reproaches.
Immature. Head in the clouds. An out-of-touch romantic. No vision of the future. Unhealthily shortsighted. Needy for constant affirmation. Emotionally dependent. A penchant for using “freedom” as an excuse to justify my mediocrity. Unadventurous and resigned to being an underachiever with my three part-time jobs. My scruffiness. “Sharing an apartment” (crashing on their couch more like) with my best friend, his girlfriend, and their seven-month-old baby. Never having a dollar in my pocket to make plans or go on trips. Burping after the first sip of beer.
That bitch had really done a number on me. She never seemed to complain when I was eating her out every single day, the stupid whore.
Okay. I was pissed off. What phase of grief was that?
Whom was I trying to fool? I was sad. Very sad.
“Are you listening to me?” Ivan asked.
I snapped out of it and stared at him blankly. He was leaning against the bar with a rag over his shoulder, wearing his favorite checkered shirt, and smiling in a way that looked dopey to some but I knew was simply honest. He snapped his fingers, and it infuriated me. Like a little boy getting told off in class and feeling humiliated by his classmates’ laughter.
“David, you’re spaced out.”
“No, Ivan, I’m not spaced out,” I snapped back as I turned around, pretending to count the sodas we had in one of the fridges behind the bar.
“I was telling you, for the hundredth time, that you should bring her home whenever you want. Dominique wants to meet her, and…I do too. Seeing her photo is fine and all that, but…I don’t know. We’re going to end up thinking you’re hiding us because you’re ashamed of us.”
“Don’t be a dumbass.”
She was the one who didn’t want to meet them. She was never “really into” mixing with my people, she would say. Not with Ivan and Dominique or with my crew from the village.
“You already told me she’s elegant and sophisticated,” Ivan continued, “and she has that super modern job, but…we’re still good people in the hood.”
“Uh-huh. Listen, is it better if I start in the storeroom?”
Ivan came closer and studied my expression with a furrowed brow. His hair was even more disheveled than usual. I normally joked with him, inventing stories about a surfer soul who grew up in Madrid and surfed on the M-30, but that day the fact that Ivan had abandoned his dream of living by the sea seemed much sadder than normal.
“What’s going on?” he asked me seriously.
“Nothing.”
“Is it because of the night the little one had? I’m sorry, dude. Her teeth are coming in, and…you know they say if we had to deal with that pain as adults, it would drive us crazy?”
“It’s not that, Ivan. I live in your house, and you don’t even charge me rent. I’m not going to complain about your baby crying at night.” I leaned against the bar and felt a current of grumpiness, sadness, and frustration zip down my spine.
“So?”
“Nothing. It’s…” I sighed. I didn’t want to talk about it. “It’s…this job. I can’t handle any more brats screaming for their drinks.”
“Ah, well…” He shrugged. “It is what it is. We’re bartenders.”
“Bartenders, messengers, florists, dog walkers…”
“After all that studying, my mother says.”
“As if that guaranteed anything,” I muttered as I headed back to the storeroom.
“Hey!” Ivan snapped. “Seriously, what’s your deal? You’re fucking up the feng shui in here with all your negativity.”
I snorted and slumped against the wall. Ivan wasn’t going to stop until he wheedled it out of me. It was better to confess now.
“She broke up with me.”
“What?”
“Idoia broke up with me.”
“But…why?”
I grabbed the notepad again and kept walking toward the storeroom as I said over my shoulder, “She doesn’t have time for me because she has to focus on her job. If I were more mature, more reliable, had anything to offer…she would make an effort, but me being me, it’s better to leave it here because we don’t have any future. Well, to be honest, I’m the one who doesn’t have a future, apparently.”
“You don’t have a future? Why not?”
“Don’t make me repeat it all over again. Bad vibes.”
“But…what a bitch! Who does she think she is? What is she talking about? She doesn’t deserve you, dude… She doesn’t deserve you… You know what I mean? What’s going on here is…”
Ivan’s voice drifted away into nothing as I submerged myself in the chaos of the storeroom, which, as always, smelled damp and stale. Like floors sticky with beer, sugary liqueurs fermenting in the corners. The dark side of the moon, the dirty side of a club where hundreds of boys and girls go to make out on the weekends.
I guess Ivan’s words would’ve comforted me if I had stopped to listen to them, but I didn’t give him the chance. Whatever he said, he wouldn’t be able to talk louder than the voice in my head confirming everything Idoia had said to me. It was true. Apart from a bunch of pipe dreams, I had little to offer, even to myself.
I was a twenty-seven-year-old guy with no cash in my pocket. I was a dude with no guarantees for the future. I was a kid who had not even the slightest idea where he would be in a few years. No higher education. No masters of the universe. No connections. No long-lost rich uncle. I, David, was the living example of what a poor kid shouldn’t aspire to; freedom, the real kind, costs too much money.
I perched on a box of Coke bottles and scrunched my hair in my hands. My life was a disaster. I envied people who had time to lick their wounds. I envied the guy in the movie with his glass of whiskey and a bartender who looked nothing like me. I envied everyone who wasn’t me because I was a real mess and nothing ever turned out how I wanted.
I took a deep breath, looked at the ceiling, and wondered why the fuck I still felt so full in spite of everything. I was overflowing with desires.
Shit, I was going to end up choking on my own hunger to be loved.