She knew the long knife would slip even before using it. The
parmesan felt cold and dusty in her right hand. She pushed the cheap blade
against the block of cheese slowly, both hands on top of the handle. Pushing
her weight toward the counter, she breathed a warm frustration. When scarlet
jumped out her skin like scarves from a magician’s hat god damn knife slowly on
the counter paper towels where are they where are they where are oh and arm
over bathroom skin some yellow thick dotted fatty tissue flap the skin back
over doesn’t need stitches and if it does too bad I don’t have the cash right
now paper towels will have to suffice the blossoms of blood kept blooming it’s
springtime in my hands.
The blood stopped and she wondered how she was going to wash
her hair the next morning. Her little hands with bonier fingers. She lifted the
paper towel and the red twisted in between her hands again, diving onto her
thighs. She had stayed in bed all weekend, her oily hair now bituminous at the
roots. The footsteps of rain on her balcony mimicked the footsteps that used to
come to her room, joining her on those scratchy plum sheets. On rainy days, she
forgot all about the delicate moments of a woman’s solitude.
___
He was her lover before they even spoke.
She immediately knew he was an American, like her. To the
untrained eye, or perhaps someone less desperate for contact, he could have
been a Spanish intellectual, an Anglophile, one of those post-Almodovar
hipsters with a thirst for all things American (an affliction which touches all
countries, not just China,
or Japan, come
to find out). The stature of this man seemed decidedly Spanish, all compactness
and several inches above femininity, and his hair could have been Spanish,
tight unruly brown curls, and not an inch of his skin whispered WASP. But the
clothes gave it away, and the sprawl in the expat bookstore's biggest leather
armchair. Only an American would happily, so comfortably, claim such a perch on
foreign ground. He was reading an anthology of short stories. The next time,
another, but in Spanish. Then in Basque, then in Spanish, then Neruda poems in
English. And she watched him and he sometimes followed her outside, when she
took a break from reading, and bummed smokes. He was a man who believed
that everything had been written. Her choice of Spain
over Bolivia.
His being from Wisconsin, the
state of her father’s childhood farm. Her weakness for curly hair. Their
repulsion for one another. They fought often. His cruel sense of humor summoned
hers. And she was glad the people who passed by the shop, as they stood
outside, could not understand English.
But he fucked her in her mind. And fucked her. And fucked
her. And she said nothing to initiate an affair and neither did he. One
afternoon she burst out, “Why haven’t you asked me to dinner yet?” In that moment sounds blended like watercolors.
Her hands shook so she put them down on something anything oh, against the
building, cheeks scarlet pulsed with her now short and sharp breaths in out in
out in why isn’t out he in responding out in out his eyes are so big and God
look at that curly curly hair in out fuck why did in I out say anything at all
and he told her, roughly, “You’re used to being catered to. You won’t get any
of that from me.”
___
She somehow ended up spending the night on his couch. A
group of her friends had wandered around until she missed the metro going to
her apartment. She stood at the bottom of his street, looking at the Spanish
plaza behind her, and then up his street. Down, and up. She told herself to
walk down to Charles III, toward his fleet of humorless taxi cab drivers, and
her feet carried her up Montera, toward him. Her favorite street in Madrid.
Tiny prostitutes, old prostitutes, black prostitutes. The police stood at the
very top and watched these girls be bought and sold like cheese. She stopped to
light a cigarette and leaned against a doorway. A drunk, jaundiced eyes rolling
back into his skull, started snaking his way toward her. She froze, only for a
moment, and then continued to walk up the street. A stocky young girl with
platinum hair grabbed a young man walking in front of her. “¿Quieres follar?”
She asked mockingly, “¿Quieres follarrrrr?” The man asked her how much and they
began to squabble. She walked behind them slowly, forgotten cigarette between
her lips. Her feet reached his door. She stepped onto the stoop, in between
three prostitutes. Two ignored her and the youngest, maybe thirteen, pursed her
cracked lips and cackled something in Serbian to the others. She flushed and
rang his bell. Come on, come on.
They sat on his hard white couch. She tucked her knees into
her chest and her chin into her knees while he spoke. They got up and leaned
out his window, smoking cigarettes. He told her that the place selling gold
across the alley was a front for a whorehouse. He quoted, “Love is kinda like, you
know when you see a fog in the morning, when you wake up, before the sun comes
out for just a little while, and then it burns away. Quickly.” He told her that
he thought she was a beautiful woman. He offered his bed and she refused.
Offered and refused. He told her to suit herself and started up the stairs.
“I still belong to someone else,” she said to his back.
“What am I supposed to do with that information?” He
disappeared over the landing. In the morning, he told her she could stay while
he went to the doctor. She left with him. He held her on Gran Via before
turning away and walking toward the bus.
Their skin collided one night. They followed some friends
into a salsa bar in the center. The walls were a gleaming white and the Spanish
women gleamed too, in tacky sequined dresses and garish lipstick. He leaned
against a pillar, his drunken curls pressed flat. She shifted from leg to leg
and asked him to dance with her. His gaze cascaded down his Roman nose as he
watched her speak to him, his eyelashes feathery fans. The trio of lights pink
blue green and jazzy quick salsa pink blue green faded into tinkling
chandeliers, a cough through thin apartment walls, when he grabbed her waist
and spoke into her hair, kissed her cheekbone. Spoke into her hair. Kissed her
other cheekbone. Pressed his forehead against hers. Pink. Pushed her away from
him. Pulled her back. Kissed her eyelid. Blue. Murmured on her nails. You have
beautiful curls. Cheekbone. Forehead. Air like footsteps on her hair. His mouth
covered hers. “Let’s get out of here.” Green. Trumpets. Sequins. White. Green.
They simply slept. She awoke around 6 am, feet cold and back aching. His mattress was hard. She
couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t breathe because his head was buried in her breasts.
____
After an hour she had used an entire roll of paper towels.
She peeled the duct tape off her window that covered the inch-long crack in the
glass. It had some adhesive left, beneath some hairs and a matte black bug. She
wadded some of the tissues against her wound, that yelling flap of skin, and
held them in place with the silver tape. She slept on her side, arm carefully
erect. Elevated above her heart, like suggested. In the morning she swept her
hair into a bun and walked to the peluqueria two blocks away. Twenty euro for a
wash. She lit a cigarette and sat on the bench in front of the salon. Twenty
euro for a fucking wash. She took a drag, imagining that the wizened Spanish
man next to her could smell her greasy hair. Drag. Her finger pulsed. A bruise
was mysteriously forming on the web between her index and middle fingers. Drag.
Twenty euro. Jesus. Drag. Toss.
___
The city got to be too much so she disappeared for a few
days, a week, no one could really say. She found a shopping bag crumpled in the
corner of her tiny room and threw in some torn lace panties, a hard baguette,
her passport. The bus station was full of sweating Spaniards. She followed a
man speaking Basque onto his bus and ended up in Bilbao.
The only available pension was on the river, far from the center and next to a
factory. The old woman who lived above the room cooked her squid in its ink
when she came home from wandering around in the humid downpour. In the middle
of the night, she curled up in the corner of the room and called the man in Madrid.
She said, “I can’t find an accurate map of this town.”
He asked her, “Where are you?”
She hung up and waited until the bus left for Santander,
at dawn. She met an Italian surfer with an unwashed dick and a girlfriend in England.
When his heart ran out of rooms, he told her, he built more. “The human heart
can do this. It can surely do this.” He took her to meet his friend in another
pension. She followed him up the stairs and found herself in an apartment,
alone, with the Italians. The rooms were completely bare, except a dentist’s
chair in the corner and some tattoo ink in little bottles on a small table.
Large photographs of porn stars, orange-skinned and wide-cunted, shouted from
the white walls. After some time, they left and went to a bar. The bartender
was another surfer, also Italian. Mario.
She left for San Sebastian
at dawn. The unwashed Italian followed her there. They spent the day on
Zurriola, chaperoned by Jesus on the hill. Watched him drink crimson aperitifs
until midnight, supported his rippling
trunk back to the hostel, where he stripped her of clothes on the balcony and
put his hand inside her, lifting her body above the railing. He told her she
was beautiful and deserved the world. She smirked, she left for Madrid in the
morning.
She found the man in a club owned by his cousin, all moist
air and perfumed men. Cabaret dancers wearing nautical lingerie lined the
walls, dancing in elevated cages. He was sitting on a pleather purple couch
drinking Mahou, trashed, hands in a Spanish girl’s crispy dry hair. When the
young thing wandered away, he stood up and approached her, interrupting as she
leaned on the bar and flirted with one of the dancers. He grabbed her by the
arm and hauled her up the stairs, livid. He had worried, he said. She lit a
cigarette on the sidewalk and thought of the Italian, thought of how bored she
looked. He shoved her against a car and, when she straightened herself coolly,
shoved her into a closed storefront, covered with sheet metal. She sucked in
her breath.
She told him, “You don’t mean enough to make me angry. Tiny
man. You’re nothing to me.” He disappeared inside the club for a moment,
returning with her purse. He hailed a cab and ushered her inside, arranging
himself after her while she gave directions to his apartment.
He said, “Tell me you don’t want it. Fucking say it.”
She smirked into the sheets, “I don’t want it.”
He twisted her neck back, fingers gripping her ballerina
chin.
“Tell me you’ve never thought about it.”
“I can’t. I can’t.”
“Tell me it’s the smallest dick you’ve ever seen.”
And when it was over, he said, “Now I have to wash my
fucking sheets. Get up.”
In the morning, they began to fight at the breakfast table.
Politics, probably. His roommate and the roommate’s girlfriend ate
mechanically, timidly, until his roommate stood up angrily. “You guys have the
baggage of five years in two months. Please. Leave.” She took off his sweater
and gently shut the heavy apartment door behind her, sleepy feet bicycling down
the steep stairwell as she fumbled for a cigarette in her coat. She threw her
cell phone in the trash and entered the metro stop on Montera, heading to her
apartment.
____
She smoked another cigarette and stood up from the bench,
trying to smooth her rumpled hair. The greasy strands stood in stubborn salute,
the slight pressure of her hair bringing a sharp ache to her finger. Although
trying not to swing her arms while walking, the bandage was seeped with dregs
of blood by the time she got home. More wads of paper towels, another strip of
duct tape, a nap and some painkillers, arm above the heart. She woke up when it
was dark, dismissing the possibility of paying for a hair washing.
She wondered if he would wash her hair. Wondered if she
could bear to let anyone else see her naked. Wondered which would feel more
like being shoved against metal sheeting of a store front. Fumbling with her
covers, she leaned over the bed and looked underneath it, searching for her
cigarettes. She lit one and ran quickly from her room to the balcony on the other
side of the apartment. The streetlights lit the night a sickly orange. Drunken
Spanish boys walked under her and called up to the girl above them, smoking,
legs and cunt visible despite the height and iron bars she stood on. She waved
back and then yelled, “FUCK YOU!” The boys laughed and then stumbled away,
singing “Fack you fack you fack you.” She finished her cigarette and turned,
opening the balcony doors into the living room. Instead of walking inside, she
placed her bleeding hand on one of the French doors, the left side, and then
slammed the right against her hand. Again. Again. Three times and all she did
was breathe dark and deep and long. Kicking off her slip, she held the black
satin under the purple swollen digits and walked into the bathroom. She turned
on the shower and, before the hot water could run out, quickly shampooed her
hair.
