Left Index Finger

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.