LAURA'S STORY
How I miss her! Miss those glorious afternoons with my LP at full blast! Puccini, especially Puccini. Sumptuous music pouring over that body of Laura's, smoother than silk, compact as granite, accompanying my mellowed, languorous lover's kisses. My Laura of the tight muscles and rawhide tendons. My little girl!
I know, I know. The plots of Italian melodrama are improbable, the heroines implausible. It didn't matter to us. The geisha committed harakiri and who the hell cared. Mimi lay dying of tb...give her an aspirin. Liu, drawn and quartered...slap on mercurochrome. Mario going before a firing squad...lend him a bullet-proof vest. What did matter was that we were breasting those immense, leisurely waves; that we let ourselves be carried away by the radiance of the incandescent, almost impossible, paroxysmal beauty of our unplacated desire, our bewitchment.
Ah, those panther piss and Puccini afternoons of mine!
We had our rituals. Laura always rang twice and banged the knocker once...a bill-collector's knock. None of those namby-pamby, drug-store paperback lovers' leit motifs. Ours was a militant tenderness. No racing over beaches, no Pachelbel's canon, no slow motion. We downed churros and panther piss as we watched the dawn come up from Palacio, our kisses surging spontaneously, naturally as breathing. That's all, friends. That was it. The rest, TV spots. We didn't walk down the road holding hands like the sheriff and the school teacher. Nor were we environmentalists with Save the Whales stickers on our rear ends. We strolled through the Plaza Mayor rolling a stick of Afghan hash. It was as though we were in Turkey or one of those places that has customs officers on the take, bandits on the highways, and guerrillas in the forests. Nevertheless, at the sound of banging on the door, the dregs of old bachelorhood would surface prompting me to grumble: That kid imagines she can get away with whatever behavior she damn pleases! You'd think she might announce herself without raising such a row with that bloody twentieth-century feminism of she's into. But the moment I saw her standing in the doorway, looking at me with that smile hovering between artlessness and skittishness, all went by the board and I could think of nothing but gobbling her up like a bonbon. "Come in, little darling," I would say to her, imagining myself Humphrey Bogart when actually I'm more like the tourist who shuts his eyes at the bullfight.
Laura would smile. Not coming on strong like Lauren Bacall, say, but with an expression that was at the same time apologietic, challenging, and suggestive. She would come through the door almost on tiptoe, and without a kiss or a hello, go straight to the table
and empty her pockets.
Those calm, unhurried movements as she divested herself of her belongings--with not a glance of collusion in my direction, without a wink, had special meaning for me. Laura was the only woman I ever knew capable of leaving the house without her purse. A doughty lass, Laura, ready to enter the jungle without a rifle, to leap into the sea without a diver's helmet.
This cataloguing of her possessions was an exercise in humility. She was a child with nothing to her name, no money, not even debts. Owning nothing she had no biases, was without guile. A few coins, a pack of cigarettes, nearly empty most of the time, a cheap lighter, a bus pass.
I don't know if she realized how the defenselessness signalled by such display of paltry possessions aroused a tenderness in me that routed all resistance. Such a confession of humbleness turned me into a mere vagabond lost in his own defeat, a blind man bewitched, a victim, her lover, nothing more.
After that, I would take off her shoes. She lent herself to the process, yielding, amiable, gently stroking my hair, sometimes. Tiny feet, a child's, really a child's, size four, that I looked on reverently before kissing them. How perfect the curve of the instep! A mark of divinity not to be encountered in the works of man, an arc that brings to mind not Praxiteles nor Raphael, but the perfection of a fruit smooth as a jade stone whose shape has been polished into beauty by centuries of erosion, its harmonious essence unmarred by human endeavor to reproduce it.
I would lie on the bed impatiently awaiting that gesture which, like a lightning flash, revealed her to me. Laura tossed off her blouse with a sweep of her arm, almost angrily, as if to say here I am, that does i! What else did you expect?
And if our liturgy had an entrance hymn, that would have been the moment for display of the sacrament. There she stood, as when light burst forth in a flash: naked, rounded pefection, unattainable. Bedazzled still by the offering, I always thought of golden monstrances, of enormous jewels, of gods dwelling amidst pearls and precious stones.
Laura was like that with me, haughty, challenging. Telling me silently: I am your second self, your victory in defeat, your mate. And I admired her in silence, envying the certitude of her twenty years, the cruelty of her challenge. And I would hold out my arms to her.
But she was unhurried. She displayed her weapons with the serenity of the hero who, knowing beforehand that he will be victorious feels no contempt nor hatred for his opponent but rather loves him, for victory will mean fame and the fiercer the fight the greater his glory and the more glorious his legend.
Laura was brilliant. Hard, fresh, she had to be coaxed for moments before entering the lists while I was chafing for immediate combat. A battle in Uccello pinks and violets similar in the intimate joining, identical in the eager disorderliness.
I watched her approach me on her knees, a soft, cuddly kitten wrought of silence and mystery and, as always, I admired her hard breasts like small marble bowls. "Sphinx," I would say to her, "wild creature, little panther!" She would not answer, but continued to advance with harmless ferocity. Her intensity was always astonishing.
A diligent, eager sweetness like that of a child at its homework with much sticking out of tongue tip and compressing of lips. At first, I scarcely responded, letting myself be attacked by that hundred pounds of tenderness. Playful lion cub, I would bite her little ear, Joan of Arc. And when I stroked her skin, it was so taut that the feeling was like that of coaxing music out of a guitar string, rather than just a caress.
At the early encounters, I was like the ocean liner that doesn't roll when struck by a breeze. "Tiny one, little toy, I don't feel you," I would tease. She, excited now at the first skirmish, paid me no mind, soon her drive became mine, my desire hers. I lost my bearings, then, entered the fray, and was hers.
Oh, the Laura only I knew! No longer was she the distant goddess, the aloof adolescent. Her stolidity melted under my caresses, her body like an ill-tied knot beginning to unravel. Her lips, no longer a portcullis of teeth, now opening like silken petals,moist and warm. My hand glided over skin no guitar string now but a soft, sweet shadow. We were sighs, moans, a passion increasingly shared until finally transformed into a single wave, one heart, one source. And so, shying away we drew closer to complete abandon on a course no less sparkling no less prodigal in freshness, discovery and delight than the most cherished of nostalgic encounters.
Although for me the most beautiful part of an ensuing encounter was that the wound would finally heal. For, as I waited for Laura, desiring her, or simply thinking of her, I hurt infinitely. And when, finally, she was before me, the pain became immediately umbearable, invading me, impeding my breathing, my seeing, even my feeling, almost, as if the imminence of the embrace made any waiting at all unbearable.
I would sometimes suffer something like vertigo and almost shout: If you only knew how much you hurt me, little torturer, cruel monster! But that was of the past. We were now lovers and though we sailed without compass, divine grace guided us. The voyage lengthened, shortened, was interrupted or changed course but never ended in shipwreck. Our pennant was a good-luck charm. No spells or witchcraft could prevail over that shield of fire and flame.
Adventurers, striking it rich, yes, explorers, lovers who in the urgency of invention have lost their way. Shipwrecked in the eye of the storm, victims drunk with our very victory, we rose up, disposed to resist to the enigma's end. Until finally, a wave like a sheet of lightning drove us one against the other, to break, then, with delight before depositing us, dazzled by the collision, astonished, and uninjured, in the gentleness of fatigue as close to soft silence and sleep as to the strangeness of having escaped unscathed such ardor and such beauty.
"Enough, enough," says the girl. Chicks are lots craftier at the game. There'll be a happy ending, not a one-night stand. How sweet to be in love...they met in the main square on Christmas Day, nearly, and boy, oh, boy, is this guy romantic! Whaddaya say, José. This ain't Madrid, it's Holeygood!
Okay, okay, I know what's on your mind. You're thinking of that. You can see right through me... They love each other tenderly. They fuck like minks (how charming, how subtle, how idyllic), nearly a page out of True Romances. He, such a man of the world, she so innocent. And you can now be sure that they will marry and live together, or the other way around...the order of the factors does not alter the product...she makes him settle down and they set up an emotional corporation. That is to say, they take out a mortgage and go into debt like their parents and grandparents before them, to build a native land by the sweat of their brow, as should be: on dividends.
Then, they get married to a Savings and Loan and that's it. Until the mortgage doth them part. What the interest rate joins together no man shall put asunder.
The epilogue, twenty years after. He got tenure at the University Extension when their firstborn came along and is still teaching there. She took a master's in pedagogy at the same university, they are still paying out on a dacha in the hills, they have a savings account in government bonds, and Laura's greatest culinary triumph is her dish of lentils and codfish. And, oh how lucky! Their children, one of each gender, a double blessing. Papa Homer said it, "the generations of man come and go like the generations of leaves..."
But, no, gentlemen, no. I'm sorry to disappoint you, for what follows is not out of a Hollywood dreamland, but life in the raw.
The telephone rang one day at an off hour when nobody you know would be calling. But with the telephone, you never can tell. It might be a promotion for egg custard with salmonella just as easily as that crazy cousin who eloped with a maharajah and in a moment of wild abandon decided to name you her sole heir. Unlikely but not impossible.
This was an undeducated female voice, its inarticulateness even more pronounced on the phone, probably an elderly person of rural extraction. All this before she really says anything? That and more. Hoarse voice, momentary incoherenece: "I'm Laura's mother. you see, and as it's weeks I don't see her and as I know
that you...it's that she...from what she's told me...and you..."
And she bursts out crying.
I said to myself: Uhoh, soundslike besmirched maidenhood coming up! Laura's got a gorilla truck driver of a daddy, a bruiser of a brother, and I'm in bad trouble, man. And I mean, nasty stuff. Beaten to a pulp or a shotgun wedding.
"Look here, Señora," I assumed an impersonal, professional tone of voice, "I can assure you that I have not seen your daughter in weeks and have no idea where she might be." God's truth, what's more. Ours was no two-hearts-in-waltz-time deal.
"It's that..." she picks up, "...it's that..." She breaks up again. Ah, I get it...the eternal, silver-haired mom. And she goes on about her daughter, a young girl, the heartaches she's broght her. "Not the first time, but since she was fourteen...and sure enough it's because she's got no father, an accident did him in, no older brother. They loved each other very much, don't you know? And it was a dirty shame. As she's eigheen now, the police said there's nothing can be done, it's out of their hands, and then there's that, I know them. We have a relative, a prison guard, and the other times...'
I thought: The other times? Now, what's that all about? My goddess, a jailbird? Is that possible?
"Please tell me what this is all about," I asked her.
"Yes," she said, "didn't you know" Since the business with
the cottage..."
"What cottage are you talking about? Are you in the real estate business?"
"No, no," she tells me, "the priest's cottage."
"Priest? What priest? Is she dying?'
"No, no. On account of the habit."
"Habit?" I thought: This old dame is off her rocker. She can't be serious. Laura a nun? Come on!
"Sure, the heroin. the heroin, sure."
"Heroin!" Then, the light dawned. She was talking about horse, the big H. Laura, a heroin addict! I dropped into a chair in a cold sweat.
"Hello, did you say something?" asked the poor woman.
"No, nothing," I answered, still in shock. I could hardly speak, my mouth lined with cork.
What would you say I was thinking? I couldn't think, I wasthat scared, freaking out. The first thing that hit my brain was AIDS. Me having got it from her, that is. She had the monkey on her back and was shooting up, for all the difference it made to me. She must have been pretty desperate to get into such a spot. Her anguish is what did her in, of course. That she concealed it from me, I couldn't care less. It was her problem. What really scared the shit out of me was the possibility of my having AIDS, of her having infected me on one of those panther piss and Puccini afternoons.
And now Doña Encarnación, Laura's mother, began raving. "Me, I kept telling her...but the thing is...of course...how is one going to know?...when her uncle was in the house...and Ramón...oh, Ramón...and it was the Pub all the time, eh?" And she broke into sobs. "...and I..." More weeping. "...police, the detectives..."
I broke in on her tears. "Where do you live, Señora? Don't you worry. I'll come to see you and you'll tell me all about it. Yes? No, don't trouble yourself. I'll come, of course." And she gave me her address in the Fuenlabrada barrio.
I decided to venture there on a real safari. You don't charter a yacht to go down the Amazon. It would be rankly inappropriate. It must be done properly in a dugout canoe with a headhunter for a guide, preferably, of course, one not in interested in collecting Caucasian cocos.
This was a similar situation. No taxi, the suburban train would do. Some brainy guy, I don't remember who, once said that a city is its river. Paris is the Seine: London, the Thames; Washington, the Potomac; and Madrid...the Manzanares (aka Shit Creek, I might add). One who had done a modest bit of traveling compares the virtues of suburban train routes. Surrey, for example, from London...New Jersey from New York...Versailles from Paris...the subway and outskirts of Munich...forget it, and add Fuenlabrada from Atocha Station, definitely.
Something like the Plaza Mayor on Christmas Day that I was telling you before in an effort to compare it with the Vosges or Trafalgar Square. Eternal Spain, mean and scruffy! When a German likes birdies he produces an encyclopedia on canaries. When a Spaniard likes birdies, he eats them, fried, at the corner bar.
My curiosity was aroused also because I had read, I don't remember in what paper, about the Atocha Station. Moneo had remodeled it and the architecture columnists considered it the monument of monuments, the Sistine Chapel of the Railraod System. What am I saying...it's the Bruneleschi dome...Mies van der Rohe, Bramante, Le Corbusier...all a bunch of apprentices. Plunge on, then, to Atocha, a thing of wonder. being doomed (by AIDS, perhaps), then, better to die a pilgrim of art. Off, then, to the new land where the lemon tree blooms. I might even be cured, and all. That is, if I had the disease...still only an assumption.
It was a magical entrance. Almost without realizing it, I left the lights of the Prado behind me and entered a grayish tunnel that stank of formaldehyde. From there through a passageway like a toboggan run, I came upon a rotunda into which several avenues emptied crowds of people in dark clothing. Silent mannikins, resigned, dejected, sad-eyed people. They moved rapidly, being in a hurry, of course, wanting to get home fast and all ending swallowed up by lateral passageways that appeared to be leading them to the infernal regions.