Learning to Lose (21 page)

Leandro waits in line in front of the teller’s window while an old lady tries to update her bankbook, barely able to see, with blind trust in the woman who tells her her balance. The branch director touches Leandro’s shoulder and greets him with fake cordiality. He invites Leandro into his office and as he offers a chair he makes a sign to one of the employees. They talk about Christmas approaching, the weather, the mountains that are already covered in snow, while Leandro thinks that, if the director were an animal, he would be a mosquito, nervous and distrusting. When he asks Leandro about his wife, the conversation turns serious. Bad, to tell the truth, I don’t know if you know she broke her hip a month ago … Oh my God, I had no idea, how is she? Well, pretty weak, says Leandro, and lets the pause lengthen, her recovery is long and difficult.

Leandro explains that Aurora has to learn to walk again, like a child, but that she doesn’t have the strength. The other day, she insisted on sitting but wasn’t able to. She couldn’t hold herself up. The doctor who visited that morning had tried to be reassuring. It’s a normal process, she needs rest. But Aurora went to pieces; that same afternoon she whispered to Leandro, it would be better if I just died now. Leandro took her hand and stroked her face. He talked to her for a long time and it seemed to lift her spirits.

The female employee puts a statement of recent activity in Leandro’s account in front of the director. Leandro defuses the alarm growing in the director’s eyes. My wife is dying, I have to spend up to the last peseta of my savings on anything that can extend her life or at least make her suffer less. The director points out the almost constant withdrawals from ATMs, the excessive charges on the card. Leandro doesn’t say much, just
names nurses, expensive medications, second opinions in private clinics. He doesn’t say whores, massages, foam baths, paid caresses. He reaches for his wallet and suggests covering the overdraft, but the director stops him. Don’t think of it, don’t think of it, there’s no rush. We put people before numbers, at least in this bank.

Leandro lies naturally, finds it simple to just let himself be dragged along. The bank director pulls out a calculator and scribbles various amounts. He suggests a higher line of credit, which could help Leandro during the coming months. We could take your home as collateral, a part of it, maybe just 50 percent, and that will provide you the liquidity for peace of mind as you face your wife’s illness. Otherwise, I don’t know if you are familiar with our offer of reverse mortgages.

Leandro hesitates. I’m not sure, I would have to talk to her about it, he says. Here, of course, we are going to give you the best terms on the market, the director assures him. Yeah, but my pension is so ridiculously small, I’m afraid to take on something that size … No, Don Leandro, please. Let me explain how our credit system works.

He leaves the branch with the hypothetical bank operation written on a piece of paper. He thinks his entire life story is summed up there, in the intersection of four or five figures. They gave him his most recent statement and Leandro felt a humiliating stab when he recognized the fake name of the whorehouse. Every afternoon with Osembe, every excess, shows up there. A petty amount appears for the tickets to the Joaquín Satrústegui concert that Aurora bought over the phone a few weeks ago; in the end she insisted on getting them. Then the house expenses, the bills. But among them all the withdrawals
of money for his vice stand out, accusatory. He is even further debased by the director’s expression as he watches him leave the branch, that sort of condescension, respect, pity.

If only they knew.

If only they knew, he thinks, the people who look at him now and see a decent old man bitterly facing his wife’s illness, the honest decline of old age, if they only knew his hidden vertigo of moral degradation. If they knew what he knows, that he’ll go back to the chalet that afternoon, around five-thirty, and he’ll give himself half an hour of doubting, he’ll torment himself with anticipated guilt. But he knows in the end he’ll ring the bell beside the metal door and he will watch through the frosted glass to the reception room as Osembe arrives with her long stride, her little jump on the final step, her straight-toothed smile as she discovers he’s returned, another evening, punctual and vanquished.

Perhaps because of all that, and because when he returns home he finds Aurora more fragile and somber than ever, as he lies down beside her on the bed, instead of consoling her, he breaks out in tears. It is the slow, muffled cry of an old man broken inside. On the radio, Beethoven’s adagio from the Emperor Concerto plays, a little bit mosso, and Aurora reminds him that sometimes, long ago, he dared to play it for her. Do you remember? When was the last time you played it? No, I only knew the beginning, he apologizes. Oh yes, I remember now, when Lorenzo decided to quit school and I was so depressed and it seemed like you didn’t care and you said that I shouldn’t blame people for choosing a different life than the one I would’ve chosen for them. And I was sad and you played it for me. Aurora dries the tears from Leandro’s face with her
soft, thin fingers, without even being able to turn toward him. Then they hold hands, lying on top of the bedspread, and she tells him, don’t be afraid, everything will be okay, you’ll see, I’m going to get better. Why are men always so cowardly?

Why are you so afraid of everything?

Her grandstand seat in the stadium is almost at field level, with the grass before her eyes like a damp, springy carpet. Soccer isn’t so simple from there. The ball is more intractable. The spaces tiny. The players human. You can smell the sweat, you can hear the groan of a collision and the whistle asking for the ball. Sylvia is seated beside Lorenzo, her leg in a cast. With every breath, steam comes from her mouth. Dress warmly, Lorenzo had told her before leaving the house. He wears a wool cap, but Sylvia is protected by her cascade of curls. They shared the row of comfortably upholstered seats with some players who are sitting the game out and the wives of some others, mass-produced beauties, who instead of following the game keep their eyes fixed on their husbands and shiver slightly every time they are tackled. Look, that’s the wife of the Pole who wears number five, points out Lorenzo, they say she spent a hundred thousand euros on a pedigreed dog, but Sylvia doesn’t pay attention to the gossip. And the Argentinian? Which one is his girlfriend? she asks. Haven’t the slightest.

When Sylvia was fifteen months old and had just started walking, Lorenzo watched her looking at herself in the mirror.
She held a jar of her mother’s face cream in her hands and offered it to her own reflection, convinced that it was someone else. Lorenzo dressed while keeping an eye on her. At one point, Sylvia peeked behind the mirror, trying to figure out where the hell the other girl was hiding, the girl who was watching her and also offering her a jar of face cream. She looked for her several times. Lorenzo didn’t say anything, didn’t explain it to her. He just watched, smiling as he enjoyed his daughter’s concentrated calm as she stared at her reflection, unbeknownst to her. Sometimes he remembered that moment and wondered if something as simple as that was happiness.

And another time Lorenzo had taken his daughter to a soccer game. Sylvia was eight years old. After half an hour, she had lost all interest and was playing in her seat, talking to herself, looking around. Being back at the stadium, sitting beside her, sharing the bag of sunflower seeds, his gaze searching for the woman who raucously shouted insults at the referee and his family and trying to find where the cigar smoke was coming from, it felt like he was getting that day back. At the VIP door, Sylvia had picked up an envelope with her name on it that held two tickets. I won them in a radio contest, she told him. Lorenzo helped her get through the turnstiles that led into the stadium. In their special seats, Lorenzo joked, sang the team song out loud, and recited both lineups to her, leaving time to comment on some of the player’s particular traits. He was enjoying the luxury of sharing a moment with his daughter again, a rare gift in these days when she’s so independent.

Pilar had suffered Sylvia’s adolescence before he had. As mother and daughter, they argued and got mad at each other over trivial things. The way she dressed, the long silences, her
table manners, her friends. Sylvia turning fifteen had been decisive in Pilar’s daring to end their marriage. We still have a lot of life ahead of us and she doesn’t need us so much anymore, she had said, suggesting a separation. Lorenzo can’t seem to pinpoint when their home stopped being a place of refuge, their family a guarantee of happiness, how their partnership, their love, died. Before he even realized it, the three people living under the same roof were strangers. Each one had their own interests, worries, priorities. In Sylvia’s case, that was normal, part of her growing up. But in theirs, as a couple, it was a symptom of something darker, sadder. Passion dies out in small trifling moments, and one day there’s none left. Lorenzo sensed that there was a moment when Pilar let go of his hand and decided not to get dragged down with him. She jumped in a parachute from a crashing plane. He was too busy avoiding his own catastrophe to hold on to her. He doesn’t blame her for not wanting to share in his breakdown.

In the past, when Lorenzo reflected on his relationship with Pilar, he used to think that she made him a better person. She infected him with her tranquillity, her confidence, her generosity. She allowed him to choose, to establish himself, to grow. She celebrated him each time he made progress. The marriage was a support structure, a driving force. Getting married, living together, having a daughter, those were the natural steps of their harmony. When Sylvia was born, Pilar stopped working, but after a while she needed to escape the house. I feel like my life is on pause, she said. She drifted through unsatisfying jobs until she found her place, but Lorenzo was convinced it was at that moment they started on diverging paths. Paths that crossed at home at night, in shared details about their little girl, in the
quick sex on Sunday mornings. The union ended, the coexistence ended, and, as happens, someone new came into her life.

When Pilar announced her escape, Lorenzo couldn’t hold on to her. He knew his wife well. Once she had made the decision, there was nothing that could force her to change it. No tears, no promises to change, no emotional blackmail. Pilar’s decisions could be slow in coming, but they were rock-solid. She was indulgent, but her sentences were definitive. And that was how it happened. In two days, she no longer lived there, in four there was barely a piece of her clothing, in two weeks they had negotiated the separation and worked out the accounts, done the math, divided expenses, savings. It was easy. She left him almost everything. I’d rather stay in my home, Sylvia told them. Lorenzo took it as a victory, that she had chosen him, but he also knew it was the most comfortable choice for her, as well as the most respectful of her mother’s new life. Really, he thought, she is choosing her neighborhood, her friends, her high school, her room, not choosing me over Pilar.

Since the separation, Lorenzo hadn’t been with another woman. Sex was something he could do without, something dormant, pushed into a corner. Too many problems. He didn’t have enough money for the drinks he’d have to buy to wait out the arrival of a woman lured by his lonely soul or his desperation. He was too proud to admit defeat. He wasn’t going to beg in matters of love, either. Everything would work itself out once he recovered his true standing.

Looking for work in a waning field wasn’t easy. For three months, he worked as a salesman on commission at a computer company, but the contract expired and Lorenzo found himself out on the street again, without the energy young people have
for stringing together six or seven crappy jobs a year. Thanks to a friend’s help, he got a position at a telephone equipment distributor, but the workdays were endless and the chemistry with his coworkers was soured by a stupid accident. During one of the little five-a-side soccer games they played on Thursdays after work at a municipal gym, he tackled hard on a disputed ball and one of the young guys at the company, a cocky little guy who often feinted and nutmegged, was badly hurt. He suffered a cranial fracture, a broken collarbone, and a concussion that scared them for a while. Lorenzo apologized a hundred times and they all chalked it up to an unlucky play, but he stopped going to the games, and shortly after he quit the job. He didn’t have the energy to make new friends, start new relationships. At that point, he was already considering the heist that would give him back some of what was rightfully his, taking justice into his own hands. Stealing from Paco what Paco had stolen from him, which wasn’t only money.

His father had lent him some cash to get over the rough patch: I don’t want Sylvia to have to change her lifestyle. He worried that his daughter would suspect his money problems, feel she was a burden, and go live with her mother. It would mean losing everything. For Lorenzo power had always been something physical that travels with you, that’s conveyed, like some sort of body odor. That was why he struggled to show everything was the same as always, when really nothing was the same.

So the young woman who took care of the neighbor’s kid had showed up at the right moment, when he most needed new people, people who wouldn’t judge him for what he had been, but rather for what he could be. Who didn’t know about the
skids he was coming off, and who could appreciate his ability to bounce back.

When he had offered to drive Daniela to the airport, they agreed to meet at the metro entrance. Lorenzo drove up and she got in with her friend. This is Nancy, said Daniela, introducing them. The young woman’s smile was bridled by braces. It was her cousin they were picking up at the airport.

In the arrivals terminal, they waited more than three hours for the flight from Quito and Guayaquil, which had constant delays. A little girl waiting for her father rolled on the floor. Other families waited restlessly, checking the clock, pacing back and forth. All foreign faces, distrusting looks, tension. Sometimes they seemed more like mourners at the door to a morgue than people waiting for an airplane. Daniela and her friend Nancy accepted a bottle of water from Lorenzo to make their waiting more bearable, but that was it. He asked them questions about how they had come to Spain, their working conditions. Neither of them had papers. They both worked without contracts in domestic service. Daniela claimed to be happy with the family on the fifth floor; Nancy was more critical of the family of an old man she took care of. They shared an apartment with three other girlfriends, on the first floor of a building near Atocha Station. Nancy had a daughter in Ecuador, left in the care of her grandmother, whom she sent money to every month. I didn’t leave anyone behind, said Daniela, although she explained that she supported her mother and her younger siblings in Loja.