Rivero, Pablo, and Tejas seem a bit absent, too, now that they’ve finished.
“Fuck, man, don’t hurt her,” Rivero says.
Marcos comes immediately and climbs off, pulling up his pants. Now it’s his turn. He pulls his pants down, but he’s not turned on. Then, without wanting to, he does become turned on. Is it the fear? It’s not, to be sure, attraction. He is turned on without meaning to be, like someone who trips without meaning to, or falls in love without meaning to. And when he gets on top of her, he feels the viscous wet of her thing. He decides to pretend that he’s doing it. He decides to make noises, do all the things the others did, but without penetrating her. It’s a snap decision, like the kind made when someone playing a game decides to cheat and all rules are suspended. Marita understands immediately and looks at him — something she didn’t do with any of the others. She looks at him with eyes that are not real, as if her glance were somehow passing straight through his body and fixing attentively on something fifty feet behind him. He puts a hand on her shoulder, as though he were tired and had to use her to hold himself up, and at that instant he feels she belongs to him, pure and simple, like an object, she belongs to him. In the memory, Marita’s body takes on a strange grace and fills with bones, flesh, blood, intestines. He would like to whisper something in her ear, something sweet, but he doesn’t know what. He wishes he could tell her that he’s sorry, that he doesn’t want to be doing what he’s doing, even though all he’s doing is pretending. He would like to say something, anything, but he senses that her face is fading, that she can’t hear him, that she isn’t there, where she is. And he senses, too, in the memory, that Marita is mortal, as is he. He senses it like an ingenuous realization, one full of sentimentality. Then he pretends to come, giving two or three juddering spasms. He gets up. Marita finds her panties and pulls them on while standing, taking off her flip-flops.
“Well, that’s everyone,” Rivero says.
In the memory they are silent for a while, until Tejas tries to joke.
“So, princess, how’s that for a sendoff?”
But no one keeps it going, not even Rivero. And the walk back along the esplanade takes longer than before. Marita walks ahead of them, more awkwardly and clumsily than usual, as though trying to get a little farther from them with each step, and then a little farther still, without their realizing, trying to get very far away. Rivero sidles up beside her.
“Marita.”
“What.”
“You know I’ve always taken care of you. You know that. Lots of times.”
Marita doesn’t respond.
“You know that, Marita.”
A very faint yes.
“And you know I always mean what I say, you know that, too.”
“Yes.”
“If you say a word about this, I’ll slit your throat. Understand? Marita, do you understand me?”
“Yes.”
And then, like a spring, Marita bounds down the esplanade, as though her own yes were the starting gun at a race; she’s running away, arms and legs flailing in a crazy dance, toward the low, boxy houses by the estuary. Marcos makes as if to follow her, but Rivero stops him immediately.
“Leave her,” he says, “she won’t say a word.”
And in the memory it’s as though after Rivero speaks, everything fades away; the esplanade by the dock, the houses lit in the yellowy light of street lamps, the sound of people still making merry at bars and cafés, the distant glimmer of the estuary, the tinkling of boats — all of it fades into a sort of faint, gray light. Does he say goodbye to them, or does he not? He doesn’t even know. None of that is included in the memory; in the mishmash of things in the memory, there is even a different light, as though a new day were rising as he walked, alone, into town, and the people he passed were all very freshfaced. Not even when he walks into the house, when his mother asks him where he’s been, is he capable of speaking.
“You’ve been drinking,” she says.
“No.”
“You’ve been doing something — tell me what you were doing.”
And she follows him to his room.
“I wasn’t doing anything.”
PART TWO. MEMORY OF OCTOBER
He would say, “Boring, like every other summer.”
He would say, “One day, at the beach, I almost drowned.”
He would say, “My aunt Eli died, right at the end.”
The rest, he kept to himself.
He’d become a pensive young man. He had never been particularly popular in class, and that was still true at the start of the new school year. It was odd the way Madrid had the ability to absorb things, the efficiency with which everything was subsumed in the monotonous blinking of traffic lights, in the afternoon light — first white and crisp and then vaguely pastel. There seemed to be no pain or sorrow the city could not swallow, swaddling it in thin, transparent layers until it was muffled, though not gone. The city had a belly full of rocks.
His mother told them they had to help their father through this trying time. His father had become a quieter person, too, as though Aunt Eli’s death had imbued him with a meekness he’d never before possessed. His health had declined a bit, and sometimes he had mood swings. Some sort of stomach trouble, a dull ache, useless and persistent, that lasted a whole month. When he wasn’t in a bad mood, he became sentimental.
“I love you so much, kids,” he’d say out of nowhere, in the middle of dinner, giving rise to an uncomfortable silence. He told them he loved them not as though it were a joyful proclamation or a way to erase something from the past but as though it were an ill-fated attachment, one binding them together in present and future, a way to share the road to emptiness. He himself felt a mixture of compassion and irritation; sorrow had made some of his more masculine traits dissolve.
During that first week, his own brain seemed to prevent him from thinking about what had happened. Then, from one day to the next, he got scared. He was walking down the street with Anita; it was a Sunday, and their mother had sent them down to buy the paper. The weather in the city was still balmy, and people were sitting out at sidewalk cafés. Anita was explaining to him, with surprising precision, how much she hated one of the girls in her class. They sat on a park bench, and for a minute he was unable to process what his sister was saying, he became completely self-absorbed momentarily, and then got a strange wave of vertigo. He could hear the water in the park’s fountain in the distance — the sound of droplets gurgling out of the sprinkler head — and the mud encircling it, and the trees, and all the people. . he didn’t know how to explain it, it was as though suddenly they were all too close to one another, horrifyingly close, or imbued with something sickening. And so was he, slack and languid and viscous, and even Anita — everything slowly, senselessly rotting away. It was a type of fear he’d never before experienced, bare and perfunctory, shapeless, making him almost want to leap up from the bench where he sat and hurl himself under the first passing car. Anita asked him if he felt OK.
“You’re all white,” she said (Anita used only colors to describe moods: white, red, green, yellow).
“I know.”
That was the first time. Over the next two weeks, it happened three more times. It wasn’t the kind of fear brought on by a concrete, identifiable object, more like a state, a sort of festering of things. And there was no way to stop it from coming or even predict when it would appear. It just erupted, like sudden anguish, like some colossal finger pointing at him and making him recoil.