She never said anything to hurt me, not once in all those years. Never said anything or did anything. Do you think that’s usual with couples? I don’t know if it was love that she felt for me, although I was crazy about her, I still am, but she must have loved me a little to have treated me with such respect for all that time. The fact that she did the kind of work she did is another matter, irrelevant. She would go out each night about her business and come home afterward, just as I went about my business and came home afterward. I know it must seem strange to you, but I never saw it as anything other than a job; and I think she saw it that way too. I suppose you want to know if she ever felt attracted to her clients, if any of the men she had sex with ever gave her pleasure? I never asked. I don’t think I was interested, to be honest. It was like the background noise on the radio when they’re broadcasting a match. It’s not important. I felt attracted by some of the women who came to fill up their gas tanks, I would watch them bend over to get in their car or to pick up their purse or their handbag from the passenger seat, their tight jeans revealing half their bottom or their mini-skirt revealing most of their thighs. No, I don’t deny it, I did have the odd fantasy, I would smile and make suggestive remarks. But I never cheated on her. I never said to any of those women, go into the toilet and take your panties off, go into the backroom, and I’ll be right with you; or wait at the exit for me to finish my shift, and we’ll find a quiet road somewhere and do it in the car, or we could rent a room for a couple of hours in the Hotel Parada, just down the road. I never did that, and I don’t think she met up with any of her clients either. I’m quite sure that she never had sex for free with anyone — and that’s what matters. Why would she, when she could charge for it? Or, rather, and this is the main point, if she wanted that, why stay with me when she could be with other men who were happy to pay her? No, what she did was her job, and I was her home: me and her son (who I treated better than if he’d been my own son), we were her home. The furniture, the sofa, the smell of coffee and toast when she woke up at midday — that was her home. I don’t think that’s so very difficult to understand. At home, she never misbehaved, she was never moody or angry, she never raised her voice. And, whether she really wanted to or not, I don’t know, but she would let me have sex with her, and I would melt into her arms: yes, she’d have a shower, dab on some perfume and lie back on the bed, and I knew then that she wanted me to fuck her that morning, even though she must have been tired — even sick to death — of doing what she’d been doing with other men just a short while before. But like I say, she never got angry with me, she never raised her voice, she never sulked; probably because she was fed up with the loud voices, the noise, the sound of glasses smacking down on the bar or the clinking of glasses, tired of pretending to pout and flirt, of saying the kind of things whores say: buy me a pack of Marlboros, give me a coin for the jukebox, buy me a drink before I show you the color of my G-string tonight, the kind of things whores say to put you in your place, so that you know it isn’t simply a question of turning up and paying, but that you have to earn them and play the part of the man seducing the woman, even if it’s all lies; a way of disguising what’s really going on and that everyone takes for granted, that going up to a woman’s room is nothing to do with liking or disliking, with feeling attracted or repelled, it’s purely a matter of money — the only bulge in your trousers she’s interested in is the one made by your wallet — but she likes you to pretend to believe that she just happened to be there, in that bar, because she got bored at home, or she didn’t want to go to the movies with her girlfriends, that she’s there because she’s been waiting for you for months. It’s probably because of having to put on a show all the time that she had a loftier idea of family, because she knew what that other life was like, experienced it on a daily basis, was accustomed to living with lies and pretense, and knew what it means to be cut off from family, at the mercy of the first man who comes up to the bar; having no protection, being somehow exposed to the elements. She was already thirty when I met her, no longer a girl, but there’s a market for the kind of woman whose looks are just about to fade, men imagine that, because such women are experienced, they’ll have stored up inside them everything they’ve learned from many hours spent with many men, and imagine their cunt to be a kind of warehouse of unsuspected vices, and they fantasize that, in some way, they’re going to benefit from part of that accumulated capital. It’s not easy to live under the same roof with anyone, and yet we were together for eight years.