I shrugged and went back to the kitchen, closing the bedroom door behind me. Just as I was sitting down at the table, Tomatis appeared. He was euphoric, the same kind of euphoria I had noticed at the paper the morning before. He washed the coffee pot and put more water on. He asked if I had slept well.
— Perfectly, I said.
— How did you like the party? he asked.
— Oh, so fun. A dead body was the only thing missing, I said.
— And how did you like the girls? said Tomatis.
— La Negra was appealing, but I’m worried that she’s an ape, I said. I didn’t really notice the others.
Tomatis brought a finger to his lips and gestured toward the bedroom.
— Gloria’s still here, he said.
— I didn’t realize, I said.
Tomatis prepared the coffee and offered me a cup.
— I’ve had enough coffee, I said.
I put my hand in my pocket and felt the pack of cigarettes I took from the desk drawer the night before. It was still sealed shut and had flattened out. I squeezed it hard. Tomatis sat down with a cup of coffee and started sipping it.
— For a week I’ve been trying to tell you about something that’s been happening to me, and I can’t get you to listen, I said.
— You can’t really count on people for much, he said. Besides, it’s not my fault that you asked Gloria to stay and she didn’t want to. She decides if she stays or not and who she stays with, don’t you think?
So she’d told him. I was blinded for a minute. I could hear Tomatis’s voice but didn’t understand a thing. I felt a shudder in my stomach, and then I asked Tomatis for a cigarette, just to say something, because he was quiet again, and if there’s something I can’t stand when I’m with someone else it’s silence. Tomatis went to his bedroom and came back with two packs of North American cigarettes. He threw one on the table.
— Keep it, he said.
Then he offered me a cigarette from his pack.
I lit the cigarette and told him the situation with my mother.
— In my opinion she’s not being fair with me, I said. I’m the reasonable one. I’ll let her dress however she wants, but she can’t answer the door naked. It doesn’t matter that she’s my mother or whatever. It’s not right. I don’t think the milkman, for example, is at all comfortable with her answering the door in a bikini when she exchanges the bottles. And then there’s the thing with the gin. She knew it was mine all along, and there was no reason to pretend it was hers and I was the one in the wrong. And even if the bottle had been hers, it’s still willful ignorance because she knows full well that she steals piles of cigarettes and cash from me and I act like nothing’s happening. And another thing: How does she have the right to keep telling me that my brain is going to rot from so much reading, when all she does is read romance novels and a pile of gossip rags? In any case, it’s not my fault she turned on the light and saw me with a hard-on. I didn’t call her. I’m not in the habit of calling my mother to come see every hard-on I get. Ever since my father got sick I’ve turned a blind eye each time she went off on one of her nocturnal excursions to God knows where, so it doesn’t seem like asking too much to expect her to respect my rights the way I respect hers. There was no reason for her to come and turn on the light suddenly, thinking she’d find me doing who knows what with who knows who. I don’t think she heard a strange noise and turned on the light suddenly to scare a burglar or something like that. No: her idea was to surprise me in flagrante in who knows what imaginary crime she assumes I commit every night. Another question: How can she hit me for saying that the bottle of gin she had in her room, and which she’d drank two-thirds of, was in fact mine and not hers? She knew full well the bottle was mine. She shouldn’t have gotten up from the bed and slapped me. I got angry and hit her back. Then she slaps me twice again and I couldn’t take any more; I took off my belt and start whipping and punching her until she surrenders and curls up on the bed crying and all and doesn’t look up or say a word when I pour myself a gin and take it back to my room.
— So you gave your mother a beating, says Tomatis.
— Exactly, I say.
Because Tomatis doesn’t say anything, I add: She was making life impossible for me. It seemed like the best way to get her to leave me alone.
— I suspect you didn’t come to the decision as calmly as you’d now like to make me believe, says Tomatis.
— I probably wasn’t thinking ahead when I hit her, I said.
— Yes, said Tomatis. That’s the impression I get.
— And what about her? I asked. Does it seem normal to you to get so enraged that it completely changes our relationship because she saw me in the courtyard with a hard-on?
— How old is your mother? asked Tomatis.
— Thirty-six, I think.
— You should be more careful around the house, said Tomatis.
Then Gloria walked in, and Tomatis told her to make breakfast. Gloria looked at me and smiled weakly, but it seemed like she hadn’t woken up completely. She had the pale skin and puffy eyes of someone who’s just gotten out of bed, and she couldn’t focus her gaze on anything. Tomatis shook his head and gestured for me to follow him to the front room, but I had already forgotten the thing with my mother and would rather have stayed in the kitchen checking out Gloria’s ass while she got the food ready. Clearly Tomatis was trying to show interest in my problems after making me wait more than twenty-four hours, but when we got to the front room I didn’t feel like talking anymore and went to the window to look at the street. No one was out, and the shrubs bordering the sidewalk were frostbitten. Across the street, the sky’s tense gray color seemed even more tense and more gray over the skeletal frame of a house under construction.
Tomatis waited for me to say something, and when he understood that I preferred to stand there the whole time looking through the window with my hands in my pockets, he said: I’m not going to give you advice, Angelito. It’s not something I do. But I suppose you want to find some explanation for what’s happening. If we analyze the facts, maybe we can come up with something.
— She’s a slutty old bag, I said.
— First off, she’s not old, said Tomatis.
— I hope you’re not talking about me, said Gloria, coming in just then.
— Not the old part, I said.
— Give me a cigarette, Carlos, said Gloria.
Tomatis handed her a cigarette and lit it. I had an unopened packet in each pocket, and I squeezed them both.
— Come in and eat, if you want, said Gloria, and walked out.
We stood there in silence for a moment, and I could hear Gloria’s footsteps moving down the corridor toward the kitchen. She looked like she’d woken up completely, and her thin, freckled face, with the mole on the cheek and the lips curved slightly upward, had regained the soft shape of the night before. When we were walking to the kitchen and I started to smell fried onions, I worried that we were going to have to eat that revolting canned soup again, but Gloria had changed out the peas for some pieces of beef liver that must have gone rotten while the cow was still alive. If she’d fried it in jet fuel it might not have been so terrible. And she and Tomatis swallowed it so easily and with so much appetite it was like they were eating rose-flavored milkshakes. It seemed like Gloria didn’t know how to do a thing, apart from letting herself get fondled all night by one guy and then jump in bed naked with another one. I couldn’t get the image of her out of my head — her face flattened against the pillow, her mouth open, and the little saliva stain forming on the white pillowcase. But she was able to do more than spread her legs all night, the tramp. She played poker a thousand times better than Carlitos and me, and she won more than a thousand pesos from each of us in less than an hour, when we went to the front room to play a game after breakfast. And after winning she said that something must be open despite it being May first, and she went out and bought a kilo of cream puffs to eat with tea. Then she started reading some poems aloud in English, from an anthology Tomatis had just bought in Buenos Aires. The book had a strange odor, which I can’t recall without shuddering. When she grabbed it the first time and brought it to her nose and smelled it with her eyes closed, I thought it was a put on, plain and simple. But then she handed it to me so I could smell it, and I realized the smell was something madman. Then she read a section of Robert Browning’s “Pompilia,” then “The Chambered Nautilus,” by Oliver Wendell Holmes, “This Bread I Break,” by Dylan Thomas, “To Waken an Old Lady,” by William Carlos Williams, Yeats’s “Vacillation,” Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi,” Pound’s “A Study in Aesthetics,” and half a million others. It was obvious she knew everything and had perfect taste, the bimbo. That made me even angrier, and I told her not to read any more in English because I couldn’t understand a thing (even though I had studied English for four years and could read it easily) and Tomatis cracked up laughing.