She looked at me seriously after that remark. The off-the-wall adjectives my neighboring columnist uses in his reviews came to mind. Even now, it’s difficult to tell if her serious tone was a joke. I’d prefer to think it was, even if she could very well be the sort of person who is capable of saying something like that without a glimmer of irony. We have to make ourselves distrust the impression that we can know a stranger perfectly. I like someone who can tell a good joke, but that’s the easy bit. You don’t know somebody until you’ve seen what he takes seriously. Many with an impeccable resume for irony will end up putting a foot wrong and lapsing into awful, plodding earnestness sooner or later. I spoke into my whiskey glass.
“And what’s on the site?”
“Guys like the kid you saw today. Well, guys and girls. You know, the typical repertoire: people on their own, people in couples or in groups. They’re always amateurs, though. And always in hotel rooms, a different one every time. It’s a really saturated market, you’ve got to stand out. And people get a kick out of the hotel thing — they like to see the world a bit, compare bedrooms and bathrooms. That’s our trademark. To get all the photos and videos you have to subscribe and pay a monthly fee. It’s not much though, you’d be surprised. All above board. We always ask the models for at least two forms of ID to be sure they’re eighteen or older. We keep copies in the office just in case ‘the authorities’ come and ask for them one day. Although to tell you the truth, they’ve given no signs of life up to now. When we started, I thought there would be someone watching everything we did online, but these days I don’t even think about it most of the time. Maybe some day the police will call me, or I’ll get a summons in the mail, or in an email. Maybe one of our models’ significant others will turn up one day to ‘have a little chat.’ For a moment, earlier, that’s who I thought you might be, actually.”
She scarcely smiled at her own joke. You could tell she was in a hurry to carry on telling me her story. If indeed it was me she was telling it to. She was speaking into her glass, too. Perhaps she’d forgotten I was in the room.
“So that’s about the size of it for now. And in the meantime, the page has really taken off. Especially with people who only speak Spanish. There’s a lot of competition from the Americans, but we carved out a niche in the market for ourselves pretty quickly. And it wasn’t just luck. I knew there was no reason porn should be any different from movies or soap operas — sometimes, even if it’s just for a nice change, people like to see how the things the Americans do are being done in their own language, too. So if you’re the first one to start something new and you run the business well, you’re unlikely to get knocked off your perch. Like everything else, people have their habits when it comes to porn, and they want convenience — they can’t spend all day at it. We professionals are here to make things easier for them.”
My page neighbor had said something similar. Perhaps he would have accepted this woman as belonging to our own trade in some broad sense. Anyway, judging by what she told me and what I’ve seen since, she’s a real professional in her field. She told me that she now has a staff of ten working on the site, as well as the actors, the casting team, and the film crew. They’re often all on the road, looking for actors and something new to offer people: new faces, new hotel rooms. She also told me that in porn, everything needs to be changing a little bit — but not too much — all the time.
“At the beginning, I did it all myself, and when I was looking for actors, I got more than one nasty response, and even several insults. Then I realized it was all a question of practice. Pretty soon, it becomes easy to see who’s going to like the idea and say yes. A lot of the people I’ve talked to lately have already heard about the site or have even looked at it. I’m not sure why I say ‘even,’ though, because it’s not like there’s much difference between hearing about a website and looking at it. With the internet, no one needs to stay curious about anything for long. A lot of people write and send in photos spontaneously, although fewer than one in fifty actually make the cut. Individuals put themselves forward as models — but also couples and even groups and families. They invite us to visit their city, or offer to pay for their own trip out. Some of them very kindly recommend hotels to us. But I prefer to do the casting in advance and send somebody to prepare everything. To do the scouting, as they say in the movie business.”
She looked up at me again and smiled. Then she changed her tone, like someone hurrying to the end of an awkward or boring speech. I wasn’t bored, and I don’t think I looked it, but I understood why she was in a hurry. I know these hotel conversations all too well. Lone travelers fall into them easily — in the bar, or the elevator, or the armchairs in the lobby during those fearful forty-five minutes before dinnertime. I tend to sidestep them, myself, but I’ve eavesdropped on a lot of them. Confidences are abruptly cut off, or else continued in someone’s room. In our case, the former might come to pass at any moment. But the second option was impossible — we were already in the place where chats like that wind up. And the truth is, as I am forever making my way through hotels (and, more so than anyone else, just passing through), I’ve never worked out what those encounters are supposed to lead to the next day, after the sojourn upstairs. At that moment, I could have used a map just to find my way around my own room. Perhaps she was less lost than me.
“So that’s how it goes. I could run the business from home. But working in an office is boring, and I’ve got people who are better at it. We’re selling more and more ad space all the time. We even have T-shirts. They’re pretty popular, apparently. People are selling them on eBay.”
She paused, and I thought perhaps I was supposed to reply. The whiskey was making her more talkative. It made me reluctant to speak. And actually, now I’m glad I didn’t say much that evening. She didn’t seem to mind.
“I never found traveling for pleasure very pleasurable. When I travel for no reason, I end up going a bit crazy. You tie yourself up in knots over decisions that are tiny but can suddenly turn tragic — whether to have a siesta or not, whether to go to the museum or to the park. Does that happen to you? Now I’ve always got something to do — a place to go to, and a reason to go there. Pedro comes with me to help me out with the other camera. And to help me generally. Sometimes stuff can get a bit out of hand, and he’s great at getting things under control. What do you think?”
I sat up in the armchair. It was precisely the question that would be most difficult to answer. I decided to buy a bit of time.
“What do I think of Pedro?”
“No, I mean what do you think of the whole thing. I imagine you don’t think much of Pedro. He’s not the friendliest guy, and actually, it’s his job not to be. He gets rid of snitches, peeping Toms and weirdos for us.”
“Ah.”
She laughed and got up.
“I didn’t mean you were a weirdo. A peeping Tom, maybe.”
She was looking for two more bottles of whiskey in the minibar. She spoke without looking at me, her head still halfway inside the fridge.
“Did you like what you saw?”
I stared into my glass. I let her empty another miniature bottle into it. I took a drink and let her question spread out and slip down my throat with it. So, really, it was going to be me who had to try and catch up with her. I made a sincere effort to reply. I’ve thought about the answer since, but I still haven’t come up with a convincing one. Now, I realize she was asking the wrong question.
Or simply an unfair one. I talk, you listen; I choose the topics, you introduce some variations — that was the pattern that had been established in our conversation up to that point. Once someone has set the tone in conversations like this one (which always happens very quickly, during the first few exchanges, or even before a single word has been spoken), it’s difficult to force a change. For me, it was actually the ideal solution: I could think through all of this later. I would know what I thought — whether or not I liked what I saw and heard — later, when I wrote it all down. I was deceiving myself, of course. In fact, I think it was a way of deceiving her, too — I’m writing now about what happened and I still don’t understand it. And I could already tell, then, that that was how it would be.