The Girl at the Door Read online

  Her

  I finished responding to the questionnaire. I had the impression that I could have responded yes or no indifferently to all the questions and still not have lied. When I fucked my boyfriend for the first time, we were so stoned that my sensations that night changed by the second. His face had opened wide above me and appeared monstrous; then a second later I caressed his cheek as if he were a baby. His body had mutated in shape and proportion, his odour was horrifying and irresistible, his randy expression disgusted and excited me. Even his eyes transformed continuously – a stupid gaze, then a deep one, distant and close. I felt like I was fucking a stranger, and I was moved by the familiarity of his embrace. I could smell his rancid alcoholic breath and taste the sensuality of whisky on his lips. I was frightened by the smack of his hand on my thigh, and I sucked his fingers after they’d reemerged from my pussy.

  Did you ever feel abused by your partner? That’s what the Commission asked me. At certain times I wanted nothing more than to feel abused – by my boyfriend, by life, by enthusiasm, even by the opposite, desperation, alcohol, or drugs, something that overwhelmed me violently. Or even softly. It didn’t matter how. There are many people who describe their lives in these terms. They succumb to something. Then they break away. They damn and regret their damnation. From the way they describe it, fantastic love always seems to be at the heart of it, a great love affair. There are many TV programmes that recount these stories. The ex-alcoholic with her hair just fixed by the hairdresser, still a little tousled, who looks at the TV camera stunned, careful never to blink. Alcohol was her lover, her demon, her master. Then there’s the anorexic, prey to other demons. And the junkie. And the gambler (a man), and even the writer who was afraid she would take her own life because she heard voices. For so little, I thought. At least she heard voices, felt presences. You can have a chat, I wanted to tell her. Much better to feel presences than to feel fuck-all. Anyway, no, I never felt abused by my boyfriend.

  Him

  One of the few witnesses to show any comprehension was the swimming instructor. She didn’t teach me, just the little kids. She was listed as one of my friends. When I went to the pool, I liked watching her from my lane. From a distance her legs looked very long. She struck an elongated and imposing figure, a sort of muscular statue with a watery sheen, and her hair tucked tight into her light-coloured swimming cap made her head just as sculptural. But when you got closer, you realised she was much tinier than you’d have expected. She was a giant among the kids because they were small. Even her legs looked shorter; they were still alluring, but they wouldn’t make you think of a statue. So I preferred watching her from afar, staring at her thighs as she came out of the water. I’ve always liked going to the pool, more than to the sea. There were fewer risks in the pool to erode my competitive spirit. And I couldn’t care less about catching an octopus with my bare hands. I was into clean and clinical competition, without any heroism. I even liked women in their Olympic one-piece suits more than in floral bikinis. The forms were more defined, the arses, arms, and shoulders a precise geometry of solids. There was nothing romantic in admiring those bodies, and it relaxed me to watch a girl dart by in her lane and pull up to me; I would pass her at the last moment and imagine her little frustration as she touched the pool’s edge with her foot to turn and catch up with me again. In the Miden pool there were excellent female swimmers, and I presume they weren’t interested in seeing a man with an octopus in his hands. We didn’t want to get dirty with sand, smell the pestilential odour of algae, or burn ourselves on the hot pebbles. I’ve never understood who gets pleasure from nudism, swimming naked in the open sea, being in contact with the elements. To me the most exciting thing is the elimination of all friction, tight suits gliding through the pool’s bright blue water. I’ve never yearned to feel like a fish, but rather to be a perfect laboratory creature, measuring myself against the other creatures, win or lose.

  The swimming instructor beat me a couple of times when I challenged her, and during the races I stopped thinking about her size. From the chats we had, she came across as a sympathetic woman. She tried to understand. And to explain. Maybe it was an occupational hazard; there’s something intrinsically pedagogic about her because she has to deal with children. Or maybe – I said to myself – she wondered why I hadn’t come on to her, since after the affair with the girl, I’d suddenly become known as a womaniser. I’ve never been a womaniser. I admire beautiful women, like everyone else, but I’m too lazy to put in the effort. I don’t like the idea of random hookups. I might have come on to the instructor had we managed to keep our distance: me in my lane and she at the other end of the pool. When I had a band, before Miden, our best song was called ‘Sidereal Distance’. I played the bass. I should have learned more from those years.

  The instructor explained to me what it meant to be a girl and take a fancy to a professor. She used that expression ‘take a fancy to’; she wasn’t worried about revealing the shortness of her legs up close, but with her words she made sure to keep a little distance. In any case, no one said anything about love in all those pages written by the Commission, so there’s no reason to expect the witnesses to mention it either. All the same, she was warm in her report about ‘taking a fancy’. I don’t know if she’d had that experience too, and still felt the effects. Without her saying it outright, her point of view was that it was a mistaken affair from the outset. On that point, I conceded. I stopped trying to justify it and in fact would often bring it up myself: What had I been thinking? Then I prepared to nod before she could. But what sense was there in accusing me of violence after all that time?

  ‘Some things need time to process,’ she told me.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘but maybe in two years she’ll process something else, and we’ll be back to the beginning.’

  ‘Then in two years we’ll talk about it again.’

  ‘It’s not like truth can change infinitely.’

  She paused reflectively.

  ‘I was expecting a more dialectical approach from a philosophy professor,’ she quipped. ‘I believe it took centuries to show that the earth wasn’t flat.’

  ‘That example has nothing to do with it.’

  ‘It does, it does …’

  ‘That was a scientific demonstration. It wasn’t a question of interpretation –’

  ‘Listen, there’s no need for scientific demonstration.’

  ‘Yes, exactly, but you’re the one who brought up the flat earth.’

  ‘Who cares about the earth? They might one day discover it’s a cube.’

  ‘Well, in that case it would be a matter of false truth.’

  ‘But we’re not talking about the earth!’

  ‘Exactly, we’re not talking about the earth!’

  ‘This is about a girl who felt she was raped,’ she said.

  ‘The point is that two years ago, she didn’t feel raped.’

  ‘She didn’t understand. As a child, you don’t understand if your father is violent. You figure it out later.’

  ‘She wasn’t a child, and I wasn’t her father.’

  ‘You were her professor!’

  Her

  I would have liked to call the girl. I was carrying a being in my womb, maybe I should have tried to be more maternal. Maybe I could have explained things to her. I wasn’t really an idealist, but I did have my own ideals. She was born in Miden; her father was one of the founders of the Dream. The Crash had barely grazed her, an anomalous migraine that tormented her one morning, only to fade in the afternoon. For me it was different. What are you doing? I would have asked her. Why are you doing it? Should I have allowed myself a little theatrics? Why are you doing this to us?

  The annoying thing was that the girl didn’t seem the least bit interested in my boyfriend. It wasn’t a form of revenge for her as a betrayed, disappointed, or frustrated lover. There were no such feminine subtleties. It was
all matter of fact. So even my desire to create a little bit of theatre – invite her out to lunch at a nice restaurant where she would never have gone, make her feel uneasy, observe her not touching her food the way she didn’t touch her tea, and ask, Why are you doing this to us? – would have all been vaguely ridiculous, seeing as how she wasn’t doing it to hurt me or him, but just ‘for herself’, as she would have said in that insufferable tone of hers. And she would have fixed that bottomless gaze on me, a gaze I’m sure could have erased my theatrical banquet, the nice restaurant, my hair loose for the occasion, and my glass of red wine (going against the recommendations of my doctor: ‘If you must, then half a glass of white, not red.’ As if there really were a difference in the swill that was sold in Miden).

  But there was another factor that rendered the question altogether inadequate. It didn’t take much concentration for me to understand that my boyfriend had lost the necessary desperation and amazement to fear an attack that could destroy us. There was nothing to destroy. It was a rather calming truth. We weren’t fighting against anyone. I like deluding myself that there was a time when it was different. We had worked out our first encounter very well. At times I had the impression that we were constructing a story to tell our children: And that’s how Mum and Dad … We had all the necessary requirements for being credibly in love then. The sea, the tent, the Miden dawn, the sex, and the country we had left behind. Not to mention our emails. We had material for our children, and then some. It was just us two against everyone, we would tell them. There was no reason for them to doubt it.

  Him

  The swimming instructor thanked me. I’d opened her mind, she said, with that example of the violent father. Actually, the example was hers, I noted. Who knows where I got this desire to play the sophist just as my whole life was going to shit. Or going to whores, as they say in my country. ‘Going to whores’ was one of the expressions that sparked the most debate in the linguistic exchange meeting I’d attended after moving to Miden. The reactions alternated between hilarity and indignation, often flowing together in a surge of shameful consternation, as when kids first discover that they stink if they don’t wash. The meeting’s Mediator proffered her theory: in the end there should be nothing wrong with going to sex workers as long as they are happy, pay their taxes, and are good company. So an expression like that – I pointed out to her – would be useless. It would be ‘my life is going for a stroll’, more or less. The Mediator reflected on that: ‘Yes, why not? It would be good to get some fresh air.’

  My swimming instructor was grateful to me because I had given her a way of proposing to the Commission on Relations with Minors that they consider TRAUMA no. 215 in certain cases between parents and children. She wasn’t part of that Commission, but there’s always a certain pride among the inhabitants of Miden when they manage to venture across Commissions. Some amuse themselves this way to pass the time, constantly looking for good ideas to propose. Then they often discover that someone else has already proposed the same idea. These things happen.

  ‘So the trauma has to come up before the age of eighteen?’ I asked.

  She looked at me, perplexed. ‘No. There are no temporal limits.’

  ‘So you’ll have to find another Commission.’

  I could see she was disappointed.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll find it,’ I reassured her. ‘It sounds like a great idea.’

  Her

  I didn’t call the girl. But I decided to write in my diary that day. Maybe they would include it in the trial material. At least I would have some readers. It was a little less frustrating than responding to the questionnaire. I wrote a good diary entry. I was hoping they’d take it into consideration. I was hoping they’d ask me to keep going. However this story wound up, I told myself, there would be someone interested in my version. I even knew a guy at the Publishing Commission. So I started with that little diary entry. I reread it many times and was extremely satisfied. I thought, after the pregnancy I can start smoking again, I can sit in my boyfriend’s study while he’s at the Academy and try to write. I reread that diary page and thought of myself without a belly, without tea, with whisky and a cigarette. Pages and pages at my boyfriend’s desk. Maybe we would buy a new one. I would choose something at the Miden market that felt more lived-in than the white laminate. A real wooden table. Full of veining. Walnut. Cherry. Oak. As if I knew the difference.

  Him

  I saw the girl on the street. I stopped her, thus violating the restraining order.

  ‘We need to talk,’ I said.

  ‘I really don’t think so,’ she said. ‘As a matter of fact, you can’t talk to me.’

  ‘Do you realise this is absurd?’

  ‘Do you realise that I was assaulted?’

  She spoke as if she wanted spectators. I was the only one on the street; we were outside the Senior Citizens’ Garden. Who knows what she was doing there. I never thought that the kids in Miden had grandparents. But if they did have any, they were all there in the garden. I never saw any old people anywhere else. Inside the garden you could see silhouettes dressed in white, filling baskets with cherries. Fruit trees don’t grow in Miden, because summer barely lasts a month. I believe workers attached cherries to the trees. In fact, they were fir trees.

  ‘I loved you,’ I told her.

  The girl gathered her hair back with her hands and stood there, her elbows raised in the air. I saw the blond hair under her arms, a scrape from the bike on her elbow, and I was moved. It was cold, but she couldn’t wait to go sleeveless. Even to class, she always wore a tank top. On top of it she wore a formless oversized jacket, pieces of cloth that hardly covered her bones underneath. She stood with her elbows suspended, as if waiting for something else. Then she lowered her skinny arms.

  ‘What about now?’ she asked.

  ‘Not anymore.’

  ‘I loved you too.’

  We couldn’t have found a sadder way of saying it.

  Her

  In bed, my boyfriend caressed my belly, keeping his hand there to check if he could feel any movement. I took his hand and slid it farther down. I started masturbating with his hand, and he let me.

  ‘I want to be the girl,’ I said to him.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Do to me what you did to her.’

  My boyfriend pulled his hand away.

  ‘What the fuck are you saying?’ he shouted, sitting on the bed, looking like he wanted to smack me in the face.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Let’s start with a smack. Did you smack her? The letter from the Commission doesn’t say anything about that. It only mentions spanking.’

  I got up and turned on all fours.

  ‘Don’t play crazy,’ he said.

  ‘I want to know how it feels to be raped,’ I said.

  ‘I never raped her!’ my boyfriend shouted, and got up. Who knows where he thought he was going. He rummaged through his dresser drawer as if looking for his cigarettes, but he never kept them there. It wasn’t easy to rummage through an empty drawer.

  I stayed there on the bed, on all fours. My belly grazed the mattress.

  When I went for walks in Miden, I met a lot of mothers with their newborn children. I saw them bend over the prams with their backs straight, bent perfectly at a right angle, the way they teach you in yoga. I’d taken a few yoga lessons at the beginning of my pregnancy. The teacher’s attention was insufferable: I was pregnant and foreign, and she treated me like a panda. So I stopped. While I was on all fours there on the bed, I looked at myself in the mirror on the wall. Every once in a while we used it to get turned on, even though I don’t get very turned on by watching myself fuck. But my boyfriend liked it. He grabbed me by my hair and forced me to watch. I did, but couldn’t find anything seductive in my red and swollen face; he evidently could. I took off my nightgown and went back on all fours to look at myself in the mirr
or. I tried to lengthen my back. My shoulders slouched and my arms had no muscles. I lifted my head to stare at my boyfriend, who was still next to the drawer.

  ‘I want to be the girl,’ I said again.

  ‘Stop it,’ he said.

  ‘I’m one of the witnesses. I need to understand.’

  My boyfriend came up to the bed and pulled my arm out from under me so I’d lose the pose. I fell on my side. I kept looking at myself in the mirror. I was more decent in the foetal position. All you could see was my belly, the mercy and stronghold of those days.

  Him

  We went to bed late that night. During dinner my girlfriend poured herself a couple of glasses of wine. I didn’t like monitoring her, appealing to common sense. Two glasses of wine, I said to myself. Okay, who cares. But then, after dinner, she insisted on a dash of whisky. I didn’t say anything, I just gave her a look that struck me as eloquent, hence the look of an arsehole. Usually those looks elicit the opposite effect of what was intended; in fact, she poured herself an abundant glass of whisky and drank it down in one gulp as I sat there sipping mine.

  ‘How do you manage to still enjoy things?’ she asked me, as if there had been some prelude to that question, as if we’d already discussed it and that was all we ever discussed. But then what was it we were discussing?