Children… Friends… Race… Belonging… Loneliness… Love…
No, it wasn’t the words but the ideas they contained that spread the icy silences when I would endeavor to come up with something else to talk about, as if trying to avoid the iceberg whose reflection I saw gleaming in Ettu’s little eyes.
One day he brought the first artist home. They talked for a while, Ettu listlessly and the other almost in a frenzy. Then Ettu invited him upstairs, and they spent a long time in his apartments. Not in the inner sanctum that he never let me enter, but in his bedroom, with the enormous bed that I knew he never slept in.
Later the artist, a pompous little genius of the holoprojections, came down strutting around smugly, but with a strange expression on his face, a mixture of disgust and terror. And Ettu said goodbye with a sad—yet final—smile.
I ran upstairs, with a horrible suspicion… The bed was unmade, as if someone very large and very heavy had been romping in the sheets. Strange liquids were staining the silk. And the smell of sex, which I knew so well, mixed with Ettu’s acrid and cloying scent.
He surprised me there, and I said nothing. I don’t exactly know why, but I felt… betrayed. I thought it was because he had introduced the grownup world into the childhood paradise of the house. But, deep down, I knew it was something else.
Jealousy.
Why them and not me?
I wasn’t such a little girl as I’d been months earlier…
I tore the costly silk sheets in a fury, my eyes moist, like a wronged woman. And I peed on the mattress, vengeful as a hurt child. The following day, Ettu instructed the huborgs never to let me enter his suite until they had finished erasing all traces of his encounters with artists.
I never again found traces of what I thought of as his repulsive xenoid lechery.
Oh, if I had only suspected the truth…
Artists continued to visit. After a while they became a routine. Always different, always urgent, hopeful, skeptical but clinging to that possibility. When I saw them arrive I’d withdraw, as if to express my disapproval of all that. Ettu always had long conversations with them. Sometimes they went upstairs, sometimes not. When he sent artists off without inviting them into his bedroom, their faces had the look of being devastated but, at the same time, sort of relieved. When artists came downstairs after a while, they seemed happy… but always with that shadow of disgust.
As if they’d sold their souls to the devil, it occurred to me to think one time.
I naturally pretended to be playing, though I was really spying all the while. I tried to find out what it was that made some of them eligible for his pleasure and so prizeworthy while others didn’t deserve that “honor.” My feminine instinct told me that the whole pantomime of a long conversation, then going upstairs or not, was very important to Ettu. And that the key lay in the questions he asked and the answers he got.
One day, dying of curiosity, I dared to bring up the subject directly. What was all that? What was he up to? Why make them go upstairs if he was going to give them money? Couldn’t he do that just as well downstairs? Was this what he came to Earth looking for? Why the whole masquerade of acting mad for beauty, hiding the fact that he was only interested in easy, cheap sex, like all the others? Wouldn’t it have been easier, cheaper, and more sincere just to ask them?
“Sometimes, especially when dealing with difficult issues, the easiest road isn’t the best,” he answered, very serious, looking me straight in the eye.
That confused me.
It was strange, contradictory. As if I’d suddenly discovered another Ettu. I’d been innocently living with him for months, and he’d never tried anything. I hadn’t seen that he had any lovers, either. And now, all this interest in sex.
It all came down to sex, always: the perennial means of exchange between humans and xenoids. What every tourist came to find on Earth. But—my playmate, too? Practically my adoptive father, so taciturn at times and other times so communicative?
We never brought up the subject again.
As the scene was constantly repeated—artists showing up buried in debt, heading upstairs after the interview with Ettu and later coming down contented, or else being sent packing—I ended up accepting the inevitable. Yes, sex. He might be a very special sort, but it was still all about sex. Ettu only liked adult human artists. And his respect for me no longer seemed like respect but scorn. The only reason he didn’t touch me was that he wasn’t attracted.
So why did he love me, then? The eternal question.
That night I ran away. I didn’t have the platinum card, but I had a couple of regular ones. With enough money on them to…
To do what? I knew all too well that I had no place to go home to. Even though my Abuela still lived in Barrio 13, accepting my frequent remittances so she could keep on happily destroying her liver, I no longer belonged there. And what’s even worse, after those months of traveling around the planet and living this new life in the Castle, I was starting to doubt whether I belonged anywhere.
If there was any place in the world for me, it was with Ettu. If I cared about anyone and if there was anyone who cared about me, it was him. But that was precisely what I felt least disposed to accept.
I rented a room in a third-rate hotel… In theory a minor shouldn’t be able to do that, but credits work wonders in practice.
The first night, I could hardly sleep. I was restless, tossing and turning all night long. I was furious. Jealous. Of Ettu, much as it angered me to admit it. Why other men and women, and not me? Wasn’t I woman enough for him? Lots of guys would pay a fortune to enjoy a ten-year-old virgin eager to stop being one. That stupid Colossaur and his obsession with beauty—not that the artists were so handsome. Being able to create beauty didn’t make them special or better. They were rotten inside, and he knew it as well as I did. I was more beautiful than all of them together…
The next night I put on my most womanly dress and went to Lolita, a nightclub known as a hangout for teenagers of both sexes—and for xenoids more or less interested in pedophilia.
I drank one kind of wine after another, like that first night in the New Cali Galaxy restaurant. Maybe it was because I was so coldly determined to get drunk that I never fully lost consciousness of what I was doing.
I danced for hours, with humans and grodos, Cetians and Centaurians. I put my whole soul, with all the anger and confusion I was feeling, into every movement; I was the star that night. Everybody was watching me, and I got plenty of propositions. Fewer than I was expecting, I admit. Apparently my obvious need for sex, here and now, frightened away most potential clients.
I smiled politely at each offer, and that was all. I was waiting for him. Just him. Stupid me, completely forgetting that Colossaurs can barely grasp the meaning of music. He never would have gone to a place like that. Or maybe that was why I was so hoping he would come looking for me there… Even if just to have him bring me home like a naughty runaway girl. Because it would have meant that he cared a little about me. That he took me a little bit seriously. That he loved me a little… since I hated to admit that I was the one who loved him.
He didn’t come. I wanted to forget. If it wasn’t him, somebody like him would do. That had to be my night, and no stupid armored Colossaur was going to mess it up for me by not showing up. I kept on drinking; I smoked pot, sniffed coke. I even let a Centaurian who showed more interest than the others give me a dose of telecrack, which fortunately must have been fake.