Little by little, he began to recall the episode with Marita, almost always at night, or when he was alone in his room doing homework. He’d start to zone out, his gaze hovering over the letters in his textbook as though dissolving them, and then her face, or something like her face, would appear there. He remembered being in the dunes, remembered the presence of Pablo, Marcos, Tejas, and Rivero. He remembered, more than anything, his own cowardice. Then came the whiteness of Rivero’s ass, that ass wriggling and contracting like a slug, but not like it was on top of Marita, more like it was penetrating something fragile and delicate, a crystal glass or a little girl, and it was like he might still be there and something inside him were screaming—What am I going to do now? Then he’d get the jitters, a sort of dull vibration and an incessant urge to still be there so he could wrench Rivero up by the arm, shove him, punch him. It wouldn’t matter if they beat the shit out of him after that — beat him and beat him and beat him. He’d get up from the chair where he’d been working and, if he was home alone, open the closet and punch the wall, and then again, in an attempt to draw blood. After the hysteria would come uneasiness and melancholy. His soul had been stretched taut as a rubber band, and then from one second to the next it was released, snapped inside. He’d say aloud, “I’m a coward.”
He said I’m a coward not as if it were a simple description but as if it were his most essential attribute, as if it were his true nature. And when he looked in the mirror, he no longer thought Tomás has brown hair but the coward has brown hair, and if he was hungry, the coward is hungry, and if he was tired, the coward is tired.
His fourth week back was the most excruciating of all. It started with a recurrent dream — him, sitting by the seafront, back in the beach town, with Anita. They were upbeat, relaxed, and jovial, until Rivero came along. It was very hot in the dream, a muggy, unpleasant heat. It was all so real, profound, interesting; it had the same delicate quality as certain summer afternoons. Rivero’s presence at first went unnoticed. Then from one second to the next, he was taking part in the conversation, too, asking Anita questions. And then suddenly he’d say, “Suck my dick, Anita.”
Or maybe, “Take off your panties, Anita.”
Then he’d watch him lay down on top of her, but he himself would remain motionless, right there beside them, unable to move. That was when his memory of the dream slowed inexplicably, as if Rivero and Anita were two frozen shapes, sculptures maybe, and he felt cornered, trapped, unable to reach them; the air was thick, and all he could do was crouch down beside them. He looked at Anita’s face. It was the same face she’d always had, maybe a bit more inexpressive than normal, she had those tiny features he had so often adored, those little eyes, round as two coins, and her body was moving at regular, rhythmic intervals as Rivero’s body slapped down on top of her. Then, suddenly, Anita’s face sparked in him a kind of inexplicable revulsion. Revulsion as if something in it had vanished, or something had been poured over her. He’d wake up.
It would have been nearly impossible to explain the hysteria with which he would awake from that dream. One time he woke up screaming, which led to a small panic. He saw his mother crouching there beside him, disheveled, face puffy, smelling like sleep, eyes wide with fear.
“What on earth were you dreaming?”
He couldn’t help it, he burst into tears. His mother sat down beside him and tried to hug him, but since they almost never touched, the physical contact was even more distressing. He felt like he was slipping down a soft, oily, gray hill. That was the first time he cried in front of his mother as an adult.
Rage and shame sometimes converged to form a state of full-on misery. He felt within his body the pain of things hitherto unknown — his liver, blood, stomach, lungs, heart. And disgust at the pain. And disgust at the shame. It got even worse when he found out a girl liked him. There was this one girl in his class who was kind of after him, a girl named Lourdes who had a very small body and boy’s hips, who sometimes waited for him after class and didn’t live far from him. She was pretty, though, her facial features had a fine, delicate beauty about them, a beauty just starting to emerge but clearly present. Her features had developed unevenly; she had full, sensual lips, but her expression was incredibly childlike and anxious, as though something inside her were teetering, constantly losing her footing on the path to becoming a woman. It wasn’t specifically Lourdes’ desire he found so unpleasant but desire in and of itself, any desire for bodies on top of one other. The fact that all those people — Lourdes, the other girls, men strolling past him on the street — had done it, or at least were always wanting to do it, imposed a kind of fatalistic quality on the world. After class, when he saw her there waiting for him, he could almost feel her desire on top of him like a slimy substance. Then, walking along beside her, Lourdes would be talking about her parents or some classmate and he couldn’t help but focus on her arms, her already-developed breasts (which, curiously, she tried to squash beneath T-shirts that compressed them unnaturally), the robust, carnal message her body sent by walking so close to him. It seemed grotesque and unnecessary to use sentimental ploys to conceal something that was, in fact, grotesque and crude, and although he felt disgusted by desire, he felt equally disgusted by the fact that it couldn’t be openly addressed. Lourdes would laugh, and he’d see — behind her disturbingly perfect, white teeth — a strange, repulsive tongue, a repulsive tongue darting around inside her mouth with repulsive speed, he’d see the slight trembling of her cheeks when she tried to smile, and the way the trembling persisted when she held her smile longer than necessary, and how it then became fixed, like an animal hide that’s been pulled taut and laid out to dry in the sun. The quick kiss on the cheek she gave him when they got to her house and said goodbye was like a burning moth on his skin, and he would try to wear himself out when climbing the stairs, as if in need of physical exhaustion to escape the listlessness.
Only pain was real. Physical pain. Only pain had the ability to hold everything, to impose order on it, to place it within strict confines. The first time it happened, it was almost by accident. He was in bed and leaned to one side and jabbed himself with a screw sticking out of the wooden bedframe. Immediately his body flinched in pain. He touched his thigh and felt around the bed for the source. The boards on the frame’s joint had separated slightly, and the tip of a long, black screw was sticking out. After that, it became a near-daily routine — he’d lie face up and inch closer to that spot until he could feel the tip of the screw in his thigh, he’d force his body not to recoil and then press firmly into it. The pain was sharp and concentrated, and his whole body tensed against it. It was as if something inside him could be at ease when he felt that pain, as if something stopped being unreal and weak. But then the pain would subside again and there would be nothing left, nothing but a round bloodstain on his pajama bottoms, which he then had to rinse out in the bathroom so no one would see.
He began to cry. It was a strange kind of crying, one sometimes brought on by the most banal of events.
“You’re blue today,” Anita said.
“What do you mean, blue?”
“Blue,” she insisted.
“I’m not a good person, Anita, I’ve done very bad things.”
“Me, too,” she replied gravely. “If you knew. .”
Then he’d get the feeling something was entering his body, slowly and cautiously, making his insides all soft, and then suddenly there would come a burst of anguish. The scene from the dunes would appear, startlingly sharp — sterile, monotonous, unacceptable, repetitive — he’d feel even more anxiety than he had when he was actually beside Marita, or on top of her. Then he’d go into the bathroom, get a towel, and bite down on it as hard as he could, until his jaw ached.