‘If I didn’t drink so much I’d understand Chinese? Yeah, right!’
‘If yuh didn’t drink so much yuh wouldn’ have scayud them.’
‘Don’t you preach at me, Villem.’
When we got back to the apartment, the cockroaches were merrily strolling about on the ceiling. Another time, Willem had installed traps in every corner of the place, these little black plastic boxes. I never understood how they worked: were the cockroaches going to lift up the little boxes and get inside? That idea didn’t work either, but at least it was intriguing. It kept my brain occupied for a whole week. Just as mysterious were the plug-ins, which in theory gave off a substance that would flush out the critters. Equally ineffective. A yellow powder you had to smear on the filler between the tiles on the floor turned out to be the worst of the fiascos: the cockroaches ate it and started flying madly around like rockets. I suggested to Willem that we try it ourselves.
Failures came and went, until finally, one Wednesday afternoon, Willem turned up with his head bowed.
‘I’ve run out of ideas, Teodooruh,’ he said.
I had one: we set to smashing them with books.
He, with his Bible, and I with my Aesthetic Theory.
~ ~ ~
The woman next door had got a job and her hours prevented her from collecting her daughter after school, so she had asked if my mother could help get her home safe and sound. The woman was a widow and the little girl her only daughter, and she took classes in the afternoon. I had all my classes in the morning. The girl was fourteen, nearly fifteen.
‘Can she not she walk home on her own?’ my mother asked.
‘You have no idea what an ordeal that would be,’ explained our neighbour.
I did: queues would form down the street to follow her long-legged walk home. The street was full of dangers, you only had to open your eyes to the canine show going on to imagine what might end up happening to her. Lines of dogs waiting patiently to mount a little bitch in heat. Or not so patiently: sometimes there were furious fights in the queue. Growls. Fangs. Bloodied hackles. Unwanted pregnancies.
My mother replied that she could count on us, or rather, on me, and told me I could take Turnup out for a walk at the same time. Our neighbour was satisfied: she didn’t know that until now I had been one of her daughter’s most ardent stalkers.
The girl was called Hilaria, despite evidence to the contrary.
‘Why did they call you Hilaria?’ I asked her.
‘Why do you think?’ she replied. ‘Listen to my laugh, it’s hilarious.’
And she growled.
Every afternoon I waited for her on a bench outside school; Hilaria would cross the road and, before doing anything else, she would walk over to the mirror in a nearby shop window, where she would apply make-up, let down her hair and hitch her skirt up to her knees. Things only got worse: if she already caused an uproar when she walked along dressed like a nun with her mother, now it was like the procession of the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe in December. It was a walk of nine blocks and it took us twenty minutes going at the slow pace Turnup obliged us to walk at, pissing here and there, grubbing about in the rubbish in the gutter, seeing what he could stick his snout into. My mother had got it into her head that if we tired the dog out he’d do less damage. When her hypothesis failed, she said that tiring the dog out made him hysterical. What was certain was that, if he was out in the street for a long time, the damage would at least be caused to other people’s property.
Sometimes it took us longer, if we had to stop on the way, if we crossed paths with a bitch on heat. Then there was nothing for it: the first few times we’d tried to walk on by and Turnup had snapped at our ankles. Knowing full well how uncooperative he was, we had to wait our turn with the other dogs. I looked beyond Hilaria, at the other queue, the queue of guys ogling her. Until at last, it was our dog’s turn. Turnup was medium-sized, a big dog by the street’s standards. He mounted bitches easily, skilfully. Hilaria watched the spectacle and asked me: ‘Does it turn you on, Teo?’
I tried to put my hand over my crotch so she couldn’t see what was going on underneath it, and she thumped me on the back with a petulant smile and said: ‘Pervert.’
The days came and went, and I took advantage of the routine to carry out my own pursuit, armed with my sketchbook.
‘Will you let me draw you?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I want to make a portrait of you, I’m an artist.’
‘I know that, everyone knows that, they say your mum ended up with a right dud with you, that you’re a fat lot of good to her. I meant how do you want to draw me, how would you do it?’
‘A nice portrait, nothing avant-garde.’
‘Nude?’
Beneath my fly I suddenly felt my erection, rising up and up, leaving me without an answer.
‘Does it turn you on, Teo?’
I swallowed hard and started to imagine her long naked legs and everything else, which, truth be told, I didn’t even know how to imagine, so inexperienced was I.
‘Tomorrow,’ she promised, ‘before my mum gets home.’
‘A portrait takes several days.’
‘I knew it! You’re a sleazebag.’
The following day, I told her:
‘I’ve got a new sketchbook.’
‘And how are you going to draw me?’
I was slowly growing less timid, emboldened by her provocations, and getting used to discussing these things with a great deal of blood in my groin and very little in my head.
‘First I’ve got to look at you for a long time to concentrate, I have to find a style, it’s not just about copying your figure.’
‘Look at me for ages, eh? With my legs open?’
‘Maybe,’ I replied, my trousers wet.
‘I knew it! You’re sick. I can’t do it today, my mother’s coming home early. Tomorrow.’
The hours came and went, long as years, and eventually the next day arrived.
‘Have you got any ice?’
‘Ice? What for?’
‘No ice, no portrait.’
‘Why?’
‘What do you mean, why? I need ice to put on my nipples so they stand up nice and stiff.’
Under my fly, my erection howled.
‘Get some ice. Tomorrow.’
Tomorrow, of course, never came; what did come was the day one of her pursuers emerged from anonymity. He wasn’t one of the usual ones, although he did seem vaguely familiar and I was sure I’d seen him before. We were at Hilaria’s front door when he called at us to wait for him. He was an older guy, fat, who wore his trousers pulled up to his chest. Literally: it looked like he needed to clamp his arms close to his body to keep the trousers in place. He took a while to reach us, panting, and he had a spot of paint on his left shoe. He bent down with great difficulty to pat Turnup, who seized his chance to steal and then eat a paintbrush out of the man’s overcoat pocket. When the man stood up, even though the dog’s lead led to my hand, he acted as if I didn’t exist.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked Hilaria.
‘Marilín,’ she replied, putting the accent on the last syllable.
He asked if she lived there, pointing over to the entrance to our building with his chin. She said she did.
‘I’d like to speak to your mother,’ the man said.