That summer, Calcagno and Brando had gone to a poetry festival in Necochea, and that trip had given them, him and Leonor, some space. They could see each other at any time of day without their time being limited, as it tended to be otherwise. They were at a point in their relationship when, no matter the subject, their opinions always coincided, something which they noticed every so often, euphorically, always with a renewed sense of astonishment. Gutiérrez still hadn’t expressed his feelings in any straightforward way, but the increasing precautions they took not to be seen together revealed, though they didn’t seem to realize it, the nature of their intentions.
They went out to a restaurant, a secluded place near the waterfront whose owner Gutiérrez knew. Since it was summer, there was hardly anyone there; if they weren’t on vacation, most people still preferred to eat outdoors, at grill houses or beer gardens, to escape the suffocation of the hot nights. The owner sat them in an annex at the back that only fit a handful of tables, all empty but for theirs. When they were alone, their hands caressed on the table, unselfconscious, almost distractedly, and at one point Gutiérrez had stood and stepped around the table, leaning over to kiss her, just when the owner, who, because he knew him, was serving them himself, came in unexpectedly with something, and pretended not to have seen anything. Soon after that, when Gutiérrez got up to go the bathroom, the owner called him over and told him there was a room behind the restaurant that could be rented by the hour, but that he could have for the whole night and even the next day if he wanted, since it was Sunday and the restaurant would be closed, and that he could stay as long as he wanted since the room was actually separate from the restaurant and had its own entrance through the courtyard, and that he could return the key on Monday morning.
When he returned to the table, Gutiérrez already had the key in his pocket, but he waited a while before asking Leonor to the back room. He was afraid that she’d be angry and that the night would be cut short. He was sure she wouldn’t accept, and he’d already decided that if she said no he wouldn’t insist — he couldn’t bear the idea that Leonor would be offended and stop seeing him — but when he finally suggested it, he was surprised by the open and straightforward way she considered the idea, interrogating him at length about the owner’s discretion and not about the intentions that a young law student might have regarding the wife of the professor who’d given him a job as a clerk in his firm. Actually, it was like Leonor hadn’t understood that the point of going to the back room was to make love, and simply wanted to clarify the owner’s ethics and his discretion, first of all, along with his sense of honor, his habits, and his family history. After discussing all of these points with Gutiérrez, Leonor seemed satisfied and accepted but said that they should wait until the patrons and two or three employees in the front of the restaurant had left. She would only go to the back room when, with exception of the owner, who would lead them through the dark courtyard and disappear, no one was left in the place but them. So they went on talking as before. About an hour passed, more or less, and the conversation was so animated that for a while Gutiérrez forgot that eventually they’d be going to the back room, and he was almost sorry when the owner interrupted them, around midnight, to lead them first through an old tiled courtyard with a large refrigerator, a covered balcony, and two or three half-open doors, then through a kind of storage room where, in the weak light, wine racks, sacks of flour, several folded chairs and tables, a soda machine, and two or three dozen bottles stacked around it were just visible, and then through another courtyard, with trees and brick path through flowerpots and vegetable beds. Finally, after opening the door to a small room attached to the back wall of the garden, whispering, The switch is to the left when you go in, and discreetly taking the money Gutiérrez had already prepared to give him when they reached the room, he disappeared silently into the dark courtyard that they’d just crossed, where the only thing that caught the weak light was the brick gravel path that had led them there.
They went in. At twenty-four, Gutiérrez was still a virgin. When he reached puberty, he’d masturbated just like everyone else, but in boarding school, where he’d been until he was eighteen, he hadn’t had either the occasion or the stimuli for it, unlike his classmates, who, despite the vigilance of the faculty, never did without it, alone, in groups, in the bedrooms or the bathrooms. In college, he had to work to pay for his classes (in fact, two years passed before he could produce anything, since all the temporary jobs he found didn’t leave him time to study) and after trying to go to bed with a prostitute a few times and failing, he’d stopped trying. The year before, César Rey, unaware of his virginity, had taken him to a brothel, and he was with one of the girls for a while, to no effect. The girl had gone about her work with complete earnestness for almost a full hour, every so often saying, It’s not getting up, honey, no matter how much I suck it and tug it, it won’t get up, and finally they’d given up and just talked until Rey came looking for him. But Gutiérrez knew he wasn’t impotent — prostitutes just didn’t turn him on. A few times he’d been with a friend, dancing or caressing her against a tree, in the shadows of a park, in a dark hallway, and his erection and orgasm had come, but that was at a time when women generally didn’t sleep with their friends or boyfriends, and they all knew that by letting him rub up against her or put his hand up her shirt, and even helping to masturbate him, letting him finish against her thigh, or, what was less risky, in her hand, they would keep him calm and help him to wait for their wedding night. He was a virgin not because he wanted to stay pure or because he was impotent, but only because he’d never been inside a woman. After a few months had passed since he’d gone out with anyone, he started to think, with a sense of defeat, that he’d been denied the vitality that sex incarnated and that could allow him access to what at the time he called normality and real life.