"When did you know?"
"That I'm still attractive?"
"That this was the job for you."
"Oh, I don't know. You're imagining nonsense now, aren't you? Well, I didn't give my dolls massages, much less my girlfriends, for your information. Don't laugh, it's true."
"I believe you."
"If I'd had brothers close to my age, maybe I wouldn't have felt so alone, I was a lonely child. But my brother was six years older than me, well, he still is. He was never with me. He began to notice I existed when I was about eleven, around there. One time my chest was hurting, you know, when you first start to grow, and my parents were both at work, so I told my brother. He took me into the bathroom and sat me on the washstand. He was very strong and he lifted me up from the floor like that, in one go. And he started to touch me. 'Does it hurt here? And here? Does it hurt here?' He touched my ribs-does my telling you this bother you? He touched my nipples. It hurt a lot, but I answered yes, no, a little. And then he went off to do his military service and those things didn't happen anymore. Then, the first time he came home during his military service, something very strange happened to me, like a feeling of disgust, like a small disgust. It might have been his shaved head, I don't know. I didn't like the way he was talking either, that flashy ways soldiers talk, you know? And all the bloody crap, sorry, all the silly things he told us about his new military friends, people who'd come back from Korea three or four or five years ago, who told him such interesting things, interesting to my brother at least, and he showed up repeating them like a parrot. I was bored and my brother seemed like a jerk. When I went to take a shower, I locked the door and pushed the dirty-laundry basket up against the door. It was just a latch and if someone pushed hard enough it would open, not that my brother was going to break down the door to see me naked, but still. And then my brother arrived with the news that he was leaving home. He'd got his girlfriend pregnant and he was moving out. No one even knew he had a girlfriend. She lived in Santa Marta, worked in a travel agency, or a tourism office, and she was going to get him a job. As soon as he was settled into his job and had saved a bit of money, he was going to invite us all to the coast. He promised all that, but then nothing. I remember my mum saying, 'We've lost him.' She'd done some calculations, and she was sure her grandchild must have been born by then, and my brother didn't say anything. 'He's gone and we've lost him.' That's what my mum said. For me, on the other hand, it was a relief. It's sad, but that's how it is."
"It's not so sad. The guy was a heel, Angelina."
"Yeah, but he was my brother. Imagine later when I told them I was leaving, too. Of course, that was a long time later. I was doing my practical training, but all the same it hit them hard. I was the baby of the family. They busted their arses to send me to college, Gabriel, and what for, so I'd grab my diploma and head off to Bogota. Ungrateful brat, no? But I was really good. It's not my fault I had magic hands."
"Teacher's pet."
"No, as a student I kept my head down, tried not to stand out. It was later, during my internship. It was in the Leon XIII. I would have stayed there my whole life if I hadn't come to Bogota. It was the Leon XIII physiatrist who noticed I worked miracles with my hands. He assigned me an eighty-year-old patient who'd had three bypasses, and in ten days I had him doing aerobics. When they transferred him to Bogota, he practically dragged me with him. That's when we started seeing each other."
"Name?"
"Lombana. He was the kind of guy who liked traveling and being in other places. He'd studied in the United States and he got along great, everyone liked him, he made thousands of friends. But I didn't. In this whole fucking city I only knew him, so I did what anyone would have done in my place: I fell in love. It took me three years to find out the guy was married. He was already married in Medellin. The transfer to Bogota wasn't a promotion, he'd requested it, because in Medellin he'd married a girl from here. And do you think I told him to go to hell? No, I stayed right there working away, like an idiot, meeting him almost always in my apartment, and in the motels in La Calera for special occasions. He'd take me there to weaken me: sometimes I'd get hysterical, or threaten to finish with all that shit, and that was my consolation prize. I deserve it all, for my stupidity. I like the motels in La Calera. When there aren't any clouds, when the air is clean and the pollution's not too bad, you can see the Nevado del Ruiz volcano. I used to love to see the snow-capped peak. He used to say he was going to take me there one day even though it was dangerous. Of course I didn't believe him, I'm not that naive either."
"No."
"And that went on for ten years. Ten years, Gabriel. It sounds like a long time but for me it went by like a shot, that's the truth. Because there wasn't the wearing down that real couples have. I've never been married, and maybe I shouldn't talk about something I don't know, but I swear Lombana fought more with his wife than with me, I haven't got the slightest doubt. Because with the wife there's a history. That's what a person had to avoid, that you build up a history with people, with friends, with lovers. You get close to a person and right there the resentments start to build up, things you say or do without meaning to, and that gets you into a history. You go to see your cardiologist and he takes out your medical history and without even meaning to he checks out everything: that you stopped smoking, yes, but not till you were forty. Your father had a heart murmur. Your great-uncle had arteriosclerosis. That's what Lombana told me, that with his wife it was like that, they went to bed and each and every grudge over their whole marriage went to bed with them. In the end he only made love to her from behind because he didn't want to look at her face. He told me all that. With every possible detail. I didn't want that to happen to me, and I suppose that's why I put up with it for ten years without doing anything, anything serious, I mean. I didn't want to do things that would later fill me up with bitterness and grudges, you know how it is. I like sex face-to-face, like normal. I'm a decent girl."
"How did they kill him?"
Silence.
"Right, then, is there any part of my life Gabriel didn't tell you about? He was a newsreel, your dad. Well, I'm sorry, but I don't like talking about that."
"Oh please, Angelina. You already told me your brother used to touch you. You just told me how you like sex."
"That's different."
"It was downtown," I said to her. "It was in a nightclub."
"And what does it matter to you?"
"It doesn't matter to me. I'm just curious."
"Morbid."
"Exactly, morbid curiosity, that's what it is. Was he into any dirty business, drugs?"
"Of course not. There was a fight and guns came out and he got shot, nothing more. The most normal thing in the world."
"Were you with him?"
"No, Gabriel, I was not with him. I was tucked up safe in my apartment. I wasn't with him, and I wasn't with my parents later, OK? Yeah, I wish I'd been killed, too, by that fucking bomb, I wish I'd been killed in the shootout. I wasn't with him and nobody came to tell me because very few people knew I existed, and all the ones who did know preferred to respect the wife and not tell her, they killed your husband and besides he's had another woman for the last ten years, no, thirteen whole years, how about that. No, I found out on my own. He wouldn't let me phone his house and I had to go and stand there in front of it like a prostitute to ask him if he wanted to finish with me, or why had he disappeared like that, and when he didn't appear all day, then I checked into things and eventually found out, but no one informed me because you all hide under the same blanket, fucking hypocrites. So I wasn't with him, so what? Can we talk about something else?"