A while later he showed up at the pub, though, and I made him his chamomile tea myself. After that he came every day. Rosita, the other waitress, thought there was something going on between us. When she said that it made me laugh. I thought about it for a while and it made me laugh even more. How could there be anything between Arturo and me! But then, for no good reason, I thought about it again and I realized I wanted to be his girlfriend. Until then I'd only dealt with two South Americans, both basically assholes, and I didn't have any desire to go through that again. And I'd never known any novelists. Here was this guy from South America and he was a writer and suddenly I wanted to be his girlfriend. Anyway, it's better to share an apartment with a boyfriend than a stranger. But it wasn't just practical reasons that made me want to be his girlfriend. It was how I felt, I didn't ask myself why. He needed someone too, I could see that right away. One morning I asked him to tell me something about himself. I was always the one who talked. That time he didn't tell me anything, but he said I could ask him whatever I wanted. I found out that he'd been living near Malgrat and that he'd recently given up his place. He didn't say why. I found out he was divorced and had a son. His son lived in Arenys de Mar. Once a week, on Saturdays, he would go see him. Sometimes we took the train together. I would go into Barcelona, to see Pepe or my friends at Muscle Gym, and he would go to Arenys to see his son. One night, as he was having his chamomile tea at La Sirena, I asked him how old he was. Over forty, he said, but he didn't look it. I would have guessed thirty-five at most, which is what I said. After that, even though he hadn't asked, I told him how old I was. Thirty-five. Then he smiled at me. I didn't like that smile at all. He smiled at me like someone with a kind of complex, or someone who doesn't give a shit. Anyway, it was a smile I didn't like. I'm basically a fighter. I try to stay positive. Things don't have to be bad or inevitable. That night, after that smile, I don't know why but I said that I didn't have kids even though I would've loved to have them, and that I had never been married either, and I didn't have much money, which was obvious, but that I thought life could be a pretty thing, a beautiful thing, and a person had to try to live a happy life. I don't know why I said all that corny stuff. I regretted it immediately. Naturally, all he said was of course, of course, like he was talking to a moron. Still, we talked. More and more. In the mornings, over breakfast, and at night, when he came to La Sirena, once he finished his workday. Or took a break, because I guess writers are always working: I remember hearing the sound of his typewriter at four in the morning in my sleep. And we talked about everything. Once, while he was watching me lift weights, he asked me why I'd gotten into bodybuilding. Because I like it, I answered. Since when? he said. Since I was fifteen, I said. Do you think there's something wrong with it? Does it seem unfeminine to you? Does it seem weird? No, he said, but there aren't many girls like you. I tell you, sometimes he drove me crazy. I should have answered that I was a woman, not a girl, but instead I told him there were more and more women doing what I did. Then, I don't know why, I told him about the time two summers ago that Pepe suggested that we perform in Gramanet, at a club in Gramanet. They gave us all stage names. They called me Lady Samson. I had to strike poses on the go-go girls' platform and also lift weights. That was all. But I didn't like the name. I'm no Lady Samson, I'm Teresa Solsona Ribot, period. But it was an opportunity, it paid all right, and Pepe said that some guy who scouted for models for the special-interest magazines might show up any night. In the end no one showed up, or if they did nobody told me. Still, it was a job, and I did it. What was it that you didn't like about the job? he asked me. Well, I answered, thinking about it for a while, what I didn't like was the stage name they gave me. It's not that I'm against stage names, but I think that if someone's going to take a different name she should have the right to choose it. I would never have called myself Lady Samson. I don't see myself as a Lady Samson. It's a cheap, sleazy name. Anyway, I wouldn't have chosen it. What name would you have chosen? Kim, I said. After Kim Basinger? he said. I knew he was going to say that. No, I said, after Kim Chizevsky. And who's Kim Chizevsky? A champion in the sport, I said.
Later on that night, I showed him a photo album I had with pictures in it of Kim Chizevsky and Lenda Murray, who's perfect, and Sue Price and Laura Creavalle and Debbie Muggli and Michele Ralabate and Natalia Murnikoviene, and then we went out walking around Malgrat. It was too bad we didn't have a car. If we did we could've gone someplace else, to some club in Lloret, for example, I know lots of people in Lloret. Well, I know lots of people everywhere. As I said before: I'm sociable, I'm a person who likes to be happy, and where do you find happiness if not in people? Anyway, that's how we became friends. Friends is the word for it. We respected each other and we had our own lives, but we talked more every day. What I mean is, it became a habit for us to talk. I was usually the one who started it, I don't know why, maybe because he was a writer. And then, democratically, he would follow. I found out a lot about his life. His wife had left him, he adored his son, at one time he'd had lots of friends but now he had hardly any. One night he told me that he'd been involved with a girl in Andalusia. I listened patiently and then I told him that life was long and there were many women in the world. That was where we had our first important difference of opinion. He said no, that for him there weren't lots, and then he quoted a poem that I begged him to write down on a page in my order pad so I could learn it by heart. The poem was by some French guy. It said more or less that the flesh was sad and that he, the poet who was writing the poem, had already read all the books. I don't know what to think, I said to him, I haven't read much, but it still seems impossible to me that anyone, no matter how much he read, could've read every book in the world. There must be so many of them, and I don't mean every single book, good and bad, just the good ones. There must be stacks of them! Enough so you could spend twenty-four hours a day reading! And that's not to mention the bad ones, since there must be more bad ones than good ones, and at least a few of those, like anything, must be good and worth reading. And then we started to talk about this "sad flesh." What did he mean by that? That he'd already fucked all the women in the world? That just like he'd read every book in the world he'd slept with every woman? I'm sorry, Arturo, I said, but that poem is total bullshit. Neither of those things is possible. And he started to laugh, you could see he thought it was funny to talk to me, and he said that it was possible. No it isn't, I said, the person who wrote that is full of shit. He probably hardly slept with anybody, I can tell you that for a fact. And I'm sure he didn't read all those books he bragged about reading either. There were a few more things I would've liked to say, but it was hard to keep up the conversation because I was always having to come out from behind the bar to wait on people. Arturo was sitting on a stool and when I came out I would look at his back or neck, poor thing, or I would search for his face in the mirror behind the shelves holding the bottles. And then I finished my shift. That night I got off at three in the morning, and we went walking home. At some point I suggested that we go to an after-hours club on the coast road, but he said that he was tired, so we went home, and as we walked I asked him, as if I had accepted his argument, what a person was supposed to do after reading everything and sleeping with everyone, according to the French poet, of course, and he said travel, go away, and I said well, as far as traveling is concerned, you never even go as far as Pineda, and he didn't say anything back.