Not long after this, one of the women decided she wanted to leave, having got what she could out of the evening. Since it was nearly three o’clock in the morning (these poker evenings used to begin after supper, at around midnight, and, at the time, people of all ages tended to stay up very late and we madrileños have always only ever slept the bare minimum) someone needed to accompany her, but the bullfighter and the actor (she had come with one of them, if not both) were not yet ready to strike camp, preferring to recover some of their losses and return home victorious and slightly richer.
‘The boy will take you in a taxi,’ the bullfighter said, ‘he’s not playing at the moment.’ And he took a note from his wallet and handed it to me, for the taxi fare, and I took it so as not to leave him with his hand poised disdainfully in mid-air. It was true, I had hardly played at all, they had merely made room for me for five or six rounds when Muriel was taking a somewhat curmudgeonly rest from a series of bad hands. I hadn’t even bet any of my own money, only his, and had managed to break his run of bad luck, which had cheered him up sufficiently for him to resume his place at the table.
‘Leave it to me now, clever clogs, let’s see if I can hang on to some of your good luck,’ he said, happily patting the back of the chair to indicate that I should give it up to him. He had recovered his good humour, and it pleased me to be called ‘clever clogs’, you only call someone that if you’re genuinely fond of them, and it’s usually a term reserved for children. Or it used to be, that’s yet another term that, like so many others, has fallen into disuse; our languages are slowly shrinking. ‘If it lasts, I’ll give you a percentage of the booty. Does five per cent seem reasonable?’ he added mockingly.
The woman and I had to walk quite a way in search of a taxi, she should have booked one over the phone, but once she had decided she was going, she wanted to leave immediately and was too impatient to wait. No taxis, either occupied or free, passed through that residential area near El Viso or thereabouts, with its detached houses, large and small, the streets unlit by a single shop or cinema, bar or restaurant, and besides, it was late, and the street lamps fewer and further between. It was a spring night verging on summer, she was wearing only a skirt and a close-fitting, low-cut top that left her arms almost bare, and no tights either, she had clearly not been expecting to have to walk anywhere, or only from a car to the house, which belonged either to the actor or the bullfighter. Her high heels meant that she had to walk fairly slowly, and I had to fall in with her rhythm, but she walked well, with a discreet wiggle. It made me think that she was not entirely indifferent to how she appeared in my eyes, that she wanted me to like her, not that this means very much, some people have a need to be liked by whoever they’re with, even if it’s the monster from the deep or, if they’re in the countryside, a herd of pigs. She was the one I described as being more delicate, which means only that she was more so than her friend, but not necessarily delicate per se. She was too curvaceous for that (not that I minded in the least) and she was wearing very large hoop earrings and a very short skirt, short even by the brazen standards of the time, revealing most of her tanned thighs, in fact, she was tanned all over; as soon as the good weather arrived, she must have spent every spare minute at the local swimming pool or at the poolside of some wealthy friends. I asked her name (we hadn’t been formally introduced) and she said it was Celia and asked me for mine, for throughout the evening, everyone had referred to me as either ‘young De Vere’ or ‘the boy’ or ‘Romeo’ or even ‘the lad’.
‘Do you know Dr Jorge well?’ she asked. She perhaps couldn’t remember Van Vechten’s surname or didn’t feel like struggling to say it.
‘No, not well. I’ve only ever met him at gatherings like tonight’s. Only with other people around.’
‘He’s a bit of an old lecher.’ She said this confidently, without expecting any corroboration on my part. But I didn’t know if she was saying this after what she had just heard, after his inquisitorial questions about my exploits, or because she’d had dealings with him herself and knew all about his manners and manias.
‘Why do you say that? Because he kept asking me questions? Or have you been out with him and he’s tried it on with you?’
‘No, I wouldn’t even go rowing on the Retiro lake with him, and there are always loads of people there. But I once went to him for a medical examination, I was getting these pains and Rafael sent me to see him for a consultation.’ Rafael was the bullfighter, Maestro Rafael Viana. ‘I know he mainly treats children, but since he was a friend, Rafael thought he could perhaps check me over just to see if there was anything wrong.’
‘And what happened? Was there something wrong?’
‘No, he said it was nothing and that it would pass, and he was right, because the pain hasn’t come back. No, I mean, he must be a good doctor, he’s highly respected and all that, but it seemed to me that he touched me more than was necessary, a woman notices these things straight away. He had me lie down on a couch and get half-undressed, which was fine, perfectly normal. But then he kept saying, “Does it hurt you here?” “Can you feel this?” “And this?” and “What happens if I press harder?” I don’t know, he spent far too long doing this and in places that were some way away from where I was getting the pain. He’d say, “Relax your stomach” and then stroke my abdomen as if his fingers were about to go where they shouldn’t, if you know what I mean, and he kept brushing my breasts with the sleeve of his white coat or with his wrist, as though by accident. But almost no such contact is purely accidental, we all know that, you’re almost always aware of touch, I mean, aware of what you’re touching or what’s being touched, and if you don’t move away, that’s fine. That’s all I’m saying, that he kept touching me. I tried to move away, but he took no notice. It went no further than that, but the fact is I felt sort of queasy when I left. Not because of the pain, which vanished magically as soon as he told me it was nothing to worry about’ — ‘The hand of the doctor that calms and dispels,’ I thought, ‘his words like a balm’ — ‘but because I felt like I’d been groped. I think he probably didn’t dare go any further because Rafael had sent me, and he was afraid I might tell on him and Rafael might get angry, because otherwise …’
‘Otherwise what? Would he have gone further, forced the matter? I mean, doctors do have to touch you. And it’s easy to misinterpret such things. In America, oversensitive patients are always suing their doctors for some mad reason. I think most doctors are so used to touching people that they no longer feel anything, it’s as if they were touching cork. With their patients, I mean.’
‘Well, I know what I felt and I’m not a prude or a hysteric. I know what I’m talking about.’ — She didn’t sound offended, she just wanted to be clear. — ‘But no, he’s not the violent type, I don’t think that’s his style, and I’ve known a few of them. He’s just a pest, the kind who doesn’t quite overstep the mark, but comes very close. He’s a lecher, a sleazebag, someone who stores up sensations for later on, do you know what I mean? Someone who pretends not to know what he’s doing, but keeps trying again and again, just to see what happens, to see if he gets anywhere. Thinking that you’ll get all excited, if he touches you here, feels you up there, or that you’ll just give in to avoid an embarrassing situation. Some men take advantage of women who are very timid or young or polite, women who have a horror of confrontations or of giving a straight No. You may not believe it, but there still are women like that. And they’ll end up letting a man get away with a lot, just so as not to seem rude or to avoid making a scene.’