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‘Well, spend a night with one of them, then. You just have to stop the car and pick one up. If you don’t just settle for a blow-job, it won’t take you long to find out. And, as I understand it, it won’t cost you much either. Then come and tell me all about it, about the nasty shock you get, I mean.’

I knew they didn’t charge much because a transitory friend of mine at the time, Comendador, who was five or six years older than me, had taken to paying for their services now and then. He had always been heterosexual, and he still was, and even had a girlfriend he was madly in love with. He tried to give me details of those ambiguous encounters, but I always stopped him in his tracks, preferring not to know. He saw them as very attractive women, I’m sure, but he also knew that they weren’t. I found this all very odd.

Van Vechten said nothing for a few moments (this was one of several such conversations), as if hesitating. He glanced over at the pavement, at the road, then back at those apparently real women wearing skirts or very short shorts and with their breasts almost exposed, eyeing them lustfully. The strange thing is that his hesitation appeared not to be related to the problem of their uncertain or deceiving gender, but to something else.

‘No, certainly not, I’ve never paid for sex in my life,’ he said at last, dismissing the possibility. ‘And I’m not going to start now.’

This was presumably true, and from what I saw he didn’t seem to be the kind of man who went with prostitutes. Perhaps he had never needed to, perhaps his height and his blond hair, his captivating teeth and his pale blue eyes, which, in certain lights, took on a watery quality, had been enough to dissipate or conceal the repellent quality I saw in him — I’m not quite sure how to describe it: a combination of conceit, a kind of exaggerated, jokey warmth and sheer ruthlessness, which, however vague, was there on his face — and which, it seemed to me, could not have gone unnoticed by women, now and in the past — it was something intrinsic and nothing to do with age. Of course, I’ve often been wrong about this and have seen remarkable women fall in love with and give or surrender themselves to truly nauseating men, and he wasn’t quite that bad. And even though he no longer looked young, he was, as I said, very well preserved. This, however, was not enough to explain why some of my female acquaintances or friends not only didn’t avoid him or exclude him from their nocturnal excursions, they happily chatted to him, sometimes while sitting slightly apart from the others, I mean, it wasn’t that they were all talking together and including him in the conversation — he was there, after all, and with me as his visiting card — but they ended up talking only to him. Seeing the women laugh, I would think that perhaps he was regaling them with the string of ancient jokes he sometimes trotted out, or perhaps it was his air of sophistication and his ability to flatter — the young are so sensitive to this that you often only have to administer a good dose of it to get whatever you want from them, in almost any area.

I observed Van Vechten constantly, for this was, in part, the task Muriel had set me and I wanted to be useful to him, and, on two or three occasions, I saw the Doctor and a young woman heading towards the toilets of whatever bar or club we happened to be in. I made a mental note of how long they were away, and, on each occasion, it didn’t seem to me that they would have had time to do anything more than snort a line of coke or something of the sort (cocaine wasn’t as commonplace as it became years later, but it was beginning to be sold and to lose its alarming image, and Van Vechten had more than enough money and could use it as bait, as flattery, to make him look like one of us), not even time for a quick blow-job. That was the expression I used when I was with him, along with other still cruder ones. They did not come naturally to me (I’ve always been rather polite), but that is what Muriel had ordered me to do, along with other things I found still harder to follow: ‘Show off. Boast … Don’t worry about seeming vulgar or even disrespectful when talking about women, be as vulgar and disrespectful as you like, exaggerate … Reveal yourself as vile and unscrupulous and watch his response, whether he’s sympathetic and even of a like mind, whether he urges you on or disapproves.’ All this was unknown territory to me or went against my nature, but I forced myself to do it, as if I were an actor in a film Muriel was directing blind and at a distance, an actor who — and it frustrated and pained me that he wouldn’t see me play the part — would receive neither congratulations nor applause. Soon, I was blithely boasting about supposed exploits that had never happened and talking about women as if they were objects, as if they were as interchangeable as melons, artichokes, watermelons, bags of flour or parcels of meat. At first, hearing me talk so cynically, Van Vechten would look at me wide-eyed — his eyes were positively glacial then — and listen to me part-condescending and part-surprised, as though he had already sussed out my basically respectful nature and couldn’t quite square my current attitude with the impression he’d had of me at Muriel’s apartment, at suppers and occasional outings and poker games, when talking to Beatriz and her children and Flavia, with whom I was usually exquisitely polite, and even with the insidious Marcela and Gloria, from whom I did my best to conceal my antipathy.

But one quickly gets used to anything and one idea can easily be replaced by another. I suppose he assumed I was putting on a front when at work and that my true self was the one I displayed when out and about, and he soon became accustomed to my coarse, contemptuous language and my predatory behaviour, although the word ‘behaviour’ is misleading, for I continued to behave towards my women friends and girlfriends and with any new ones (one was always meeting new people in the welcoming night of that new age) as I always had — if I hadn’t, my female friends old and new would have been astonished — but later, I would discuss them all with Van Vechten as if I were a callous swine and regale him with unsavoury adventures and dirty tricks that had sometimes never happened or, if they had, had not been perpetrated in such a utilitarian, exploitative manner, certainly not with the degree of lying and indifference or deceit on my part that I described. It wasn’t so much my behaviour that was disdainful and vicious, as my description of it. I heeded Muriel’s advice: ‘There’s nothing like boasting about your own exploits to get others to tell you theirs, however ancient; it never fails.’ And Muriel was right, it rarely does fail.

VI

Some people take pleasure in deceit and trickery and pretence and have enormous patience when it comes to weaving their web. They’re capable of living through the long present with one eye fixed on a vague future, which will arrive when it arrives or only when they decide that it should at last become the present, and then, immediately afterwards, the past. Sometimes they put off or postpone the moment when they will take their revenge, if revenge is what they’re after, or when they achieve their goal, assuming they had one, or when their plan finally reaches fruition, if a plan is what they’ve been hatching; and sometimes they wait for so long that nothing comes of it at all and the whole thing decays inside their imagination. There are those who live their whole lives in a state of continuous secrecy and concealment, and who also have the patience never to destroy their web. Curiously, they never tire of this or miss transparency, simplicity or clarity, miss being able to lay their cards on the table, look someone straight in the eye and say: ‘This is what I want and that’s what I’m going to do. I don’t want to confuse or fool you any more. I’ve lied and pretended and have been lying and pretending for a long time, almost since I met you. It was necessary or I felt obliged to do it, I was obeying orders or my happiness depended on it, or so I thought. I was weak or being loyal to others, I was afraid of losing you for ever or was persuaded to behave as if I was. You were too important to me or I didn’t care about you at all, I regretted having to deceive, it went against my conscience or I found it really easy, for me you were everything or you were nothing, but it doesn’t matter, not now. I feel really bad and I’m exhausted. It takes endless work to silence the truth or to tell lies, maintaining them is a titanic task and remembering which are which even more so. The fear of putting my foot in it, of contradicting myself without realizing it, of being caught out, unwittingly going back on my word, or lowering my guard, it’s utterly draining. My guilt has eased, it’s not so great as to stop me trying, and so I’m going to tell you the truth. My lie began a long time ago, things are as they are and there’s no alternative now, no going back. At this point, the truth doesn’t exist and has been replaced; all that matters is what we have experienced since. Maybe that distant deceit has become the truth. Nothing is going to change very much because you know what was once the truth and no longer is. And I need to rest.’