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  They decide to eat out. It’s a weekday. Txema is opening an exhibition in Donostia and is going to spend the week there; and yes, he found it funny that Diego and Idoia are together. Txema liked, no, loved her interview in the newspaper – things people say out of politeness (or not) – “I was about to call you to congratulate you.” They go through two bottles of expensive wine, laugh nonstop, Diego and Txema, Txema and Diego. Having them both in front of her, it’s obvious to her who is more original, more anarchic, more passionate, who believes more in what he’s doing. What are you doing, Idoia? Are you about to make the same mistake? Don’t you recall that you spent your chance to start over a year ago?

  Apart from that comparison from which Lazkano comes out the loser, Idoia detects other alarming signals. Even though Diego addresses Txema with sincere admiration (“a true photographer in this world of fake artists”), the admiration isn’t mutual. When Txema finally stops going on about the photographs he takes in abandoned quarries and houses and – with forced politeness – asks him, “What about you, what do you have in mind? Will there be a new novel this year?” Idoia clearly notices that he’s not really paying attention, that he’s completely indifferent to Diego’s verbal diarrhea, and that nothing is more pathetic than realizing a friend you admire looks down on you with feigned deference. Actually, something is: not noticing that your friend looks down on you while your wife does.

  As they order desserts, and Diego gets tipsier – he’s the heavier drinker of the three and the one compulsively topping off their glasses – Txema’s eyes turn more and more blatantly toward Idoia, he stares into her eyes for longer – “what are you doing with this milquetoast?” – maybe because he has perceived the woman’s desolation: Idoia has sent him imperceptible signals that he’s been able to pick up; the tiredness, the tiredness again, a leaden counterweight that makes truth rise. She doesn’t have the strength to pretend, just like, later, when Diego gets up to pay, complaining about the waiters’ slowness, she doesn’t have the strength to push Txema’s hand away when he takes the opportunity to grab her arm.

  “I’m at the Hotel Orly, call me.”

  “Will you look at me with those same eyes after you’ve come?”

  Txema doesn’t answer the question. Instead, he dives into Idoia’s thighs, and she feels him write, with the tip of his tongue, every truth and every lie they could tell each other. And it occurs to her that words are unnecessary, that they are all useless, whether they are written in a newspaper or in a book, whether she’s written them or Diego has, that the only thing that matters is the tip of that pleasurable tongue, which, if it weren’t for the feel of Txema’s warm hands on her thighs, she could mistake for the wet beak of a little bird. Idoia bends until her knees touch the mattress; like a trap opening up, she lifts her waist and arches her back and feels Txema’s teeth retract, although in that moment a little bite would do nothing but increase her bliss, so possessed she feels by the desire to explode. Panting, she throws a cascade of sheets on the floor, kicks the air, and, pushing the blankets away, peels the mattress, leaving it naked, clean. When her breathing subsides, she starts sucking her lover’s cock.

  “Will you look at me with those same eyes after you’ve come?”

  “Are you as daring as I think you are, my filly? As self-destructive?” Txema caresses Idoia’s beautiful mane while trying to find some white hairs, and finds three or four; Idoia’s tresses make him think about the way the horsehair in an overused cello bow breaks up; now Txema is a blind mother looking for lice in her child’s head, “Let’s see if I can find more out-of-tune strings among these fine hairs”; all in vain, his sense of touch is not that refined. These imperfect details that reveal aspects of our aging and decrepitude…these details always turn me on so much, thinks Txema, because they make that moment of ecstasy-that’s-not-so-different-from-others more real. But it might be better to stop feeling for white hairs, because when you find one you find another and so on and so forth.

  Dawn comes silently into the room, apart from a few random smacking sounds, the smack of saliva, the smack of tongues and lips that softly meet and pull apart. Idoia thinks that life escapes while she holds the man’s cock tight between her legs; she doesn’t want to come, not yet, she doesn’t want to leave this world, the world of pleasure.

  “Will you look at me with those same eyes after you’ve come?”

  The blinds are not fooling anyone, dawn is breaking, soon they’ll come to clean the room, cart and all; Idoia looks at the bedside table: there it is, they forgot to hang the DO NOT DISTURB sign from the door – in five languages, no less, although Basque is not one of them, of course: the whole world is foreign to us – and all they need now is for someone to knock on the door and come in. That fear adds a slight delay to Idoia’s next round of sighs.

  “Txema,” she murmurs twice, and those four syllables are open containers, overflowing bowls that spill over. “It excites me to hear you say my name,” he’d confessed earlier. And Idoia thinks that his wife must not say his name when they make love, that her way of doing it must feel anonymous and that’s why he prefers her in bed. People come and go along the corridors; wheeled suitcases, ping, the elevator’s bell. They go up, they go down, they come in, they come out. It’s the drywall, everything filters through, even people’s coughs. Txema hasn’t come yet and Idoia takes his glistening shaft in her mouth again, pushes his thighs apart while placing her clitoris in Txema’s direct line of vision. He doesn’t dare ask if she likes to swallow cum, or if she only does it to pleasure him (it gives him pleasure, it’s true, and each time Idoia’s throat pulsates differently), or if it really gives her pleasure to finish like that. He doesn’t ask her what differences, what nuances, she detects in alternate sperms, if there are any, doesn’t she sometimes think that, after swallowing sperm, fertilized tadpoles, twin frogs, could appear in her vomit? He might ask her after two, three, or four dates, as a joke. There may not be as many dates. There haven’t been many before now.

  Last night they watched a pornographic movie together in their hotel room. Txema wants his next exhibition to be a pornographic series. “I’m researching on the Internet, have you ever looked for pornography?” Idoia confesses that she never has, and suddenly feels like a nun. “You should try someday, amateur porno is a world unto itself: it never ends.”

  But theirs will, their world will end.

  She doesn’t swallow his cum today, and she washes the mess off her hand by rubbing it against her thigh, kisses Txema, and walks to the window. She opens the double curtains, the black ones first, a transparent set afterward, as if the play, the show, is about to start; but something else needs opening first: the blinds, halfway up. Her pupils panic when they absorb a beam of light that looks to have been washed through with chlorine. It could be arm wrestling or a sword fight: who will avoid looking at the clock the longest? Who will hold out for longer the need-curiosity-desire-want to check out the time? Isn’t the question in both of their heads? Aren’t they both trying to guess it by the light flooding in from the street?

  Who is weaker?

  What does weakness have to do with being realistic?

  Who will be first to allow the world outside to enter their kingdom of sex and pleasure, ruining the vibe with the wrong turn of phrase?

  Who will need the least time to slip right back into the daily routine of work?

  Who will be first in thinking up practical questions, coming up with alibis, realizing that we’re not immortal but we are immoral? Who will be first to modulate their voice with deliberate inflexions?

  Who will leave the hotel room first, even when they are still inside it?

  Idoia stands in front of the mirror so that, instead of one, two people will be candidates for the sad little title of Most Miserable and Cowardly Person in the World Today. “Why do I punish myself continuously?”

  When Txema comes out of the bathroom, the swords in his eyes are still high up, looking straight ahead.


  Idoia is by the window. She lights up a Marlboro. An arrow of smoke stabs her breast, she scratches between her legs, right there where the semen is drying, relieving her itch in a slightly masculine way. Txema likes that gesture. He should tell her. She’s got quite a bushy bush, earlier he’d found a black, very black, hair trapped between his teeth. I love these moments with her, I wouldn’t like to lose them. I should tell her, thinks Txema.

  He thinks it, but doesn’t say. “Later, after two or three dates.”

  “Looks promising.”

  He’s talking about the weather. The light, however (the light, too, unfortunately), that cascade of light that looks like it’s been washed with chlorine and disinfected, filtered through the carpet dust and the hotel’s air conditioning, that light can seem sad on occasion.

  Txema puts his pants on, Idoia too. No underwear: just jeans on skin. She kisses Txema on the lips and, playful, sticks her used thong down the waist of his pants, as a stimulus for his worn-out balls, which have retreated into their sack. A souvenir devoid of nostalgia.

  “Don’t forget me, okay?”

  But, in the way she’s looking at him, Txema reads something else: “Don’t even dream of hurting me, okay?”

  But Idoia still loves Diego a bit, she likes the way he is at home, she lives comfortably and easily with Diego, despite every “what?” and “how?” Besides, he is in a very good mood, it looks like things are going well with his latest book, although Idoia still has no idea what it’s about. And even though Txema tells her “I want to photograph you naked,” and Idoia replies “don’t even think about it,” “don’t use cheap tricks with me” or “baizea, don’t tell me this cheap trick works with the others,” and Txema retorts “what others?” Despite all that, even though it feels like he turns her skin inside out and makes her feel things she hasn’t felt for a long time, she decides to be honest, because she knows that she’s just a plaything to Txema, that he receives a lot of phone calls he never answers, and that his face shows her, when he turns the cell phone off without answering, that the calls come from women, and not just one woman – his wife. And since she has decided to be honest, because she can’t stand leading a double or a secret life, she confesses everything to Diego, her foolishness, that she slept with Txema, his friend, “a true photographer in this world of fake artists.” And Diego goes quiet and a bit pale, says “thanks for telling me the truth” while swallowing all his pride, and disappears for the night, leaving her alone in a house that no longer feels her own.

  After a sleepless night, the phone rings. The call is from the hospital. Idoia’s mother died.

  White roses on a black coffin, and suddenly we are surprised: obvious beauty reawakens us briefly at unexpected moments. A call from Mikel la pluma y la trova, quill and song: “It’s so nice of you to call me,” Idoia says, and she really means it; “how are you?” and she, instead of telling him how she is, tells him that her mother “was very sick, she died like a little bird,” and he replies “call if you need anything.” Her ex-husband comes to the funeral, and to the burial too. Her colleagues from the newspaper offer their condolences: Roger, Victor, the intern Pilar. She is grateful. Very grateful. Diego doesn’t hold her hand until they start to lower the black box. He does it softly, and Idoia squeezes his fingers.

  “There is no sex life in the grave.” She thinks it, but she doesn’t say it.

  It’s only with dusk that Idoia realizes that Diego was wearing the suit that he always wore to his book launches to her mother’s funeral. She’s not sure what that means.

  Perhaps it’s not the right moment, but she doesn’t know what else to say:

  “I’ve been so crazy, I can’t even think of seeing him again. I would understand if you…however…”

  “No. I want you to stay. I love you.”

  He says it almost in tears. “Not as much as I loved Ana, but I love you.” He thinks it, but he doesn’t say it.

  “Would you forgive me if I did something like that to you?” Diego asks her.

  Idoia is too tired to lie. Tiredness has always been very relevant to their relationship. Now too.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if I’d forgive you.”

  “I understand.”

  “With time, we forget everything.”

  Diego doesn’t say anything. Only to himself: “Yes, we forget everything, like my father did.”

  Idoia kisses him, undresses him as if he were a child, and then starts to undress herself. Diego is not playing along, so Idoia caresses his spine vertebra by vertebra, as if counting the rings of a felled tree, until she reaches the place where that now-erased word used to be: chibato. They haven’t made love for a long time. Idoia wonders if Diego masturbated often in that time. Seeing how quickly his penis becomes erect, it would seem not. And she finds that hypothetical fast flattering.

  He mounts her from behind, on all fours, without reciprocal caresses, and pulls his member out at the last moment and comes all over her back like a porn star, vigorously. She senses as much aggression and ire as pleasure in Diego.

  They both know they don’t have a future together.

  LEGIS SILVA – THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE

  SOMETIMES, THE ENGINEER FORCES HIMSELF to remember the day they kidnapped him. It seems very far away, but he knows he mustn’t forget:

  “When I get out of here they’ll ask me all the time, and I’ll have to give them every single detail. The air was cold, I’d just had a shave and put on that Williams lotion my wife found too strong. They grabbed me from behind, I felt an arm, one above mine and another around my neck. I quickly realized that the hands belonged to two different people. There must have been a third one driving, that’s usually the case. They told me they were the ETA and that they were kidnapping me, to keep calm, that nothing bad would happen if I obeyed. ‘Nothing bad is going to happen to you…’ They covered my head with a black hood; although, to be honest, they were the ones wearing hoods. What they put on my head was more like a black sack that smelled of dust and apples, without any holes for the mouth or eyes, I can’t say more than that; who knows what the original use of that rough sack might have been, who knows what attic it must have been kept in, if it might have covered someone else’s head previously. How many sacks like this one do armed organizations require for this type of endeavor? Ramming a head into a black sack, is there a more perverse gesture a torturer can inflict on his victim? ‘You are a victim, therefore you must put the black sack on your head.’ I could hardly breathe inside the car, inside the black sack, but I fell asleep very quickly, I’m sure they gave me something, either they injected it or they made me smell it, who knows. I didn’t feel any pricks on my body, only an intense smell, like the smell of farm tools piled up in a farm’s attic.”

  He’s going to tell it just so. And then he’ll tell how he woke up in the zulo. A hole, a square igloo, a mousetrap that looked like an irregular room in a mental asylum: with tiny holes, perforations that allowed the air to run through, although just barely, and a trapdoor that linked him to the outside world, the world beyond the doghouse that was his habitat.

  And then the ants. “There were hundreds, they came out of the holes and crawled up my arms,” he’ll say, in a way that many would find hard to believe.

  They weren’t carrying weapons. At least they never showed them to him, although maybe they kept them well hidden; they knew that it would never cross the kidnapping victim’s mind to confront them, to try to run away.

  How do you pass the time when you’ve been buried alive?

  It’s imperative to establish discipline. Make some decisions. Schedule your time. He asked them for a watch, and they gave him an old Casio wristwatch, the kind you get from duck shooting galleries at carnivals.

  That’s what he told his kidnapper. “It looks like a prize from a shoot-a-duck range.” And he’d swear the kidnapper smiled, even though he couldn’t see his face. The engineer would have never thought he’d utter such words in a hol
e in the ground: shoot-a-duck.

  It’s important to know what time it is, how many days he’s spent there, exactly.

  He does his exercises before breakfast. Squats, crunches. Fifty of each. He could do more, and he did do them, filled with ire and impotence, during the first few days, but it wasn’t a good idea: with all that sweat, the walls got coated in condensation and the air turned unbreathable for the rest of the day; inside the hole things have their own measure, which is absolutely not the same as the measure of things outside, it’s another, new, a completely different one. Condensation must be considered. After that, breakfast arrives: he eats it slowly, paying close attention. When they bring him cracker bread, before spreading the butter on it he feels its hard, harsh surface with his fingertips, he caresses that cracker bread with a surface like sandpaper; after the first few weeks, he realizes that the most alarming aspect of being kidnapped is the loss of his senses: how continuously seeing and hearing the same things – in other words, practically nothing – dulls his senses, especially touch and sight. It’s different with hearing: the opposite happens, it sharpens, to the point that one can even detect strange sound waves and murmurs.

  At the beginning he couldn’t hear anything. But it’s impossible not to hear anything at all. His own heartbeat, for example, his bowel movements, the smacking of his tongue, the gnashing of his teeth, his breathing rhythms. Every now and then he snapped his fingers, right hand and left hand, to ensure that his body maintained its usual ability to make noises. That he was still himself. And then, of course, there were the noises from the outside. The ones he thought he heard during the long hours he spent on his own, without perceiving a single sound or signal from his keepers.