Najat El Hachmi was born in Nador in the Rif Valley in Morocco in 1979, by which time her father had already emigrated to Catalonia where Najat went to live at the age of eight when the family came together again. She has a degree in Arabic Philology from the University of Barcelona. Her first novel, The Last Patriarch, won the Ramon Llull Catalan national prize for literature in 2008. It has been translated into ten languages, was on the shortlist for the Prix Méditerranée Étranger and won the Prix Ulysse.
Praise for The Last Patriarch
‘El Hachmi’s searing Bildungsroman boldly mixes family and cultural history, feminist polemic and satirical humour, and won Catalonia’s prestigious Ramon Llull prize… The undercurrent of menace in the complicated relationship between father and daughter is leavened by the buoyancy of the translation and El Hachmi’s light, conversational writing; the ending is truly transgressive’ Catherine Taylor, Guardian
‘An exciting fictional take on politics and the family’ Melissa Katsoulis, Sunday Telegraph
El Hachmi excels in her portrayal… never simplistic about oppression… The Last Patriarch works on all its levels: a document of the changes assailing modern Morocco; a story of the suffering and success of migration; and a feminist diatribe on how desire and courage can defeat patriarchal values. Najat El Hachmi’s narrative poise, humour and fresh, unrepressed language turn her painful subject matter into a pleasure to read’ Michael Eaude, Independent
‘A lively depiction of family life in Morocco and Catalonia’ Stylist
The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Institut Ramon Llull
A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request
The right of Najat El Hachmi to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Copyright © 2011 Najat El Hachmi
Translation copyright © 2013 Peter Bush
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
First published in 2011 as La caçadora de cossos by
Columna Edicions, S.A. Barcelona
First published in this translation in 2013 by Serpent’s Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street
London EC1R 0JH
www.serpentstail.com
ISBN 978 1 84668 901 7
eISBN 978 1 84765 858 6
Designed and typeset by sue@lambledesign.demon.co.uk
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
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For Carlos
The city simultaneously prompts mixophilia as much as mixophobia.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN, City of Fears, City of Hopes
I am but the hand you use to touch.
GABRIEL FERRATER
I want my half orange, but I’ll eat mandarins as I go.
Written on a blackboard in a Gràcia hairdressers
She’s standing opposite a door at the top of steps that are far too steep. And hesitating. She’s not rung the bell yet. She wipes the sweat – or nervous tremor – off her cheek with the back of her hand, a caress almost. Though, of course, it isn’t a caress; they explore slower, more tentative paths across your skin. She looks over her shoulder: one day somebody decided to build those narrow steps rising in hot pursuit of each other and created a precipitous staircase. What’s more, no banister. Beautiful marble steps from another era that make you dizzy. How stupid to stand there, not daring to ring, like a little kid. Hardly, kids are bolder because they know less, and haven’t a clue what might be lurking behind the door. What if a neighbour saw her? It’s only a job like any other, a way to pay the bills. What’s wrong with topping up your earnings? True, she’d pledged never to do this kind of domestic work, but she’d been obsessed by the prospect from the moment a friend at the factory suggested it. She has wiped her forehead, wiped her sweaty hands over the stitching on her trousers, switched her bag hand a couple of times, scratched her right ear until it’s sore, and now she has run out of excuses, she feels frightened when she rings the bell and sets off that strident buzz.
Sir, if you could only see my memories of all those men, though I always told myself it was about having a good time, putting a bit of spice into life. I’ve never managed to forget a single one, however briefly they lasted.
I remember Mr Ethereal. Mr Ethereal was a young guy. Yes, I’d say he was still very much a young guy, who would walk up a slope close to where I lived. We walked up that slope together a lot. Until I realized we were heading to the same place, where I was going to clean and he went to loaf around. Right now I couldn’t tell you what attracted me so much that I stuck with him for so long. But it wasn’t all the time, was more off than on, and never a real relationship. What’s a relationship anyway? Where do you start? I don’t have a serious girlfriend, he told me, just the casual sort. I didn’t ask him what he meant by his girlfriends, or what he thought that meant, or whether they were half serious, I mean, that he simply went to bed with them whenever he felt like it. When you think people haven’t left you anything to remember them by, you keep quiet about such things. I was saying that I don’t know what attracted me to Mr Ethereal, maybe it was his bottomless eyes, or the expression permanently fixed on his face as if someone had pressed the pause button. He took ages to answer questions people usually answered without a second thought. When it was all over, that bothered me a lot.
Mr Ethereal invited me to lunch at his place and we both knew where that would end but it took longer than I imagined. Sure it was great sitting on his balcony warming up a bit in the February sun and swapping our life stories, drinking tea to which he wouldn’t let me add sugar because he’d flavoured it with anisette and anisette is sweet enough. Every sip left a nasty, warm, bland taste in my mouth. We found our lives had things in common. We’d both been reasonably happy kids in reasonably conventional families; we’d not stood out either way from our classmates and had decided to give up studying because we’d no clear idea where we wanted to go. When we’d established the common elements in our past lives we felt on a high and that smoothed the way for what came later. As if it was fated. In fact, we could have shared those things with almost anybody. Looking back, it seems clear we hardly mentioned how our lines began to diverge at that point in the conversation when he told me he’d left for Canada at the age of eighteen and I hadn’t dared reveal that I’d hardly been outside my city. Or when he talked about how he’d gone back to studying after a sabbatical year when he’d learned how to cure broken bodies. Studies that obviously cost a mint and made him what he was now.
I ignored these differences, just as I didn’t go along with that universal rule hammered home by every film and television series that says you must never, on any account, fuck a guy on your first date. I was thinking about all that, the scenes of sloppy kisses and girls going upstairs by themselves, shutting doors in forlorn faces, when I felt something press hard on my belly button. Something hard coming from behind the knee up to my bum. And this was before he’d even kissed me or we’d passionately embraced, him making the first touch, even before we’d rolled around on the kitchen floor. Not that we ever did do it on any kitchen floor. I’d say I was won over by the bold, hard way he pushed me onto the bed, and that other slow, suggestive movement I found strangely invasive and arousing. He never did it again. I sometimes thought it was just a ploy, a trick he’d worked on, knowing full well the effect it would have on my body. Because Mr Ethereal knew a lot about bodies, even if he knew next to nothing about anything else. He studied and investigated them, knew the names of every muscle, limb and joint. That was why he grabbed a soft drink bottle when we first went to bed and pressed on a muscle that connected with another I didn’t even know existed. I made sure I gripped the table tight to ensure his pressure on my flesh lasted longer.
In fact, sex with Mr Ethereal was perfect. He slid and hid himself in my body, then resurfaced powerfully. He acted with a deceptive, gentle tenderness and then abruptly turned into a dominator. How do they know I love to be dominated? I never tell them, they just know. But, I have to say, Mr Ethereal was a courteous, subtle dominator and used tricks others would have never tried to get me to play my favourite role. Like the sudden, energetic way he’d pull my arms away from his body and force them down against the pillow, leaving me helpless, or slid his fingers down my back until they were inside me without my even noticing, then sticking it into me without hurting. When I think back now, I must be honest and say that sex with him was really perfect. Mr Ethereal was a body tamer. He never started off rough or crude, he was into rhythm, the most difficult thing for a lover, but then I’d start to think it was all one big joke. I’d burst out laughing when I saw him looking so serious from on high, as if his eyes were going all dark. That’s right, those blue glassy eyes of his changed with the really serious orgasms he usually had, as if it were the climax to a tragedy. Maybe I just got bored, bored of sex transforming his face into something so grotesque, or of him making it out to be such a big deal or saying so little it exasperated me. These are things you don’t see when desire is driving you on, as if you were in a race and all that mattered was reaching the tape. You only see the kind of thing that worried me afterwards when you are quiet and relaxed, and, in any case, I’d only start sprinting when I saw desire flash in a man’s eyes.
When did I begin to turn against him? Turn against him, hate him to the point of repulsion, not want to be near him. I could tolerate him, but only at a distance, when I couldn’t smell him. When exactly did I stop racing in tandem with him? Because, for sure, he hadn’t changed, he was the same as at the start, but I’d stopped seeing him with the same eyes. I’m good at deceiving myself when I feel the need for a body, I tell myself it’s pleasure and no more, but I can’t deceive myself for long. Fortunately or not, who can say, such self-deception is short-lived. That’s how I began to think about the things that bugged me about him: when he was frantically licking me in the hope of a reaction and I could only think about how slow-paced he was when he wasn’t fucking, about the despair on his face when he couldn’t light the burner on the cooker, how he got upset when it was late and he had to walk along the dark streets that go from my house to his. Sure he was only young but he was old enough not to be afraid of the dark. Or what about when he didn’t eat salad at a party because the lettuce leaves had been in contact with tuna and he never ate meat. When he is licking me, hoping I’m going to come at any moment, I think about how he counts his almonds and rations them over a number of days so they last longer. I make an effort to cover my nose to keep out his smell that used to be so pleasant. I don’t come anymore because I don’t relate him to sex now and I don’t know if I do that for myself or as an act of revenge because he is the pits and yet still part of me. Until I say stop, leave off, and he says, no, I can’t, I don’t want to leave you halfway and I say I don’t feel like it, I’m alright, and now it’s all about eluding the pleasure he wants to impose on me. He doesn’t get it, but he doesn’t get annoyed because he’s long since passed the halfway mark.
Then he became crazy about entering me from behind, something I liked as a bonus, but after one session in particular he always wanted to end up in that same place. We’d kiss and embrace but when I wasn’t watching he’d stick it in there, as if he was obsessed with the back entrance. A lot of men are like that, when they do something with you they’ve never done with another woman, it soon becomes what they always want. And if you are cheeky enough to say that what you like one day, you don’t necessarily want the day after, though maybe the day after that, fine, they look at you all upset as if you’d gone mad. But the way Mr Ethereal went after me was rather animal-like and he reminded me of dogs when they sniff each other the moment they meet. He’d said he’d never dared do it like that before he’d been with me, but I thought it was because it was taboo or unusual, or he was afraid I’d suck him off in front until he disappeared completely. Or was that when I was afraid of sucking off the men I was fucking? As I don’t like thinking about such things, I did all I could to get him to change his ways, silently guided him, made sure I didn’t turn my back on him, but in the end I was bored because he always seemed irritated, became dull and deadpan and all our sex was a big letdown. I thought he was trying some kind of blackmail, for when I said no not like that he’d go all limp in bed leaving me to do the work. As if he was saying, ‘If we can’t do that, you just do what you want.’
I also took against him because he talked about other women’s bodies. I never said anything to him, naturally, because right from the start it had been made clear we weren’t going steady, that he only had casual girlfriends, but he’d no need to tell me how he was aroused by the sight of the naked bodies of the women who came to see him through his job, because he had to cure them on his bunk bed and there was no way round that. Lucky he was a real professional, he’d say, but he went on talking about his patients who gave him a hard-on when they were on hand. I also think he did it on purpose. He’d always said he didn’t want a conventional relationship, that everything should be freer and more flexible.
And that sums up the pair of us: friends who got together to fuck, like so many couples of our age. Except that I was no friend of his before doing it with him the first time and still wasn’t after we broke up, even if our sexual encounters had been more frequent than encounters between friends. No need to label things, he’d say, why do we have to be like other couples and kill everything by sticking on labels. No need to. I was fine with that, I wasn’t interested in a life-long relationship, those that begin, go through every stage and come to an end. Passion at the start, followed by something like love, then hatred and final indifference. I didn’t want to take that route.
But our relationship stopped being entirely open or at least I noticed it was only open for him. I let him know when I wanted him and he would let me know when he wanted to be with me and the two things normally coincided. Until one day he sent me a message saying, ‘Can I come?’ and I said no. Not that I didn’t feel like it but I was in a bar drinking a beer with Him, and He was already caressing a finger of mine and talking non-stop. He was quite the opposite of Mr Ethereal. Tense, always in a rush, plump, short with lots of flesh on Him, not like tall, skinny Mr Ethereal. Right, if I had to define Him, I’d say He was all flesh and I imagined myself disappearing into his flesh. He was also fond of excesses, He’d never have counted his almonds; He’d have scoffed the lot to a chorus of animal grunts. A wild boar. I’d think of wild boars running through woods when He told me how important his work was, wiping the corners of his lips with two fingers more often than was usual, before wiping them under his nose. He ran his hand through his hair, kept shifting the leg resting on the stool by the bar in that shadowy dive where I received that message from Mr Ethereal when I was outside.
Out in the street, stumbling over the flagstones lit by the streetlights, I could hear his desire summoning me as I read the message – ‘Can I come?’ – that had been on my mobile for three hours – and I replied that he couldn’t. ‘I can’t’ at one a.m. is hardly the same as ‘I can’t’ at ten p.m.
The thing died a death of its own accord. Either I was already interested in Him or had become interested in Him by dint of the disenchantment sparked by Mr Ethereal, who always wanted to do it in the rear and talked about other women’s bodies because we weren’t set to marry, or whatever, but I had turned against him and that stopped me from wanting to go near his body. Especially when he asked me what I was doing awake at one a.m. and I told him I was drinking beer with a friend. But was it a friend, a special friend or just a friend? Hell, a friend, how many meanings does that word have? It was then he said something that stripped off all his masks: don’t you know what a man is after when he invites a girl out for a beer? What a pity all round, because in the beginning he was polite, if not poetic, and at the end, he was totally pathetic. Anyone who’d been there would have agreed. I had no choice but to push him out of the door and slam it behind him one day when he came, when you might have assumed we were only good friends and wouldn’t get embroiled again because I didn’t want to and he was soon mauling me on the sofa and when I said no, he said why not, I can see you are panting for it. No way, I shouted before he began bawling and his cool, calm gestures turned into a grotesque show of crummy violence that made him look a real fool. Hey, get the fuck out of here and don’t ever speak to me again. I was forced to use all my body weight to remove the foot he’d stuck between the door and the door frame, and that gave the whole scene the vulgar aftertaste of a B-movie.
Naturally he tried it on time and again, but now I saw him for what he was and he could do nothing to restore his aura as guru and mythical lover. I was kind to him because, though we met up afterwards and chatted like friends, I never told him how I’d got embroiled with a Ghanaian he introduced me to, with whom I’d danced at the tuna salad party when he’d stared at us so edgily. Now I’ve told you all this, sir, I’d like to know what you think, but I still don’t know you well enough, still don’t know exactly who you are and you must think I’m mad to reveal this kind of detail to a complete stranger.
You’ll probably be shocked, sir, if I tell you I’ve always liked men who are different. Or maybe not, because you seem like a man of the world, even though you never move beyond these four walls. Fascinated would be the right word. Men with features that distinguish them from the crowd, from the men I’m familiar with, the usual suspects, drew me like a magnet. Fairer hair than is common around here, darker skin, longish arms or glassy eyes, accents not from my city. And then men from very distant lands began to appear and it was a struggle to quell the desire to try them all. Now I don’t understand why I was so keen to go after them. I’d walk along the streets where they lived. They’d stand together on the pavements watching girls pass by and shouting with every step we took; it would have been so easy to beckon to one and try him out simply because he came from a country I’d never visited. Maybe I was frightened, the same fear that made them seem irresistible, but fear can also go by the name of mystery. Yes, you might laugh to hear me say that, but fear and mystery are two sides of the same coin. That’s why I shook off my fears one day, like a cat making a dash for it, and flipped the coin. That was how I stopped simply tolerating their stares when I walked past them, when they rubbed the back of my hand as they gave me a trolley in the supermarket or I felt their breath on the back of my neck when they sat behind me in the cinema. I couldn’t tell you if I was the one going after them or if all those different guys were chasing me.
Maybe after Mr Ethereal I found it easier to clear the barrier between them and me, as if, in comparison, the men from my city no longer had that shine that made them desirable. Obviously I know there were exceptions. Maybe Mr Ethereal had nothing to do with it and I was simply fed up of living for that world that had sprung up around me in my neighbourhood. Expressed that way, it sounds rather greedy, doesn’t it? But I really liked the sight of that all-you-can-eat buffet. My eyes flitted from one dish to the next wanting to taste the lot and I was afraid I wouldn’t have room to take a bite from each and every one.
In a practical sense, Mr Ethereal had a lot to do with my meeting the Ghanaian. I don’t remember his name, but he was taller and thinner, and the muscles were so taut under his skin you could trace every one. They danced under his lean skin. His fingers seemed never-ending, all of him seemed never-ending. Like an infinite tightrope. I’m sure you’d agree with my description if you could only see him.
I have very vivid memories of what attracted me to the Ghanaian: his skin was dark in a way I’d never seen before, and gave out heat as if it had soaked up the rays of the sun for years. I immediately imagined him under the sun on the savannah in a previous life that had finally led him to my cold world. It really was like that, however absurd and clichéd it might seem. Skin glowing from within, not on the surface, urging me to go after him. And a very unusual shade of black. No, there’s not one colour black, it comes in lots of different shades. Why are there so many words to describe other colours and only one for black? Because, of course, every inch of him was black, but the black of his eyes was different to the black of his eyelids or of his dark curls or the glinting black hair around his sex. No one could pin down those shades of black or describe skin that isn’t smooth or thin, I can vouch for that. Not that his skin was hard but it was thicker, as if it was made from some other material. That sounds horrific, right? Like something a real racist might say and not someone in love with every different kind of man, but I can tell you from experience that their skin has different thicknesses and textures. Though, come to think of it now, maybe I just wanted them to feel different, so I could say they were different. You make me wonder about that.
We danced together at that party I went to with Mr Ethereal, crotch to crotch. They dance like that, as if they were having sex and I quickly got into that American music that wasn’t at all Ghana. I don’t know if I did so partly to annoy Mr Ethereal or if I really let myself be swept up by those black bodies surrounding me, so many swaying groins and gleaming smiles entertained by the sight of me trying to dance like them. I didn’t realise this, naturally, but not very long after, feeling myself desired by so many men who passed me round and Mr Ethereal, a wallflower, glass in hand, taking it all in, I was out to the world and dripping sweat. The party was being held in a small flat, lots of people, all really huge.
They included the Ghanaian, the one who became my Ghanaian, and he too was different. Thinner, tauter, longer fingers. The music made it hard to understand him and the fact he didn’t know our language, but he did manage to ask me my name and tell me his. Almost immediately he asked whether Mr Ethereal was my boyfriend, right when we were dancing next to him, and he was looking really upset. No, I shouted, we are just good friends, aren’t we? And I smiled at him and grabbed the Ghanaian’s shoulders, tossing my head back and letting my whole back bend away from him. The Ghanaian looked surprised because he thought I had come with him. No, I hadn’t, I said, and he tried to say we should fix a date by ourselves. I agreed but Mr Ethereal grabbed my arm and started moving his pelvis in an absurd imitation of what the others were doing. Poor Mr Ethereal, when I think about it, I gave him a hard time that night. Though we left soon after and I was so intent on finding my coat in a heap of coats I didn’t think to say goodbye to the Ghanaian.
And then one day I bumped into him in a square or street and he called after me. And we stood and talked, neither of us really understanding each other very much, but the words were only a background melody, we were more interested in following the movements of the other’s lips, as they opened and closed between words, as they made pauses not required by what we were saying. Reactions confirming our desire. I’d already learned how to talk with my lips when there was silence, I left my lips slightly open, the air coming out smelled, blood was rushing there, my nostrils flared the way they do when you are ready for sex. I sometimes bit my cheek, a habit I’d got into that took years to throw off. It was a signal a clever enough lover picked up straightaway.
I told him I was on my way home and he wanted to come with me. We walked up a steep street in my neighbourhood as far as my front door. And it was inevitable, like in the films, inevitable, he’d come in, wouldn’t even need inviting, only an open door. But the Ghanaian was wary and couldn’t make his mind up about what to do while I was enjoying a whiff of his armpits from the other end of the sofa. The smell of sweaty armpits differs from country to country, no one ever talks about this but it’s true. It isn’t? Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. It’s not about some generating a smell and others not, or some using deodorant and others not, it’s not about cleanliness. If I’d a crowd of men lined up after a shower, I could guess where they come from by the smell of their armpits or even the insides of their elbows, and do it blindfold. And the Ghanaian’s smell was rich, like plasticine, and went straight to my crotch. That’s something else not everyone is aware of, that each kind of sweat hits you in a different place.
In the end, he didn’t have much to say for himself, he couldn’t find any more to say about his brothers and sisters in Africa or about the one who lived in the United States and was married to an American woman who took in orphans. Our words dried up. He acted as if I’d something on my face he had to remove in a gesture that seemed ages old, from a bygone era. Maybe his long fingers that were too big for my face made me think that or maybe they just caressed clumsily. In all that time I never found out whether it was them or where they’d come from. For whatever reason, the Ghanaian hadn’t a clue when it came to caressing, but the moment I started crushing his never-ending lips, I forgot all about his caresses. His thick, fleshy lips were a dream. The Ghanaian’s lips could have been enough to satisfy me. Telling him I just wanted him so I could kiss them, lick them, bite them hard because however hard I bit, they were lips that never fell apart. And the bloody gum trying to depart his white teeth, a gum I kept sucking all the time. But he didn’t want me to stop at his lips. He told me to pull the shutters down and go to bed with him. His legs stuck out over the end they were so long, his was a body that exceeded mine from head to toe. He spoke a language I didn’t understand while he moved as if he didn’t know how, as if we were adolescents and didn’t know how to guide the impulses spurred by desire from lack of experience. What was he saying? Lovely loving words and flattery or nasty insults? I could recall them now, but I’d never dare go and ask for a translation, even if I knew the name of the language he used. Can you imagine me trying? No, much better to keep that unknown litany to myself and imagine what it meant. He soon poked it in and I’d forgotten the little English I’d learned at secondary school, the language the Ghanaian had used with Mr Ethereal, so I was astonished when a cry came from deep inside me, an ‘Oh, my God’ that sounded absurd even before it became audible. I was too short to take him all in, every thrust made the pain unbearable, as if he was shredding my insides. We weren’t made to measure even though I tried to find the pleasure he thought the experience should be giving me. The bigger, the better, the women said at work. Yes, you say, but life isn’t a porn film, though in theory I was in the most arousing situation possible. I put up with the pain and with him moving on top of me as if it was the first time he’d touched a woman. The emotion caused by his explorations soon subsided and I was happy to have his sooty body on top of mine and smell an armpit from the tropics.
It was no sacrifice not to repeat the experience. Maybe if I’d given him a second opportunity, it might have been better, we’d have both learned to go at the same rhythm, to rock at the same pace, but he rushed and spoiled it. One day he turned up with a small box wrapped up in shiny paper that I found quite upsetting. So small in a hand that was so large… I don’t know if I was sorrier on his behalf or mine, but I told him as best I could that he didn’t need to buy me anything, that he shouldn’t have got me a present, he really shouldn’t, but he was all nervous, as if he’d felt duty bound. When I opened it, after I’d removed the wrinkled silken paper, I found a trinket on a chain that was as thin as fishing line. It was orange and square and darker at one corner. There were also earrings made from the same material. He said he wanted to marry me, we could go to the United States and live with his brother, where they’d given him a study scholarship and look after children who had no parents or parents who couldn’t look after them. Not to say it might not have been a nice adventure, him being so tender, but I’ve never believed in tenderness that comes so easily, and even less so if we’d already fucked. You, sir, must know this well enough, what men like is guaranteed sex: sex they can have on tap whenever they need it, and a lot think that a trinket on a fishing line is enough to guarantee them a woman who is always up for anything. Though frankly nothing he might have offered would have been enough. Not at the time.
I think He encouraged me to go after the young guy from Extremadura so I would tell Him about it, but I wasn’t altogether sure. Imagine, then, how long my adventure with Him has gone on for. Much longer than I sometimes like to remember. It’s typical of this kind of relationship, they are so on and off that you don’t notice the time passing and they become part of your life even though it’s only one fuck after another. They are tricky because those that are only sex shouldn’t be an affair at all, should be simply loose pieces of a mosaic that makes up your sexual CV. If it is longer than one of these fragments it’s because we’re not just talking sex. But if what went on with Him wasn’t only sex, I couldn’t tell you exactly what it was. The fact is that I got on the train to go back to my city after dark and sat on one of those fold-up seats by the doors that open and shut in every station. Have you ever noticed the squeaky noise they make when they fold down? It puts my teeth on edge. Luckily the train emptied out and I could move to one of the fixed seats. The conductor who was wearing a striped shirt and a name badge came by and asked to see my ticket. I was simply struck by his smile. Now I can only recall the chaos of bodies from when I went from one to another and couldn’t say which was the last or whose smell was lingering on my skin. I kept telling myself that was complete freedom, that I was doing what I wanted to do, much more than other women who were so repressed. Can you imagine, sir, how I could split myself in two like that and do nothing to salvage myself from the anguish beginning to silt up my forearms? I’d sit there and smell my arm trying to guess who’d impregnated me most, but the residues got all mixed up and I couldn’t even identify my own. All to show Him what I was capable of or conceal from Him things that were less congenial. Yes, you’re right, I didn’t really want to show Him how far I could go. In fact, I wasn’t into revealing anything.
I was still sniffing my skin when the Extremaduran, who was the ticket inspector, sat opposite me and started talking as if I knew him. He got the shakes because he was sure I fancied him. I hadn’t registered that until then, but he sat down to talk and immediately said I was very pretty. Saying which was like a first step in the protocol, a statement of intent, like compliments from building workers, though a lot politer. And entirely neutral, practically meaningless, in fact, doesn’t mean lovely (a word more to do with love) or hot (more to do with sex). Pretty is a no-risk comment, unless you react with a different kind of gaze, that’s that, because it’s simply a compliment. Not hot, you’re hot is bold and the person saying it has to be very confident or can end up looking quite ridiculous. As I gestured to catch the Extremaduran’s attention, in what was a counterattack, he soon shifted from pretty to you’re so pretty, that showed he was teetering on the brink, or trying to keep up polite appearances.
The Extremaduran was on the short side, and his hair went from very patchy light ash to white. In fact, he wasn’t that