Alonso Mesía Macher
I Wouldn’t Be Thrilled If You Showed Up
Translated from the Spanish by Sam Simon
Every night, after tucking the kids in, Kaisa would head up to the terrace to smoke and think about that afternoon. More than ten years had passed, but she could still feel herself sitting on the ledge, hugging her legs. A crowd of people had gathered at the foot of the building, as if they were waiting for someone famous to lean out one of the windows. The police and an emergency vehicle arrived and, after a few minutes, two firefighters detached one of the windows from the fourteenth floor and helped Kaisa inside. The next day, her name and photo were in the papers and the images were shared everywhere. Cut off from the world by Turkish soap operas, her mother found out in the worst way: while Kaisa and her cousins were arguing at a café downstairs if it were necessary to tell her or not, a Channel 9 reporter rang the doorbell and, with the delicacy required of the situation, asked: Do you know the reason why your daughter tried to take her own life? Kaisa got a call from her mother who was screaming and gasping for air. The reporter lowered the camera, even these professions have their limits.
Nobody forgets news like that, but Kaisa began to feel, a while later, that people faked it better or felt less sorry for her. She no longer noticed the whispers or sudden silence at the office and sometimes she convinced herself her colleagues and friends were no longer interested in the ordeal. Perhaps there had been people who believed the whole thing was overblown. Even she had believed it on occasion, though she’d assumed that her closest friends were secretly har- boring their own theories. To them, men were Kaisa’s problem. Often, in those days, they chastised her for the parade of morons who had traipsed through her life since she was fourteen.
The one before Benjamin had been a theater director, as well as an actor and musician and photographer and writer. He had been forty (ten years older than Kaisa) and he dressed somewhere between the Sex Pistols and Iris Apfel. In the three months they spent together, Kaisa had discovered that sex was more important than conversation. He used to tell her enticing details about The Brothers Karamazov or Annie Leibowitz, but he delivered the most mediocre sexual experience Kaisa ever had in her life. So when he broke things off without much explanation, she had been relieved to return to masturbation.
“You don’t even choose them,” Gabi had told her one rainy afternoon while they watched RuPaul reruns on Kaisa’s sofa.
Kaisa hadn’t replied. She’d looked at Gabi like she didn’t understand what she was saying, despite understanding it perfectly. It was possible that men tended to choose her. It was enough for someone to be aesthetically acceptable and artistically curious. If someone like that demonstrated interest, she reciprocated with adoration.\ After the episode on the ledge, however, her friends had stopped speaking about Kaisa’s exes. Only Gabi asked her if it was related to Benjamin. She had replied no, though the answer was yes, just not in the way Gabi might have imagined.
Kaisa had met Benjamin at a Mexican spot. It was a nice place in the heart of San Isidro that sold Corona, tequila, and cheesy nachos. Benjamin arrived late. He greeted her with a kiss, apologized for the delay, and sat down. Over a plate of nachos, Kaisa discreetly looked him over. She’d liked him. He wasn’t as tall as he looked in his photos, but he was very attractive. He had straight dark hair, a bushy beard and perfect teeth. He told her he was French, from Brittany. Kaisa had only a vague idea about France: Paris, the Eiffel Tower, and Pepe Le Pew. So Benjamin spent part of the evening explaining to her the prejudices that Bretons had about Parisians. They also spoke about their jobs (standard, in a way), their hobbies (nothing too unsettling, thank god), political ideas (on which they, happily, agreed), and why they had chosen one another on the app (the short answer: they were both ridiculously hot).
Benjamin spoke Spanish slowly, with some grammatical errors, but with acceptable pronunciation. He told anecdotes that involved music festivals in Europe, designer drugs, remote villages in Latin America, eccentric and memorable friendships. He had the charm of someone who had ridden many buses, trains, and planes and who had hitchhiked six or seven times. She admired that he was a traveler, that fine line between being adventurous and a destitute tourist. He had studied business, but he was a photographer. Kaisa told him she had just finished restoring her aunt’s old camera and that she was a graphic designer. Although she would have preferred to be a dancer or an actress, she didn’t mind her job and had a passion for visual arts in general.
“Maybe we can go take photos together one day.”
Kaisa smiled.
“Your name . . .” he said. “Where does it come from?”
“My father’s name was Carlos and my mother is Isabel.”
“Carlos with a K?”
“Ha ha, no.”
The waitress came and asked if they wanted anything else. They both hesitated, looking at one another, and the waitress took the opportunity to explain the differences between quesadillas, tacos, and chilaquiles.
“No, thanks. We’re fine,” Kaisa finally replied.
They paid the bill and left in a taxi to Benjamin’s apartment. In the middle of the room, they kissed and he spun her halfway around by her waist and pinned her against the wall. He unbuttoned her pants and yanked them down along with her underwear. The brusqueness seemed perfectly measured to Kaisa. Immediately, he knelt down as if to pray and spread her buttcheeks with both hands to insert his tongue. When he penetrated her, Kaisa thought to herself, Oh, finally! Real sex.
He didn’t send any messages the next day and, though Kaisa had wanted to, she opted for restraint. She was nervous those first twenty-four hours. She told her friends in the group chat about her amazing affair the night before while replaying the details over and over again. What mistake could she have made? Talk too much, snore maybe? Or might it have to do with the sex? Maybe it was that she had asked if they had a king in France.
“Eh, no,” Benjamin had replied as they lay naked on the couch. “We cut off his head, remember?”
How stupid, how could she have forgotten the French Revolution?
At noon on Sunday, Benjamin wrote: It was great meeting you and added the emoji of the cat sending a kiss. Kaisa got the message while she was cooking and immediately replied with a kiss emoji of her own. Perhaps she had been too paranoid. She asked Benjamin how he had been and what he was thinking about doing that day. He replied: No plans / Want to come over for dinner?
Things flowed naturally after that. They began seeing each other almost daily, frequently sleeping together and texting nonstop. A while later, Benjamin decided it was the right time to buy a double bed and Kaisa thought it was time to introduce him to her closest friends.
“Gabi, Benjamin. Benjamin, Gabi.”
“Finally, I get to meet you!” Gabi had exclaimed that night of the meeting, and directed them to the living room. “Come in, come in.”
Luisa had been seated on the carpet at the foot of the sofa. She stood up and greeted Benjamin with a kiss. Benjamin had seemed nervous at first. He topped up her friends’ drinks and chimed in only if named. At some point, he talked about his friend Bastien. They had traveled together through the jungle and done an Ayahuasca ceremony. Kaisa listened attentively but her friends seemed bored and skeptical.
Gabi made an involuntary gesture with her upper lip, indicating that something was too hippie. Kaisa recognized that expression. Benjamin finished by explaining how he had floated above his own body. Kaisa’s friends said that it hadn’t even occurred to them to try it, that they were afraid of going crazy.
“I’d like to,” Kaisa said.
“Yeah, well, you would,” Luisa said.
Kaisa tried to take offense, but soon the conversation veered to more comfortable topics for them: school anecdotes, ex-boyfriends, classmates, and inside jokes. When they left Gabi’s, Benjamin didn’t want to wait for a taxi, so they walked to the main road. He was silent, looking ahead, and when they got in the taxi, he bristled when Kaisa tried to take his hand.
“Why are you upset?” she said.
“I’m not. I just got bored.”
“Okay, then,” Kaisa snapped, scooting to the far corner and leaning her head against the window.
Benjamin asked the driver if he could smoke with the window open and the driver said no.
“Then let us out here,” he barked.
The driver stopped, Benjamin paid him, and Kaisa got out behind him. Benjamin lit a cigarette.
“I don’t know if it’s safe to walk at this hour.”
“I know. I’ll finish smoking and we’ll get another taxi.”
“Can I know what’s wrong?”
“Your friends . . .” he said, wrinkling his nose, “seem a bit dumb.”
That Saturday, as Kaisa had packed her bag to go to Benjamin’s house, she got a message from Luisa. A question along with the screenshot of a Tinder profile: Isn’t this your Benji? And, in fact, it was: Benjamin, her Benji. At first, she tried to stay calm and hope for the best. Or the least-worst, at any rate. She didn’t want to fill herself with ideas without first talking to Benjamin. She thought about sending him the screenshot but held back. Despite her anxiety, she felt a little proud of herself. In charge of her impulses. She texted: On my way. Right away, Benjamin replied: Waiting for you, amor.
In the backseat of the taxi, Kaisa began to savor that last word, to chew on that affectionate nickname that was so common among official couples, but anxiety and anger churned. It was true that there hadn’t been an explicit commitment to exclusivity, but, given how they treated each other, the agreement seemed implicit. A few blocks from her destination, she began to doubt if she was really in control of her emotions or if she was only pretending not to be freaking out. Perhaps she was trying to handle the situation in a more European way. More modern, she mentally corrected herself. Or were those her prejudices against the Bretons, the Parisians, and all the other French and Europeans? They were capable of carrying on a more open relationship, unlike most Latinos. Could she handle that kind of relationship? The taxi stopped in front of Benjamin’s house and Kaisa sent a message that she was downstairs. The front door opened and she climbed the stairs with her blood boiling, while imagining Benjamin calling every girl he had ever met in his life amor. By what right? She entered the apartment with her phone in her hand and denied Benjamin her lips when they greeted.
“I sent you something. I want you to explain to me what this means.”
Benjamin looked at her weirdly and went looking for his phone. He looked at it in front of her and smiled nervously.
“I just forgot to erase the app, amor.”
Kaisa felt her soul return to her body, but still remained uncomfortable and unsure the rest of the night. Benjamin drank a beer sitting on the floor and Kaisa watched him from the sofa.
“Are we in an exclusive relationship?”
“We hadn’t talked about it.”
“Was it really necessary, Benjamin? That’s the problem!”
They talked things through. They said I love you and those things that couples say. They agreed to be boyfriend and girlfriend. Though Kaisa was unconvinced by the label, it seemed to her that the first disagreement had been productive: clear enough for their communication to become deeper and more transparent. She felt, despite everything, that things had gone well. But later that night, something weird happened. They were lying in bed, looking up at the ceiling and talking about nothing in particular, when Benjamin got up to get water. While he was in the kitchen, Kaisa thought hard and, at that very instant, Benjamin suddenly appeared beside her. Kaisa looked over her shoulder, still lying in bed, and saw him with an empty glass in his hand. She had no doubt about what had just happened, but she tried not to seem like a madwoman. Benjamin was still and pale. His hair was mussed and he hardly blinked.
“And the water?” Kaisa asked.
He looked at her and then got up and left in the direction of the kitchen without saying anything. Kaisa did it again: without trying, she thought about Benjamin with all her strength and, once again, he showed up at her side, even paler than a few seconds before. Benjamin sat down on the edge of the bed, then sprang up and ran to lock himself in the bathroom. Kaisa heard him vomit in the toilet. Then she heard the tap open and Benjamin wash his mouth out. He must have thought intensely about her, because Kaisa suddenly found herself inside the bathroom.
They started a child’s game. First, they transported each other all over the apartment and then, since the space was quite small, they carried on with the tests in the stairwell and on the street. They began to understand the rules of what was essentially a simple trick. If one thought of the other with full concentration, that person was immediately teleported to the thinker’s right side. Always the right side. Never the left, nor in front or behind.
But the questions the maneuver brought up were not simple. What happened in those fractions of a second when they were traveling? Did the totality of their molecules decompose? They both agreed it felt like a fraction of a second in contact with nothingness, the brain simply shut off while the body moved to a new place. Did they zip through space at an imperceptible speed or did they dematerialize to rematerialize elsewhere? Did they run the risk of losing some extremity during this journey? It didn’t work with other people nor could they send themselves to places they wanted to visit. The gift seemingly served no humanitarian purposes. They agreed, then, that they had received this divine grace, satanic curse, or whatever it was because they were two people who were destined to be together forever. It might have been a mawkish explanation, but it was good enough for them.
It didn’t take long before they began trying new things. One would go to the movies, sit in the dark theater next to an empty seat and think about the other until they appeared. They could apply the same approach to traveling, going to museums, and concerts. It was the ultimate scam against the entertainment industry. The world had become a never-ending two for one. Benjamin talked about how he could bring her with him to visit his family that summer. They could go to the Louvre in Paris and the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. But before that, Kaisa moved into Benjamin’s apartment.
“You’re going to abandon me like this?” Kaisa’s mother grumbled, pouting.
Kaisa was an only child and her father had died three years earlier.
But it made the most sense. After all, nearly every night they slept together at Benjamin’s place or at Kaisa’s childhood home and, when they didn’t plan to, it happened involuntarily. Thoughts before nodding off pulled the other over.
A week before leaving for Máncora, Kaisa asked Benjamin to join her at a friend Sol’s art show. Sol wasn’t a close friend, she was part of another social crowd, but Kaisa enjoyed her company and their conversations. Benjamin refused to come. He preferred to stay at home because art exhibits made him uncomfortable. He found them over-the-top and inane.
This particular one addressed menstruation through contemporary dance. It was at a small gallery in Barranco. Kaisa was standing in a circle with the other spectators and in the middle, Sol and other women performed. They all wore white tunics with red spots on their inner thighs and they were all chained together. Kaisa thought about how ridiculous Benjamin would find it and, without meaning to, or perhaps meaning to a little, she brought him to her side. She looked shamefully at him as soon as appeared. She apologized and tried to explain that it hadn’t been on purpose. Benjamin shook his head.
“I told you I didn’t want to come to this bullshit.”
She gestured for him to lower his voice.
“I told you . . .”
“Okay, I’m sorry. Go if you want.”
He walked out.
Kaisa stayed a while to say hi to Sol. She drank a beer and, when she got back home, Benjamin was listening to music on the sofa.
“I told you I don’t like that crap.”
“I already apologized.”
In the weeks leading up to his trip home, they still hadn’t resolved things. Kaisa told him not to even think about her while he was away, that it was best they spend time on their own. She also forced herself not to bring him back to Lima. They only texted a few times but it was enough to return to better terms. They enjoyed good days when he came back. But then their relationship changed. Benjamin had found a way to receive unemployment from France, which let him stop working. He didn’t go out or make plans to do so and, when Kaisa tried to go out, he found excuses to hold her back.
“I don’t feel well enough to be alone tonight.”
“But you’re also invited, amor.”
The first few times, Kaisa agreed to stay home. She interpreted his behavior as homesickness and assumed it would pass. But Benjamin spent his days sitting in front of the computer, playing with a small console he had bought on Amazon while listening to an electronic mix that sounded to Kaisa like the soundtrack to a nightmare. When Kaisa went out, her friends told her off afterward for leaving without saying goodbye. But it was out of her control. Benjamin had decided that Kaisa’s curfew was three in the morning, so at that time he transported her to his side.
“You have no right,” she complained one night after zipping from the dancefloor to the sofa. They got in an argument that ended when Benjamin punched the walls and smashed glasses against the floor.
Other times it was Kaisa who attracted him. She was aware of the constant threat of being transported away from where she was, so she wound up thinking about Benjamin and dragging him to her. Personal space ceased to exist.
Then Benjamin began to talk about returning to Brittany. It gave Kaisa an immense sense of abandonment and made her love him more. Her world also shrank. Kaisa went straight home after work. She would cook, they would drink wine and watch a movie. He stayed up all night, playing with that blessed console while she slept alone in the bedroom.
There were reasons not to break up. The sex, when it happened, was still fabulous. And there was that unusual faculty that allowed them to break the laws of physics. Was that enough? At first they had thought so. Kaisa often reached for past emotions to justify the present.
The night it stopped happening was just like the night when it all started. They simply figured it out from one moment to the next. It didn’t work the following days either. They argued for the last time about a message on Kaisa’s phone. It was a friend who texted her at one in the morning to find out if she was awake and wanted to chat. Benjamin read it and reacted by kicking a full-length mirror that crashed against the floor.
“You’re a violent, manipulative piece of shit.”
“You’re a wack job with no personality.”
In the weeks after the breakup, Kaisa dedicated herself to accumulating sexual experiences that distracted her from her recent past. A few guys from work, a friend of Gabi’s, and a guy that fronted a Radiohead cover band. She soon found herself in a dynamic that to her taste was empty and unpleasant, and chose to keep seeing only the one she found least unpleasant of the bunch. So it happened that once or twice a week, after an insipid orgasm, she listened to the caricature of Thom Yorke snoring beside her. She missed sex with Benjamin. She found fake Thom Yorke too smooth and mechanical, and fantasized about having her hair pulled or her breasts spit on, having her face forced into the bed. While wondering if she was right in the head, she wished Benjamin would penetrate her and squeeze her neck with both hands.
One night, after a concert, they stuck around drinking in the bar. Kaisa drank several glasses of wine. Throughout the night, she was turned on by the idea that she would be the one to fuck fake Thom Yorke; her and not the dozen twentysomethings who had joined their table to fawn over him. They went to Thom’s place and Kaisa started kissing him and licking him as soon as they walked into the apartment. They removed half their clothes and Kaisa mounted him on the living room sofa.
“Oh, hit me.”
Fake Thom Yorke hesitated and she thought that maybe he had misunder- stood, even though she also felt that her oh, hit me had been over-the-top.
“Hit me,” she repeated and Thom raised his hand behind her and gave her a shy spank.
“Yes, like that. Like that!”
Kaisa kept alive the hope that that action would escalate in intensity. She counted three flaccid spanks and then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Benjamin standing beside the sofa. But he immediately stormed out of the apartment, slamming the door. Thom jerked around, startled, though he quickly relaxed: maybe he thought that the door hadn’t been fully closed and the wind had blown it shut. Kaisa slipped out of his arms and sat next to him.
“Did I do it too hard?”
Kaisa thought: good riddance. But she kept quiet. Suddenly she felt dizzy and short of breath. Thom stroked her hair like a cat. Just then Kaisa’s phone rang inside her purse. She didn’t look at it until the next day.
“PUTAIN DE MERDE.”
Kaisa became certain that any thought could attract Benjamin. So her body went into overdrive to blow off steam but her brain hid the roots of her anguish. With time, she got accustomed to feeling guilty and ashamed of herself, and she adopted a nihilistic and resigned attitude. She would skip work or ask permission to work from home. She spent the day in her pajamas without bathing, her bedroom smelling of fast food and sweaty sheets.
One Friday at noon she collected the dirty laundry from her room to put in the washer. She was enjoying a rare burst of energy. But suddenly she felt like she was in one of those dreams where you start to fall and suddenly, she became suspended in midair, outside the top floor of a building. Luckily, gravity immediately set her down on the ledge, which was only a few inches from her feet. She wobbled, but regained her balance and steadied herself.
She looked through the glass and recognized Benjamin leaning against the window inside. He leapt up and hurried out through the door. There had been no look of shock on his face. Nor a trace of satisfaction. People sat eating lunch inside and approached one by one. She saw their mouths move, but she couldn’t hear anything. It was one of those corporate buildings with gigantic windows that didn’t open.
She squatted down, hugged her knees, and waited.
What did people think of her? That was what Kaisa had asked herself in the immediate aftermath. She questioned whether a man could ever love her again or if she would be able to love someone. At some point, she began to talk openly about her healing process. Not from a scientific or psychotherapeutic perspective, but rather from superstition and self-help. She published quotes on social media that she sometimes thought were brilliant and other times sounded as brain dead as a sea sponge.
Five years after the incident on the ledge, she married a man who did love her, and five years later, they had two children. He wasn’t a bad husband. Happiness, in any case, depends on expectations. The four of them now lived in a modern building in the heart of San Isidro. After putting the children to bed, she had the habit of heading up to the terrace to smoke. She hadn’t heard anything about Benjamin in years, but when she looked into the void every night, she thought about the remote possibility of appearing on a ledge somewhere, or falling from it to the ground.
That was something she couldn’t let happen, now more than ever when two critters who hardly spoke or walked depended on her. Often, before finishing her cigarette, while she leaned her right shoulder against the railing of the terrace, she dared to think about Benjamin for a few seconds. She knew that attracting him to the void would be a relief, the definitive way of ending the threat, like stomping out a poisonous spider. But she started naming the objects she saw in the vast, starry night to distract herself from her thoughts. She would stub out her cigarette on the edge of a flower pot then go downstairs and put on her pajamas. She would fall asleep before her husband turned off the television and went to bed. Sometimes, he accidentally woke her up when he got in beside her, but other times, he was stealthy, delicate, and discreet. When that happened and she didn’t feel him settle down beside her, she got the false impression that he had appeared suddenly, which terrified her. She didn’t startle or flinch, instead she trembled in silence until she managed to fall back to sleep.
Alonso Mesía Macher (Lima, 1989) is a Peruvian writer based in Barcelona. He is the author of Días bellos, pero no tanto.
Sam Simon is a writer, teacher, and translator from Oakland, California. He lives in Barcelona, Spain.