Julian Robles
Entr’acte
My own girlfriend was living in Buenos Aires that year, and each morning I could hear the Guinean guy in the apartment next door talking to his girlfriend. They didn’t argue or anything, it was always sweet stuff. She asked about his childhood and she told him about hers. They were really honest with each other.
The way our building was laid out had always perplexed me: it was as though the architect had spent a month playing Escher and then regretted it. As a result little sections here and there were overly ornate and distorted, while the rest of the building resembled a standard East Harlem walk-up. There was a spiral staircase that didn’t lead anywhere except into a wall with a single, cir- cular window the size of a frisbee. Of the three apparent entrances to the basement laundry room, two were false doors carved in relief; inside the room, the washers echoed beneath a barrel vaulted ceiling, and an inaccessible opera box overlooked the dryers. The third-floor custodial closet was a hall of mirrors. My kitchen floor had a fourteen-inch gradient from one side to the other. I measured it after a pomelo rolled off the counter and smashed into the wall opposite me.
So it didn’t scare me when I heard their voices come in at a slant above my headboard one morning. It was as if they were inside the walls, speaking diagonally from a stage, but really they were lying in their own bed.
The Guinean guy was talking about his dad, who had died in a freak hunting accident. I was drifting in and out of sleep, but I heard something about bees. Had his father been a beekeeper? I believed so. He was harvesting honey when some creature pillaged the hives and mauled him. Or was it that he went hunting with friends and stumbled into a hornet nest and was stung to death? That’s how my great-great-grandfather died, in Mexico, a year after the revolution began. Maybe I heard the word bees and nothing else and then began dreaming of my grandfather.
“I know he’d be so proud of you today,” the girlfriend said. The Guinean guy was getting a master’s degree at Columbia. Business, I think. I had graduated from Columbia a year prior, so we started talking on the landing one evening.
“Guinea? That’s interesting, my girlfriend is in South America right now, too—Argentina,” I’d said.
“You must be thinking of Guyana,” he replied. “Guinea.” He repeated it, slower this time.
“Oh, you’re right,” I said. After that correction, I didn’t dare ask him to repeat the name that I’d forgotten seconds after he introduced himself.
I listened to him and his lover through the wall and began to miss my girlfriend. I could call her. We were practically in the same time zone. But I always waited until she was angry at me, begging to speak to me, before I would call. I wanted to feel like she needed me real bad because that made me feel better on the days that I thought about killing myself. I’d considered hanging myself from the opera box inside the laundry room. The box was enclosed by a thick wooden balustrade that I was sure could hold my weight. Had I discovered the architect’s secret door to the opera box, I would have tried.
Listening to the Guinean and his girlfriend made me feel better, too. If I didn’t have work or anywhere to be I would lie there and listen to them speak. One morning she told him that she was afraid of committing to her music. She had high standards for herself, and when she thought about it, deep down, she didn’t think she was a good enough artist. That’s why she was going to law school. Sometimes they asked each other hypotheticals that turned into these beautiful debates. I didn’t always agree with their positions, and they were so in love that the discussion invariably turned sappy and melodramatic, but the melodrama made me like it even more. That same morning they talked about what would happen if the other person were to die. She said her grief wouldn’t be legitimized because she hadn’t yet met his family or childhood friends. To them, the relationship would be a haunting, posthumous story. “And I would be posthumous, too. Like a ghost,” she said. “I don’t believe in ghosts, but that’s the closest a living person can come to being one.” Her voice reminded me of my girlfriend’s: small and faraway, even with her lips right up to my ear. When she spoke it was like hearing an old recording of a voice rather than the voice itself. When they talked like that in bed they called it telling secrets. “Tell me a secret before I fall asleep,” she would say. I was stunned when I first heard them use that phrase, because my girlfriend and I had done the same thing. We would lie down and face each other and ask anything, the tough questions that are supposed to expose your soul, and we also called the ritual “telling secrets.” I couldn’t remember when the Guinean guy had moved in, and I wondered if he’d spent time listening to us before my girlfriend left for Argentina. There wouldn’t have been much else to hear. We hardly fought—we strained ourselves to avoid conflict—and our few fights had begun and ended outside the apartment. She and I would have sex, of course, but I never heard the Guinean have sex, and by the logic of the apartment’s architecture that meant he had never heard us, either. One night I invited him into my apartment. I’d been out late with an old friend who was back in town. A big group of us had met up, and there was a girl who I wanted to sleep with. She’d been into me when I first started dating my girlfriend, but I thought I was in love then, so I spent the first four months faithful. In the year since graduating, this other girl had apparently lost interest.
I didn’t ask if she had a boyfriend now, though I did come close to asking if she saw how sunken my eyes had become and how grey my skin was turning.
I went home early that night and did laundry. The only time I had energy for chores was when I got drunk. My clothes had a couple minutes left in the dryer and I stood there staring at the opera box. I’m sure I was thinking about hanging myself, and also trying to figure out how everything had gone so wrong. I’d begun dating my girlfriend after an extended bout of erectile dysfunction, cured when she didn’t ask me to use a condom. Maybe I had never been in love.
That night the velvet curtains of the opera box were drawn open to reveal three red seats. But that didn’t mean anything. Sometimes the curtains were open, sometimes they were closed, and things stayed the same.
I wondered if the door leading to the opera box might be in one of the washing machines. I had just stuck my head in the nearest one when the Guinean guy came downstairs to do his laundry. We started chatting. I invited him to my apartment for a drink and to my surprise he accepted. All I had was vodka and Sprite and a couple beers. Still, we got really drunk.
I learned more about Guinea—it sounded beautiful, I said. He told me stories from his childhood, mostly things I’d already heard through the walls, but I listened and asked questions—the same questions his girlfriend had asked—as though hearing his stories for the first time. He didn’t talk about his dead dad. I said I’d love to visit Guinea and he shook his head and laughed. He said he wanted to visit Mexico. “Come with me, we’ll go in the spring,” I said.
We talked about Mexico and grandfathers. We talked about wars and girlfriends. We talked about violence. We talked a little bit about Columbia and he asked what I did after graduating. I told him that I worked at a hospital doing cancer research and that I wanted to be a writer. I didn’t tell him that I secretly read patient medical records and planned to write a book about it one day. Then I told him about a job that I did for extra money. “Something that might interest you, actually,” I said. “It’s a start-up that’s like a bank for other start-ups.” His eyes widened and he had lots of technical questions about the business that I couldn’t answer.
“I write content,” I explained. “The founders are eccentric, so they let me put this article online.” The article had generated some buzz, mainly for its title: “Banking for Virgins.” The bulk of the writing was research and case studies about startups in developing countries, the businesses themselves being equated with virgins. I thought because of what he was studying and how he had immi- grated that he might get it.
The Guinean guy read the article on my laptop but his reaction wasn’t what I expected. He wasn’t laughing. “Why did you use this word, here?” He pointed at “virgin.”
“That’s the point,” I said. “Right, a person who hasn’t had sex? Like a business that hasn’t made money.” The apartment was so small that I used my windowsill as a bookshelf. I opened the window to let in some cool air, lifting too loudly and brusquely, and causing some books to tumble down the gradient of my kitchen floor, the way they often would. The Guinean was unperturbed. He was still looking at that word. “What do you know about virgins?” he asked, shaking his head.
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s a reference to a famous book in the financial industry. A joke. You know, Bloomberg?” We had a few more drinks in silence and watched the books tumble down my kitchen floor after each gust of wind. They piled at our feet. He picked a couple up without looking at their covers and stacked them neatly on the table. Then he asked if I wanted to hear about the first time he had sex. I said yes. But as soon as I answered I felt the urge to retract my response. I didn’t want to hear it from him. I wanted to lie down in my bed and listen to the story told through the walls. I realized I didn’t care at all about the things he had just shared about his life. I didn’t care about any of what was spoken between him and his girlfriend, either, only that I could hear it, even with the three of us stretched across different dimensions of this twisted building.
“It was with a prostitute,” he said. “I wish it wasn’t, but that’s what happened. I was fifteen.” He said that all his friends had already had sex by that point and he felt embarrassed that he hadn’t, so one day he got an address from an older guy at school. The address led him to a café in an unremarkable part of town. An older woman—he described her as a grandma—noticed him milling around and she pointed silently to a door behind the kitchen. I was so drunk that the next part in his story became difficult to follow, or perhaps he sought to paint a dizzying, cinematic scene. He described a velvet curtain, a dark tunnel, spiral staircases, nested doors and false doors. It was an endless series of dead ends and bare walls. At one point he thought he’d been set up, he thought he would die in a labyrinth beneath the café. Of course, he didn’t. He found the room. There was only one prostitute. She was about his age, and the act that followed was fairly standard. Except that shortly after she undressed he grabbed her breasts and felt milk dribble out. He learned that she had recently given birth.
That detail didn’t faze me. I don’t know if he had intended it to, as if that image—that speck of bodily fluid—was meant to contain and reflect the immensity of his guilt. Like I’ve already said, I was drunk and wasn’t very interested in the story to begin with. He sighed and rubbed his eyes. We finished our drinks and looked at the pile of books without speaking. We looked at the walls. I thought about asking if his apartment was like mine, with Corinthian columns in the shower and windows caulked shut in the bedroom and doorknobs that, when turned, opened doors in other rooms. I thought about asking if he had ever tried hanging himself from the opera box in the laundry room.
He left and we didn’t see each other for a long time. I kept listening to the conversations he and his girlfriend had in bed. A few times I had friends or lovers over whom I invited to listen alongside me, but they always got bored and I would ask them to leave. Then it was just me and him and his girlfriend. One night she asked how old he was when he lost his virginity and they exchanged stories. I expected him to lie, but he told her exactly what he’d told me.