The Accidentals, page 5
‘You can come in if you like,’ said a voice so sweet I felt compelled to obey it. It was then that I saw there was someone sitting in the back of the room, in front of what must have been a wardrobe or, at most, the door to a bathroom. This person was dressed the same as the others: black trousers, a red top and a cap. It was impossible to make out their gender. On their lap, a box of sweets just like the ones brought around by the confectionery vendors in cinemas and theatres shortly before the show begins. What was this person doing there in work mode, as if there were customers to sell to? Their only potential buyer, at least at that moment, was me. For a second, I thought about asking once and for all what kind of place it was, but I didn’t, probably because it seemed obvious that the sweets were a front and that asking would not only be awkward, but would put everyone involved on the defensive.
‘I’m sorry, but my wife is waiting to make a birthday cake and I’ve already wasted a lot of time. She’ll be annoyed by now, and if I don’t go back home soon, she’ll put me in the oven instead of the cake.’
My interlocutor lifted her gaze. She was a girl with her hair cut very short and large brown eyes, which she fixed on me imploringly.
‘Take one of our sweets, at least – it’ll sweeten your way back home,’ she said, as softly as before, holding out a cellophane bag with a tiny little sweet inside it. ‘It’s a sample, I won’t charge you for it.’
I didn’t want to be rude, so I accepted her gift and popped it into my mouth. Immediately an aniseed flavour washed over my tongue. I like most sweets, but there are some flavours that drive me wild, and one of these is aniseed. As I savoured it, I walked rapidly, resigned to being ticked off by my wife.
I entered the house breathing hard to let her know that I had run all the way home, but instead of finding Lili at the stove, her apron covered in flour as I had left her almost forty minutes earlier, I saw her sitting on the sofa, absorbed in one of those comedies I find entertaining and which she never lets us watch. At first, I told myself that she had decided to do without the vanilla extract, but there was no smell of cake either, and in the kitchen not a trace that she had been baking.
‘Sorry, darling,’ I said with an artificially remorseful tone. ‘The shop was really busy. What time is Clara getting here? Will you have enough time to finish off her birthday cake?’
Only then did my wife lift her gaze from the TV, a strange expression on her face.
‘I think you’ve got mixed up,’ she said, ‘her birthday’s a month away.’
I am an absent-minded man, and so would gladly have believed that this was a misunderstanding if we hadn’t spent part of that afternoon planning the menu and going over the ingredients for her birthday dinner.
‘Is today not the 24 September any more?’ I said, flippantly.
‘It is, but Clara’s birthday is the 25 October. Don’t you remember the date your own daughter was born?’
Of course I remembered. I had written it dozens of times on all kinds of official documents over the course of my life, and I was certain it wasn’t in October.
I let Lili carry on watching her film and went up to the study to call Clara. In the background, I could hear the din of an airport at full volume, with that metallic voice calling passengers to start boarding, and it was clear she didn’t have the slightest intention of coming over this evening.
‘Can I call you in a couple of hours, Dad?’
She must have noticed bewilderment in the few words I managed to stammer out, because immediately she asked:
‘Is something wrong? Is Mum alright?
‘Everything’s fine. I just wanted to say hi.’
The confusion remained with me for the rest of the night. As I tossed and turned, I wondered if I wasn’t starting to suffer from some kind of dementia, which Lili insinuated on a regular basis, and whether I ought to go and see a neurologist.
I worked all next morning, trying not to think about anything that wasn’t calculations and probabilities, but as soon as the heat grew less intense and the sky began to grow dark, I returned to Calle Mariposa, drawn by the mystery. The candelabra was already lit when I arrived and saw the half-open door. I had the feeling that someone was waiting for me. This time my feet stopped not at the entrance, but a few feet away. Another man was waiting by the door. He wasn’t wearing a uniform. More than a cinema employee, he looked like any one of my neighbours. Before knocking at the door, he straightened his shirt collar and smoothed down his trousers. He was let in almost immediately. The street was deserted and so I plucked up the courage to go over, even putting my ear against the door. I managed to hear the vibrations of a dialogue I interpreted as intimate but perhaps was merely discreet. I didn’t want to be seen spying out in front of this house, this room or whatever this place was, and so I started walking up and down the empty street. What did I hope to find exactly? This is what I asked myself as I wandered anxiously around the block. My wife’s hypothesis had awoken in me a peculiar fascination, as well as the awareness of having longed, for many years, not just to disobey her but to do something truly transgressive. To go whoring, a few feet from my house, was without a doubt transgressive. But was this really what this business was? I wasn’t convinced. If it was, I wasn’t too sure I would dare to take it all the way, either. The mere possibility stirred up in me a mixture of fear and elation which I hadn’t experienced in a very long time and this alone was already a bonus.
The man took a little over half an hour before emerging again, just when I had decided to leave. I carefully observed the happy expression on his face and felt a kind of envy – and simultaneously admiration – towards this individual, much bolder than I, who had been the first to pluck up the courage to resolve this enigma in our neighbourhood. It would probably have been enough just to intercept him and ask what he had discovered, but I wanted to see and hear it for myself, not via someone else. Once the street was empty again, I pushed at the door timidly, but without hesitating a single second.
‘Come on in,’ said a voice from inside. ‘Feel free to take a seat. We were waiting for you.’ I recognized the girl who had given me the tiny sweet.
Ever since I was a boy, my way of combating embarrassment has consisted of talking non-stop, and that evening I made full use of this tactic. I explained to the seller that I had waited a long time before deciding to come, that I wasn’t in the habit of leaving the house, and that it had doubtless helped that they had opened this place so close to where I lived, where I worked from home as an independent contractor. I also said – and I regret this – that things with my wife had not been going well for a few years now, ever since she had retired, to be precise, and just stayed at home endlessly telling me what to do and what not to do. To conclude my long spiel, I assured the seller that I was in need of some kind of supplementary emotion, opening my eyes very wide to stress that this was innuendo. When I recall that day, it is all I can do not to blush and feel flooded by a profound nostalgia, because since then, my life has never been the same again.
‘Don’t worry, sir,’ replied the young woman. ‘We’re here to help you with whatever you need. That’s what we do.’
I thought that I would be led then and there to the back of the establishment or, in the worst-case scenario, that the girl would get up to close the door and start undressing without further ado. But she merely took out a folder of samples, samples of sweets.
‘Pick one,’ she suggested, flicking through the clear plastic pages of the collection.
With the same verbal diarrhoea I’d displayed before, I told her that the aniseed-flavoured sweet from the previous afternoon had been delicious and that I would happily eat another, except this time I would like it to be a little larger.
The saleswoman smiled at me, pleased. With her long, delicate fingers, she took a sweet from the folder and placed it in a little see-through bag.
‘This time it’s five hundred, Mr Moncada.’
I thought the amount excessive – it would have covered the service I’d been expecting from her, or, failing that, at least five packets of sweets from the supermarket – but my relationship with these people had barely begun and I didn’t want to make a bad impression, so I tried to hide my surprise.
‘What exactly does the price include?’ I asked, as naturally as I could.
‘The sweet and all its consequences,’ the girl said, abruptly adopting a very serious air. ‘Do you have any more family, Mr Moncada? Do you share your life with someone aside from your wife, is there another person who is very important to you?’
Only then did I become aware of all the information I had given this young woman about my private life, but it was one thing to be indiscreet and a different matter entirely for her to be asking me questions. I considered the possibility they might extort me.
‘No. It’s just me and her,’ I replied, curtly.
As I sucked on the sweet, I thanked the saleswoman and hurried out of the place, minded never to return.
When I got home, my wife’s car was not in the garage. The door to the kitchen, which we always left open, was locked that day. All the blinds were down and, even though it wasn’t yet dark, the light on the porch was on. In the dining room, I found a note in Lili’s handwriting: I’ll be in court till six. Back for dinner. It had been years since my wife worked on a case, and even longer since she’d gone to court in person. My heart racing, I headed to the kitchen, took some fish and vegetables out of the fridge and began preparing them, as I had done for years, back when my wife worked outside the home, and which probably constituted the happiest period of my life. Two hours later, Lili returned. The tight-fitting skirt she was wearing looked perfect on her. The weight she had lost wasn’t the only thing that struck me: she was wearing her hair long, too, and stylishly cut, with not a single grey hair on her head. She thanked me for dinner, poured herself the first of several glasses of wine and began talking animatedly about the trial and everyone involved in it that morning, taking it for granted that I was still interested in all these details and, sure enough – to my utter surprise – they did indeed interest me once again. Soon after, Lili came to sit on my lap and began to unbutton my shirt. I felt a desire for her even greater than the one she used to awaken in me when we first knew each other. As my lips slid along her neck, I told myself that five hundred pesos was really a laughably low price.
I remained like that for a week, enjoying the new situation intensely. Lili went to court in the mornings, and I would stay home on my own, working on my insurance forecasts in the study and then recouping territory in the rest of the house. In the evenings I would take great pains to prepare delicious dinners that always had a happy ending, whether in the living room or our bedroom. Who needed to think about hiring some strange woman when Lili was embodying the best possible version of herself? Though I had by now identified the source of all these changes, thinking about it was beyond me. So as not to worry about it, I decided to assume that life had always been like this, and that it would continue to be so indefinitely; that instead of going back to the little sweet shop that afternoon, I had woken from a long siesta and the years of unhappiness in my marriage had been nothing but a bad dream. My life with Lili was so harmonious at that point that I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better to leave it that way forever.
By around the third week, I began to feel the lack of something that, at first, I struggled to identify.
‘Have you heard from Clara?’ I asked my wife one evening, just before dinner.
‘Who’s Clara?’ she replied.
That night I couldn’t cook. Trying to hide at least in part the anxiety eating me up inside, I left everything in the kitchen and, without even taking off my apron, went and shut myself up in my study. I searched unsuccessfully for my daughter’s number on my phone. I couldn’t find any photos of her, either. Refusing to believe it, I typed her full name into the search bar of my browser to try to find her, but it was futile. I recalled my conversation with the sweet seller, and chastised myself for not having told her the truth. By leaving Clara out of my story, she had erased her from my life. I had the sense that I had stupidly sacrificed the thing that mattered most to me in the world in exchange for a few years of marital bliss. I went to find a bottle of whiskey in the kitchen and sat weeping in rage and impotence for the rest of the night.
The following day, I went back to Calle Mariposa to ask them to give me my daughter back.
‘That is completely beyond our capabilities, Mr Moncada, and even if we could do it, it wouldn’t be fair to compensate you: it was your mistake. You concealed essential information from us when we requested it. If at any point you hire our services again, it is vital you tell us the truth. That way we can avoid this sort of issue.’
I strove as hard as I could to adapt to the life I had then, I swear on my mother’s grave, but my remorse was boundless. I cried all the time, and at any hour of the day or night, before my wife’s astonished gaze. As if this weren’t enough, I was fifty-seven years old, and Lili forty-one. Despite my efforts, I couldn’t keep up with the rhythm she demanded of me. Every morning I would wake up exhausted with the sensation of having been bled dry. To reduce my exhaustion a little, I started ordering takeaways a couple of times a week. At around 6 p.m., I would call one of my wife’s favourite restaurants: the Sicilian trattoria, or the Thai place on Encinos. At first she took it well, but after a month she began to worry about the expense.
‘I work like a dog while you’re at home. Can you not even take charge of dinner?’
Things grew worse when I rebelled against the obligation to fuck every day. As soon as she began snuggling up to me, I would move away and shut myself up in my study or switch on the TV. Lili made her bad mood and resentment abundantly clear. There was no end to her reproaches. One morning she even threatened to leave me.
‘Fine then. Leave!’ I replied, in a burst of honesty. ‘Maybe I’ll be able to live in peace then.’
But she didn’t leave. She picked up her bag and her work files, climbed into her heels and left the house as if I hadn’t said anything. That afternoon she returned from court hungry and with the same need for sex. We went on like that for several more weeks, in a tug-of-war between her needs and mine. It was as if, in spite of herself, my wife was tied to the house and to my body. My life had stopped being boring to become a hell on earth. I had no choice but to return to the little shop.
‘How are you, Mr Moncada, sir? Is there anything I can do for you?’
The saleswoman greeted me with her customary benevolent air, but this time I found her attitude and the whole set-up almost unbearable.
Though I hadn’t been invited to, I sat down on the sofa and then lay back on it disrespectfully. With no preamble, and without reciprocating any of her affected politeness, I told her at length about my domestic situation.
‘There’s too much of an age gap between me and my wife. We need the same levels of energy so we can understand each other,’ I concluded. ‘Can you not make both of us young?’ I asked, sitting up.
The saleswoman looked into my eyes as if searching for some microscopic insect sheltering in the whorls of my irises.
‘I could, Mr Moncada, but youth brings with it a great number of disadvantages. I’m not sure if you remember them.’
‘And many advantages,’ I replied. ‘Including the possibility of starting over and correcting some of our mistakes.’
‘Think hard about this, sir. Are you sure you want to do it? Coming back from there won’t be so easy.’
Cockily, I accepted, not listening to her warnings.
This time the price was ten times as high. I paid with a bank transfer, expecting a proportional improvement in my life. It was the last time I saw my bank balance in good health. Devil-may-care, I swallowed the sweet down then and there and, when I stood up from the sofa, I felt coursing through my body a vigour I had not expected.
That evening, Lili and I were twenty years old and newly married. Like the other times, the date remained the same, as did the house, except now the furnishings were considerably shabbier. In the distance, I could hear the sound of a vacuum cleaner. In our little fridge I found a carton of eggs and a dozen beers. I opened one right away and sat down in the chair by the front door, my legs splayed open wide, in a posture I felt in keeping with the age I was now. I stayed like that for a few minutes, appreciating how good my eyesight was now. In the sky there wasn’t a single cloud, and the sun flooded everything with a promising light. Soon after, Lili arrived, dressed in shorts and a top that exposed her back.
The urgent swelling between my legs was so intense it was hard to control.
‘If you’ve finished sweeping the garage, do you think you could do the kitchen, too?’ she said.
‘If I’ve got to do something, I’d rather do you,’ I replied, crassly.
My wife frowned.
‘Have you taken some kind of drug without telling me? You’re acting really strangely.’
‘I haven’t taken anything, sugar. Except a sweet they gave me in the shop on Calle Mariposa,’ I replied, and began to laugh, surprised at my own brazenness.
‘I asked you never to go near that place! Which part did you not understand?’
It was fascinating seeing how some of the things we had said or done in the future (I don’t know how else to refer to the other times), were still applicable in this new time period.
