The Encounter
The Encounter
I had been in Madrid a month and a half and the solitude was getting to me. It was another job photographing the Gypsies, each day roaming the shanty town fields on the outskirts of town, watching the women wash clothes in the winter air, their hands red from scrubbing in freezing water. Some of the unmarried women would flirt with me, and we would both go crazy with the impossibility of it all. As we stood by the water spigots, we all knew we were hoping for something that our different cultures could never reconcile.
Then, after a long day in the shantytown, I would go home, arriving late at night, tired and in no mood to re-enter the noisy streets in search of friendship. Going out would mean speaking to people, standing up in a dark and smoky bar. But I did not want to speak to anybody. My work took everything from me. When I arrived home I was spent. As the days went by, my conversations with the Gypsy women at the water fountains only aggravated my loneliness, causing a pressure inside me that grew and grew.
As it grew, I began to think of my two brothers and father. I was different from them in many ways, but at the core of every difference was the primal fact that they liked whores and I didn’t. For them it was a simple economic exchange where both sides benefited, an exchange they had made countless times across the globe. Nevertheless, for me the act insulted my idea of human decency, and I had always resisted it. Yet, as I sat in my apartment, the noise of the New Year celebration bouncing up from the street, I questioned my convictions. You’re all pent up and miserable, my father and brothers would say in this situation, you need to get laid, but you don’t have the time or energy to find her. So, get a whore.
Too tired to stay up, I went to sleep at twelve thirty on New Year’s Eve. Next Saturday I would do it, I thought. Maybe.
The week dragged by and by the time Saturday came I had decided to put a fixed amount of money in my pocket and go to the street where the women stand. I would walk along it like I was passing through, and if I saw a woman who wasn’t repulsive, I would stop.
I arrived early, people were still having dinner, and the street was empty except for one woman on the far corner. I walked over to her. She stood by a bar door and the bar’s blue neon sign blazed by her ear. She looked up. I was amazed to see that she was pretty and my age. I felt a generational bond with her. She seemed pleased to have a possible client so early in the night and smiled. Her teeth were black and rotted, but unable to back out, I asked her how much. I was nervous and came across bluntly. Two thousand pesetas, she said. She spoke Spanish with an accent, maybe Portuguese. Two thousand! This woman is selling her body to strangers for two thousand pesetas. What a deal.
“Okay,” I said, “so what do we do now? Do you come to my house?” I looked really stupid.
She smiled again, I wish she didn’t, and said, “No, I have a place.”
We walked down the street in silence, then she asked my name in an overly friendly way. Such niceties seemed out of place. I have no manners, I thought. Hearing my name, she asked, “You’re Italian?”
“No, American. What’s your name?”
“Susana.” Something in her tone made me suspect the name was made up. I felt slightly betrayed.
We walked past the movie theatre. Two thousand pesetas would buy us a movie, but not popcorn.
At the corner she turned into a darker street. She walked ahead of me, leading the way, or maybe she was eager to get it done. As she crossed the street she walked through the parked cars and I noticed her gait. She lurched. Only heroin addicts lurched like that, stumbling, fighting with gravity. Shit. I will get myself an AIDS test.
She rang the buzzer on a crumbling wall. The door clicked and we walked up a circular wood staircase with crumbling cement walls to the first floor. A woman waited by the door. Susana went in, they talked, she came out.
“It’s one thousand for the bed.” Susana said.
I hesitated. “Above the two thousand?”
“Yes, for the bed.”
I gave her a thousand. We walked by the fat woman down a narrow hallway with doors on one side. We stopped at one and she opened it.
“And the two thousand for me,” she said.
“Now?” It seemed so businesslike. What did I expect.
I gave her the money and we entered a very small dark room with a red light over the double bed and a sink and bide in one corner. It was very small and the bed took up all the space. Without pausing, she sat on the bed, took off her dress in one swipe, and rolled her stockings down and off one foot, wrapping them around the other.
Why did she wrap her stockings around one foot? So they were easier to put back on? She had no needle marks on her arms; maybe she injected in her foot. But she probably smoked it, like most addicts in Madrid. I knew this; some of the Gypsies I photographed were sellers. She had no bra; her breasts were barely there.
Once I saw her body, I recoiled inside. She was the skinniest person I had ever seen. I was going through with this, though, I told myself. I had to do it for many reasons.
She walked to the bidet, her ass slightly brown and wrinkled, and sat down to wash herself. She looked like an old lady, bent over, her ribs showing, doing something intimate in public, like a homeless woman washing in the park. She washed herself for a long time, as if she couldn’t get clean.
Was she washing herself for me or for herself? She was engrossed in her act and I undressed on my own. Afraid I would not get an erection, I played with myself on the bed. I coaxed myself to some sort of hardness and had plenty of time to put on a condom. I lay of the bed keeping myself hard.
She came over and lay next to me.
“Do you want a blowjob?” She said it in the same friendly way that she had asked my name. Her manners were much better than mine.
But eager to get this over with, I said no. She lay down flat and I got on top of her. Again she kissed my chest like she was being polite, but I came close to her so that she couldn’t. It was too awful for such niceties. I put myself inside her and she was cold, like meat from the fridge. She had washed herself with the cold winter water. Her cold, thin body reminded me of a corpse. Terrified that I would never come, I moved in and out quickly. The friction heated her up.
“Can we do it doggy style,” I asked.
“No, it hurts too much,” she answered, breathing softly. Heroin addicts have aching bodies all the time, or maybe it was the amount of sex she had. Pushing away visions of hairy fat men grunting over her small fleshless frame, I tried as hard as I could to come.
In and out, I finally came.
I groaned and she put her arms around me and waited. I got up, and she went to the bidet again. I wrapped the condom in a tissue and dressed.
“It wasn’t good, it wasn’t bad,” she said cheerily and with a hint of gratitude as she unrolled her stockings from her foot and pulled it up her leg. Jesus, I though, that was lousy sex. I imagined some of the pigs she had to deal with and figured I was a relief to her.
“But why do you come to me? A handsome guy like you can just go to a disco and get a girl.”
She spoke of the disco as if it was an innocent world she did not belong in.
“I don’t know,” I said, “too much work, maybe.”
Now that it was over, I relaxed. I wanted to know her. My sense of decency wouldn’t allow me to just leave now. And I did not want to go back to my cold apartment. I sat on the bed instead of rising to the door. She sat next to me, the red light bulb behind her head, and I marveled at the beauty of the image. I wished I had my camera with me.
“Where you from?”
“Portugal.”
“Why did you come here?” I asked.
“I came to find my father, he’s a heroin addict, he smokes.”
“Do you smoke?” I asked, hoping to get an honest answer that would relieve me.
“No,” she said unconvincingly, “I have a two year old son.”
“Where is he now?”
“In my room.” I thought of the boy sitting alone in a room. She asked, “What do you do?”
“I’m a photographer, here to photograph Gypsies.”
“I’m saving to go back to Portugal. I want to work there. Oh I don’t care what. Office work maybe.”
“Maybe we’ll see each other, have a coffee,” I said, feeling warmth for her.
“Yes,” her teeth blacker in the red light. Then I realized I was kidding myself and she knew it. I saw myself sitting with her in the café, a sinking feeling in my gut as her life weighed down on me, pulling me with her. My human decency had no bearing here and her smile mocked my idealism.
She stood up and I followed her down the narrow hallway. She stopped at the entrance and exchanged some words with the fat lady. A suitcase appeared from nowhere and Susana lugged it into the stairway. The landlady closed the door. To my surprise, Susanna made to go up the stairs.
“I have to pay the rent,” she said. My two thousand was paying her day’s rent.
“Well,” I said unsure what to say. “Goodbye.”
“Yes, goodbye,” she smiled lightheartedly, her suitcase pulling on her arm, and walked up the staircase. Before she even turned, I could see that I was out of her mind.
Maybe she was thinking of her son. Her footsteps slowly scraped up the stairs. I stood there, feeling the cold draft. A door opened and slammed shut. I shivered, and then walked down and into the street. I went home to my empty apartment and took a shower.
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