What scale does the woman apply to determine whether her affairs are a product of love, and her boyfriend’s of lasciviousness? He says it’s a very simple scale: she is herself (and that justifies everything) and he is not only not her, but is a man, which comes with its own historical baggage. She denies this, though over the years she’s learned that, in effect, men and women behave differently. But she doesn’t say so, because, even if it’s a belief she doubts less and less as time goes by, it is a generalization. And there are always exceptions, although she’s never ever been so close to recognizing that the cliché about men being all the same, though commonplace (and therefore repugnant), is true, if only in part: maybe not all, but the vast majority of men are the same. The knowing woman knows what she’s talking about: she’s fallen in love with lots of men, and every single one, unfailingly, whatever display they put on, date her because they are driven by lust. Lust to which she often yields because (she has to recognize this) she’s been loving by nature from a very early age and love is so intoxicating that, as soon as a man puts an arm around her shoulder, kisses an ear lobe, and slides his hand between her legs, though she opens her mouth to say no, she never does, and always says yes.

  THE DECISION

  THE FEMME FATALE AND THE IRRESISTIBLE MAN MEET IN THE evening in a café with ocher colored walls. They look into each other’s eyes: they know this will be the last time. For weeks both have been aware of the evident fragility of the thread that has joined them for three years, that made them constantly call and live for each other; an edginess that meant not even Sunday afternoons were boring. Now the thread is about to break. The moment has come to question their love and then conclude it.

  They used see each other every day, and the days they didn’t, they’d call, even if it was in the middle of a conference in Nova Scotia. They have barely met three times in recent weeks and they weren’t happy encounters. They haven’t said as much, but both know today’s encounter is to say goodbye irrevocably. They’ve reached such a state of interpenetration that neither needs to say they are bored because both feel that simultaneously. They hold hands and recall (singly and silently) the fornicating perfection they’ve recently achieved: they themselves wonder at it. It is hardly strange if, compared to such acrobatics, the rest of their lives must seem insipid. They drink coffee, say goodbye, and go their own ways. She has a dinner date with a man; he has a dinner date with a woman.

  After dessert, the femme fatale takes ninety minutes to get into bed with the man she had the date with. The irresistible man takes one hundred and eighty to get into bed with his companion. They both do it so clumsily they are taken aback. How passive! How awkward! How impatient! They have a long, long way to travel before they reach with their new lovers the perfection they just said goodbye to, over a cup of coffee.

  ADMIRATION

  THE GIRL LISTENS OPEN-MOUTHED AS THE ABSTRUSE NOVELIST reads a chapter from his latest novel. When he finishes, while people clap she grasps her chance to position herself strategically and, when the novelist leaves the room, chatting to this person and that, and shaking the occasional hand, she accosts him. She tells him she is very interested in what he does and, if at all possible, she’d like to get to know him much better. The girl is pretty and the novelist likes pretty girls. He looks at her, she looks into his eyes and smiles. The novelist agrees; he sees off the organizers and they go to a restaurant for dinner.

  It’s a cheap restaurant, because although he is a good novelist (or precisely because that is what he is) he isn’t successful enough to frequent top-notch restaurants. She couldn’t care less. She (she realizes when he looks into her eyes) is totally besotted with him. He chatters nonstop, and she likes what he says. She laughs lots and they leave the restaurant in deep embrace. They go to his place, he lives in a top-floor apartment with no elevator (“just like in the movies!” she enthuses) and they spend the night there. They meet again the following day.

  They end up moving in together. She’s pregnant within four months. They have a baby girl. The apartment becomes not only too small, but too uncomfortable to raise a child there. One evening the abstruse novelist makes a decision: whatever it takes, he must increase his income. Abstruse novels struggle to bring in anything. And what he earns with his commentaries on chess games in the daily paper and what she earns as an assistant in a perfumery, is a total pittance.

  Luckily, a friend (who published a couple of books of poetry years ago and now produces ads) finds him a job in an advertising agency. He joins as a copywriter. He’s never lacked wit, and knows plenty about writing. So much so, the management recognizes his worth immediately. Things improve, economically and professionally.

  Finally they can move to another flat. She’s pregnant again. From time to time he recalls the days when he wrote abstruse novels. They are ever more distant. That’s a phase that’s over and done with, and he sometimes thinks he can’t possibly ever have been a writer of abstruse novels. He wouldn’t go back to that under any circumstance. He now thinks literature is a moth-eaten thing, an art belonging to centuries past. The future and the present are not in books, which nobody reads anymore, but in daily papers, television, and radio. And advertising, which consciously prostitutes itself, is the art par excellence. And he is making it in this art par excellence. To such an extent that three years later he is running his own agency, and gets home worn out every day, with time just to give the two girls a kiss before he stretches out on the sofa, grunts, and tells his wife, at machine-gun rate, about his day’s thousand and one tasks.

  She looks at him pitifully. She knows he doesn’t miss the time when he wrote abstruse novels. She knows he struggles daily from dawn to dusk to keep the household afloat, that he does so with good grace and that, what’s more, he’s a success, and that makes him happy. Sure he wouldn’t understand why she pities him, but that is how it is. That’s why when they go to bed and he falls asleep immediately, she continues with the light on, reading a novel. It’s an intricately plotted novel (it’s the new trend; abstruse novels are no longer in vogue) that came out a fortnight ago and has already been successful, a huge success within the residual world of literature. She finds it fascinating, so much so, she doesn’t intend to miss the lecture the novelist is going to give in a prestigious cultural institute in the city tomorrow afternoon.

  WHY DO THE HANDS OF A CLOCK TURN THE WAY THE HANDS OF A CLOCK DO?

  THE BLUE MAN IS IN THE CAFÉ, STIRRING A SPOON IN HIS CUP OF pennyroyal. A magenta man approaches him rather uneasily.

  “I need to talk to you. Can I sit down?”

  “Please.”

  “I don’t know where to begin.”

  “At the beginning.”

  “Last month I seduced your wife.”

  “My wife?”

  “Yes.”

  The blue man takes a few seconds to respond.

  “Why are you telling me?”

  “Because I’ve been miserable ever since.”

  “Why? Do you love her so much that you want to live with her? Does she not love you and that’s what upsets you?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe it’s remorse?”

  “No. The fact is she won’t leave me alone. She calls me night and day. And if I don’t answer, she comes to my place. And if I’m not there, she looks for me everywhere. She comes to see me at work, she says she can’t live without me.”

  “And?”

  “I’ve lost my peace of mind. Ever since I met her, I can’t get her out of my hair for a single day. Haven’t you noticed anything?”

  “When did you first meet her?”

  “A month and a half ago. You were in Rome.”

  The blue man was indeed in Rome a month and a half ago.

  “How do you know I was in Rome?”

  “Don’t you believe me? She told me, the day I met her. I met her at a computer class.”

  The wife had indeed gone to a computer class, taking advantage of the fact the blue man was in Rome.

  “So what do you want?”

  “For you to help me get out of this. It’s not that I don’t like your wife. She’s fantastic, intelligent, and sensual. What else can I say? But …”

  “She is very overpowering.”

  “Isn’t she just?” says the magenta man gleefully, seeing that the blue man understands him.

  “You want to get her off your back?”

  “Yes, in a nutshell.”

  “She won’t leave you alone for a second, right? If she sees you by yourself, smoking, enjoying the fresh air, reading the paper, studying, watching your favorite TV show, whatever, she immediately lies down on top of you and starts buttering you up.”

  “What’s more, if you’re not 100 percent into it she thinks she’s in the way and gets dramatic that way she does. That’s why, though I’ve no right to, I’d like to ask you a favor: talk to her, be jealous, threaten her. Whatever it takes. Anything to make sure we don’t see each other ever again.”

  “Do you really want to get her off your back?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Nothing could be easier. Do what I do. Stop avoiding her, don’t hide, be nice, warm-hearted, and considerate. Be more into her than she is into you. Call her, tell her you love her like nobody has ever loved before. Tell her you’ll devote your whole life to her. Marry her.”

  JEALOUSY

  TAMAR LICKS IT AGAIN AND LOOKS UP VERY SLOWLY UNTIL HER eyes meet Onan’s.

  “I really like your cock.”

  She’s exhausted. She shuts her eyelids. In next to no time she has dozed off, her head on the pubis of the man who can’t stop thinking about what she just said. “I really like your cock.” “I really like your cock …” Why does she always say the same thing? Ever since they started dating, how often has she said that, when they’re lying in bed? Countless times. Conversely, she never says she really likes his right arm or his shoulder blades. It’s always: your cock. Sometimes, Tamar holds it in the palm of her hand and it comes out differently: “You’ve got a lovely cock.”

  Now she’s asleep and the man has turned on his side. To do so, he’s had to move her head off. Even though she’s dozing, she still clings to it. She is so infatuated with his tool. Is his tool all she likes about him? Does she like him? She never says she likes him. Initially, he found her single-mindedness delightful. It was tender and stimulating. Like when he told her: “I really like being inside your cunt.” But it gradually became a tad obsessive. It is true that she really does like his cock. He sees that in her eyes, in the way she looks at it, in the rhythm of her words, in the way she emphasizes the word “really”: “rreeeally.”

  He’s woken up the next morning by Tamar’s mouth caressing it. Onan moves away, as if hurt.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I really like it.”

  “You really like it?”

  “Yes.” She pauses for a second. “I really like your cock.”

  They’re back to that.

  “Would you love me as much if I didn’t have a cock?”

  She looks at him askance. “

  What’s up with you?’

  “What do you think? All you ever talk about is cocks.”

  “Your cock.”

  “You never say that you like me.”

  He abruptly removes her hand. Tamar gets up. She is lovely, and indignant.

  “You’re crazy.”

  “No, I’m not crazy. But I do exist too.” And he adds cuttingly, deliberately so it sounds ridiculous: “Wouldn’t you agree?”

  Tamar hurriedly gets dressed. She slams the door behind her. Her footsteps echo down the stairs, ever more distantly. Onan sits in bed, puts his right hand on his flaccid member, lifts it slightly and scrutinizes it, half in fury, half intrigued.

  HAND ON HEART

  THEY GET ENGAGED ON NEW YEAR’S EVE, AT THE STROKE OF midnight, when fireworks erupt across the city and people hug: in homes, in the street, and in dance halls. The era of friendship is at an end for both of them with a betrothal that will lead to marriage. When will they marry? They’ll decide later: they’re too excited for now. They look into each other’s eyes and pledge eternal love and fidelity. They decide to ditch the more or less amorous affairs each had had to this point. They also promise to be totally honest with each other; they will never lie.

  “We’ll be completely honest. We’ll never lie to each other, no way, no excuses.”

  “A single lie would be the death of our love.”

  These pledges excite them even more. At two in the morning they fall asleep on the sofa, tired and in each other’s arms.

  They get up at midday, hungover. They shower, dress, and go out wearing sunglasses.

  “Shall we go get lunch?” he asks.

  “Yes. A light one, I’d say. A couple of tapas would be fine for me. But you must be ravenous.”

  He’s about to say he’s not, that anything would be fine, but he remembers their pledge.

  “Yes, I am. But I’d be happy with a few tapas. You eat a couple and I’ll eat more.”

  “No, you must want a real sit-down meal. Wouldn’t you rather go to a restaurant?”

  They have promised to be totally honest with each other. So he can’t say what he would have said if they hadn’t: that he’s fine with tapas at a bar. Now he must acknowledge that he really would prefer to go to a restaurant and have a sit-down meal.

  “Let’s do that then,” says she. “Let’s go to that Japanese restaurant we went to a week ago and that you liked so much.”

  The previous week they’d not yet promised to be totally honest with each other. Besides, he never told her he had liked the Japanese restaurant. He recalls that clearly: when she asked, he’d said he thought the restaurant was OK, a formula that didn’t convey the enthusiasm she is now putting in his mouth.

  “I told you I thought it was okay, not that I’d liked it.”

  “In other words, you didn’t like it.”

  He has to tell her: “I hate Japanese food.”

  She looks him in the eyes, peeved.

  “You know I like Japanese a lot.”

  “I know.”

  He wonders if their pledge requires him to do this or not, but, preferring to err on the side of excess rather than commit a sin of omission, he tells her everything else he is thinking: that one of the things he doesn’t like about her is precisely (and it ties in with an attitude of hers she thinks is sophisticated, but is basically merely pretentious) her fondness for restaurants that have replaced good cooking with public relations. She tells him he is an idiot. He is forced to say he doesn’t feel at all idiotic and that he is convinced, that if they were to test which of them had the most powerful brain, hers wouldn’t win out. Such words offend her, and she slaps him, in a rage repeating that he is an idiot, an outright idiot, and will be for the whole of his life, and that she never ever wants to see him again, a sentiment he immediately espouses.

  INSTABILITY

  FED UP WITH THIEVES WRENCHING OUT HIS CAR RADIO TIME after time, Sr Trujillo had one installed that you could remove and put back. That way they’d never steal his again.

  He drove out of the repair shop, listening to a program. It was a good radio. When he reached home and parked in the community lot, he’d always take out the radio, stick it under his arm, and go up to his apartment. When he went to the office, he’d do likewise. So, all in all, he carried the radio under his arm for a very short while. From the community lot to home, from the office lot to the office: in each case, short walks plus an elevator ride. That’s why it was a hardly a pain to carry it. If he’d had to carry it along the street, he’d have thought differently. He’d always felt contempt for people who walked everywhere with their car radio under their arm. They made him fume, when he saw them at the bar, with the radio beside their glass. Or in shops, dragging it from counter to counter, never losing sight of it, even though the shop assistant concealed it under fifteen shirts.

  That’s why, a week and a half later, he suddenly stopped in the middle of the street and surveyed his armpit. What was he doing with a radio under his arm? How come he hadn’t noticed until he was fifteen yards from his car? He’d driven to the city center to do some shopping and, after spending an exasperating amount of time driving around looking for a parking space, when he’d finally found one, he’d automatically taken the radio out. The tension that had built up as he circled about had caused his brain autonomously (for a moment) to decide that his reluctance as regards carrying his radio down the street under his arm was nonsense. That’s why it had taken him fifteen yards to realize. He felt ridiculous. He turned back, opened the car door, and sat down holding his radio. Where could he leave it? Under the seat? Would a potential thief perhaps see it through the rear window? In the glove compartment? He looked down the street to see whether anyone was looking. Nobody was. He opened the glove compartment, put the radio inside, and closed it. Then he got out. He checked that the door was properly shut and headed to the first shop, where he bought some green shoes.

  When he came back to his car forty-five minutes later, he discovered that the left window had been broken and his radio stolen.

  He went back to the repair shop the next morning. He asked them to fit a new window and another radio. He went to pick up the car that afternoon and drove home full of doubts. What would he do from now on? If he only had to go home or to the office, it wasn’t a problem: he would pop in the radio and, once he’d arrived, he’d take it out and carry it up to his flat or office. However, if he went anywhere else (shopping or a restaurant), he wouldn’t leave it in the car, because if he did, it would be stolen.

  That’s why the following night he drove without his radio. Something he hated doing; he really liked listening to music when he was driving. I mean, why had he had a radio installed if in the end he had to leave it at home? He decided that, until he’d solved that dilemma, he’d leave the car in the lot and travel by taxi.