Alejandro Zambra - My Documents

“At least use the informal in bed,” I told her one night.

“I prefer to use usted, Professor,” she said, fixing her hair. “Just pretend I’m a hot Colombian.”

One evening when the rain was coming down in torrents, Juan Emilio arrived late. He brought with him a man who greeted me happily, then immediately started to pile a series of boxes next to my desk. It was hard for me to understand the situation, which Juan Emilio failed to explain except with a strange, condescending smirk.

“I hope these little gifts won’t bother you,” he said finally.

I reacted angrily, but too late. I’m sure he had never met anyone as poor as me; in fact, coming down to Plaza Italia must have been, for Juan Emilio, a kind of transgressive adventure in itself. But I wasn’t poor, far from it. I lived on very little, but in no way was I poor. I told him I couldn’t accept his charity, asked how he could he even think of such a thing, but as I was arguing Juan Emilio was opening the boxes and stocking the pantry, or that corner of my minuscule kitchen that served as a pantry. There really were a lot of boxes, and they held, among other delicacies, soy drinks, different kinds of Twinings tea, a sophisticated selection of cheeses, octopus and salmon carpaccio, some tins of caviar, several six-packs of imported beers, and two dozen bottles of wine. There was also an immense box of cleaning products, which in a certain way offended me, since he obviously thought they were necessary.

I thanked him for his good intentions and I told him again that I couldn’t accept his generosity. “It’s nothing to me,” he replied, which was undoubtedly true, and after refusing two more times, with less conviction, I finally accepted the gifts. Then there was a less than emphatic attempt on my part to begin the class. We vaguely discussed some stories by Onetti while we snacked on cheese and olives and some delicious Middle Eastern pastries. I tried, but I couldn’t hide the fact that I was hungry.

As he was leaving I started to tell him about what we would do the following Monday, but he stopped me. He ran his hand through his hair and lit a cigarette with a speed that was unusual for him, before telling me: “I’ve discovered that I don’t really like literature so much. I like to talk to you, to come here, to see how you live. But I haven’t really liked anything I’ve read.”

He pronounced these last phrases with a distasteful emphasis; I’m sure it was the same tone he used when he fired his employees. Something like: I’m afraid we’re going to have to find someone else . Only then did I understand that the merchandise was a kind of severance pay. Before taking his leave, he looked me straight in the eyes and leaned in for an unexpected and very long kiss on the lips.

I was frozen. It annoyed me that I hadn’t understood the plot. I felt stupid. The kiss didn’t upset me, it didn’t disgust me, but just in case, I took a long drink from a bottle of Syrah; I have no idea if it had a fruity expression or a pronounced acidity, but right at that moment it struck me as fitting.

At work the next night, since it was rumored that they were going to cut off the supply again, I collected some water, but I forgot to turn off the tap. I fell fast asleep, like never before, on the floor, and I woke up at seven in the morning, lying in water, the rug almost entirely drenched. My boss gave free rein to his well-trained sarcasm as he chastised me, but in the end he thought my ineptitude was so funny that he decided not to fire me. I understood, however, that it was the end.

More than once I had thought about staying in that office forever, answering that phone for the rest of my life. It wasn’t hard to imagine myself at forty or fifty years old, spending the night with my feet up on that same desk, reading the same books over and over. Up till then I had chosen not to think about anything too confusing or elaborate. I never seriously imagined the future, perhaps because I trusted in that thing they call good luck. When I decided to study literature, for example, the only thing I knew was that I liked to read. What sort of work I’d do, what kind of life I wanted: I don’t know if I ever thought about those things — it would have brought nothing but anxiety. And nevertheless, I guess that, as they say, I wanted to come out ahead, I wanted to thrive. The flood was a sign: I had to work in the field I’d studied. Or in other words, to be precise: I had to work with something at least slightly connected to what I had studied. I quit right then. At my good-bye dinner, Portillo gave me a book by Arturo Pérez Reverte, his favorite author.

When I told my students that I was unemployed, they offered to help me, although they didn’t have any money or contacts or anything. I told them it wasn’t necessary, that I had time to look for work, that I had managed to save a bit of money. They looked at me very seriously, but when I told them about the accident at the office, they cracked up, and they agreed that I had to quit. Especially Pamela.

We went to my apartment; we could finally sleep together. It was the beginning of October, the night was pleasant, enticing. We drank an incredible wine, and after sex we watched a game show (she got all the questions right) and a movie. We woke up late, but there was no rush. We stayed in bed for an hour while I caressed her generous legs and looked at her feet, perfect but a little diminished by the turquoise polish, now fairly chipped, that she used on her nails. By then we had decided to raise the price: she charged me ten thousand, and I charged her ten thousand.

“You’re out of work, but your house is full of food,” she told me, laughing. It really was a lot of food, I thought, and I started to fill a bag with cheeses, cold cuts, cups of yogurt, and bottles of wine. I gave it to her. I was young and much more of a dumbass than I am now, it goes without saying. She listened, stunned, to the stupid sentences I said to her. Only then did I realize I had committed a fatal mistake. Pamela looked at me with rage, silent, disconcerted, disappointed. She touched one of her breasts, who knows why, as if it hurt her.

Then she picked up the bag and dumped it furiously at my feet. She was about to leave without saying a word, she’d opened the door but then she stopped, and she told me, in a broken voice, that she was not and would never be a whore. And that I was not, and would never be, a real professor.

“I got the cat so you would have something here,” said Daniel, repeating the psychologist’s words exactly, and Lucas showed an enthusiasm that seemed new, unexpected. At his mother’s house—“my true house,” the boy said — there was a little yard where a cat or a small dog could have lived happily, but Maru, on that point, was inflexible: no dog, no cat. But from now on, every other week, the boy would get to spend a couple of days with the cat at Daniel’s house. They named him Pedro, and later, after they found out it was actually a girl cat, and she was pregnant, they started calling her Pedra.

The “true or false” thing came from school — they were the only exercises that Lucas liked, that he did well on, and he insisted on applying the categories to everything, capriciously: Maru’s house was his true house, but for some reason he judged the living room of that same house to be false — and the armchairs in the living room were true, but the door and all the lamps were false. Only some of his toys were true, but those weren’t the ones that he always preferred. Just because something was false didn’t mean the boy disliked it. The few days he spent with his father at the false house, for example, consisted of a bounteous marathon of Nintendo, pizza, and french fries.