Andrés Barba - August, October

The author would like to express his gratitude for the grant received from the HALMA network during the editing phase of this novel, and to thank to the Spanish Ministry of Culture, the Cervantes Institute, the Het Beschrijf literary society in Brussels, and the Translators’ House of the Hungarian Ministry of Culture.

It would start on the way from the beach to the house, walking back with his parents and his little sister. Arousal that was more like discomfort than pleasure. He’d take off his bathing suit and masturbate in the bathroom before showering, conjuring up vague images he’d seen on the beach a few minutes earlier or on the walkway that led from the beach to the house his parents had rented for the summer, images that were almost abstract, of girls his age or a little older, sixteen or seventeen. Rather than any one specific body, what he saw when he closed his eyes and began touching himself was an indistinct amalgam of imaginary bodies whose contours were, at the same time, somehow disturbingly concrete. The crease of a girl’s hips when she sat, for example, or the slope of breasts in profile, or those strange, circular, dimple-like indentations at the base of a back. He didn’t feel attracted to those things, it was more an enthralled sort of revulsion, as if the images somehow merited awe and yet were simultaneously preposterous. Sometimes he actually found it difficult to recall specific bodies he’d just seen, or he could recall them but not tell them apart. He’d have the whitewashed image of a girl in a bikini walking along the water’s edge as if her hip hurt with each step, or a girl’s back, a skinny back, like that of a sickly old man, or a pair of arms crossed over a chest and an almost amphibian whiteness, full of little, blue veins. He wasn’t even thinking about them, exactly, when he masturbated. It felt more like being underwater, like something abating and then welling up, and then receding without having been even remotely resolved. He’d breathe in and out, in and out. Then wipe himself off with toilet paper, wipe the floor, look in the mirror.

“You’ve changed so much this year,” Aunt Eli had said the minute she saw him that summer. “You’ve become a man all of a sudden.”

He’d become a man all of a sudden. In the past six months he’d had such a growth spurt that half his wardrobe no longer fit. His father attributed it to the fact that he’d gotten involved in sports, and he himself was so fascinated by the transformation that ever since his father had made that comment, he’d redoubled his interest in physical activity. His face had grown sharper, his lips had stopped being so fleshy and gotten thinner — like his mother’s — his cheekbones protruded, too, as did his chin, which, together with his round, childlike eyes, gave his face a frightened-boy look. He was aware of this effect and so, over the course of that year, had developed the nervous habit of narrowing his eyes when spoken to, as though displeased or mulling something over. His arms had gotten longer, and his legs, but exercise had made them sinewy. He was proud of his arms, but less so his legs, since they were still thin and in all likelihood — at least judging by his father’s anatomy — would remain that way for the rest of his life. His chest seemed stuck in an inexplicable, childlike state despite all the exercise, a bit sunken in. Taller than average, he was wiry, though not noticeably so. He knew he wasn’t objectively good-looking but also knew that his solemnity and silent demeanor made him seem attractive. Plus, that year he’d become a strong person. Strong in a way that perhaps not even he had imagined he ever would be. He’d borne his scrawny childhood and adolescence like some sort of Biblical plague. In the same way an ugly girl looks in the mirror and thinks crossly this is not me , he had looked in the mirror for years and felt a sort of furious discord between what he was and what he saw. A month after turning fourteen, he realized, astonished, how much he’d changed, and he felt as if a dull fury were subsiding, as if some nebulous clot had dissolved, and he clenched his j aw.

“And that’s not all,” his mother said. “If you could see how organized he’s become. .”

Aunt Eli had given him a babyish cuddle and a noisy smack, provoking his instant displeasure. Order and cleanliness were actually like overspill from his physical change. He’d become methodical and meticulous, as if he felt the need to follow a step-by-step plan to the letter.

“I don’t know what happened to him. You know how messy he used to be, and then from one day to the next. .”

He hated that about his mother, the relentless habit she had of talking about him to other people as if he weren’t there, and the fact that she was doing it with Aunt Eli irked him especially. Maybe it was his mother’s uncanny ability to make him revert into a five-year-old with a single look, or maybe it was the objective shame of someone feeling constantly on the verge of being exposed that drove him crazy. Aunt Eli sat down beside him and scooted in close. He felt her enormous breasts spilling over his shoulder, and this time he couldn’t help but be disgusted. He pulled away, grimacing involuntarily. Not even in illness had she been able to lose weight, but she had become very pale, and the result was that rather than a real person, she now resembled an enormous wax figure, white and doughy.

“So, you’re a young man now, huh? Don’t even want to cuddle. Or you do, but not with your Aunt Eli. .”

“I’m going to my room,” he said, bouncing up like a spring, and before he’d even managed to leave the room, he heard his mother offering feeble excuses and Aunt Eli empathizing.

“Oh, it’s normal, dear. .”

Each summer they rented a different house, and that summer’s was the nicest one they’d had in a long time, an old, two-story bungalow very close to the beach. It had four bedrooms upstairs — which meant that for the first time he didn’t have to share a room with his sister for the summer — and a huge, wrap-around balcony with bamboo blinds that could be rolled up with little cords and then tied to the balcony’s supporting columns. When they walked in the first day, it was all he could do to keep from shouting in glee. It looked like an African house, an explorer’s refuge. The first floor was open-plan, designed the way houses on the estuary often are, on stilts to avoid flooding. They were old fishermen’s quarters that had been renovated into luxury vacation homes for city folks — carefully restored inside, though the decorators had cleverly preserved some of the “original charming inconveniences” (Mamá). They spent the first few days enjoying the house with almost angst-ridden delight. Deep down they were a childish family. Just as some families were melancholy, or happy, or destructive, theirs was a childish family. They got overexcited at the drop of a hat, then grew sad for no reason. They needed swift kicks for motivation, especially in the summer, and then felt their joy simply wither and rushed on, with bold and terrifying logic, to another form of entertainment, as if the whole point of summer were to flee the tedium of their previous hobbies. They were as disorderly in the summertime as they were orderly in the winter. The rest of the year, his father ran a banking firm, his mother, a pharmacy in the city center, and he and his sister went to school; they were reasonable and hardworking, not overly emotional, and a bit reclusive, but there was a healthy air of calm at home.