Lina Wolff - Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs

For two weeks there was total silence from the flat below. There was no sign of Blosom either. And then one morning there they were again, Alba and Blosom on the terrace, only this time they were not alone. There was a third person present. I remember it was a Tuesday, because Mum and I had been at the market in Poblenou and bought clothes. We had our bargains packed in the yellow plastic bags we were carrying. Once we had parked the car and were walking towards the flat, we could see immediately that there was something different about Cambó’s terrace. The old plants had been swapped for new ones. Now there were lemon and olive trees on it. An abundant bougainvillea was hanging over the wall to the neighbouring building. Alba was sitting at the table. Good Lord, Mum mumbled. What now? She must have gone completely mad over in Italy. Because a man was sitting next to Alba. A real bullfighter, a turkey, a rooster, Mum said under her breath as we approached them. Alba and the man came over to say hello. They stood there, all attentive politeness, on the other side of the fence; they each held a glass of wine and were both obviously drunk. Blosom stayed sitting at the table and raised her glass to us. Cambó and the man told us about the holiday when they had got to know one another, about the beach outside Genoa, and about San Remo and other places they had made trips to. They asked where we had been and Mum said that we had been at the market in Poblenou to buy clothes. Alba smiled the whole time and told us that we might be getting a new neighbour, Valentino Coraggioso, the very man standing beside her. They laughed together. How beautiful they are, I thought. Mum asked Valentino what his job was. I’m a porn star, Valentino replied. Oh yes? we said. Alba giggled. Did you really have to tell my neighbours that? she said. I’m just joking, Valentino said then. Mum and I didn’t know what to say, we just stood there holding our bags, and then he laughed and Alba Cambó laughed even harder, and we had no idea what they were laughing at, whether it was at something they had said, or if it was just a way of making fun of something or if they were laughing at us. Nice to meet you in any case, said Mum. We’d better go in and hang up our clothes. Come on Araceli. Don’t take it seriously, Mariela! Alba called. Valentino could never be a porn star, he’s much too ugly. You should have seen the way the fish kept staring at him when he was snorkelling! Mum did not reply, just shook her head as we walked up the stairs. They were royally drunk, the pair of them, she said when we closed the door behind us. It’s on occasions like this I feel deeply and profoundly grateful not to have a man of my own.

Then she said that she had always thought highly of Alba Cambó, and that she had always managed to be straightforward and unpretentious on the surface at least, ‘so perfectly normal’, and this new hilarity felt wrong to her, it didn’t fit in, not in this neighbourhood.

How to describe Valentino Coraggioso? You could describe him the way Mum did the Canary Man: attractively ugly, though with a certain inclination to the lymphatic. A suitable husband for Alba? That was impossible to tell, because we didn’t know him or Alba. We had no idea what lay in their past, or what the future held in store. We had only seen them standing there with the sun shining on them, surrounded by the flowers that had been newly watered.

It would not be long, however, before I had an opportunity to get to know Valentino. His place of work was not far from my school, so it seemed entirely natural for me to get a lift with him in his car every morning. He kept talking, which he would never do in Alba’s company; his voice was different and he took liberties in asking questions he would never have asked if Alba or Blosom had been present. Have you got a boyfriend? he asked. In the beginning he would ask this every day: Have you got a boyfriend, someone you’ve just got to have, you’re quite the grown-up lady after all? I didn’t answer and just kept looking out the window. When I failed to reply, he would eventually give up and start talking about himself. He sounded anecdotal when he did this, as though he thought his life was a string of pearls, each one a successful episode about himself, a photo album you could leaf through in as much time as it took to drive between Joaquín Costa and Parque Güell. Valentino Coraggioso as a child with his mother in the park in Genoa. Valentino Coraggioso fishing with his father and how the two of them, Mum and Dad Coraggioso, stayed together all their lives, how they understood that it was all about staying together, that that was what everything was all about. He remembered them as the last happy couple. Something happened after them. Everyone started thinking of themselves. Tender egos were allowed to grow uncontrolled, to overflow every bank. The glue between the sexes split and most people became unhappy.

I laughed in an attempt to defuse the issue. You’ve got to have at least one bad memory from childhood. No one’s got only good memories of growing up. And if someone does have only good ones that’s because they are lying to themselves which means they are still in a state of denial, and that suggests real repressed traumas.

He thought about that.

‘No,’ he said then. ‘There really are people who haven’t got any traumas, even if it’s hard for other people to believe that.’

He continued driving that gigolo car of his with a grim look on his face.

One time he asked me:

‘Don’t you want to find love?’

I replied that I did want to find love, but that I couldn’t cope with husbands and lovers.

‘Husbands and lovers?’ Valentino shouted then. ‘Husbands and lovers! What do you know about them, Araceli Villalobos?’

Come to think of it, what did I know about husbands and lovers, and what did Valentino Coraggioso know about Alba Cambó? You never really know anything about anything. At best you have an aching feeling in your stomach and a compass that sometimes points right, and other times spins crazily. And what did we know about Blosom? Blosom whom we thought had crossed the Atlantic to do Alba Cambó’s washing-up. Mum and I had not the faintest idea of whatever plans Blosom might have, and to what extent we might be part of them. What we felt towards her was that pleasant and proper sympathy people who are safely removed from problems can permit themselves to feel. We would stand at the railing and look sympathetically down at Alba’s terrace where Blosom was moving around. We had no way of knowing that while we were looking at Blosom, Blosom was looking at us out of the corner of her eye, the mother and daughter in the flat above: women who were not yet overcrowded, needy perhaps, and still hadn’t let a man move in. I can see it all before me now, looking back, and it makes the whole thing slightly comical. I realise she must have had intentions of some kind even then — because there came a knock on the door one Saturday morning just a few months after Coraggioso’s arrival. The three of them stood there in a row: Alba Cambó, Valentino Coraggioso and Blosom. Alba Cambó had lost a little weight and looked pale and sickly, her hair was all flat and dry. Coraggioso was smiling wryly with the whole of his face and his hair had been slicked down with water.

‘Hello, Araceli,’ said Alba. ‘How are you?’

Without waiting for a reply, she went on:

‘Please excuse us for turning up so early on a Saturday morning. Is Mariela home?’

I let them into the hall. Valentino held out a bag of croissants. I invited them to sit in the living room. The flat was silent and the air musty. What light there was came in through the blinds. Blosom went over to the terrace doors and opened them.

‘Ah,’ said Valentino as the smell of the sea and exhaust fumes filled the living room.