Rob Doyle - This is the Ritual

*

On the afternoon of her twenty-sixth birthday, the Belgian girl drew a bath and opened her wrists. A drowsy, incoherent goodbye. Her flatmate was in his room with the porno. ‘She was always insane.’ ‘We will never make it home, not now in any case.’ ‘The condition of being locked outside of life.’ ‘A willing, attractive woman by your side. Days free of all obligation. . Does it matter that our sexuality was incompatible? I loved you, in my way.’ Burning condoms in a deserted car park. There is nowhere to go.

Utter derision, in this mirror full of screams.

*

Interstates, freeways. Drives all night with the radio on. ‘I would want, literally, to kill her.’ A cuckolded boyfriend — that perennial experience. When something is broken, it’s broken. Hears the voice of the talk-show host say softly: ‘The saddest thing I ever heard. .’

In an early bar on the dusty edge of a city, saves himself only by getting blind drunk. ‘How beautiful you were.’ Starts weeping and embarrasses the barman (he is the only customer). The barman has no time for this maudlin scene — he looks away. ‘Last night the devil stood outside my door. .’ It’s all coming out slurred. The barman continues to ignore him.

Finally he collapses face-first on a table. Everywhere, whiskey and broken glass.

Alicia moved to Barcelona when she was twenty-nine, having ended an eight-year relationship after learning of her partner’s long-term infidelity.

After a couple of months in the city, she got a job as a waitress in a restaurant on the Calle Trujas, on the fringes of the red-light district. She mostly worked nights, and often prostitutes or their pimps or clients would come in, alone or in small, garrulous groups, to eat burritos and kebabs. The prostitutes’ clients were drunk and loud, and sometimes they tried to joke with Alicia about their exploits, as if to reassure themselves through her complicity. Many of these late-night customers were foreign tourists. Sometimes they said the most obscene, misogynistic, lewd things in Alicia’s presence, not realising she spoke English. Other times they just didn’t care.

On some nights, Alicia was overcome by bitterness and misanthropy. It seemed to her that the Calle Trujas was a sewer, and that the restaurant where she worked was a rotting piece of wood that floated along the surface, on to which rats would crawl and sniff around for a while before lurching back into the fetid stream. Alicia did not have much money: most of what she made at the restaurant went on rent. She could have lived more cheaply if she shared an apartment, but she was determined to live on her own, which she had never done before. Late at night, when her shifts ended, she would go back to her apartment, several streets away on the Calle de la Madera, and sit with the lights off, looking out at the rooftops, drinking a beer and eating from a box of noodles or a few slices of pizza. When summer came, she sat on the roof terrace instead.

Before I started getting to know her, Alicia had no significant friends in Barcelona. She could have met some had she wanted to, but it felt natural, even enjoyable, to be alone, walking the streets on her days off work, letting her sadness and anger swirl out into the foreignness of the city. She put aside at least half an hour every day to study Spanish, aided by a book and the accompanying CDs which she had loaded on to her phone. On a few occasions, she went for late-night drinks with her colleagues after they had closed up the restaurant. She danced and laughed with them, and they liked her, but whenever they suggested meeting up again soon, she made tactful excuses. On one of these nights out, when Alicia had been waitressing for a month or so, she went home with a slender Moroccan named Salim who worked in the kitchen. Before they made love, Salim stripped his bed of its covers, rolled them up and laid them in front of the window. Alicia did not know why he did this. In the morning, she awoke to find Salim kissing her neck. She drew him in around her, enfolded by him on the uncovered bed. Afterwards, Salim unsheathed the condom and tied it with the tip of his finger in a manner that struck Alicia as delicate and touching. Salim wanted to take her out for breakfast, but Alicia kissed him on the lips and said she would see him in work on Monday night. After that, she and Salim remained friendly, but they didn’t sleep together again.

Alicia found a bar that she loved on the Carrer de Paris, one Metro stop away from her home. Sometimes she would go there to write in the notebook she had bought at the Saturday market, or to read, or just to sip coffee, wine or brandy, and watch the locals float in, have their conversations, drift away again. She developed a passion for Chekhov, reading first all his short stories, then all his plays (or as many as she could find in English translation). She also read Kundera, until it came to seem to Alicia that he was engaged in a conversation which excluded her, as if he were unaware she was even in the room. After that, she read Djuna Barnes, Gogol and Jane Bowles. The bar was called Angelino’s and it was never full, never empty, and always played appealing music at just the right volume. Once, a couple walked into the bar holding hands. The woman was older, perhaps in her early forties, and wore a red leather skirt and a red top, not unlike some of the prostitutes Alicia encountered at the restaurant. The man was handsomely dishevelled, a decade or so younger than the woman. They sat at the bar and giggled, grinning at one another even as they ordered their drinks, oblivious to the rest of the bar and the world outside. Alicia had been writing about St Stephen’s Green, but now she began writing about the couple in Angelino’s, imagining the relationships they had both fled to be with each other, the affair they would live out over the coming months — passionately sexual, yet bound on a course for agony and destruction. She wrote about the woman in red standing on a windswept coast, alone, looking out to sea but expecting nothing.

Another evening, Alicia was again writing in the bar. It was already autumn, the sun sinking on the street outside. She did not have to work till the following night. Absorbed in her writing, she was startled when the empty chair by her table shifted. She looked up and saw that it had been moved by a man, who was asking by gesture if he might sit with her. Momentarily Alicia was annoyed that her writing had been interrupted. But the man’s eyes were kind. He sat down with her. He wanted to buy her another coffee but she said she shouldn’t drink more caffeine. A few minutes later, she let him buy her a glass of Prosecco. He was a big man, with thick arms, strong shoulders and dark, Mediterranean skin. His balding head was shaved and he had a neat, black beard. He laughed softly as he spoke, and listened attentively when Alicia did, nodding faintly. Halid was his name. Around midnight they took a taxi back to Alicia’s apartment. They made love till dawn began to show over the rooftops outside the window. Later they stood on the roof terrace in the light of early morning, a sheet wrapped around the two of them to maintain their modesty before any passing seagulls. Alicia later told me they were like two Greek philosophers, and they both giggled like children.

Alicia and Halid met up usually once a week, always on Alicia’s terms. When Halid realised that this was to be an exclusively sexual affair, he amiably accepted the situation. They would meet in bars, have one or two drinks, and then go to either Alicia’s or Halid’s place. If they slept at Alicia’s, she would always gently let Halid know, soon after they woke up, that she wanted him to leave. When they were at his tiny apartment in the Barceloneta district, she always left early. Then she got on with her day, smiling spontan-eously as she bought vegetables at the market, or took orders from customers, or sat on the roof terrace and listened to the sounds rising up from the street.