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Fiction

The Shower

By Patricia de Souza
Translated from Spanish by Mara Faye Lethem
Patricia de Souza creates a world of cruelty in this short story about a poor Peruvian student in Paris.

At first she stared at the window for a while, as her life paraded past in scenes: her mother’s house in Piura, the silent sun high over Piura’s dusty rooftops, which bristled with aluminum antennas marking the luminously streaked sky. Her mother’s house that smelled of Bolívar soap and rue plants beneath the gold sun that hung in the taut, infinite sky. She missed it all, but she was in Paris and there was nothing she could do about it. That was the harsh truth. She didn’t want to pull her feet out of the warm bed, until she thought, if I don’t get up, I won’t see Madame Dupuy to find out when I start cleaning the apartments. Then she watched a few birds flying swiftly beyond the other side of the window, not many, mostly crows that sometimes leaped onto the sidewalk and went booo!! On TV she’d once seen a show that said they were very crafty birds with quick minds, capable of feigning injury so they could steal food from other animals, even some sort of wildcat in southern France, the gennette. She kept imagining that she was still at home, beneath the warm sheets, until she began to feel anxious: she had to shower and the bathroom was in the hall, she’d have to tiptoe out so as not to disturb the people living on the top floor of the Parisian building. She imagined herself like one of the actresses in the film Les femmes du 6ème étage, the doomed souls forced to live in the servants’ quarters—like her apartment, where she’d rented the attic with the understanding that she would clean the middle-class apartments on the lower floors. When she held out the banknotes intended to pay her rent, Madame Dupuy smiled disdainfully with that bitter face of hers, quickly adding, that’s nothing! Rien, she said with that pointed French accent Úrsula was all too familiar with. She wrenched her legs from under the covers and planted her feet on the rug covered in cigarette burns and black and reddish stains. She approached the wall in front of her and tugged on one end of the wallpaper, which came loose, revealing a naked stretch of plaster eaten away by dampness and covered in blisters. Her telephone rang for a few seconds before stopping like a heart weary of showing signs of life. It was actually the incarnation of life, the conduit for the voices of her parents, her friends, sometimes even her Aunt Marina whom she missed so much. She thought how those communication networks were up in the sky watching over life on the entire planet, how everything could be recorded on some vaporous white cloud, invisibly and almost poetically. And it was terrifying, and she remembered the face of young Snowden warning of the dangers of handing our lives over to the satellites. It was both terrifying and fascinating. She was about to go shower . . . when someone knocked on the door.

“Hello, Yves.” Her neighbor was standing there, one hand holding a trembling tray with a teapot and two cups laid out elegantly like something out of a fairy tale.

“May I come in?” he asked, as if the answer was implied in the question, his gaze overpowering, as Úrsula observed his rigid jaw and almost yellow skin. Her mother said that people with short jaws were decisive and cold. His forehead was flat and his head was well-coiffed with gel, his torso was covered in a robe he had intentionally left loose, revealing some hair. He stood there looking at her incisively, with the somewhat perplexed expression of a zombie, thought Úrsula.

“I was going to . . .”

“You can have a cup of tea first,” he said. His accent was even more forced than Madame Dupuy’s, who the day before had asked her to go to the market and buy several bags filled with bottles of wine and champagne for the woman on the third floor, ordering her with a contemptuous gaze to not forget to deliver them on time, marking her status, establishing her role as the one in charge. Poor Madame Dupuy, she must have a rock where her heart should be, and she brought the heavy bags up, panting, to deliver them to a woman wearing a lot of makeup, with long nails and intense perfume, who immediately closed the door in her face without a glance. Úrsula thought she must be transparent, and Yves’s arrival seemed like a stroke of luck, almost benevolent.

“Well, let’s try that tea,” and she let him in. Yves stumbled over some newspapers before sitting in the only chair in the room, from Ikea, which Úrsula always sat in to pore over the newspapers she salvaged from the garbage cans behind a very heavy solid iron door in the basement. She followed all the current events in Greece, she felt Greek, she wanted to know everything about Syriza, and she’d also taken an interest in what was going on in Spain. And she told her mother, Look, when this starts happening in Peru, I’ll come home, this is new, Mama, believe me. But her mother didn’t believe her, she thought that perhaps her daughter was a bit of a naïve dreamer, she imagined her sleeping in cold beds in Paris and felt a little sorry for her. And that was it.

Yves finally sat down on the floor with his legs crossed and his torso straight, while she rushed to pull on a long T-shirt that covered her transparent nightgown as he began to speak, his eyes fixed on her breasts.

“Well,” said Úrsula, “should we have that tea, or what?”

Yves served the tea in silence, his hand quivering a little when he picked up the cup by its handle, making it wobble. He looked like a little Miura fighting bull, his nostrils opening to let out dense clouds of breath, cold as the morning.

They barely spoke, she noticed that every time she said something, he would look at her breasts again, it was starting to irritate her . . . Did you know that Madame Dupuy offered me the cleaning job? Poor thing, being the building’s bonne is a tough job. Madame Dupuy’s not so bad, Yves immediately added to soften what he’d just said, her son was killed in a motorcycle accident, and her husband is paralyzed on one side of his body . . . At that point their teacups were empty and she felt him teetering on his axis, as if meditating. The little fighting bull. Then he stood up and moved about impatiently. Úrsula followed suit, thinking that Yves was only two strides away from the exit, she was relieved, her bed was unmade and a bra hung from one end, well . . . Yves . . . she saw he was pale, mumbling something incomprehensible, Úrsula, forgive me, I didn’t want to say this, but, perhaps, if you . . . if you were more generous with me you wouldn’t have to do the cleaning . . .

She looked at him, thinking she should slap him, but the poor man, he was so ridiculous, so arrogant in his half-open Chinese robe, his feet in velvet slippers . . . she almost started to laugh when she felt the mass of his body against hers, seeking out her mouth like a suction cup, covering her with dense, transparent slobber as she kicked him, pounded on him, slipped out from under him. Once she was free from his grip, she pointed at him with her index finger and ordered: “Get out of here right now, right this minute or I can’t be held responsible for what I might do.”

“It was just an idea,” Yves responded cynically, his face red, his lips damp. How disgusting, thought Úrsula once he had stormed off in a huff like a deposed king about to throw a tantrum.

She went to find her towel and headed to the bathroom, to the shower, the Parisian attic’s torture chamber, which awaited her with its dim light, its damp walls, all its cold and all its squalor. She thought of Yves—ridiculous and humiliated—pacing around his 215-square-foot room; she was starting to feel sorry for him, he was such a miserable wretch that she couldn’t get mad at him. She had the feeling that they were somehow like siblings, another doomed soul like me, she thought. She felt repulsed by him, but mostly she felt sorry for herself. She didn’t know why in the hell she was studying philosophy at the Sorbonne, so many anxious mornings alone, so much fear of the future, there, in her country. Times have changed, suggested a friend from her department, philosophy has no place anymore, it’s increasingly obsolete, relegated to coffee shop debates. She’d heard the same thing said about sociology, another friend had made a similar comment: it’s disappearing. Books will also disappear, there’s an anthropological revolution afoot. Haven’t you realized? She approached the shower stall where the yellowing enamel gave off a scent of dampness mixed with urine, proof of the presence of other bodies in that same place, through their smells that lingered in the floor. She pulled on the chain of a dirty window that opened a dusty skylight to reveal the gray sky of Paris. She had to slam the shower’s frosted glass door several times before managing to close it, leaving barely any space for her body. She washed herself, watching as the soap slid down between her legs, it was pleasurable even though the place was as sordid and dark as a cave. If she extended her arms to rub herself with the towel, her elbows hit the plastic edges, if she leaned forward to soap up her feet, she felt the glass glued to her buttocks. Suddenly she heard someone shouting her name, it was Madame Dupuy’s voice and she wanted to imagine it was her mother’s, who actually rarely spoke to her in that tone. Her mother was practically illiterate, she hadn’t gotten past primary school, which was why her parents had decided to sacrifice the little money they were able to save up from selling fabric at their shop in Lima’s Gamarra shopping center so that their only daughter could study in France. Her father had failed to convince her mother that going all the way to France wasn’t worth it, that they were hostile there toward people with dark skin, that she’d be better off staying in her own country, that there were good universities in Lima. No, I want to see Paris, I want to know what it’s like to be a foreign woman in the land of the French Revolution, she had responded before going to apply for her visa at the embassy, waiting in endless lines until finally signing up for the Sorbonne by mail after having graduated at the top of her class at the Alianza Francesa in the center of Lima. In her head, she traveled through the red fields of quinoa in the Peruvian Andes as the water ran slowly toward the shower drain. She could still hear Madame Dupuy, she imagined her face disfigured by exasperation, she thought she should rush so Madame Dupuy would stop shouting her name, but then she dried herself off and emerged slowly from the torture chamber, pulled on a T-shirt with the Mona Lisa’s face, and went down the stairs two by two. She felt like she was crying, that her heart was crying for her sunny days, her Lima evenings, her walks through the city center, the sunset in Chorrillos. She was crying. For a few brief moments she felt she could return to her previous state, to her past life, and start again, but she was in her Parisian attic and had to pay the rent at the end of the month.

“The Shower” © Patricia de Souza. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2015 by Mara Faye Lethem. All rights reserved.

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE: Read an excerpt of Patricia de Souza’s recently re-issued novel Ursula’s Last Body

English Spanish (Original)

At first she stared at the window for a while, as her life paraded past in scenes: her mother’s house in Piura, the silent sun high over Piura’s dusty rooftops, which bristled with aluminum antennas marking the luminously streaked sky. Her mother’s house that smelled of Bolívar soap and rue plants beneath the gold sun that hung in the taut, infinite sky. She missed it all, but she was in Paris and there was nothing she could do about it. That was the harsh truth. She didn’t want to pull her feet out of the warm bed, until she thought, if I don’t get up, I won’t see Madame Dupuy to find out when I start cleaning the apartments. Then she watched a few birds flying swiftly beyond the other side of the window, not many, mostly crows that sometimes leaped onto the sidewalk and went booo!! On TV she’d once seen a show that said they were very crafty birds with quick minds, capable of feigning injury so they could steal food from other animals, even some sort of wildcat in southern France, the gennette. She kept imagining that she was still at home, beneath the warm sheets, until she began to feel anxious: she had to shower and the bathroom was in the hall, she’d have to tiptoe out so as not to disturb the people living on the top floor of the Parisian building. She imagined herself like one of the actresses in the film Les femmes du 6ème étage, the doomed souls forced to live in the servants’ quarters—like her apartment, where she’d rented the attic with the understanding that she would clean the middle-class apartments on the lower floors. When she held out the banknotes intended to pay her rent, Madame Dupuy smiled disdainfully with that bitter face of hers, quickly adding, that’s nothing! Rien, she said with that pointed French accent Úrsula was all too familiar with. She wrenched her legs from under the covers and planted her feet on the rug covered in cigarette burns and black and reddish stains. She approached the wall in front of her and tugged on one end of the wallpaper, which came loose, revealing a naked stretch of plaster eaten away by dampness and covered in blisters. Her telephone rang for a few seconds before stopping like a heart weary of showing signs of life. It was actually the incarnation of life, the conduit for the voices of her parents, her friends, sometimes even her Aunt Marina whom she missed so much. She thought how those communication networks were up in the sky watching over life on the entire planet, how everything could be recorded on some vaporous white cloud, invisibly and almost poetically. And it was terrifying, and she remembered the face of young Snowden warning of the dangers of handing our lives over to the satellites. It was both terrifying and fascinating. She was about to go shower . . . when someone knocked on the door.

“Hello, Yves.” Her neighbor was standing there, one hand holding a trembling tray with a teapot and two cups laid out elegantly like something out of a fairy tale.

“May I come in?” he asked, as if the answer was implied in the question, his gaze overpowering, as Úrsula observed his rigid jaw and almost yellow skin. Her mother said that people with short jaws were decisive and cold. His forehead was flat and his head was well-coiffed with gel, his torso was covered in a robe he had intentionally left loose, revealing some hair. He stood there looking at her incisively, with the somewhat perplexed expression of a zombie, thought Úrsula.

“I was going to . . .”

“You can have a cup of tea first,” he said. His accent was even more forced than Madame Dupuy’s, who the day before had asked her to go to the market and buy several bags filled with bottles of wine and champagne for the woman on the third floor, ordering her with a contemptuous gaze to not forget to deliver them on time, marking her status, establishing her role as the one in charge. Poor Madame Dupuy, she must have a rock where her heart should be, and she brought the heavy bags up, panting, to deliver them to a woman wearing a lot of makeup, with long nails and intense perfume, who immediately closed the door in her face without a glance. Úrsula thought she must be transparent, and Yves’s arrival seemed like a stroke of luck, almost benevolent.

“Well, let’s try that tea,” and she let him in. Yves stumbled over some newspapers before sitting in the only chair in the room, from Ikea, which Úrsula always sat in to pore over the newspapers she salvaged from the garbage cans behind a very heavy solid iron door in the basement. She followed all the current events in Greece, she felt Greek, she wanted to know everything about Syriza, and she’d also taken an interest in what was going on in Spain. And she told her mother, Look, when this starts happening in Peru, I’ll come home, this is new, Mama, believe me. But her mother didn’t believe her, she thought that perhaps her daughter was a bit of a naïve dreamer, she imagined her sleeping in cold beds in Paris and felt a little sorry for her. And that was it.

Yves finally sat down on the floor with his legs crossed and his torso straight, while she rushed to pull on a long T-shirt that covered her transparent nightgown as he began to speak, his eyes fixed on her breasts.

“Well,” said Úrsula, “should we have that tea, or what?”

Yves served the tea in silence, his hand quivering a little when he picked up the cup by its handle, making it wobble. He looked like a little Miura fighting bull, his nostrils opening to let out dense clouds of breath, cold as the morning.

They barely spoke, she noticed that every time she said something, he would look at her breasts again, it was starting to irritate her . . . Did you know that Madame Dupuy offered me the cleaning job? Poor thing, being the building’s bonne is a tough job. Madame Dupuy’s not so bad, Yves immediately added to soften what he’d just said, her son was killed in a motorcycle accident, and her husband is paralyzed on one side of his body . . . At that point their teacups were empty and she felt him teetering on his axis, as if meditating. The little fighting bull. Then he stood up and moved about impatiently. Úrsula followed suit, thinking that Yves was only two strides away from the exit, she was relieved, her bed was unmade and a bra hung from one end, well . . . Yves . . . she saw he was pale, mumbling something incomprehensible, Úrsula, forgive me, I didn’t want to say this, but, perhaps, if you . . . if you were more generous with me you wouldn’t have to do the cleaning . . .

She looked at him, thinking she should slap him, but the poor man, he was so ridiculous, so arrogant in his half-open Chinese robe, his feet in velvet slippers . . . she almost started to laugh when she felt the mass of his body against hers, seeking out her mouth like a suction cup, covering her with dense, transparent slobber as she kicked him, pounded on him, slipped out from under him. Once she was free from his grip, she pointed at him with her index finger and ordered: “Get out of here right now, right this minute or I can’t be held responsible for what I might do.”

“It was just an idea,” Yves responded cynically, his face red, his lips damp. How disgusting, thought Úrsula once he had stormed off in a huff like a deposed king about to throw a tantrum.

She went to find her towel and headed to the bathroom, to the shower, the Parisian attic’s torture chamber, which awaited her with its dim light, its damp walls, all its cold and all its squalor. She thought of Yves—ridiculous and humiliated—pacing around his 215-square-foot room; she was starting to feel sorry for him, he was such a miserable wretch that she couldn’t get mad at him. She had the feeling that they were somehow like siblings, another doomed soul like me, she thought. She felt repulsed by him, but mostly she felt sorry for herself. She didn’t know why in the hell she was studying philosophy at the Sorbonne, so many anxious mornings alone, so much fear of the future, there, in her country. Times have changed, suggested a friend from her department, philosophy has no place anymore, it’s increasingly obsolete, relegated to coffee shop debates. She’d heard the same thing said about sociology, another friend had made a similar comment: it’s disappearing. Books will also disappear, there’s an anthropological revolution afoot. Haven’t you realized? She approached the shower stall where the yellowing enamel gave off a scent of dampness mixed with urine, proof of the presence of other bodies in that same place, through their smells that lingered in the floor. She pulled on the chain of a dirty window that opened a dusty skylight to reveal the gray sky of Paris. She had to slam the shower’s frosted glass door several times before managing to close it, leaving barely any space for her body. She washed herself, watching as the soap slid down between her legs, it was pleasurable even though the place was as sordid and dark as a cave. If she extended her arms to rub herself with the towel, her elbows hit the plastic edges, if she leaned forward to soap up her feet, she felt the glass glued to her buttocks. Suddenly she heard someone shouting her name, it was Madame Dupuy’s voice and she wanted to imagine it was her mother’s, who actually rarely spoke to her in that tone. Her mother was practically illiterate, she hadn’t gotten past primary school, which was why her parents had decided to sacrifice the little money they were able to save up from selling fabric at their shop in Lima’s Gamarra shopping center so that their only daughter could study in France. Her father had failed to convince her mother that going all the way to France wasn’t worth it, that they were hostile there toward people with dark skin, that she’d be better off staying in her own country, that there were good universities in Lima. No, I want to see Paris, I want to know what it’s like to be a foreign woman in the land of the French Revolution, she had responded before going to apply for her visa at the embassy, waiting in endless lines until finally signing up for the Sorbonne by mail after having graduated at the top of her class at the Alianza Francesa in the center of Lima. In her head, she traveled through the red fields of quinoa in the Peruvian Andes as the water ran slowly toward the shower drain. She could still hear Madame Dupuy, she imagined her face disfigured by exasperation, she thought she should rush so Madame Dupuy would stop shouting her name, but then she dried herself off and emerged slowly from the torture chamber, pulled on a T-shirt with the Mona Lisa’s face, and went down the stairs two by two. She felt like she was crying, that her heart was crying for her sunny days, her Lima evenings, her walks through the city center, the sunset in Chorrillos. She was crying. For a few brief moments she felt she could return to her previous state, to her past life, and start again, but she was in her Parisian attic and had to pay the rent at the end of the month.

“The Shower” © Patricia de Souza. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2015 by Mara Faye Lethem. All rights reserved.

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE: Read an excerpt of Patricia de Souza’s recently re-issued novel Ursula’s Last Body

El Aseo

Primero se quedaba mirando la ventana un tiempo y su vida desfilaba en escenas delante de ella: la casa de su madre en Piura, el sol de Piura, alto y silencioso sobre los techos polvorientos de las casas erizadas de antenas en aluminio que marcaban el cielo de estrías luminosas. Esa casa de su madre que olía a jabón Bolívar y a plantas de ruda bajo el sol de oro colgado del cielo tenso e infinito, le hacían falta, pero estaba en París, y no podía hacer nada contra eso, era una verdad violenta. No quería sacar los pies de la cama, hasta que se dijo, si no me levanto, no veré a la señora Dupuy para saber cuándo empiezo a hacer la limpieza de los departamentos. Luego miraba pasar a través de la ventana algunos pájaros a vuelo raudo, eran pocos, la mayoría cuervos que a veces ahuyentaba saltando sobre la acera y haciendo ¡!buuu!!! Había visto en un programa de televisión que eran aves muy tramposas, de una inteligencia rápida, podían fingir que estaban heridas para robar comida engañando a otros animales, una especie de gato montés del sur de Francia, la Gennette. Seguía pensando que todavía estaba en su casa, bajo el calor de las sábanas, cuando sintió angustia, tendría que ducharse y el baño estaba en el corredor, debía salir de puntillas para no hacer ruido y no molestar a los ocupantes del último piso del edificio parisino. Se vio como una de las actrices en la película de Las mujeres del sexto piso, el piso de las condenadas de la tierra, es decir,  el suyo, donde había logrado que le alquilasen la buhardilla a cambio de que se comprometiera a hacer la limpieza de los departamentos burgueses de los pisos anteriores. Cuando extendió los billetes con los que pensaba pagar la renta, la señora Dupuy sonrió desdeñosa desde su cara de amargada, añadiendo enseguida,  ¡eso no es nada! Rien, dijo con su acento francés puntiagudo que ella conocía tan bien. Enseguida, sacó las piernas y plantó los pies sobre la alfombra llena de  quemaduras de cigarrillos, con manchas negras y otras tirando el rojo, se acercó al muro que tenía delante y jaló de un extremo del papel que se despegaba dejando desnudo un trozo de  yeso carcomido por la humedad, lleno de ampollas de agua.  Su teléfono sonó unos instantes hasta detenerse como un corazón cansado de dar señales de vida, en realidad él encarnaba la vida,  la voz de sus padres, de algunas amigas, a veces, su tía Marina, a quien extrañaba mucho. Pensó que esas redes de comunicación estaban en el cielo vigilando la vida de todo el planeta, que todo podía quedar grabado en alguna nube vaporosa y blanca, de manera casi poética e invisible. Y era aterrador,  y recordó la cara del joven Snowden advirtiendo del peligro de entregar su vida a los satélites. Era aterrador y al mismo tiempo fascinante. Iba a ir a ducharse… Y alguien llamaba a la puerta.

Hola Ives, su vecino estaba parado sosteniendo una bandeja con la mano donde temblaban una tetera y dos tazas dispuestas con gracia, con la indulgencia de un cuento de hadas.

¿Puedo pasar?, preguntó como si la respuesta estuviese integrada, su mirada dominaba cuando Úrsula observó su mandíbula rígida,  de piel casi amarilla. Su madre decía que las personas con mandíbula corta eran personas decididas, frías. Su frente era chata y la cabeza estaba bien peinada, con gomina,  el torso iba envuelto en una bata que había dejado a propósito abierta, se veían algunos vellos, mientras estaba de pie, mirándola de una forma incisiva, con una expresión un poco perpleja, de zombi, pensó Úrsula.

Iba a ir a…

Puedes tomar un té antes, dijo con un acento aun más forzado que el de Madame Dupuy, quien  le había encargado el día anterior varias bolsas de mercado repletas de botellas de vino y champagne para la señora del tercer piso, ordenándole con la mirada displicente que no olvidase entregarlas a la hora, marcando categorías, colocándose en el rol de la patrona. Pobre Madame Dupuy, en lugar de corazón debía tener un pedazo de mineral, y subió bufando las bolsas pesadísimas que entregó a una mujer muy maquillada, de uñas largas y perfume intenso, que enseguida le cerró la puerta en la cara, sin mirarla. Pensó que era transparente y la llegada de Ives le pareció un azar feliz, casi bondadoso.

Bueno, a ver, qué tal está ese té, y lo dejó pasar. Ives tropezó primero con varios periódicos antes de ir a sentarse en la única silla de Ikea que tenía en la pieza, donde ella se sentaba a devorar los periódicos que recuperaba de los tachos de basura en el sótano, tras una puerta de fierro maciza, muy pesada. Seguía toda la actualidad de Grecia, se sentía griega, quería saber todo sobre Syriza, luego había empezado a interesarse en España. Y le hablaba a su mamá, le decía, mira, cuando esto suceda en el Perú, me regreso, esto es nuevo, madre, créeme. Pero su madre no le creía, pensaba a lo mejor que su hija era un poco ingenua y soñadora, la imaginaba durmiendo en camas frías en París y sentía un poco de pena. Y eso era todo.

Ives se fue a sentar finalmente en el suelo, piernas cruzadas y torso enhiesto, mientras ella se apuraba en enfundarse una camiseta larga que cubriese el pijama de tela transparente  y él empezase a hablar fijando la mirada en sus senos.

Bueno, dijo Úrsula, ¿tomamos ese té, o qué?

Ives sirvió silencioso, la mano le temblaba un poco cuando agarraba el asa de la taza haciéndola tambalear.  Parecía un torito de miura, las fosas nasales se abrían dejando pasar una respiración densa, fría como la mañana.

 

Casi no hablaron, notó que siempre que ella decía algo, volvía a mirarle los senos, empezaba a irritarse… ¿Sabes que Madame Dupuy me ha propuesto hacer la limpieza? Pobre, ese sí que es un trabajo pesado, ser la “bonne” del edificio. No es tan mala la Madame Dupuy,  agregó Ives inmediatamente para suavizar lo que acababa de decir, un hijo suyo se murió en un accidente  de moto en la calle, y su esposo es hemipléjico…

Dicho esto, las tazas se habían quedado vacías y, como meditando, lo sintió titubear sobre su eje. El torito. Luego se levantó y empezó a moverse con impaciencia. Úrsula hizo los mismo pensando que solo hacían falta dos pasos para que Ives alcanzara la puerta para marcharse, estaba aliviada, su cama estaba sin hacer y un sostén colgaba de un extremo, bueno… Ives… lo vio pálido, murmurando algo medio incomprensible, Úrsula, perdona, no quería decirte esto, pero, tal vez, si tú… si tú fueses más generosa conmigo podrías evitarte la limpieza…

Ella lo miró pensando en darle una cachetada, pobre hombre, se le veía tan ridículo, tan arrogante con su bata china medio abierta, sus pies dentro de las pantuflas de terciopelo, casi empezaba a reír cuando sintió la mole de su cuerpo pegándose al suyo, buscando su  boca a manera de ventosa, cubriéndola de baba densa y transparente mientras ella pataleaba, daba golpes, zafaba por abajo. Se deslizó y luego lo señaló con el dedo índice y le ordenó: Te vas inmediatamente, inmediatamente o no respondo por mí.

Era solo una idea, respondió con cinismo Ives que tenía la cara enrojecida, los labios húmedos, qué asco, pensó, Úrsula en cuanto se fue desairado, como un rey depuesto, a punto de hacer una pataleta infantil.  

Fue a buscar su toalla y se dirigió a la sala de aseo, la ducha, esa sala de tortura de las buhardillas parisinas, estaba esperando por ella con su poca luz, sus paredes húmedas, todo su frío y toda su miseria. Pensó en Ives dando vueltas en su cuarto de veinte metros cuadrados, ridículo y humillado, le empezaba a dar pena, era tanta miseria que no podía enfadarse con él. Le parecía que eran de alguna manera hermanos, otro condenado como yo, pensó. Aunque sentía asco, pero, sobre todo, se daba pena a sí misma. No sabía para qué demonios estudiaba filosofía en La Sorbona, tantas mañanas angustiada, sola, tanto miedo del futuro, allá, en su país. Los tiempos han cambiado, le había sugerido un amigo de la “fac”, la filosofía no sirve para nada, está cada vez más obsoleta, son discusiones de café. Había oído lo mismo sobre la sociología, otro amigo le había dicho un poco lo mismo: desaparecerá. Los libros también desaparecerán, hay una revolución antropológica. ¿No te has dado cuenta? Se acercó a la cubeta de la ducha donde el esmalte se veía teñido de amarillo, despidiendo un olor a humedad, mezclado al de orín, una prueba de la presencia de otros cuerpos en ese mismo lugar a través de sus olores adheridos al el suelo. Tiró de la cadena de una ventana sucia que se abría a una claraboya cargada de polvo, desde donde se adivinaba el cielo gris de París. Se golpeó varias veces  antes de lograr cerrar el vidrio labrado de la ducha que apenas dejaba espacio para el cuerpo. Se lavaba viendo correr el jabón entre sus piernas, era un disfrute aunque el lugar fuese sórdido y oscuro como una caverna. Si estiraba los brazos para frotarse con la toalla sus codos golpeaban los bordes de plástico, si se inclinaba para jabonarse los pies, sentía el vidrio pegado a las nalgas. De pronto oyó que alguien gritaba su nombre, era la voz de Madame Dupuy y quiso confundirla con la de su madre que rara vez le hablaba en voz alta. Su madre era casi una analfabeta, no había hecho más que la primaria por lo que sus padres habían decidido sacrificar el poco dinero que ahorraban en la venta de telas en de su tienda de Gamarra, en Lima, para que su hija única pudiese estudiar en Francia. Su padre había protestado sin convencer a su madre de que no valía la pena ir a Francia, que allí maltrataban a los de piel oscura, que mejor estaría en su país, en Lima había buenas universidades. No, quiero ver París, quiero conocer lo que es ser una mujer extranjera en la tierra de la revolución francesa, había respondido antes de ir a tramitar una visa a la Embajada, hacer colas interminables, hasta terminar por inscribirse por correo en La sorbona, después de haber sacado el diploma más alto de la Alianza francesa en el centro de Lima. Recorría mentalmente los campos rojos de quinua de las regiones andinas de su país mientras el agua corría lenta, hacia el agujero de la ducha. Siguió oyendo a la Madame Dupuy, su cara casi siempre se desfiguraba en una mueca de hartazgo, pensó que debía salir corriendo para que dejase de gritar su nombre,  pero entonces se secaba y salía despacio de la sala de castigo, se enfundaba una camiseta con la cara de la Gioconda, y bajaba al grandes zancadas las escaleras. Sintió que lloraba, que su corazón lloraba sus días soleados, sus tardes en Lima, sus paseos por el centro, la puesta de sol en Chorrillos. Lloraba. Solo por unos instantes sintió que podía regresar al estado anterior, a una vida pasada y empezar de nuevo, pero estaba ahí en su buhardilla de París y tenía que pagar el alquiler al final del mes.

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