Learning to Lose Read Free

bibles of teen taste.
    Hey, Dani, Sunday’s my birthday. Oh, yeah? Happy birthday. I’m having a little party at my house … Mai’s coming. And a few other people. You wanna come? Dani doesn’t answer right away. Sunday? Yeah, in the afternoon, on the early side. Around four-thirty, five. Um, I’m not sure if I have plans.
    They walk along the street. Cars two rows deep and the sound of honking horns. The northern exit of the school has traffic jams on Fridays. The junction of avenues is presided over by a Corte Inglés department store, triumphant like a moderncathedral. A blond American actress with a suspiciously perfect nose encourages autumnal spending. Dani’s jeans fall from his waist, their bottoms frayed at his heels. Sylvia is convinced that her lips are too thin and she tries to make them look bigger with an expression she’s practiced in front of the mirror two thousand times, the slightly open mouth.
    Will there be potato chips, Coca-Cola, sandwiches? he asks. Yeah, of course, and a clown that blows up dick-shaped balloons. Sylvia adjusts her backpack on her shoulder. Are you gonna come? Dani nods. Sixteen, right? he adds. Yup, sixteen. An old lady.
    Sylvia’s hair floats up over her shoulders as she walks. She is wearing it down and as she steps off the curb it rises weightlessly and then drifts back to its original position. Dani heads toward the metro. As they say good-bye, she’s about to tell him the truth. There is no party. It’s all just a stupid tactic to get him alone. But she just answers his ciao with an identical one of her own.
    Sylvia walks toward her house. There is a slight breeze that hits her back and pushes a curl toward her cheek. As she always does when she’s nervous, Sylvia chews on a lock of hair, walking with it in her mouth.

2
    Aurora broke her hip in a completely unspectacular way. Getting out of the bathtub, she lifted her leg over the edge and suddenly heard a small crunch. She felt a slight shiver and herlegs turned rubbery. She fell slowly, with time to brush the tips of her fingers along the wall tiles and prepare for the impact. Her elbow hit the fixtures, causing a cold pain, and a second later she was lying down, naked and overcome, on the still-damp bottom of the bathtub. Papá, she wanted to shout, but the sound came out weak. She tried to raise her voice, but the best she could do was emit a repetitive, well-spaced-out lament.
    Papá … Papá … Papá.
    The murmur reaches the little back room, where Leandro is reading the newspaper. His first reaction is to think that his wife is calling him for another one of her ridiculous requests, for him to get down a jar of spices on a too-high shelf, to ask him something silly. So he answers with an apathetic what? that gets no reply. He leisurely closes the newspaper and stands up. Later he will be ashamed of the irritation he feels at having to stop reading. It’s always the same: he sits down to read and she talks to him over the radio or the ringing telephone. Or the doorbell sounds and she asks, can you get it? when he already has the intercom receiver in his hand. He goes down the hallway until he identifies where the monotonous call is coming from. There is no urgency in Aurora’s voice. Perhaps fatalism. When he opens the bathroom door and finds his fallen wife, he thinks that she’s sick, dizzy. He looks for blood, vomit, but all he sees is the white of the bathtub and her glazed, naked skin.
    Without exchanging a word, in a strange silence, Leandro prepares to pick her up. He takes her old whitish body in his arms. The flaccid flesh, the melted breasts, the inert arms and thighs, the veins that show through in violet lines.
    No, don’t move me. I think I broke something. Did you slip? No, all of a sudden … Where does it hurt? I don’t know. Don’t worry. In a gesture he can’t quite explain, Leandro, who has been married to Aurora for forty-seven years, grabs a nearby towel and covers his