The Unknown University (41 page)

One night, the old man who brought them (there were three of them that
time, an old man and two boys) offered us a show.
We’d never seen one.
How much does
it cost?
I said.
Nothing.
Laura told them to come in.
The steam room was cold.
Laura
took off her towel and turned the valve: steam started rising from the floor.
I felt
like we were in a Nazi shower and they were going to gas us; the feeling grew more
intense when I saw the two boys come in, very skinny and dark, and behind them the
old procurer covered only by some indescribably dirty underpants.
Laura laughed.
The
boys looked at her, a little shy, standing in the middle of the room.
Then they too
laughed.
Without removing his horrific undergarment, the old man sat between Laura
and me.
Do you just want to watch or watch and participate?
Watch, I said.
We’ll
see, said Laura, very given to this sort of risk.
The boys, then, as if they’d heard
a commanding voice, kneeled down and started to lather each other’s privates with
soap.
In their gestures, learned and mechanical, you could see how tired they were
and glimpse a series of tremors which could easily be related to Laura’s presence.
Time passed.
The room recovered its density of steam.
The actors, however,
motionless in their starting pose, seemed frozen: kneeling down face to face, but
kneeling in a grotesquely artistic way, masturbating each other with the left hand
while keeping balance with the right.
They looked like birds.
Metal engravings of
birds.
They must be tired, they aren’t getting it up, said the old man.
Indeed, the
soapy cocks only pointed timidly upward.
Don’t lose her, boys, said the old man.
Laura started to laugh again.
How do you expect us to concentrate if you keep
laughing all the time?
said one of the boys.
Laura got up, passed by them and leaned
against the wall.
Now the two tired performers were between us.
I felt like time was
tearing apart inside me.
The old man mumbled something.
I looked at him.
He had his
eyes closed and appeared to be sleeping.
We haven’t slept in such a long time, said
one of the boys, letting go of his partner’s penis.
Laura smiled at him.
Next to me
the old man started to snore.
The boys smiled, relieved, and adopted a more
comfortable posture.
I heard their bones crack.
Laura let herself slide down the
wall until her butt was on the tile.
You’re very skinny, she said to one of them.
Me?
He is too, the boy responded, and you.
In fact, we were all skinny.
The whistle
of the steam, on occasion, made it hard to distinguish the voices, which were too
quiet.
Laura’s body, back against the wall, knees lifted, was covered in sweat: the
drops slid down her nose, down her neck, made grooves between her breasts and even
hung from her pubic hair before falling on the hot tiles.
We’re melting, I mumbled,
and suddenly felt sad.
Laura nodded.
She seemed so sweet in that moment.
Where are
we?
I thought.
With the back of my hand I wiped away drops that slid from my
eyebrows to my eyes and kept me from seeing.
One of the boys sighed.
I’m so tired,
he said.
Sleep, Laura recommended.
It was strange: I felt like the lights were
dimming, losing intensity; I was afraid I might faint; then I figured it must be the
excess of steam changing the colors and tones, so much darker now.
As if we were
seeing the sunset, here, inside, without windows, I thought.
Whiskey and Mary Jane
are not good company.
As if reading my mind Laura said, don’t worry, everything’s
fine.
And then she started smiling again, not a mocking smile, not as if she were
enjoying herself, but a terminal smile, a knotted smile somewhere between a
sensation of beauty and misery, though not even beauty and misery per se, but Little
Beauty and Little Misery, paradoxical dwarves, traveling and inapprehensible
dwarves.
Relax, it’s just steam, Laura said.
The boys, ready to take everything
Laura said as irrefutable, nodded over and over.
Then one of them let himself drop
to the tiles, head propped on his arm, and fell asleep.
I got up, careful not to
wake the old man, and moved closer to Laura; squatting next to her I buried my face
in her humid and fragrant hair.
I felt Laura’s fingers caress my shoulder.
In a
little while I realized Laura was playing, very gently, but it was a game: her pinky
was sunbathing on my shoulder, then her ring finger would pass and they’d greet one
another with a kiss, then the thumb would appear and both, pinky and ring finger,
would flee down the arm.
The thumb was then king of the shoulder and would lie down
to sleep, it seemed to me he even ate some vegetable that grew up there, for the
fingernail dug in my flesh, until the pinky and ring finger returned accompanied by
the middle and index fingers and all together they would frighten the thumb who hid
behind an ear and spied on the other fingers from there, without understanding why
they’d thrown him out, while the others danced on the shoulder and drank and made
love and, out of sheer drunkenness, lost their balance and fell off the cliff and
down the back, an accident Laura would take advantage of in order to hug me and
lightly touch her lips to mine, in the meantime the four fingers, terribly bruised,
would climb up again clinging to my vertebrae, and the thumb would observe them
without ever thinking to leave his ear.
Your face is glistening, I whispered.
Your
eyes.
The tips of your nipples.
You, too, said Laura, a little pale, I guess, but
you’re glistening.
It’s steam mixed with sweat.
One of the boys was watching us in
silence.
Do you really love him?
he asked Laura.
His eyes were enormous and black.
I
sat on the floor.
Yes, Laura said.
He must be madly in love with you, said the boy.
Laura laughed like a housewife.
Yes, Laura said.
With good reason, said the boy.
Yeah, I said, with good reason.
Do you know what steam mixed with sweat tastes like?
It depends on the particular flavor of each person.
The boy lay down next to his
partner, on his side, his temple pressed right against the tiles, without closing
his eyes.
His cock was hard now.
He touched Laura’s legs with his knees.
He blinked
a few times before speaking.
Let’s fuck a little, he said.
Laura didn’t answer.
The
boy appeared to be speaking for his own benefit.
Do you know what a little steam
mixed with a little sweat tastes like?
What it would really taste like?
What the
flavor would be?
The heat was putting us to sleep.
The old man slipped until he was
lying down completely on the bench.
The sleeping boy’s body had curled into a ball,
his arm wrapped around the waist of the one who was awake.
Laura stood and watched
us at length from above.
I thought she was going to turn on the shower, which would
have had fatal effects on those who were sleeping.
It’s hot, she said.
It’s
unbearably hot.
If they weren’t here (she referred to the trio) I’d ask the bar to
bring me a soda.
You still can, I said, no one’s going to come all the way in here.
No, Laura said, it’s not that.
Should I turn off the steam?
No, Laura said.
The boy,
head slanted, stared fixedly at my feet.
Maybe he wants to make love to you.
Before
I could answer, the boy, almost without moving his lips, pronounced a laconic no.
I
was kidding, said Laura.
Then she kneeled down beside him and with one hand caressed
his buttocks.
I saw, in a fleeting and disturbing vision, how the drops of sweat
moved from the boy’s body to Laura’s and vice versa.
The long fingers on my friend’s
hand and the boy’s buttocks glistened humid and identical.
You must be tired, said
Laura, that old man is crazy, how can he expect you to fuck each other here.
Her
hand slid over the boy’s buttocks.
It’s not his fault, he whispered, the poor guy
has forgotten what a bed is.
And what clean underwear is, added Laura.
He’d be
better off wearing nothing.
Yeah, I said, it’s more comfortable.
Less awkward, said
the boy, but wouldn’t it be great to put on clean white underpants.
Tight ones, but
not too tight.
Laura and I laughed.
The boy scolded us calmly: don’t laugh, this is
serious.
His eyes seemed erased, gray eyes like cement beneath the rain.
Laura
grabbed his cock with both hands and yanked it.
I heard myself saying, should I turn
off the steam?
but the voice was weak and far away.
Where the fuck does your manager
sleep?
said Laura.
The boy shrugged; you’re kind of hurting me, he whispered.
I held
onto Laura’s ankle, with the other hand I wiped away the sweat getting into my eyes.
The boy straightened until he was sitting up, with restrained gestures, trying not
to wake his partner, and kissed Laura.
I bowed my head to see them better: the boy’s
lips, thick, sucked on Laura’s lips, closed, where you could just barely make out a
smile.
I squinted.
I’d never seen her smile so peacefully.
Suddenly the steam hid
her.
I felt a kind of detached terror.
Fear the steam would kill Laura?
When their
lips separated, the boy said he didn’t know where the old man slept.
He put one hand
to his neck and made a slicing gesture.
Then he caressed Laura’s neck and pulled her
even closer.
Laura’s body, elastic, adapted to the new posture.
Her gaze was fixed
on the wall, on what the steam allowed her to see of the wall, her torso forward,
breasts grazing the boy’s chest or pressed against him with gentle strength.
The
steam, at times, made them invisible, or half covered them, or silvered them, or
plunged them into something like a dream.
Finally it was impossible for me to see
her.
First one shadow on top of another shadow.
Then nothing.
The chamber seemed
about to explode.
I waited a few seconds but nothing changed, on the contrary, I got
the impression the steam was thickening more and more.
I reached out a hand and
touched Laura’s back, arched on top of what I assumed was the boy’s body.
I stood
and took two steps along the wall.
I heard Laura calling me.
A Laura with her mouth
full.
What do you want?
I said.
I’m suffocating.
I went back, less carefully than
before, and bent down, feeling my way around the place where I figured they must be.
I only touched hot tiles.
I thought I was dreaming or going crazy.
I bit my hand so
I wouldn’t scream.
Laura?
I moaned.
Beside me the boy’s voice sounded like a distant
thunder: the boy according to whom steam mixed with sweat tastes distinctly.
I stood
up again, this time ready to start kicking blindly, but I checked myself.
Turn off
the steam, said Laura from somewhere.
In fits and starts I was able to get to the
bench.
While ducking to look for the main valves, I heard the old man’s snores
practically in my ear.
He’s still alive, I thought, and turned off the steam.
At
first nothing happened.
Then, before the silhouettes recovered their visibility,
someone opened the door and exited the steam chamber.
I waited, whoever it was was
in the other room and making quite a bit of noise.
Laura, I called quietly.
No one
answered.
Finally I could see the old man, still sleeping.
On the floor, one in
fetal position and the other stretched out, the two actors.
The insomniac appeared
to really be sleeping.
I jumped over them.
In the room with the divan Laura was
already dressed.
She threw me my clothes without saying a word.
What happened?
I
said.
Let’s go, said Laura.
We saw this trio again a couple times, once at those
same baths, the other time at some in Azcapotzalco, the baths of hell, as Laura
called them, but things were never the same.
At most we smoked a cigarette, then
adios.