In One Person

my hotel before I went to bed. I was too tired to appreciate the muscle-bound waiters in T-shirts at the Mama Ines Cafe on Hortaleza; there were mostly men in couples, and a woman who was alone. She was wearing flip-flops and a halter top; she had an angular face and looked very sad, resting her mouth on one hand. I almost tried to pick her up. I remember wondering if, in Spain, the women were very thin until they suddenly became fat. I was noticing a certain type of man—skinny in a tank top, but with a small and helpless-looking potbelly.

I had a cafe con leche as late as 5 P.M.—very unlike me, too late in the day for me to drink coffee, but I was trying to stay awake. I later found a bookstore on the Calle de Gravina—Libros, I believe it was called. (I’m not kidding, a bookstore called “Books.”) The English novel, in English, was well represented there, but there was nothing contemporary—not even from the twentieth century. I browsed the fiction section for a while. Diagonally across the street, on the corner of San Gregorio, was what looked like a popular bar—the Angel Sierra. The siesta must have been over by the time I left the bookstore, because that bar was beginning to get crowded.

I passed a coffeehouse, also on the Calle de Gravino, with some older, stylishly dressed lesbians sitting at a window table—to my limited knowledge, the only lesbians I spotted in Chueca, and almost the only women I saw anywhere in that district. But it was still early in the evening, and I knew that everything in Spain happens late. (I’d been in Barcelona before, on translation trips. My Spanish-language publisher is based there.)

As I was leaving Chueca—for that long walk back to the Santo Mauro—I stopped in at a bear bar on the Calle de las Infantas. The bar called Hot was packed with men standing chest to chest and back to back. They were older men, and you know what bears are like—ordinary-looking men, chubby guys with beards, many beer drinkers among them. It was Spain, so of course there was a lot of smoking; I didn’t stay long, but Hot had a friendly atmosphere. The shirtless bartenders were the youngest guys in the place—they were hot, all right.

THE DAPPER LITTLE MAN who met me at a restaurant in the Plaza Mayor the following night did not immediately summon to mind a young soldier with his pants down at his ankles, reading Madame Bovary in a storm at sea, while—on his bare bum—he skipped over a row of toilet seats to meet my young father.

Senor Bovary’s hair was neatly trimmed and all white, as were the short bristles of his no-nonsense mustache. He wore a pressed, short-sleeved white shirt with two breast pockets—one for his reading glasses, the other armed with pens. His khaki trousers were sharply creased; perhaps the only contemporary components of the fastidious man’s old-fashioned image were his sandals. They were the kind of sandals that young outdoorsmen wear when they wade in raging rivers and run through fast-flowing streams—those sandals that have the built-up and serious-looking treads of running shoes.

“Bovary,” he said; he extended his hand, palm down, so that I didn’t know if he expected me to shake it or kiss it. (I shook it.)

“I’m so glad you contacted me,” I told him.

“I don’t know what your father has been waiting for, now that your mother—una mujer dificil, ‘a difficult woman’—has been dead for thirty-two years. It is thirty- two, isn’t it?” the little man asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Let me know what your HIV status is; I’ll tell your father,” Bovary said. “He’s dying to hear, but I know him —he’ll never ask you himself. He’ll just worry about it after you’ve gone back home. He’s an impossible procrastinator!” Bovary exclaimed affectionately, giving me a small, twinkling smile.

I told him: I keep testing negative; I don’t have HIV disease.

“No toxic cocktail for you—that’s the ticket!” Senor Bovary exclaimed. “We don’t have the virus, either—if you’re interested. I admit to having had sex only with your father, and—save that truly disastrous dalliance with your mom—your dad has had sex only with me. How boring is that?” the little man asked me, smiling more. “I’ve read your writing—so, of course, has your father. On the evidence of what you’ve written about— well, one can’t blame your dad for worrying about you! If half of what you write about has happened to you, you must have had sex with everyone!”

“With men and women, yes—with everyone, no,” I said, smiling back at him.

“I’m only asking because he won’t ask. Honestly, you’ll meet your father, and you’ll feel you’ve had interviews that are more in-depth than anything he’ll ask you or even say to you,” Senor Bovary warned me. “It isn’t that he doesn’t care—I’m not exaggerating when I say he’s always worrying about you—but your father is a man who believes your privacy is not to be invaded. Your dad is a very private man. I’ve only ever seen him be public about one thing.”

“And that is?” I asked.

“I’m not going to spoil the show. We should be going, anyway,” Senor Bovary said, looking at his watch.

“What show?” I asked him.

“Look, I’m not the performer—I just manage the money,” Bovary said. “You’re the writer in the family, but your father does know how to tell a story—even if it’s always the same story.”

I followed him, at a fairly fast pace, from the Plaza Mayor to the Puerta del Sol. Bovary must have had those special sandals because he was a walker; I’ll bet he walked everywhere in Madrid. He was a trim, fit man; he’d had very little to eat for dinner, and nothing to drink but mineral water.

It was probably nine or ten o’clock at night, but there were a lot of people in the streets. As we walked up Montero, we passed some prostitutes—“working girls,” Bovary called them.

I heard one of them say the guapo word.

“She says you’re handsome,” Senor Bovary translated.

“Perhaps she means you,” I told him; he was very handsome, I thought.

“She doesn’t mean me—she knows me,” was all Bovary said. He was all business —Mr. Money Manager, I was thinking.

Then we crossed the Gran Via into Chueca, by that towering building—the Telefonica. “We’re still a little early,” Senor Bovary was saying, as he looked again at his watch. He seemed to consider (then he reconsidered) taking a detour. “There’s a bear bar on this street,” he said, pausing at the intersection of Hortaleza and the Calle de las Infantas.

“Yes, Hot—I had a beer there last night,” I told him.

“Bears are all right, if you like bellies,” Bovary said.

“I have nothing against bears—I just like beer,” I said. “It’s all I drink.”

“I just drink agua con gas,” Senor Bovary said, giving me his small, twinkling smile.

“Mineral water, with bubbles—right?” I asked him.

“I guess we both like bubbles,” was all Bovary said; he had continued walking along Hortaleza. I wasn’t paying very close attention to the street, but I recognized that nightclub with the Portuguese name—A Noite.

When Senor Bovary led me inside, I asked, “Oh, is this the club?”

“Mercifully, no,” the little man replied. “We’re just killing time. If the show were starting here, I wouldn’t have brought you, but the show starts very late here. It’s safe just to have a drink.”

There were some skinny gay boys hanging around the bar. “If you were alone, they’d be all over you,” Bovary told me. It was a black marble bar, or maybe it was polished granite. I had a beer and Senor Bovary had an agua con gas while we waited.

There was a blue-tinted ballroom and a proscenium stage at A Noite; they were playing Sinatra songs backstage. When I quietly used the retro word for the nightclub, all Bovary said was, “To be kind.” He kept checking his watch.

When we went out on Hortaleza again, it was almost 11 P.M.; I had never seen as many people on the street. When Bovary brought me to the club, I realized I’d walked past it and not noticed it—at least twice. It was a