The Spirit of Science Fiction

Chapter 27

Laura and I didn’t make love that afternoon. We tried, but it didn’t happen. Or at least that’s what I thought at the time. Now I’m not so sure. We probably did make love. That was what Laura said, and she was the one who introduced me to the world of public bathhouses, which, beginning that day and for a long time after, I would associate with pleasure and play.

The first was definitely the best. It was called the Gimnasio Moctezuma, and in the lobby some unknown artist had painted a mural of the Aztec emperor up to his neck in a pool. Around the edges of the pool, near the monarch but much smaller, smiling men and women washed. Everyone seemed cheerful, except for the king, who stared out of the mural as if pursuing the unlikely spectator with wide, dark eyes in which many times I thought I glimpsed terror. The water of the pool was green. The stones were gray. In the background, mountains and storm clouds were visible.

The attendant at the Gimnasio Moctezuma was an orphan, and that was his main topic of conversation. On our third or fourth visit, we became friends. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen; he wanted to buy a car, so he was saving everything he could, basically his tips, which were few and far between. According to Laura, he was half retarded. I liked him. At every public bathhouse, there’s a fight at some point. At this place, we never saw or heard a single one. The clients, conditioned by some unknown mechanism, followed the attendant’s instructions to the letter. And the truth is that few people came, which is something I’ll never be able to explain, because it was a clean, relatively modern place, with private cubicles for steam baths, and bar service to the cubicles, and, most important, it was cheap.

It was there, in Cubicle 10, that I saw Laura naked for the first time, and all I managed to do was smile and touch her shoulder and say that I didn’t know which tap to turn to make steam come out. The cubicles, though it would be more accurate to call them private rooms, were a set of two tiny compartments connected by a glass door; in the first, there was usually a divan or old sofa (shades of psychoanalysis and the brothel), a folding table, and a coatrack; the second room was the steam bath properly speaking, with a hot- and cold-water shower and a tile bench built into the wall, under which the steam pipes were hidden.

Moving from one room to the next was extraordinary, especially if it was so steamy in the inner room that we couldn’t see each other. Then we would open the door and come into the divan room, where everything was sharp and clear, trailing clouds of vapor like the vanishing filaments of a dream. Lying there hand in hand, we listened or tried to listen to the barely perceptible sounds of the Gimnasio as our bodies cooled. Chilled nearly to the bone, deep in silence, at last we could hear the rumble that issued from floor and walls, the feline purr of hot-water pipes and boilers in some secret part of the building, fueling the enterprise.

“Someday I’ll go exploring around here,” said Laura.

She had more experience in trips to public bathhouses, which was easy enough, since I had never crossed the threshold of a place like this before. Nevertheless she claimed to know nothing about the baths. Or not enough. She had been with César a few times and, before César, with a guy twice her age, someone to whom she occasionally alluded mysteriously. In total she hadn’t been more than ten times, all to the same place, the Gimnasio Moctezuma.

Together, on the Benelli, which I had mastered by now, we tried to make the rounds of every bathhouse in Mexico City, driven by an all-consuming urge that was a mixture of love and play. We never managed it. In fact, the more places we visited, the wider the abyss that yawned around us, the greater the black stage set of the public baths. Just as the hidden faces of other cities may be theaters, parks, docks, beaches, labyrinths, churches, brothels, bars, cheap movie houses, old buildings, and even supermarkets, the hidden face of Mexico City is its enormous network of public baths, legal, semilegal, and underground.

Our strategy as we set off on this quest was simple: I asked the attendant at the Gimnasio Moctezuma to give me the addresses of a few cheap bathhouses. He passed me five business cards and wrote down the street names and numbers of a dozen different establishments. These were the first. After each one, the search branched countless times. Schedules varied as widely as facilities. Some spots we came to at ten in the morning and left at lunchtime. These, as a rule, were bright, crumbling places, where sometimes we could hear the laughter of adolescents and the coughs of lost, lonely men who, after a while, feeling better, began to sing boleros. Here the motto seemed to be limbo, a dead child’s closed eyes. They weren’t very clean places, or maybe the cleaning was done after midday. At others we made our appearance at four or five in the afternoon and didn’t leave until nightfall. (This was our most common practice.) Bathhouses at this time of day seemed to luxuriate—or languish—in a permanent dusk. An artificial dusk, I mean: a dome or a palm tree, the closest thing to a marsupial pouch, welcome at first but gradually coming to weigh on visitors like a tombstone. The busiest time for bathhouses was seven, seven thirty, eight at night. On the sidewalk by the door, young men stood guard talking baseball and the latest hits. The hallways echoed with the grim jokes of workers just out of factories and shops. In the lobby, the old queers, birds of passage, called each of the receptionists and the loafers whiling away the time in chairs by their first names or noms de guerre. Wandering the hallways, feeding one’s indiscreet curiosity in small doses, or pinches, never failed to be highly instructive. Like landslides or earthquake cracks, the open or half-open doors presented vivid tableaux to the lucky observer: groups of naked men where any movement or action was courtesy of the steam; adolescents lost like jaguars in a labyrinth of showers; the tiny but terrifying gestures of athletes, weightlifters, and lone men; a leper’s clothes hanging on a hook; little old men drinking Lulú and smiling, propped against the wooden door to the sauna…

It was easy to make friends, and we made them. Couples, after meeting a few times in the hallway, felt obliged to greet each other. This was due to a kind of heterosexual solidarity; in many of the public bathhouses, women were an absolute minority, and it wasn’t unusual to hear extravagant tales of assaults and harassment, though the truth is that those stories weren’t always trustworthy. Friendships like this never went further than a beer or a drink at the bar. At the baths, we said hello, or at most we got neighboring rooms. After a while, the first couple to finish knocked at the other couple’s door, and, without waiting for a reply, announced that they would be at Restaurant X. Then the second couple emerged, stopped by the restaurant, had a few drinks, and that was it until their next encounter. Sometimes the couple shared confidences, the woman or the man, especially if they were married but not to each other; they’d tell their life stories, and you’d have to nod, say that’s love, that’s life, that’s fate, that’s kids. Sweet but boring.

The other, more troublesome kind of friends were those who came right into your private room. They could be as boring as the first kind, but much more dangerous. They turned up with no warning, just knocked at the door—a strange, quick knock—and said let us in. They were hardly ever alone; usually there were three of them, two men and a woman, or three men; the reasons offered for their visit were usually implausible or stupid: they wanted to smoke a little weed, which they couldn’t do in the collective showers, or they wanted to sell some random thing. Laura always let them in. The first few times, I got tense, ready to fight and fall bloodstained to the tiles. I thought it was only logical that they had come to rob us or rape Laura or even to rape me, and I was about to jump out of my skin. Somehow the visitors knew that, and they spoke to me only when they had to or when it would’ve been rude not to. All propositions, deals, and whisperings were addressed to Laura. It was she who opened the door, it was she who asked what the fuck they wanted, it was she who let them into the little divan room. (I listened from the steam room as they sat down, first one, then the other, then the other; Laura’s back, very still, was visible through the glass door that separated the steam room from the anteroom, which had suddenly become a place of mystery.) Finally I got up, wrapped a towel around my waist, and went in. A man and two boys or a man and a boy and a girl nodded uncertainly when they saw me, as if from the very beginning and against all logic they had come here for Laura and not for both of us; as if they had expected to find only her. They sat on the divan, their dark eyes not missing a single one of her movements, while their hands rolled joints as if of their own accord. The conversations seemed coded in a language I didn’t know, certainly not the slang I spoke with my friends, though now I can hardly remember it, but a much more affectionate kind of talk in which each word and each sentence had a trace of burials and holes. (Once when Laura was there, Jan said that it might be Air Hole, one of the bizarre manifestations of the Immaculate Grave. Maybe, maybe not.) In any case, I talked, too, or I tried. It wasn’t easy, but I tried. Sometimes, along with the weed, they brought out bottles of alcohol. The bottles weren’t free, but we didn’t pay for them. Our visitors were in the business of selling marijuana, whiskey, and turtle eggs in the private rooms, rarely with the blessing of the attendant or the cleaning people, who chased them relentlessly; that was why it was so important for them to be let in by somebody; they also sold performances, which was how they really made their money, or arranged for private shows in their clients’ bachelor apartments. The repertoire of these traveling companies could be meager or extremely varied, but the basic elements of the staging were always the same: the older man remained on the divan (thinking, I suppose), while the boy and the girl, or the two boys, followed the spectators into the steam room. As a rule, the performance lasted no more than half an hour or three-quarters of an hour, with or without the participation of the spectators. When the time was up, the man on the divan opened the door and, coughing in the steam that immediately tried to creep in from the other room, informed the respected audience that the show was over. Encores were expensive, even if they lasted only ten minutes. The boys showered quickly, and then the man handed them their clothes, which they put on over skin that was still wet. In the last few minutes, the hangdog but enterprising artistic director made sure to offer the satisfied spectators delicacies from his basket or bag: whiskey served in little paper cups, joints rolled with an expert hand, and turtle eggs that he opened with the enormous nail festooning his thumb and which, once in the cup, he sprinkled with lemon and chile powder.

In our room, things were different. They talked in soft voices. They smoked marijuana. They let time go by, checking their watches every so often, until their faces were covered with droplets of sweat. Sometimes they touched each other, everybody touched each other, which was inevitable anyway if we were all sitting on the divan, and the brushing of legs, of arms, could become painful. It wasn’t the pain of sex but of something irretrievably lost or a single small hope wandering, walking, the country of Impossible. If they were people we knew, Laura invited them to undress and come with us into the steam room. They hardly ever accepted. They just wanted to smoke and drink and listen to stories. To rest. After a while, they closed their bag and left. Then, two or three times in the same evening, they came back, and the routine was always the same. If Laura was in the mood, she let them in; if not, she didn’t even bother to tell them through the door to fuck off. Relations were at all times harmonious, except for one or two isolated incidents. I sometimes think they were fond of Laura long before they got to know her.

One night the old man who brought them (this time there were three of them, an old man and two boys) offered us a show. We had never seen one. How much does it cost? I asked. Nothing. Laura said they could come in. The steam room was cold. Laura took off her towel and turned the tap on: the steam began to issue from floor level. I had the feeling that we were in a Nazi bathhouse and we were about to be gassed; this feeling got stronger when the two boys came in, very thin and dark-skinned, and, bringing up the rear, the old pimp in nothing but an indescribably dirty pair of undershorts. Laura laughed. The boys looked at her, a little inhibited, standing in the middle of the room. Then they laughed, too. Between Laura and me, and without taking off his horrible underthings, the old man sat down. Do you want to just watch, or do you want to take part? Watch, I said.

“We’ll see,” said Laura, who liked puns.

Then, as if following a command, the boys knelt and began to soap each other’s sex. Their movements, practiced and mechanical, betrayed weariness and a series of quiet tremors that it was easy to connect to Laura’s presence. A minute went by. The room grew thick with steam again. The actors, still engaged in their initial activity, nevertheless seemed frozen: kneeling face-to-face but in a grotesquely artistic way, masturbating each other with their left hands and keeping their balance with their right. They looked like birds. Tin birds. They must be tired, they can’t get it up, said the old man. It was true, the soaped cocks only pointed timidly upward. Is that the best you can do, boys? asked the old man. Laura laughed again. How are we supposed to concentrate if you keep laughing? said one of the boys. Laura got up, went around them, and leaned on the wall. Now the tired performers were between us. I felt that time, inside of me, was splitting open. The old man whispered something. I looked at him. His eyes were closed, and he seemed to be asleep. We haven’t slept for so long, said one of the boys, letting go of his companion’s penis. Laura smiled at him. Next to me, the old man began to snore. The boys smiled in relief and relaxed into more comfortable positions. I heard their bones creak. Laura slid down the wall until her buttocks touched the tiles. You’re very thin, she said to one of them. Me? So is he and so are you, replied the boy. The whistle of the steam made it hard to hear their voices sometimes, they were so low. Laura’s body, her back against the wall, her knees bent, was covered in sweat: drops rolled down her nose, her neck, ran between her breasts, and even hung from the hairs of her pubis, where they fell onto the hot tiles. We’re melting, I murmured, and immediately I felt sad. Laura nodded. How sweet she looked. Where are we? I wondered. With the back of my hand, I wiped away the droplets that were falling from my eyebrows into my eyes and blinding me. One of the boys sighed. I’m so tired, he said. Sleep, said Laura. It was strange: it seemed as if the lights were fading, growing dim; I was afraid I would pass out; then I guessed that it must be all the steam that was making the colors shade into something darker. (As if we were watching the sunset with no windows, I thought.) Whiskey and pot don’t mix.

“Don’t worry, Remo my love, everything is fine,” Laura said, as if reading my thoughts.

And she smiled again, not a mocking smile, not as if she were amused, but a terminal smile, a smile caught between a sense of beauty and pain, though not ordinary beauty and pain but beauty and pain on a tiny scale, paradoxical dwarfs, roving and elusive dwarfs.

“Relax, my beloved, it’s just the steam.”

The boys, ready to believe that anything Laura said was irrefutable, nodded repeatedly. Then one of them dropped to the tiles, his head on his arm, and fell asleep. I got up, careful not to wake the old man, and I went over to Laura; crouching beside her, I buried my face in her damp, fragrant hair. I felt Laura’s fingers stroking my shoulder. Soon I realized that Laura was playing—very gently, but it was a game: her little finger brushed my shoulder, then her ring finger, and they greeted each other with a kiss; then the thumb appeared, and the two of them, little finger and ring finger, fled down my arm; the thumb was left alone, master of the shoulder, and it fell asleep, even eating some vegetable that grew there, I think, because the thumbnail dug into my flesh, until the little finger and the ring finger returned, accompanied by the middle finger and the index finger, and together they scared away the thumb, which hid behind an ear, spying from above on the bullying fingers, without realizing why it had been kicked out, while the others danced on my shoulder, and drank, and made love, and lost their balance they were so drunk, plummeting down my back, an accident that allowed Laura to hug me and graze my lips with her lips, while the four fingers, bruised and battered, climbed back up, clinging to my vertebrae, and the thumb watched without ever considering leaving his ear, which he’d grown fond of by now. Head to head, we laughed without making a sound. You’re shining, I whispered. Your face is shining. Your eyes. The tips of your nipples. You, too, said Laura. You’re a little pale, maybe, but you’re shining. It’s the steam mixed with sweat. The boy watched us in silence. Do you really love him? he asked. His eyes were big and black. I sat down on the floor, close against Laura. Yes, she said. He must love you like crazy, said the boy. Laura laughed. Yes, I said. He’d have to, said the boy. You’re right, I’d have to, I said. Do you know the taste of steam mixed with sweat? It depends on each person’s particular taste, doesn’t it? The boy lay down next to his companion, on his side, his temple resting directly on the tiles, not closing his eyes. His cock was hard now. His knees touched Laura’s legs. He blinked a few times before he spoke. Let’s fuck a little, he said. If you want to. Laura didn’t answer. The boy seemed to be talking to himself. Do you know what steam mixed with sweat tastes like? What it really tastes like? What does it taste like? The heat was putting us to sleep. The old man had slid down until he was lying on the bench. The sleeping boy had curled into a ball, and one of his arms was around the waist of the one who was talking to us. Laura got up and looked down at us for a long time. I thought that she would turn on the shower, with tragic results for those who were sleeping so peacefully. It’s hot, she said. It’s unbearably hot. If you weren’t here (she meant the trio), I would order a soda from the bar. You can, I said. They won’t come in here, they’ll hand it to you at the door. No, said Laura, it isn’t that. The truth is, I don’t know what I want. Should I turn off the steam? No. The boy, his head turned to the side, stared at my feet. Maybe I want to make love with you, said Laura. Before I could respond, the boy uttered a laconic no, almost without moving his lips. I was joking, said Laura. Then she knelt down beside him, and with one hand she stroked his buttocks. I watched—it was a fleeting and disturbing sight—as drops of the boy’s sweat were transferred to Laura’s body and vice versa. The long fingers of her hand and the boy’s buttocks glistened identically. You must be tired. The old man is crazy. What was he thinking, asking you to fuck here?

So that we could watch, I reminded her. Laura didn’t hear me. Her hand slid over the boy’s buttocks. It isn’t his fault, the boy whispered. He’s forgotten what it’s like to sleep in a bed. And what it’s like to put on clean underwear, added Laura with a smile. He’d be better off wearing nothing, like Remo. Yes, I said, it’s more comfortable. Less cramped, said the boy, but it’s wonderful to put on clean white briefs. Tight ones, but not the kind that pinch. Laura and I laughed. The boy scolded us gently: Don’t laugh, I’m serious. His eyes looked blurred, gray eyes like cement in the rain. Laura grabbed his cock with both hands and tugged. I heard myself saying should I turn off the steam? but my voice was faint and distant. Where the fuck does your manager sleep? asked Laura. The boy shrugged. You’re hurting me a little, he whispered. I took Laura by an ankle; with the other hand, I wiped away the sweat that was getting in my eyes. The boy rose to a sitting position, moving carefully, trying not to wake his companion, and kissed Laura. I bent my head to see them better: the boy’s thick lips sucked at Laura’s closed lips, on which there was barely the hint of a smile. I half closed my eyes. I had never seen her smile so peacefully. Suddenly the steam hid her. I felt a kind of distant terror: fear that the steam would kill Laura? When their lips parted, the boy said that he didn’t know where the old man slept. He raised a hand to his neck and made a slicing motion. Then he stroked Laura’s neck and drew her even closer. Laura’s body, elastic, adapted to the new posture. Her gaze was fixed on the wall, what she could see of the wall through the steam, her torso thrust forward, her breasts brushing the boy’s chest or pressing gently against it, the steam hiding or partially obscuring them, turning them silver or submerging them in something like a dream. Finally I couldn’t see her at all. First a shadow on a shadow. Then nothing. The room seemed about to explode. I waited for a few seconds, but nothing changed; in fact, I had the impression that the steam was getting even thicker. (I wondered how the fuck the old man and the other boy could keep sleeping.) I reached out a hand; I touched Laura’s back, arched over what I guessed must be the boy’s body. I got up and took two steps along the wall. I heard Laura calling me. Remo, Remo… What do you want? I asked. I’m drowning. I retraced my steps, less careful than I had been moving forward, and I bent down, feeling around in the spot where I guessed she must be. All I felt were the hot tiles. I thought that I was dreaming or going crazy. Laura? Next to me, I heard the boy’s voice: anybody can tell you that steam tastes different when it’s mixed with sweat. I got up again, this time ready to kick out blindly as long as I hit someone, but I restrained myself. Turn off the steam, said Laura from somewhere. I stumbled to the bench as best I could. When I bent down to find the taps, I heard the old man snoring almost in my ear. He’s still alive, I thought, and I turned off the steam. At first nothing happened. Then, before silhouettes were visible again, someone opened the door and left the steam room. I waited. Whoever it was in the other room was making quite a bit of noise. Laura, I called softly. No one answered. At last I could see the old man, who was still asleep. On the floor were the two performers, one in the fetal position and the other stretched out. The boy who couldn’t sleep before seemed really to be asleep. I jumped over them. In the divan room, Laura was already dressed. She threw me my clothes without saying a word. What’s the matter? I asked. Let’s go, said Laura.

We met the same trio a few more times, once in the same bathhouse and another time at a bathhouse in Azcapotzalco, the bathhouse from hell, as Laura called it, but things were never the same. At most we smoked a cigarette and adiós.

For a long time, we kept coming back to these places. We could have made love elsewhere, but there was something about the bathhouse route that attracted us like a magnet. Crazy things were always happening, of course—men running amok down hallways, a rape attempt, a raid—all of which we were lucky or cunning enough to navigate. The cunning was Laura’s; the luck was the solidarity of bathers. Out of all the bathhouses together, now a jumble that I confuse with Laura’s smiling face, we extracted the certainty of our love. Best of all, maybe because we did it there for the first time, was the Gimnasio Moctezuma, to which we always returned. The worst was a place in Casas Alemán, fittingly called the Wandering Dutchman, which was the closest thing possible to a morgue. A triple morgue: of hygiene, of the proletariat, and of bodies. Though not of desire.

I still have two indelible memories of those days. The first is a series of images of Laura naked (sitting on the bench, in my arms, under the shower, lying on the divan, thinking) until she disappears completely in a growing cloud of steam. The End. Fade to white. The second is the mural at Gimnasio Moctezuma. Moctezuma’s unreadable eyes. Moctezuma’s neck suspended over the surface of the pool. The courtiers (or maybe they weren’t courtiers) laughing and talking, trying with all their might to ignore whatever it is the emperor sees. The flocks of birds and clouds mingling in the background. The color of the stones around the pool, surely the saddest color I saw in the course of our expeditions, comparable only to the color of some gazes, workers in the hallways, whom I no longer remember, but who were surely there.