In One Person

too tired to appreciate the muscle-bound waiters in T-shirts at the Mama Inés Café 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
café 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 Ángel 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.
    T HE 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.
    Señor 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 difícil
, ‘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!” Señor 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