David Trueba - Learning to Lose

part one

part two

part three

part four

Desire works like the wind. With no apparent effort. If it finds our sails extended, it will drag us at a dizzying speed. If our doors and shutters are closed, it bangs at them for a while, searching for cracks or slots it can slip in through. The desire attached to an object of desire binds us to it. But there is another kind of desire, abstract, disconcerting, that envelops us like a mood. It declares that we are ready for desire and that we just have to wait, our sails unfurled, for the wind to blow. That is the desire to desire.

Sylvia is sitting in the back of the classroom, in the row by the window, in the penultimate seat. The only kid behind her is Rainbow, a Colombian kid whos wearing the official tracksuit of the Spanish national soccer team and dozing through the days classes. Sylvia turns sixteen on Sunday. She seems older, rising above her classmates with her detached attitude. Those same classmates whom she now scrutinizes.

No, its not any of these. None of these mouths is the mouth I want brushing against my mouth. I dont want any of these tongues tangled in mine. Nobody here has the teeth that are going to nibble on my lower lip, my earlobe, the bend of my neck, the fold of my stomach. Nobody here.

Nobody.

In class Sylvia is surrounded by bodies that arent fully formed, incongruous faces, ill-proportioned arms and legs, as if they were all growing in haphazard spurts. Carlos Valencia has appealing tan forearms that stick out powerfully from beneath his T-shirt, but his arrogance is off-putting. Seplveda the Dullard has the delicate hands of a draftsman, but hes goofy and spineless. Ral Zapatas body is flabby, definitely not the one Sylvia wants to receive onto hers like a wave of flesh. Nando Solaress face is overtaken by zits and sometimes blends into the stucco wall. Manu Recio, scar Panero, and Nico Vern are nice, but they are little boys; the first one has a peach-fuzz moustache, the second only speaks in fits and starts, and the third is now shoving two pencils into his nostrils to make his buddies laugh.

The Tank Palazn goes out with Sonia and puts his arm around her waist and smacks her ass with his sausage-fingered hand in a possessive gesture that Sylvia abhors. Skeleton Ocaa is malnourished, has grown rampantly, and has a lisp; Samuel Torn only thinks about soccer, and shed have to turn into a ball to attract his foolish brown gaze. Curro Santiso is already, at fifteen, obviously the property registrar, drab accountant, or financial adviser he will become, completely uninteresting. Blockhead Sanz is out of the running because he doesnt just tend toward homosexuality, he oozes with it. Hes got enough problems sidestepping ridicule from the macho kids who exaggerate his swishiness, hounding him and pushing him with their shoulders every time they cross paths. Quelo Zuazo lives on an unexplored planet and Cocky Ochoa treats high school with the same passion a nuclear engineer could muster up for studying in elementary school. Pedro Suanzes and Edu Velzquez are both Goths, loners with long hair and black clothes, given a wide berth due to the suspicion that theyre plotting to murder the rest of the class in some painful way. Hedgehog Sousa is an Ecuadorian with spiky hair and a wall lizards laugh. And then theres Rainbow, nicknamed for the many different colors he wears, almost the full spectrum.

The sun that comes in through the window and rests on the desks is sometimes more interesting than class. Sylvia would love to pole-vault over her age. Be ten years older. Right now. Get up without permission, move through the rows of desks, reach the door, and leave her life behind. In spite of everything, Sylvia still hasnt achieved Rainbows perfect indifference. Sitting behind her, he sometimes plays with his pen cap among the thick jungle of Sylvias curls, as if he dreamed of finding a toucan or some other exotic bird beneath the mat of black hair. Sylvia doesnt like her hair. Shed rather have the adopted Byelorussian Nadias blond locks or Albas straight hair. They were two of her best friends at school. The good thing about hair is that at least you dont have to see it all the time. Unlike your breasts. Two years ago, Sylvia secretly prayed they would grow; she now suspects that her prayers were answered, to an extreme. As if wishing for rain brought floods. She doesnt dare take a step without her 38C bra, a garment that shes always found orthopedic. On the street, she puts up with constant lustful stares focused on them, in gym class she listens to Santiso and Ochoa joke about their uncontrollable bouncing, and in every conversation there is a moment where they monopolize all the attention, space, and time. When she chooses a T-shirt or a sweater, she is competing with her tits. If they take center stage, the rest of her is ignored. Sometimes she jokes that its a drag to always arrive a minute after her boobs. Her friend Mai reproaches her for buying loose shirts instead of form-fitting ones. Would you rather be flat like me, no one can tell the difference between my chest and my back. But Sylvia suspects that Mai pretends to be envious just to make her feel less self-conscious.

Others had sat at that same desk before her, enveloped in the same bittersweetness, that desire to desire. The Instituto Flix Paravicino was founded in 1932, expanded in 1967 with an impersonal concrete extension that insults the beauty of the original brick one, and in 1985 went from being an all-girls school to coed. In the old building, the staircases are wide with intricate braided patterns on the floor and a wooden railing with an addictive curve that thousands of young hands caress each day. In the new building, the stairs are narrow and have a terrazzo floor, like youd find in a bathroom, and a handrail made of cheap pine with a glossy varnish. The old building has wide French windows, where the glass is set into wood with iron latches that turn with a pleasant friction. In the new building, the windows are aluminum, with handles that creak when you pull them. The hallways of the old building are spacious and light-filled, with art nouveau tiles. In the new one, theyre tight, dark halls punctuated by tiny hollow wood doors. When someone goes from one building to the other, its like an aesthetic slap in the face; if the worlds progress were judged solely based on the expansion, we are clearly headed in an appalling direction.

On Fridays Sylvia finds the succession of classes even more unbearable. Doa Pilar, history, first thing. Nicknamed I Was There because no matter how distant an event she describes, she seems old enough to have lived through it. They say she managed to suppress her death certificate to make it look like shes still alive. In the family vault, theyve given her an ultimatum: theyll hold her spot for a couple months more. And Dionisio, the English teacherhis eyes shine brighter than the students do when the bell rings, even though he doesnt seem to have anything more exciting awaiting him than the sports section, or maybe one of those Internet sites where chicks get it on with horses. Carmen, the Spanish teacher, has a nervous problem with her jaw and can only speak for ten minutes; the rest of the class is devoted to syntactical exercises. During class she brings her hand to her jawbone as if it were about to detach from her face, and even though she seems to be in constant pain, her students insist its all due to her voracious oral sex practices. Don Emilio, physics, tirelessly travels down the aisles between the desks like hes trying to break an Olympic record. His students imagine him arriving home proudly: honey, today I did four and a half miles in four classes. Octavio, math, has a bushy moustache and neck paralysis, and leans to the right stiff and unstable, as if an intense wind were blowing from the other direction. He is the only one who sometimes gives them the pleasure of interrupting class to talk about real life, commenting on a TV show or a curious news item, or helping them to calculate what inflation means when applied to their teen interests. Any chance of a seconds break from classwork feels like a party. Last year they used to leave the newspaper on his desk to tempt him into commenting on it and squandering class time. Sylvia has the feeling that her teachers have given up any other existence beyond being teachers. When she sees them on the street, they are unrecognizable, like a doctor out of his office. Like once when her mother told her about going to the theater and being greeted in a friendly way by someone in the next row, not realizing until the third act that it was her dentist.