Free Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig Page B

he barely said anything unless it was absolutely necessary. And I always ordered the cold meat salad, the soup, the main course, dessert and coffee, so he’d come back and forth to my table a whole lot of times, and little by little we began to have a bit of conversation. Obviously, he had me pegged right off, because with me it’s easy to tell.
    —To tell what?
    —That my real name is Carmen, like the one in Bizet.
    —And because of that he started talking more to you.
    —Christ! you don’t know very much, do you? It was because I’m gay that he didn’t want to let me come near him. Because he’s an absolutely straight guy. But little by little, dropping a few words here, a few there, I made him see I respected him, and he started telling me little things about his life.
    —All this was while he waited on you?
    —For the first few weeks yes, until one day I managed to have a cup of coffee with him, one time when he was on day shift, which he hated the most.
    —What were his regular hours?
    —Well, either he came in at seven in the morning and left about four in the afternoon, or he’d show up about six in the evening, and stay until roughly three in the morning. And then one day he told me he liked the night shift best. So that aroused my curiosity, because he’d already said he was married, although he didn’t wear any ring, also fishy. And his wife worked a normal nine-to-five job in some office, so what was going on with the wife? You have no idea how much trouble I went through to convince him to come have coffee with me, he always had excuses about things he had to do, first the brother-in-law, then the car. Until finally he gave in and went with me.
    —And what had to happen finally happened.
    —Are you out of your mind? Don’t you understand anything at all? To begin with, I already told you he’s straight. Nothing at all happened. Ever!
    —What did you talk about, in the cafe?
    —Well, I don’t remember anymore, because afterwards we met lots of times. But first thing I wanted to ask him was why anybody as intelligent as he was had to do that kind of work. And now you can begin to see what a terrible story it was. Like, well, the story of so many kids from poor families who don’t have the cash to study, or maybe don’t have the incentive.
    —If people want to study, some way they find the means. Listen . . . in Argentina an education’s not the most difficult thing in the world, you know, the university’s free.
    —Yes, but . . .
    —Lack of incentive, now that’s something else, there I agree with you, yes, it’s the inferior-class complex, the brainwashing society subjects everyone to.
    —Wait, let me tell you about it, and you’ll understand what class of person he is, the best! He admits himself how, for a moment in life, he gave in, but he’s been paying for it too ever since. He says he was around seventeen, anyway I forgot to tell you, he had to work from the time he was a kid, even in elementary school, like all those poor families from certain neighborhoods in Buenos Aires, and after elementary school he started working in a mechanics shop, and he learned the trade, and like I said, at about seventeen, more or less, already in the flower of his youth, he started in with the chicks, making it like crazy, and then yes, even worse: soccer. From when he was a kid he could play really well, and at eighteen, more or less, he started in as a professional. And now comes the key to it all: why he didn’t make himself a career out of professional soccer. The way he tells me, he was only at it a short time when he saw all that crap that goes on, the sport is riddled with favoritism, injustice of every kind, and here comes the key, the key to the key, about what happens with him: he can never keep his mouth shut; whenever he smells a rat, the guy yells. He’s not two-faced, and doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut. Because the guy’s straight that way, too. And that’s