Learning to Lose by David Trueba Read Free Book Online Page A

advice.
    But Mai gets off the bus with a tired expression. The fucking shoot-’em-up movies didn’t let me get a wink of sleep, shesays. She hadn’t slept the previous nights, either. She tells Sylvia that she spent the four-hour ride sending messages to her boyfriend’s cell phone because she missed him from the moment she got on the bus. Sylvia decides not to take the metro with her and watches her descend the stairs. Mai turns before disappearing. Happy birthday, girl, I owe you a present, she says.
    Sylvia, alone on the street, walks quickly to release her rage. Mai’s happiness is a betrayal, her tiredness a personal affront. She steps down onto the street to avoid any unpleasant encounters on the sidewalk, some pimp or pervert pushing her into a doorway. It is Sunday night and the city empties as she walks. People gather in their homes to shield themselves from the end of the weekend. The ground is dry and the streetlights barely reverberate on the asphalt. The lace on one of her black-rubber-soled boots has come untied, but Sylvia doesn’t want to stop to retie it. She takes aggressive strides, as if kicking the air. She is oblivious to the fact that, crossing the street she now walks along, she will be hit by an oncoming car. And that while she is feeling the pain of just having turned sixteen, she will soon be feeling a different pain, in some ways a more accessible one: that of her right leg breaking in three places.

6
    Leandro walks at that vague hour between day and night, on Sunday, when some are returning from Mass or the theater, when couples are headed home, when the streetlights are beginning to warm up and slowly gain intensity, when young people share the last kisses of the weekend, kisses that taste of farewell,tedium, or passion. Relatives are leaving hospitals and old folks’ homes, and the droning results of a soccer lottery, which no one’s won, are heard from distant car radios or some apartment with its windows open. Leandro continues along a residential street, among yellowing trees, a street with barely any traffic, with no people except some neighbor being walked by his dog. In a few hours, it will be Monday, and an early gray mist spreads.
    Leandro looks for number forty, but from the odd side of the street, to keep a certain distance. The houses are low, with small backyards and narrow entrances. There are apartment buildings with four or five stories that defy the old buildings with their new bricks, their aluminum terraces, and their uniform ugliness. Number forty is a two-story chalet, the high fence obscuring everything but the tops of the trees and the walls of the upper floor, cream-colored but so worn they look gray. The roof is made of slate slabs and the façade is the victim of a renovation that robbed the chalet of what little charm it had. All the blinds are lowered. Beside the plaque with the house number is a light illuminating the doorbell.
    Leandro passes without stopping.
    He gets a few feet away and waits on the other side of the street. He doesn’t dare look at the chalet for too long, as if it were human and he wants to avoid locking eyes. He lowers his gaze. He looks up again. There is nothing threatening. Why is he being so careful? No one ever suspects anything from a seventy-three-year-old man. Everyone knows that his steps lead nowhere.
    He chooses not to prolong his prowling. He decides to cross the street and walk up to the door. He feels a coldness that sets him on edge, that tempts him to abandon his pursuit. He makes sure no one is watching him from the sidewalk or some nearbywindow, waits for a car to quickly pass, and hides his face so he can’t be recognized. He rings the bell and the only response he hears is a lengthy electrical buzzing that invites him to push the fence door open. There is a path through the grass of flat stones that ends at a small porch and a white door beneath a yellow fluorescent light. The walk is barely fifteen paces, but it