The foreign student who taught me not to be afraid

Beside his grandmother, Bruno stirred the noodles, slowly browning them over a bed of oil and garlic. He lowered them carefully into the boiling pot, but the care came from habit, not attention: really, he was somewhere else. As he went on with the meal, he had to split himself between the stew and the soup, and while his grandmother squeezed big yellow lemons, he did something wrong. The carrot slipped off the cutting board, or the pan started making that sound that meant everything was sticking.

—You’re not here, my boy —Doña Remedios told her grandson—. Get a grip, please, the girls are going to arrive from the university and we need to have the food ready. It’s the first week and we need to make a good impression.

But there was nothing that could distract him more than that sentence. Suddenly all the impressions of the last few days crowded together in his head.

***

First he remembered a girl walking into the guesthouse. Her name was Camila, or at least that was the name she had introduced herself with. Straight hair, a glossy black like the plumage of a grackle. Skin pale, but fresh and luminous. Her face ended in a delicate chin, in contrast to two fleshy cheeks and dimples that appeared when she smiled. Her mouth was bright red from the cold, with a swollen lower lip. A turned-up nose, small ears. Two slanted but wide-open eyes, deep and shining.

Bruno had made it a rule not to look at women’s bodies, much less those of the guests who stayed for a while at his grandmother’s house. It wasn’t always easy, because they were often tall Eastern European women, blond and sharp-featured, who seemed to want their bodies touched at least once by the tropical sun. Bruno felt a mixture of fear and reverence toward them, so he tried to remain more or less absent when they showed up. When he had to serve them food or collect their monthly payment, he tried to look them in the eye, but ended up looking at the floor.

With Camila, things were different from the start. She arrived wearing a heavy red coat with dull gold buttons, and Bruno felt as if half a nation were crossing the threshold of his house. The coat was intimidating and the color was harsh on the eyes, and that, for some reason, intensified the boy’s budding crush: the kind of attraction that made him feel a little clumsy and a little sad. Besides, dressed like that, there was no way to know what Camila’s body was like, which let him look at her fairly often without feeling guilty.

On Monday, when Doña Remedios welcomed her, coffee and cookies were served in the living room. The girl looked around. Seeing the hardwood floor and the heavy wooden furniture, she felt as if she were inside a giant gingerbread cookie. She liked the paintings of lakes with water lilies, the green stone coffee table, the cozy creaking of the old armchairs. This is so grandmotherly, she thought. She was smiling with a certain condescension, and Bruno thought he understood her.

The three of them started talking almost by rote. Without quite knowing how, Bruno’s passion for that distant country—its literature, its history, its economy, its revolutions—loosened his tongue in front of Camila. The girl listened with tenderness, though also with an amused sense of wonder. Her Spanish was far from perfect, but she understood enough to realize that Bruno was a homebody, kind and harmless. She could almost feel how his intellectual interest blended with the attraction he couldn’t hide. Suddenly he found himself resting his cheek on his hand, lifting his eyebrows, pretending to pay attention when he wasn’t, and giving her little signals with his eyes.

On Tuesday night, Camila was finishing arranging the few things she had brought. Wanting to be comfortable, she wore only pajama pants and a cheap gray blouse, quite tight-fitting. Making the room her own didn’t seem to have cost her sweat so much as simply opened her pores and flushed the skin of her cheeks and shoulders. If anyone was sweating in that house, it was the room.

When Bruno knocked on her door to tell her dinner was ready, she opened it by reflex. He had only known her through the formality of their first meeting, and suddenly coming face to face with a body he hadn’t expected tore down all his defenses. The pants were discreet, as pajamas can be—though Bruno immediately imagined her tucked up in bed—but the fitted blouse revealed two enormous breasts. Maybe, he thought unwillingly, they were the biggest breasts he had ever seen. The reddish tone of her shoulders made him wonder whether they had also gone pink. The different shades of gray in the fabric made it impossible to tell, but for a second, just before he regained his composure, he thought he could make out the shape of her nipples, stiff from the cold.

Camila was delighted to have unsettled the boy, but she didn’t show it. She acted as though she noticed nothing and asked him to come in for a moment. She sat down at the desk, took out an agenda with schedules and addresses, and asked for his help figuring out what transportation to take to get from one place to another. They spent ten minutes like that. Bruno had completely forgotten about dinner and started asking her about her language and her homeland, doing everything he could to look her in the eye. He was clearly as uncomfortable as he was fascinated. She answered with a certain weariness, but at the same time she leaned her shoulders and head back coquettishly, urging him to look at the small neckline.

—Can I ask you for something people have surely asked you a thousand times? —Bruno finally said.

—Just don’t say a kiss —she teased.

The blush flooded his whole body, and for several seconds he couldn’t speak. At last he blurted out what he had meant to say:

—No, no. Of course not. I want you to write something in your language for me.

Camila took a pen from the desk and held out his left wrist.

—This is my real name —she said softly, while drawing signs that crossed his wrist and went onto the back of his hand.

Because of course Camila was not the girl’s real name, but the one she had chosen when she started studying Spanish. Her family had no connection to this side of the world, but she had fallen in love with the ruins of Palenque when she saw them in a red-and-gold hardcover encyclopedia.

—We’re going there —the girl declared one day, in a long, very nasal language.

—The girl’s crazy —her father told her mother, ignoring her.

But she wasn’t crazy. She had simply gotten that idea fixed in her head. Her parents disapproved of her taking Spanish classes, but they paid for them anyway; they disapproved of her entering the History program, but they allowed it anyway; they were horrified when she said she was going on exchange to the other side of the ocean.

—What, don’t you remember? I told you I was going —she told them, smiling.

So her parents disapproved of her once again. But they still went to the airport to see her off, smiling. Her mother cried and her father kissed her on the forehead.

I think that if they had managed to take her to those ruins as a child, Camila would never have become obsessed with crossing the world. Because three things distinguished her from a very young age: her paleness, the shining blackness of her eyes, and a delicate need to always challenge authority. During the plane ride she noticed how men stared at her red lips. She stared back at them, sometimes angrily, sometimes mockingly, sometimes with empty eyes, as if she were thinking of something bigger than them. The men felt as if she were reading their souls and looked away; then she smiled to herself.

The day she wrote her true name on Bruno’s wrist, he looked into her eyes and felt exactly that: emptiness. Then Camila winked at him and they both went downstairs to dinner.

On Wednesday, more students arrived for the semester that was about to begin, but Bruno didn’t even stay to greet them with coffee and cookies. He locked himself in his room with the lights off and his arm over his eyes, silently repeating Camila’s real name.

***

On Thursday, while Bruno was cooking beside his grandmother, a sharp, furious scream came from the girl’s room. The young man looked at Doña Remedios, anxiety filling his eyes.

—Go see what’s wrong with the girl —the grandmother told him—. You knock on the door and ask if everything’s okay. If everything’s okay, I want you right back here in thirty seconds.

No sooner had he heard her than Bruno ran off, went up the stairs, took a breath, and felt his chest vibrating with nerves. He closed his eyes to calm himself and knocked on the door with his knuckles, four soft taps.

—Camila, it’s Bruno. Is everything okay?

—Not okay —she said.

—What happened? —he insisted, noticing that his voice sounded more worried than he would have liked.

—Cold! —Camila shouted from the other side.

He heard her searching for more precise words, stammering something. Then she opened the door and pulled him inside.

Camila was wearing only a towel tied over her chest. Since she was slender, you could tell how prominent her breasts were by the way the towel hung loosely, swaying around her body like a ghost.

Bruno needed immense composure not to stand there with his mouth hanging open. In a flash of common sense he decided he had to look for just a second, that he had to see her very briefly so he would never forget her. During that instant he strained to memorize her bare shoulders, open and almost pointed; her pale, pearly skin, like a sheet of paper in the sun; her black eyes, slanted yet large; the thin thighs suggested beneath the towel; and those hidden breasts which, nevertheless, were without a doubt the biggest he had ever seen in his life.

—Did the water in your bathroom come out cold? It must be a problem with the heater… Um… It’s not a windy day, so the gas probably ran out. What do we do? We could ask for a tank, but maybe, if you’re in a hurry, it’s better I heat some water for you so you can bathe with a basin.

At that moment Bruno swallowed. Throughout his halting speech he had tried not to think about Camila’s body, but in that last sentence he couldn’t help imagining her as a statue of Aphrodite, bending down to scoop water from a basin and letting it run over her bare back. Only then did he blush fully.

During the half minute he spoke, Camila kept thinking about her bath. She was trying to follow the solutions he was offering her in Spanish in her mind. Now at last she understood what was happening. She didn’t really understand why the idea of the basin was turning her on—in fact, she wasn’t entirely sure she knew what a basin was—but it was clear that Bruno was thinking about her. About her towel.

—Bruno, Bruno —she said, stumbling over the syllables—. I already know what you have. It’s fine. You don’t have to be nervous all the time with me. I’m just a person.

As she said it, she took his hand firmly, more like a politician than a friend. Then she let go and brought her own hand to the hem securing the towel.

—I think if you see me, you’ll realize there’s nothing to be afraid of.

Then she dropped the towel. Bruno looked away by instinct, but she took his chin firmly. Since he still had his eyes tightly shut, Camila went on speaking:

—I don’t know if it’s a cultural difference —she lied—. I think bodies are just bodies. It’s nothing sexual. Look at it as something educational, kid. You’re not a child anymore and you can’t spend your whole life being afraid of women.

Bruno was a shy person, but above all he was a reasonable person. And what Camila was saying seemed reasonable to him. It was true that his fear of the women he was attracted to wasn’t normal. The sensible thing was to fight it, wasn’t it? And there was a girl noble and open enough to help him.

He opened his eyes. He had only a few seconds to look, but it was enough. Camila’s waist was small and slender; her thighs, by contrast, were strong. Maybe her ass was too. But that chest. Lifted, round and pale, reddened by the cold where the breasts began to blur into the sternum, with a huge nipple, raised like a mountain, a dark, charged, hypnotic color.

Bruno was already aware that his crotch was starting to bother him. Now he had a visible erection, impossible to hide. Camila laughed, playful. She quickly picked up the towel from the floor and said to him:

—What a pervert you turned out to be! What’s your grandmother going to say?

Bruno put on a sad face and tried to leave. Camila, guilt-ridden, called him back and even had to take his hand to keep him from going out.

—I was teasing. It’s not against you —she confessed, with tender eyes.

Then she moved close until she was right up near his face. She stuck out her tongue and licked him, from his chin to his lips, once. Then she smiled and let him go, completely confused.

Camila bathed with a basin, and in the process found out what it was. Of course, she didn’t tell Doña Remedios anything about her grandson’s perversity. That night, locked in his room and still repeating the girl’s real name, Bruno masturbated as if he wanted to empty himself of the whole week.