On the eve that Sergio realised he did not love his wife, he was caught in a vicious stalemate with his chess partner. One sick revolving game played out with a king and a queen and another king for hours and hours till fifty useless moves were completed and the game ended. And then he went to her, his whore.
She sat where she always sat by the fountain with the siren statues. With her hair hung over one shoulder and dressed in a polka dot dress. Behind her stood the mansion of chastity, falling apart due to irony, all creepers and ivy and broken statues, and it was only two months and three days old. Sergio sidled across the park, a poppy in his breast pocket and a rose in his right hand, knowing that this was the day he would declare his love.
“I love you,” he said, “completely and utterly, I love you.”
She turned her head away, “I do not believe in love, Sergio, it is very much for fools and I do not believe in it.”
“Well then, neither do I.”
“Then leave,” she went to fanning herself. She never looked at him.
“Do you not care at all for me?”
She spat. “You entertain illusions.”
He disagreed and she disagreed and they disagreed again and again and on and on until dawn came over the back of the mansion, when Sergio had become sober and his wife found him sat by the fountain with his whore and a wilted rose in his right fist.
Sergio had fallen in love with his wife because he was afraid of the dark. One night, when he had had too much to drink and his lantern had gone out, she found him hunched in a ball on the paving slabs of an alleyway. He looked up at her with her lamp. She shook her head at this whimpering man. Through tears, he asked her whether the most beautiful woman he had yet to see would walk him home. After shaking her head and tutting, she took him home by the arm, but not without him taking a longer route and her making sure to stop and adjust her hair to stop the wind from getting at it, and also was that rain because she felt rain and we should stop under this portico, and also was that a dog because he had seen a dog and it looked rabid so we should go this way, and also there is a prettier route but it is longer and it is down by the docks so you should take my coat, and also, perhaps, she should, perhaps, pass her house and pick out her own coat, and also, and also, and also, so that, by the time they arrived at his, she was very much in love with the little man with his black curls and his endearing fears who made violins in the dockyard.
A change seemed to come over Sergio after that day, he worked harder in his violin shop, making purple violins for rich clients and even a beautiful golden one in the shape of a butterfly for the princess, arriving before the sun had risen over the bay of lost ghosts, and working long after it had gone down. And, by the end of the month, he had the money to pay for a wedding.
She’d taken him to bed two year later, only for her to be a constant disappointment, with all the enthusiasm of a plank, all the movement of a sloth and all the passion of a broken heart. And, from then on, he’d needed a whore.
Sergio had never taken a whore, or a girl, or a woman, before he met his wife. Before the first instance of disappointment, he had not even had his passion aroused, he understood it as just another muscle spasm, just a tightening. When his wife had found him naked but limp and ready to go to work with a pair of scissors, a pair of pliers and three rolls of bandage she had asked:
“What are you doing?”
He had told her that he was trying to understand it and she took that as a casual joke. He’d felt so silly that he abandoned his surgical enterprise. Later, she told him she wanted a baby and he went to writing to the stalk, composing avid passages of beauty containing references to his and his wife’s aptitude with children. She shook her head like she had done on that night she found him in the alley and then she’d taken him to the bed.
He began his search the next morning. She found him looking around her sister’s house for some sort of clue when they visited for soap. She found him writing lengthy correspondence to his friends and working on some sort of code and taking his siesta’s in the little Spanish bar where the flies and the banjos were and a fan turned again and again with whump whump whump whump’s. Somewhere, he picked up a clue and then he’d gone to the district with the red lights. Where tramps and beggars sat beneath parasols watching the young men play. He’d visited whores that smelt of butterscotch and honey. Whores that dressed as maidens and one that only wished for his money and his watch. It took three months to find one, a good one, one he liked. He called her his laughing lady.
He’d met her after another night with a whore named Josephine, who liked to drench them both in gallons and gallons of water till her bed was so soggy from the constant downpour that it sagged over the wooden frame and dripped onto the tiles and looked generally miserable. She lay on it like a siren, but she never spoke. He was leaving her one night, crossing the courtyard and going to the bench he always sat on, usually till dawn, wringing out his hat and his shoes after another night with all the energy and excess of a tsunami, when his laughing lady came and sat next to him. She was a large woman, ugly too. Her nose too curved. Her eyes too sharp. She wore a little hat tilted to one side, with flowers all in a dying state of bloom.
“I see you have met Josephine,” she said and laughed. He looked up from his hat wringing.
“Yes, she is different, but she is not the one I want.”
“What do you want darling?”
“Something more enjoyable,” he put the hat back on, “and less wet.”
“Well come right this way.”
She had an odd habit of laughing whilst he lay with her. Laughing as he took off her dress and caressed her neck and took her to the bed in one big heave and dump. She’d laugh as they rolled about like worms, or turtles, or rabbits, she’d even laugh when they pretended to be panthers. And for a while, even when they did it like apes, he was happy.
“What makes you so happy?” he said to her one night, when they lay with the shutters open so they could see the stars and the moon and an owl they named Jesus that sat on the peach tree.
“I have nothing to worry about, not even death,” and she laughed and said it again, “not even death,” and she rolled about kicking her legs and chanting, “not even death,” till he could not shake the images the next time he came to see her and the time after that, and in the end he gave up entirely and wandered about in the district of the red lights miserable. In the end it was luck.
Her house was a small house, tucked away between one big sloppy restaurant with funnels and brass and bronze pipes, and another whore house, one that reeked of stale men and had it’s whores hanging from the balconies wringing out their filthy rags into the cobbled streets. The small house was blue, had wooden cross-hatching with dark green leaves and dark red roses weaving across them. In his misery, Sergio did not, at first, recognise the small house and went to the restaurant and ate rice and then went to the whore house and screwed a woman who looked scared at every third occurrence, and then he realised he’d been passing a house he’d never seen before, and so, he went inside. It had pillars and a shallow pool which was only good for dipping your feet in. Caged birds hung all around the room and he was wandering between these great constructs of gold and wood and sometimes matchsticks, when he saw her for the first time. She was sat in a silk blue dress that fell neatly, and showed very little cleavage. She was dipping her toes into the pool, swirling her big toe in circles. She looked up at him, and the abyss of her dark black curls fell across her right shoulder, her auburn eyes captivated him, he stood looking at her. The birds sang.
“What would you like?” she said at last and Sergio felt sick to his stomach.
“Are you the owner?”
“Yes.”
“Are you not available?”
“I’m the sole whore.”
“The sole whore,” he made sure to taste every word.
“Yes, what would you like?”
“Anything,” he said, “anything.”
And then he was happy. He had found her. He went through days and weeks and months visiting her in the night and then waking up in the morning next to his wife. His wife became amazed when she saw him dancing for the first time in the front room with a gramophone he had bought just for her. They danced for an hour and a half, laughing and twirling in little salsa twists. Flowers sprang up on every available surface, he bought some tulips for her study, some roses for the bedroom, although the roses were frowned upon by his wife’s parents, some bluebells for dining with, some lilies for sitting with. One day he burst through the door carrying a dead chicken and proclaimed, I will cook to night and every other night from now on, and he did. He told his wife she was the only one he loved, and it was true. He told her she was beautiful. She didn’t age. How did she keep so young? And he lived days and weeks and months before his imagination began to grit the wheel of his life and the revolutions began to slow and slow till the wheel barely moved at all and it was then that he realised he was in love with Silvia, his whore.
It was around this time he began to play chess with Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite, or as Sergio affectionately called him, Mi y acogedor Santa, My cosy Santa. The oddness of the man was what first struck him, dressed in a Victorian flat collar frock and big boots, adorned with a moustache, curled and waxed, topped with a long tall hat that sat at a jaunty angle and wearing a monocle with gold ringlets that, later, when they began playing chess, he would always remove on the fifth turn. He was poking around in the cages when they first met, using his long cane with a top shaped as a lion’s head, when Sergio crashed into him whilst hastily removing his coat as he always did. Sergio rebounded and landed in a heap on the marble.
“Christ, Christ, I am sorry, good friend. Christ! I am sorry! I was looking into these cages,” Ricardo said.
“No, no it was me. I was rushing.” Sergio said, standing up, brushing himself off, and continuing to remove his coat, he began searching for the hat stand.
“Rushing, haha, yes, rushing, excellent,” Ricardo said, “say, have you looked into these cages, I was entranced, else I would of seen you, well, come to think of it, I wouldn’t have been here at all.”
“It’s fine. I was rushing.” Sergio hung up his jacket.
“As you keep saying, tell me have you ever noticed the birds in these cages?”
“No, I am always in a rush,” Sergio said and smiled. Ricardo flashed him his own pearly whites in return.
“They are not real birds,” Ricardo said.
“What?”
“They are not real birds. Come have a look,” Sergio walked over and looked at the birds. The little paper birds hung on pieces of string and revolving in half circles, each one painted. Swallows in brown, their feathers chopped into their paper backs. A parrot made of multiple dyed sheets, a line of lead down it’s back keeping it upright.
“But the sound…”
“A very big sea shell that echoes everything it has heard in the past few years,” Ricardo had not stopped looking at the birds, “it is in the pool, there’s the sound of children and a shark eating something, I think it is a turtle. I presume you are here to see Silvia,” It didn’t seem like a question.
“Yes.”
“She is a good whore. The best in the city I would say. Of course I tried that big whore house which is said to be the best, but it is not the best,” and then they talked about whores for a whole five minutes and Sergio discovered Ricardo had also slept with the woman who drenched her partners and herself in gallon after gallon of water. They agreed that Silvia was the best and the reasons were usually the same. And then both at once they said,
“But, of course, I love my wife.” and then they began playing chess every second day for the next year and three months. On these nights Sergio would take the chess board down from between the box of white and black pieces and the small collection of china frogs that his wife had began to collect when she was but three and five months and still collected now she was thirty five and seven months, and included statues that the ministry of sculpture was after, one being a frog dressed in a matador suit and another being the three frogs playing poker in white, rolled up, sleeves and black, sometimes loose, jock straps. He left the box of black and white pieces because once Ricardo had refused to play because of the colour of the pieces:
“We are not either of these colours,” he said, “and I will not entertain the notion we are. We should play with pink and purple pieces,” and so Sergio had carved some pink and purple pieces that replaced a piece from the black and white set one week at a time, and, in the end, he had decided to gift the pink and purple pieces to Ricardo, who lavished him with fancy handkerchiefs from then on. From taking the board down, Sergio would then cross the street and head down one of the many alleys that lead towards the centre of town, he would pass the docklands, where he would always see the sun rushing towards the ocean far far in the distance, he would go through the red light district, passing through the foundations of a place that would soon become known as the mansion of chastity, then he went on to pass the place where a man, know by many as left handed Lopez, was permanently fixing a vehicle he called a motorcar, but everybody else realised was a large seat mounted in a skiff mounted on three bicycle wheels, Sergio always waved and then climbed three sets of steps and met Ricardo on his porch.
This went on for several months, Sergio learning more and more about chess, before he could begin to beat Ricardo and then Ricardo learning more and more about chess before he could begin to beat Sergio again, and on the sixth month, when Sergio sat in his front room, constructing the grandest violin he had ever conceived, piece by piece with his knife and, by now, bloody fingers, his wife came to ask him,
“Does he have a wife?” and the violin then issued a sharp snap and one of the wires slung back and sliced another cut into Sergio’s middle finger.
“Yes, he does,” she sat and kissed him on both cheeks.
“She must be bored.”
“I had not thought about it.”
“Tonight, I will come with you,” and she strung the violin wire that Sergio had been struggling with in one deft twist.
“Who is this for?” she asked, looking over the violin with three strings strung.
“Me.”
“You don’t play.”
“I can learn,” she kissed him again on the cheek.
“Red or white wine?”
“Red, he has something about skin colours.”
And so, Sergio’s wife accompanied him to play chess every other night. Ricardo greeted them the same way, always. He would embrace Sergio’s wife, ask her when she was going to leave Sergio for him, kiss her on both cheeks and then let her leave, he would then embrace Sergio and they would play till night time.
Meanwhile, in the day, Sergio began constructing intricate symphonies which he would then play to Silvia before making love to her. She would laugh when he did so, and he smiled, he told her it transported him away from the guilt, not realising that if that was true he would not be playing the same symphonies in the morning when he made breakfast, before he went to work at the carpenters shop, when he had lunch, to his wife, to Ricardo, to the sun and the moon. When he had to think, he would play. And when he played he only thought of one thing, and he never connected the two until one night, three nights before he had realised he did not love his wife.
On that night, when Ricardo had played a gambit and Sergio had played a Dutch gambit, they looked up from the porch and saw that a new building had been constructed three stories high across the town, and had loomed over them for several months before they’d recognised the c shaped shadow that fell on the porch was coming back night after night.
“What is that?” said Sergio. Ricardo looked over the pieces and shook his head.
“I’ve got nothing. No plan,” he looked up at Sergio, “Oh, oh, I have no idea. Some one told me it was to be the mansion of chastity, a new whorehouse.”
Sergio pottered round the outside on the way home, and went to the newly opened bar to drink a simple beer. It was here, among woman dressed only in sheets that Sergio heard Silvia was to move from her little green blue villa to the mansion. He was horrified and tried something to make her stay, something he rarely did unless he had just finished playing or there was an error in the accounts, he tried to talk to her. The first time he’d try to do it, he’d been in bed on his third visit and she was sat up and putting on her ear rings when he had said:
“How long do you work for?” and she had said,
“You do not have to talk to me afterwards. I am not one of those whores.”
And now, now that she was to move to the mansion of chastity he was worried so he tried to talk to her,
“Why are you moving?”
“I wish to move.”
“But, I like it here.”
“The mansion of chastity is mine, you fool.”
“Yours?”
“Yes, I am the owner. What did you think I was spending my money on?”
So now, after hour upon hour of him wandering the streets of the district of the red lights. He had finally told her. Told her, by the fountain with the sirens, in front of her mansion of chastity, after his game of chess with Ricardo. After days and days. He had finally told her. And now his wife was here.
“What is this Sergio?” his wife said, “Why are you here? Who is this? Did you think you could sleep with a whore with out me knowing? Who do you think you are Sergio? How do you think you could do this and get away with it? How many whores have you slept with?” and they argued all the way home. Sergio saying, you were no good, you were worse than wood. “You didn’t even know what it was, let alone where to put it, you stupid damn fool, you whore ridden damn fool,” And they walked about the house picking up objects and throwing them aside, and they each found gramophone records to break.
“Would you love me if I slept with Ricardo?” his wife said.
“I don’t love you, not any more.”
“Bullshit. Bullshit, Sergio, you do not love me. Do you not? Are you in love with this whore? She does not care, she loves money. Why didn’t you just ask? I can screw like a whore if you wish it.”
“Shut up. Shut up. You were wood.”
“I was wood, was I? I was wood. You were about as faithful as the whore you love so much.”
“Why don’t you become a whore?”
“Oh, I will have to, I will have to. The only way I can keep my husband is to be a whore. You god-damn whore ridden foul. Perhaps, I should become a whore and chuck you out completely and bar the door and sleep with Ricardo and spit on you when you pass? Perhaps I should do that?”
“You would make a terrible whore.”
“Worse, you made a terrible husband.” and then in a fit of anger she went round and blew out all of the candles in the house, and pulled all the curtains. And ,in the morning, the sailors who came to take rich people away from their houses, saw a woman walking in a jaunty gait, due to the two suitcases she carried, away from a house where all the windows and doors were covered by great wooden beams, so not a scrap of light could enter. She told them to take her as far away as possible and stomped across the gangway, and for all the people in the town she was never seen again, only remembered.
Sergio lay in a wreck for the next hour, before he even began to open his eyes. Then he realised he was in the kitchen and he pulled himself onto his feet, bit by bit with trembling hands on the cupboards. He slipped on the tap of the sink. Water gushed, and swore that it was a poltergeist so ran to the front room. He spent the next two days behind a sofa, sure that the lampshade was the carcass of his dead aunt reincarnated and waiting for him. It took him an hour to build up the courage to rush across the room, knock over the lampshade, and hurl himself at the wooden slats that stopped the light coming in. The slats came free and the room flooded with the evening sun. He climbed up and out, still shaking from the shock, and then, in a limping gait, before he thought of food or water, he headed towards the mansion of chastity, but not before he went back to fetch the violin.
