Gasoline. Quim Monzo

He also leaves him a saucer with a salt shaker and half a lemon, but the mere thought of going through the ritual of licking the salt and sucking on the lemon before drinking down the tequila irritates him beyond expression. He drinks it down and asks for more. The waiter brings another, in another glass, with another piece of lemon. If he asks for many more tequilas, the table will soon be full of half lemons. So why haven’t they brought him another salt shaker? He had not consumed the lemon, and they had brought him another. By the same token, he had not used the salt shaker, and they ought to have brought him another. Something is out of whack here, but the effort required to follow the thread of the argument is so tiring that he turns his attention to something that won’t require him to think so hard.

      He looks at his glass and wonders if those little glasses have a special name. If only he had Hildegarda’s dictionary . . . If only, as before (a before whose border blurs in the distance between two and four weeks earlier), he had the energy to jot down on a scrap of paper “Look up synonyms for glass and find the one that corresponds to little glass . . .” He remembers the word “tankard” and finds it stunning. Each glass for each different drink ought to have a different name. Once, making small talk, a waiter had told him the names of a number of glasses: “up glasses,” for cocktails served without ice, straight up, like a Manhattan up, or a martini up . . . ; “rock glasses,” for cocktails served with ice or water, like whiskey sours, Manhattans, vodka tonics, scotch and water . . . ; “tall glasses,” in which Bloody Marys, piña coladas, Tom Collinses, fizzes, and beer must be served . . . ; “cordial glasses,” for Kahlua and Amaretto-type liqueurs; brandy snifters, for cognac; “sherry glasses,” for Harvey’s Bristol Cream . . . When he looks back down at his glass, he doesn’t want it any more. He can already predict how it will taste if he brings it to his lips. What a strange feeling, to be repelled by a familiar taste, when till now he had always been nauseated the first time he tried new foods whose taste was unfamiliar!

      He looks at the first page of the other two newspapers and pushes them aside. He asks for the check, pays, and just as he is getting up, manages to snatch up the glass and gulp down what’s left. But this gesture seems absurdly tragic to him. He gathers up the papers, sticks them under his arm, and goes outside.

      He walks under the tress in a square. All at once, just as he had felt, before going into the bar, that, despite its not appealing to him, it was relaxing for the place to be clean and quiet, now the neighborhood seems too bland, too pretty. It is a nice neighborhood, and he finds this very unpleasant. He throws the paper into the garbage can and breaks into a trot. If only his feelings would take a definite turn instead of this constant fluctuation, this swinging back and forth between desiring and despising . . .

      He goes into the first train station he comes across and gets on the first train that comes along, without looking to see which part of the city it’s heading for; once inside, he shuts his eyes, trying not even to count the number of stations the train stops at.

      •

      Two policemen stand close to the turnstiles at the exit. He takes the stairs two at a time. On the street, he walks around among the pimps and the bums. One drunk, soaked with slushy water from the melting snow, is clinging to a parking meter. In a clothing store window all the mannequins are undressed and wigless; some of them are missing arms. A man on top of a ladder is taking down the Christmas lights and signs bearing wishes for a Happy New Year. He walks by two sex shops, tramples already-trampled snow, and slips and almost falls. At the third sex shop, he stops and looks in the window. At the movie theater next door, they’re showing Foxtrot, a movie they’re advertising with enormous billboards containing enlarged reproductions of favorable reviews taken from sex magazines. They include no pictures, suggesting that it has been impossible to choose a single still, as none of them could possibly be put on public display. He keeps on walking. Next door is another sex shop. He goes in.

      He comes to a stop in the middle of the room. Only one of the walls is lined with sex toys: rubber vaginas and penises, fantasy condoms, whips, ben wa balls, inflatable boy and girl dolls . . . The other walls, painted yellow, are lined with rows and rows of magazines. On the ceiling there are three fluorescent panels, in one of which two of the tubes are flickering. He finds it odd that the two broken tubes should be precisely in the same panel when (by random chance) the probability of their being in different panels was much greater. This leads him to conclude that there is a defect in the fixture itself. Next to the door, on a platform, a bored elderly man with glasses and long sideburns is leaning on a counter as high as the tops of his clients’ heads, overseeing the room, apparently keeping everything under control. Heribert looks at the condoms: there are blue ones, pink ones, green ones, black ones, transparent ones, and red ones . . . They come with bumps, with filaments, one has a little hand with five fingers at the tip, several have protruding stars. The boxes say that these extras give the woman pleasure and make her go mad with delight. The penises are all different sizes, colors, and shapes. Some reproduce the texture, the veins, and the shape of the real thing, but others are perfectly cylindrical, or cylindrical with bumps at the tip, like porcupines . . . They look to him like orthopedic devices. He looks at the magazines. In the first one he opens there are pictures of a man with one woman. In the second, there are two men with one woman. In the third, there are two women. He opens a fourth: two women with one man. The fifth one he opens has two men with one woman again. He opens a sixth: there is a whole slew of people and part of the fun seems to consist of mixing whites, blacks, and Asians, and men and women. In the most general shot, Heribert counts four men and five women. He thinks it’s too convoluted to excite anyone.

      Farther on is the teenage girl section, most of them unaccompanied, in positions of self-gratification, and in black and white. The magazines of men with men are all in another department, a bit farther on. One of the guys in charge of the store is busy attaching price tags to a pile of inflatable dolls, which, inside their clear plastic bags, look a lot like dead bodies.

      The people in the store are mostly middle-aged men. When he entered, he thought he would find more teenagers. The men must be office workers, killing time after work (Heribert looks at his wristwatch; a little after 5:00 p.m.) before going home. There are old men, too, with that defeated look some retired people develop. A guy of about twenty-five is looking at a magazine that shows a woman and a Great Dane.

      Heribert continues on, toward the back of the place, where the booths are located, announced by a large neon sign: peepshow. On the door of each booth hang two pictures and two titles, each of which, respectively, corresponds to one of the two films projected there. He looks at the doors to each of the booths and at each of the titles. By one of the walls next to the first booth there are two video games with Martians, and there’s a boy playing at one of them.

      He gets change from a machine he spots in the back. He looks at all the doors once again. He has trouble deciding which picture to choose. He goes into the one whose protagonist’s face was the prettiest in the photograph.

      The space he is enclosed in measures less than a square meter. Against one of the four walls there is a bench. He sits down on it. In front of him is a white surface. On the wall to the right, two machines with slots for coins labeled a and b. He sticks a coin into the slot labeled b. The light in the cabin goes out and the movie appears before his eyes, emerging from a projector (he stands up to get a better look) whose light flows out onto a tilted mirror located over the head of the seated spectator. From the mirror, the image is cast onto the white surface (he touches it: formica). On the screen, two girls (one blonde, one with light brown hair) and a boy (with dark brown hair) appear on a sofa. The boy is wearing a polo shirt (sky blue, with a Lacoste alligator); the girls (one of whom was white and the other black) are wearing stockings and garters (white stockings on the one with the white garters and gold on the one with the black garters) and high-heeled shoes (black for both of them). The boy is penetrating one of the girls, while the other goes from kissing the girl being penetrated, to kissing the boy, to kissing both of their genitals. Heribert quickly realizes that the booth is just isolated enough from the outside so that its occupant (aroused by the film) can masturbate in peace. He looks for traces on the walls, the surface of the screen, the floor set with shiny, irregular, multicolored tiles, the bench; it’s dark, though, so he doesn’t find any. When he looks up at the screen again (“What a jerk,” he thinks, “I’m missing the