The Demon of Dakar - Kjell Eriksson [123]
He walked toward Dakar. It was the irony of fate that the only stable point he had in Uppsala belonged to Slobodan Andersson. At Dakar there was the Portuguese, and above all Eva, the waitress who was so curious about his country and culture. She listened and asked him a never-ending stream of questions, everything in an astonishingly strange English, in which her limited vocabulary forced her to take long pauses before she managed to communicate what she wanted.
She had also not cared about his lie. For her it didn’t matter if he came from Mexico or Venezuela. It made him even more willing to talk to her. She gave him the freedom to be himself.
On top of all this, she was the first white woman who had spoken to him as an equal. He had met many gringas in the United States, but they had seen him as a dirty chicano whom they could exploit for underpaid labor but never treat as a human.
She is also beautiful, he thought, not without a pang of guilt, because ever since the message of Angel’s death and Patricio’s incarceration had reached him he had had increasing difficulties caring about Gabriella in the village. Love and future plans faded away. He became irritable and listless. How could he talk of personal happiness as his family was breaking apart? Did he love her? He no longer knew.
He walked to Dakar in a rare mixture of depression and excitement. This time he banged on the back door. The chef who smoked in the dishwashing area and looked like a bulldog opened the door.
“Well, well, look who’s back,” he said and looked at him with a smile that Manuel could not evaluate.
“I need to work,” he muttered. “Is there anything for me to do?”
Unconsciously he adopted the subordinate tone he had learned in California.
“There are no dishes, but it’s been a while since the dressing room was cleaned.
Manuel was supplied with cleaning solution, rags, a bucket, and a mop. He decided to do a thorough job. Not in order to please anyone but because he needed to do something well, something that made a difference, for quite egotistical reasons. He needed to disappear into work. The past week had shaken him. He would never again be the Manuel Alavez he had been. Everything that he said in the future would contain a measure of untruth, or so he felt. Only work was honest.
He kept polishing, wiping down lockers and benches, scrubbing the floors frenetically, and taking the light fixtures down in order to pick all the dead flies out of the glass globes.
He had just finished and sat down on a bench when Eva walked in.
“What a difference!” she exclaimed. “And how good it smells.”
Manuel stood up at once. Eva pulled off her coat and hung it in her locker. He could not help looking at her breasts. Her look of amusement confirmed that he had been caught.
“I’ll go,” he said.
She smiled even more broadly and patted him on his blushing cheek. His confusion only increased before this fearless woman. Why was she laughing? Was she offering herself to him?
“Are you married?”
Manuel shook his head. Eva took her black work skirt from the locker, brushed away some dust, and reached for the white blouse on its hanger. Manuel forced himself not to look at her clothes.
“It should be …” she started, but couldn’t find the right word in English, and simply made a gesture with her hand. He understood that she meant the blouse was wrinkled.
“See you soon,” he said and left the dressing room. He wished he could iron her blouse, simply to touch it. He wanted to do something for her, more than just scrub the dressing room. He wanted to make her happy.
He walked over to the dishwashing area. A man in a white hat had just put down a load of pots, dishes, and utensils, nodded to Manuel, but did not say anything. Manuel guessed it was Johnny, the one who had started recently and that Feo had told him about. Manuel took on the dishes, happy that there was something to do.
Eva emerged from the dressing room in her work clothes. She looked in on him, running her hand along her blouse and laughing,