The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [9]
When he smiled, his nose wrinkled up and his teeth showed suddenly, altering his face completely. He looked like a demon, as if there were a demon inside him peeking out its head. Then the smile disappeared just as quickly and the serene mournful expression settled on his face again. He had shadows under his eyes, like the shadows children have.
We entered my apartment. “Oh, wow, this is a weird place,” he said. He was walking down the checkered hall. “Cool. Weird.” We circled through the kitchen—I checked the water again, just in the off shot—then went into the living room.
“Here, the phone’s here,” I said.
“This is a guy I know, not that well, he’s a client, a plumber and an electrician. He can tell us.”
He called the guy, whose name was Hugo.
I went back into the kitchen and fiddled with the faucet.
Gabriel got off the phone. “Okay, he says first to check the tank—you did that—and then to check all the valves, here in the apartment and up on the roof. They have to be open, which means to the left counterclockwise.” We went around the apartment, looking. I found two valves in the bathroom, another in the kitchen below the sink, all apparently open.
“Okay, now let’s check up on the roof,” Gabriel said. This time we took the elevator.
“Do you give English classes?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Actually, I’m just starting.”
“Maybe I’ll take English classes from you.”
“Really? Great. Why do you want to learn English?” I asked.
He switched to English hesitantly, moving his hands. “For work, for my work,” he said.
We were on the roof again, walking across it. The stain looked smaller, as if it had dried somewhat in the sun.
“What do you do?”
He returned to Spanish. “Well, I was studying medicine, to be a doctor, but then when the crash came, I had to stop and find a job. I’ve been mostly working as a messenger, you know, for a company that delivers things. They give you one of those little bikes.” We had arrived at the water tank. “Okay, now Hugo said there should be a valve around here, just below by the pump.”
I climbed up on the ledge of the water tank again. It was still filling, I could hear. Below on the pipe that led to the pump was a valve of a different kind, like a lever. It was up, vertical. I put it down, horizontal, and waited. But you couldn’t really tell if anything was happening.
I looked at Gabriel and shrugged.
“I guess we just have to go check downstairs again,” he said.
We crossed the stain again and headed for the door.
Back in the apartment, I turned on the water in the sink. Nothing.
“Let me call Hugo again.”
I began to feel that I’d never have water again. I heard him talking on the phone. “Okay . . . Yeah . . . Yeah . . . There’s a hose coming out of the pipe. Yeah, there is . . . Okay . . . Yeah.”
He got off the phone. “Let’s go back up. He says that what we did is right, to put that valve horizontal. The other thing is there may be air in the pipes. He says we have to go up and open that hose and let the water run out.”
We left the apartment again and took the elevator up.
“Oh, yeah, that’s what I was saying,” Gabriel said. “What I was actually thinking was that I could use English for my other work.”
“What’s your other work?” I asked.
“As a ‘gigolo.’ ‘Gigolo,’ right?” He said the word in English.
“‘Gigolo’?” I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right.
“Yeah.” He looked at me and laughed.“It’s something very new.”
“Wait, what do you mean, ‘gigolo’ like prostitute?”
He nodded.
We crossed to where the hose was and he opened the valve. A little bit of water came out.
“I think it will increase appeal, if I speak English. Some clients are foreign.”
I was trying to understand. “This is with men?” I asked. “Your clients are men?”
“Yeah, men. I love men. That’s the terrible thing.”
A moment later, the hose sputtered, jerked and then the water came streaming out. It darkened the roof where the stain was, spreading liberally to form a little pool.
“We have to let it run,” Gabriel said. We watched it together. “Yeah, the gigolo is good. The