The Nubian Prince: A Novel - Hardcover

Juan Bonilla was born in Jerez, Spain, in 1966 and is a columnist for El Mundo, the Spanish daily newspaper. He is the author of three novels, four short-story collections, and a children's book. He was awarded the prestigious Biblioteca Breve Prize for The Nubian Prince.

Nubian Prince, The
ONE My job was to save lives. It was that simple. You may think I'm exaggerating, trying to impress you. You can think what you like; the fact is I was paid to save lives, and the more lives I saved the more money I made. My existence was a kind of tennis game in which one of the players--me--never ventured far from the house, the living room with the big-screen TV, the darkroom where I'd spend whole days developing pictures, the neighborhood where I had everything I needed to be happy: a bar where I ate long, peaceful breakfasts, a small bookshop where I could get whatever book caught my eye, a fruit stand run by a big, toothy woman who'd set aside the best grapes and most tempting peaches for me, a barber shop I'd duck into a couple of times a week, and even an Internet cafe where I'd spend hours surfing the Web. Meanwhile, the other player--also me--would zigzag across half a continent, which was the zone I'd been assigned. He might be setting off for the Cádiz coast; he might be arriving in Sicily. I could usually decide for myself where this other player was to be found, but occasionally circumstances decided things for me. A huge transport of Albanians arriving in Brindisi would have me on the next flight to Rome, renting a car, and racing to the city where my partner in this tennis match would be waiting for me.You may well be wondering what sort of work I did, what I mean by "saving lives." Well, I wasn't saving people the wayfiremen or lifeguards do; all they really save are bodies. I've never known a fireman to rescue someone from the flames and then offer him a new and better life, something beyond dragging him down the fire escape to the street and providing a little emergency medical care. I've never heard of a lifeguard giving mouth-to-mouth to a half-drowned swimmer and then saying, "Marry me." My job was to seek beauty, to plunge my hands into the world's muck and bring up pearls. I cleaned those pearls, made them presentable, prepared them to acquire the value that was rightfully theirs. I traveled to places where poverty had hidden these treasures; I searched them out with infinite patience and rescued them. That's what I mean by saving lives.Look at me now, for example, here on a beach near Gibraltar with the sun reluctantly sinking below the horizon while the trees, stiff with cold, lean forward as if attempting a graceful bow. A few dozen Africans have just arrived in pitiful, flimsy boats. They drag themselves along the beach in their dripping rags, following orders, fearful of the eyes that are watching them: the Guardia Civil has been waiting for them to land and immediately arrests them. Many seem about to faint; others would give their lives for a glass of water; most can't stop trembling. But the Guardia Civil doesn't do a thing for them, just herds them together to keep them under control. Some have managed to hang on to a few possessions carried in backpacks held together with duct tape. The police won't bring out the water bottles and clean towels and start pampering the refugees until the TV cameras arrive. That's how it usually is: cameras first, then the paramedics. In between, they'll call me, if I happen to be in the area. Well, actually, the only one who calls me is a lieutenant into whose palm I occasionally slip a wad of bills. He wakes me at dawn with a whispered, "Half an hour from now at such and such a place." And I'm off. When I get there, he always says,"You've got fifteen minutes," and allows me to inspect the merchandise. I give the newcomers a quick once-over and if there's a piece that convinces me, I signal to the lieutenant, who says, "OK, stop by the station in a couple of hours."I get there right on time, and the lieutenant has set her aside for me, the one in the pink track jacket and pants that long ago were some light color, the one with the eyes that say, "Please don't hurt me." She's been spared the medical inspection and served a cup of coffee instead. Some guy who's just seen a movie celebrating human goodness may even have bought her a doughnut. I hustle her out the door, doing my best to make sure no one sees us. Even though she's been captured, she still isn't mine; I have to be charming and radiate friendliness, make her grateful. I've bought her a sweater and tennis shoes at a twenty-four-hour store. She's certain to ask where I'm taking her, what's going to happen to her family--there's always a father or brother who gets left behind--and that's when I have to tell her the truth. I'll begin by confessing why I'm saving her while all the others who made the crossing with her will be sent right back where they came from without arousing the faintest twinge of remorse in the hearts of the enforcers of the law. If she doesn't speak English, as is often the case, I can simplify matters by hiring a translator who knows how to explain the situation quickly and forcefully. If she does speak English, I can handle things on my own and convince her she has very few options besides trusting me and allowing me to save her. I even bring along the phone numbers of some of the various gorgeous specimens--both male and female--I've saved in the past; one will probably turn out to be from the same place she is; they'll talk for a while, and when the newly captured piece hangs up she'll have no arguments left. Then it's up to me to clean her up, heighten her exquisite features, accentuate her extraordinary appeal. In a couple of days she'll be ready to visitClub headquarters, where management will look her over. I always know in advance whether a piece I've collected will be accepted outright or will have some trouble passing the exam. In this case, there'll be no objection whatsoever. They won't stand there gaping; they're not in the habit of feeling or expressing astonishment. But they will be delighted to have Nadim--that's the name I gave her the moment I saw her; she told me her last name but for some reason refused to give me her real first name. They'll immediately schedule a photo shoot, and the resulting portfolio will be added to the Club's magnificent menu. Then they'll transfer her to a city where she'll work under some local branch manager. But I won't have any part in that; all I do is save her. Once she's assigned to a branch, she'll start earning money: 20 percent of every service. (As a rule, she'll be required to perform a service every three or four days.) The full price of the service is astronomical, of course. To put it bluntly, the proof that her life and beauty will soon be worth much more than they are now is that if I wanted to enjoy her body--which prior to her examination by Club management would not be at all an impossible thing (and I must confess that on more than one occasion I've been guilty of doing just that with the pieces I've captured)--at the Club's going rate I'd have to pay almost as much as I'll earn for having saved her. The Club offers no discount to its own scouts.You must be wondering how I got this job. Well, the story is not without its charm. The most basic element of any story--I imagine we can agree on this--is the thing that compels someone to tell it; that's more important than the content of the story itself. Why does someone decide, suddenly, to tell a story? There are thousands of answers to that question, maybe as many answers as there are stories, I don't know. I still haven't managed to come up with an answer of my own, though I suspect it must have something to do with the circuitous route that brought me here.I could begin by saying: I had travelled to Bolivia as part of a band of saintly crackpots sent by a nongovernmental organization to put on clown shows and acrobatic routines for the miserable children who live in the immense garbage dump on the outskirts of the capital. I was twenty-three years old, an age at which you can still fool yourself into believing that this sort of gesture will save the world. I had just finished college with a degree in dramatic arts, and to what more noble use could I put my certified knowledge, incorruptible audacity, and scant talent?This first part of my story, however, immediately demands a somewhat deeper foray into my past--though I promise my explanation of how I landed this job will require no tedious rummaging through my deepest childhood memories in search of the one shining nugget that will illuminate all that follows. When Iread a biography, I always skip the chapters about the subject's childhood; I'm sure they're only there so the author can show off all the backbreaking research he did to discover the names of the boys who waited outside the schoolyard one rainy day to settle a score with our hero. As soon as anyone starts telling me things about his childhood, both my legs go to sleep, and for that same reason I try never to tell anyone anything about mine.I remember a certain spring night at home, watching a movie on TV with my parents and brother. The movie was Magnolia, a collection of shocking dramas woven together with enviable skill and copious histrionics. Suddenly one of the characters--a pathetic former TV child star who's had braces put on his teeth in order to seduce the muscular waiter he's fallen for--bursts into tears after getting his face cut open in a spectacular fall. Between sobs, he cries, "I have so much love to give." I don't know what went through my mind when I heard that line, but I completely lost it and burst into tears myself. To my mother's astonishment, my brother's bewilderment, and my old man's stone-faced indifference, I started repeating the character's line over and over. My mother got up and came over to me but couldn't think of anything to do except throw the afghan she'd had in her lap around my shoulders. "That's right--make him look even more ridiculous," my brother said."I think the best thing would be just to change channels," my father declared. "Either that or take him to the emergency room. With any luck, they'll decide to keep him in the hospital a while."I got up, still wrapped in my mother's afghan and wiping my eyes on a corner of it, and went to the bathroom to look in the mirror and try to figure out what the hell was going on. Behind me, I heard my mother say, "That boy is going through a lot. Heshould see a psychologist. Even better, we should take him to Padre Adrián."My mother was fascinated by psychologists and therefore also by priests. In fact, her sole preoccupation in life was to find an appropriate name for what the rest of us called "her little thing," and which she, therefore, had no choice but to call "my little thing." It might come up in any conversation, with a neighbor lady or a relative, with the owner of the corner store, or, occasionally, with a fellow passenger on the bus. Whenever her spirits darkened and she left the kitchen to sit in front of the TV until all hours, voraciously consuming carton after carton of ice cream, my brother and I would say to each other, "Mother's got her little thing again." My mother was obsessed with finding the correct name of her "little thing"; she was certain that the moment she knew exactly what was happening to her--if, in fact, it deserved to have a name (if, that is, it was something that had happened to other people in the past and would happen to still more people in the future)--her obsession would disappear. Of course everyone in the family knew that Mother's condition was a banal mixture of boredom with her empty life, resentment of my father, disgust with herself, and, finally, an uncontrollable urge to put an end to the whole thing--a combination that did not fail to present an interesting philosophical conundrum. Here was a cocktail of woes topped off with an ingredient whose essential purpose, in addition to giving the brew its own distinctive flavor, was to eliminate the cocktail itself.During the phases when she wasn't feeling so low that she had to remain prostrate most of the day, she would valiantly pursue the label that could reduce her problem to a few syllables. First she went back to finish up her interrupted bachelor's degree, enrolling in night school, where her classmates were an impressivecrop of slow but determined learners. She lasted less than a year. It was true, she said, that she'd learned things about Ferdinand and Isabella and the causes of the Spanish Civil War, that she had recovered a certain taste for mathematical formulas--Ruffini's theorem struck her as "enchanting," and its derivatives inspired rapturous commentary--and had confirmed that chemistry remained as uncouth and insufferable a subject as it was when she was in college. But something was missing. She hadn't managed to strike up a friendship with any of the students in her class, and it wasn't for lack of drinking lots of coffee with the ones who seemed most interesting. She decided that what was missing was exercise. Why wasn't gym a required subject in night school? She could answer the question herself simply by imagining most of her classmates in workout clothes. That same week she put all her class notes away in a drawer and rushed off to enroll in a sports club.My brother maintained that what my mother really needed was a lover. It's true that when women who are inordinately bored with their families and the dull routine of their lives find something to focus on so as to escape to a better place, they experience an upsurge in mood and looks that is in direct ratio to the neglect with which they then punish their families--and during her fitness period my mother managed to get a little closer to that better place. I don't know whether she actually did have a lover during those months (I hope she did), but it would have been difficult even to ask the question; the "upsurge" had lifted her so high above us that we would have had to scream just to get her attention. And it wouldn't have been a good idea to arouse my father's suspicions. He was contemptuously dismissive of my mother's attempts to save herself and find a name for "her little thing."There was no doubt the daily visits to the gym were doing her good, but she suddenly decided that no, this wasn't the place shewas going to find herself either; some element of soul was missing in that sports club packed with bodies. Yes, that was it, what she needed were words, not push-ups. Maybe the lover who'd helped her love herself a little more grew tired of her constant doubts and rigorous self-examinations, deliberately intended to fuel her sense of guilt. In any case, the gym days were followed by a brief period of prostration. Then, I imagine, she had an idea: given the impossibility of finding a name for her problem in Spanish, it might be easier to try finding it in some other language. She enrolled in a language school. My brother suspected that my mother's decision to study German rather than English could only be a kind of secret tribute to her lover's nationality. (You see how, without knowing anything for certain, we were able to conjecture a rather odd sequence of events in order to explain something that undoubtedly required no explanation.) Whatever the case, it was the worst decision she could have made. If she'd chosen English, she might have managed to finish the course, but with German her chances were a lot slimmer. Before the end of the second semester my mother abandoned her declensions and once more took refuge in silence, serving up boiled potatoes for dinner with a vacant stare, spending hours each day in front of the television, and, on the days when she felt worst, buying colossal quantities of entirely useless things.Finally, my brother, who is much more candid than I am and consequently wound up working as a gas station attendant desp...