I'm a Fool to Want You by Camila Sosa Villada

Author:Camila Sosa Villada [Villada, Camila]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2024-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

THE BEARD

Some girlfriends just get lucky. You pass them in the street and they’re like, What are you looking at? when the guy walking next to them is hot enough to make a traffic light blush. You just want to go up to them and say, You’re a fortunate woman, honey. Then you get the ones with no luck at all, who fall in love with men who treat them badly and they just put up with it in silence. Out of love. Or convenience. Some girlfriends want to be loved more than they are. Then there are the girlfriends who can’t find a balance. Girlfriends who can’t stop fucking other men. Sleepwalker girlfriends, girlfriends who never wanted to be girlfriends, girlfriends who smash crockery, girlfriends who say yes to everything, girlfriends who forget about their friends. And there’s one kind of very rare girlfriend, as rare as an albino crocodile, the girlfriend for hire. Not much is known about them, but there’s plenty of conjecture.

The first time was pure chance (I’m revealing all this now because finally, after many years, my first ever client has found his way out of the closet). My friend Marcio Cafferata had to go to his brother’s wedding and his parents had begun to nag him about his bachelorhood, because he’d never brought a girlfriend home. Thirty years ago, that was a clue that you might have a gay son. Parents wouldn’t stand for faggot offspring. Better dead than a fag. Marcio found the pestering suffocating: his mother’s health, the family name, his grandfather’s clinics, and their reputation among the declining elite of Córdoba were all apparently at stake.

He was a teenager when his father found a photo of Antonio Banderas in the nude in his history folder. He threw him out of the house. He stayed over at a friend’s for several months until his mother tracked him down and begged him to come home before people started to talk. She sent him to a psychologist for conversion therapy. I was the friend who most urged him to come out of the closet, telling him that it was all damp in there, it was better in the light. But we were a different generation; the world was still beautiful and very hostile. The point is that Marcio had to go to a wedding and his father had given him an ultimatum: either he went accompanied by a girl or he’d better start thinking about a different surname.

The wedding day was fast approaching, he’d tried on his tux…and he’d made vain attempts to seduce women at the office and in bars. I mean, the things that family occasions make us do. The night that he suggested it we were standing in line at the La Cochera theater, I can’t remember what play we were going to see, I think it was Divine Kisses, one where at the end they have a load of brides dressed in white peeing for real onstage. Marcio was deathly pale and it was obvious that he’d ruined his manicure from the nerves.

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