Naked Men by Alicia Giménez Bartlett

Author:Alicia Giménez Bartlett [Bartlett, Alicia Giménez]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781609454760
Goodreads: 41072119
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2015-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

My first thought was to call Sandra to tell her about it. An immediate but completely irrational impulse. But I was so surprised, I needed to tell somebody. Iván, a prostitute! I started laughing. In all the speculation I’d done about his supplementary occupations, that possibility had never occurred to me. And yet it was related to our activities in the club, to the demimonde we frequented. It was so obvious. Most likely all of my colleagues at El Diamante were doing the same thing, working as escorts. Who’d have guessed it—Iván was so manly, so textbook macho! Servicing women. Amazing.

According to Iván, really high-end male escorts. But what did “high-end” mean to him? No way of knowing for sure. In any event, he went out with women who had the money and the balls to hire him. After I stopped laughing, the questions I hadn’t dared ask him echoed in my head: did he meet up with the same woman more than once? Did he fake loving gestures during the encounters? Did he really go at it when he was having sex? Did he do ménages à trois, orgies? How much did he charge—were they fixed prices, flexible; did it depend on what he did with the women, how much time he spent with them? I was dying of curiosity about the salacious subject, but it hadn’t even occurred to me to ask as he was confessing. He could have interpreted it as me clarifying details before accepting his offer. Why did Iván think I might become a prostitute? He knows I still feel really uncomfortable about stripping even though I’ve been performing at the club for a while. So he offers me something that’s a huge step beyond that? He’s a strange guy—maybe he thinks it’s more shameful to bare all in public than to go to a private appointment. And is it, actually? I don’t think so. There’s a theatrical aspect to performing at the club, a little like playing a part in a musical or a variety show. But there’s no excuse for going to bed with a strange woman and charging for it.

The word “excuse” made me flinch a little when I thought it. Who was I trying to fool? Let’s be serious, I said to myself, stripping was total shit, nothing like a variety show or avant-garde theater. I was earnestly playing the fool—and not exactly a Shakespearean fool or a children’s clown. No, I was just putting my body on display in a crude, vulgar spectacle utterly devoid of artistic merit. And what had led me to that point? Not so much the need to earn money as the pressing internal need to stop being unemployed. I’d wanted to get out of the house and work with other people, belong to an active group, shed my worry about becoming a social parasite. If I accepted Iván’s new proposition now, all those understandable, even laudable motives would disappear and only one would remain: earning money.

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