The stranger's maid
The stranger's maid
The fridge is resplendently empty. There aren't even any ecktachrome films in the egg tray. There’s nothing sadder than an empty fridge when you're hungry. So devastatingly empty that she looks at me and I look at her and at this precise moment we meet. In front of an empty fridge. And how have so many people come to be in this house all at once? In the house many bodies wander sleepily and we’ve just run into each other: Hi! Nobody’s got a penny and when you haven’t got a penny you start looking for change in every drawer, pocket, jacket, coat, under the beds, the cushions, the carpet, and especially under the floorboards, and Pist used to throw coins in the air so that one day he'd find them. She laughs, we’ve got three pounds together that weigh a ton, the black rain slides over our young skin while in the street Jamaican pushers offer us pills of every colour and never cross All Saints Road all by yourself but it won’t be that bad. And now we’re in a supermarket on Portobello the supermarket beside the Electric Cinema where the story of O’s playing. We’re in front of the cheese section. The smell is delicious and she is delicious and she looks at me and the look means cover me with your body while she fills her bag with camembert, brie, cheddar, Kraft Philadelphia and my heart’s in tachycardia and her laugh is a blue sky with a white sun. And then she covers me with her body and I fill my bag with tons of packets of salmon, salami, a lobster and the Pakistani shop assistants have eyes all over their bodies but she puts smiles in all their eyes and they smile dopily at our euphoria and her smile is hypnotic and now our heartbeats invade all the shelves of the supermarket in a state of alert and it’s strange that the shop assistants are so deaf and we laugh our heads off while they admire her sexy body and maybe mine while we leave the supermarket with our bags absolutely bulging and our looks will be words from now on and all the assistants of all the shops in this damp city will fall under the spell of her cheek and will think we’re crazy, our happiness must be something foreign they’ll think, and when we get back to the house the fridge stops feeling so devastatingly sad and nobody asks useless questions and this time we taste everything three times and stealing is sometimes like playing spies with trench coats hats and sidelong glances.
A piece of cheese
A few packets of sliced ham
An expensive shampoo because when you steal it’s only worth stealing the most expensive stuff
She dresses as a schoolgirl. She dresses as a schoolgirl even though she had the good luck not go to school as a little girl de puta madre. She wears army boots and her hair is short really short. Her succulent lips: her face would be a lie without her red lips painted red so red her lips as if all the blood in her body was concentrated in one part of her body. Her red lips and her boots are the most important things in life, so she sleeps with her boots on in case anyone tries to steal them while she’s asleep. She doesn’t intend to get married and she intends to be young forever because youth is a great alibi. She doesn’t want to work because she’s not a robot: work is for robots, the chosen ones become robots. Work used to be for those who had nothing. She has nothing. Not one cent but not having money isn’t a problem if you know how to steal well. She knows how to steal well. Red lips and army boots. And then the school uniform. Her red lips are also her uniform and now she leaves the house with them and her oversize black felt coat. She wants a man. She wants a Spanish man with black hair and not too tall. The black hair is important. Or a sincere man. She wants a sincere man guantalamera guajira guantalamera but at the same time you can’t be too choosy in life because sincerity is another alibi but a very boring alibi as Pist would say. Pist doesn’t like her to go out alone in case she gets caught but Pist is a blue eyed middle class white boy. Anyway what the fuck would she do with a sincere man? She lives with Pist because with Pist she doesn’t have to pay rent and he lets her drive his van. She doesn’t fancy Pist but Pist is always drugged up in some corner of the house and that doesn’t bother her de puta madre. She doesn’t take drugs because the doctor told her not to take drugs and sometimes she thinks that maybe the doctor is mistaken but a doctor is a doctor is a doctor and anyway she hasn’t got any veins left. Nor does it bother her when Pist ties her up in some corner because he likes it when she ties him up too, but she’d never let him kiss her because she doesn’t like other people’s spit and pregnancy is a sexually transmitted disease so she doesn’t let anyone touch her. Sometimes she thinks she should wear a full body condom when she goes out so she doesn’t catch anything because you can also catch invisible diseases: when she thinks about the condom she starts to laugh because she realizes that everybody really does wear a condom from head to toe to protect themselves and then she feels like crying.
And also sometimes the feeling of being too corporeal. If only her body were invisible. Always under the same pressure: at any moment they might stop her and: excuse me miss could you come with me please and the impossibility of running because they’ve got hold of her arm and she knows they won’t let her go until they’ve humiliated her enough: anyway now she can say she’s a poor orphan while she streams crocodile tears de puta madre man because once in a while she likes acting. Anyway she’s always adored being called señorita.
Psychedelic marbles
and opaque marbles
Spices: cinnamon and cloves
A bottle of tequila
Shoes always in pairs
American magazines
Dark chocolate
Red lipstick really red lipstick: names of the colours of lipsticks:
Cruelty Red
Chilli Pepper Hot
And she’s shown up at the door of my house with an old suitcase and I know she’s come to stay and she laughs her head off and now we’ve just stolen a big bag of tube tickets from Victoria station and all our scrounger friends suddenly come to visit us because in the bag are tube fares for all of us for two years and everyone sticks a hand in the chest as if it were a treasure greedy for stolen but authentic travelcards and she still doesn’t know that her smile is a credit card. And a ticket collector’ll catch her with a strange ticket and in his eagerness to get promoted he’ll take her to the transport police and when she runs off she’ll fall and he’ll catch her again and there they’ll treat him like the idiot he is because obviously he spends his whole day reporting poor little innocents trying to get himself promoted and the next time she sees the same ticket collector she’ll steal another bag of tickets from right under his nose for a laugh and the ticket collector won’t notice because he’ll be looking carefully at everyone’s tickets and there’ll be more tickets for everyone for more years and everyone’ll put their hands in the sack greedy for tube tickets and bit by bit we’ll sink the London Transport budget because every soul in the city will buy their tickets from us and we’ll get rich.
Now we’re in Alabama restaurant looking at the menu. She’s got her lips all wet with saliva and all the looks slide down her cleavage and she takes them out laughing and her smile is a question: should we run out on the bill? and we laugh our heads off and she’s wearing her black leather coat with the lining prepared for stealing all the desirable things in the world and she’s never liked paying for anything, she assumes no one likes paying for things, especially when prices are so inflated, so inflated that one day they’ll burst. And now we direct ourselves to all the most expensive items on the menu and we are the most radiant couple in Alabama with our pink cheeks, the hypnosis of our eyes, and we play heads or tails to see who’ll stay drinking coffees until the waitress loses track and it’s me, so she says good-bye giving me two kisses very close to the corners of my mouth, I’ve still got all the kisses she’s ever given me kept quite close to the corners of my mouth, and she goes leaving me with the impossible bill and when the waitresses aren’t looking, I leave the restaurant invisibly and she’s waiting for me reading a Chinese magazine outside the macabre Madame Tussaud’s museum as agreed. And now we go to a shop and try on all the wigs while trying out various erotic and infantile fantasies and laugh our heads off and all the wigs look good on her and she’s so gorgeous that everyone’s left with their mouths hanging open when they look at her drooling and she wants a really wild black wig and me a red one of pretty much the same style and her blink means: now! And I quickly hide the wigs under my armpits, under my coat, and now I could be a penguin with my arms so stuck to my excited body and she leaves the shop assistant petrified by her spell and when we try on the wigs out on the street we look like movie stars and tonight we’ll go to the opera and no one will suspect that her silver Cartier watch has been stolen with the most impeccable dexterity in Harrods where not even thieves dare to rob and everyone will think we’re real señoritas and now she squeezes my hand and no one has ever squeezed my hand so affectionately.
Bubble baths of every scent and jams of every flavour too
A chocolate cake
Plastic wrapped leg of lamb
under the arms
Under the arms everything that fits
under the arms
Heart shaped glasses
A bottle of tequila
Mozzarellas swimming in plastic packages
It’s de puta madre being an orphan because it’s another alibi and now the knives fly in the living room, along the corridor, in the kitchen: her mother is dodging them. In a way it’s lucky not to have parents she thinks. As you don’t choose your parents and this is a mysterious curse, it’s best to play dumb. Her parents are not her parents. That is to say, she disowned them as parents. This is an example of a typical day in her house: knives and heavy objects flying across the rooms. Every time her father sees her mother he throws something: an iron, a bottle, a knife. Her mother hides behind the curtains, under the bed, and is scared: her mother’s eyes pop out and she looks like a toad when she’s scared. This is all she remembers of her parents: her mother hides and her father looks for her to throw sharp objects at her. Her mother dodges them dextrously but that doesn’t mean she’s not scared. When her father feels democratic he gives her a choice: what do you want the axe or the hammer?: her mother runs and locks herself in the toilet. Her father has never thrown anything at her. Not an axe or anything. Her father has never given her a kiss. He just ignores her. When she goes near her father her father says: go to hell. And when he feels open-minded: go and fuck your mother. Her father doesn’t let anybody touch him, not even to hug him. Telling this is a great alibi for society because she’s got the excuse that her parents were monsters. When she tells this, people are touched and she can steal their wallets. Being a victim isn’t that bad after all. Her parents weren’t monsters, they were people with parents too like everyone, that’s all. She’d never steal a friend’s wallet. Her father is an Italian gangster and doesn’t speak English: he just utters hoarse noises. Her mother translates: he says not to forget that you’re only here in this world so the council would give us a bigger house. Her mother explains:
... beetles live on monkey excrement. There are substances in shit that go to waste forever if you don’t eat them. Our brains are full of shit. There are people like vultures who like to pick our brains and know how to extract gold from the shit. These people are shit and they’ll get what they deserve. Birds so beautiful and colourful eat the beetles that eat the monkey excrement. Remember this my daughter. Satan 666 is in our toilet and he feeds off our shit. All men are jealous that we can have abortions and they can’t. All men intimately desire to have abortions in some sordid clinic with some demented guy passing himself off as a gynaecologist: if they want to experience it they can put a vacuum cleaner up their asses and turn it off when big clumps of fat and blood start coming out of their mouths. To understand life you’ve got to have at least one clandestine abortion: Marilyn Monroe had thirteen abortions because thirteen is the lucky number of those who wish to die because everything disgusts them. If men could have abortions, the clinics would be full. Since men can’t have abortions, they invented society and culture. Sometimes artificial things beat nature hands down. Women keep having babies and don’t leave them alone until they have turned them into walking abortions. The abortions grow and compete among themselves and then buy a car and a house. Sometimes rebellious abortions come out and become human beings but soon the abortions get them because abortions want to annihilate everything that has a soul. The surviving human beings hide in their houses and when they go out they try not to show any weakness that can give them away. Abortions are great invaders of minds. As they don’t have enough space with their minds, they invade other minds to speak through them. The human race is a disgraced race. In reality the world is the Virgin Mary’s abortion that made the dinosaurs extinct ...
And she has always ignored her mother, who’s not her mother, who’s crazy. Mothers are always right. And suddenly her mother ducks: another flying knife and this time the knife grazes her mother’s neck and makes a hole in it. At the age of nine she gets up and there’s no one in the house: her parents have disappeared. De puta madre. A Samaritan teaches her to read and to write and also to cook. The Samaritan teaches her to read with a book called Little Women. The Samaritan doesn’t throw knives at anyone. She misses the knives and the things that fly through the house. She misses her mother who hides. So she throws an iron at the Samaritan but the Samaritan doesn’t get out of the way and her head gets split open. A split head is very strange: there are all the hairs and then a hole with blood coming out of like red paint. She misses the objects that fly through the house. Her mother’s just hiding. She looks for her all over the house but doesn’t find her. The Samaritan doesn’t come back. She never wanted to hurt anyone. Her parents aren’t her parents. She doesn’t want anyone to see her with her parents. They’re not her parents, they’re her neighbours she says. Now they’ve disappeared. When her mother goes out in the street to look for her she pretends not to know her. The Samaritan was a big ear open day and night. Her parents have disappeared but the Samaritan has brought her a television. Her parents are better than a television: but things are more faithful than people: a television can’t not be there when you get up: you can throw an alarm clock out the window but if you don't throw it, it stays with you until it dies because things die too although it’s hard for a fork to die.
Single suitcases
Everything for travelling
A captain’s cap
A Polaroid camera
A lucky ring
A harmonica
A travel diary
A travel toothbrush that won’t be found the day of the trip
A chrome cigarette-case
Cotton pyjamas
Instant tanning lotion
Tampons to suck the dirty blood from her body: are babies born from dirty blood?
Have you ever been to the opera? The opera is an excess like the lives of saints and we sit in the front row and everybody in the front row looks like silhouettes cut from the tabloids and probably the diamonds and jewels are real and these people are strange because they seem a little cardboard in their elegance and it seems to her they’re all phantoms of the opera all together and she laughs so as not to cry because laughing is better than crying. Her laugh is a virus. A nice virus. And the voice of the soprano is like screaming alone on a mountainside but when the dance of the seven veils starts the set becomes a seismic tremor shuddering under her weight like at the beginning of an earthquake and it’s not fair that Salomé looks like an Indian elephant with lots of veils on, sopranos being always so big even though they may have enormous passionate hearts the size of whales and she laughs so much and we all laugh our heads off and then the snobs shoot us looks that are bullets and with their bullets we die laughing and laughter is a bullet-proof vest and the usher is laughing too so he doesn’t say anything to us because he knows that the opera is us now and that she is the real soprano, the other was an impostor, but now she’s not an impostor anymore because she’s laughing too because she appreciates that laughter is a gift like the singing of birds is a gift and anyway she feels ridiculous doing the dance of the seven veils and the usher is laughing so hard his jaw’s fallen on the floor and the front row people really are cardboard, that’s to say, they don’t react, and people are divided between those who have sparks in their eyes and those who have eyes like voids and she collects her velvet coat from the cloakroom and kindly offers the conductor a tip and he refuses and she insists and she only realizes that he wasn’t the porter once outside the Royal Opera House whose ashtrays are distributed among the different houses of those with sparks in their eyes and on the way out, just for the hell of it, we steal two enormous chocolate cakes and one falls making a big intensely brown stain on the white tile floor of the restaurant that now looks like an abstract painting and some tramps don’t like chocolate cake but others do.
A Staedtler eraser: the smell
A white velvet dress
Coloured dresses: various coloured dresses
T-shirts with cartoon characters
Orgasmic underwear
Little boxes: she likes little boxes
The sensation of silk stockings
A bottle of tequila
Pretty pens and ball-points
The smell of body lotions and silver trainers
Coloured contact lenses can’t be nicked
The wild wigs
Illustrated books
Prisms
Bottles of rum of whiskey of tequila
You can get a tattoo done and then run out of the shop but it’s like dining and dashing from a Chinese: inadvisable
Temporary tattoos in little bags that fit in any pocket
A set of lights for the Christmas tree
She’s never liked goddamn cameras. The world is full of cameras. She doesn’t like camera’s eyes. Cameras everywhere. Cameras in your bed. And in the bath. And in your soul. And in the toilet bowl. Everyone watches everyone. In airports. Train stations. Supermarkets. Restaurants. Your friends’ houses. Everywhere there’s a camera watching her. And a tape, lots of tapes, that can later be used against her. She knows she’s been in many episodes. And depending on who’s watching the movie she’ll be the heroine or the villain of the film: a movie where all the rest will be more or less disaster's children depending on who’s watching it. And she’ll be punished. And the good guys will be drooling with pleasure. And they’ll have multiple orgasms when they stone her already battered body while they shout we’ve seen you you miserable thief, you’re the lowest of the low, because bank robbery has its merits but stealing slices of cooked ham and getting caught cannot be idealized that’s why we’re throwing stones at you, because we can’t make a movie about someone who steals ham. And she shouts: but I was hungry. And she also murmurs something about ham being pink. And their obese cackles will reveal perfectly disciplined teeth. So because their teeth are very white, she’ll spit in their face and she won’t let them feel even a moment’s compassion for her brown mouth, so brown from nicotine, and she’ll run, run, very fast, and they’ll step on her heels because they’ve got nothing better to do and then she’ll say: you’re all dead. And they’ll keep acting as if she hadn’t said anything but from that moment they’ll exist less than ever. In all this there’ll always be someone who helps her to hide and avoid them but she’ll never see his face. Not seeing his face will sometimes be worrying because she won’t be able to know if it’s an angel or a fake angel because the sky is full of fake angels but because she’ll feel this warm hand, she’ll give in to it, and let herself be led by this warm hand and surprised when it throws marbles on the ground to trip them. And it will also be de puta madre because then she’ll steal a motorcycle and the motorways will multiply and trusting in warmth is all that’s left to us: echo: trusting in warmth is all that’s left to us.
A puzzle of the world
A cane that’s an umbrella
A video of the Flintstones for when they have something to play it on
A small coffin with a skeleton with an erection
A pair of jodhpurs
A baby’s booties
A toy car
A wooden cross from a church
A white silk kimono and a kimono with a traditional print
A crystal ball like witches have
A poker deck
An addictive video game
Driving gloves
Several packets of espresso coffee
An hourglass
A mechanical mouse
A jade Buddha
Some soft socks
A set of false eyelashes and a red leather jacket
A Jean Paul Gautier corset
A sea shell
In the South Americans’ house everyone is sleeping but they let us in to shower because in our house there’s no hot water, no shower, no bath and our hygiene oscillates between the Royal Oak swimming pool and the South Americans’ house and now they’re all dreaming about grazing sheep and in the kitchen there’s quite a big little box full of coke and we suck our fingers and she puts her long fingers covered in this pure white powder in my mouth and I suck her long fingers like an excited animal and I put my wet fingers in the box and then in her wet mouth and she sucks them and bitterness is sometimes euphoria but we drop the case on the carpet that absorbs it like an evil monster and at this moment Lolita comes in sleepily and sees us sniffing the carpet like strange dogs but since she’s got her eyes sewn shut with sleep she doesn’t understand anything and goes back to sleep and in the shower while the water descends through the holes in the hose, something ascends in our bodies and we’ve forgotten to take off our clothes and the clothes are stuck to our bodies and the vapour blinds the mirrors so they can’t see anything and it’s hard to talk with your mouth full of water and the water is the water of oblivion and of memory and this is an interminable shower forever and she has taken me by the hand and we’ve gone down the bathtub drain and passed through all the wet pipes of this wet city and our bodies are now pure like the pure cocaine because we are dressed in white light and have you ever been hypnotized by a smile and you don’t remember what’s happened?
A second-hand pair of handcuffs
Today she comes home with a pair of lockable linked metal rings. Funny thing is in Spanish the same word can mean handcuffs or wives. The policeman had put one cuff on her and then he’d put the other on himself and they seemed like a happy heterosexual couple out for a stroll de puta madre hand in hand through the streets of Camden towards the police station. She tingled a little with the unexpected feel of the handcuffs against her skin, that’s why she blinked more than she should have done when she looked tender to him, and that’s how they’d ended up in a café, and please, please, she is a poor orphan from Bosnia victim of an unjust society. She steals actively. She has always been cautious: prudence. And speed. The precision of every movement. The confidence and surety of being invisible at the exact moment. Overcoming any timorous thought. She knows they look the other way a little because deep down they like to see her around even if she steals a bit: they look the other way because their secret desire is to be in her pockets she thinks and so she secretly satisfies them. And she smiles and laughs. She laughs out loud because laughter is her guardian angel: her laughter is a way of keeping the houses from falling down. A laugh that’s never off key: a laugh that makes a fan of everyone who hears it while things disappear. She is a mermaid now, her smile a song, and the shop assistants sailors, and she’s discreetly handed the bag to Pist and he’s discreetly handed it to me and I’ve disappeared among the people in the street, but the police have caught her outside now, but all she’s got on her is a plastic flower that she liked and it’s none of his business and the face of the policeman is of an unknown shade of white. It was like an impulse like lighting a cigarette if you smoke, she says while she decides that the only thing that’ll save her is to look like a startled animal and her lips suffer a movement outwards so red her lips, and the spellbound policeman unbelievably takes off the handcuffs de puta madre and hooks them on the handcuff-hook of his trousers and puts the keys in his pocket. And back home she’s realized that when she was little she always wanted a pair of real handcuffs to handcuff her parents. And these handcuffs could be a bit of a trophy de puta madre. And Pist and I have prayed a lot that nothing happens to her but she doesn’t know.
Postcards that wink at you
A case of oranges
An air-freshener in the shape of an egg
A Japanese person’s wallet
A magnetic chess set
A watermelon
A book about UFOs and Martian abductions
A radio cassette and CD player
A weird hat
Diving goggles for peeling onions
An inflatable birthday cake
Plastic silver wings
Boxing gloves to hang on the wall
A necklace of transparent beads
A weekend in a hotel: a portable television set
Multivitamins
Some gentlemen’s shoes for Pist and Calvin Klein underwear for Pist: Calvin Klein men
A ping-pong ball
A bottle of tequila
An animal book
A little mother-of-pearl box
A pirate flag
Fish-net stockings
A leg of cured ham
A hot-water bottle
A man’s pin-striped suit
All absolutely all the CDs she likes
An antique porcelain tea-pot
An antique paperweight
A pacifier
An Epilady
Some John Lennon sun glasses
Candles to light up the whole house
Triple effect eye shadow
Yellow nail polish
A toolbox
A set of silk sheets
A radio that’s a flashlight and a calculator
A platinum blond wig with really long hair
and a rubber dress
A blender to make delicious whipped fruit drinks
A red blue and yellow striped jumper
A sophisticated answering machine
A baseball cap
A guide to Thailand
An 18th-century chest
A calendar with tranquil landscapes
A nurse’s first-aid kit
Red ballet slippers she’ll never put on
She is a maid with an apron and a cap and she follows the orders of her master. REBEL. REBEL. REBEL. This message appears intermittently in her head just before she falls asleep. She doesn’t know who her master is and steals this and steals that and now she can’t go out without stealing. She doesn’t like faceless orders but maybe orders are always invisible like a cell. She can’t go from the house to the tube stop without stealing. Stealing is sometimes a euphoria. A big euphoria. When she steals in spite of herself it’s no longer a pleasure. When she steals because something forces her to steal it’s not the same anymore: she feels like a stranger’s maid. At the beginning she steals out of necessity but stealing is a pleasure. Now stealing is like smoking a cigarette: one after the other without noticing and it’s no fun anymore. And she doesn’t laugh anymore. And she’s less and less herself. Stealing is also like breathing. She knows she can steal everything she wants. In an spontaneous manner. In a calculating manner. She can steal alone. And in a team. She can steal the ring off your finger without you noticing. And also credit cards out of the pocket of your trousers. That’s what she’s here for. Because she doesn’t feel the euphoria of stealing anymore. It’s good here. Cindy is de puta madre. Cindy is Jamaican. Cindy is here because she quite did in her husband and they caught her on a train to Geneva but they didn’t find the arsenal of hundreds of stolen pistols and she’s already been in another jail for seven years for armed robbery. She’d like to be a bank robber. She and Pist playing Bonnie & Clyde. But she’s only good at stealing. Stealing little things. I’m fine here, she thinks: I get up early, something I’ve never in my life been able to do. I have a hot shower every day. I’m learning French de puta madre. Every day they give me some very pretty disposable knickers and Cindy tells me stories about Jamaica. She wears her hair in little braids now. Cindy braids her hair and she does Cindy’s and she’s de puta madre, shame she’s going to spend her whole life in here for killing her husband, a long fingered pig who gave sweets to little girls. Cindy reminds her of her Cindy doll just because of the name. Her doll was white but there were black Cindys too. Cindy was all she had then. And Cindy is all she has now. Cindy has told her a secret and it’s incredible: a buried treasure on the island of Formentera and she’s drawn a map with an X and she’s given it to her along with some phone numbers and jails have always served to make contacts. And she’s always dreamed of finding a treasure: take off her clothes forever and dive into the blue ocean. And please keep on dreaming. And today when she’s suddenly showed up at the door of my house with a freshly stolen lobster in her hand and she has offered it to me and she has laughed with her red lips so red her lips, I have thought that a leopard can’t suddenly change its spots. And: shit honey I had a great time in the nick! And: are you coming with me to Formentera? Get ready the suitcase, we’re off to Formentera! But give me a kiss! First give us a kiss! And I'm packing my bags now.