ASSAULT ME MORE, LOBATO

It happened one night.

I’m a taxi driver in Madrid, although I’m from a town, Sacramenia, in Segovia, and one day, I picked up a woman with two children at the Glorieta de las Pirámides, asking me to take her to the Lista metro station, on Ortega y Gasset Street, where she lived, because she wanted to keep an eye out there for her husband who was out with a whore.

She told me her name was Fernanda, and her sons were Miguel, the oldest, and Corono, the youngest.

That her husband, although a gentleman and devoted himself to his children, was bald and a well-known whoremonger in the Salamanca neighborhood, as he hung around in bars and seafood restaurants where officials and wealthy people went, posing as a gynecologist, even though he was a simple official.

She told me she’d been looking at an apartment in the Glorieta courtyard, a row house with a bustling neighborhood, whose floors opened onto a balcony that ran around the entire interior courtyard, because she wanted to separate from her husband Lobato, who was a notorious whoremonger.

That the apartment belonged to a Capuchin brother from the Church of Jesus of Medinaceli, Jesus “the rich man,” with whom she heard confessions once a month, approaching the confessional on her knees, telling him all the suffering her husband had caused her, and the obsession she’d developed with denouncing him and accusing him of having been with whores, checking his fly for any woman’s pussy hair, his shirt collar for any lipstick stains, or his neck for any hickeys.

That she, a top-notch seamstress, highly sought after by the best fashion houses in Madrid, when he made a move to hit her, insulting her vulgarly, she would say:

-Insult me ​​more, Lobato. Hit me, hit me more, bald, bald-faced, prick-faced. Go with the whores, you shitty pimp.

That she realized that the brother had taken a fancy to her, because, kneeling before him while he was confessing, she noticed a bulge in his habit; and that, when he blessed her, he would reach for the bulge first.

That a nun from Our Lady of Zion showed her the apartment, and that it seemed too small for the three of them.

This woman, Fernanda, was very pretty. She reminded me of Kim Novak, a sex symbol from the golden age of Hollywood. I don’t know what happened to me, but when I stopped the taxi at the subway entrance, I put my hand on my bag and said to her:

-Ma’am, if you separate or divorce your husband, you and your two children would live in luxury with me.

She replied:

-Sir, stop with the luxury. There’s no luxury here or there. Get paid, and ¡good service!