VIEJO VERDE – Dirty Old Creep

I’m happier than I’ve been in seven years, until I hear my landlord’s footsteps on the stairs, hear him call my name. And for a moment he’ll take centre stage, though this is not the real story but its backdrop.

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My landlord always keeps his door ajar so I must greet him by the stairwell.

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“How about wine and castañas tonight?” he texts.

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“Call me later,” he reads aloud.

He reads my tank top. He reads my breasts.

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My landlord needs me downstairs, needs help in the garage.

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My landlord greets me in the kitchen, in his dressing gown, leans over me to grab a spoon. I can smell his breath as he asks about my weekend, see his grey front tooth.

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Always leaning over me.

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My landlord, he’s a viejo verde.

—

It’s Monday morning and my landlord is meant to be at work. But he’s downstairs in the kitchen coughing his lungs up, then he’s outside my room, a zipper, a footstep, a something that seems to linger like a silent fart. I’ve been in bed for thirty minutes. If I close my eyes for a little while, he’ll be gone when I open them.

But he isn’t, he isn’t gone, and I’m contemplating buying a kettle for my room, migrating my instant coffee, my mug, my morning essentials from that cold kitchen into this bedroom that buds with life. A door shuts, the water hisses through the pipes. It’s hard to listen when I hear the click clack of my keyboard. I feel groggy and hostile, but the coffee isn’t worth the forced smile, the feigned interest, the discomf—cabinet doors bang in my bathroom just outside. Why is he in my bathroom? My fingers whisper across the keyboard. I need to buy a kettle. I might just wear a surgical mask downstairs and grunt buenos días. He’ll speak to me, though, and I’ll be incapable of writing afterwards. I’ll spend the whole day sour as a lemon, my duvet up around my neck, strangle me, strangle me.

—

My first night here waves of nausea kept waking me, a peculiar, unidentifiable smell lurking in the folds of the duvet cover. I’ve identified the unidentifiable. The dishwasher smells like that, the kitchen rag smells like that, the landlord smells like that. Rotten.

Degradation, decay, death.

And I’ve learned to trust scents.

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The guy I’m seeing is a lucky man, says my landlord.

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They meet and shake hands.

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My landlord brings my delicates in off the clothesline. Might have to burn them now.

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I thank him for the new computer chair in my bedroom.

“Una silla bonita para una chica bonita.” A pretty chair for a pretty girl.

—

Doors bang in their frames. Just a thunderstorm but I stare at the moonlit door for an hour expecting my landlord to barge in.

—

My landlord brushes the wall down with a paintbrush, brushes away the dust.

“I didn’t know you were a painter,” I say. Unnecessary, but it fills the silence. He’d insisted I be present while he installed a cliprail in my bedroom, you see.

He makes a joke of painting me, mimics removing a bra strap from the shoulder, then gestures to me as though it’s an imperative. He tells me, now earnestly, that he’s taken figure drawing classes, that he learned more than just art from the models.

An hour and a half later—I still don’t know why I had to be here—Frida Kahlo is mounted on the wall, but my landlord sits cross-legged on my carpet, fiddling with the radiator.  

I wish he would leave. I wish he would stop touching my things. I wish he had never entered my room. All he touches is a festering wound.

I try not to think too much, try to express my gratitude, to fill this uncomfortable space, this silence, and thus cut up an orange and offer him a slice, a thank you, a hint to leave. I hand it over on a square of toilet paper from the kitchen – we’re out of paper towel like most students and young professionals.

He likes the roses on the toilet paper, he jokes.

“It’s not mine,” I say. “It’s Carmen’s.” Carmen, the other tenant, whose butch lesbianism has likely spared her these encounters. Maybe I should cut my hair.

“Bueno, os conozco iguales, no os conozco así de íntimo.” Well, I know you about the same. I don’t know either of you that intimately.

“Quizá algún día,” he continues, “¿quién sabe?” Maybe one day. Who knows?

His lips split into a grotesque smile, and I shut myself in the bathroom, watch my own face scrunch up with disgust as I seek refuge in my reflection, as though we can share and thus divide the discomfort.

When I exit the bathroom, I find my landlord in the corridor just outside, hunched slightly over the orange slice. He eats it with sticky hands, glancing up at me. His mouth still pressed against the flesh, his thumbs tugging down the skin.

—

I was wrong to dismiss my hunches. I knew before I’d moved in. I knew as soon as his face appeared from behind the door. I knew as he kissed both my cheeks, encantado, nice to meet you. I knew as I followed him up the stairs, as he showed me every room, as he closed the two of us up in the bedroom to keep the cats out. No, no, no, no, no. I knew something was off, gluggy like curdled milk, but I rationalised my way out of it despite knowing the subconscious processes stimuli that the conscious mind does not, despite knowing that hunches are the result of said stimuli.

They say trust your gut, and my gut said vomit.

—

My landlord says I’ve changed. That I’m cold.

I almost doubt myself.

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I turn on my phone’s voice recorder the day I tell him I’m leaving.

He’s eating cereal in the kitchen, milk on his lips.

I hate my own name in his mouth.

—

New landlords. No weird smells.

Not live-in landlords, either. Thank God.

—

Green walls, green couch, green beginnings.

Nothing else green.

—

I’m happier than I’ve been in seven years, I wrote, until I hear my landlord’s footsteps on the stairs, hear him call my name.

I’m happier than I’ve been in seven years, and the source of which has a name. The source of which threw my suitcase in his trunk and drove me away from insane. The source of which spends the night and lends me his sheets, lends me his pillowcase.

And I suppose, really, that this is where the real story begins.

A sigh of relief, anyone?