Marina rang the bell today. Finally I caught her alone. She asked me for $50 pesos, she was restarting work today after a long illness and said that she would pay me soon. I told her not to worry, but that we had a pending conversation, and I asked if she had time right now. She said yes, and came in.

We sat down at the table. “Look”, I said “The day after I withdrew the money that your brother sent, Óscar told me that you had a big fight, and I was afraid that the fight might have been about the money”. She assured me that it was not about that, but that they had a big fight in which he had bloodied her nose, and even the neighborhood guard had to come.

His boyfriend had called the police on her denouncing that she was an illegal immigrant, but after her pleading he had called again to say it was no longer necessary. It was obvious to me that it had been a ruse, and that he was controlling her through fear. They had reached a fragile peace in which she had said that if he lay a hand on her again, she would be gone.

I told her that—as a fellow illegal immigrant in Spain, I understood that her options were limited, and that I felt a lot of empathy about her situation becase I had been living in a situation in which I didn’t want to be, but because of my immigration status I had no choice. In truth this was a patent lie, I did feel the constraint of not being entirely free of choosing where I wanted to live, but my living arrangement was nothing short of privileged. But feeling the lack of alternatives was enough to make me feel a vague anxiety.

I told her I had researched options for her, and that I knew that she was very tough and that she could take care of herself—which she is, but that I could see that if she didn’t want to live in the way that she was living, she had very few options, if any. So I had called an NGO that took care of women in vulnerable situations because of men’s violence. I had called and they had told me that they could put her into a safe house where she would be given the basics, food and lodging, but that they had told me that she had to make that call by herself. I asked her if she wanted the number. She said yes.

I had written down the number on a scrap of paper, which I fetched, and after giving her the money she had asked for we bid farewell.

At night Óscar came for his nightly dinner and told me Marina’s boyfriend was at home. He asked me to have dinner with them, that they had prepared soup and that I could take something to eat. My first inclination was to say no, but I overcame my aversion and prepared some quesadillas with chicken and took them to his house.

I had already conversed with the guy before, and he has a very formal way of being with me. His bulging eyes and full lips convey a sensuous character, which in tandem with his measuredness in conversation transmit a sense of dishonesty, as if his face wouldn’t match his conversation. I don’t want to write that I sensed that he was a bad person, but I will leave this description as a placeholder for sensing his negative energy.

Dinner with them left me exhausted. He asked me what I did for a living. I told him I was a designer, and that I worked from home. He told me that he was a broker, someone who facilitated businesses, and went into details about the businesses that he had helped make happen and I pretended to be interested, but I was bored senseless. I steered the conversation towards common ground: I knew his father was the owner of several small properties which housed businesses in a run down neighborhood, two of which sold very good food. He steered the conversation again in the direction of business, as a way of signaling the status of his family and the numerous properties that they had.

I sense this is not the end of the story with Marina. I know better than to involve myself in this storyline, I’m just a facilitator of things to happen. I do not hate her boyfriend, I just find him to be a throughly distasteful character.

I am too tired to continue writing.