I humbly and faithfully cherish a lodge of mentors, most of them gone: the tutelary spirits of photography. One of the members of this lodge is Robert Capa, who said that if a photo is mediocre or lifeless, you weren’t close enough. That’s the reason why I often cross the same line that cross stalkers, voyeurs and exhibitionists.
I’m a shy, discreet man, but the need to capture life naked and off guard gives me the arrogance, the boldness, the immodesty necessary to do my best with the only precious talent I think I’ve got.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
Close enough
The escort
She had a deep longing for someone who didn’t want to change her habits, thoughts or looks. She was done with an authoritarian father, bossy lovers, macho managers and contemptuous therapists.
After a decade of serial dating, she picked up the phone and officially became a regular escort client.
At some point as grown up, a woman may find great relief in the integrity of her bliss, and stop asking for permission or absolution for what she really wants.
Most of her girlfriends are jealous and they comment upon her behavior when she’s not present.
She is not that old to pay for company, and she is sexy, more than the average. Why should she get a gigolo, then?
There’s a certain body language indicative of discomfort or boredom in a man.
I’m a photographer. My job is to read other’s minds through their gestures.
Believe me. The guy was at home with her.
She sucked on a chupachups while paying absorbed attention to the races.
He was leaning his chest on her back, softly holding her hips.
I imagined that perfect red manicure running on his chiseled rear delts or pecs.
The portrait of perfect love.
Playing the cast
Despite my attempts to stay back, playing invisibility, some people still break the delicate balance between the image and the event, striking the pose, bringing to play all their complexes and identity struggles. While editing, I often find that they were showing off my own disowned shadows, my conflicts as an artist. But there’s a gift in random accident: the realization that no photography has a chance of getting close to perfection unless letting that script be gone, unless letting the fakery, the posing, the seduction of the model render it’s personal language. Like in a well rehearsed dance.
So lost
At the firtst sight, she reminded me Jane March cooking naked in Bruce Willis’s kitchen.
I didn’t even realize that my wife was about to arrive home with the groceries. Of course, she was not naked under a white apron with embroidery flounces and not baking cookies for me either, but I was speachless, paralyzed by her arrogance and candor to break into my kitchen like a burglar, covered only by a thin, almost transparent T-shirt, no bra, and a pair of jean shorts, soaking wet.
‘Who the hell are you?’ I asked in a harsh whisper, as if someone could hear us.
She was leaning on the marble worktop and adopting a naughty, deceptively naive and seductive pose. After a calculated silent lapse she said ‘I’m so lost’.
Don’t ask me how a grown up man, a married man, a self-made man, a father, a responsible adult could let himself get caught in a trap like that. I have no clue. I used to be one of those claiming life sentence for child and teen sexual offenders.
She seemed like she used sex to get a fix, to ease some kind of deep emotional pain. She seemed to be hooked on it, she craved me like an addict craves drugs. And she acted older than sixsteen. I know it’s not an excuse, but she acted older than sixteen.
We did it in less than five minutes, fiercely. And in those five minutes I had a blowjob, a soggy hookup and a back door raid better than anything before in my whole life. I came into her, groaning like a beast. Such a bang, such a seizure, such a liberation. The garage door opened just when I was making up my suit. My wife was asking help with the bags.
All of a sudden I realized she wasn’t there anymore. I came out from the trance like if someone punched my stomach. My heart was pounding wildly, my face felt feverish, and my clothes were wet. I filled a jar with water and I smashed it against the tiles, trying to arrange a plausible scenario to justify my messy looks. My wife didn’t notice the tiny footsteps, but she found a bra on one of the deckchairs by the pool and nail tracks in my back a few hours later.
I am sleeping on the couch and she is giving me a silent treatment, while she decides if I deserve to be forgiven or not. And if you ask me if I deserve, I say I don’t.
But I can’t take her wet, tiny, juicy body off my mind. I can’t think about anything else.
It’s killing me.
The whisperer
Like a hunter, patiently awaiting for its prey, Carla spent fifteen years for him to exhaust his energy, his sexual drive, his hunger for all things expensive and exciting, his eleventh lover, his eleventh breakup, and finally, when he had been fired and gone through full-blown bankruptcy, and was bleeding from a coke-hole in his nasal septum, she approached him in the street, not far away from his attic and said hello.
Power driven men are the easiest to blackmail and put into trance.
Certainly, he didn’t care she was a little plump, he didn’t notice that she wasn’t his type of girl.
He couldn’t think about anything but their advantageous encounter and he couldn’t remember anything but that night she whispered him out from fear in the summer camp.
They spent the evening making an inventory of the last decade.
They moved together three weeks later.
He is dogmatic about the blessing that was to find his first love.
Don’t even try to change his mind about Carla. He will fire you.
Two girls under the searchlight's beam
A searchlight’s beam passed by our temporary shelter. One of the girls was crying and the other one was holding her close so the soldiers couldn’t find us all. Neither of them spoke in the two hours that we shared the abandoned bakery. When the soldiers walked away, we silently sneaked into the nearest metro station, which was very crowded.
A lot of people had been shipped to an unknown destiny, including their parents, awakened in the middle of the night while the girls were staying at Oma’s. I knew the family. They owned a cyber café not far from the bank where I worked as a cashier. The girls were left behind due to a pen pusher’s mistake in the register, and that mistake might saved their lives. The eldest kept the other fed and warm, hidden in a warehouse until the new inspections and house searches make it risky to stay there.
The rumor of trains passing drowned our voices, but I clearly heard that amazingly strong and sweet girl saying: ‘Whatever it happens from now on, remember that you are much more stronger than you think. Don’t cry, don’t make noise, never let go of my hand. I don’t know how, but I will find Mom and Dad for you. Ok ?’
Then she gave her a piece of bread she kept in her school backpack. She wasn’t older than eleven. In the blink of an eye they weren’t there any more and I haven’t seen them again, but every time I feel tempted to abandon hope or cry quits, her voice comes to my mind, powerful, mighty and determined so I can’t help but bringing myself together to carry on.
Soap Opera
He is looking around for her -or should we say him?- among the others in the noisy small square, resisting the urge, postponing the ultimate daring, the boldness to ask her to hide from the world in whatever the nearest and darkest building highway available.
On anyone else that flashy attire would be too much, but on her it looks perfectly attuned to her nature, and even exquisite. Look at her gorgeous hair.
This is the closest he has been from being in love. Since he saw her for the first time, working the street from the bathroom’s window, trying to catch the wireless signal of neighbors with the laptop on his knees, sitting on the toilet, he has spent hours watching her meeting the clients, appearing and disappearing in about five or ten minutes, lighting countless cigarettes with lost and dramatic eyes, or chatting with other rent girls and boys of the district.
Isn’t it love when you wake up and fall asleep thinking of somebody? Isn’t it love when you fantasize to rescue and save her from all harm and affliction? Isn’t it love when you notice a thick lump in your throat every time you see her in the arms of others?
A bundle of anticipated guilt, doubt and regret is paralyzing him. Look at his face, look at him swallowing saliva and cleaning his nervous sweaty hands on his Levis. I bet he is shaking inside, with panic and desire.
Now he is walking towards her. Now they are talking. Now they are leaving. Now they are sneaking in that filthy entry. Wait. I bet he is now opening up to her. Oh, my… I would pay to see the moment, to get the exact words. How long have they been there already?
I don’t know. Not more than five minutes.
It feels like an eternity. Have you heard what she said?
She said: ‘Do you want me to continue or what?’
God bless your ears. And what the hell does that mean?
Well, I don’t know. You are telling the story.
Both look heartbreakingly sad. Maybe she was a father in Brazil, before the surgery I mean. Maybe the little son or daughter is fighting for his life in a hospital and he is making the money to pay an expensive treatment. That would make this love impossible, wouldn’t it?
Look at the knocked flat expression in his face walking away without looking backwards.
Or he finally got a blowjob and he is trying to get over it. Wasn’t he dating a girl? Maybe he is bisexual and he wanted to try what is it like to get a blowjob from a trans.
She has just spit and used a mouth refresher. And now she is redoing her lips and her wig. Remember Grissom. Stick to the evidence.
You love to ruin all my fun, don’t you?
Five boyfriends later
The street dancer was not an especially sensitive man. He didn’t do the dishes, he peed over the toilet like most men and certainly was not the kind of guy that cares about feelings, but openly liked chubby women without any trace of macho pride, hesitation or embarrassment.
Our relationship began with a flirtatious compliment about my bosom when I stopped by to applaud their break dance performance and that same afternoon I lost virginity on a filthy bed in a filthy patera lodge near Lavapiés.
At the beginning I felt pressured to go further than a skinny girl would go, but soon I realized that my ample flesh was arousing enough for him. He showed no interest at all in risky practices and seemed perfectly content with a few basic positions, so I had no need to undergo cheap book- learned Kama Sutra twists. Condoms were not an issue either and he never asked for a blowjob, yet he loved going downwards and my beefy thighs around his neck.
I felt one lucky chick, the only among my messmates that got a big O the first time. For a buxom hangdog like me, such an early ravishment was almost an assumption of superiority.
Following my intuition, I never discussed our relationship, but after five months of fine carnal romance and sharing a rotten and bad smelling den with a throng of Colombian, Moroccan and Nigerian outlanders, I forgot the odds and my anemic self esteem and brought our future into question.
He said he was earning the money to go back to Michoacán on time for his wedding to someone called Angélica. Then he opened his wallet and show me a shabby photograph of a raw-boned, flat-chested and undersized Mexican girl.
Although speechless, I pushed the question out with great effort: “Did you ever love me?”.
He didn’t temporize: “No, you just make me horny”.
I dressed up holding tears, I said good bye and left the Embassy of Cockroaches with any idea of where to go.
Five boyfriends later I just fake it to work it through, and still miss him like crazy.
The proved notion of my power to make a man steamy is the only thing that keeps me going.