Javier Marias

 

Fewer Scruples
by Javier Marías

original title: Menos escrúples
translated by Margaret Jull Costa

I WAS SO strapped for cash that, two days earlier, I'd gone for a screen test for a porn movie and was amazed to see how many other women aspired to one of those roles with absolutely no dialogue, or, rather, only exclamations. I'd gone there feeling shy and embarrassed, telling myself that my daughter had to eat, that it was no big deal and that it was unlikely that the film would be seen by anyone I knew, although I know that everyone always ends up finding out about everything that happens. I doubt, though, that I'll ever be important enough in future to merit being blackmailed about my past. Besides, there's quite enough material for that already.
      When I saw the queues inside the house, up the stairs and in the waiting room (the screen tests, like the filming, were being held in a three-storey house, somewhere around Torpedero Tucuman, not an area I know), I began to feel afraid that they wouldn't choose me, when, up until then, my real fear had been that they would, and my real hope that they wouldn't; that they wouldn't think I was pretty enough, or well enough endowed. There was no chance of that, I've always turned heads, all my life, I'm not exaggerating, it's true, not that it's done me much good.
      "I probably won't get this job either," I thought when I saw all the other female hopefuls. "Unless the film includes a massive orgy scene and they need loads of extras." There were a lot of girls my age and younger, and older women too, ladies who looked rather too homely, mothers like me probably, but mothers with kids, with irrecoverable waistlines, all wearing rather short skirts and high heels and tight sweaters, like me, badly made up, it was absurd really, if we appeared at all, it would be naked. Some had brought their children, who were running up and down the stairs, the other women clowned around with them when they passed. There were a lot of students there too, in jeans and T-shirts they would have parents, what would their parents think if their daughters were chosen and they happened to see the film one day; even if it was only going to be sold on video, they do what they like with them after that, they end up being shown on television in the small hours of the morning, and an insomniac father is capable of anything, a mother less so. People are really hard-up and there's a lot of unemployment: they plonk themselves down in front of the television and watch anything that's on just to kill time or kill the emptiness, nothing shocks them, when you have nothing, everything seems acceptable, atrocities seem normal and any moral scruples go by the board, and, after all, this kind of filth doesn't actually do any harm, it can even be quite interesting sometimes. You can learn things.