Children of Piraeus
Raúl Gonzalez/Fernando Morientes, AU, R. Life as outsiders in conflict zones. Fernando is a humanitarian medical aid worker. Raúl is a diplomatic staff member.
It turns out the hardest part of the job, Fernando thinks (amused), the hardest part of this lifestyle is that it’s few and far between the times when he can catch his team play anymore.
"Not that it’s a bad thing with the way Madrid is going these days,” Stevie, his English colleague, says with a laugh.
Fernando’s being flippant of course-though no less truthful-but everyone he knows would agree; to do this job requires possessing a sense of humour that defies all odds.
The others (the ones who would take this comment almost insultingly), they are the ones who would never be able to survive.
Fresh out of his Madrid hospital residencies, they send him somewhere easy; Moldova, for sixth months. It’s easy because it’s not far from Spain, mainly rebuilding, setting up local clinics. He’s filling the shoes of someone who came and left, someone who already spent their time earning the trust of the people.
Then, they sent him to Chad. There, he has a difficult time because it is war. Though Fernando and the team, they did not get caught in the crossfire, the spill-over-refugees of all ages and conditions and all levels of physical and mental strength-makes it difficult to sleep at night.
In hindsight, maybe that was better, when he couldn’t, because now, even after Indonesia and the short stint he did in the southern US, the smell of death, the despair and anguish, even the hope, he doesn’t think about any of it.
Then again, work is hard and in any case, he’s mostly asleep on his feet when they send him to his tent, or sleeping back, or-if he’s lucky-an apartment (he has to share, of course), a room in a house.
Barely a month into his fourth posting, Benitez, the head doctor, breaks his leg and is airlifted home. He gets the job-temporarily-but there is a lot of politics nowadays with the logo they represent and the single month they said it would be turns into two, then more.
He spends his days doing paperwork, signing death certificates, birth certificates, arguing with officials, ministers, telephoning, begging for funding to build a well here or there, letting children play with his stethoscope as he operates on their mothers, administering vaccinations, and he wonders when he signed up for this.
At night they go to the five-star hotel and rub shoulders with diplomats, journalists, backpackers that can’t hack it, flash-packers doing charity work for two weeks.
He sleeps with a couple of them, because he can (it’s not like there’s something better, he’s gone through his supply of novels-and his colleagues’ as well-and he doesn’t have a television at home). They always leave, though, and he knows they’ll never look back except as an anecdote at dinner parties.
The replacement never arrives. Instead he gets promoted-without his consent. His colleagues throw him a party at that hotel bar, and he shows up and shakes hands of people he doesn’t know.
It’s nearly midnight when he slinks to the bar. They are showing Madrid and he uses it as a premise to remove himself from socialising.
“You like Real?”
It’s rare that he hears Spanish spoken here so he blinks and pulls his eyes away from a Real side about to have a player booked. He gives the man next to him a cursory glance as he nods.
At half-time, the other man starts up a conversation, “You’re the one the party is for then?”
Fernando half-shrugs, because he can’t avoid replying, “Theoretically but I don’t think they need a reason.”
The man laughs and Fernando sees a flash of the man before him as a young boy.
“Raúl,” the man says, holding his hand out.
Fernando takes it, shaking, “The new spanish attaché. You climbed that ladder quickly.”
Raúl smiles, “not any different than you. Project manager in five years?”
“How do you know?”
“It’s the embassy’s job to take care of our citizens.”
Fernando almost laughs, because it sounds rehearsed, a line in a play, but the second half starts, and they fall back into silence as they watch their team of stars prove their worth in the very last minutes of the game.
That night Fernando takes him to bed.
They strip their clothes off hurriedly as they kiss, open-mouthed and desperate.
Fernando can’t wait for much longer and they press, groin to groin, as Raúl slinks a hand in between them, rubbing, and Fernando contributes a hand, like horny teenagers, and it’s not long before they’re both seeing stars.
The next day he wakes up late and has to rush back to make his nine o’clock meeting with the W.H.O.
They have their first proper kiss, awkward and fumbling, over cups of coffee.
Fernando doesn’t see him for two weeks until they run into each other at the hotel.
Raúl tells him that he has moved into a flat in the diplomatic enclave and the day he moved in there was a security threat. Fernando talks about the boy whose leg he amputated that day because of a badly timed walk to school and a small roadside bomb.
He doesn’t know when Raúl’s hand ends up covering his but he stays longer for dinner.
Raúl's body is warm and pliant under his that night. Fernando takes him into his mouth and for the first time he enjoys giving head because Raúl makes sounds like he can’t get enough and when he thrusts into him, at that moment, Fernando thinks he could spend his life listening to him.
When they fall asleep they are entwined, barely an inch separating them.
They’re both strangers in this country, to everyone and each other. But Raúl is a diplomat by profession and a diplomat by nature and though he arrived later, by several months, he accumulates more acquaintances and parties and dates and events.
At his insistence, Fernando tags along, usually in a borrowed shirt and tie and in the only nice pair of pants he has that Raúl launders in the ‘expat colony’, and puts up with the bullshit spouted.
One night, when Raúl tells him that people find him interesting, Fernando breaks into a smile, a real smile, and Raúl doesn’t think he’s ever seen that before and they both don’t get a wink of sleep that night.
They can’t quite pinpoint when Raúl started to pick up groceries from the commissary and does the rest of his reports at Fernando’s tiny kitchen table, glasses perched on his nose, fortified by caffeine from a “Cien Años de Real” mug, chipped and brown from past use, while Fernando drifts off to sleep to the static of the radio, snoring on the sofa.
They wouldn’t be able to say when it became normal for Fernando to drop in, well after midnight, ink stains or bloodstains, and sometimes, on bad nights, both, on his sleeves, stripping his clothes in the dark and curling himself around Raúl, the other man acknowledging him with by shifting slightly in his sleep.
Every moment Fernando waits for those words that he knows will eventually come. (Either that or the funds for projects will dry up and they’ll be forced to recall him or send him somewhere else while his superiors whore themselves out even further for financial sponsorship.) But as the conflict-conflicts, really-seem to snowball, and with it, his work, that becomes the last thought in his mind.
Fernando lets his guard down even though he knows how it works.
One day Raúl comes to his office unannounced.
Puzzled, he lets him in, shutting the door, thinking it is official business but Raúl shuts his questions up with a kiss and bends Fernando over his paperwork, fucking him, one hand over his mouth, the other jerking off Fernando until he comes all over his hand and the desk and Raúl bites his shoulder as he follows.
“I’ll see you at dinner.” Raúl says as they silently clean themselves up, and he leaves without another word.
“They’re sending me to Japan.”
Fernando freezes for a brief second before he resumes cutting his steak. Raúl has pushed his food aside and watches him.
Fernando knows he wants him to say something (they always do) but he doesn’t know what to say (he never does).
When Raúl leaves to take a phone call, the woman behind the bar gives him a sad look and sends over a drink on the house.
His whiskey tastes more bitter than usual.
That night he takes Raúl before they reach the bedroom. He is rougher, harder than he usually is and Raúl lets him, even encouraging him physically as he pushes, arches back against him, meeting him with every thrust, digging his nails as he grips Fernando hard when he comes.
In the morning light, Fernando sees the bruises and scratches along his torso and hips and feels guilty.
A day before Raúl leaves, the embassy throws him a dinner. Fernando is invited. He wants to decline but he doesn’t.
So he shows up and they seat him in the guests table, the ones for the civilians and barely sees Raúl the entire time.
He gets a little drunk.
Raúl takes him back to his place-empty now.
He pushes Fernando slowly to the mattress, hands ghosting over his body as he is slowly divested of clothing.
Fernando, filled with expensive government wine, wants a quick hard fuck. He’s not ready to forgive and wrestles him down. But Raúl has the upper hand here because has been trained to get his way, trained to be convincing. Exhausted, Fernando relents, as his body sobers up.
Raúl pushes him back onto the mattress, trailing kisses from his lips, down his torso as Fernando arches up under him, and takes him, tasting him, coaxing him and when the time comes, swallows every thing he gives.
Later that night, as, sticky and sated, they drift into sleep, Raúl reaches up to touch Fernando’s face and his hand comes away moist. Fernando is just grateful that he doesn’t say a word.
They don’t make a big deal out of it. Fernando doesn’t accompany him to the airport because he’s got his own official ride.
But he feels like his legs have fallen out from under him and he curses himself for being such an idiot.
At work Stevie comments about his state and insists on requesting more staff members, despite his protestations that he’s just a little under the weather.
It takes them two months, but two more join their team, and in the meanwhile, they finally move into the diplomatic enclave.
The day they move Fernando comes down with a fever.
His superiors in London insist on sending him on a two week paid leave. They say he’s done a great job and reward him with a slight pay raise before he leaves and when he accepts, it crosses his mind to ask about where they got this money from.
He visits his parents but he is restless in their house, waiting for the time to pass.
On the third day, his parents get sick of him and buy him a train ticket to Madrid. He doesn’t know whether to be insulted or amused.
He returns the tickets and takes his parents to Valencia instead, and the sea rejuvenates him, but when he goes back, he stills feel a little hollow.
“You’re a veteran now,” Stevie says, as he pushes a shot in his direction. “Two years in one posting, how does it feel?”
Smile firmly in place, Fernando tosses it back. He cringes and shrugs, “it’s all the same except now I have definitely abandoned any illusions of actually helping anybody meaningfully here.”
His colleagues laugh at the joke not because it is funny (and the delivery is terribly off), but because it is true.
Everyone he knows has trickled back home, but Fernando stays to watch the game with a few strangers in the bar. It’s a Champions League fixture with his team against Lyon and it doesn’t look good for his boys.
“You like Real?”
Fernando knocks over his drink as someone from his team scores a long awaited goal that he suddenly no longer cares about.
It turns out the hardest part of the job, Fernando thinks (amused), the hardest part of this lifestyle is that it’s few and far between the times when he can catch his team play anymore.
"Not that it’s a bad thing with the way Madrid is going these days,” Stevie, his English colleague, says with a laugh.
Fernando’s being flippant of course-though no less truthful-but everyone he knows would agree; to do this job requires possessing a sense of humour that defies all odds.
The others (the ones who would take this comment almost insultingly), they are the ones who would never be able to survive.
Fresh out of his Madrid hospital residencies, they send him somewhere easy; Moldova, for sixth months. It’s easy because it’s not far from Spain, mainly rebuilding, setting up local clinics. He’s filling the shoes of someone who came and left, someone who already spent their time earning the trust of the people.
Then, they sent him to Chad. There, he has a difficult time because it is war. Though Fernando and the team, they did not get caught in the crossfire, the spill-over-refugees of all ages and conditions and all levels of physical and mental strength-makes it difficult to sleep at night.
In hindsight, maybe that was better, when he couldn’t, because now, even after Indonesia and the short stint he did in the southern US, the smell of death, the despair and anguish, even the hope, he doesn’t think about any of it.
Then again, work is hard and in any case, he’s mostly asleep on his feet when they send him to his tent, or sleeping back, or-if he’s lucky-an apartment (he has to share, of course), a room in a house.
Barely a month into his fourth posting, Benitez, the head doctor, breaks his leg and is airlifted home. He gets the job-temporarily-but there is a lot of politics nowadays with the logo they represent and the single month they said it would be turns into two, then more.
He spends his days doing paperwork, signing death certificates, birth certificates, arguing with officials, ministers, telephoning, begging for funding to build a well here or there, letting children play with his stethoscope as he operates on their mothers, administering vaccinations, and he wonders when he signed up for this.
At night they go to the five-star hotel and rub shoulders with diplomats, journalists, backpackers that can’t hack it, flash-packers doing charity work for two weeks.
He sleeps with a couple of them, because he can (it’s not like there’s something better, he’s gone through his supply of novels-and his colleagues’ as well-and he doesn’t have a television at home). They always leave, though, and he knows they’ll never look back except as an anecdote at dinner parties.
The replacement never arrives. Instead he gets promoted-without his consent. His colleagues throw him a party at that hotel bar, and he shows up and shakes hands of people he doesn’t know.
It’s nearly midnight when he slinks to the bar. They are showing Madrid and he uses it as a premise to remove himself from socialising.
“You like Real?”
It’s rare that he hears Spanish spoken here so he blinks and pulls his eyes away from a Real side about to have a player booked. He gives the man next to him a cursory glance as he nods.
At half-time, the other man starts up a conversation, “You’re the one the party is for then?”
Fernando half-shrugs, because he can’t avoid replying, “Theoretically but I don’t think they need a reason.”
The man laughs and Fernando sees a flash of the man before him as a young boy.
“Raúl,” the man says, holding his hand out.
Fernando takes it, shaking, “The new spanish attaché. You climbed that ladder quickly.”
Raúl smiles, “not any different than you. Project manager in five years?”
“How do you know?”
“It’s the embassy’s job to take care of our citizens.”
Fernando almost laughs, because it sounds rehearsed, a line in a play, but the second half starts, and they fall back into silence as they watch their team of stars prove their worth in the very last minutes of the game.
That night Fernando takes him to bed.
They strip their clothes off hurriedly as they kiss, open-mouthed and desperate.
Fernando can’t wait for much longer and they press, groin to groin, as Raúl slinks a hand in between them, rubbing, and Fernando contributes a hand, like horny teenagers, and it’s not long before they’re both seeing stars.
The next day he wakes up late and has to rush back to make his nine o’clock meeting with the W.H.O.
They have their first proper kiss, awkward and fumbling, over cups of coffee.
Fernando doesn’t see him for two weeks until they run into each other at the hotel.
Raúl tells him that he has moved into a flat in the diplomatic enclave and the day he moved in there was a security threat. Fernando talks about the boy whose leg he amputated that day because of a badly timed walk to school and a small roadside bomb.
He doesn’t know when Raúl’s hand ends up covering his but he stays longer for dinner.
Raúl's body is warm and pliant under his that night. Fernando takes him into his mouth and for the first time he enjoys giving head because Raúl makes sounds like he can’t get enough and when he thrusts into him, at that moment, Fernando thinks he could spend his life listening to him.
When they fall asleep they are entwined, barely an inch separating them.
They’re both strangers in this country, to everyone and each other. But Raúl is a diplomat by profession and a diplomat by nature and though he arrived later, by several months, he accumulates more acquaintances and parties and dates and events.
At his insistence, Fernando tags along, usually in a borrowed shirt and tie and in the only nice pair of pants he has that Raúl launders in the ‘expat colony’, and puts up with the bullshit spouted.
One night, when Raúl tells him that people find him interesting, Fernando breaks into a smile, a real smile, and Raúl doesn’t think he’s ever seen that before and they both don’t get a wink of sleep that night.
They can’t quite pinpoint when Raúl started to pick up groceries from the commissary and does the rest of his reports at Fernando’s tiny kitchen table, glasses perched on his nose, fortified by caffeine from a “Cien Años de Real” mug, chipped and brown from past use, while Fernando drifts off to sleep to the static of the radio, snoring on the sofa.
They wouldn’t be able to say when it became normal for Fernando to drop in, well after midnight, ink stains or bloodstains, and sometimes, on bad nights, both, on his sleeves, stripping his clothes in the dark and curling himself around Raúl, the other man acknowledging him with by shifting slightly in his sleep.
Every moment Fernando waits for those words that he knows will eventually come. (Either that or the funds for projects will dry up and they’ll be forced to recall him or send him somewhere else while his superiors whore themselves out even further for financial sponsorship.) But as the conflict-conflicts, really-seem to snowball, and with it, his work, that becomes the last thought in his mind.
Fernando lets his guard down even though he knows how it works.
One day Raúl comes to his office unannounced.
Puzzled, he lets him in, shutting the door, thinking it is official business but Raúl shuts his questions up with a kiss and bends Fernando over his paperwork, fucking him, one hand over his mouth, the other jerking off Fernando until he comes all over his hand and the desk and Raúl bites his shoulder as he follows.
“I’ll see you at dinner.” Raúl says as they silently clean themselves up, and he leaves without another word.
“They’re sending me to Japan.”
Fernando freezes for a brief second before he resumes cutting his steak. Raúl has pushed his food aside and watches him.
Fernando knows he wants him to say something (they always do) but he doesn’t know what to say (he never does).
When Raúl leaves to take a phone call, the woman behind the bar gives him a sad look and sends over a drink on the house.
His whiskey tastes more bitter than usual.
That night he takes Raúl before they reach the bedroom. He is rougher, harder than he usually is and Raúl lets him, even encouraging him physically as he pushes, arches back against him, meeting him with every thrust, digging his nails as he grips Fernando hard when he comes.
In the morning light, Fernando sees the bruises and scratches along his torso and hips and feels guilty.
A day before Raúl leaves, the embassy throws him a dinner. Fernando is invited. He wants to decline but he doesn’t.
So he shows up and they seat him in the guests table, the ones for the civilians and barely sees Raúl the entire time.
He gets a little drunk.
Raúl takes him back to his place-empty now.
He pushes Fernando slowly to the mattress, hands ghosting over his body as he is slowly divested of clothing.
Fernando, filled with expensive government wine, wants a quick hard fuck. He’s not ready to forgive and wrestles him down. But Raúl has the upper hand here because has been trained to get his way, trained to be convincing. Exhausted, Fernando relents, as his body sobers up.
Raúl pushes him back onto the mattress, trailing kisses from his lips, down his torso as Fernando arches up under him, and takes him, tasting him, coaxing him and when the time comes, swallows every thing he gives.
Later that night, as, sticky and sated, they drift into sleep, Raúl reaches up to touch Fernando’s face and his hand comes away moist. Fernando is just grateful that he doesn’t say a word.
They don’t make a big deal out of it. Fernando doesn’t accompany him to the airport because he’s got his own official ride.
But he feels like his legs have fallen out from under him and he curses himself for being such an idiot.
At work Stevie comments about his state and insists on requesting more staff members, despite his protestations that he’s just a little under the weather.
It takes them two months, but two more join their team, and in the meanwhile, they finally move into the diplomatic enclave.
The day they move Fernando comes down with a fever.
His superiors in London insist on sending him on a two week paid leave. They say he’s done a great job and reward him with a slight pay raise before he leaves and when he accepts, it crosses his mind to ask about where they got this money from.
He visits his parents but he is restless in their house, waiting for the time to pass.
On the third day, his parents get sick of him and buy him a train ticket to Madrid. He doesn’t know whether to be insulted or amused.
He returns the tickets and takes his parents to Valencia instead, and the sea rejuvenates him, but when he goes back, he stills feel a little hollow.
“You’re a veteran now,” Stevie says, as he pushes a shot in his direction. “Two years in one posting, how does it feel?”
Smile firmly in place, Fernando tosses it back. He cringes and shrugs, “it’s all the same except now I have definitely abandoned any illusions of actually helping anybody meaningfully here.”
His colleagues laugh at the joke not because it is funny (and the delivery is terribly off), but because it is true.
Everyone he knows has trickled back home, but Fernando stays to watch the game with a few strangers in the bar. It’s a Champions League fixture with his team against Lyon and it doesn’t look good for his boys.
“You like Real?”
Fernando knocks over his drink as someone from his team scores a long awaited goal that he suddenly no longer cares about.