By Lucas Rodríguez Schwarzenberg
The Personal Trainer left the radio on the grass and pressed Play. He walked away from it while clapping to the rhythm of what was beginning to sound, a polyrhythm of polynesian drums intertwined with noises that can only be found inside a synthesizer, ambushed every four bars by a sample of a soul singer from the late 60s releasing a passionate We Gotta Get it!!!, originally designed to amplify the emotion of a protest song about the civil rights. His students abandoned the meager stretching they had been doing for the last five minutes and got into position to start the zumba class. The largest patch of grass in the plaza was filled with thighs wrapped in phosphorescent, colorful lycra rising through the air, grazing each other amid the flapping, a gesture somewhere in between a gymnastics move and the counterweight necessary to maintain balance. At the helm was The Personal Trainer, dressed in a black synthetic vest fitted to his fibrous body, a grey headscarf with a grinning skull and wide, mirrored, Arnold Schwarzenegger in-Terminator styled glasses. Every move he chose to do was mirrored by his students. Each decision was picked from the routine he performed every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturdays in the hit zumba classes organized by the city hall.
The coordination of the participants was not ideal. All of them women in their 40s or 50s without any previous experience in gymnastics, dance or any other of the disciplines gobbled up by the zumba, they compensated this shortcoming with joy and perseverance. The difference between the elegance and precision of the movements made by The Personal with that of his students was difficult to ignore, especially for him. A vital part of his job was to reserve all judgments, sublimating them in corrections and advice given in the most pleasant way possible, so that they didn’t interrupt the flow or enthusiasm of the local women. The Personal Trainer made a quick tally of his attendees: 18. Two were missing. Jessica hadn’t come for three classes, so he could forget about her. The other absence had to be Sol. The idea that she had also decided to quit fascinated him. Not only was she one of the worst students, taking into account both her performance and her respect for the rules, but she had also started to bring her son along. The presence of other men in the vicinity of the activity already bothered him: having to scare away the couple of subway guards who stared at the ladies caused him enormous displeasure. Having to work under the gaze of this skinny, long, milky kid, who instead of sitting on the grass and looking at his phone as any teenager would, stood there watching the class, never changing position or getting bored, seemed unbearable to him. Several days went by until the kid took advantage of a break and approached The Personal Trainer to deliver a series of corrections and suggestions. Shocked by the audacity of this noname, The Personal Trainer remained silent. Sol leaned in to boast of his son’s good eye and intelligence, his talent for noticing every problem and finding the perfect correction in a matter of seconds. The rest didn’t take long to react. They applauded each comment, going so far as to suggest, only half-jokingly, that the kid should join in as an assistant teacher. The success of this intervention convinced him that his criticisms were most welcome, so he kept repeating them in subsequent classes. When The Personal Trainer cut him in the middle of one of his performance reviews, asking him why didn’t he joined the group so that he could see more closely how the activities were carried out, he accepted. As he always came in T-shirts and shorts, The Personal Trainer suspected that this had always been his intention. The Personal Trainer took it for granted that integrating him into the class would shut him up: it was half an hour of aerobic exercise, so he wouldn’t have the space or the oxygen to talk. But the kid not only continued with his contributions, but also interpreted the invitation as a sign of the importance of his work, as well as a token of his closeness with the instructor. From giving comments from the sidelines of the class, waiting for pauses, the kid went on to shout corrections and point out errors as soon as he noticed them. The Personal Trainer began to feel that the class was slipping out of his hands, becoming a series of corrections interspersed by brief moments of zumba. That the ladies celebrated the kid’s enthusiasm made him feel more and more cornered by this notion.
The five minutes of class that he had been doing without the presence of Sol and his son had him thrilled. He didn’t remember other occasions when he would have enjoyed commanding the municipal zumba so much. The attention of the ladies was focused solely on him. Every move he made was copied with a half-second delay by the 18 middle-aged women in front of him. The music blasted at the right volume. Even if the couple of subway guards did show up, those sexually frustrated hyenas who didn’t make the slightest effort to disguise their intentions wouldn’t be able to ruin that perfect morning. However, experience had taught The Personal Trainer to always expect the worst. His attention diverted involuntarily towards the subway stairs, the infernal portal from where Sol would stumble, with a lunch box of the Powerpuff Girls in one hand and the demoniacal teenager in the other. When it actually happened, The Personal Trainer didn’t know how to differentiate the reality from what his anger had made him hallucinate. Sol appeared shouting the usual reasons for her delays, blending in without asking for pardon or realizing how she had interrupted the flow of the zumba. Her son stood beside her, assuming the postures and movements in silence. The Personal Trainer stared at him. How many calm moments would he have left before the corrections began. Every order, count, or movement he made was received by the entire class, but he made them thinking of the kid, taking for granted that he would find a fault.
The class went on with a disturbing normalcy. Sol quickly ran off of her stories of the subway and how she was never able to have the metro card loaded. Her son followed the movements without any hesitation. As he looked at his enormous watch, The Personal Trainer realized that if they went on like this for ten more minutes, he would have made an entire class in peace. The couple of subway guards hadn’t shown up, but that was secondary. Looking out for him, he saw that the kid was doing the moves with his head down, eyes fixed on his feet. The Personal Trainer thought that maybe something had happened to him, some tragedy outside the zumba had mounted on his shoulders and was trying to knock him down. He flatly dismissed a sentimental problem: the kid was too ugly and too unbearable to entertain a woman. Needless to say, going to zumba classes with her mommy wasn’t a great seduction material. The reason for his turmoil took a back seat as soon as The Personal Trainer realized that he could pretend to be concerned about his problems. He would come closer, question him about his long face, lack of motivation and more than anything (this was the masterstroke), abandonment of his very welcomed contributions to the class. There was no way that putting him in such a situation wouldn’t destroy him completely. He would be unable to give a convincing answer, let alone open comfortably. The Personal Trainer would seem sympathetic: resorting to the jargon of the sports world, he would urge him to continue to strive to achieve it, emphasizing that fulgurant vagueness that inhabits the core of the sports marketing. The kid would not be able to look him in the face without remembering that humiliation. If he resisted, he’d say something like There’s nothing wrong with showing your feelings in front of others. The Personal Trainer felt as if he had just synthesized the atomic bomb.
A subtle execution was key to the success of his plan. Leaving the routine set in a sequence of movements that were easy to perform, he began to hover around his students, celebrating those who were doing well and ignoring the mistakes of those who were not. He approached his prey slowly, dodging the legs and arms that flew through the air with the motions of a chess bishop. He avoided paying too much attention to Sol: if she managed to wrap him in any of those stories that she was able to thread without ever abandoning her dancing, the whole plan could be sabotaged. He limited himself to praising her enthusiasm. Sol replied something he didn’t have the time to listen to: he was busy executing that sympathetic crouch, the leveling of the coach who seeks to create an intimate bubble with one of his players. Both the volume with which he said it, shouting at him as if they were not centimeters apart, and the ease he had in describing the class as an absolute disaster, were enough for The Personal Trainer to abort his plan. Taking advantage of the fact that the kid’s head was still bowed and that for the next movement he had to bend his legs, he stood up and struck him in the back of the neck. Taking advantage of the fact that the kid’s head was still tilted down and that he went to make a move in which he had to bend his legs, he stood up and struck him in the back of the neck. They were weeks of anger, whole minutes in which he had felt his blood boil with hate against that asshole who came to point out to him, a fitness and body care expert, what he was doing wrong. The kid collapsed, landing with his neck loose and his arms crushed by his torso. With his back to his victim, The Personal Trainer could not see his face. Nor did he hear him say anything. His legs were ready to finish him off in case he thought of criticizing his attack. Sol’s horrified scream served as a trigger for his escape to begin. He ran along the gravel paths of the park, noticing the music he himself had chosen dissipating behind his back. When he heard the song come to the We Gotta Get it!! shout, The Personal Trainer was already turning a distant corner and getting lost between the alleyways.
He burst into his one-bedroom apartment. The door bounced against the wall and closed. The Personal Trainer ran to his room, coming back into the living room-kitchen with a yoga mat under one arm, a huge jar of protein supplements in the other, weights and some other gym tools swinging on his forearms. He extended the mat over the fake wood floor and grabbing a dumbbell in each hand, began to do a mixture of push-ups and weight lifting. He counted the repetitions aloud while inhaling and exhaling sharply. When he reached fifty he put the weights on the floor and jumped up. He took a mouthful of protein supplement powder, chewed, swallowed and went on to do squats. To concentrate, he fixed his eyes on the wall in front of him, specifically on the picture of the Ustacha flag. Not too many days ago, that space had been taken up by a poster with the iron eagle, but when he read on the Internet, at a website of cyber-extremists who loved (but were not necessarily) Croatians, that even the Nazis feared the Ustacha, he replaced it that same week. Now he was training under the gaze of Ante Pavelić, the perfect inspiration for the upcoming confrontation. He counted 50 sit-ups and moved on to the abs. His muscles burned from the heat: he took off his synthetic suit, leaving only his underpants on. He noticed the reflection of his body in the window, and with it the sweat emanating from his pores, the pectorals assuming involuntary contractions… he had to train harder.
From the street came up the usual noises: alarms, motorcycles, buses, shouts, laughter. Whenever one of them stood out from the ordinary, The Personal Trainer would stop and listen. He remained motionless, sharp and watchful. Only when he was sure that it wasn’t a patrol car did he carry on with the training. The confrontation was imminent, the confrontation was too imminent. There was no way the zumba class hadn’t reported him. The organizers of the activity had all of his data. They would come for him. Not one, not two. A complete brigade. Special forces. They would add to the aggression of that afternoon that time when he had lost his patience with that twenty-something years old architect who made him go from one end of town to the other every morning to train her and who insisted on taking a break – a guarana juice with ice and a slice of lemon – after each sequence, that he had insulted until she began to cry as well as the former navy admiral who he had forced to repeat a squat that he had difficulty performing – he bore a perforated knee, an illness that forced his retreat – until he fainted from the pain.
The Personal Trainer got up with a jump. His breathing was fast and choppy like that of a frightened dog. Now it was time to stiffen his knuckles. Moving into the kitchen, he stood in front of the concrete wall and began to pound. Each impact resonated through the room, transmitting itself through the walls until it met the following one. He trained until he had the skin from his hands peeled off completely, which he put under cold water. A scream of pain crept up in his throat, but he stopped it before it could come out to shame him. With his hands bandaged, he returned to the middle of his apartment. They’d be here any minute, but he was ready. The weakness of others would have no chance of mocking his own personal strength. He stood in front of the window, concentrated only on his reflection. He watched his body from head to toe, his chest full of patches of irritated skin, his neck tangled with hardened and throbbing hamstrings, his hands red, the bandage stained with clotted blood crunching every time he made and released his fist.
The sun set over the horizon, the night fell. As daybreak announced itself, he was still there, ready.
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