The Barcelona Brothers (13 page)

AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR THINKING, EPI LOOKS OUT
through the window, his eyes dazzled by the dirty light refracted in the glass pane. In a spasm of clearheadedness, however, he decides to limit his break to five minutes, and then he’ll go back to thinking about going back to thinking about what to do. This important decision calms him down immediately, and he remembers warm summer nights when he looked out of windows very much like this one. At the neighbors’ roof terraces, at the street, at some noisy passerby or other, still echoing the racket in the bar or open-air dance he was returning from. Sometimes the sweltering heat was so oppressive that Epi could fall asleep only if he stretched out on the floor tiles. His neighbors all had very large families, cousins and siblings by the dozens, all of them together night and day. The men would play cards, sing to themselves, or cause upsets. The women carried baskets of wet clothes upstairs to hang
on the wires that crossed the flat roof from one end to the other. Slender women, with their hair caught up behind, dark complexions, and naked legs under floral-print skirts. The slap of their rubber flip-flops, which were barely held on their feet by a plastic thong between their big and second toes, would shatter Epi’s voyeuristic universe. Apparently the women liked wearing those rubber sandals as much as their own daughters did, though the girls would toss them into the air ecstatically at the least provocation.

Still today, when his family no longer exists, Epi can recognize within himself the hatred he used to feel toward his parents. So Catalonian, so civilized, so urbane. The balanced family unit, with four members. Now just two of them are left, Epi and Alex, but a brother isn’t anything, hardly more than an acquaintance you don’t always feel like greeting. His mother: a professional in dissimulation. The only inhabitant of a cyclothymic world which seemed to be reborn every day with new rules and procedures, from the most overwhelming affection and protection to the handful of salt rubbed into the infected wound. His father: an angelic sluggard, lacking in all the masculine attributes one hopes to find in a father. He knew a great deal, indeed he did, but nothing a kid could brag about in the barrio. His histories of the Greeks and Romans, all those books standing in bookcases and glass cabinets all over their apartment, and the reverential respect given him by the next-door neighbors—what good was all that? What good was he, if he didn’t know how to sort out anything at home, if he couldn’t so much as kick a soccer ball, if the only time the
neighbors across the hall invited him to play
tute
he didn’t take off his shirt the whole afternoon, they relieved him of all his cash, and he was a laughingstock at the card table for the rest of the summer? When the old man disappeared—in a perfect escape, treacherous and even admirable—Epi (in contrast to Alex) found it a relief. He’d no longer have to avoid him, or to excuse and defend him in front of the neighbors.

“Mama, I’d like to have a family.”

“You already have one.”

“No, more family.”

His mother would run her hand through his hair and kiss him on the head, inhaling his child’s smell. She seemed to understand him. They’d remain together at the window, looking out at the terrace filled with people, lights, cries, and songs, which were coming from their neighbor Sonia’s little Cosmos record player.

“You’ll have one someday. You’ll have lots and lots of children. And your wife will have brothers and sisters with children. It’ll be a really big family, and you all will invite me to your terrace, and I’ll join you there, of course, I’ll join you there.”

Now, stepping back from the window, he asks himself how everything could have gone so wrong. He looks around to make sure he hasn’t forgotten anything or left any traces. He can leave and maybe head over to Salva’s bar, the murderer returning to the scene of his crime; let all the world know the truth, and God’s will be done. Nothing will change from now on; his faith isn’t great enough for that.

He’s on the point of leaving when the doorbell rings. As he’s closer to the window, he looks out, but he can’t see anyone. So he picks up the intercom. Maybe it’s Tiffany. He says nothing and listens, then presses the buzzer to open the main door. Now he’s sure the girl will soon be retracing her steps, because her son is coming up the stairs.

ALEX IS GETTING
over his fright. He feels better already. So much so that he begins to think the leper’s only a nightmare he once had. Now it’s returned, he concludes, regurgitated into his brain. Like one of those flashbacks that punish you for doing acid. Goddamned drugs. If only his brain were still intact. And to think, when it came to playing chess, he used to be the pride of the barrio; now he wouldn’t know how most of the pieces move. Pawns and kings. That’s all he sees around him. And queens, of course. Queens like Tiffany.

He’s in Salva’s bar. He’s taken his medication again, hours ahead of schedule. He’s going through a lucid phase. Such phases sometimes last minutes and sometimes hours. The fact of having been to the police station has reduced the pressure sufficiently for him to start thinking he can straighten out this whole mess. He knows, all too well, that he doesn’t have much time. That there are matters he’s completely ignorant about. Like the van the cops mentioned, for example.

Goddamned drugs, yes indeed, but what he wouldn’t give to be high right now. How he longs for a good fix. Just one, and he’d sort everything out in a minute. The memory of the
drug lays him lower than the drug itself ever did. The bittersweet aftertaste of his nostalgia. The shadow of the glorious past, before and during his addiction. And the memory also brings back a sensation of struggle—from the moment of awakening—against something you need and hate at the same time. Every day the same effort, the same defeat. And then the knowledge that you’re off on one side, watching the big wheel turn without you.

And before? Are there memories from before the first fix? In his case, not many. One of them comes from his teenage years, a memory of going downstairs carrying a paperback book in his pocket—the already-read pages bent backward, as one does with an arm in a fight—to enjoy the sun outside. He recalls choosing, in various corners of the barrio, one or another of the mountains of rubble the municipal workers left behind, whether out of forgetfulness or malice was never quite clear; he’d use the debris as a place to sit and read. If Alex believes in coincidences, if he believes that a map of energies with crisscrossing lines exists, surprising us only because we don’t know how to read it, his beliefs are now about to receive some support. In Salva’s bar the usual crowd is gathered, but the news of the morning’s events has left them chattier and more excited than ever before. Actually, there’s nobody near the part of the bar where Tanveer lay bleeding. The police examined whatever they wanted and said nothing about it to anybody, but no one wants to sit over there.
El senyor metge—
“the Honorable Doctor” in Catalan—is present, along with Abel and Professor Malick, the last-named on his daily tour
of all the bars in the barrio, and sitting at a table in the back, twenty-something years older than the image of him Alex has had in his mind until a few seconds ago, is Helio. In an unfortunate encounter one day when they were both teenagers, Helio tore Alex’s book into a thousand pieces just because he was reading it. From that day on, Alex stopped looking for a sunny place to read outside. In fact, he hardly read at all anymore. Now, many years later, Helio—Alex knows this by hearsay—is in the construction business. He recruits laborers, carpenters, and night watchmen from among the roughest guys he can find. It’s not so much good workers that Helio’s interested in; he wants to sign up violent or desperate rabble. He keeps them for a couple of months. In general, he calls them by nicknames or insults that Helio and Helio alone finds funny. Ecuadorians, Moroccans, recent residents of Modelo prison rise and follow him, willing to put up with the steady abuse and humiliation because they know, or they’ve heard from others who know, that the more humiliation you put up with, the greater your reward will be.

“You monkey son of a bitch, fucking Indian … look how ugly you all are!”

Salva’s observing the scene, unaware that Alex is at the bar, barely a few paces away from him. Mari asks Alex what he’d like.

“Give me some coffee. It’ll make up for all the tranquilizers I’ve got in me.”

Salva’s surprised to see him but keeps drying a glass that has actually been dry since the spectacle—Helio paying his
workers their week’s wages—began. Evidently, Salva’s not pleased with what’s been going on in his bar today. He says to Alex, “What are you doing here?”

“I need coffee. Since when is your bar Helio’s office?”

“Don’t talk to me about it. I must have stepped in shit right after I got up this morning. First there was what happened before, and now this.”

“But I heard he puts on this circus at Jacinto’s.”

“Jacinto’s has closed. We don’t know why. But for God’s sake, I hope they reopen soon.” He turns a little to address Mari: “Just think, the joint was crawling with cops all morning long … It wouldn’t be a bad idea for a few of them to drop in right now.”

“Com el Colombo que sempre tornava
,” says
El senyor metge
in Catalan.

“Shit, Salva, Colombo! You remember?”

“Fuck Colombo, and fuck his mother, too.”

“Salva, instead of cursing and swearing, how about going over to that table and telling him you don’t want him here?” While she’s speaking, Mari points to the sign that says the proprietor has the right to refuse admission to anyone.

“You want to be a widow so you can sell the bar.”

“Not a bad idea, not at all.”

The shouting in the corner continues. At regular intervals, one of Helio’s workers leaves the café, counting his money or already carrying it in his pocket, his head bowed down, his eyes burning with hatred.

“Salva … can I talk to you?”

“What’s up?”

“Nothing.”

“We’ll talk in the john.”

Professor Malick sits on the barstool Alex has just vacated. At the same time, Alex and Salva enter the storage room where the toilet is, the same room where Alex’s brother, a few hours that seem centuries ago, lingered for a long time in the dark. Making sure they have no company, the bar owner opens the stall door and in a purely routine movement pulls the flush chain. The room is fairly large and filled with refrigerators and towering stacks of plastic bottles, which surround the two men like statues in a pagan temple. Salva stands in the doorway, positioning himself at an angle so that he can spot the cops if they come through the front door, with or without Colombo.

“First of all, I want to tell you what an asshole I am. I covered for your lunatic brother.”

“You did right …,” Alex manages to say.

“I’m not so sure. Look, I knew your father and your mother and … fuck, we were all friends! All the doors in the barrio were open back then—people were always offering kids snacks.” Alex is quite familiar with the evocation of these golden memories, but now is not the right time to get smart. “And all of a sudden, nobody respects anybody anymore. That Tanveer was just another worthless son of a bitch, living on my taxes and whatever he could get dealing drugs, filling his pockets with public subsidies here in Spain, because the people in his country don’t have the balls to get out in the street and protest against the sheikhs. He’s dead, and it’s a good thing he’s dead.”

Up close, Salva looks a good two heads shorter than he does behind the bar. Maybe that’s because he’s hunched over, as if protecting his lungs from all the smoke in the place.

“He was dead as a doornail when they took him away,” Salva goes on. “But to tell you the truth, I’ve heard all kinds of rumors. What the hell was your brother thinking?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know where he is.”

“Well, the cops are looking for him. If he can get control of himself and talk to them, maybe nothing happens to him. The thing is, there aren’t any witnesses.” Here Salva lowers his head even more and speaks very softly, but his words sound like a warning: “So now, if he fucks up, they’re going to screw me to the wall for covering for him.”

“You could have told them you didn’t see anything.”

“That’s what I did.” As a sly gleam lights up Salva’s eyes, a loud row begins between Helio and one of his subordinates, and Salva shows himself in the doorway for a few moments. Then he continues, “I already explained it to you: I was in the kitchen, I heard a commotion, I got out there as fast as I could, and I saw the
Moro
on the floor and the Pakistani leaving in a hurry. What did you tell them?”

“He’s my brother. I saw the whole thing.”

“But you must have told them
I
didn’t see anything, right?”

“More or less.”

“What does that mean, more or less? You’re going to fuck up my life! I knew it! I knew!…” All at once, Salva tenses up and starts waving his arms around.

“No, no. Calm down. I told them the fight scared me so much I didn’t see anyone. I said if you’d been there too, you would have intervened. And you didn’t. I said I saw you afterward.”

“Are you sure?”

“I told them the fight scared me so much I didn’t see anyone.”

He keeps repeating the same things he’s just said. Salva wants to believe him. He looks into Alex’s eyes, trying to discern whether or not he’s sincere. Alex turns his head away, not to hide the truth from him, but because Alex can’t hold anybody’s gaze. The older man takes pity on him. Salva can practically span Alex’s shoulders with one hand. He sees the incipient wrinkles, like cracks in parched clay, around Alex’s eyes and considers his childish face, one of those faces that will look more and more like a bulldog’s with the passage of time. For a moment, Salva retreats into the past. He remembers Alex when he was a little boy, sitting in the back seat of his mother’s car as she drove him to visit his grandmother so that she—the mother of Alex and Epi—could have a few hours alone with Salva in a room somewhere. Who’s left to remember that passion, which they managed to keep secret during the ten years it lasted? It’s the source of Salva’s loyalty, whose origins Alex will never know.