A Not So Perfect Crime (6 page)

As for me, I'd been working far too many years in a bank in the morning and as an accountant for a small computer firm in the afternoon, and couldn't take anymore. I'd become a respectable, timorous bank clerk whose only hope in terms of changing his life was to win the jackpot in the Christmas Lottery. To make things worse, the bank
where I worked had been taken over by a bigger fish and the new bosses decided to reorganize the staff via a wave of redundancies and a canny restructuring of the workforce. In my case, thanks to the fact I'd worked there for twenty years and was still too young to take early retirement, the generous sods offered me two options: either to accept voluntary redundancy, with compensation that was hardly generous, or to go to work in Lleida. Monte refused point blank to change city, and I wasn't exactly grabbed by the prospect of spending a minimum of four hours a day risking my life in a train. But if that was not enough, there was another problem. A problem that went by the name of Raquel.

The fact is that quite unintentionally (at one of those office parties, after soaking every one of my neurons in a whisky whose name I'd rather not remember) I embarked on an affair with a married colleague, and didn't know how to extricate myself. What started as a straw I'd grasped when plastered turned into a nightmare. Raquel, for that was her name, was stricken and talked about separation, divorce and starting a new life together. I won't go so far as to say she was harassing me, but she came pretty close. She even threatened to show up at our place and tell Montse about our so-called relationship, as she dubbed it. This really shook me up, and what with Raquel and the reorganization at the bank I was at my wits' end.

I won't deny that initially I quite liked Raquel. She was good in bed, very hot in fact, though I don't understand why the hell she fancied me, given I'm quite run-of-the mill between the sheets. I'm not trying to justify myself by saying she was the one to make the first move at the party, or the one who booked a hotel room a few days later, or the one ringing and texting me all the time, but this is what happened after Montse had been on Prozac for several weeks.

The fact is that the affair, for want of a better word, had taken a turn for the worse and I was scared. I was still in love with Montse and besides that there were my daughters. I fancied Raquel but wasn't in love with her. I'd not considered the possibility of separating from my wife for one second, and even less so for someone like Raquel. All things being equal, there are women you'd spend the night with (particularly if it's a freebie), but not necessarily the next day. Montse was for life, even though neither of us knew how to climb out of that black hole swallowing everything except our mortgage repayments and instalments on the car.

Borja appeared at that precise moment. My brother came back into my life the same way he'd left it, out of the blue, with no prior warning, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. One day, after fifteen years without a single sighting, he swanked elegantly outside the branch of the bank where I worked and suggested I should resign from my job and become a partner in this strange enterprise we now have on our hands and which legally doesn't exist.

He'd lived abroad, as I knew, and in all that time our only contact had been via the occasional postcards he wrote me and the letters I sent to a post box in Paris. One such letter had invited him to our wedding but he never came. What he did was to send me a set of very fine crystal goblets that arrived in equally fine fragments. I was tremendously upset and went round antique shops until I'd collected a dozen of something similar that cost me an arm and a leg. I said nothing to Montse. To justify the expenditure, I invented a couple of yobs who'd mugged me with a syringe when
I came out of the metro. It was the second lie I'd told her since we'd been going together.

“Hey, kid brother, how are you?” he rasped that day when I emerged from the bank. It was almost three clock and he'd obviously been waiting for me for some time. “Still working here? You've put on weight ...” he said looking me up and down.

I hardly recognized him. His hair was cut short and he exuded the same elegantly sophisticated style he now assumes. I was so delighted and surprised I couldn't think what to say when I finally did react. I immediately invited him home for lunch.

“Fine but first we have to talk,” he said, smiling enigmatically. “I'll come to your place, if you like, but you shouldn't tell your wife (Montse, isn't it?) or anyone I'm your brother.” He paused while a bemused look spread over my face. “I must tell you that I'm not Pep anymore. I'm Borja from now on. Borja Masdéu-Canals Sáez de Astorga. Yes, you heard right! ...” And he proudly showed me a high quality business card. My amazement increased in leaps and bounds.

“Fuck, things have changed in all this time!” I exclaimed. “Although you've obviously changed much more than your name ...”

I was happy to see my brother again, but also rather hurt by all those years he dropped out of my life. Borja isn't just my only brother; he's also my twin. And fifteen years, I remember thinking, is a hell of a long time. Perhaps too long.

“Let's go for a beer and I'll tell all,” he bounced back at me.

“No.” I shook my head. “I'll ring Montse and tell her I won't be home for lunch today. I'll think of some excuse and you and I can go and lunch elsewhere. You've got some explaining to do, Pep! ...”

“Borja,” he corrected me. “Remember I'm Borja now.”

I took him to the Set Portes, a well-known restaurant not far from the bank. As it was Friday, I had a free afternoon, although Raquel kept texting me to say we should meet. I decided to take a risk and, before I had time to regret my decision, I switched off my mobile. I didn't want any lover inopportunely souring our meal.

The restaurant was packed with tourists and what looked like businessmen agreeing devious deals between courses, but we were lucky and got a table. It was next to a family of riotous Russians who ate and drank like Cossacks, and we agreed to emulate them. I ordered paella – one of the chef's specials – and a bottle of Rioja. After all that time, our fraternal reunion merited a celebration.

However, rather than letting him speak, I rushed into telling him about my affair with Raquel and the crisis in my marriage. I told him how I hated my work and the decision the new bosses were forcing me to take. We didn't notice we dispatched the bottle of Rioja and a plate of olives before engaging with the paella. Two more bottles soon hit the dust.

I don't think I could have come at a better time,” he smiled very confidently. “You seem to have got yourself into a right state.”

“I don't know what to do ...”

“Eduard, God doesn't play dice ...”

It was the first time I'd heard him pronounce the phrase that I'd end up hearing time and again. On that occasion, however, after all the wine I'd sunk, I almost asked him if
the guy up there didn't play dice then what the hell was he doing the day our parents were killed in an accident. But I shut up and let him speak. It was his turn.

“So how are you?” I asked, switching tack. “What happened to you over all those years? Are you married? Do you have a girlfriend?”

Borja proceeded to tell me very little, indeed nothing in particular, about his life. He'd travelled, tried his hand at various trades and seen enough of the world to learn that the good guys always end up losing. His silences led me to deduce his love life hadn't been days of wine and roses.

“I'd rather not discuss that,” he said looking down. “Better we talk about the future. About our future.”

He explained his idea – the company where we now work – and suggested I should give up my job and enter into partnership with him. He'd been a rolling stone for too long and wanted to settle down, or so he said.

“I have a couple of matters to settle and can't carry them forward by myself,” he said confidentially. “I need you, Eduard. And anyway, it's not as if your finances are booming.”

“No, you're right,” I had to agree. “We're still paying the mortgage off, and although Montse works and is a civil servant, we only just keep our heads above water. And the twins are a bottomless pit. You must meet them, Pep.” I still hadn't got used to calling him Borja. “After all, they are your nieces!”

“All in due course. If everything turns out as it should, you'll pay off your mortgage before long and be able to take that trip round the world you wanted to do when we were kids.” He paused. “You haven't done that yet, have you?”

No, I hadn't. When I succeeded in escaping from the hell that was life with my uncle and aunt at the age of twentythree and set up on my own, I enrolled on a university course. I couldn't give up the bank job that fell into my lap at the age of nineteen thanks to mysterious strings pulled by uncle, yet at the same time I still dreamed of becoming a writer. Borja had been much more adventurous than me, had gone abroad and fled the miserable vision of the world with which our relatives soured our adolescence, and I was alone. Too alone to embark on an adventure I'd always dreamed I would share with my brother. I'll never cease to wonder how different our lives might have been if our parents hadn't crashed on the Garraf corniche when Borja and I were thirteen.

In any case I never managed to write a single novel or finish my degree course, and
Don Quixote
was partly to blame. To my great misfortune, I can't stand that book. In those heroic days when we students went on wildcat strikes and smoked joints in the Arts Faculty quad, I was a proud, naïve idealist, and that got me into the odd spot of bother. Including never taking my degree.

“I don't know what Montse will make of all this,” I reflected aloud while I polished off the
crema catalana
I'd ordered for my dessert.

“So you ended up marrying your psychoanalyst! That's really funny!”

“No, I didn't, Montse isn't a psychoanalyst. She's a psychologist.” I pointed out.

“Yes, but you did get involved with her,” he smiled mischievously.

In fact, it was down to
Don Quixote
and my trauma that I met Montse. She had just finished her psychology degree and
was the friend of a friend's girlfriend. After she'd worked out my problem she insisted on helping, and, although she failed in that, I did end up marrying her.

True, I have a trauma in relation to
Don Quixote
. I only have to hear the title mentioned to go all jittery. I can't help it, but I have a terrible complex about it, a sort of phobia, I've always thought it's because it is a novel everyone praises to the skies. Politicians, whatever their stripe, quote from memory some of its wittiest lines and praise its author, and suffer no outrages of fortune when it comes to spending our taxes on all manner of commemorations and homages, which, knowing the likes of them, just have to be extremely dubious. For my part, I'm convinced most of our parliamentarians have never bothered even to leaf through the book, although, to be honest, I should confess I've never been able to get past the first forty pages, and it's not for want of trying.

To be frank, not to have read
Don Quixote
is not such a serious problem, unless you happen to be a student in a Department of Spanish Literature. Naturally I'd have behaved much more intelligently if I'd imitated most of my companions and pretended I'd read it. It would have been sufficient to repeat pompously and authoritatively a handful of ill-digested critics. Rather than this, let's be quite clear, I behaved remarkably stupidly.

I had only a year to go and couldn't think of any better topic for my final dissertation than a study that would show how almost nobody in this country (in this city, really) had read from beginning to end the sacred text of Spanish letters. I wasted my time getting 500 questionnaires distributed – yes, five hundred – in and outside the faculty, a sample that included every social class, from patrician Pedralbes to proletarian Santa Coloma de Gramenet. Of the 500 surveyed, eighteen were emphatic they'd read it from cover to cover and had really enjoyed the experience (needless to say, not a single one belonged to the faculty or had passed through its halls). The remaining 482 confessed they hadn't even tried to read
Don Quixote
or hadn't got beyond the first fifty pages. Always for the same reason: as a novel it was too long and too full of words they didn't understand, not to mention the miles of footnotes that some demented sadist had decided to concoct with the clear aim of demoralising the long-suffering readers. These 482 en masse answered “no” to section “D” of the survey which asked if they would be prepared to confess to their sin in public.

Predictably, I felt relieved after seeing those results and a little less lonely. It turned out I wasn't the only person in the world who'd not read that masterpiece of world literature! Unfortunately, the staff in the department didn't rate my original contribution to the study of Golden Age literature and muttered that rather than wasting my time so dreadfully I should have immersed myself in the tome and forgotten all that nonsense. They swore they'd never give me a degree, whether in that faculty or any other, and also declared
if you attempt to go all quixotic and make this survey public
(verbatim)
someone will ensure you get a facelift
(also verbatim). As I wasn't at all sure what going all quixotic entailed, I decided to drop it and deliver myself unto Montse.

“My only condition is that you don't tell your wife I'm your brother,” Borja pressed me while we were still in the restaurant. “If she knew, she'd put her foot in it sooner or later. Eduard, this business will only prosper if we can persuade our clients I am Borja and belong to their social
circle. Believe me, it's the only way they'll confide in us. Just think of it as your second chance in life.”