The Barcelona Brothers (11 page)

He tries to synchronize his strides with his breathing, as the psychologist has recommended. But the corner around which he intends to disappear seems to be moving farther away, as in those nightmares where the curb keeps receding while the automobile bears down on you, bent on breaking your spine. His medication. He has to stop in some bar and wash down another pill. When he does that, he doesn’t hear voices like the ones he’s hearing now, behind him and around him. Alex needs to think clearly and well. And not just about what may happen to his brother, but also about how to make sure the foul soup Epi’s got himself in doesn’t splash on him, too. He has to talk to Salva. And he also has to talk to Epi. He has to find out what the van Epi uses for work, the one the cops had so many questions about, has to do with all this. But above all, he has to stop hearing these voices and stop seeing shadows like the ones now looming on his right.

Alex is barely twenty or thirty paces from the corner he’s designated as his salvation. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a shadow that’s adapted itself to his gait. He acts as though it’s not there and closes his eyes, but he feels nauseous, begins to fear he may fall, and decides to stand still and confront it.
And so the elder of the Dalmau brothers stops and addresses a shadow, keeping his eyes fixed on the ground.

“What do you want? Get out of here!”

But nobody replies. Alex hesitates. Maybe it’s disappeared. Or it could have been just a passerby, walking in the same direction as him, and all a new invention of his imagination. He opens his eyes and, unfortunately, he’s not alone. It’s not Jesus. It’s not the devil. It’s not the police, and it’s no angel, either. It’s not Salva or Epi. Or his mother, or Tanveer. No.

“Who are you?”

“An inhabitant of the lepers’ cave in
Ben-Hur
, and I’ve come to touch you.”

It can’t be true. He’s wearing a wristwatch, Alex tells himself. His rags are the remains of a ruined executive’s business suit. It’s true that he has a beard and long hair. That he’s barefoot, and that his fingers are black and covered with sores. It’s true that his clothes are bloody from his having been dragged through the sand, like Messala. But he’s not real. Inside his own four walls, Alex can go so far as to accept that his visions are real, but outside in the street, he can’t let himself do that.
No, please, no, you don’t exist, you’re the product of my paranoid schizophrenia, and of Papa’s bright goddamned idea to see that stupid goddamned movie on that Holy Week afternoon a thousand years ago
.

“That’s not true. You’re just part of the confusion in my mind.”

“Then touch me and see for yourself how my flesh falls off in shreds.”

Alex looks over toward the police station at the other end of the street to check whether anyone might be watching him. He sees nobody, except for a woman who crosses the street, draws near, and looks at him with an expression between fright and surprise, when the normal thing to do would have been to stare at the bloody, scruffy, dirty leper. The confirmation that his ragged companion is part of a film being shown exclusively inside his head encourages Alex. That’s his unique and sole reality.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m removing my ear and exchanging it for my nose. A bit of change is a good thing.”

And the leper does as he says.

“I’m not afraid of you. You don’t exist.”

“Well then, touch me and tell me where the cave is.”

“Leprosy’s not contagious like that, idiot.”

“Aren’t you the smart one? Then tell me what Saint Martín de Porres died of.”

Alex reaches out, not expecting to touch anything, thinking that everything will disappear, as it does when one awakens from a dream. But that doesn’t happen. He touches a body that doesn’t disappear. It’s like touching wood. It feels clammy and cold, like a bad fever. Terrified, Alex snatches away his hand and begins to run. He has no intention of stopping until after he reaches the barrio. And then he’ll need to find an antidote to leprosy before his flesh starts coming off in tatters, or at least to take his medication again and keep taking it until his stomach turns sour and all his nerves fall asleep.

At this very moment, Epi has come to the realization that he’s alone, terribly alone. His brother, Tanveer Hussein, and Tiffany Brisette are all he has. Thoughts and arguments get muddled in his head. It used to happen to him when he was a boy. His mother would tell him to look inside for the thread, the first word, and when he found it, he’d be able to draw out the rest. Easy, right? But everything’s always dark in there, there are many paths, and apparently every one of them is wrong. He would say what he was supposed to shut up about and shut up when it was his duty to speak, and whatever he said was always and in every case the opposite of what others expected to hear from him. Faced with so many daily fiascoes, he decided to do whatever he was ordered to do. If he obeyed, he reasoned, he’d commit fewer errors. But of course, he’d also receive less satisfaction.

He could go over to Salva’s, he thinks. Or call him up. Except that he doesn’t remember the number. Still, he needs to know what’s happening. To see it all from outside. But leaving the apartment strikes him as the craziest idea conceivable. The typical mistake that fucks up everything. No, he won’t do that. He prefers to stay inside these four walls. A text message, he thinks, regretting that it hasn’t occurred to him sooner; he can send a text to Alex’s cell, tell him where he is, and ask him to come. There’s still time. He turns on his phone, disregards its chirping death throes, implores it to hold on a little while longer. If he can just key in an address, the text will fly through the air and arrive at its destination. He sends the message, but he has no way of knowing whether Alex has
received it, because his phone fades out before the reception is confirmed. He tells himself he’ll try again later. If only his brother would show up here, and soon.

At first Epi thought Tiffany would turn around and come back; storming out was just the culmination of one of her tantrums, he imagined. But she hasn’t returned, nor does it look like she’s going to. He should have followed her when she ran away. Once in the street, he should have chosen a direction at random and run after her and caught up with her. Maybe she’d been angry with him only because he’d made her angry. Or maybe she was jealous because she thought he’d been talking on the phone with some other girl when he was on the stairs. If only that was it. If it was, it would be easy to convince her that she was mistaken. Because he, Epi, loves her so much he’s even committed murder in order to be with her for the rest of his life. That sounds pretty good to him, so he tries to memorize it, to say it by heart. They’ll leave the barrio right away. He’ll get a good job. She’ll be able to study modeling or languages, which is what she used to say she wanted to do in the very beginning, when they were practically engaged. They’d have children. Lots of them. He should have played the game harder in those days; way back then, he should have bound her tightly to him.

But who could have imagined that everything would change? Only Alex, naturally: “That guy’s stealing your girlfriend.”

He was referring to Tanveer, obviously. His brother’s superior airs have always annoyed Epi. Typical Alex, like the way he always figures out how movies will end when they’re
halfway through and tells you just so he can brag. When he made that remark about Tanveer, Epi chose not to pay attention to him. He remembers the scene perfectly: he was lying in his bed, killing time while waiting for a phone call from Tiffany that should have come more than an hour earlier. But his brother didn’t know that. He was just leaning in the doorway, with no apparent purpose other than to get on Epi’s nerves.

“Don’t talk nonsense.”

“You know it’s not nonsense.”

“Anyway, so much the better, right? From the very first day, you’ve been giving me a pain in the ass with all your shit about how that girl’s going to fuck up my life. So if she walks, terrific! There’s no problem.”

“But you’re already jealous.”

“That’s not true.”

They both knew he was lying. Epi remembered that he’d been falling in love forever, and that it had always been unrequited. He never could understand it. It wasn’t just that teacher whose silhouette against the window made you forget what a dope she looked like with her big eyeglasses, or that friend of his mother’s, the one who wound up bored and alcoholic in a fancy house in the Zona Alta. After those two impossible fantasies came the girls of his own age, classmates, shadowy figures in bars and discos, and the same thing kept on happening. There was something in Epi that made women not want to go very far with him. He wasn’t so ugly that they didn’t want to be in his company. He wasn’t dirty, he wasn’t rude, and he always treated people politely, keeping his distance more from
caution than from insecurity. But no one went so far as to love him. At most, girls might sit and talk to him at one end of the metal tables at Sunday afternoon gatherings while the other boys’ entire attention was captured by the racing cars speeding around on the TV screen. At most, a girl or two might consider him a friend, someone she could trust. But none of them thought about him with desire, none of them thought about loving him, and no female had enough interest in toying with him even to try to break his heart. As she leaned toward him so that he could light her cigarette, a girl whose breath smelled like disinfectant once said to him, “You have hands like an undertaker.” Epi hated clever people like her, maybe because they showed up the confusion he lived in. After he got home, he imagined a thousand replies and insults and even a couple of smacks he could have given that painted, drunken idiot, with her tight black clothes and her suicidal mug, when she dared to provoke him. But in real time, he gave her a light, smiled, and failed to utter a single word. If he had an undertaker’s hands, he thought, his embrace would be like a coffin. But it was too late; the comeback occurred to him six hours after it would have been appropriate.

“Be prepared. The
Moro
’s going to take her away from you. Guaranteed.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

Epi wasn’t such a fool as not to recognize that his brother could be right. And it wasn’t possible to lay all the blame on Tanveer. It was more than obvious that Tiffany was flirting with him. In the past several months, whether they were alone
together or in a group, Epi could tell that her attitude had changed. Tiffany no longer liked staying home or hanging around with old pals. Now she wanted to go out almost every night. They no longer went to the same joints, and if Hussein wasn’t in the new ones, he soon showed up. She spoke ill of him in private, she seemed to hate him, and when he appeared, she ignored him or sometimes was even rude to him. But if someone changes the way she is when someone else appears, it’s because she cares about him. Or likes him. Or is already sleeping with him. Considering how late she’d been for some of their last dates and how she kept forgetting the time she was supposed to call or the fact that they were supposed to do something together, Epi asked her about Tanveer. Miss Brisette denied everything, and as usual, Epi’s role switched from injured party to offender without his being very clear about how he’d crossed the frontier between one position and the other. He soon learned not to show that he was jealous or cross. Because after every row, or even after a simple conversation, Tiffany would tell him she was sick of his jealousy and possessiveness and disappear for two, three, or four days, during which she neither answered his telephone calls nor returned to her apartment. People talked about having seen her here or there. With Tanveer, often enough. The gossip made Epi feel broken inside, but he forced himself to wait and welcome her back and forgive her without so much as a reproach, assuming all the blame, giving the best of himself, bowing to her every whim, avoiding any mistake that could give her a fresh excuse to disappear again. And then, one day,
Tiffany went away and didn’t come back. Somebody told him she was with the
Moro
. He called her up, and on this occasion she answered his call. Epi asked her if what he’d heard was true, and Tiffany spun out her spider’s web.

“You’ve been seeing each other behind my back for a long time, right?”

“Don’t be so paranoid. It’s not anything yet. You and I—it wasn’t working out for us. I want to be alone. Tanveer’s only a friend. And that’s all. I don’t want to keep talking about this, okay?”

He trotted behind her like a puppy. He was so obvious and pathetic that it was painful to look at him. But Epi didn’t care. He was proud of his love, proud of his wounded heart. Because loving her was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

ROCÍO BAEZA’S PROBABLY A FOOL. SHE DOESN’T GENERALLY
hear that suspicion inside her head, nor would she acknowledge it to anyone. But she knows she’s foolish, or if not, then she’s extremely unlucky, or maybe both at once. It’s not a good night. The competition is numerous and merciless. All these damned immigrants, all this foreign flesh, black or mulatto or pale as milk. Whores and transvestites with silicon breasts, bubble-butts from Colombia, underage Senegalese girls, junkies with gleaming eyes and transparent adhesive strips on their arms. Rocío Baeza has some bad nights and some very bad nights. This night is one of the worst.

One day a colleague told her that having to be a whore is bad enough, but if nobody wants to hire you, that’s the worst. The other women are getting in and out of cars. An unbearable scent of pride and triumph emanates from them; they exhibit a certain overacted fatigue; they know where the center
of the world is and how much to charge for it. Meanwhile, Rocío and another woman watch the scene out of the corners of their eyes and pretend not to notice all the activity. They stand around the flaming oil drums and prattle, as if they weren’t there for the reason they’re there, as if they’ve come to chat a bit, to reminisce about the old days, to gossip about Isabel Pantoja, the singer, and other famous women.

Rocío Baeza feels like the last of a vanishing breed, fading away little by little, but that’s because her pride is as deceitful as her memory of a time when she was young, beautiful, and desirable. When the national product ruled the market and the sex worker’s life was different, pleasanter, simpler, better organized, easier to understand. Even the clients were something else. They came looking for what men have always looked for, but they did it differently. Now you gaze into those eyes with their dilated pupils, into those mouths as deep as hell, and fear makes you turn your eyes away. Fear of knowing. Fear that fear has no bottom. Fear of pain, of humiliation, of dying with your head bashed in, like a plastic doll left over from a Nativity scene.