The Barcelona Brothers (2 page)

Salva bellows and tries to scramble out from behind the bar as fast as he can. At this point, Epi would like to forget the whole thing. Stop what he’s doing, tell Tanveer it was all a joke, rewind the tape to a point months, years, lives ago. Cast a spell and awaken his dead mother, break his fingers pushing through walls and roofs, and become a child again, an innocent child with an easy life ahead of him. But it’s not possible.

Tanveer, tall and strong, clutches his arm in pain and tries to get up. He slips on the recently washed floor and tumbles against the slot machine. Now the hammer lands on his back. Screaming insults and curses, he grabs hold of Epi’s T-shirt, pulls on it hard, and falls back again.

Neither Salva nor Alex can intervene, because the hammer blows keep raining down wildly, one after another. Tanveer crawls away on all fours and collides with a metal ladder left by the painters. He gets behind the ladder, using it to shield himself from Epi’s blows. Epi keeps swinging the hammer until, in the middle of a swing, he loses his grip. The hammer flies out of his hand, slams into his favorite game machine, and shatters it. For a few seconds everything seems suspended. Maybe Epi’s thinking that all is lost now. Tanveer, by contrast, sees his chance. Though badly hurt, he grabs the ladder with both hands and finds the strength to bring it down hard on his adversary’s back.

“Fucking fag, I’m going to kill you! You crazy son of a bitch!
I know why you’re doing this, candy ass! Can I help it if you’re a lousy fuck? Son of a bitch!”

The blow from the ladder rocks Epi and drives him against the wall. As luck would have it, he finds the hammer at his feet. So he seizes it forcefully, dodges Tanveer’s weak follow-up attack, rears back, and staves in the
Moro
’s forehead with one blow. Hussein staggers and hugs his assailant to keep from collapsing. Epi looks at him with no idea of how to free himself from this dying embrace. Finally, Tanveer slips down and sprawls in the bleach and sawdust. On the floor under his head, a pool of blood forms and spreads, gleaming colorfully with the reflected light of the video games. The various machines, seeing what has just happened to one of their number, seem to be holding their breath.

Finish him, finish him
, says a voice inside Epi’s head.

But he can’t do it. He’s gone that far, but now he’ll go no farther. He stands there with slumped shoulders, staring at Tanveer’s body. Epi has awakened from his dream, and he can’t recover the strength that exploded in him a few moments ago. Exhausted and broken, he looks at his brother—he sees him now—who stands paralyzed, watching him. Neither of them manages to utter a word.

At this moment the restroom door opens and the half-drunk Pakistani appears. Puzzled, he sees a man lying in a pool of blood and two other guys staring at him fixedly, as if waiting for him to explain all this. When he scurries out of the bar, no one stops him. And Epi, with several seconds’ head start on him, has vanished as if he were never there.

“Is he dead?” Salva asks insistently.

“Of course he is, shit, you didn’t see his head split open?”

Obviously, there’s no hurry about calling anyone.

“I’m going up to tell Mari to stay out of here so she won’t faint.”

“Call her on the phone.”

“It’s better if I go up.”

“And I’m supposed to stay here alone with
him
?”

“Yeah, keep him company. I won’t be five minutes. And when I come back down, I’ll call the cops.”

Salva leaves the bar and pulls the rolling shutter halfway down. Inside, Alex, to avoid watching the death throes, returns his gaze to the television set. For no apparent reason, it’s changed channels all on its own, and now it’s showing a Madonna music video on MTV. She’s stepping along a horizon of flowering paths. Better than Christ walking on the water. It’s nice to distract yourself with something beautiful when you’ve got a guy whose skull is oozing blood and brains a yard from your feet. Alex thinks it would be wonderful to take refuge under Madonna’s skirts. To live in New York. To be immensely rich. Not to live in this shitty city full of bicycles and assholes.

The black wings of a premonition suddenly darken his head and freeze his nerve centers. His brother has killed Tanveer. Salva and he, Alex, have both realized that they can pin the murder on the poor Paki, whom Allah, Yahweh, or some goddess with fifty thousand arms and the head of an elephant brought to this place in an evil hour. But how innocent is Alex going to look if someone wants a cup of coffee right away,
undeterred by a half-lowered rolling shutter? What’s he doing standing over a corpse? Why is he still in the wrong place at the wrong time? Besides, there’s that sports bag, the souvenir of the Bolshevik Olympics. Something tells him that this is the moment to go home and leave Tanveer in Madonna’s pleasant company. Alex pulls down the sleeve of his sweater and uses it to pick up the hammer, which he sticks in the bag. He steps out onto the street. Feels cooler. With all that commotion, it’s a miracle there isn’t a group of people hanging around outside and speculating. Alex pulls his jacket tight around him, wipes his nose with his fingertips, tries to forget everything and go on to the next screen. He raises his arms and imagines he has some magic dust he can use to make the city disappear. He sees himself swinging between buildings like a large spider, his shadow falling on roof terraces and tall windows.

Inside the bar, Tanveer’s eyes are open, but he can’t see anything. He’s at death’s door, breathing his last. A song plays inside his head. He listens to the music while he smells his own blood, while he feels it filling his mouth. He didn’t know that keeping your eyes open doesn’t necessarily mean you’re able to see. He doesn’t know who Madonna is, either, nor does it matter much. But she seems to find his ignorance insulting, not funny. So Tanveer thinks his own urine is hers; she’s the woman who pees on him in his dreams. Apparently, Madonna still has bad manners left over from her days on the street, when she lived on popcorn and remunerative sex.

TANVEER AND TIFFANY BRISETTE WERE SHUT UP IN THAT
room. It was a narrow room, filled to bursting with objects evidently impossible to get rid of. And below the mountain of stuffed toys, of dirty, recently ironed, or perhaps forgotten clothes, of ashtrays and CDs, there was a single bed, a night table, a chair, a mirror.

In that room they could hear sounds from the rest of the apartment. Sounds moving closer or keeping their distance or fading away without a hint as to where they’d come from or why they’d gone. Aside from visiting the bathroom now and again, Tiffany’s mother and sister never bothered them. Instead they spent the time looking at television and acting as though Tanveer and Tiffany didn’t exist. For his part, Percy, Tiffany’s little son, knew that he mustn’t go near the room when his mother had company. Tanveer was convinced the child liked to watch. Not that he cared, but Tiffany refused
to let the boy spy on them. So to avoid any detriment to their screwing, the
Moro
usually brought something the kid could distract himself with while they shut themselves up in the room. And if Percy wanted to watch, let him learn how to do it without his mother finding out. As he himself had done. As everybody did.

The soft click of the door when it locked was the signal for Tanveer to go up to the girl and stand behind her. He’d keep very still, and she’d remain with her back to him, without ever turning around. Automatically, they switched off the lights. She could hear him breathing and inhaled his scent, a mixture of sweat, tobacco, alcohol, and mint, or whatever the happy smell invading her nostrils was. Then a few seconds would pass. Tiffany could feel his fingers on her neck. In the beginning they’d barely graze her, as though not wishing to be mistaken for any sort of caress. Then the pressure would grow steadily more intense. Tiffany, well acquainted with the rules, would stand there unmoving, asking no questions, only waiting, as if suspended in a bubble formed by Tanveer’s breath. After a few seconds, and without decreasing the pressure on her neck, he’d place the palm of his other hand in front of the girl’s mouth, as though trying to feel some imaginary steam rising from her lips. Then the fingers gripping her neck would become an open palm pushing on the back of her head, while the other hand was now a fist a few inches from her mouth. Tanveer would now be in front of Tiffany, and at this point, he’d say, “Kiss it,” and she’d pretend she hadn’t heard him. He’d insist and push her face toward his fist, which remained
immobile, practically under her nose. Eventually, she’d obey; she’d kiss his fist, his knuckles. On a few occasions, and without any obvious reason, he’d unclench his fist and give her a slap. A flat, simple blow to the face. The hand that caresses can also hit. That seemed to be the lesson. Although Tiffany could sense when the slap was coming, she wouldn’t dodge it. After she kissed his fist, he’d open his hand and offer his palm for more kissing. And then, only then, would she speak. The Heartbreak Queen, she who paraded around the barrio like a commander, would start babbling and making funny faces and spouting nonsense; she was a woman pretending—badly—to be a child.

The
Moro
’s eyes would get blurry and moist, like the eyes of a drunkard. They could express nothing but the flood of desire that was surging through him. He liked to feel her through her clothes, to thrust his hands under her top, slowly spread his fingers, and cup her breasts. To fasten his fingers like clamps on her nipples, nipples that had suckled a child. He’d ask her to tell him how he could get himself inside her, all of him, big and ungainly as he was, so that he, and not Percy, would be her child. Tiffany would regress a few years, stroke his hair, take him in her arms, and suckle him, finding no words that weren’t fantasies and dreams, lullabies and echoes of words and songs spoken and sung by so many before her.

Then they’d face each other in silence. He’d stretch out his arms, put them on the girl’s shoulders, and slowly press her down until she was on her knees and waiting for him to put it in her mouth. Both of them liked everything to seem as
though they were doing it for the first and last time. Tanveer Hussein’s member pounded the inside of her throat; the more violent thrusts made her gag, but she said nothing. She’d get her payback later. When he’d raise her up, his hands clasping her ass, and make her explode with pleasure. When they’d hit the pavement at night with a group of people who were more or less friends and destroy themselves with gin and cocaine and laughter. When they’d go up and down other streets, streets outside the barrio. When he’d buy her clothes, dinner, and drinks, whatever she wanted, as the price for her sex and her freedom.

Sometimes Tanveer would cross the line, going beyond the agreed limits in the demonstration of his power and her submission. On occasion, something she misinterpreted or something he deemed a lack of respect was enough to set him off. At such times Tiffany would have liked to annihilate him, to tear him apart with her own hands like a clay figure. That sort of thing always ended in the wee hours of the morning, with her clinging to her poor mother’s arm at the police station. The
Moro
would be arrested, and he’d leave the court with a restraining order against him. But neither he nor she could obey it, and the whole thing would become just one more papier-mâché prop on the stage behind the two protagonists. Nevertheless, it left Tiffany with a certain power over her man, a power whose savor was acrid in her mouth and aroused her senses, as if she could turn it into something physical. One call from her, and Tanveer would go to jail for violating a court order. Another kind of call, and they’d shut themselves up
for the entire evening in Tiffany’s room or in the safe house the Moroccan shared with people nobody knew at all. Tanveer was aware of both aspects of the game, and although it enraged him to lose the initiative, he felt something like the peace, the sense of order, the security that come from knowing that jails, stool pigeons, and guards still exist.

Before and after her meetings with Hussein, Tiffany hated herself. As she lay on the bed, alone, inhaling the scent of sweat and violence that emanated from the cotton bedspread, she’d think about what she’d done and felt and find it difficult to recognize herself, in the same way as when they were out in the street and she’d see him being so loud and boisterous, she’d look at him and remember asking him to describe fragments of a childhood neither of them could have had. At those moments, when their eyes met in the street, there was nothing more for them to say to each other. He knew that she knew, and vice versa. It was as if each of them had kidnapped the other’s secret and neither of them had the slightest intention of paying the ransom.

And yet Tanveer, too, hated himself. For getting attached to Tiffany. For desiring her, and at the same time for getting her so easily. For not having been the first, and for knowing he wouldn’t be the last. Hussein’s mother was a Spanish woman from Tangiers. His father, a
Moro
and a Muslim—as his mother never failed to point out—had died several times, and it was therefore probable that he was in prison or that one day he had escaped from that woman forever. Tanveer was never able to get a clear answer about what had happened, but in his
heart he knew the truth: Spanish women aren’t generous, they make deals for everything, everything’s a negotiation, and so no way his father would have stayed. He likewise knew that one day his father would come back for him, and that when that day came, he’d break the old man’s jaw before deciding whether or not to return with him to Morocco.

Tanveer believed there was nothing that couldn’t be stolen and no one who couldn’t be fooled. The only exception, if he had to make one, was the ethereal figure of his paternal grandmother, who along with his mother had raised him after his father abandoned them. They lived in an adobe brick house, or at least that was the way he remembered it. In that house, and in those years of his childhood, Tanveer Hussein had left everything, absolutely everything: the Future, Propriety, Truth, Law. The streets, the money, the easy women, the poor saps who almost begged you to rip them off, the television shows, replete with tits, colors, and cars, that humiliated his family, or, much worse, the ones that sugarcoated reality with feeble, paternalistic speeches—all that was nothing but city lights, as attractive as only the devil can be. And in the end, they ruined the good boy from the country who only wanted to have a good time for a while over the holidays. They doomed the skeptical kid who didn’t know how to get home after the first few drinks and so had to keep on going. Tiffany was a part of the pleasure trap that had orchestrated his life. Tiffany was the vice you don’t give up today because you think you’ll be able to give it up tomorrow. A weakness he would have been ashamed to confess to
his grandmother, sitting at dusk in her whitewashed adobe brick house.