The Boys (4 page)

“How did she know?” said Miqui, when she had left. “What a bitch . . . You know how she knows I'm going to see her? Because I didn't order the garlic mayonnaise.”

Wherever they were and in whatever state, the last thing the two brothers would be thinking about, if they were able to think about anything at all, would be coming back. Yet these two men, his wife, his three daughters, Mr. Cals, all
the customers in that restaurant, the survivors of the bombings, these survivors of Saturday's accident, had all thought at some point about how to stay here, how to escape death, their own death and the deaths of their loved ones, which is the same thing. Escape from it like the brother wanting to leap out of the car at the last minute. But, while the dead knew where to return to and chose not to, the living didn't know where to go to escape. And they all had fantasies like he did: they imagined strategies, switching places with someone else, leaping from one living body to another like hopping from one rock to the next so as not to fall into the river. That's what he should have done, rather than having three daughters who chained him to this world. Any of those diners, Miqui himself. . . maybe that's why he had followed him, maybe that's why he was here. You take my car, I'll take your truck, each of us will escape our death; we'll speed off in opposite directions, we'll take on the other's destruction and not our own.

“What happened to the fender?”

“Nothing.”

“Why did you show it to me?”

“I didn't show you anything. Maybe I didn't do it, that dent; maybe it was my father before he gave me the truck, in that accident. He just went off the highway, the next day a tow truck came and pulled the truck out, it was nothing, but he'd had enough, it shook him up. That evening he had a heart attack. We didn't notice a thing; the doctor told us after my dad was dragging himself around like a zombie for weeks. In the meantime, a perfect opportunity for the bank to rip him off.”

How could he explain what he was doing to his wife and
daughters? Wasn't it running away? Can you escape without betrayal? Can you escape?

“Fucking heartless bankers. How can you not have noticed Cindy?” said Miqui. “That's a wedding ring you're wearing, right? Do you have any idea why I've had such a hard time staying with any one woman? I must've had bad luck. Maybe I needed something special. Like a South American chick. That one's a total fox. A little short, but grade A stuff. Cindy. Just her name gets your motor running. I'm a good catch . . . well . . . I'm a good catch for her. Where's she from? Bolivia? Paraguay? Exotic, half Indian, with that accent that . . . She talks like us, but she came from the other side of the world. Who knows why. That's the problem with chicks. You think two guys could ever be as different as a guy and a girl are?”

“Look at us.”

“What's wrong? I forgive you for being a banker.”

“Don't count on ever seeing me again.”

“Does she have a boyfriend, Cindy?”

“Cindy is a child.”

“She's a fox.”

“Leave her alone.”

“Shit. You bankers think you own the world, huh? You're like civil servants, living like kings at the expense of poor stooges like me and my dad. I bet you have kids. Fuck, I guess you guys have to fill your time somehow. And that potbelly. And that jacket. And deciding who gets close to Cindy and who doesn't. Unbelievable. What's wrong, you saw her first or something? My ass. You didn't even notice her. You have to know how to see girls. It's not as easy as it looks. It's
something you learn. Now that I've spotted her, she's got you all hot under the collar. Your wife not enough for you, huh? You've got some balls. I feel sorry for you, I have to admit. If I were you, I might do the same thing. When I leave here I'm going to see some girlfriends. You wanna come with me?”

“I can just imagine your girlfriends.”

“What's wrong with my friends?”

“No, thanks.”

“You haven't seen them. Don't be in such a rush. You aren't made of stone. Look how worked up you got over a little spic piece of ass. They've got us by the balls, that's what I always say. They should teach it at school. Strategies for resisting them. Just like you learn not to piss the bed. They should've prepared us when we were little.”

“Those girls are kidnapped from their countries. Everyone knows that. They drug them, they beat and rape them, they kidnap them, they threaten to kill their families. They're found dead on the side of the road and they can't be identified, nobody knows anything about them. They find them destroyed, twenty-year-old girls, on this highway right here.”

“And if you screw them your dick falls off. You've seen too many movies. I'm telling you, none of that is true. It's not against the law.”

“Because we pretend they don't exist.”

“Well, if they do exist, I guess they have to eat. It's a business like any other; life is rough for everyone, except the bankers. Don't look at me like that. I'm a good guy. I've never left without paying. I've never hit any of them. Now you're gonna say that other businesses are different. And
that, coming from a banker, for fuck's sake.”

“Let's forget about it. But I'd prefer not to see you in Vidreres again.”

“Now you're the sheriff again. When I've got my shotgun, you want me to lend it to you, or what? You've got some balls. You're threatening me, right? You're threatening me, right, banker? A fucking coward, threatening me? What the hell were you doing there at the tree? Do you talk to the dead or what? Didn't you say you didn't know them? That's spineless. You think about them to avoid thinking about your own fucking life. I know a few guys like you. Starting with my father, or that old guy by the tree. There was a war, poor him! When he was a kid! And he's still not over it! Shit, what a good deal. Eighty, ninety years later and he's still thinking about it. My mother died when I was this tall. You see me crying? Do you? No, we won't forget about it. Come with me to see the girls. Grow a pair, man. It's all very well that you want to have balls, banker, but you can't just talk. Come on, shake a leg. You'll be a big hit in that suit. Let's go see them. Right after lunch is a good time. You'll see, all your hang-ups will disappear, just like that.”

III

He saw the tree again, the bouquet of flowers, the ribbon snake bandaging the wound. He drove, following the truck: they were headed to Lloret. Before they got there they left the highway and entered a housing development, passing over empty streets named after flowers. The street where they stopped only had one sidewalk, with detached houses. To build the houses they had emptied out the granite, which still showed its teeth between some of them. There were houses with swimming-pool blue awnings, rolled up and faded, lethargic summer homes with lawns hibernating in front. A single car parked on the entire street, no smoke from any chimney—little hills filled with empty houses. The trucker got out of his cab with the flowers in his hand.

“You thought I was gonna take you to some club, banker?”

When he had to make a big decision—approving a mortgage, giving a credit line for a risky business operation—the bank employee thought about his daughters. Normally he decided in their favor, but sometimes he decided against
them. The trucker rang the doorbell. They heard a girl's voice.

“Just a minute!”

The door opened and it was a blonde, like a projection from youth. Healthy face, precise movements. The trucker held a flower out to her.

“Miqui . . . how sweet! Marga!” she turned into the house. “They're here!”

This was Cloe, the one the waitress had mentioned. They kissed on each cheek, and then the two men followed her through the hallway toward the empty dining room.

“Would you like some coffee? Marga! Marga!”

Marga had just taken a shower. She was wearing a tight, matching blue outfit with a short skirt like her friend's. Nothing like the girls on the highway. She and Miqui gave each other kisses on each cheek, and Marga received the second flower.

They couldn't have gone out onto the street dressed like that. Ernest tried to figure out which girl was for the trucker and which one was for him. It wasn't like on the highway, where you just passed them by. Perhaps it was sordid, just a few hours after the burial, perhaps the trucker was sordid, perhaps the housing development was . . . but the girls' skin made the sordidness seem far, far away. He couldn't decide between them, and he was afraid that, if the trucker discovered which one he wanted, he would take her from him. His body made the decision all on its own, choosing Marga, with her hair still damp from the shower and combed back, with all the skin on her face revealed as a pale mask against the bright color of her earrings, which hung like stone worms from her earlobes. He had never had a girl like this so close
to him before. His daughters couldn't hold a candle to her. There was no shelter from the carnal bombing.

“How ya doing, Miqui?” said Marga.

“You two are my downfall.”

The girl must have gotten cold, because she put on a short, tight red leather jacket and sat beside Ernest, with the tips of her hair dripping onto her leather shoulders. She had the flower on her knees, held in one hand. She put it on the table, with the other. He touched her leg with his pants. He felt stuck to her, threaded through her earrings, overlapped like half of the zipper, stuck together by the pull whose paint was peeled, which meant she'd worn the jacket more than it seemed, so bright and waxy, so new-seeming with the damp hair. The girl's long fingers had gripped the pull a thousand times to open and close the jacket. It hadn't been long since that jacket had been in contact with her adolescence.

“That's why I brought my banker friend,” said Miqui, winking and gesturing to say: choose the one you want. “We met . . . Have you ever done it with a guy from South America?”

“Don't be weird,” said Cloe.

“I met a chick from somewhere down there.”

“You never stop,” said the girl.

“You have no idea. Times are bad now, but remember Ahmed? The Arab guy who used to come with me in the truck—I don't need him now, there's no work, but I'm talking about the good times, five or six years ago. One Saturday we left Vallcanera in the morning with the truck, and we did the whole highway. We left no stone unturned. When we got to La Jonquera that night, shit, we dropped dead
at the Paradise. Four in the morning, both of us, first him then me—we switched off, and took whatever chick we got. Shit. It was like we were high as kites but we hadn't taken a thing, we were laughing so hard we almost pissed our pants. We ate in Banyoles, took a snooze by the lake on the grass, and kept going up toward the border. To see who would cry uncle first. You know, the further north you go, the more material. The whore would climb into the cab, and one of us would go take a piss—you didn't come back until the other whistled. We kept our eyes on the prize, and whatever you got you had to make do with; if you got an old cow, tough luck. We held up like sons of guns. We were in a dead heat. I could do a porn film, I swear. Isn't that right? The next day, we kept going, back down from the border, wanting to break the tie, first him then me and on and on like that. But there was no way. We exited at Banyoles again for a rest and got to Sils that night, destroyed, still laughing our asses off. And we weren't drunk, but we couldn't stop laughing and shouting like lunatics, fucking hell, Ahmed, and with the music blaring. We didn't need to drink; we had central heating! Those whores couldn't finish us off in one weekend, no way! We were wrecked! Fucking Ahmed! Wonder where he is now. Must have gone back to Morocco, fucking hell. I wouldn't do that again for anything in the world, banker.”

One of the girls had gone to the kitchen to get some beer. The walls in the house were too clean, the paint couldn't have been more than six months old, but the dining room looked lived in. The few furnishings were cheap but new.

He could still feel the kisses on his face, the fresh saliva,
warm and corrosive like the exfoliating creams housewives use to get their skin shiny and clean, the water of the fountain of youth in a painting he had seen on the cover of a magazine at the bank, men and women bathing in rejuvenating waters . . . And, at the same time, how exhausting . . . man wasn't the result of evolution from animals, man was already there: there was no evolution, only taming, vigilance—but the hierarchy was still fresh . . . Man drinks and eats, copulates and urinates, breathes and sleeps and looks at his cage as if it were a mirror, fascinated, suspicious, imprisoned as well. How can he hope to return home, that man in the zoo looking at the animals? On which side of the bars is his house? And all the years of watching over the animal were exhausting, the way he's exhausted by the temptation to leap to the other side, to avail himself of his rights . . . . He couldn't lose his freedom, accept that there's a boss without creating a scene, accept it like the girls accepted them: a sweaty trucker flecked with straw, a potbellied office worker stinking of garlic mayonnaise . . .

“Hey, what are you thinking about? You're on some other planet!” shouted Cloe. “What's wrong with this guy?” And she laughed and started kissing Miqui. “Come on, man, you're gonna have fun!”

He couldn't imagine hugging Marga with the other two there. He had to wash himself, get the animal off him. But he shouldn't wash all of it off either.

He glanced at Marga, ashamed, with the same shame that animals have—the way they lower their gaze and their ears when they're around humans.

His contemplation was already an access into her, and
maybe what he had to do was be satisfied with that, just get up and leave.

“There's plenty of fish in the sea,” his father told him the first time he broke up with a girl.

There were plenty of fish and no: he would never understand what they had in common, what made them women, what made them different from him.

“Hello? Hello? Hellllooo?. . .”

The other two were nibbling on each other like they were in love, and he couldn't even speak. She would eventually react, that was her job. Had he become so unappealing over the years? Didn't his body have the right to get close to these bodies? Or was that precisely what would make the act more human?

“Hello? Hello? Don't you like me? These handsome office workers. . . you have so much time to think . . .”

It wasn't having time that made him think, but having relations. And he would think about this for quite some time. It had happened once with a client. She and her husband owned the Vidreres hardware store. Twice a week she came by the office to make a deposit. She was older than him—that was before Ernest had a potbelly. They agreed to meet after work, saying they had some details to discuss about a pension plan. They were so discreet about their intentions that they met at the social club right across from the office. Cindy didn't work there then. The waiter made the rounds of the tables. Ernest wrote a few numbers on a piece of paper on the marble tabletop, and, among the figures, without looking up: “I like you.” And then he added, in a trembling hand: “A lot.” And then, in all caps: “A LOT.” And once more, the pen
going through the paper: “A WHOLE LOT.” He wanted to write: “I'm shocked by this, I can't believe it, what am I doing?” He wanted to keep writing what he was feeling, revealing it and revealing himself to her. Was he himself? And she, was she? “I'll wait for you on the corner,” he wrote, and made a diagram with an arrow pointing to a car. “Blue Megane.” The same one he still had.

He drove with one eye on the mirror, afraid he was being followed, and veered into the forest. The next day she called the office, and he hung up without saying anything.

You aren't the one who decides . . . the girls don't decide to be on the highway, the boys didn't decide to kill themselves, the trucker's father hadn't decided to be scammed, he hadn't decided to come here. The girls were too young. No man could resist them.

This was nothing like the highway. These girls earned more than his two eldest daughters put together. The little one spent all day at home, online. Of course, he thought. My daughters should take this business up. I mean it, girls. From the bottom of my heart.

“I'll bring you another beer,” said Marga, getting up.

Thinking wasn't a question of time, but rather a question of space, of intensity. You could think about two contradictory things without any contradiction, in closed compartments, because the brain worked in layers. There's a party going on upstairs; on the floor below, someone is trying to sleep. You hear the music from the party, and those up there know that every stomp, every dance step, will be heard down below. Regrets above and headaches below, but each private, without being communicated. Most of the time, the brain
isn't a two-story house, but a skyscraper forty or two hundred floors tall, with a different landscape out each window. If it were just one floor, it wouldn't matter which one. Being forced to live on more than one simultaneously gets you used to relativism. You have forty, two hundred thousand lives. But, on the other hand, you have to choose, because you have to be someone, you have to be a role model for your daughters, at least, for the people you love, you don't want to be an example of solitude, you don't want to leave them alone, you want them to know that you are here, in one window or another. You aren't an irresponsible cad. And so what does he decide? To take advantage of the fact that the girl is in the kitchen to stand up and flee? What is going with the flow? Staying or leaving? What does he want? Shouldn't he know that? Otherwise, what's he doing here? How could he not know? Doesn't he know if he wants it? Isn't indecision a worse sin? If you're going to make a mistake, at least save yourself the suffering! If only you could leap! From the twenty-first floor! From the car speeding toward the tree!

He suddenly remembered something one of his cousins once told him at the tail end of a wedding reception, when the dancing had begun and there were only three people left at their table: his cousin, a bearded man, and him. The bride passed near them, and the bearded guy made some comment about her ass. His cousin's face changed suddenly, and he told him he could cut out the crassness.

“That kind of comment,” he said, looking into the eyes of the bearded man, who was at least as drunk as he was, “always comes from guys who aren't getting any, guys who resent women.”

The bearded man was slow to grasp what he'd just been told, but then he answered with the same rudeness he'd used to describe the girl's ass—and which made his cousin realize that the comment wasn't coming from carefree joie de vivre, but was tinged with self-indulgence and in bad faith—and, still smiling: “There's no merit in getting some if you have to pay for it.”

“No one's talking about merit here,” answered the cousin. And then he said the words that haunted Ernest for weeks, to the point that it changed the frequency of his sexual relations with his wife. His cousin said: “I look for a bit of life without hurting anyone. That's why I pay for it, but I don't recommend it to others.”

The girl came back with more beers.

“What?” she said, taking his hand.

She didn't know how to take an old man's hand; she took it in hers carefully, like a teenager, and tried to tug. He pulled it away. He emptied his beer in three gulps. A happy feeling of release washed over him. As he waited for her to finish her beer, he saw the other girl's hair at his friend's waist.

“Let's go to a room,” he said.

Learn to live for once. For once, learn to think about your family from many floors up or down, move away from the windows, learn to live without them for the day you'll have to leave, for the day they leave.

In the girl's room there were towels from the shower and scattered clothes. Some pants, a skirt, and a blouse. The furniture in there was new too, and there was nothing hanging on the walls. They didn't live here. But the door to the closet
was half open, revealing colorful dresses and shoes.

The girl drew the curtains and turned off the light. The room was left quite dark. He took off his clothes, imitating her. He got into the bed. He was embarrassed by his body. The age difference was obscene, and he would have preferred she approach him dressed, because he also desired her clothes. She wore a purple lingerie set. She had a tattoo at the base of her neck, ivy that went down the middle of her back.