The Barcelona Brothers (14 page)

El senyor metge
approaches the restroom. Upon seeing them, he tries to say something, to make some joke, something neither indecent nor very stupid. But his tongue, swollen with alcohol and routine, finds nothing special to say, and so he opts for excusing himself and entering the toilet stall. Alex and Salva remain silent and wait for the explosive flush. When the alleged ex-physician is back in the bar, Salva once again
asks Alex if he’s absolutely sure about what he said to the police. Alex swears by all that’s most sacred.

“Tanveer was bad company,” Salva says. “There was a lot of talk about him, and recently about your brother, too. And judging by the questions the
mossos
asked me, they’ve heard those stories.”

“What do you mean? Stories about what?”

“What do I know? Various atrocities.”

“Be a little more specific, Salva. I have to know what I’m stepping into.”

“I didn’t get many details myself. Drug-related stuff. Vice crimes. I don’t know. You know I don’t like to hear about that kind of thing, especially if it concerns someone I’ve known since he was a little kid.”

“But Epi doesn’t deal drugs. I’m sure of that. If he did, I’d know.”

“I have no idea. Ask him when you see him. I’ve got to go. If I stay in here any longer, Mari will kill me. And I don’t want to talk to you again for at least a year.”

“Wouldn’t that look suspicious?”

“Well …” The old man hesitates. “Then don’t come back before tomorrow or the day after.”

When Salva leaves, Alex steps into the toilet cubicle to urinate. Before leaving he looks at himself in the mirror. He’s sweaty, weary, worried. And he has something more than a premonition. It’s as if everything has only just begun, as if Tanveer’s murder was only God’s excuse for throwing the dice against the wall and betting against himself. Alex wets his face. That will
do him good, he thinks. He can picture Epi in this restroom. He evokes his brother’s obstinate insistence on ruining his life.

“I drank your coffee,” Professor Malick says to Alex when he goes back to the bar.

Then Helio’s at his side, asking Mari how much he owes her. He doesn’t recognize Alex. Why should he? Alex means nothing to this thug, but just in case—is he still afraid?—Alex chooses not to look at him. He smells of cognac, sweat, and cruelty. And if he’d pay attention, he’d probably smell the fear on Alex. Helio pays for his food and drink with interest, disdainfully dropping the banknotes on the glass surface, below which Russian salads and Galician-style octopus and eggs languish like corpses in their niches. After the brute starts to leave, but before he’s out the door, Mari blurts out, “When’s Jacinto opening again, Helio?” but she gets no reply.

Alex asks Mari for another cup of coffee. With a flick of her wrist, she puts his cup under the machine and presses the proper button, which pops out and lights up with an efficient-sounding click. It must be hard for her, Alex thinks, to navigate these waters, to survive amid so many loudmouths, so much violence, so many fearful children hidden inside men’s bodies. Why has she stayed here, too? When the smart people left the barrio, why couldn’t she escape with them?

“In God’s Holy Book,” Professor Malick begins to explain, “there are towns called Cities of Refuge. Do you know what those Cities of Refuge were?”

Alex shakes his head at the yellow eyes embedded in the black-and-pink surface of his interlocutor’s face.

“Say you killed somebody. Either on purpose or accidentally. For example, you were hoeing and the blade flew off and killed a person. Something like that. The dead man’s family could demand retribution from you. That was the Law of Men. If you ran away from your town and reached safety inside the walls of a City of Refuge, you were protected. There you would have a right to a just judgment. Nobody could take justice into his own hands, because the law in force in those cities was the Law of God.”

“Why are you telling me about this?” Alex asks, searching for his cell phone so he can keep trying to call his brother. He puts a hand in his pocket, comes across Epi’s scrawled notes, and decides it wouldn’t be a good idea to take them out in front of the Professor.

“Because you’re going to pay for the coffee I drank. What are you looking for?”

“My cell phone.”

“You’ve lost it.”

“No shit.”

No, he doesn’t have his phone. What could have happened to it? Alex can’t imagine where he must have left it. He probably dropped it on the street after leaving the police station, but he doesn’t have the nerve to retrace his steps. Maybe Malick himself swiped it as a way of confirming his prowess.

“Don’t look for what you don’t have.”

“Then come on, Mister Wizard, you tell me where it is. Salva, let me pay you—I need change.”

Mari immediately extends her hand and places three coins, wet with water and detergent, on the bar in front of Alex. He picks them up and heads for the public telephone at one end of the bar. Alex figures those three coins will be enough. In fact, the call turns out to be as useless as the dozens of other calls he’s made to Epi during the course of the day. But Alex doesn’t despair. He’d like to regain the feeling of control over the situation that he had in the already distant past of a few minutes ago. If it weren’t for the loss of his cell phone, everything would be back on track. His conversation with Salva has indicated to him that there’s no reason why this affair should come to a bad end, but only if he can get in touch with his brother, talk to him seriously, and convince him of what he has to do. And he’s sure it’s true that there are a whole lot of other problems festering here and there, problems hinted at in the questions the police officers surprised him with, but Alex decides not to think about those for the moment. His responsibility toward his younger brother is limited to the murder of Tanveer. If the stupid little fool has gotten himself involved in other bad stuff, that’s a problem Alex is not going to try to solve.

Now, after a prolonged but ultimately successful effort to remember his number, he calls his own phone. As it starts to ring, he can’t wait any longer to pull out Epi’s paper-napkin notes and spread them on the bar. They immediately become soaked with some other customer’s spilled beer. He doesn’t try to rescue them, knowing it would be better for them to disappear. He doesn’t even understand why he still has them. Once
again, he reads them over. Some of them look as though they were written in blood. A third-rate psychopath, his sibling. The profusion of spelling mistakes makes Alex’s desperation and obsessive desire for knowledge about his brother seem less than genuine, as if the errors created an insuperable distance between the writer and the reader and formed a barrier to any kind of empathy or compassion whatsoever.

The good news is that his cell phone’s turned on and ringing. The bad news is that no one seems interested in answering it. Maybe it hasn’t been found yet. It’s ringing as it lies on the sidewalk, or in the happy thief’s pocket. For a few moments, his mind plays him a nasty trick and then pokes fun at him. Maybe the leper stole his cell phone, and now he’s making hurried calls to Saint Martín de Porres before his ear or his mouth falls off. The joke’s not funny, not even to Alex.

Before the answering message starts, Alex hangs up and redials. With his free hand, he rips the wet paper napkins into a pile of shreds and puts them in the ashtray. Another redial, and then another. He watches Mari as she cheekily serves a tall man in his fifties, wearing a big black belt and a knockoff designer shirt with side slits. Alex doesn’t recognize him from the barrio. He’s not Spanish. Or maybe he is, who knows?

“Yes, hello …”

“Hello, who’s this?”

“You’re the caller. Identify yourself.”

“Listen …”

“You’re calling the district police station.”

“Ah, hello.” With dizzying speed, Alex seems to understand and take fright at the same time. “I was there this morning, and I think I left my cell phone, and—”

“A black Sharp?”

“Yes, of course, the one I’m calling.”

“You left it at the security desk. You can drop by and pick it up whenever you want.”

As he hangs up, Alex clearly recalls leaving the phone in the basket. He apparently didn’t pick it up after passing under the security arch. Terror at the thought of going back there, along with everything else, overcomes him. It’s an illogical fear, he knows that, but knowing what it is doesn’t make it any less real. Nevertheless, if he wants to avoid problems, he has to go back to the police station as soon as possible. The guy who was talking to Mari picks up his coffee with cognac and carries it to one of the tables, not far from another table where four old fellows are whacking dominos against the marble top.

“Do you know who that is?” Mari asks Alex.

“No.”

“Tiffany’s father. Almost, almost a member of your family,” jokes Mari, smiling under her mustache.

“I thought he was doing time,” Alex answers, looking at the man again, curious to discover signs in him of the bad vibrations that radiate from his daughter.

“In prison? That’s one of the girl’s inventions. He often stops by when he’s in the neighborhood. All in all, it’s like a movie about the Wild West in here today, don’t you think?”

“How about the restraining order his wife got against him?”

“It’s not restraining him all that much, kid. If you keep believing everything women tell you, you’re going to have lots of trouble,” Mari exclaims, plunging her hands into the hot water in the sink. A little water splashes on her nose, which she wipes on her shoulder, talking all the while. “As my sainted mother used to say, women are very wicked; it would never occur to any man to fake an orgasm.”

“Can’t argue.”

“Wait a little while. You’ll see him step out of here and cross the street, and then he and Doña Fortu will walk off, heading for a place where their witch of a daughter can’t see them.”

Alex can’t stay any longer. But Mari likes to talk so much that there’s hardly ever a pause in her conversation long enough for Alex to get away without interrupting her.

“That guy’s a bumpkin, I grant you, but he’s nice. I don’t know—he’s got something. They say he has Brazilian blood. Maybe it’s that. Did you know he speaks German, too? He learned it by himself. He’d go to the Mercat de Sant Antoni on Sundays and buy Nazi books from World War II, and he learned to read them with a dictionary.”

“You shouldn’t believe everything men tell you, either.”

“That story I believe. He’s a smart guy. When he arrived in the neighborhood, he had a family but no work. So he got into installing air conditioners. You see the one in here? He installed it. It’s still working. Then he found out there was a congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the barrio, and zap! Every Saturday and Sunday, there he was, him and his wife and the two girls, sparkling clean and dressed to the nines
in the tackiest getups imaginable, singing praises to the Almighty. Within three months, all the faithful had bought air conditioners, serviced and installed by the gentleman himself. Then, who would have thought it, the family lost their faith.”

“I have to go, Mari. I have to pick up my cell phone.”

In the street, Alex checks to see if he has enough money to take a cab. That would be the fastest way to get to the police station, but he appears to be out of luck. No matter; the buses are usually running smoothly at this time of day.

A SHAKEN JAMELIA WALKS DOWN THE STREET, HER FACE
still burning from the slap Tiffany gave her a few minutes ago. They were standing in the middle of the sidewalk when Tiffany struck her, and now Jamelia’s seething with aggression. She mustn’t let this chagrin wipe out the illusion she was savoring when she ran into her sister on the street. She has to recover her calm, even though she knows she’s not going to be on time for her job interview.

It’s all Tiffany’s fault, hers and hers alone. With all her airs, like she’s the queen and everybody else has to make way for her. And yes, maybe Jamelia should have listened to Tiffany and not caught the bus. That way they would have met up sooner. And Jamelia probably should have taken the cell phone when she left home. Also, maybe she should have escorted the kid upstairs to the apartment where his mother was supposed to be waiting for him, but Jamelia was already
late for her interview, and besides, he was surely capable of going up there by himself, wasn’t he? Hasn’t his own mother left him alone in front of the TV for hours and hours at home? Jamelia figured Tiffany was upstairs, waiting for him. What was the sense of all these scruples about the boy now, when the little guy’s already seen much more than any child should see? Somebody buzzed the door open, didn’t they? So the kid must be with Tanveer or Epi or whoever her sister’s current boyfriend is. Jamelia’s not Percy’s mother,
she
is, Tiffany is.

Her tears, her running nose, her perspiration from walking so fast, without time to think … She was going to arrive disheveled as well as late, and she’d prepared for this interview with such special care! She’d scented herself with talcum powder and perfume stolen from her sister; she’d showered first thing in the morning so she’d have time for her final preparations. Jamelia feels herself bathed in sweat, something nothing and no one can avoid or alleviate. She’s sure she’ll reek at the interview. She’s afraid they’ll laugh at her, at the poor silly fool. She’s afraid of disappointing the neat, well-dressed, handsome gentleman who’s so eager to meet her, who must be waiting for her and wondering why she’s late. She didn’t do anything wrong. She only obeyed when she shouldn’t have. But Tiffany’s bad and mean. Mean to her, mean to Mama. Mean to Percy. Mean to Epi. Mean to everybody. And someday God will punish her. Jamelia’s convinced of that. Nobody can be so selfish without getting punished for it in the end.

For Jamelia, the interview’s much more than a good job opportunity. It means she’ll be able to show she can work and do
things well, earn a little money to buy clothes and gifts, get an ice cream, whatever she wants. It means popcorn at the shopping center. And going to the movie theater to see romantic films. Besides, it’s the chance to get out of the apartment and meet the man of her dreams. She’s aware—as she looks at her wristwatch and discovers she’s already almost ten minutes late—that she sometimes imagines life as a television soap opera, like the ones Tiffany loathes so much. Just after clearing the table, or while she’s sewing, Jamelia likes to sit on the sofa next to her mother and watch an episode in a serial followed by some celebrity gossip shows followed by an episode in another serial. Five hours of not thinking about yourself. Such sessions connect mother and daughter with the irremovable truths they left on the other side of the ocean, truths that reconfirm both women’s faith in life and love: goodness makes its way through tragedies and the traps evil people put in its path; love is irrepressible and overcomes all obstacles; it makes no difference if you’re not rich or very beautiful or outgoing or Spanish, because to emerge triumphant it’s enough to be good, feminine, hardworking, and faithful. When you meet the other half you lack before your life can be full, don’t think twice about it, give yourself totally, inundate him like a rushing river.