The Barcelona Brothers (3 page)

Tanveer was tall and dark. From the first moment he arrived in the barrio, he never tried to be inconspicuous, not that he could have succeeded had he tried. He’d swagger around with his shirt off, exhibiting tattoos, medals, bracelets, and abdominal muscles. He’d run here and there in his Nike sports shoes, doing a lot of drugs and drinking unspeakable quantities of alcohol. He bummed Winston cigarettes, he was good with a knife, and in street fights he’d land some really impressive whacks, the kind that ring out, bounce off the sidewalk, echo, and then climb buildings floor by floor. And every now and again, he worked with some guy who was in construction. He dealt drugs, of course, he’d had some prior arrests as a juvenile that counted against him as an adult, and he got to know the inside of a cell for a few months. If he felt like dressing up to impress a woman, he’d put on a tracksuit that cost as much as the rent on the apartment his mother paid for, bless her soul, by working in a plus-size clothing store; if he was bored, he’d go looking for trouble, robbing the exchange students in the barrio, terrifying people at random, or picking up whores with Epi around the city morgue. As he did the night before the morning when his companion in debauchery would, to his surprise, dash out his brains.

When Tanveer arrived, things in that part of the city had already begun to change. It was one of those moments when you perceive that everyday life has shifted, has been shaken up, and will be put back together again but in a different
shape. The environment was changing, tenaciously, inexorably, and as the image of the barrio was altered, the older residents started feeling uncomfortable. Because little by little they found themselves being shut out of bars, squares, and streets, while—as they saw it—the others, those who had to suffer humiliation and to be grateful to find a job and a future, were getting government assistance, obtaining permits to hold bazaars on Thursdays, and taking up a lot of television time.

It was true that new renters had been succeeding one another in those buildings for years, entering and leaving, occupying the residences of those who once were alive and today were dead, of those who’d lived together there and whose names are now all that remain of the families that fled. Now there were strange kinds of music, unfamiliar words, and the newcomer’s disagreeable determination to conquer the new world for himself. And what happened was that one fine day the original inhabitants of the barrio who still lived there reviewed the situation and realized that they’d been abandoned to their fate. They saw that many others, the farsighted ones, those with children gone from the barrio, had escaped to the mountains and left behind whatever was useless, slow, or dim. And that all that was left in the neighborhood were the impaired, the poor, junkies, drunks, and old folks.

ALEX ENTERS THE LOBBY OF HIS APARTMENT BUILDING
. He runs past the mailboxes in the hallway, looks left and right, and decides against taking the elevator. Throwing an arm over the metal handrail, he launches himself up the stairs, two or three at a time. He doesn’t want to meet anyone. It’s very early in the morning, but too many things have happened already. He’s not interested in running into neighbors, whether friendly or unsociable or enemies of long standing. To say nothing of shades or spirits. Thus far, they haven’t made an appearance, but he hasn’t taken his medication yet today, and he’s sure they’ve been invited to the party. He’s supposed to take a pill every morning, right after breakfast; otherwise, stomach acid will ruin his day. At the turning of every landing, the gym bag strikes his leg. He’s already tossed the hammer into a Dumpster he passed on the way home. Nobody saw him. When it comes to taking precautions, being schizophrenic has its advantages.

He’s breathing hard when he lunges into the apartment. He calls out to Epi, hoping against hope that he’s taken refuge at home. As this wouldn’t be a bad option, it seems pretty unlikely to Alex that his brother has chosen it; by now, Epi has surely come up with something ten times worse. At the end of the hall, the light in their mother’s room is on. The light that never goes out. It never went out while the old lady was still alive, and for some idiotic, fraudulent reason, neither Alex nor Epi wants to turn it off now, three months after her death. They’re probably afraid she’ll start yelling at them the way she used to when they assumed she was asleep and switched it off.

His mother’s gone, but Alex still sees her, hears her, senses her everywhere. It’s surely her hand guiding his when he forges her “certificate of existence” so they can keep receiving her family assistance check from the government. She’s what protects them from the social worker, who never stops calling. Obviously, the healthiest course would be for them to go into their mother’s room and drive all the ghosts out of there. Break ruthlessly into closets and drawers. Burn the furniture and the holy pictures and the family photographs. But such an undertaking would be so titanic that instead, day by day, the room has been turning into a museum, and so it shall remain.

Another possibility is that Epi has gone into hiding at Tiffany’s place. It would be a good idea to give her a call. Alex can still remember the first meeting between his mother and Tiffany. When the girl said her name, the old lady grimaced, made her repeat it two or three more times, and then asked, “What kind of a name is that?”

“Just a name.”

“Which saint is it?”

“Saint Don’t Bug Me, señora.”

“You don’t have very good manners. Didn’t they teach you to be polite in your house? Where are you from?”

“From here,” Tiffany lied.

“Well then, how about your parents?”

“From Peru.”

“Ah, right. And how did you come to be born here?”

“Tell your mother to drop it, will you?”

Later, they learned to get along quite well, but in her last days, the old lady didn’t recognize Tiffany, either. The hepatic poisoning she suffered from severely limited her ability to understand almost anything. She persisted only in watching television and talking to the husband who’d left her, to her first sweetheart, to her last lover, to her dead grandmother, to Jesus Christ, also dead, and to Elvis Presley, who was, indeed, forever alive.

Suddenly, the telephone at Alex’s side starts ringing. It takes him a few seconds to grasp the fact that the sound is coming neither from his pocket nor from inside his skull, but rather from the cordless phone right there, within reach of his hand. He hesitates to answer the call. He doesn’t recognize the number that appears on the display, but he knows the caller’s not using a cell phone. What to do? It might be Epi, calling from a pay phone.

“Alex? Is that you?”

“Yes.”

It’s Salva, maybe on the phone in the bar.

“Man, you left me with a real mess on my hands.”

“I’m sorry,” Alex replies, summoning enough strength to keep on replying, and forcing himself to think. “I was scared shitless. I don’t know what—but look, if someone comes in and finds me with a dead body, then I’m sure to get busted. Nothing’s going to happen to you, you own the bar. It makes perfect sense that you’d be there, but not me—”

“I told them you were with me,” Salva interrupts him.

This revelation definitively activates the alarm in Alex’s head. He rapidly considers the possibility that Salva’s call is being monitored, that Salva has given him up to the cops, him and Epi both. Alex has to be careful. He says, “Why shouldn’t you tell them that?”

Salva doesn’t reply. He hesitates. It may be that he’s sensed Alex’s mistrust, or that the
Mossos d’Esquadra
, the Catalonian police, really are in the room with him.

Alex, beginning to lose patience, waits for the bar owner to show his cards, once and for all, and then asks, “Where are you calling from, Salva?”

“From home.”

“Is there anything else you want? I have stuff to do.”

Alex walks into his brother’s room.
I wish he was back, I wish he was lying in his bed right now
, Alex thinks, as though trying to replace the nightmare of what’s happened with his own desires. But no, no such luck. The sheets are in disorder, dirty clothes are strewn across the floor, the computer’s screen saver is shedding green, blue, and red tears, and one of Epi’s
thousand sneakers, lost and disoriented, is propped against the door. Alex says to Salva, “Don’t worry.”

“What’s to worry about?”

“You told them I ran out after the Paki, right? He went into the subway. I couldn’t catch him. He ran too fast. You know how those guys can run.”

“In any case, the cops want to talk to you.”

“What about?”

“Alex, for Christ’s sake, I don’t feel like playing games. You witnessed a murder, what do you expect? You think you can send them a postcard? Drop by the Embajadores police station. I didn’t have your cell number, so it’s lucky that Mari has your home phone number—I don’t even want to think about why. Anyway, go and talk to them, because if you don’t they’re going to come looking for you at home, and nobody likes that.”

“I’ll go down there. I wasted my time running after that Paki. The bastard took off like a man possessed. I lost him in the subway.”

“Alex, will you please calm down? You just told me that.”

“I know I just told you that.”

“Okay.”

“So what about Tanveer?”

“You won’t believe it, but when the ambulance came, he was opening his mouth a little.”

“Think he’ll live?”

“No.”

“May Allah take him to His bosom.”

“Don’t be a jackass, Alex.”

“I’m serious.”

“But Tanveer was half Spanish.”

“What does that have to do with it, Salva? A man believes what he believes.”

“Right.”

“Wait till my brother finds out.”

“Maybe he already knows,” the bar owner replies mysteriously.

“How could he know?”

“All right, Alex. I have no idea …”

“I gotta go, Salva.”

“Okay.”

“One more thing.”

“What?”

“Thanks.”

So Epi well and truly wasted Tanveer
, Alex thinks. Up until this moment, it’s been as if it wasn’t real, or at least not as real as it actually was. Alex’s legs start trembling again. He looks up and finds himself staring at his reflection in the mirror. He can still recognize himself. He’s not a dead man’s ghost—not yet. But he
is
old and tired. His hair’s disheveled, unruly, like a patch of woodland a fire has weakened but not destroyed. Years ago, Alex had an angular, bony face, but now he’s got bags for cheeks. His skin is waxy, with violet shadows; the more obstinate ones look like tattoos under his eyes, which are small and set wide apart.

No, he wouldn’t like it if the
mossos
came to his apartment. Still, before he sees them, he’s got to talk to Epi. He calls his brother’s mobile phone for about the thousandth time, but it’s
either turned off or out of range. He looks for Tiffany’s number, but he lost it when he changed phones and didn’t do anything to recover it. If Epi’s got to forget her, every little bit helps.

He goes into Epi’s room again, giving the vigilant sneaker a swift kick. The shoe skitters away and hides under the bed like a fearful dog. Alex is looking for he doesn’t know what. Maybe the girl’s telephone number. Maybe a clue that will tell him where his brother is. He checks the objects on the table. It occurs to him that Epi’s cell phone might be somewhere around here, but fortunately there’s no trace of it among the miscellaneous litter. However, he does find some paper napkins with notes addressed to Tiffany and written in Epi’s horrendous, childish hand. Alex starts to read them, but he can’t go on. They make him sick. For caution’s sake, he decides to take them with him. Better if no one ever finds them. He thinks about another occasion, when he saw a girl, a different girl, lying on that same bed. Alex had overslept and was going to be late for his shift in the parking garage where he still works today. He staggered out of his room and found the bathroom door closed. Epi was inside, and Alex could feel the presence of someone else in the apartment, in Epi’s bedroom. He opened the door of his brother’s room a little wider and intuited rather than saw her, lying under the jumble of sheets and blankets, entangled in disorder, surrounded by the reek of sweat, tobacco, and sex. She was the source of the soft snoring he heard, the configuration of soft flesh filled with heat, guts, and straight razors that his brother had introduced him to a few days before.

Not that Tiffany was something out of this world. She was rather short, with a moon-shaped face and big eyes. Her tattooed blue eyelids were the only feature that distinguished her from any other girl. You could tell that as she grew older, she’d get fat and lose her curves, because having the baby had already broadened her hips. But she had something that lit you up if you were next to her, something that made you shine. There was no need for explanations; the mere fact that she’d chosen you proved you were someone special. By the same token, to be left by Tiffany was to return to eternal, impenetrable, unyielding darkness.
A skillful player would know how to leave her ten minutes before she left him
, Alex tells himself. Alex knows he would have been better at the game than Epi, but Tiffany was never his. Once upon a time, she was his brother’s. Now, in fact—Alex sees the matter more clearly than ever, if possible—it’s as though Epi won the prize and lost everything, all with the same ticket.

Alex lies down on his brother’s bed. He closes his eyes and tries to calm himself. There’s no time to waste. He must get up and take his medication before everything starts to get complicated inside his head. He knows perfectly well that after he swallows the pill, it will be easier for him to decide what to do. But he stays there, lying on the bed with his eyes closed. It’s ridiculous, he thinks, to be forty years old and still in custody, a prisoner in almost everyone’s eyes. To pay attention to the doctor, who tells him not to drink or take drugs and to stick to his medication schedule. To obey his mother’s
former commands: Take care of your brother. Pay the rent. Greet those who greet you, and also those who don’t. And then there are all those voices he hears and recognizes, both inside and outside his head, always giving him orders, warning him, frightening him.