The Empty Family (22 page)

The city was a vast distraction. I found a restaurant I liked; a few bars; a few English-speaking friends. I got some hours teaching. I signed up for Spanish classes. Like everyone else, I followed the news about the failing health of the old dictator. And now and then over those months, a crucial time in the history of Spain, I noticed how generally indifferent people were to anything except the private realm, which was inhabited by the young with great intensity. The books you read, the friends you met, the lovers you slept with, the music you listened to, the new identities you took on, these were the things that mattered in that autumn in Barcelona. The disintegration of the old man and his regime was like an invisible undertow. The surface of life was too exciting for anyone to do more than shrug at the possibility that this undertow would begin to pull us elsewhere.

I called around to Plaza Real whenever I felt horny. Sometimes, my friend was there and we would make love. We would arrange to meet and make love again, often in different bedrooms in buildings elsewhere in the city that were owned by friends of his. I never introduced him to anyone I knew. I never told anyone about this secret life. A few times, when I called and he was not there, I stayed if there was a party. The parties were good. I realized that the painter, with his elaborate mantillas and costumes and fans, was slowly becoming a personage in the city. He moved up and down the street, cheeky, full of mockery and wit, with one or two friends, dressed like a young Spanish girl at a fair or a religious ceremony, but wearing two or three days’ stubble.

He was, I realized one night, very funny. I had stayed over in his room, sleeping with some others on a mattress on the floor. Early in the morning he began a monologue, imitating accents, putting on voices. I had no idea what he was talking about, but everyone in the room was howling with laughter. It might have been that morning, or maybe it was another, when a woman, who seemed to have a room in the warren of rooms on that floor, arrived with her child, a little boy less than a year old, who could crawl but not walk. She left him with us, twenty half-naked, half-sleeping men. Our friend the painter set about entertaining the child, and we all joined in. Everyone was jealous of whoever had the child’s attention. The baby crawled on top of us all, laughing and making us laugh. We made faces, did voices, played in whatever way we could with the little boy, until his mother came back. The baby cried at being taken away from us.

I discovered that my lover could read English with astonishing ease and fluency. When he spoke he was hesitant, but then I realized that he was also hesitant in Spanish and in Catalan. A few times at night I lay beside him and watched him reading late Henry James novels, amazed at his sharp grasp of the most complex sentences. Once, when the painter was out, and my friend had a key to his door, or it had been left open, we made love on his bed. I knew where the Vaseline was kept. It was the first time that he fucked me from the front, my legs spread out, my ankles on his shoulders. At first, this was even more painful than before, but soon it was easy. I loved looking at his face as he fucked, his gaze so intense, as though he might eat me. When the painter came back and saw us on the bed and the Vaseline on the table beside us, he put his hands in the air and said: ‘Por favor!’

My lover was not there the evening the dictator died, nor was I. He later told me that he had heard the party that night was the best of all. Outrage after outrage was committed, and, I supposed, many new unwritten rules were devised. I was sorry I had missed it. I was drifting away. The painter had got tired of me sitting on his bed listening to the Triple Concerto. I was very interested in those years in taking my clothes off; putting more of them on, dressing up as a señorita, was not my style.

So I did not go to the opening of Ventura Pons’s film about the painter in the Cine Maldà. I read about it in the newspaper. By this time, the painter’s name was a byword for the new freedom and all the youthful happiness that came in its wake.

I stopped seeing my lover. Six months later, however, when I got a flat around the corner from Plaza Real, I discovered that he had moved to another flat on the same floor of the building where we had met. If he was home, the lights were visible from one of the streets between Escudellers and the Plaza Real. Sometimes when I walked home I would check the light and if I was feeling in the right mood I would call in to him. He would play his old game of talking and listening as though there were no sexual charge between us. And then I would move towards him and touch him, and, just like the first time, he would remain still, in his lovely old trance. This transformation from the social to the sexual, which I could do in a split second, took him time. And then he was ready.

All these years later, I can still take pleasure in the tight, hard shape of him, his tongue, the knob of his dick, the glitter in his eyes, his shy smile. I always knew that if I did not keep him, he would go. Someone else would claim him.

One night, towards the end of my time in the city, he hesitated for even longer than usual when I touched him and then he told me that he could not make love with me. Someone else had come along and wanted him, he said, and he could not fuck anyone else. He was sorry. I nodded. It was my own fault. I should not have wandered off as I did, coming to him only when I felt too horny to keep away. I walked down the stairs of that flat in the Plaza Real for the last time and into the shining city. I was ready, once more, for anything.

The Street

Malik stood in the corner by the drawer where the cash was kept while Baldy counted the day’s takings. He tried to look humble but also alert as Baldy, without once looking up, spoke to him for the first time since his arrival. He told him that he could have a half-day free every week until he was trained and then maybe a whole day. Malik nodded and stayed still and then nodded again in case Baldy turned in his direction, or in case one of the other barbers in the Four Corners was watching. They all claimed to dislike Baldy, but Malik did not think he could trust any of them.

Baldy was gruff. When they had met at the airport in Barcelona a few weeks earlier, he had not even said hello to him. When Malik had tried to explain the long delay in Madrid, Baldy had not paid him the slightest attention, he had turned and walked away, having brusquely indicated that Malik should follow him. Then he had walked impatiently out of the airport building towards the car park. As he drove into the city, Baldy had talked business into a tiny mobile phone that he attached to his ear and in front of his mouth and had not said a word to Malik.

Malik remembered how dark and frightening the city seemed. Baldy had eventually pulled up outside a tall old building in a narrow street and motioned to Malik from the front seat that he should take his bag out of the car. With Malik standing on the pavement beside him, Baldy rang a bell beside one of the doorways and shouted a name when someone answered through an intercom. Then, without a word, he got back into the car and drove away. Malik had waited alone in the street until a man came down and accompanied him upstairs to his quarters. The time waiting had frightened him even more than the arrival in Madrid.

Malik was surprised at the idea that Baldy thought he would ever prove himself as a proper barber. Although he was becoming more confident at the practice sessions, the others still laughed at his awkwardness. He found the machines difficult. One night the previous week, for example, they had let him give a full haircut using the electric shears and Salim had taken photographs of the result to amuse everyone. Some of the cut was far too tight, but in places Malik had left tufts of hair uncut.

Malik began sweeping until the floor was clean and then moved towards the door and stood close to it. He found a newspaper on a chair and folded it neatly. He wondered if he should do something else and tried to look busy, even though it must be obvious, he thought, that he was not busy. Baldy, he saw, was adding up the number of customers who had come to the Four Corners that day and what each had paid. When he had finished this, he put the euro notes into his back pocket and left the coins in the drawer. Then he walked out of the Four Corners without speaking.

The atmosphere changed as soon as Baldy left. One of the barbers went to the cassette player and turned up the sound. Malik thought for a moment that he might go and sit down, but then he worried that Baldy might suddenly return and catch him doing nothing. He went into the back room and checked the towels and then came out again into the shop, where there were still two clients having haircuts. The other barbers were chatting and cleaning up. He leaned against the wall and watched them. He thought that some of them resented his sullenness, his silence.

He wondered what they all did with their day or half-day free. He had never heard anyone saying that they went anywhere or did anything. It struck him that the only thing he could do was spend his free half-day sitting beside Super at the cash register in the supermarket a block away on the same street as the Four Corners. He had met Super on his second day in the street, when he was sent to get tea. Super was the first person to call him by his name and ask him questions about himself. If Super was busy, he thought, he would help him out; if the supermarket became quiet, he would sit and listen to Super’s commentary on those who passed in the street, or on his regular customers, or on what was happening in the world.

Later, as the shop was getting ready to close, he was glad when no one suggested that he continue his training. He waited with them until the last customer had gone; then he joined them as they walked back to the house, being careful to say nothing, and not seem to listen too closely to any of them, in case they picked on him or laughed at him. He looked forward to getting into bed and feeling alone there in the darkness; the very thought of that pleased him and made him feel almost comfortable and happy.

One day he explained his fears to Super that he could not seem to learn as the others had learned and he noticed how attentively Super listened, how much he wanted to know the names of all the barbers and what each one had done or said. He waited for Super to give him advice, or predict what was most likely to happen, but Super said nothing, just looked out the shop window into the street. Since the supermarket was open late, he went there sometimes for a few minutes after work but Super was not always free to talk to him, as there were other men who looked up in surprise when Malik approached and grew silent as Super indicated that he was busy and suggested that Malik return some other time. The men, most of whom had beards, did not seem like customers and Malik wondered who they were. They were older and seemed serious, like businessmen or mullahs.

Malik did not move beyond the street and he liked how gradually he was becoming known as he made his way to the supermarket to buy milk or soft drinks or tea. He enjoyed being greeted and saluted. And there were other things too that made him feel comfortable. Even though eight of them shared the room, for example, he learned that he would not need to lock his suitcase, he was assured that no one would touch it. One night, when one of the other lodgers wanted to move his suitcase for a moment, he came and asked permission. He realized that they all kept money and photographs and other private things in their cases, fully confident that no one would go near them.

He noticed too that each of them had something special, a camera, a Walkman, a mobile phone, a DVD player, that set them apart and that they lent out as a special favour, or at particular times. Only Mahmood owned nothing. Mahmood worked hard and spent no money because he wanted desperately to go home. Some of the others, he told Malik, spent half their earnings on phone calls home. He had never called his wife even once, he said, not even for a second. He would not waste the money and it only made him sad.

Each morning, except Saturday and Sunday, Mahmood left early to deliver
butano
. He carried the heavy bottles of gas up narrow staircases. And then in the afternoons he took care of all the laundry in the house, leaving clothes clean and folded on each bed, never making a mistake. And in the evening he cooked, charging less than even the cheapest restaurant in the street.

Malik liked Mahmood from the beginning and liked having his clothes washed by someone he knew, and laid on his bed as though he were equal to the others. He also liked the food Mahmood cooked. But more than anything he was intrigued at how single-minded Mahmood was, how determined he was to go home.

It was Super also who warned him not to wander in the city. The locals were not the problem, Super said, and not even the tourists. It was the police you had to be careful of. In this street and the few around it, Super assured him, they would stop only blacks, but in other streets they could easily mistake you for a Moroccan.

‘Why do they not like Moroccans?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know, but they don’t,’ Super said. ‘They just don’t. And they don’t like Africans either. They like us because we just do business, that’s all we’re here for.’

Under the counter Super had a collection of magazines with photographs of the prisoners the Americans held in Iraq. Malik had seen the pictures on television; he had noticed that no one wanted to talk about them. Each time the television in the house had shown the naked figures being tormented by the American guards, for example, his fellow lodgers had watched in complete silence. When the news moved on to some other item, they still did not speak but simply stared straight at the television for a while.

When he went through the pages of the magazines with Super, neither of them said anything either; instead, they looked at each picture slowly, letting their eyes take in every detail. It was the one with the big black dog that Malik remembered most; that was what made him most afraid. At night sometimes he thought about it, and the sharp teeth of the dog and the crouching prisoner tied up made him shiver.

Super reminded him of men in his village at home who could be found after prayers at the mosque gathered in a small group having earnest discussions, or who would visit a house if someone was in trouble. He had a way of becoming quiet and looking serious.