Читать книгу The Boys - Toni Sala - Страница 7

I

Now it seems we blame everything on the recession, but the recession wasn’t to blame for the display of prostitutes out on the shoulder of the highway, out past the halted construction meant to split it in two, past the half-built bridges with faded circus posters and the spray-painted words N-II HIGHWAY OF SHAME, DIVIDE IT ALREADY, past that stretch of highway with its sketchy mirror version, unpaved and separated by a low wall of concrete blocks, past fields flooded by black water and crowned with shocks of grass . . .

The recession wasn’t to blame for that display case filled with fresh meat, a whore every hundred meters; the recession wasn’t to blame, because the whores were there before—it was during the years filled with cranes that the business extended like an oil spill. But morality doesn’t move as fast as money and, with the good years behind them, the girls were still there, resigned like the rest of us to the hardships of the new times.

Club Diana announced the beginning of the display as you travel north on the national, before you get to Tordera. Fifteen kilometers later, on the outskirts of Vidreres, a similar building—another old block of rooms at the foot of the highway, the Club Margarita—presaged the end. They were the landmarks at each extreme. Despite the distance and mountains that separated them, at night, when their neon signs came on, it seemed the two buildings spoke to each other in a code of blinking lights. On the roof of Club Diana a yellow arrow lit up, flying right into a red pubic triangle; on the roof of Club Margarita a giant daisy lost its petals, one by one, until it suddenly bloomed again among the dark fields.

And there had to be some relationship between the two brothels, because in the Club Margarita parking lot he often saw vans advertising Club Diana: the silhouette of a naked girl dancing on the circles of a bull’s-eye. He always passed the brothels in the daytime, when they were still closed—the blinds were always lowered, but he could tell from the deserted parking lots—and the girls, perhaps the same ones who worked in the clubs at night, waited by the side of every road that led to the national highway, sometimes sitting on plastic chairs, with parasols in the summer and umbrellas in the winter or if it was raining. When they were busy they left a towel and a rock on the white plastic chair so it wouldn’t move. When they weren’t, they talked on their cell phones and smoked with the patience of fishermen on a riverbank until some driver flipped on his turn signal, negotiated a price with the girl from his car, and then took her along the dirt road to behind the first trees, or sometimes not even that far: then he’d see the stopped car and the back of a man’s neck through the window, facing away from the highway. He had seen every make of car stop, vans, trucks, trailers, and motorcycles, and once he saw a black guy walking toward the trees with one hand on his bicycle and the other around a girl’s waist.

Yet the girls all seemed cut from the same cloth, none of them older than twenty, all attractive and always wearing makeup, with clean, combed hair, snugly fitting party clothes, and naked from the waist down to their boots at the slightest hint of sunshine. He would see them after lunch on his way back to work, and from the way he studied them he surely knew them better than even their clients. When there were new girls—because the bosses changed them often—they would tempt him with a wink. He’d smile back and, if he was in the mood, he’d blow a kiss, and then he’d wonder if that was taking advantage of the girl, or if she’d understood it as the sign of affection and solidarity that it was, if, deep down, it really even was that at all. The one thing he knew for sure was that they cursed him when they saw he wasn’t stopping.

The gesture lasted as long as it took his car to pass by them, like a reminder of youth and the joys of the flesh. He was nearing sixty years old. Did he want something more? Did he desire those bodies? How could he know? They were girls like any others but, luckily, the distance between their lives was vast. Was it better that they were out in the open, or should they be forced to work hidden away? It wasn’t good for people to get used to dehumanizing girls, but wasn’t having to see them a good punishment? When his girls were little, if they were ever sitting in the back seat when he had to go down those fifteen kilometers of sex on display, he made sure not to take his eyes off the license plate of the car in front of him, not out of shame, but to ward off the jolts life brings.

Past the Tordera Bridge, the highway lost its sea views and climbed behind the backs of Blanes and Lloret until, after a blind hill, it opened up on the plain of La Selva, with the luminous teeth of the Pyrenees in the background.

He’d traveled that route every day for the last fifteen years, ever since they’d transferred him to a small branch of the Santander Bank in Vidreres. He knew it better than the back of his hand: the patched highway, the ghost gas stations and warehouses, the large rusty silo, the trees with sawed branches whose trunks almost touched the asphalt, the descent to the plain of La Selva, and Vidreres like a tiny island among the fields, with an antique tractor and a Catalan flag at the traffic circle as you enter, and a small spiderweb of streets and people. He knew what he had to know about the town where he earned his living, which family each client belonged to, who had money and who didn’t and who someday might, who was important in town hall and who wasn’t, that sort of thing. He used the slow, gentle accent of the local dialect when speaking with them, aware that he would always be an outsider there, no matter how many years he spent working right across from the Santa Maria church at a job in which he was privy to more of the town’s secrets than the rector himself, or even the girls at Club Margarita.

Money moves between men like a gust of wind. In a small town, where the amount of money is always the same, you can watch it just move from one account to another like birds changing branches. That was the only appeal of the job, watching the deposits and withdrawals, the incoming salaries and the unexpected expenses, those intimate movements of money—he had access to private spaces. He controlled the movements in the bankbooks, the investments, the gambles, the timed deposits, the pension plans, the mortgages, and the loans. He and his coworker speculated on where the money came from and where it was headed. Nothing surprised him. They foretold which businesses would do well or go under; they worked in the most predictable office in the world, with the most conservative clientele on the planet, and, even still, it was fun.

He reached the office as the bell tower rang eight o’clock, as usual. His colleague was from the town—sometimes it was like having the enemy in your home—but they were the same age, which is similar to being born in the same place.

He let his coworker raise the shutter and pick up the newspaper, as he did every day. This time he just stood at the door and turned the pages until he found the news he was looking for.

“Heaven help us,” he said, and gave a whistle. “What a sight.”

Ernest looked over his colleague’s shoulder at the newspaper. A photograph showed a black Peugeot with the hood crunched and the windshield shattered. The radiator grille had come off and the engine was beside the car, because it had fallen out in the accident. They had carried it separately to the municipal morgue where they took the photograph. Two brothers die in an accident in Vidreres. The savage jolt that, only through some miracle of elasticity, avoids ripping apart the spiderweb of a family or an entire town.

Jaume was shaking his head.

“They drive like madmen,” he said. “I’m surprised more of them don’t get themselves killed.”

You wouldn’t say that if the dead boys were your sons, thought Ernest.

During the first few hours on a Monday, Vidreres is still warming up, few people come into the office, and you can spend a good chunk of the morning watching the other side of the street from your desk: the little paved square with four benches and four clipped trees, dry parterres, and the large door to the Santa Maria church.

The reinforced glass of the branch’s windows scarcely echoed the vibration of the few cars that circulated on the pedestrian street. They had modernized the town center four years earlier. People from the outlying areas of Barcelona bought places in the housing complexes, and Vidreres grew the way all towns near highway exits do. But the town center continued to have the same families as ever, and every morning from behind the glass he saw the same soundproofed women heading toward the bakery and the butcher’s shop. Hourglasses with baskets, little figures in a clock dragging the shadows, sundials. At ten on the nose, Mrs. Garcés passed by. Five minutes later, Marta came out of her house. Five seconds after that, Mrs. Dolors turned the corner. They stopped to greet each other, following an ancestral routine, commenting on the television programs they’d seen the day before. From their gestures he guessed at whether Enriqueta’s bones were aching that morning or not. Mr. Vidal railed against the politicians: “The young people are right to protest! Just you wait until they get fed up! Just you wait!” Miquel Sr. warned of some clouds coming from Girona with a nod of his head. They had farming in their blood. They never missed the weather report.

That morning, the conversations went on longer than usual. Heads shook and hands opened. Miquel Sr., who usually read the newspaper at the community social club, carried it under his arm. If they hadn’t thought to order more for the kiosk, the local papers would sell out. Into the silence of the sun and winter frost, in a corner of the office, at low volume, Radio Vidreres repeated the news of Saturday’s accident every hour. The host spoke in a thin voice, and without naming names he announced that the funeral was that afternoon.

“Why do they have to keep going on about the accident,” grumbled Jaume.

He wore black shoes, black pants, black tie, dark shirt.

“Are you going to the funeral?” asked Ernest.

On the street there was also a lot of dark clothing.

“Don’t expect any clients.”

“Did you know them?”

“Everyone knew them. The only sons in the Batlle family, over in Les Serres. Their father works for La Caixa bank. Did you see the marks?”

“What marks?”

“I’m surprised you didn’t notice them on your way in. You can still see the skid marks on the asphalt.”

Then Mr. Cals came in, like he did every Monday at that time, to take out fifty euros. There’s no way Mr. Cals, who was retired, lived on so little, especially since they saw him pass by the office every day with a small lit cigar. But every Monday he came to get his fifty-euro note and didn’t come back for the rest of the week. Once the water and electricity bills were paid, the rest of his pension piled up in his account. Today he was dressed in mourning clothes that were out of style and had been ironed too many times. He gave off the scent of mothballs and his shoes were shiny. Ernest remembered the suit as the same one he wore at his wife’s funeral.

“You see, Jaume, that’s life,” said Mr. Cals. “Twenty, twenty-one years old? And what are they gonna do at Can Batlle without those boys? Goddamn it all to hell, isn’t that just the way it is. Those poor people. Who could’ve ever even imagined such a thing! Now it’s Lluís’s moment. I told him, I did. Wait, be patient, life takes many twists and turns, holy hell does it ever. Twenty million he offered them, fifteen years back! Twenty million pesetas, twenty years ago! Let’s see what old Batlle can get for that land now. I already told him: you, now, keep quiet as a mouse. Lucky bastard. You can just imagine the party going on yesterday at the Margarita, goddamn it to hell.”

Mr. Cals put the banknote in his wallet and the wallet in his pocket. He couldn’t stop talking.

“I’m old and don’t care about anything now; otherwise, if I were twenty years younger, maybe that bastard Lluís wouldn’t be fast enough and I’d get the land. He can shove it up his ass. When you see these tragedies you say fuck it all, man, come on, to hell with it all, shit, to hell with all of it, and God and his virgin mother, fuck, I wouldn’t want to be in Batlle’s shoes right now, holy hell, or Llúcia’s, because that’s some real bad luck, both sons, goddamn it, both of them, holy shit. And where were those poor kids coming from so early in the morning?. . . I guess I’ll be seeing you later, holy fuck, goddamn, shit, holy shit, fucking hell.”

He left the office cursing.

“Boy, is he mad!” said Jaume. “He can see it coming. Lluís is going to buy up the lands of Can Batlle. It’s killing Cals. He’s obsessed with land. Don’t you see he’s still saving up? I don’t think he has enough. He’s got some, but not that much. And with today’s prices . . . Or maybe he does have the dough, and that’s why he’s been telling the other guy to keep quiet and wait. We still might get a surprise. You never know with these old guys. Maybe he has an account in Andorra or a fortune under his floor tiles. I know him all too well; I’ve had to put up with him all my life. When I was a kid we walked past his field on the way to school, and we were all scared of him. He would be digging, and he’d look up and wouldn’t bend over again until we were gone. And there wasn’t even anything there for us to touch. Just a fig tree by the road, the one that’s still there.”

On the other side of the glass, the square was filling up. Mourners arrived from every street. It didn’t seem like there were this many people in Vidreres, a little town where the streets were always pretty much empty—in summer because of the heat off the plain and now in the winter because of the cold air from the Montseny and the Pyrenees and sometimes the fog. He was no longer listening to his coworker. Jaume was going on and on about the old man’s stinginess, as if the time had come to account for the debts of an entire lifetime. It was the swarm of words that death attracts, and Ernest let him talk, trying not to listen, until he couldn’t take it anymore and cut him off: “Do you really think today’s the day to be talking about that?”

His coworker let a moment pass before standing up. No one likes to be told they’re petty. When you speak of petty things it’s because you want your interlocutor to join in, you are offering him a bit of freedom from his prison of niceties. When you open that door to invite him to share in your baseness, when you are standing there, exposed to the elements, it’s not pleasant to be reminded that not everyone is from the town, that there are outsiders who only come in to work and who remain unsullied by local misfortunes. Ernest could understand that and forgive Jaume, even return the favor and invite him to the party of his own lowliness, continuing the exchange of small, everyday evils as if nothing had happened. After all, they were people of transactions—they knew how to play with prices and stock values. It was precisely because they understood each other that his repugnance was so strong. Jaume could have gotten violent, he could have scuttled all the things on the desk onto the floor, picked up the letter opener and threatened him, asked him who he thought he was. But he just said, “I’m going to the funeral.”

And he went to the closet, resolutely and silently. It was worse than physical violence; it was as if he shouted: You think you’ve taught me some big lesson, but I’m the one going to the funeral, not you. Me, I’m from here. You don’t have even the slightest idea of what’s going on. You’re an outsider. I’m from here and so are my parents and my wife and my children. So just shut up. You think you have the simplicity of those dead boys in your favor. Well, here’s something else that’s simple: I am in mourning, I will go to the funeral, I will share in the town’s grief, I will be with them, I will cry with them. I’m dying to cry with them. Just wait, you’ll see what a big crowd there’ll be. We won’t all fit into the church. Look at the square. The whole high school is there. The soccer team. The parade association. Those boys’ friends. You see the young people? You see the old fogeys? We’ll all be there. We’ll flood the church with tears. And the church isn’t more than two hundred meters from this office. I’ll have to wipe my feet before I come back in. I will be there and you will be here, doing numbers and thinking about your daughters. Go to hell. You stay here to watch over the office in case some other outsider like you comes in. I’ll be there, listening to the mass with the others. I’ll hear the wails of their parents and friends, the sobs echoing against the church walls as they have for a thousand years, me and everyone else will be buried there among the dead, it will be a physical thing and not one of your jokes, I will be there with my people and you here adding up numbers, waiting, and contemplating. That’s the truth and not your moralizing. Save your morality for the day your daughters are killed. Then we’ll see if you still feel like giving lessons.

He was used to hearing the bells toll for the dead and watching funerals from the bank office, but this time, alone behind the desk, as the church door swallowed up the swarm of people, he had the impression that the bells tolled louder than ever, twice as loud, four, eight times louder, because there were two boys dead and Jaume had left him alone in the office. They came through the glass with such intensity. They rang so loud. Why such immodesty? Did they have to tell everyone that the boys had finally reached the moment of knowing everything, of seeing everything, of understanding their own existence completely? Did it have to be shouted from the rooftops? We spend our lives in retreat, only at the bottom of the well can we know if life was worth living or not, or, to put it better even though it’s the same thing: only then can we know whether we can know if life was worth living. But we can’t communicate that knowledge. Why toll the bells? To remind him that, when the moment comes, his death will also serve to torment others?

He searched for Mr. Cals amid the crowd in the square. He tried to figure out who Lluís could be. He looked for his coworker’s wife and children. He recognized clients. The host of Radio Vidreres must have been there as well, because only music was heard on that bandwidth.

Once everyone was inside the church, the first hearse was able to enter the square, backing up to the doors. Two funeral home employees dressed like businessmen unloaded the first coffin. They went up the steps and put it on a metal platform with wheels. The empty car moved aside, and the second car entered the square.

Inside the church they waited for the dead with the same expectation they would have for a bride and groom. Which brother was in which box? Did they have little plaques with their names, or was that not necessary? We live fighting against randomness: there has to be a protocol. Would it be the older brother who entered the church first—first to arrive, first to leave? The same employees carried out the same task. Afterward, the second car left the church door and parked beside the other one, in the middle of the square.

He switched off the radio. He wanted some excuse to call home. He let the feeling pass through him, the way he let mornings in the office pass. He didn’t want to turn himself into a bell tower. It was sunny, no one was left on the street, the kiosk and the bakery were shuttered. He thought of the priest, the poor guy, having to serve as a hinge, having to speak when there’s nothing to say. He thought of that little man he watched go in and out of the church each day, thought of his self-censure, of his self-control, of a priest’s forced cerebral mutilation, of his sacrifice for his parish, his loyalty to lies and ritual. Unless he was a con man and lived off others’ weakness.

Most people hadn’t gone to the wake, but some of them, the closest relatives, had. They had seen the boys displayed in their two coffins, humiliated like stuffed animals in the double zoo of their death: caged by rigor mortis and caged by the glass-topped coffins. Or perhaps it was their victory, their revenge, and it is the dead that watch over us.

And then he heard an engine approaching the square, a truck, it had to be from somewhere else, on that day, and it was already strange that it was squeezing its way down such narrow streets. He approached the door to watch it pass. It was carrying a load of hay bales. Bales of hay in January. You saw them going back and forth in June and July, after the harvest, or in the months following, but never at this time of year. . . They were the old style of bales, rectangular and small; someone must have ordered them for the animals they kept, they must be coming from Llagostera or Cassà, the truck driver was confused, he was looking for someone to ask what was going on, where were the owners of the house where he was scheduled to drop them off, why had he found it locked . . .

When he saw that he’d reached the church square, the driver put the truck in neutral in the middle of the street and got out of the cab. He was a tall man, about thirty years old, with short hair and a Van Dyke beard, and the strong body of a young hauler. He had bits of straw stuck in his blue sweater. Ernest half hid behind a column, and the truck driver looked toward the closed bakery and kiosk not understanding a thing. He checked his watch and then walked slowly over to the community social club. The door was open. He found the place empty except for Cindy, the South American girl who worked behind the bar. She must have explained to him what was going on, must have told him he should park and have a coffee while the funeral finished, because after a second the truck driver left the club, got into the cab, and parked down the street.

They died so young they took the whole town’s life with them, the trucker must have thought. He hadn’t parked in Vidreres, he’d parked in the Vidreres cemetery, with niches like houses; a cemetery with a kiosk, a bakery, and a bank; a cemetery with streets, with a church; a cemetery with a cemetery; with a club and a parking lot filled with empty cars. That’s what the afterlife must be like: solitude and walls.

Meanwhile, the priest spoke, and no one took their eyes off the two coffins, placed perpendicular to the altar at Christ’s feet. And while the entire town of Vidreres, locked up tight in the church, struggled not to imagine the dead brothers’ bodies, their faces, while they all tried to shrug off their curiosity, tried not to want to know what clothes the poor saps were wearing, nor who’d had to decide on the shirts the boys would wear to their own funeral and pull them out of the closet . . . Who had chosen the pants, the socks, the shoes, which weren’t their usual Sunday morning shoes but imposter shoes, an attempt to fool them, to pretend that perhaps they could warm their feet, as it should be in a tolerable world where parents died before their children . . . The pretense dignified the shoes, made them useful in their attempt to console, because useless objects are monstrous; he was sick of seeing it at the bank, money rotting in the vaults and creating bad blood between relatives . . . But, at the moment of truth, the shoes made the cadavers more contemptible, because death won the match, infecting the clothes and the coffins, infecting the church and all of Vidreres with its ugliness. Not even the consolation trick worked. When he got home each day, the first thing Ernest wanted to do was loosen the laces and take off his shoes . . . and those shoes would last longer than the feet they were on. Meanwhile, in the church, no one wanted to know who had pulled them out of the closet, whether it was their mother, their aunt, or their father, all three of whom were sitting in the front row with their backs to everyone and facing the coffins, contaminated; no one wanted to imagine the expression on the face that handed over the boys’ changes of clothes, in a bag, to the man at the funeral home, a last package for the brothers, sent to hell . . . They had given the boys’ clothes—not new, not bought for the occasion, but already worn, already lived in, to a stranger, a man they’d never seen before, and that stranger put on some gloves and stuffed cotton into the boys’ noses and ears and then, with another stranger, stood the dead boys up, first one then the other, to dress them, and the boys stood like plastic dolls, and those strangers at the funeral home were now standing as well, behind the last bench, with their gazes on everyone’s backs, supervising the ceremony, waiting to take the coffins away again, because the coffins were theirs, they would always be, a dead man owns nothing. . . Those strangers would be the last ones to have seen and touched the brothers’ bodies. And while some inside the church tried to respect the memory of the dead . . . how does one respect a memory? How can you think about a dead man without mucking him up? How can you separate him from the living? While at the church they tried not to curse the brothers for what they represented: death before its time, the most absolute, double death, because an unexpected death is a death that doubles back on itself, that kills hope and longing, that doesn’t leave time for making plans or for renouncing making plans, it is a death that doesn’t let death live, doesn’t let it make a will, or project anything for what’s left of life; it kills the future like any death but also kills all possible expectations and therefore kills the past, a retroactive death, a death that shoots at itself from the future, that overtakes death, that passes it, the death of death itself, a death that commits suicide . . . While the adults rummaged through memories to make an inventory of what remained of the two boys—what images, which smiles, what residue they had left behind—they found some surprises, because, now that they were dead, the last time they saw the two brothers became the last time they would ever see the two brothers, and the memory grew laden with nostalgia for what they now knew had been about to happen the last time they saw them. And the smiling faces of the brothers, who couldn’t imagine what awaited them. And the last words they said now meant different things, and therefore required a different answer from those who knew the future, a rectification from the prophets . . . And while they relived those last moments, they remembered how they themselves were at the brothers’ ages, what they were doing at the ages the brothers would remain, and they compared the two, and then they calculated what they would have missed out on if they had died young like them, and they tried not to cheat and decide whether living beyond their youth had been worth the effort, and finding that it had, they decided that against the brothers, and it was like spitting on them . . . and while some looked at each other out of the corners of their eyes, searching for how to behave, how to find the right tone—not too affected or too cold over the abandonment, over the novelty of it—they found it was impossible to avoid hypocrisy, and they gave thanks for the conventions, the ritual, the priest who didn’t allow them to start shouting or dancing or to burn down the church . . . While they did that, at the bank Ernest thought that even though those boys were from Vidreres and their fathers, mother, grandparents, and an endless line of ancestors were from Vidreres, given the way things had turned out, those two boys were the least from Vidreres of anyone on the planet right now, less than the last grain of sand in the depths of the sea. And while inside the church the more emotional people cried, the hearses waited outside, parked in the middle of the square, breaking the law. Keys hung serenely from car locks, the policemen were at mass, and the truck driver had a coffee at the bar with Cindy in the large, empty club with its high ceiling, marble tables, and the television talking to itself; meanwhile, in the Santander Bank branch, standing behind the glass, Ernest focused on the strands of hay that had fallen off the bales on the truck. They were at the foot of the wheels and on the sidewalk, hollow strands of straw, and a slight gust of wind dragged them up and down, from one corner of the square to the other, and when the sun hit them they sparkled, splattered, gilded the whirling air with ephemeral cornucopias.