Читать книгу The Boys - Toni Sala - Страница 8

II

He drove slowly, searching for the site of the accident. He saw the girl by the side of the highway. She didn’t look familiar at all. Thin, childlike, with long curly hair and bright eyes, stuffed into a tight little white dress, a bottle of water in one hand and a cell phone in the other. He could have touched her if he stuck his hand out the car window.

He had been thinking about the two brothers’ deaths all morning, and now he was tired. One enters the adult world through death’s door, through the assumption of mysteries, the most simple and fantastic mysteries of life and death. Being an adult is accepting death, harboring it inside you like a cancer, dying. How can he accept that his own daughters are already adults, that they are already infected? Accept death, how could he? How can you accept something you don’t understand? How can you continue to be a person if you accept the incomprehensible? Accepting death is accepting loneliness, and his turmoil over the death of the two brothers was, in fact, his resistance to facing up to his own age, to his own death, resistance to separating from his daughters, the death of his daughters—by dying, the brothers had freed their parents from killing them, as he would have to kill his daughters the day he died. He’d had them too old, almost forty. He’d made up his mind late, with a younger wife. Now he was living in immaturity, on the uncomfortable border between two worlds. He traveled to the world of his daughters, but what if they had actually grown up so much that they were no longer there? Was there even anyone left in this world he had fallen into?

He passed the girl. The Pyrenees, the Guilleries, and the Montseny mountains suddenly appeared in view. They were experiencing the initial cold as autumn turned to winter, with lunar ice, a smattering of grays, and impotent patches of sun. The highway bound the fields together like a ribbon of grief. The tall plane trees were the feathers of a buried monster, the fins of transparent fish that fed on the earth like parasites. Two solitary poplars in the middle of a field represented the two brothers’ skeletons, wedged into the earth and touching each other with their branches.

It happened here, right before him. The asphalt was striped with tire marks. The brothers had braked before hitting the tree. They hadn’t had an entirely treacherous death. The fierce screech had flown over the fields, appearing on the streets of Vidreres with such violence that the next day the townspeople found tire tracks in the hallways of their homes, on their sofas, in their showers, on their sheets.

Why had they slammed on the brakes? Had an animal crossed their path? Was a car coming at them head-on? Had the brother who was driving nodded off, then woken up suddenly and tried to avoid the accident? They were speeding. Fast as lightning. They’d crossed into the opposite lane, gone over the hard shoulder, and plowed into the trunk of a plane tree. The S’s ended before the asphalt did. The brother who was driving had taken his foot off the brake pedal.

Why had he released the brake? Why hadn’t he held out until the final moment? Had he given up? Had he understood that there was nothing he could do? Not even soften the blow, no matter how slightly? Or was it that, when there is nothing to be done, the body relaxes and accepts its fate? Or did the driver want to escape the car? Did he want to get out in that half of a second? Half a second? What is a half second? But did he try anyway? You have to do something with the time, no matter how little there is, something to fill that desperate wait, a moment like that, and perhaps his body focused on that rift; did his whole being shrink painfully to get through it and leap out of the car in half a second? The driver didn’t know what half a second was. He had no idea. No one does. No one knows what half a second is. Life is made up of half seconds. Life is half a second. But it turned out that he had no idea. How long would it last? Did he have time? Perhaps he wasn’t wearing his seat belt. What luck! In the panic, the idea traveled at the speed of light. It became porous and ramified his brain. His blood became adrenaline. Dynamite. It flooded that half second, or what was left of that half second, the longest half second of his life: half a second of explosions, half a second that the driver would have lengthened or shortened infinitely, but was only able to turn into the best utilized half second, the most lived half second of his life. A terrorific farewell, the skull awaiting the bullet, a half second that never reaches its end but will be over at any moment—when you least expect it, suddenly, but what do you do in the meantime? How do you spend it? The more you concentrate on it, the longer it becomes. And you’re waiting for it, you can’t stop waiting for it! Half a second of perverse, labyrinthine corners, of torture chambers, vaults, and monstrous self-discoveries, of mirrors and windows, of holes that lead to stairs, half a second filled with alarms that rush you, with the loves you forgot until now, with friends who’ve come to say good-bye, waiting, lined up on the branches of the plane tree. Half a second filled with ideas, with joys and unexpected comforts, with solutions: for example suicide, but he doesn’t have time to beat death, he won’t even have time to escape or accept it, even though he leaves his mark on the asphalt, an oscillogram of the last seconds, a final signature. He heard the sound of his braking run through the fields to Vidreres to warn everyone, and smelled the burning rubber, and that brother who was driving thought of his parents, cursing the disgrace and grief he was leaving behind—their lands, their lands, how would they get along without him?—he felt filled with rage for that which he could not prevent, for not being able to control the situation, for still being alive and not being able to do anything, and suddenly he remembered his brother.

He was right beside him. He was with him. His hair stood on end when he grasped that. His brother with eyes wide as saucers, scared out of his wits just like him, and he suddenly realized that it was all over. His brother trusted him—he had no choice—but he couldn’t give him the steering wheel, and he thought: Now how do I let him know there’s nothing to be done, when my body is so slow that I don’t even have time to open my mouth. I only have half a second! How do I tell him that I want to leap out of the car and leave him alone here, that I’ve lost control, that it’s my fault, this accident, that I’m the one who will plow us into the tree? How do I confess to him that I’ve taken my foot off the pedal and if I can, I’ll abandon him without even saying good-bye?

The car, flying toward the tree’s trunk.

Ernest took his foot off the accelerator.

Two days earlier, on the morning of the accident, he was many kilometers from there, at home, sleeping with his wife, in a room that shared a wall with his eldest daughter’s bedroom.

There was a bouquet of flowers tied to the trunk. He would have liked to stop and have a calm look around. He would have liked to keep thinking about the deaths, searching for signs of the dead boys scattered amid the bits of glass and plastic around the trunk. He had made a discovery: thinking about them calmed him down. His thoughts were alive, impossible to kill. He would die before his thoughts. The boys, in his head, were immortal. Perhaps he should tell their parents. A stranger was protecting their sons.

But he didn’t stop when he saw the plane tree. They had beat him to it. A couple of teenagers were looking at the bouquet from their motorcycles, stopped on the side of the highway with their mudguards pointing toward the tree.

He continued slowly, driving more through the landscape than along the highway, as if he wanted to save himself from the accident, as if he was now accompanying the two brothers and passing by death, taking them—sitting in his back seat—along a highway of embers, unable to stop, open to the landscape just like every day as he went from his house to the office and from the office to his house, his favorite times, in the summer because it was summer and in the winter because it was winter, but today with an intensity that surpassed him: saving himself, leaving the plain behind. He was fleeing. He was finishing off the two boys. They were no longer there. He had taken part in the brothers’ deaths. He had designed and poured the highway’s asphalt; he planted the tree. He was guilty of two deaths, his guilt made it all make sense, so he could escape from it, because it was all programmed, it headed toward his own salvation. Farewell, see you never. He sacrificed the two boys for his family.

He was already stepping on the gas when he heard the motorcycles behind him. He saw them in the rearview mirror, and slowed up again to wait for the teenagers to pass him. When they were out of sight he exited the highway at the first road he came across, turned around, and went back to the scene of the accident.

He swerved his Megane onto the shoulder. He parked where the motorcycles had stopped before and found it all banal: the black S’s on the asphalt, the bouquet of flowers tied with a white ribbon around the wounded tree trunk, and the smattering of glass on the ground. The violence of the accident—the extinction of two lives—had nothing in common with the stillness of the tree nor with the cement mass of the Montseny in the background. He remembered the car in the photograph with its engine on the ground, the mourners, the parents’ sobs. They had nothing to do with it either.

The highway that linked Vidreres with the main freeway had little traffic. He heard the rhythm of some music a kilometer away. He looked up. The girl from before was dancing, holding her cell phone to her ear. It was just a moment, the music rode in on a gust of wind. He could no longer hear it, but he was captivated by the sight of the girl’s hair and white dress, silhouetted against the fields and little houses of Vidreres. The distance made her dancing more precise. The flame of a candle in memory of the boys. Suddenly, the girl was still. A truck was approaching. It was the truck that was loaded down with hay before. Its turn signal flashed and it slowed. The girl got excited and took up her dance again, more joyfully, to convince the client, or maybe to show him that she wasn’t dancing for him.

The truck left the highway onto the access road, and stopped just past the girl. The driver stuck his head out of the window and looked back without turning off the engine or his turn signal. Ernest recognized him. The girl continued dancing. The truck driver started waving to get her attention. He must have been shouting at her. The girl danced as if she didn’t hear him, with her cell phone against her ear. The driver disappeared back into the cab of his truck. He shut off the engine. He got out and stood by the door, hands on his hips. The girl didn’t even look at him. The driver put a hand in his pocket, pulled out his wallet, opened it, and held out a bill to her. He waved it at her. The girl stopped. The trucker put the bill back in his wallet. The girl walked toward him. Then he leaped into the cab and started the engine. When she reached the driver’s side door, the truck’s horn blared with such violence that the girl jumped onto the highway without looking. If a car had been passing just then, she would have been hit.

The truck backed up a few meters. The girl followed it. The truck accelerated. Finally, the girl stopped. The truck stopped too. The girl again walked toward the truck. When she was beneath the driver’s side window, he honked the horn again. The girl covered her ears. She turned to leave. Then the trucker stuck his arm out of the window and closed his hand, leaving his middle finger raised. The girl turned, made the same gesture, and started to shout, but over the noise of the truck she couldn’t be heard.

The truck driver advanced slowly until he reached Ernest’s car. He stopped the truck behind it and got out.

“What a whore,” he said. “Did you see that? When I showed her the bill it got her attention . . . fucking whore. Maybe she thought I’d pay her a hundred euros! Who knows what she’s on. Look how she’s dancing.”

She had turned to dance facing them, to provoke them. The truck driver lifted his arm.

“Little whore! . . . Littttle whooore! . . . Come here, you little pussy! . . . There are two of us! Litttle whooore! . . . Come here, littttle whooore!”

The girl made another rude gesture, turned her back to him, and kept dancing.

“When they’re high they don’t concentrate,” said the truck driver. “But I have to admit she’s really hot. You gotta admit she’s really hot. Thin with small breasts, easy handling . . . A little ass the size of my hands. An easy little pussy. There aren’t many like that. You see, over on the other side of the highway?”

There was a white van half-hidden behind a tree.

“She’s new. They’re keeping an eye on her. I’m not surprised, she’s out of this world that whore—I could lose my mind over her. Am I right or am I right? What do you say? Sure is a coincidence to find such a nice piece, just the way I like ’em, isn’t it? Let’s see. How can it be that I’d find her here, on this bit of lost highway, right as I’m passing by, when I never go this way? A new girl? Was she waiting for me? Right now if somebody said: Tell me, Miqui, what kind of girl are you looking for exactly? Ask for whatever you want. How do you want her? Like this one, yes or no? Would you change anything about her? No. Could you improve her? Impossible. Well, here you go. All for you. Seriously, man, wouldn’t you be suspicious? Really, I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t be suspicious. But I’m cranky. I’ve had a crappy morning. Maybe it’s instinct. A man can get it on with a goat, with a hen, with another guy, if need be. I don’t know, maybe she’s not as hot as she looks, you know what I mean? What do you say? What do you think? Look at her. Is she fine or what?”

“Too young.”

“She’s super hot. It’s so obvious. What, you like old ones, or what? The problem is she’s high. When they’re high they don’t concentrate.”

Then the truck driver saw the bouquet of flowers on the tree.

“Shit,” he said. “They must be fresh, too.”

“I didn’t know them,” said Ernest, as if he’d been caught taking advantage of a tragedy. “I don’t know anything about it. I work in Vidreres, but I’m not from here.”

“Well, it’s lucky not to be from here today. Unless you’ve got my bad luck, because I had to deliver some bales of hay to the house of the girlfriend of one of the guys who died at this tree. There were two of them. This was their final stop. I had to spend the morning in the social club’s bar, scratching my ass with the girl who works there, and then her dad told me they just came from the burial of a very close friend of their daughter’s. Then I saw the daughter. . . oh man.”

A few cars passed, coming from town. The drivers slowed down and glanced at the tree.

“We’re idiots,” said the trucker. He walked past the plane tree and pissed behind the trunk. “We should be used to it by now. You think thirty or forty years will make a difference? Even fifty, you think that’ll make a lick of difference?”

“The years don’t belong to you, no.”

“They never belong to you,” said the truck driver.

“When I got here, there were some kids,” he said in his defense.

The trucker came around the plane tree, zipping up his fly. He stepped on the broken glass, extended his hand, and pulled a flower out of the bouquet.

“We must be taking turns. First the kids, then you, then me. . .” he said. “Do you know Cindy?”

“Cindy from the club?”

“She is a fox, too, isn’t she?” He plucked another flower and turned. “I don’t get it. Why do people put out flowers? It’s bullshit. Where do you usually die? At home or in the hospital, right? And no one puts out flowers there. These bunches of flowers bug me. Dead people don’t give a shit about flowers. You take flowers to the cemetery, not the highway. Two days from now nobody’s even going to remember. It’s disgusting, rotting flowers all over; I see them everywhere. We should be happy, shit, two more chicks for us; let’s worry about the girls. Damn, that one over there was nothing to sneeze at. She was begging for some tenderness.”

Ernest went toward the car. Sometimes it seemed that men chose him. Even old ones, they looked back and said to him: Ah, when I was young! Ah, if I were young again! At the bank he was used to guys bragging about money, clients who puffed up their chests and looked at him arrogantly—he spends his days touching other people’s money, poor loser!—without imagining that in the very chair where they were then sitting, still warm, the last client had moved fifty or a hundred times more money than those braggarts, money that these show-offs couldn’t even imagine was flowing through Vidreres. But sexual vanity had an arrogance and a defiance to it that vanity over wealth didn’t. You can’t live without money, but you can live without sex, so these sexual creatures boast about something more gratuitous, more pure and free. And if it’s just their nature, then it’s even worse to brag. There was nothing to brag about then. They want to get you mixed up in their lies. He gave thanks for the success of his marriage, for the modesty of his desires, for the unequal distribution of things: how nature makes skinny gluttons and fat ascetics, and he was one of the former. He had always been like that, it wasn’t a question of age.

The trucker pointed with the flowers to a dent in the truck’s fender.

“I would have made mincemeat of that tree,” he said. “Get into the cab for a minute, come on, you’ll see how different it is than a car.”

He said no, but accepted a cigarette. He saw that the girl had left. He hadn’t smoked since his second daughter was born. Twenty years. Now, the sting made him feel the outline of his tongue, the walls of his mouth. He wanted to think it was his family and friends who helped him to be himself, but the two dead boys, the unhinged truck driver, the very taste of the tobacco was helping him much more. Otherwise, what were they doing there? What made him stop there? Now, after a delay, he thought he understood what had happened. Before the truck driver showed up he had the impression of his life being captured within walls of the dead, of feeling compressed by the death around him, the dead turning into his skin, his shape, his protection against a chaotic and ephemeral world; the cadavers converted into the only breakwater against the waves of time. The dead gave life shape: everything outside of Ernest was dead, the dead were dead, but the tree was also dead, and the truck driver was dead, and the prostitute was dead too. That was why he felt so bad and so alone, but also why he had to endure. If he went home and found his daughters and wife dead, he wouldn’t have lost an arm, or a lung: he would keep breathing, keep going to work at the bank every day. He would still be whole, even more whole then, with more experience. Ernest had a potbelly but was in good health. Why worry about the dent in the fender the trucker was pointing at? Why worry about the deaths of people he’d never met? Was suffering necessary? Or did he enjoy it? The trucker was right. We are idiots. How embarrassingly gratuitous suffering is, how contemptible. Keeping everyone who was dying at that moment present was an insult to the luck of not being in their skin. He didn’t suffer for the dead boys; he didn’t suffer for his daughters. He suffered for himself, for his cowardice, and he was eaten up by shame.

“What’s the dent from?” he asked.

“I don’t know. A couple of months ago I made a trip to Breda with construction materials. Because now you never know where you’ll get sent, any day I’ll have to go to Belgium or the ends of the earth, and that’s if I’m lucky. The fucking construction bust, it’s worse than they say, it’s all illegal trucks now, everybody’s a trucker now that there’s nothing to transport. So I had to go to Breda. It was already dark on the way back, I felt a jolt, but I didn’t stop. If it was a dog or a boar, it was dead. I glanced in the mirror and didn’t see anything on the road. Anyway, when an animal crosses the highway, the last thing you should do is try to dodge it, unless you want to have an accident. I don’t know what it was, maybe a ball. It wouldn’t have been the first time I’ve had an animal stuck to the fender, but when I got home there was nothing there. I know a trucker who once brought back a roe deer from the Pyrenees. He didn’t find it until the next day. He saw a stain on the ground, he thought his truck was losing oil, but it was a roe deer that was still breathing.”

The trucker climbed into the cab, put the flowers on the dashboard, lowered the window, and said, “Hop on in, you’ll see.”

“I’ve gotta go.”

“Look,” said the truck driver. “You can leave with a clear conscience. They’re coming to relieve us.”

At first he didn’t recognize him. Then he saw that it was Mr. Cals. He was walking with a cane that he’d never seen before. He looked mechanical, black and robust like a spider.

“You came to see the tree too?” said Mr. Cals.

He felt like a tourist at a concentration camp. Mr. Cals must have more reasons for being there. He lifted his cane and aimed it at a point amid the fields, with the mountains of the Ardenya in the background.

“Every day after lunch I stretch my legs, walking all the way to Clar stream,” he said. “You won’t find a flatter plain anywhere . . . take a good look. Those trees over there are Puig’s forest. That’s Cal Borni. There, Can Batllosera. Do you see anything special?”

This eighty-year-old spider is voracious, thought Ernest, he’s very experienced, he rams in his chelicerae, waits for the poison to hit the insect he’s hunted, and then he eats it.

“The lands of Can Batlle,” said Ernest.

“Can Batlle is on the other side of town. No. These fields . . . You see how flat they are? In 1937, during the war, they made an airfield here. Workers started to come, mostly from Sant Feliu, three hundred men showed up. Vidreres, in those days, was no more than two thousand, and that’s counting the two hundred war refugees from Madrid who’d already arrived. The clouds of dust they raised, moving all the earth, the tractors . . . They still filled the trucks with shovels! They changed the course of Rere Pins and Can Canyet’s irrigation channel, they buried storehouses for bombs and gas tanks . . . and in ’38, in March, it must have been about six, because we were coming out of school, we saw planes with four wings coming in from the west, and they landed, and they were still running along the strip when Ballartet, who was a kid like me, Ballartet lifted his finger to the sky, and we saw a silvery dot, like a needle. It was an observation plane—the kind we called Pava—from Franco’s forces, with three escort planes. The excitement didn’t last long. Within four days the first bombing began. Three planes at nine in the morning. A bomb fell where Can Met is now. Antoni Amargant and Pep from Casa Nova, who are dead now, were going to the village on bicycles, and when they heard the planes they threw themselves to the ground. And Pep was on the side closest to the road, and the shrapnel hit him and he lost an arm. Spent the rest of his life in Vidreres with one empty sleeve. Bombs fell where Can Rafel is now, breaking all the windowpanes, and on one of Torre’s fields, on Modeguet and Can Castelló; it’s a miracle they didn’t kill Encarna Mauri. It was a bad spot for an airfield, one of those ideas the Republic had, putting a field here just because it was flat. The National forces came from Majorca, and when they passed Mont Barbat they were right over us . . . There was no time to do anything: when you heard the roar of the engines the bombs had already started. Five days later, a couple more planes attacked us. I remember that it hadn’t rained in a long time, and the earth was so dry that the bombs sent chunks flying higher than the tops of the pine and cork trees, so much dust, and a bomb fell on the woodshed of Can Súria, everybody was in the shelter except for Genové and Miquel Vives from Sils, who were working in the field, and both got killed.” Mr. Cals grabbed Ernest by the arm. “First thing the next morning they attacked the field again, because it was April 14, the anniversary of the Republic. I was headed to school. I saw the middle of the field all lit up. . . and the planes ran along the strip so they wouldn’t get hit—the lights were bombs . . . Ambulances ran all morning. They blew up the gas tank at the Campsa, they killed three pilots and a lieutenant, four dead . . .”

“I have to go for lunch,” shouted the trucker from his cab, starting the engine. “Come along. Trust me!”

“You know where there was a shelter, during the war?” continued Mr. Cals. “Right in front of your bank, in the church square . . . When they dug it they found human bones, that always happens when you poke around near a church . . . We went in there to play, I remember it as if it were yesterday.”

“Follow me!” shouted the trucker from his cab.

He left Mr. Cals there, obviously still wanting to reminisce, and headed to his car.

He followed the truck to get away from Mr. Cals. He was headed away from his house, but before he could make up his mind to turn around, the truck pulled into the parking lot of a restaurant on the side of the highway.

The chalkboard advertised a nine-euro prix fixe menu. He parked. He called home so they wouldn’t expect him for lunch. Some unexpected work had come up at the office. He was staying with Jaume to go over some accounts that didn’t add up. He got out of the car and entered the restaurant with the trucker. At the very back was a lit fireplace. Most of the customers were truck drivers. They were talking from one table to the next, shouting because they’d been drinking and had time—the tachometer was in charge, they had to take their required hours of rest. But the shouting could also have been from excitement, from truckers who had no time to waste.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said out loud.

“Order the lamb and you’ll know. This is definitely better than standing there staring at some bullshit tree. You work this afternoon? I’m done for the day. I sometimes have days with nothing to do. Tomorrow I have to go pick up a boat, next Monday I go to Vic to load up some scrap metal, after that we’ll see. I’ll give you my card, you never know.”

Was there sexual tension coming from the trucker, or from him? He lowered his gaze, saw his potbelly, and decided there wasn’t.

“I work mornings.”

“What are you, a civil servant?”

“I work at the Santander Bank in Vidreres.”

The other man took a step back.

“Don’t tell me I’m having lunch with a banker.”

“A commercial manager, an employee at a bank . . . I wouldn’t call myself a banker.”

“I’ve got a problem with bankers. Particularly one in my town, in Sils. You stiffed my dad out of his money. You screwed him over, which means screwing me over too. When I see a Mercedes I know it’s a banker, or a politician, or both. One of these days I’m going lose my cool, grab a shotgun, get into my cab, and start taking justice into my own hands.”

“Go right ahead, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Don’t say that twice. Look out the window. See that kid? They come around with demijohns, force open the gas caps, stick a hose in there, suck a little, and that’s all she wrote. My gas tank holds three hundred liters. You do the math. I have to go around at almost empty all the time. One of these days I’m gonna get stuck halfway to somewhere. A few weeks ago they showed up with a van that had a three thousand-liter reservoir. A plastic reservoir inside the van with a pumping system to steal diesel from the trucks. One of those trailers has a thousand-liter tank. You do the math. But if they catch them at it, then what? They won’t do any time. They’re forgiving of thieves, you know, wolves don’t bite other wolves. And at least you can see them. The problem with you bankers is we don’t see you do it.”

He was the spider himself. He ate the lamb while thinking about the brothers. The boy from outside was the same age as the two dead ones; he had come into the restaurant and was sitting at the bar.

Ernest left half of his meal. He felt like he was outside the world, reduced like a plant to the most basic functions: breathing, eating.

The waitress served them dessert and said, laughing, “Miqui, say ‘hi’ to Cloe for me!”

“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.”