The Barcelona Brothers (12 page)

Anyone who chooses Rocío Baeza does so because he’s as poor as a church mouse and because nobody—with the possible exception of old Josefa or some drug addict with skin like cigarette paper—will do it cheaper. Or because he’s a guy in his fifties and afraid of black women who tower over him or unwilling to risk the horror of finding a dick firmly set between what he thought were a girl’s thighs. The best cases are the clients who pick her because she has big, in fact enormous, tits.

And Rocío Baeza’s probably even more of a fool than she seems, because she’s cheating on Antonio, her husband, by working as a whore. He doesn’t know. If he knew, he’d kill her—even though she occasionally thinks he’s looking the other way when he doesn’t ask how she got the money to pay for this or that. She prostitutes herself because she can’t make it to the end of the month. It’s sad, it’s moronic, Rocío tells herself, it’s God knows what. And their household can’t make it until the end of the month because Antonio’s salary doesn’t cover anything. Because they have four children. And she’s a fool because she’s thirty-seven years old and she’s pregnant again, three months now. He likes children a lot, and she’s always careless about contraception.

Maybe she could have avoided falling so low. Now she’s giving six-euro blow jobs with a child in her belly, her children at home, and her husband on the road in a truck burdened by bank loans and Cofidis debts. Her companion around the fiery barrels receives a call on her mobile phone. She’s got a sick kid, and the grandmother calls her every hour with a report. Rocío seizes the opportunity to move away a little, get closer to the road, and try her luck. She’s got only twenty euros in her purse, and it’s almost four in the morning. There are no other girls around, so no one will be watching when cars stop next to her, refuse her, and drive on. Rocío Baeza’s head is still filled with the royal family’s problems—that princess is so rude—and with the sweet-talking thief who’s got poor Isabel in so much legal trouble. A car’s approaching, and she smiles. She turns up the collar of the denim jacket she’s pinched from
her oldest daughter and crosses her legs to show more of her flesh, blotchy from the cold and bruised by Antonio’s fingers. The vehicle comes closer; the driver slows down before pulling onto the shoulder of the road, but when the two young guys inside get a good look at her, they laugh in her face and speed away.

The whore looks one way and then the other to see whether anyone has observed what just happened. She can make out Berta and Irina, but they’re far off. Tears of helplessness and shame well up, and she lets them fall from her eyes. Protected by the darkness, she turns her head toward the new cluster of cars bearing down on her. The beams of their headlights pass through and behind her legs, forming columns of light that illuminate the gravel of the roadway. After the cars pass, the blackest and dampest darkness imaginable closes around her. Rocío Baeza prays to her beloved Virgin. The same one her mother used to pray to. And her mother, too. The Virgin who stands behind the iron screen and the pile of lighted candles in the chapel of the beautiful white village she used to visit in the summer every year, when she’d stay in her uncle Nato’s house. The Virgin who worked the miracle that cured Inés’s awful sickness, the protectress of the girl who waited for the return of the soldier who wouldn’t keep his promise when he got back. Rocío prays to the same Virgin, and her words come out as though she’s speaking them for the first time, although she becomes muddled and mixes up the prayers and has to start over from the beginning. Now a pair of powerful headlights is shining on her back. Rocío hears the car stop a few
meters behind her, and the driver dims the lights. She hears music playing at an extremely high volume; someone has opened a door and stepped out. She thinks she recognizes the song. It’s the one Uncle Nato used to hum along with when Bambino sang it on the radio. Rocío has a good feeling, and she turns around expectantly. A guy with his arms akimbo is standing next to a van and waiting for her. The other’s still inside, behind the steering wheel.

“Hello, sweetheart. Want to go for a ride with us?”

He looks tall and strong, possibly a
Moro
. The one inside looks Spanish. He’s punier, dragging compulsively on a cigarette with his face turned away. Rocío doesn’t like threesomes, or
Moros
, either. But she also doesn’t like going home with only twenty euros in her purse. She won’t even be able to take a cab and get back in time to fix breakfast and get the kids ready and go out for groceries.

“I don’t do two at a time. If one of you gets out, all right.”

“We’re not going to hurt you.”

“That’s what they all say.”

“Okay. I don’t argue with women. First one of us, and then the other.”

“Fifty euros. Each.”

“Not a chance. Eighty for both of us.”

Tanveer’s wearing an open shirt. He looks handsome. Rocío figures he’s well under thirty. His eyes are embers. If they’re still kids, why do they want whores? Can’t they get women, normal women, without paying for them?

“I want to see the cash first. We get all kinds out here.”

“Take a look, you suspicious girl.” Tanveer pulls a couple of fifty-euro notes out of his pants pocket and shows them to her. “You’re going to have to earn them.”

“All right. So one of you gets out of the van, and when we’re finished, the second one gets in.”

“I know, I heard you the first time. Don’t be a pain in the ass.”

“Park the car a little farther ahead, over there.”

Rocío points to some hedges ten or twelve meters away. The driver follows her instructions, the gravel crunching under his tires. The van has smoked glass windows; its wheel rims shine like knife blades. These boys look pretty clean. The
Moro
points to the driver, who steps out after he parks the van. He’ll be first. Epi, making an effort to look shy, tries to keep her from seeing his face. With a turn of the ignition key, he kills the sound inside the vehicle. Tanveer bows to Rocío, and before opening the back door of the van for her, he says, “You’ll be amazed. It’s going to be like you’re a queen. The queen wasp.”

And he’s right. The interior of the van looks almost like one of those Arab tents you see in adventure films. The floor, the walls, and the roof are carpeted with what appears to be tiger skin. Imitation, she supposes. There’s also a little table with a few whiskey bottles and some tall glasses. The dim light inside the van keeps changing color. Red, yellow, blue. Like in the night clubs where she used to make out with her boyfriends when she was little more than a kid. She feels like she’s dreaming, like she’s entered one of those television
programs where they take an ordinary person and turn her into someone special for a few hours. The
Moro
doesn’t help her get in. She grabs hold of the door and struggles hard for a while because her skirt’s so tight. Once she’s inside, she turns and sees Tanveer bound into the van with one jump, shut the door, and move close to her. Rocío’s not sure he’s a
Moro
. A Gypsy, maybe. Not a good sign, either, not as far as she’s concerned.

“You want something to drink? How about doing a line?”

“No, no drugs. But I wouldn’t mind a whiskey with anything, please.”

“Fix it yourself. You think I’m your waiter?”

Rocío Baeza doesn’t understand this sudden mood change. She looks around. The door’s closed, but it wouldn’t be hard to open it and hit the ground running and ask one of her coworkers for help. On the other hand, she thinks, why be so touchy? It won’t be the first time she’s been treated like crap. First come the nice words, but then, when you set to work, you’re just a hole, a disgusting hole.

No, she’s not going to run away. She stands to make a pretty good haul. It’ll take a little while, and then it’ll be over. She can’t go back home with empty hands, cold and sad with nothing to show for it. Besides, her colleagues will know she’s turned her share of tricks this morning. Rocío Baeza isn’t through yet. And so, while the man is hunched over one of the four big speakers that stand in the corners of the van’s interior, snorting a few lines of coke, she goes over to the little table—it’s carpeted, too—where the liquor bottles are. A bag
of ice, the kind they sell in gas stations, is under the table. The bag’s open, and she has no trouble extracting a couple of cubes and putting them in one of the tall glasses. Surreptitiously, she wipes the rim of the glass with the sleeve of the denim jacket—she’ll have to put it back in her daughter’s closet before the girl goes to school—and pours herself some whiskey. She reaches inside her pocket and touches the cigarette pack where she keeps a supply of condoms.
Moros
like to do it bareback, but she can’t let that happen. For the sake of the baby inside her. For Antonio.

Rocío lifts the glass to her lips and lets the amber liquid fall into her mouth. A shiver runs through her whole body. With whiskey, she never knows. Sometimes it makes her feel good, sometimes it’s deadly. She decides to sit down on one side of the van and take out a condom so that it will be in plain view and she won’t have to explain anything. Suddenly, spasmodically, Tanveer straightens up and turns around. His movements are rapid but somewhat clumsy. He’s really loaded. Rocío perceives that, and she feels a little scared. Let it be over fast, let the dawn come. The
Moro
’s bloodshot eyes stare at her. He stands before her, undoes his fly, and puts the palm of one hand on her head to force her to her knees. Rocío feels like she’s in a press that’s trying to crush her. She resists. She’s afraid of dropping the glass, because she doesn’t think this bastard would find that very funny, considering how immaculate the goddamned van is. And unless she can pull up her skirt a little, the damn thing won’t let her kneel down. Without knowing exactly how, she manages to put the glass on top of the nearest speaker and falls
on her knees. The hand clasping her head doesn’t stop pressing on her. Her skirt’s torn somewhere.

“Let’s go, bitch, put it in your mouth! Come on!”

She obeys. Now the hand’s pressing the back of her neck. She gags at each thrust. As she sucks, she starts praying. And thinking about her children. About her husband. About her promise not to be a fool and never to do this again. She also thinks that you forget everything eventually, even the bad times. You drink a cup of hot coffee and milk in the market. And when you leave the café, all you take with you is the money you’ve made. A few euros to buy what the kids don’t have, to play a card in the bingo hall, to keep paying the rent. Finally, the
Moro
ejaculates. He shouts with pleasure, lifts his arms, and furiously pounds the ceiling, as if he were a great ape.

“Come on, yeah, come on, let’s go, let’s go!
Bambino
!!!”

Rocío Baeza wipes her mouth with a paper handkerchief. She’s swallowed as little of this guy’s spunk as possible.

She’s still on her knees when she feels the van begin to move. Bambino’s music thunders from the four loudspeakers.

Suddenly, a blow from a fist knocks her down. The vehicle gathers speed. Nobody hears her cries when Tanveer punches her in the face, throws her on the floor, rips her blouse, and yanks her breasts out of her bra.

Rocío knows her life’s on the line, and so she bites, screams, and hits out, weeps, prays, and begs. She tells him about the baby she’s carrying, about her Gypsy friends who’ll slit his throat, and about many other things until she tastes the blood in her mouth and impotence and weariness make her stop. For more than two hours, Tanveer keeps on penetrating her and striking her here and there. His attempt to sodomize her fails when the woman’s hemorrhoids prevent him, which infuriates the
Moro
even further. Both his erection and his rage seem endless. Nothing assuages him, nothing satisfies him.

The van stops at traffic lights. Rocío screams, and the monster’s so sure of himself he doesn’t even stop her. Both of them know that no one will be able to distinguish her howls from the thunderous music flattening them against the floor. Every now and then he insults her. He tells her she’s old and ugly, that she has blue veins around her nipples. That he’s got a gorgeous girlfriend with tattooed eyelids, and he satisfies her each and every day. That the baby the whore’s carrying in her belly will be born dead after this night. That she’d better be careful about running off at the mouth …

At a certain point the van stops. Tanveer tells her she can go. He takes her bloody, beaten face in his hands and kisses
her gently on the lips. Then he grabs her purse and steals her money and her cell phone. Rocío implores him to leave her enough to get a cab and go home. The man seizes her by the arm, drags her across the carpeted floor of the van—causing abrasions on her back—opens the rear door, and pushes her out.

With difficulty, Rocío Baeza rises to her feet. She hasn’t the vaguest idea where she is. She walks around awkwardly for a good while, looking but not recognizing any of the buildings that surround the open ground where they’ve left her. Only the neon sign on top of one of the hotels gives her a little help in getting her bearings. She understands that she’s hours away from her house, that the dawn is breaking, that her daughter’s jacket is ripped to tatters and stained with blood. She looks at the van as it pulls away and fears that they’ll return and run over her. But they don’t do that. The driver has stopped a little farther on. When the light turns green, he takes off. She needs some coffee. She needs a pistol she can kill with. She needs Antonio to return as soon as possible so she can sleep in his arms and tell him she fell down the stairs, but the baby’s all right, she can still feel him inside her, alive and as big as hate.