The Barcelona Brothers (6 page)

Alex locates the barber and sits across from him at an isolated table, which he notices is damp.

“Not a very long conversation.”

“We got cut off. Out of range, I guess.”

“Who was it?”

“What’s it to you? It was my brother.”

“He called you on that Nokia I got him? He doesn’t have any idea how it works yet, that’s for sure.”

“For sure.”

Alex puts the phone on the table, hoping that Epi will call him again, right away. The black faith healer has begun to speak. The waiter listens to him spellbound, but with a mocking smile on his face. To avoid wasting time, Alex decides to go to the bar and order his own drink.

“… and the person you call Jesus wasn’t the Christ, he was a man, one who was inhabited by God for the time that He was within him. A spiritual power capable of changing shape and moving at the speed of a ray of light. So therefore, men
didn’t crucify Christ, they crucified Jesus, and maybe not even Jesus, but someone else. The writings say—”

“A coffee and cognac.”

“Coming up.”

“—that Jesus Christ transformed into Simon of Cyrene after Simon offered to help him carry the cross. They say that once the cross was carried to the top of the hill, Jesus went over to another hill near Golgotha and laughed as he watched the Romans and Jews, his dupes, crucifying Simon inside Jesus’ body …”

“I guess Simon was the one who didn’t think it was all that funny,” says the deliveryman, who’s waiting for the pink copy of the invoice to be signed so he can continue his route.

His remark catches on like a flame throughout the bar, and the resulting merriment is so general that even Professor Malick recognizes the prudence of changing the mask of his face into a smile filled with white, gleaming teeth. He accepts that his discourse has been overwhelmed, at least for the next few minutes.

“It’s true that the good Simon did the wrong person a favor …”

“Hey, butane man!” shouts another of the regular customers, a noted jokester. He addresses a group of Pakistani gas-bottle deliverymen, who are having breakfast under their turbans. “Isn’t this Simon a model for you folks? You exchange hugs with the first guy you meet on the stairs, and then he goes on up with the gas canister!”

The audience appears to be irrecoverably lost. Professor Malick could try to get it back and maybe even return it to the state of respectful silence it was in just a few moments ago. But telling that tale was obviously a mistake. Whether a story works or not always depends on the ears of those listening to it. Maybe it would be better to work one-on-one for a while, or to wait until there’s a big turnover in the clientele.

Alex sees him approaching. He looks in his direction and happens to catch a glimpse of a silhouette slipping behind some cases of wine and going through a door that must lead to the storeroom, or maybe to the toilets. Whenever Alex enters a room, any room, his head goes into the darkest corners of the space and places there shadows and persons that he alone can see. On this occasion, perhaps it’s Simon of Cyrene. The thing is, no one likes being laughed at after having been cruelly put to death on a cross.

The Professor is carrying a cup of hot coffee. “What’s the matter, son?” he says to Alex, placing the cup in front of him. “You didn’t laugh.”

“I’m not much in the mood for laughing.”

“This is missing a shot of cognac. I ordered a coffee with cognac.”

“Are you sure?” the man behind the bar asks.

“Yes.”

“Coming up right away.”

The Professor remains at Alex’s side, staring at him fixedly. His insistence disturbs Alex. No chance he’s going to pay any
attention to him. He knows these guys who aim to fill the gap left by the loss of faith. He thinks they make priests and nuns look good. Priests and nuns at least have enough decency not to guarantee one hundred percent success within three days.

“You won’t laugh until tomorrow. There will be no laughs for you today. But the person you’re waiting to hear from will call.”

“They always call in the end, don’t they?”

“Not always.”

“Yes they do.” Thanks to the
barista
’s diligence, a coffee with cognac is now steaming on the bar in front of Alex. He asks, “How much do I owe you?”

“Nothing,” Professor Malick replies. “Save all the money you can. You’re going to need it. She’s crazy. Everyone is. You’re the one sane person in a ship of fools. Come back whenever you want. I’ll pay today. The next time, tomorrow, you’ll pay.”

“Thanks …” Suddenly embarrassed, Alex pronounces the word in a stupid daze.

Professor Malick lets out a guffaw, which serves among other things as a warning to the competition. He’s in a jocular mood today. So much so that he didn’t and doesn’t care about what happened a few minutes ago. When Alex gets back to his table, Allawi’s just about finished perusing the last page of the newspaper.

“No calls.”

“That lunatic over there bought me a drink.”

“Malick? He’s a good guy. Smart, too. And he’s got a good business strategy. I should set up something like that in my own place. Do you like soccer?”

“Not much.”

“But the team you root for is Barça, right?”

“Espanyol.”

“Fuck! How is that possible?”

“It has to do with my father.”

“You like my sweater?” Allawi asks Alex, modeling it for him. It’s white with brown, blue, and yellow stripes running over the shoulders and arms. “Cheap and good-looking. You want one?”

“Is it stolen?”

“Springfield. On sale.”

“Tell me about Tanveer.”

“Just what I told you. People are fed up. Some because they’ve had it up to here, and others, well, sure, because they’re bored, and as far as they’re concerned, any kind of ruckus is a party. They all want to organize—what do you call them?—mobilizations, or some such. You people from here, you love that sort of thing, don’t you?” Allawi doesn’t expect an answer. “The truth is, I still don’t know whether I liked Tanveer or not. He was practically my fellow countryman, but his soul wasn’t right.”

“At the moment, the state of his soul doesn’t make much difference.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“What about Tiffany?”

“Tiffany? I suppose it’s a matter of indifference to her, too.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Just to say something.”

“Allawi, I hate to spoil your … mobilization, but it wasn’t the cops who broke Tanveer’s head open. I was there.”

“No shit? Who did it, then?”

“Well, look, I was in Salva and Mari’s bar—”

“Mari? I thought it happened at dawn …”

“Let me explain it to you, all right? It was very early in the morning. They had just opened. Mari had been there, cleaning up, but she’d already finished and gone back up to the apartment. I like your sweater.”

“Alex, come on, leave me alone about the sweater.”

Allawi pays close attention to Alex’s explanations, but seems to give them little credit. Maybe that’s because he doesn’t take Alex seriously. He’s known the two brothers for some time, and even though they’re good people, he thinks both of them are a bit cracked, one more than the other. Someone whom Allawi has seen go completely blank, someone who he knows is prone to obliviousness, someone for whom names and instants are empty holes, someone inclined to dizzy spells, spiraling down vertiginously into himself—signs, perhaps, from the past that he missed because of drugs, which according to the word in the barrio he used to take like aspirins—such a man, Allawi thinks, makes no very reliable witness. Or how about the times when his paranoid visions overwhelm him and he gets it irremovably in his head that he’s being followed or bugged or God knows what?

“A Paki?”

“Didn’t say much. One of the quiet ones with the dark looks, you know what I mean? So he comes into the bar, this
Paki, and goes into the bathroom. He was in a hurry to get there. He stays inside, I don’t know, something like five or ten minutes. Then the son of a bitch comes out fast with a hammer in his hand, zips over to Tanveer, and busts his head open. He hit him three times, one, two, three. Salva and I tried to stop him, but he was an animal. Not a very big guy, either. That hammer must have weighed a ton.”

“What a way to go: hammered to death.”

“Tanveer falls to the floor. The Paki looks at us, at Salva and me, warns us with signs that we haven’t seen shit, and runs out.”

“That’s it?”

“Yes. End of story.”

“Well, now I’ll explain to you what I know. Hey, kid! You want something?”

“No, thanks.”

“All right, never mind.”

“What do you mean, now you’ll explain to me what you know? I’m not repeating hearsay. I’m telling you what happened. I was there.”

Professor Malick walks past. He smiles at Allawi, who responds with a comradely, affectionate “What’s up, Malick?” It’s not a question. Nor does it appear to be an invitation, but the African stops beside their table. The next coffee and cognac arrives, as though sprung from the folds of Master Keta’s cape. Alex tries to meet his gaze and smile back at him, but at that moment the cell phone on the table goes into action. It begins to ring; its display screen shows Epi’s name, flashing on
and off; and it vibrates so hard that it rattles the little saucers and spoons and cups on the table. Alex raises the telephone to his ear and stands up to leave, but he stops at once; the connection, barely established, has been abruptly cut off. The problem’s not the range. The problem’s his idiot brother. He presses the callback button but stays inside the café because without knowing very clearly why, he doesn’t want to leave Allawi and the witch doctor alone together. It’s as though he’s afraid they might exchange confidences, as though Professor Malick and his swift, efficacious spirits were going to determine how many days of life Alex has left or reveal another of the thousand secrets one sometimes keeps without knowing it. “The mobile phone number you have dialed cannot be accessed,” a robotic voice tells him. He skips the voice mail. This whole thing is a screwup of epic proportions. He goes back to his seat.

“… they say that for listening to lewd secrets or blasphemous conversations, the most appropriate instrument is a peach pit. It has the ability to retain the echoes of words, but only if they’re conspiratorial, words spoken in erotic conversations or murder plots …”

“And the CIA wouldn’t be able to stop the attacks. Shit, plant peach orchards all over Houston. You like peaches, Alex?”

“No.”

“Well, I must leave you. Clients are arriving,” says Professor Malick, rising from the table and pointing to another farther back, where a blond prostitute is taking a seat. “By the way,
barber, your business idea for helping my brothers seems very interesting. We’ll have to work together.”

“What the fuck is he talking about?” asks Alex after Malick has gone.

“How should I know? He’s a medium. He reads your mind. I play along with him. You working today?”

“No. Tomorrow.”

“Listen, I meant to ask you this. The personalized van with the fancy windows and carpeted interior and all that other stuff—that’s your brother’s, right?”

“Yes. What about it?”

“Yesterday evening, pretty late, your brother came looking for vitamins. He’s been buying dope almost continuously these past few months. Also, I don’t know about last night, but lately he and Tanveer or some other jewel have been getting into that van and going for long rides. What they do or leave undone, I don’t know. But I’ve heard the cops are looking for a van like your brother’s.”

Behind the bar, the bartender makes signs to a guy who’s just come in. He points to the barber, who’s left a notice on the door of his shop, indicating where he can be found should anyone be looking for him, whether with good or better intentions.

“I’m coming, I’m coming … So look, I thought that one thing went with the other. Epi’s van and Tanveer. I thought maybe the cops followed them and took them by surprise last night, and then Tanveer did his Braveheart act, and—”

“Allawi, I saw it. It was with a hammer or a heavy stick. In the face, man. And I wish there
had
been a cop in the bar.”

“I don’t know. Of course, I wasn’t there. If you want the scoop on the van, ask the
mossos
. They’ll know.”

Allawi gets up, puts his hand on Alex’s shoulder, and gives him a pinch that’s meant to express complicity but actually causes pain. For a few seconds, Alex’s brain considers the possibility that the problems caused by the
Moro
’s murder aren’t going to be as easy to resolve as he thought. At the same time, out of the corner of his eye, he sees something like a shadow slip under one of the tables and settle down to observe him. Alex pretends not to notice it. Ghosts don’t exist. Shadows don’t walk or hide themselves under tables in cafés. Surely, at some point in the course of the day, his brother will be able to overcome the inopportune difficulty with his cell phone and things will begin to sort themselves out. That will surely happen. And tomorrow he’ll laugh the way the warlock predicted he would, he’ll laugh and laugh and never stop.

MAYBE TIFFANY HAS HEARD ABOUT THE BLACK HOLES
that gobble up everything around them. You throw a stone, and it neither falls nor comes back to you. Like women waiting for calls from men who are never going to call. Calls they know from the beginning are not going to be made. Who’d have thought she’d become so much like those women? Clinging to Tanveer, putting up with that retard Epi. Who’d have thought she’d throw stones that would never fall back to earth? And really, in general, Tiffany Brisette tries not to get too absorbed in thinking about herself. Today, however, she’s got the feeling she has to. She has to look around and interpret the things, the words, and the signs she finds here and there. And she must remember. Like running backward, that’s how she must do it. But it’s hard for her to keep her attention on her thoughts, to keep a steady balance as she goes backward.

Sometimes images assail her like flashes, and she doesn’t know if they’re real or fantasies. But if she thinks they can do her harm, she shoos them off with a wave of her hand, as one does with pigeons in a public square. On one occasion, Epi’s mother explained to her that in former times there never used to be pigeons, neither in Barcelona nor anywhere else in Europe. That pigeons were brought from the East to cure a rich woman’s melancholy. And that they never went back home. To this day, something keeps them in our squares and on our roofs. As if they were prisoners of something indistinct and unknown. A little like Tiffany herself.