He saw the tree again, the bouquet of flowers, the ribbon snake bandaging the wound. He drove, following the truck: they were headed to Lloret. Before they got there they left the highway and entered a housing development, passing over empty streets named after flowers. The street where they stopped only had one sidewalk, with detached houses. To build the houses they had emptied out the granite, which still showed its teeth between some of them. There were houses with swimming-pool blue awnings, rolled up and faded, lethargic summer homes with lawns hibernating in front. A single car parked on the entire street, no smoke from any chimney—little hills filled with empty houses. The trucker got out of his cab with the flowers in his hand.
“You thought I was gonna take you to some club, banker?”
When he had to make a big decision—approving a mortgage, giving a credit line for a risky business operation—the bank employee thought about his daughters. Normally he decided in their favor, but sometimes he decided against them. The trucker rang the doorbell. They heard a girl’s voice.
“Just a minute!”
The door opened and it was a blonde, like a projection from youth. Healthy face, precise movements. The trucker held a flower out to her.
“Miqui . . . how sweet! Marga!” she turned into the house. “They’re here!”
This was Cloe, the one the waitress had mentioned. They kissed on each cheek, and then the two men followed her through the hallway toward the empty dining room.
“Would you like some coffee? Marga! Marga!”
Marga had just taken a shower. She was wearing a tight, matching blue outfit with a short skirt like her friend’s. Nothing like the girls on the highway. She and Miqui gave each other kisses on each cheek, and Marga received the second flower.
They couldn’t have gone out onto the street dressed like that. Ernest tried to figure out which girl was for the trucker and which one was for him. It wasn’t like on the highway, where you just passed them by. Perhaps it was sordid, just a few hours after the burial, perhaps the trucker was sordid, perhaps the housing development was . . . but the girls’ skin made the sordidness seem far, far away. He couldn’t decide between them, and he was afraid that, if the trucker discovered which one he wanted, he would take her from him. His body made the decision all on its own, choosing Marga, with her hair still damp from the shower and combed back, with all the skin on her face revealed as a pale mask against the bright color of her earrings, which hung like stone worms from her earlobes. He had never had a girl like this so close to him before. His daughters couldn’t hold a candle to her. There was no shelter from the carnal bombing.
“How ya doing, Miqui?” said Marga.
“You two are my downfall.”
The girl must have gotten cold, because she put on a short, tight red leather jacket and sat beside Ernest, with the tips of her hair dripping onto her leather shoulders. She had the flower on her knees, held in one hand. She put it on the table, with the other. He touched her leg with his pants. He felt stuck to her, threaded through her earrings, overlapped like half of the zipper, stuck together by the pull whose paint was peeled, which meant she’d worn the jacket more than it seemed, so bright and waxy, so new-seeming with the damp hair. The girl’s long fingers had gripped the pull a thousand times to open and close the jacket. It hadn’t been long since that jacket had been in contact with her adolescence.
“That’s why I brought my banker friend,” said Miqui, winking and gesturing to say: choose the one you want. “We met . . . Have you ever done it with a guy from South America?”
“Don’t be weird,” said Cloe.
“I met a chick from somewhere down there.”
“You never stop,” said the girl.
“You have no idea. Times are bad now, but remember Ahmed? The Arab guy who used to come with me in the truck—I don’t need him now, there’s no work, but I’m talking about the good times, five or six years ago. One Saturday we left Vallcanera in the morning with the truck, and we did the whole highway. We left no stone unturned. When we got to La Jonquera that night, shit, we dropped dead at the Paradise. Four in the morning, both of us, first him then me—we switched off, and took whatever chick we got. Shit. It was like we were high as kites but we hadn’t taken a thing, we were laughing so hard we almost pissed our pants. We ate in Banyoles, took a snooze by the lake on the grass, and kept going up toward the border. To see who would cry uncle first. You know, the further north you go, the more material. The whore would climb into the cab, and one of us would go take a piss—you didn’t come back until the other whistled. We kept our eyes on the prize, and whatever you got you had to make do with; if you got an old cow, tough luck. We held up like sons of guns. We were in a dead heat. I could do a porn film, I swear. Isn’t that right? The next day, we kept going, back down from the border, wanting to break the tie, first him then me and on and on like that. But there was no way. We exited at Banyoles again for a rest and got to Sils that night, destroyed, still laughing our asses off. And we weren’t drunk, but we couldn’t stop laughing and shouting like lunatics, fucking hell, Ahmed, and with the music blaring. We didn’t need to drink; we had central heating! Those whores couldn’t finish us off in one weekend, no way! We were wrecked! Fucking Ahmed! Wonder where he is now. Must have gone back to Morocco, fucking hell. I wouldn’t do that again for anything in the world, banker.”
One of the girls had gone to the kitchen to get some beer. The walls in the house were too clean, the paint couldn’t have been more than six months old, but the dining room looked lived in. The few furnishings were cheap but new.
He could still feel the kisses on his face, the fresh saliva, warm and corrosive like the exfoliating creams housewives use to get their skin shiny and clean, the water of the fountain of youth in a painting he had seen on the cover of a magazine at the bank, men and women bathing in rejuvenating waters . . . And, at the same time, how exhausting . . . man wasn’t the result of evolution from animals, man was already there: there was no evolution, only taming, vigilance—but the hierarchy was still fresh . . . Man drinks and eats, copulates and urinates, breathes and sleeps and looks at his cage as if it were a mirror, fascinated, suspicious, imprisoned as well. How can he hope to return home, that man in the zoo looking at the animals? On which side of the bars is his house? And all the years of watching over the animal were exhausting, the way he’s exhausted by the temptation to leap to the other side, to avail himself of his rights . . . . He couldn’t lose his freedom, accept that there’s a boss without creating a scene, accept it like the girls accepted them: a sweaty trucker flecked with straw, a potbellied office worker stinking of garlic mayonnaise . . .
“Hey, what are you thinking about? You’re on some other planet!” shouted Cloe. “What’s wrong with this guy?” And she laughed and started kissing Miqui. “Come on, man, you’re gonna have fun!”
He couldn’t imagine hugging Marga with the other two there. He had to wash himself, get the animal off him. But he shouldn’t wash all of it off either.
He glanced at Marga, ashamed, with the same shame that animals have—the way they lower their gaze and their ears when they’re around humans.
His contemplation was already an access into her, and maybe what he had to do was be satisfied with that, just get up and leave.
“There’s plenty of fish in the sea,” his father told him the first time he broke up with a girl.
There were plenty of fish and no: he would never understand what they had in common, what made them women, what made them different from him.
“Hello? Hello? Hellllooo?. . .”
The other two were nibbling on each other like they were in love, and he couldn’t even speak. She would eventually react, that was her job. Had he become so unappealing over the years? Didn’t his body have the right to get close to these bodies? Or was that precisely what would make the act more human?
“Hello? Hello? Don’t you like me? These handsome office workers. . . you have so much time to think . . .”
It wasn’t having time that made him think, but having relations. And he would think about this for quite some time. It had happened once with a client. She and her husband owned the Vidreres hardware store. Twice a week she came by the office to make a deposit. She was older than him—that was before Ernest had a potbelly. They agreed to meet after work, saying they had some details to discuss about a pension plan. They were so discreet about their intentions that they met at the social club right across from the office. Cindy didn’t work there then. The waiter made the rounds of the tables. Ernest wrote a few numbers on a piece of paper on the marble tabletop, and, among the figures, without looking up: “I like you.” And then he added, in a trembling hand: “A lot.” And then, in all caps: “A LOT.” And once more, the pen going through the paper: “A WHOLE LOT.” He wanted to write: “I’m shocked by this, I can’t believe it, what am I doing?” He wanted to keep writing what he was feeling, revealing it and revealing himself to her. Was he himself? And she, was she? “I’ll wait for you on the corner,” he wrote, and made a diagram with an arrow pointing to a car. “Blue Megane.” The same one he still had.
He drove with one eye on the mirror, afraid he was being followed, and veered into the forest. The next day she called the office, and he hung up without saying anything.
You aren’t the one who decides . . . the girls don’t decide to be on the highway, the boys didn’t decide to kill themselves, the trucker’s father hadn’t decided to be scammed, he hadn’t decided to come here. The girls were too young. No man could resist them.
This was nothing like the highway. These girls earned more than his two eldest daughters put together. The little one spent all day at home, online. Of course, he thought. My daughters should take this business up. I mean it, girls. From the bottom of my heart.
“I’ll bring you another beer,” said Marga, getting up.
Thinking wasn’t a question of time, but rather a question of space, of intensity. You could think about two contradictory things without any contradiction, in closed compartments, because the brain worked in layers. There’s a party going on upstairs; on the floor below, someone is trying to sleep. You hear the music from the party, and those up there know that every stomp, every dance step, will be heard down below. Regrets above and headaches below, but each private, without being communicated. Most of the time, the brain isn’t a two-story house, but a skyscraper forty or two hundred floors tall, with a different landscape out each window. If it were just one floor, it wouldn’t matter which one. Being forced to live on more than one simultaneously gets you used to relativism. You have forty, two hundred thousand lives. But, on the other hand, you have to choose, because you have to be someone, you have to be a role model for your daughters, at least, for the people you love, you don’t want to be an example of solitude, you don’t want to leave them alone, you want them to know that you are here, in one window or another. You aren’t an irresponsible cad. And so what does he decide? To take advantage of the fact that the girl is in the kitchen to stand up and flee? What is going with the flow? Staying or leaving? What does he want? Shouldn’t he know that? Otherwise, what’s he doing here? How could he not know? Doesn’t he know if he wants it? Isn’t indecision a worse sin? If you’re going to make a mistake, at least save yourself the suffering! If only you could leap! From the twenty-first floor! From the car speeding toward the tree!
He suddenly remembered something one of his cousins once told him at the tail end of a wedding reception, when the dancing had begun and there were only three people left at their table: his cousin, a bearded man, and him. The bride passed near them, and the bearded guy made some comment about her ass. His cousin’s face changed suddenly, and he told him he could cut out the crassness.
“That kind of comment,” he said, looking into the eyes of the bearded man, who was at least as drunk as he was, “always comes from guys who aren’t getting any, guys who resent women.”
The bearded man was slow to grasp what he’d just been told, but then he answered with the same rudeness he’d used to describe the girl’s ass—and which made his cousin realize that the comment wasn’t coming from carefree joie de vivre, but was tinged with self-indulgence and in bad faith—and, still smiling: “There’s no merit in getting some if you have to pay for it.”
“No one’s talking about merit here,” answered the cousin. And then he said the words that haunted Ernest for weeks, to the point that it changed the frequency of his sexual relations with his wife. His cousin said: “I look for a bit of life without hurting anyone. That’s why I pay for it, but I don’t recommend it to others.”
The girl came back with more beers.
“What?” she said, taking his hand.
She didn’t know how to take an old man’s hand; she took it in hers carefully, like a teenager, and tried to tug. He pulled it away. He emptied his beer in three gulps. A happy feeling of release washed over him. As he waited for her to finish her beer, he saw the other girl’s hair at his friend’s waist.
“Let’s go to a room,” he said.
Learn to live for once. For once, learn to think about your family from many floors up or down, move away from the windows, learn to live without them for the day you’ll have to leave, for the day they leave.
In the girl’s room there were towels from the shower and scattered clothes. Some pants, a skirt, and a blouse. The furniture in there was new too, and there was nothing hanging on the walls. They didn’t live here. But the door to the closet was half open, revealing colorful dresses and shoes.
The girl drew the curtains and turned off the light. The room was left quite dark. He took off his clothes, imitating her. He got into the bed. He was embarrassed by his body. The age difference was obscene, and he would have preferred she approach him dressed, because he also desired her clothes. She wore a purple lingerie set. She had a tattoo at the base of her neck, ivy that went down the middle of her back.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Close the door. Don’t talk.”
“All right, but close your eyes.”
Ernest closed his eyes and waited. The bed started to warm up, the sheets were clean; no one had slept there.
He heard the trucker laugh on the other side of the door. What was taking her so long? Was she going to get into bed with him or pull the covers off him?
Women don’t know their power, nor how to depersonalize that power. The less they are like themselves, the stronger they are. The girl moved around the room, but he resisted opening his eyes until he remembered that he had left his wallet in his pants, with his ID and four fifty-euro bills.
He opened his eyes. He saw some sort of angel in front of the wardrobe. He closed his eyes and opened them again. The girl smiled in the half-light. She was wearing the purple lingerie set, the earrings, and some white wings with plastic feathers.
He had seen those wings in Vidreres, in the window of the sex shop, and now he understood why there was a sex shop in a small, rural town like Vidreres: for prostitutes and their clients.
It seemed like everything was becoming clear.
“Tell me one thing,” he said. “What did you do this morning?”
The girl didn’t answer. She knew the two boys. She was in the square, she was at the church, she had accompanied them to the cemetery.
“Answer me.”
“You told me not to talk.”
The wings were as violent and awkward as plowshares. The girl knew the two dead boys. Both girls knew them. How could they not? They were the same age. Everyone had gone to the funeral.
“Where were you earlier today?”
The girl no longer laughed.
“What do you care?”
He got up from the bed. His daughters had grown up, and he’d had to learn not to raise his hand to them. But there were moments when you had to. When you have children you spend your life risking your dignity. Your existence lies in the hands of someone else. That’s what children are. They destroy you. There should be some way to retire after having them. Retire from being a parent. Since there isn’t, you have to stay in shape to deal with them. Deal with your children; deal with the young. The girl could have been his daughter. And just as he would have with his daughters, he got up from the bed and planted himself in front of her. One more rude remark and he’d slap her.
“Get back in bed,” she said. She had lowered her gaze. “Get back in bed, will you? Close your eyes again . . . try to relax . . . We were out—in the winter this place is dead—we were in Barcelona earlier, at a gym, if you really want to know. Okay? Do you mind? What’s wrong with you? This was a special surprise for you.”
She meant the wings. Ernest got back in bed and closed his eyes. The girl lay down beside him. She kissed him on the cheek like a daughter, until he turned toward her and opened his eyes and hugged her and stroked her. She had taken off the wings but still wore the lingerie set, and she was smiling again. Innocent as animals, he thought. They live in Barcelona, they come up here to work, and then they go back. It’s a parenthesis. An upper floor. They are named Clara or Sònia or Judit, and they go out with boys who take them to the gym and know nothing about all this. Or do know and stay out of it. They live with their parents. They go to college.
He let his eyelids drop again, letting his hands take the lead, he felt her and went to her sex as was his wont—headfirst into the river—and the shock was as imminent as the tree trunk was for the two brothers. Knock up your daughter, make her a mother and grandmother, take her out of the running. Lives kept coming and going and now a new one shows up. The accident hadn’t cut short a long life, but rather two short lives that had yet to branch out: pure miscarriages. It was nothing. He put his hand on her sex, proof that the living are made to be with each other, the bodies themselves deformed to fit together—needing to talk, sometimes, on their own. Not even pregnancy lets us escape that. It was death, what brought them together. All bodies, dead or alive: plants, rocks, horses, and mountains. They followed the sway of sex, the movement of skeletons, as if it could shut off their consciousness and give comfort in the company of a shared night. But the more he wanted to get those thoughts out of his head, the more they imposed themselves. It seemed he might shake them off with a violent lurch, but he knew he couldn’t, his head was loaded down with years, with floors and stairwells, each day the same as the last, all the boredom that must have started one day—perhaps when he signed his first contract to work at the bank—the desperate life of an older man, everything ending, just remnants, Mondays waiting for Fridays, Fridays waiting for Mondays, and, thank you ever so much; when he retires he won’t even have that. The dead fell from the trees onto the boredom of the living, and every once in a while a muffled clarification: the temptation of suicide, sometimes like a compassionate light and sometimes like a bitter, soiling cowardice. Waiting behind soundproof glass and waiting, not doing anything but waiting. Meanwhile, on top of him—with reins and a crop, sinking spurs into his belly, riding him at a gallop until he’s worn out—is his own tedium, the exhaustion of him as a person.
But now the tedium had been cracked open. He had wished for a car accident a thousand times, as a reward for all those trips to Vidreres. And those two poor kids had the accident. The two young brothers had the accident. They’d mocked him. Here he had the consolation of the girl they left behind. If she hadn’t showed up in those wings, maybe Ernest would have told her what he wanted: pain. Not wings, but shoes. Shoes leaving tread marks, rubber tracks on his back, the conscious braking. A payment for being here, for remaining, for having escaped the car in place of the brother who was driving.
He filled his hands with the girl’s flesh, and his eagerness was because the dead wanted sex: it was a child’s game, religious, familiar, and worn. He opened his eyes and finished undressing her, and he didn’t care anymore about being under the sheets. Guilt is the marrow in life’s bones, the only consistent thing in life, blessed, beloved guilt, the material we are made of, the dead, children, parents of the dead, their deaths a gift from our unconscious, and it was becoming urgent that he ejaculate. He ran his hand over the girl’s straight hair, shiny and clean, with the grooves from the comb visible, still damp, and he looked around the bed for satellites of her, pieces of clothing, her purse, dresses, shoes—the shoes he would have liked to feel on the skin of his back, hard and painful enough to keep him from thinking—the vanity case, the silvery cell phone, the short jacket that would end up at the back of the closet and then in the trash, and which she’d see someday, when she was his age, in the photographs of her youth, like his daughters will see him in photos after he’s dead.
So distract yourself, celebrate the boys’ destruction, celebrate with their parents as if the boys were your daughters; swallow the incest, the necrophilia, it’s over, they won’t die again, move toward her, sink yourself deep inside.
A thrust for his life in the office, two thrusts for the boys’ lives, and one each for the short jacket, the earrings, the wings, a thrust for the ivy tattoo on her back, and another for not crying, for life to live, for life impossible to live, for the lure of life that kills you and nourishes you, for the guilt of feeling guilty, for the shouts and the chains, for life where the only joy is in deception, for life sunk in muddy quagmires filled with drowning, crying babies, for life that knows no pain or rapture, and a thrust for each closing coffin; he had to ejaculate, to rid himself of that intention, and he asked the girl to give him a hand.
Had the dead boys been released from inside him with his orgasm? Can there be consciousness of the unconscious? She got up, grabbed a towel, and left the room. She wasn’t that professional. She left the men alone too soon.
He heard the voices of Miqui and Cloe on the other side of the door, and a laugh. Water ran through the pipes. Marga was showering. She would come back into the room soon to get dressed. He couldn’t allow himself to sleep, but his eyelids were heavy. He’d drift off, he wouldn’t think about anything, he would melt . . .
He heard a door open and gave a start. It was the trucker coming into the bedroom, buckling his belt.
He covered his belly. He sat up against the headboard. The trucker extended a hand: “Buddy, I gotta go.”
“You’re going?”
“I’m leaving you in good hands. For a hundred euros, you couldn’t ask for more.”
“Do you get a commission?”
“I don’t want any misunderstandings.”
Ernest got dressed and got the money. He took a last look at the jacket and wings on the floor. He rushed. He didn’t want to see her again. He would give the money to the other girl. He would get home, have dinner, a shower, and go to bed. Maybe he’d have a bath. The next day, he’d go back to the office. He would start the week over. The truck heading off blended into the persistent sound of the shower. He wondered if he’d gotten her that dirty.
As he left the house, the water was still running through the pipes.
After a few kilometers he stopped the car. The wheels skidded as if it had been raining for weeks and the highway was flooded with mud. He got out of the car and found the asphalt soft, but it wasn’t mud, it was flesh. He looked around. Mountains, trees, and houses of flesh. Blood flowing in the rivers, the clouds were blubber, everyone had gotten out of their cars, there were worms everywhere.