CHAPTER 12

On Friday, Victor turned up at the apartment at Anabel’s request. Her face lit up when she saw him. Not a look of glee, exactly, but rather she seemed happy that he had accepted her invitation. Serguey shouldn’t go alone to the meeting: that’s how she broached it. Serguey didn’t want to cause a scene based on flimsy suspicions or jealousy, so he chalked it up to just that—his wife wishing for him and his brother to work together. And the truth was he had grown accustomed to having Victor with him of late. If he were being honest, he could admit that he could’ve used Victor’s help at the National Council for the Performing Arts.

“Where’s Alida?” Victor asked, slumping on the couch with the same histrionic flair Alida seemed so fond of. “You guys kick her out?”

“She’s with some of the actors,” Serguey said.

“Thespians and their drama.” Victor scratched his stomach. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take a nap. I need my beauty sleep.”

“Who sleeps at four in the afternoon?”

“The unemployed. Or most Cubans. You don’t take siestas?”

“Never.”

Victor yawned. “You won’t make it to fifty.”

A couple of hours later, Victor woke, his eyes bloodshot and his mouth a little swollen. Serguey stared at him from the balcony. He picked up an ice-filled glass that lay next to him and drank what was left. He waggled the glass, the ice clinking, as if it were an alarm clock.

Victor wiped his eyes and lips, and farted loudly.

“I heard that,” Anabel said from the kitchen.

“Your husband’s a pig!” Victor shouted. “What are you drinking, Coca-Cola?” he asked Serguey. Without letting him respond, he shouted, “Correction, Anabel. He’s an imperialist pig!”

Serguey set the glass down and entered the living room. “Scream it louder, why don’t you?”

Victor inhaled deeply and distended his mouth, as if to comply. Serguey cocked his fist playfully. His brother shielded himself and chuckled.

“My neighbors take themselves too seriously,” Serguey said, sitting next to him.

“Your neighbors are communist sellouts.”

“You mean like Anabel and me?”

“I don’t blame you.” Victor plucked a smooshed pack of cigarettes and a lighter from his pocket. “I like this place more than Dad’s.”

Serguey seized Victor’s wrist. “Don’t make it smell like Dad’s.”

“Come on, don’t be a joyless asshole.”

“I’m serious. We’re keen on hygiene in this house.” He wasn’t ready to let go of the habits he and Anabel had developed in the apartment. The risk of losing it wasn’t the same as giving it up.

Before Victor could unleash his next insult, Anabel called him from down the hall. He shoved the pack and lighter back into his pocket.

“The queen beckons.”

“Don’t forget that makes me the king.”

“Like the one from The Little Prince.” Victor stood and pretended to inspect his surroundings. “Where the hell is that mouse?”

Serguey scoffed. “I’ll tell you where I’d like to shove it.”

For the next half-hour, while Serguey read the paper, Anabel and Victor chatted in the kitchen. Victor was telling her, quite rowdily, stories about getting caught by the police, about business deals gone terribly wrong, about the absurdity of living a street life, the excitement and misery of it all. His statements were astute. Victor was capable of acuity. And in his typically suave demeanor, he managed to make himself out as both a victim and hero. In middle school, he used to come home with two or three bottles of perfume, a handful of flowers, and cookies or chocolate every Valentine’s Day. Felipe called him Casanova, or Romeo, or Alain Delon. Serguey had gotten flowers once, from a teacher who was doling them out to everyone in class. Felipe always highlighted Serguey’s intellect as the equalizer between the brothers. In a country where education had been prioritized as an emblem of the Revolution, intelligence was valued highest by society. Serguey was the boy with aptitude, the one who could be anything he wanted to be. Victor got the girls. This belief and its implications—the possible consequences of dealing with an irresistibly alluring young man—had accrued inside Serguey through the years like alcohol in blood, causing impaired judgment, provoking in him an inescapable, impulsive envy. Had this same state led him to misguidedly construe Alida’s demeanor with him as attraction, perhaps even subtle seduction?

He dropped the newspaper and stole down the hall, slightly self-conscious but overcome with curiosity, halting a few paces from the entrance to the kitchen.

“We get on that Suzuki,” Victor was saying, “and we can go anywhere we want to deliver the stuff. The way streets are designed in Havana, once you go into a neighborhood, the cops can’t catch you if you’re on a motorcycle. Even if all you have is a bicycle, in alleyways they have to chase you on foot. You start climbing stairs, I mean, it’s easy to jump from roof to roof, hide inside a water tank.”

Serguey thought of Raidel, of how long it took for the police to find him on the roof near the funeral home. He wondered if Victor remembered this detail, if it sparked up somewhere in his mind as he spoke.

“But we aren’t criminals, you know,” Victor continued. Serguey assumed Anabel had given him some sort of reproachful look. “We aren’t hurting anybody.”

“I don’t know about that,” Anabel said. From the lightness in her tone, Serguey could tell she was smiling. “Though I do see your point, I just don’t think the risk is worth it.”

Serguey stepped forward and peeked into the kitchen. Victor’s hand was on Anabel’s shoulder.

“With all due respect, madam,” he said, his face slanting toward Anabel’s, his mouth, from Serguey’s viewpoint, turned toward her cheek, “if I lived here and had my brother’s job, I’d be saying the same.”

As he heard Anabel reply “point taken” with a gentle nod of her head and then add something—to Serguey’s ears, not as assertively as she should have—about people still having to make a choice, one of the great paradoxes of Serguey’s life surfaced in his mind: what he really wanted—and he would never admit it to another person, especially not his wife—wasn’t to be the intelligent brother, the successful, righteous, privileged brother. He wanted to be the charming brother, the daring, brazen, spontaneous brother. What he wanted was what he didn’t possess: Victor’s bravado.

And there it was, in full display in his kitchen, with his own wife. He had always seen jealousy as a petty emotion, especially when he was the one experiencing it. But with Victor it felt ingrained, implacable.

Years prior, at Serguey and Anabel’s engagement party, Victor had, after downing an irresponsible number of drinks, told Anabel through a repugnantly grinning mouth how his brother loved to watch other people get beat up, and how, if she ever needed her husband’s help, he would probably stand on the sidelines before lifting a finger. Serguey had stood rigidly next to his brother, swallowing and sensing the flesh on his own face slowly flaming.

Anabel replied, resting her hand on Serguey’s arm, that complex men have flaws, and that those flaws are often what makes them attractive. Simple, angry men, she said, are shallow and uninteresting.

“And you, Victor,” she added, smiling gracefully to reduce the tartness of her statement, “you seem pretty transparent to me.”

Serguey had fallen in love with his soon-to-be wife even more that day, but he had also been convinced that Victor was, at some level, in love with Anabel.

Now he heard her—the opposite of tartness in her voice—asking Victor to open the cupboard.

“I’m not used to women bossing me around,” he joked, triggering an Alida-like giggle from Anabel. Perhaps this was, despite what she had told him at the wedding, what Anabel really noticed in Victor, why she always, Serguey believed, seemed so infatuated with his brother, no matter how much she tried to dissimulate it. He was not just the arresting idea of a culture—the one Serguey and Anabel had placed under an appealing lens—but he was the raw, vulgar, unabashed culture itself. He was a real Cuban, born and bred in the streets. Serguey wasn’t even an intellectual or an artist, like his father. He was a government pawn, an office pet.

He returned to the living room, not as quietly as he should have, and sat down coolly, waiting for them. It wasn’t long before they emerged from the hall holding three glasses. Victor was in front, Anabel close behind. She was grasping a bottle of rum by its neck. She flaunted it at Serguey.

“Did you really tell your brother we had no alcohol in the apartment?”

“Where did you get that?”

“Gimenez left a couple of bottles when we moved in, remember?”

Victor shook his head at Serguey. “What a selfish prick.”

“I think a drink will help everyone relax,” Anabel said. She removed the cap and asked Victor to hold each glass steady so she could pour the rum. Serguey was given a glass first.

“Let’s have a toast,” Victor said.

“What are we celebrating?” Serguey asked, getting up. “The fact that Dad’s in prison, or that we can’t get him out?”

Anabel’s expression turned somber. “Everyone’s worried. That doesn’t mean we can’t have a moment’s peace.”

Serguey gulped down a quarter of his rum. The wooden finish swamped his tongue, smooth and revitalizing. The robust, aged alcohol made his eyes water. “A moment’s peace? You’ve been laughing and giggling for the past twenty minutes while my brother admitted to you that he’s been breaking the law.”

“I was just trying to help her unwind,” Victor said.

Serguey walked to the edge of the living room, standing on the balcony’s threshold. “I’m sure that’s what you were trying to do.” He swilled the rest of the rum, in prime Gimenez fashion. He elongated his neck and scratched his throat, as he had seen Victor do the night of the play, and guzzled the evening air through his mouth and nose.

Anabel laid the bottle on the center table. “Serguey, don’t do this.”

She said it piteously. It would’ve aggravated him less if she’d been demanding. But she was begging him not to make them uncomfortable, not to feed the elephant in the room. He walked toward them, seized the bottle, and served himself to the brim. “No, you’re right,” he said, raising his glass. “Let’s drink, sing, and dance. Dad’s fucked, anyway.” He swallowed nearly half the rum in one shot.

“Here we go.” Victor dropped his glass next to the bottle. “If I hadn’t come, you wouldn’t even know what’s going on with Dad.”

Victor was in good form, ready to spar. Serguey accepted the challenge. Here was his chance to be brazen, to fight back without reservation. There was too much unsettled between them, too much that had festered and deserved a confrontation. He and his brother needed it. “Ah, but you did come. Why was that? It’s fun to brag about going around in a motorcycle selling god knows what, but not much fun when your brother’s the one saving your skin.”

“Are you listening to this?” Victor said to Anabel. “How do you put up with this fucking guy?”

“Forget the drinks,” Anabel said. “Let’s all calm down.”

“No,” Serguey said. His wife and brother were a united front against him. He was the villain, a part he hadn’t played nearly enough. The rum made it easier to do, gave him voice. “Let my little brother tell us how he really feels.” He glared at Victor. “It’s gotta be eating you inside that you had to come to me.”

“It is, actually.” In the void of an implausible moment, Victor seemed equable, calculating. Serguey felt as if he were looking into a slightly skewed mirror: the features distorted but the essence the same. “You didn’t do shit for your mother, who was killed in front of you,” here Victor stooped his head for emphasis, “or for your little brother, who you were supposed to protect.”

Serguey narrowed his eyes, telling himself it was the alcohol stinging them. He took the bottle and stared at its label—Havana Club, Añejo Especial—willing his mind to recalibrate. If he acknowledged the accusations, he’d break. What had festered, it seemed, was Serguey’s conscience: it had been seized by a sense of remorse in grave need of release. In his inebriated tongue, he transformed into spite. Victor’s controlled delivery, much like Serguey’s public persona, had been a façade. He simply had to strip it.

Serguey offered the Havana Club to his brother. “Here, it’ll make you feel better.”

Victor braced the bottle by the lip, sprung to the balcony, and tossed it over the rail. Seconds later, as he stepped into the living room, the bottle burst on the street.

The satisfaction that Serguey should’ve experienced with the blast eluded him. No catharsis had come. “With his luck,” he said, “he probably smashed someone’s head.” He pointed at Victor’s face, which had sharpened into anger. “If you end up in jail, I’m not getting you out this time.”

Victor clasped Serguey’s neck. Serguey dropped his glass, spilling rum on the floor. Victor slipped as he pushed his brother. They staggered all the way to the sofa, Victor landing on top.

“Son of a bitch,” he said, still clinging to Serguey.

Serguey pulled at his brother’s wrist but couldn’t shake him loose. Anabel shoved her body between the men and elbowed Victor. “Let him go!” she yelled. “Victor, stop!”

Victor released Serguey and took a step back.

“This is how he deals with everything,” Serguey said, catching his breath. “Imagine if he were drunk!”

“You couldn’t help Mom,” Victor said, not with anger but with what appeared to be pangs of remorse. “You couldn’t help me, and now you can’t help Dad.”

“Victor, go,” Anabel said.

“You married a fucking coward, Anabel.”

“Get the fuck out of my house!” she barked, signaling to the door.

Flustered, Victor wagged his head, mumbling on his way out, “Born a fucking coward.”

“This is your fault,” Anabel told Serguey.

“My fault?” he said. “Why don’t you go with him, then?” He kicked the fallen glass, which had come to rest by his feet. It swiveled and sprayed the rest of the rum like a sprinkler.

Anabel went to retrieve the glass. “You have to go after him.”

Serguey grabbed her arm. “Leave it. I’ll get the glass.”

She shook him off. “Go after Victor.”

“But you just threw him out!”

“So he wouldn’t hurt you.”

Serguey laughed mockingly, hysterically.

Anabel cupped the glass in her hands. “Serguey, please go get your brother and end all this fighting. Do it for me. Do it for your father. Do it for your neighbors. But just fucking do it.”

“You’re complicit in this too.”

She approached him and kneeled on the spilled rum. Her legs dragged the liquid like a floor squeegee. This, more than anything, made him profoundly ashamed.

“Yes, your lordship,” she said. “We’re all guilty in the eyes of the court. Now, can you get over yourself?”

He regretted it, the self-righteousness of it, as soon as he said it: “Why am I the one who always has to fix things?”

Anabel touched his thigh. “Because you’re the older brother. That’s how it works. I’ve been doing it with Alida all my life. And you’re a fucking lawyer. You’re supposed to fix things.” She surveyed the entire living room floor. Parts of it beyond them were slicked with alcohol. “I’ll take care of this mess you idiots made.”

She hitched herself up, wiped her legs, and removed her shoes. Barefooted, she headed to the kitchen. Serguey loitered for a few seconds, swallowing his own hypocrisy, his own inadequacy, yielding to its acerbic taste.

He left the apartment and descended the stairs to the lobby and then to the street. Victor was crouched over the asphalt, closer to the opposite sidewalk, under the faint glimmer of a streetlamp. He was picking up shards from the broken bottle, accruing them in the palm of one hand. Serguey walked slowly, circumventing his brother so he could face him. Victor didn’t look up. Serguey joined him, gathering wet pieces of glass himself.

“This is my mess,” Victor said, avoiding eye contact.

Serguey stopped. He watched his brother make sure there were no big fragments left on the ground.

“Where’s the closest pile of garbage?” Victor asked.

There was a big refuse depository around the corner. “Just drop them on the landing,” Serguey said. “I’ll take them upstairs.”

They strode silently to the building’s entrance and placed the shattered glass on the bottom step. Victor used his foot to mass the pieces against the wall. Then he squatted and lit up a cigarette. Serguey sat next to him, leaning on his elbows.

“Did I hurt you?” Victor said.

“Didn’t even make a dent.”

Victor nodded, blowing smoke through the side of his mouth. A scraggy man with a brush cut trotted by. A white T-shirt dangled from the back of his jean shorts like a tail. He was carrying a stuffed plastic bag under his arm.

“That one’s up to no good,” Victor said. “You can tell by the way he’s running. I bet you he’s not from this neighborhood.”

His brother was looking to make peace. Serguey gazed up at a musky, monotonous sky. “Do you remember when we were kids, and we spoke to Toya for the first time?”

“When we tried to sneak into that party with Kiko?”

“Yeah, with the Santeros.”

Victor flashed a muted smile. “I remember.”

They’d gotten into the porch of the house, cloaked by shadows, pretending to be ninjas. Through a gap in the window, they could see people dressed in colorful garb—long dresses and headscarves—dancing in a circle around the living room. Two black men sat in a corner banging on drums. The twirling plumes of tobacco smoke and strange singing gave the scene a dreamlike quality. The women arched their shoulders and heads back, aiming their chests upward, then suddenly slouched their arms toward the floor and loosened up their necks, as if their bodies were possessed, sections of it about to be dislodged.

While the boys bunched by the window, taking turns with the best view, someone opened the front door. They became paralyzed. Serguey wanted to yell that they should run, but the woman—big-breasted and with strikingly round eyes—moved closer and blocked their escape.

“What’s your name?” she asked Kiko.

“Carmelo.”

“Go on home.”

Kiko glanced at his friends, an apology written on his grimacing lips, and sprinted out of the porch.

The woman turned to Serguey and Victor. “You’re the playwright’s boys, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Serguey said.

Every particle of her exhalation smelled like burnt grass and honey. Serguey was reminded of an amber-hued pomade that his grandfather Joaquin had owned and which Felipe stored in a nightstand drawer. Sometimes he and Victor would twist off the lid and dare each other to dip their noses in it.

She grabbed Victor’s chin. “What’s your name?”

“Victor.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“Toya the Witch.”

The woman raised her eyebrows and chuckled. “That’s right, I’m Toya. But it’s called santera, not bruja.”

“How come you’re not black?” Victor said.

Serguey couldn’t believe what his brother had just asked. Victor later explained he thought that to be a Santero, one had to be black. Toya was light-skinned.

“Who says I’m not black?” was Toya’s reply.

The brothers said nothing.

“Tell your father to get you an Eleguá, for protection.” She leaned forward, her eyes darting between the boys, and said, “Now get out of here. This is no place for children.”

That night, Serguey told his father what’d happened.

“Don’t pay attention to Toya,” Felipe said. “She’s a nice woman, but Santería is not for us.”

“What about grandpa’s statues?” Serguey asked, referring to their obvious African themes.

“There’s a difference between observing or exploring something in your work and actually living it. Santería is not for us.”

Victor didn’t remember his father saying such a thing. He believed Felipe not only liked Toya, but he venerated what she did. He took one last drag and snuffed his cigarette on the steps. “Toya’s my spiritual advisor.”

Serguey resisted a laugh. “You can’t be serious.”

“I even made Dad go see her once.”

“Victor, you can’t be serious. What did she tell him?”

“That he was hanging out with the wrong crowd.”

Laughter overtook them both, a deep-rooted, wicked laugh—the kind that brothers can share at the expense of the world. Soon, however, they noticed the implicit misfortune in Toya’s words, and their amusement simmered.

“Holy shit,” Serguey said. “A spiritual advisor.”

“It gets worse.”

“What do you mean?”

“I want you to see her. I want us both to, actually. She doesn’t talk about you and me. She knows it’s a sore subject. But it’s been in the back of my mind.”

“You know I don’t believe any of that stuff. I wouldn’t even know how to react. You might get offended . . .”

Victor stared at him earnestly. “Do it for me.”

Serguey took a deep breath, responsibility chopping away at his resistance. “Okay.”

“You’ll do it?”

“I’ll do it.”

“Good,” Victor said. “I’ll talk to her.”

Serguey clutched his brother’s shoulder. “Let’s go in.”

“Your wife cursed me out, remember?”

“She also asked me to get you. We can’t have any more petty fights.”

“You’re telling me?”

“I’m telling myself.”

Victor flicked the cigarette butt onto the grass. “I’m not trying to stir up shit between you and Anabel. I’ve always liked her, and I’ve always been kind of envious of you two. But I wouldn’t mess with my brother’s wife. And I didn’t mean what I said about mom and—”

“I know you didn’t,” Serguey said. It had been a draining week; certainly a draining evening. He didn’t have enough left in the tank for that conversation. He pursed his lips at the wall behind Victor, his eyes looking to the ground. “Don’t forget the glass.”

“I can’t believe I wasted a Havana Club,” Victor said, his weary smile riddled with remorse.

Serguey couldn’t sleep. His throat felt constricted, as if still in his brother’s grasp. His limbs were sore. Victor was passed out in the guestroom, no doubt drooling copiously on the pillow, as he had done in his childhood. At one point, Felipe had taken him to see a psychologist, worried that, along with his wetting the bed, he might have a condition. Apparently he was just a deep sleeper, unaware of his bodily functions. Victor’s conscience got so switched off he never remembered his dreams. Not one. Serguey wondered if his brother just didn’t have any, his mind remaining vacant throughout the night.

Serguey’s own dreams were vivid. It wasn’t rare for him to remember the details. He had a recurring dream of a Spanish fortress by the water. Sometimes it was abandoned; sometimes it was a museum full of ancient statues. He’d gotten lost inside its corridors so frequently, he could map the entire structure if asked. He couldn’t imagine what it was like to not have dreams, to not remember them. But such a thing couldn’t be called an ailment. Victor’s only condition was his irrepressible impetus. It came in bursts and then fizzled, leaving him a warm, approachable person. Serguey was more cerebral, his brain harder to switch off in favor of emotions.

Anabel lay beside him in silence. The lamp on the nightstand was still on. The sheets had scrunched and wrinkled beneath his body and were now coarse against his skin. Anabel turned on her side and stared at him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“That’s not what I want to hear.”

He understood what she meant. “I’ll speak with Victor again tomorrow. I’ll fix this for good.”

“Why do you dislike each other so much? No matter how different you are, what happened tonight’s not normal. It’s worse than animosity. It feels like resentment. What did he mean you couldn’t help your mom or him?”

Serguey’s body tightened. “I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do. What did he mean?”

His lips contorted. He began to cry. He resisted it at first, covering his mouth, but his sobs broke through. Anabel rested her head on his. Her own tears fell on his shoulder. They didn’t do this often—cry together. Serguey’s breath became hot and moist. He moaned and exhaled, as if trying to release the growing pressure in his chest. He swallowed hard to relax his throat.

And then he told her.

When he was fourteen and Victor eleven, Felipe sent them to their grandparents’ house in San Antonio de las Vegas, a rural town twenty-five kilometers south of Havana. With the whole summer ahead of them, the boys decided to imitate peasant life, adopting the kinds of activities that were impossible to carry out in the city. They fished in a nearby river until the sun buried itself beyond green fields, the twilight birds and crickets serenading them as they trailed their way back to the house. They competed to see who could climb trees the fastest; they gathered avocados, guavas, and mangoes in burlap sacks and hid them inside their grandfather’s storage room, a shack concealed at the heart of a wooded area; they learned how to feed the pigs and chickens that their grandmother, Estela, bred in her backyard.

Toward the end of their stay, the boys took to hunting with their grandfather’s pellet rifle. Larido, a rough-skinned man who had moved to the countryside over two decades before, taught his grandsons how to aim steady and search for the fallen prey—mostly small birds like the black-plumed toti.

One afternoon, after they had shot at least thirty rounds and killed four birds, they opted for a different route home. The brothers loved to explore. They liked getting lost in the tangled branches of a thicket, slogging across a field of chest-high grass, swimming the width of the river in an area they hadn’t traversed before. On this particular day, Victor asked to carry the birds. He hung them proudly from a rope tied at his waist. Their wobbly, upside-down heads smacked against his thighs as he walked.

The boys entered a clearing, and in the distance Serguey recognized the fence they usually skirted all the way to the house.

“I told you I have a good sense of direction,” he told Victor.

As they continued on, they were startled by the sound of approaching voices. Three young peasants came into view. Two of the peasants were wearing straw hats; the one in the front, shorter and brawnier, had on a baseball cap. He squinted and said, “Hey, aren’t you the boys staying with Larido and Elena?”

“Yes,” Serguey said.

The peasant chuckled. “You’ve been hunting?”

“Got me four birds,” Victor said, his jaw slanted high.

“Our grandma asked that we bring her something,” Serguey added.

“What do you think, guys?” the peasant said to his buddies. “We could make a stew.”

“We can give you a bird,” Serguey said.

Victor shot him an angry look.

“Listen, city boy,” the peasant said, “just pass me the damn totis.”

Serguey went to untie the rope, but Victor swatted his hand away.

“I killed these birds,” he said. “They’re mine.”

“The little one has balls.” The peasant crept forward. “I thought all city boys were wimps.”

“Victor,” Serguey said, “just give them the totis.”

“No.” Victor aimed the rifle at the peasant, his voice and body shaking with rage. “They’re mine.”

The guys in straw hats raised their arms. “Take it easy, enano,” one said.

“He’s not going to shoot,” the brawny peasant said, trying to grasp the barrel.

Victor pressed the trigger. It clicked. He was out of pellets.

The peasant grappled the gun from Victor’s hands and threw it on the ground. “You’re going to get it, habanerito!”

Victor swung twice and missed. The peasant dropped him with a well-timed punch to the chest.

His companions lunged forward, one of them toward Serguey, who stretched out his arms hopelessly, as if trying to keep an oncoming train at bay.

“Stop,” he heard himself mutter.

The peasant cocked his fist. Serguey winced and tripped, falling on his own. The other peasant had Victor in a chokehold. Victor was screaming furiously. The brawny peasant punched him in the stomach repeatedly. Victor coughed and whimpered. As soon as he got a second wind, however, he kicked his assailant in the groin. The peasant grunted, incredulous of what’d just occurred. He hit Victor with a right hook to the face, and Victor went limp, though he was still conscious. The peasant yanked Victor’s pants and underwear down and squeezed his genitals. He produced a knife, bringing the blade close to Victor’s testicles. Victor squirmed, groaning with every breath. Serguey feared that his brother’s fright would cause the blade to slice skin. The three bodies shambled backwards, the knife inches from its target. The straw-hatted peasant, perhaps worried like Serguey that the threat could become a gory accident, suddenly released his chokehold. The knife-wielding one had no choice but to let Victor go. Victor slumped to the floor, barely moving on the dry soil.

From ground level, his brother looked like a mangled assembly of limbs. The birds were now attached to him at the knees, their carcasses scattered like rocks around his feet. Victor reached for his belt, mindlessly, frantically attempting to pull up his pants. Their mother had died at the hands of a knife. It was unfair, Serguey thought, for life to have placed such a weapon in the peasant’s hands, and for the rifle to have run out of pellets.

“What about him?” the leader asked the third peasant, who had been staring in confusion at a stiff Serguey.

“He’s too scared.”

“City boys are cowards.” The brawny peasant cut the rope with the birds and flung it over his shoulder. “You tell Larido about this,” he warned Serguey, “and we’ll chop off the little one’s balls and dump you in the river.”

As soon as the peasants were out of the clearing, Serguey strode anxiously toward his brother. Victor was breathing heavily. There was blood and dirt on his cheeks and nose. Serguey grasped his arm and asked him if he was okay.

“Leave me,” Victor said, his voice low and hoarse. He fixed his pants and massaged his stomach, groaning. Then he began heading for the river. Serguey grabbed the rifle and followed.

Without taking off his clothes, Victor submerged himself in the water, rinsed his face, and scaled his way back up the riverbank. “If grandma or grandpa asks,” he said, “I slipped on the rocks.”

Serguey nodded.

Grandma Estela inquired a few times if Victor needed to go to the doctor. He insisted that he was fine, that the bruises were only superficial. Serguey corroborated the “falling on the rocks” story but didn’t say much else. Victor apologized for having wasted the pellets and not killing a single bird. His grandfather told him not to worry, but he forbade them from going to the rocky section of the river again. Grandma Estela gave Victor half an aspirin and let him skip dinner so he could get some sleep. Serguey volunteered to feed the pigs. As he dumped the sancocho on the trough, he wept, the squealing of the pigs drowning out his sobs.

Over a decade later, no one knew about the incident: not Felipe, not their grandparents, not any of Serguey’s closest friends. Not a word about it had been exchanged between the brothers.

In the dim glow of the bedroom, Serguey cried again. Anabel held him like she would a child. He was exorcizing his own shortcomings, confessing his cowardice and shame, yet he found no relief. He appreciated the warmth of his wife’s embrace, the patience with which she waited for his weeping to subside and his thoughts to regain order. But what was unraveling in his mind—the memories, the guilt—he no longer felt could be reined in. It terrified him.

Anabel told him, “You have to speak about it with your brother. He can’t hold what happened against you.”

Serguey stifled his sobs and numbly nodded.

She said, “You’ve more than made up for whatever you think you didn’t do.”

He returned to his side of the bed. “I’ve barely seen him and my Dad since I left the house.”

“You know that isn’t completely true. And it’s not like they’ve gone out of their way to come visit you.”

“They didn’t want to intrude.”

Anabel’s sigh mimicked the steam-thickened fizz of a pressure cooker. “Really? After all these years criticizing them and telling me that it was better to keep some distance, you’re going to make excuses for them? Getting Victor out of jail counts for something. You’ve gone to every single one of your Dad’s plays. You pick up the phone when he calls. You don’t have the best relationship in the world, but who the hell does?”

Serguey masked his face with his hands, containing a forceful sneeze. Anabel handed him a tissue. He cleared his nose, crumpled the tissue, and lobbed it in the vicinity of a small basket Anabel kept by the door. “I only got Victor out of jail because my dad asked me to. I didn’t do it out of the goodness of my heart. I didn’t even go see him when he was doing his military service.”

She rotated on her side, her bent knees pointed at him. She pulled down the hem of her nightgown to cover herself. “That’s because he explicitly said he didn’t want visitors, and you were busy with your university workload. He knows that. We’re not playing games here, Serguey. We’re possibly giving up our future to help Felipe. I’ll always be the first one to tell you to take care of family, but you owe your dad and your brother nothing.”

It sounded soothing, neatly logical, but he couldn’t accept it. “I’m sorry. That’s not how I feel. That’s why I got angry today.”

She looked at him for a while, expecting him to append his statement. “You got angry because you were jealous of Victor. You two have this pent-up animosity, and you can’t even talk about it like adults.”

Serguey chuckled, twisting his mouth uneasily. “We’re not very good at that in my family.”

“Then you have to learn.” She moved closer to him, letting him caress her legs. Her lotion-glazed skin persuaded the tip of his fingers to drift back and forth. “Alida and I always lay everything out. We fight, we make up. We know what we think and feel about each other. When we were little, she had this friend who came to play with her toys, this beautiful black boy who wore orthopedic boots. Alida had a crush on him, and one day, I started teasing her in front of him, so much that the boy never came back. Apparently, he got embarrassed. To this day she won’t forgive me, but I’ve already told her I’m sorry. I feel really bad about it, and she understands it.” Anabel’s eyes followed his hand as it glided away from the bottom of her nightgown. “When she first said she wanted to do ballet, I mocked her, told her she had no grace. I took it back the minute I saw her dance in her first recital. All my envy couldn’t compete with how proud I was. I still love seeing her on stage. But that’s only because we’ve moved beyond the old stuff, the petty stuff. What happened with the peasants isn’t petty, and what happened with your mom . . .”

Serguey retrieved his hand. “Victor and I didn’t get the proper help, Anabel. We were never taught how to speak about it.”

She looked at him, her face saturated with sorrowful sincerity. “You’re going to have to do it yourselves, even if it’s ugly. You can’t let your pride get in the way.” She smiled, her dimpled chin holding on to traces of sadness. “You Blancos love pride and pity. You can’t live without it.”

“I wish my mother would’ve been around a while longer.” He scratched his own hands delicately, absentmindedly. “Maybe I’m remembering wrong, but I have this sensation that she was good at talking to me and Victor. I remember her saying that obsession was man’s perdition, or something like that. I always thought she’d stolen that from Dad, but I’m not so sure. She said one had to care for everything and everyone, not just what attracted us the most.” Serguey understood that Irene had left his father for a violent drunk—that she, like the Blancos, had been a hypocrite—but her decision to move in with Raidel was presently delegated in Serguey’s psyche to the irreversibility of a mistake, nothing more.

In a mellifluous voice, Anabel asked, “How much have you and Victor talked about your mom since she died?”

“Neither one of us likes to bring it up. When we do by accident, we pretend it was an error, a slip of the tongue. I guess we figured this is how it’s going to be, so we never questioned it.” He could intuit her next inquiry. “Dad’s the worst person to ask about her. He starts rambling about how hard it was for him, and it’s excruciating. It’s like we weren’t there, only he was.”

As Anabel began to reply, they heard a loud thud in the living room. Serguey motioned for her to stay silent. He wondered if he’d forgotten to shut the balcony door (the wind often knocked things around). He left the bed and scurried to the bedroom’s entrance, listening for another sound. There were footsteps, maybe a grunt. He told himself it had to be Victor, unable to sleep, moseying in the dark to not give himself away. He turned the handle carefully, poked his head out, and felt a sudden, chilly draft on his face. The living room light was on. Victor was standing on the balcony, a shirtless figure in a booming breeze, smoking a cigarette. Serguey closed the bedroom door and returned to the bed.

“It’s my brother,” he said, getting under the covers. “We’re not the only ones who can’t sleep.” Anabel curled up against his chest, waiting for him to continue. He couldn’t. He simply whispered, “I get everything you said, but it’s not that easy.”

She lifted then tucked her head. “I know.”

In a few minutes, she fell asleep. Serguey didn’t hear Victor pass by the bedroom. No more dropped objects or human noises. He helped a drowsy Anabel accommodate her body the way she liked it: a hand nuzzled under her cheek, the other near her mouth. He lay on his back with his eyes closed, picturing himself feet up on the railing, sharing a smoke with his brother. That’s what brothers should do, he thought as his mind inched toward impending sleep. They should see and feel themselves, in the inconspicuous plainness of a moment, luckier and bigger than all the world combined.