Spain, 1969
85. ON A WOODEN STAGE constructed the night before, Mansour uses his right foot like a hammer, pounding on the downbeat, setting the music in motion. The Irishman and the other musicians lay down each melody beside him, completing the spell over the infinite pool of dark eyes and olive skin below them. They sway, and scream, and dance. It is May of 1969, and the towns of northern Spain are alive with their music.
Their car gives out, so they borrow an old Fiat and drive through the night to the next town and the town after that. They pick fat black olives out of rich stews and force full cases of cheap spirits into a trunk already crowded with their instruments. They all stay high and famished, terrified that the old car will stop midway between towns like the other had. But it doesn’t.
After Barcelona, the tiny towns have no banks, and they worry that their pocket money will run out—and it does. Twice on their way farther north, they barter on the corners of ancient cobblestone blocks with four-minute concerts for dinner and cigarettes. Mansour holds the electric guitar on his lap as he devours roasted lamb and Spanish rice with his hand. Liam watches him form the rice into little balls he throws down his throat.
The Irishman does most of the driving, well into the morning hours, while the rest of the men start into their dreams. Delaying sleep, he drives for as long as he can, eventually pulling off on some side of the road. As he has done before in these past few days, he dreams of death, of a dying man. Sometimes the man has Mansour’s face, sometime Keifer’s. The scene, always, on the same street where Keifer collapsed. It is a recurring dream that doesn’t have an ending.
Some of the roads in northern Spain are shrouded in sparkling rubble and dirt, others lined with privately owned citrus trees. They pass ancient villages where the flat houses match the color of the earth; they row across a brown river to play at a university auditorium with no windows. At the climax of a concert with over a thousand bodies breathing in the same stagnant air, harmonizing with the guitar riff, for the first time onstage, Mansour seizes.
With his collapse, the crowd is still, and Liam and the trumpeter lift Mansour from the stage to the wings. The Irishman, having dreamed thrice now of his death, had not expected him to awake. Liam shakes as they walk out of the venue, grateful to God that the night is pitch-black, that Mansour and the others cannot see the way he cries.
They do not make it to the car quietly. The crowd follows. Theirs is a palpable and wild love that even Liam feels. Among them, Liam notes the Africans. They always find their way to Mansour’s shows, even in the most remote European towns. Mansour, whose eyes are still low from the seizure, stares into their faces like a preacher. Even after blacking out onstage, the Irishman can surmise from his manner that the African is giving his people words of encouragement, words from scripture.
But once inside the car, the African’s mood darkens. And he again indulges in spirits, picks drunken fights with the other musicians, and eventually curls into a corner in the car and sings himself to sleep.
At the edge of a village town, deep into the night, they pass an old church. Having been possessed by strange dreams for several nights, the Irishman parks the car and goes inside while the other men sleep soundly. Inside the stately old church, the wild winds have opened two of the numerous windows. He kneels in the first pew and as he thinks up words to pray, he hears deep wailing, a guttural cry, carried in by the winds of the otherwise-silent dawn. It is the voice of Mansour.
The Irishman comes out to the car to find Mansour passed out outside, sleeping soundly against the car’s back tire. The Irishman shakes him by the shoulders, worried again, until Mansour opens his eyes. He helps Mansour back into the front seat of the car, and they light fresh cigarettes and watch the sunrise in silence.
Mansour and Liam make it home to Paris a day early. Famished after three weeks on the road, they stop at a bar, walking distance from Liam’s apartment. Mansour will take the train to Switzerland in the morning. He has gone out to the phone booth to call Bonnie. Liam watches from the foggy bar window as Mansour walks to the corner and just leans against the phone booth’s door. His hand is over his mouth, one leg crossed over the other, never entering. When he returns, Liam plays along.
“How is she?”
Mansour leans back in his chair, rearranges the glasses of brandy on the table, pulls his hoodie over his head, pushes it off again.
When he speaks, his deep voice has an airy, unsteady sound, as it drifts among the clinking glasses and gruff conversations that surround them.
“Call her for me, just tell her everything’s good. She’ll believe you. She’ll see right through me,” he says.
“No, Mansee,” Liam teases. “The girl’s having your kid.”
Mansour shakes his head, grabs his face.
“She’ll worry. She’s such a worrier.”
Liam leans closer, but then, protecting his heart, he looks out of the window, whispers his fear with sour breath. “You’re getting worse. You have to tell her.”
When he raises his eyes, Mansour is glaring at him, a strange look at first like he might weep, but then it hardens into his resting expression. “You have to tell her,” Liam says again. Mansour runs his hand over his facial hair and folds his hands on the table. He sits up, staring down at them.
“We were pregnant in Brazil,” he says and takes a swig of his drink. Liam is listening. “But we … we got into this thing in Germany some weeks later. She’d already told me she wasn’t feeling well. One of our worst times. And I was screaming, and she was screaming. I left. Came back really late.”
His eyes have welled.
“Anyway she lost it. The first one.”
“I’m sorry.”
Mansour shakes his head, runs his hands over the table. He reaches into his pocket for a new cigarette. He puts the thing in his mouth, lighting it with a shaky hand. “I’ll never let that happen again,” he says, and exhales, shaking the fire off of the match, smearing off tears. “I can’t tell her what happened to me in Spain.”
“You’re not gonna tell her about your manager either?”
Mansour focuses on his drink as Liam continues.
“You fired a good man. You had an excellent manager. He was probably the only person who could’ve kept that seizure onstage out of the press. He saved your career and mine.”
“He didn’t save me. We built this from the ground.” He taps the table twice, leans in. “If it falls apart, we’ll build it again. And again,” Mansour asserts with defiance.
Liam speaks: “I’ve never met a motherfucker who’d work his ass off, almost make it big, and then walk away from a major deal. How many chances do you think a man should get to blow up his life? And how many chances should he get to blow up mine?”
Liam throws back his drink and shoves the table forward to make way as he stands. Once he’s pulled on his jacket and thrown his bag over his shoulder, he looks once more at Mansour, who looks like he might speak but only rolls his tongue across his teeth as he studies the messy table of empty glasses, planning his next drink.
Liam tugs on his jacket. Calmer, with worry, he says, “Don’t get stupid drunk before you get on the train.”
Liam turns to leave, and Mansour follows him out to the quiet street, whistling after him.
“Liam!”
Liam turns to see Mansour extending him money. Payment for the last gig. The dark, empty road lies between them.
“Just mail it to me with the rest.”
“Mail’s slow.” Mansour tips his head, extends the money again with a tiny smile. “Come on.”
Liam puts his hands in his pockets and rocks on his feet. He eyes the money, needing it, but he won’t approach.
“What is this? What’s with you?” Mansour says.
Liam won’t look at Mansour, watching the street like he’s looking for someone. “I’m beginning to feel like … I feel like you’re getting some kind of pleasure from this.”
“From paying you?”
“From screwing me over,” he says, looking Mansour in the eye. “I wrote half those songs you played in Brazil. That should’ve been double billing! We were a duo!”
“So how come you never said anything?!”
“I shouldn’t have to, Mansour.”
“When Keifer died, you didn’t want anything to do me with me. So I was supposed to just stop gigging because you didn’t want to? You dropped off, you fucked up shows, you didn’t take my calls—”
“I killed a man. I … killed him.”
Liam takes two steps back and grips his hair the way he did that night in New York. He’s staring at the ground, like the story of the night Keifer died has been etched into the grooves of the pavement. His face is red when he looks up at Mansour, open with a desperate need for forgiveness, and Mansour is paralyzed, staring back at him the same way.
86. MANSOUR RETURNS ALONE to the bar and, a few hours later, during his drunken walk to the train, he is stopped by police. When he resists, he’s thrown against the wall. Disoriented, he can’t feel anything, but he tastes blood. Three policemen threaten to shoot him in the hundred-year-old cobblestone alley.
Mansour tries not to laugh at their short heights and tiny heads. The sweatiness of their hands and the way it tickles when they grip him. He laughs until they force the barrel of a gun under his chin. Then he feels his body turn to liquid in their hands.
By the time he’s handcuffed, wrist to wrist, ankle to ankle in a heavy browning chain that leaves a scent on his body like money, he is laughing out of fear.
When he is alone, in the dark, his swollen arm keeps him from losing consciousness. He was beaten twice and now his limbs feel flammable, like his own touch might ignite him. He keeps his palms flat beside himself on the ground, trying to make a thought, trying to find his bearings. It all happened extremely quickly. His drunkenness and the strength of their blows upon his head had deafened him in one ear and weakened his vision. Their questions for him—if he knew the woman, what time he arrived at the club, how many times had he followed her home—swarmed with the room. His answers, his befuddlement, his screams, his demanding to know who in the hell this woman was and why they suspected him, they did not hear. They did not even seem to see him, their gazes firmly on him but seeing something else entirely. It all struck him as a terrible dream. A dream in which he was not the dreamer.
This is what it feels like to be forced into another man’s fate. To disappear into another. And with this thought, the cell begins to breed a terrifying vastness within him. But he breathes into it, and breathes into it, hearing, needing the sound.