by Jordi Puntí
One afternoon, about ten months after we started meeting up every Tuesday, the car broke down just after the bend near the Can Pantano restaurant. There was a sudden cracking sound, followed by a screech. Manubens immediately braked and pulled over. I thought it was a flat.
“Shit!” he said, and we both got out of the car. Watching him walking, I noticed he had a limp, as if one of his legs, I don’t remember which, wasn’t strong and dragged a little. He was taller and ganglier than he seemed when he was behind the wheel, and in the daylight he appeared older, too. He opened the hood, looked inside, and made an instant diagnosis. “It’s the fan belt. Just as I thought. Lucky we stopped straightaway.”
So it’s the fan belt. Sure it is, I thought, but I don’t know about these things. He had a spare in the trunk and set about changing it. Out of courtesy I offered to help, but with his head buried in the engine he said no need. He’d be done in ten minutes. Since I was getting in the way, I went to stretch my legs by the roadside. It was getting dark, a time when not many cars were going past. I think it must have been April, as the barley fields were rippling in different tones of green depending on whether, at that hour, the sun shone on them or not. A few meters farther on, at the end of the bend, I noticed there was some guardrail and someone had tied a bunch of red roses on it. I touched them. They’d withered but weren’t totally dry. There must have been a fatal accident not long before, or maybe it was the anniversary of a fatal accident. Then, looking for signs, my gaze went to the bank rising by the roadside. Although there was no broken glass or oil stains or anything else on the asphalt—someone had carefully cleaned it up—the earth and weeds were dug up or flattened in some places, so it wasn’t difficult to imagine the metal tangle of the car that had smashed through the rail, the violent crash, the sliding back down. (That’s why I never got a driver’s license.) Just when I turned around to go back to the car, something on the ground caught my eye: a cassette tape without its box, lying there in the grass. I picked it up. It was a BASF and someone had written on both sides Party, Party, Party.
A shout from Manubens, who’d finished changing the fan belt, broke into my train of thought. As I was on my way back to the car, he started the engine, and for a moment I thought he was going to leave me there and drive off with my briefcase. That was stupid, but maybe it was because of this strange fear, or to explain why I’d made him wait, or to distract us from the scare, I showed him the cassette.
“Look what I found on the ground over there,” I said, once inside the car. I didn’t mention the bunch of flowers.
“Do you think it will work? Go on. Try it.”
“I think it’s OK,” I said. “If you like it, you can keep it.”
Now that I know what happened afterwards, it all seems like a bad joke.
He opened the tape deck, took out the tape from inside it, slipped in the new one, and pressed PLAY. There were a few seconds of silence, and just when we were about to forget about listening to it, a deep voice came out of the speakers, slowly getting higher—the tape was stretching—until we could hear some cheerful music. Manubens smiled. It was a song I’d heard dozens of times, by an English band of my day. Supertramp, maybe? I wasn’t sure, but suddenly I thought that this was the song the person who’d had the accident was listening to, and was overcome with a hypocritical feeling of anguish, as if we had no right to be doing this, as if we were profaning the last few seconds of another person’s life. Manubens didn’t notice, and as soon as the next song began he said, “Yeah, I know this one! That’s ABBA, right? They won the Eurovision contest years ago.”
I nodded. The dark had swallowed up the last rays of sunlight and we were approaching Orís. Then, halfway through the song, which was “Waterloo,” the music sped up. The singers started to sound off-key and there was a grotesque howling, as if the tape had slackened or knotted inside the deck. Anyway, it was like someone was pitilessly torturing them. In a couple of seconds the music turned mournful, like the way I imagine psychophony would sound. Then it sounded like wailing from beyond the grave mingled with baby cries. The effect was comical and I burst out laughing, but somewhat hysterically. And suddenly Manubens pulled over to the roadside, braked sharply, almost skidding, and indignantly turned off the music, pulled the tape out, opened the window, and threw it away, into the dark again. The tape had broken inside the deck, was frayed, and it flew off with a varnishy snap.
“Where did you get that thing?” he shouted. “Who are you? What harm are you trying to do to me?”
“Me? Nothing . . . ,” I mumbled, innocent and shocked by his reaction. I don’t know if he heard me. In the shadows I could only see his contorted face. It was as if those brutal, savage sounds had taken him back to a place or time that absolutely terrified him. Maybe it was related with his mishap at work, but I don’t know. Maybe he’d put two and two together and in those shrieks he’d heard echoes of the voices of the accident a few miles back. The pain of others is a mystery that binds us, and it’s too much for us at times, so we don’t know how to react. I was so astonished, I didn’t dare to say anything else. He didn’t say anything else either. He started driving again and five minutes later, we reached Sant Quirze. He left me at the usual place and I thanked him when I got out. His only response was a nod. Go on, off you go. He was glad to get me out of his sight.
* * *
In my years of hitchhiking I’ve seen everything, but I think this story, the Manubens one, sums up well the strangeness of all people without exception, this thing we usually call inner life, which is manifested in a thousand unforeseen and contradictory ways. The following Tuesday, at the usual time, I waited in the same spot as every other week. I believed that Manubens would pick me up and we could talk about it. I’d even rehearsed some kind of apology, but there was no sign of him. Maybe he’d finished his rehab, or so I made myself believe. All in all, a road has great evocative power, and every time I pass that spot, just after the Can Pantano bend, I relive a few seconds of that April evening with Manubens. Sometimes I look at the bunch of flowers tied to the guardrail, with drier roses or, once again, fresher ones, reading them as a warning to be careful. Sometimes I think about those hellish screeches coming out of the tape deck and memory makes too much of them. Then the odometer keeps ticking over and I forget it all again, of course.
I think I already said that I have this tendency to make up stories, which is a reaction to the forced socializing, a defense mechanism if you like. It’s been many years, and I’m tempted by an abstract image: me breaking down into little bits in every one of the cars that’s picked me up, inhabiting them eternally until the day comes when they drive over a precipice, or quietly gather dust in a village garage, or docilely head for a car cemetery, where they’ll rust in the rain and under the sun till a machine crushes them into a block of steel.
Countering these mental wanderings, there are days when I also think that my legacy of all those years on the road is that I’ve turned into an urban legend. Or rural. Depends how you look at it. A variation on the famous theme of the girl who was hitchhiking one dark night and disappeared on the same bend where someone had died in an accident years earlier. Except that I haven’t died. There are drivers who’ve been seeing me for years, who know who I am, and yet they still drive past. One day I won’t be there and they’ll still keep seeing me. That’ll be my little bit of posterity.
KIDNEY
The first letter arrived at midday one Tuesday, but Gori didn’t open it until almost a week later. He didn’t open it because he didn’t feel like it. Now that he’d left his health problems behind, his life was trundling on without any dramas. Anyway, for some absurd reason that he’d forgotten, he always opened his mail on Monday nights. So the very few letters he received piled up on a wicker chair by the door together with bank receipts, advertising leaflets, and the College of Pediatricians journal, which arrived punctually every two months in the name of the former tenant.
Gori, then, dealt with the m
ail the following Monday night, sitting at the kitchen table and waiting for the spaghetti to cook. He opened the letters with a knife, glanced at them, and decided which ones he needed to keep and which he didn’t. When he picked up the envelope that started this whole story, he immediately recognized his brother’s hand. There was no sender, but looking at his own name and address was enough. The writing was lean, with vigorous strokes, bony looking. The capital T was like a tibia and the c’s were both rounded and angular, like the cheekbone of a Russian model. Studying the letters, he remembered an article he’d once read in a Sunday magazine. A serious graphologist explained that we acquire the basic script we’ll have for the rest of our lives at about the age of twelve, after which the writing evolves with us as we become adults. Only people who are very sure of themselves or very superstitious always keep the same style without perceptible variations.
Reluctantly, as if he didn’t quite believe it, he opened the envelope, took out the piece of paper that was folded in half, and read it. His brother’s same old insolent writing. It was undated, unsigned. There was just one sentence.
I’ll be needing a kidney.
Gori instantly understood what his brother was asking of him but didn’t react in any way, either well or badly. He folded the sheet of paper again to put it back in the envelope and then saw that there was something else inside. He took it out. It was a check for three thousand euros, made out to the bearer. Yeah, right. He suppressed a scornful smirk with a sigh of pity. Then he tore up the envelope, letter, and check and threw the scraps in the trash can. The spaghetti would be ready. He was hungry. He hadn’t seen his brother for thirty years.
* * *
Gori had suffered attacks of loneliness throughout his adulthood. They were infrequent, mostly benign, but they came without warning and swamped him all day long with false nostalgia for the past, springing not from memory but imagination. He fretfully wondered where life would have taken him if he hadn’t walked out the way he did three decades ago. The answers were always flights of fancy and, like teenage comedy movies, had the virtue of soothing his low spirits.
Now he lived alone. Had done for the last four years. Or was it five? He’d lost count. He’d had long periods with a lot of amorous activity, when one girlfriend replaced another without leaving enough time for him to feel abandoned, and then he’d even lived nine years, three months, and eighteen days with the same woman. He had a few friends, too. In the beginning he forced himself to socialize. In a village you’ve got to have some proper friends or you’ll rot away, he told himself. He often went down to the café at night to play dominos, Sunday mornings he rode his bike on the mountain tracks, and he visited the library and took out books people recommended to him.
Sometimes, in these attacks of loneliness when he felt that the house was closing in on him—as if all the laughter and conversations of a happy past had been eating away at the wooden beams—Gori brooded over what his death would be like. He wondered who’d find him, if he’d suffer a lot, what would happen to his things; but they were more like rhetorical questions, and they helped him to feel sorry for himself. He’d been through a hard time with his health, but his friends had made sure he was never alone. Moreover, he hadn’t taken anything with him from home. Thirty years ago he’d left without saying goodbye. He’d just turned eighteen then. He was the younger son, but his brother was only fourteen months older. People said they looked like twins. He found it hard to understand how, after coming out of the same belly and pumping the same blood, life had made them so different.
Gori had left without warning, in a fit of rebellion and rage. Time had helped him to understand that it hadn’t been a hasty, crazy decision but something that had been ripening for ages, perhaps since birth, the grand finale of a situation that had eventually become unbearable.
The next day neither his father nor his brother had gone looking for him. They must have been pleased that he’d fucked off. He phoned them a month later, from the north of France, saying he wasn’t planning to come back, that their lives had definitively parted ways. The big world was his home now. Did they get that? He’d practiced his speech in front of a mirror in the pension, jittery as a bandit preparing for the last shoot-out, but, with the phone in his hand, his voice started to quaver. After the indifference with which his father and brother received his news, their nonchalant acceptance of it, the gulf was even greater. “All right. Good luck, then.” If Mother was still alive . . . But his mother had died some years earlier, when he was fourteen, and maybe her sudden absence was the first symptom of the whole thing.
* * *
In bed, before going to sleep, Gori thought about his brother. It wasn’t difficult to picture him writing the letter, all alone in his office. Or perhaps after getting home from a session of dialysis. A specialist at the private clinic had spoken to him about his options, had asked if he had siblings. Gori imagined him grabbing the piece of paper in a fit of need and scribbling the words without thinking much about them, as if the gesture was enough to cut through all the years of silence and bring him close. Giving Gori no alternative. Hell, he was his goddamn brother after all. That first-person, future continuous tense—I’ll be needing—was so imperious that it could only be read ironically. As if gazing into his eyes from the sheet of paper, his brother was saying, “I should be more elegant and ask you politely, but I know you know I’m not like that, that I won’t have changed, not even in a moment of despair. If I’m polite and say please help me, you’ll see me as false and brown-nosing, and you’ll despise me. So, if I ask from my high-handed sense of superiority, you’ll see me as I am, your blood brother, and you’ll know I’m being sincere and not just arrogant.”
In fact, all this could be picked up in his brother’s handwriting, in the fractious strokes. He’d always been like that. When they were eleven and twelve, they played together and didn’t fight much. Often, if their games in the street led to problems, they’d join forces against some other kid. Gori was a little scrawnier, more reserved. In the playground at school, his big brother had stood up for him more than once. There was an instinctively protective bond between them. Then, one June, their parents decided that his brother was old enough to go off to summer camp and they enrolled him with a group of Boy Scouts. Two weeks in the forest, contact with nature, sleeping in tents, swimming in an icy-cold stream, and discovering the noble savage within. As for Gori, his parents said he’d have to learn to play by himself and smarten up. And if it was a good experience, they could both go the following year.
His brother was excited when he heard the news and soon started planning how he’d fill that space of freedom. His parents bought him a water bottle, a compass, a sleeping bag, and a Swiss Army knife. Gori listened, fiddled with all these things, and longed to go, too. When his brother returned two weeks later, he was different. More distant and serious, he didn’t seem to have spent a fortnight camping in the mountains but more as if he’d been dumped all alone on a desert island, struggling to survive against the elements. You’d think he’d been forced to cross some forbidden threshold, to skin a rabbit with his teeth or enter a bat-infested cave.
This new character, moreover, contrasted with Gori’s more ingenuous news. In order not to feel so alone in those two weeks, he’d made up an imaginary friend who went everywhere with him. Gori had given him a strange name: Amida. You didn’t have to be a genius to see that it was an anagram of his brother’s name. Gori and Amida were inseparable. At the swimming pool they jumped off the springboard, the two of them, hand in hand. They read the same Cavall Fort magazines together, laughing at the same jokes. Gori also got into the habit of writing in a diary every night before going to sleep. He jotted down what he’d been doing during the day without too many flourishes but always from Amida’s point of view: Day eight without Damià. Today Gori and I had a lemon Popsicle. Then we watched TV and saw the 5,000 meters in the World Athletics Championships. That kind of stuff. Amida’s words, written in real ink,
made the invented existence more credible.
His big brother didn’t take long to get jealous of Amida. As the elitist effect of his days at the camp wore off and the real-world hierarchy was once again imposed—mother, father, big brother, pesky little brother—he found the invisible kid more and more obnoxious. The first day, while they were having dinner, Gori told him about this incorporeal being and his brother was condescending. Kids’ stuff, he told himself, and, suddenly adult, caught his father’s eye, looking for complicity with a scornful expression. But after a few days he understood that Amida was coming between them. Gori no longer obeyed him like he used to. His power had weakened; his little brother had learned to fill in his time alone—well, not alone but in the company of that idiot Amida; and he felt betrayed, unappreciated, useless. One night, when Gori had gone to sleep, his brother very quietly got up, took the diary and a ballpoint pen, and locked himself in the toilet. After reading a few random entries, full of rage and taking Amida’s role for the first and only time, he scribbled on the last page, I’ve had a bellyful of Gori today. He’s so boring. He’s a crybaby. I don’t want to see him anymore. I’m getting out of here before daylight. Bye-bye, stupid family!
The next morning he waited in bed till Gori woke up. They slept in the same room, and on the floor between the two beds lay the diary. Gori saw it immediately, picked it up, smoothed the crumpled pages, and, as if guided by instinct, went straight to the last written page. As he read it, he recognized his brother’s crabby script, leapt out of bed, and threw himself on top of him. He’d pay for this. His brother soon overpowered him and, grabbing him by the scruff of the neck with one hand as they’d shown him in the camp, took control, telling him, “I think it’s very clear now that this Amida is a jerk. He doesn’t deserve to be your friend, Gori. So now we’re going to burn this book and then he’ll be gone forever.”