This Is Not America

by Jordi Puntí

  The two of them went out into the garden, still in pajamas, and, with the help of a little ethanol, burnt the notebook on the barbecue, page by page. Gori, resigned, meek as a lamb, couldn’t stop staring at the burning pages, watching how they rose for a few seconds into the air and then fell apart in flakes of ash, like low-flying birds of ill omen.

  In his bed, Gori now woke with a start, gasping, with the sensation that a crow’s wing had just brushed his cheek. He touched his face because it felt as if he were wearing a mask. He realized that the scene from the past had crept into his dream. Only it wasn’t a dream. All those years ago, the pages of his diary had been burnt to a cinder, and his big brother had played the overlord as he fed them into the flames. The memory of his brother who now needed a kidney lay heavy on him again but didn’t keep him awake. As he slipped back into oblivion, there was just time for a sketchy thought to form. Why didn’t he remember any other episode from his childhood with this clarity? It was as if some anthologist had chosen precisely that awful day to represent the years they’d spent together.

  * * *

  The second letter came a week later, with the word Urgent written on the envelope. Since he’d known from the very first moment how he’d have to respond to his brother, Gori took cruel pleasure in this new attempt. He was reading the same handwriting, of course, but, on closer scrutiny, perhaps the words written with the impatience he knew so well gave out a jumpier feeling. He spent a couple of minutes toying with the idea of throwing the letter away without opening it or getting the postman to send it back. ADDRESS UNKNOWN, they’d stamp on the envelope. He weighed it in his hand; it seemed thicker than the first one. Curiosity won and he ripped it open. What a letdown! Inside was a sheet of paper with exactly the same sentence: I’ll be needing a kidney. His brother might be successful but he never had much imagination. The letter looked like a photocopy of the first one. If he’d kept it, Gori would have taken the two sheets of paper, put them together, and looked at them against the light. The only difference he could see was that this time the letter was signed with the initial D.

  He took from the envelope another check made out to the bearer. Twelve thousand euros. Aha, so he was upping the ante. His brother thought the whole thing was a matter of money . . . Gori was about to tear up the new check as well, but then he thought again. What if he cashed it? He had no debts, but he wasn’t loaded either. He couldn’t go throwing money around. The problem was that his brother would know. He didn’t like the idea that he might turn up some day to reclaim something.

  In those thirty years they’d never seen each other in person, either by appointment or by chance. After leaving home, Gori had lived for a while in the village in northern France. In the beginning he’d done simple odd jobs that didn’t require much knowledge of the language: for example, being employed as a drudge in a scruffy hotel or working in a garden center where they grew herbs and medicinal plants. The next summer he moved south, joining up with a friend to go grape picking in the Rhône Valley and then, thanks to the advice of an overseer with whom he got on well, he went to live in a village in Roussillon, in the Pyrenean foothills. His French was improving and, moreover, some of the locals spoke Catalan. At first, every time he looked at the huge bulk of the mountains rising before him, he saw it as an impassable wall separating him from his father, his brother, and his country. Over time, the hard feelings diminished and eventually subsided into indifference. The power of inertia in ordinary days, his work as a gardener—which had gradually become his true vocation—and a series of sentimental attachments meant that he’d put down roots there. He even applied for French citizenship, which annoyed some of his friends, who thought it was a stupid idea.

  * * *

  When anyone asked Gori how come he’d ended up in that village, he tended to get enigmatic. “A girl,” he said, and it was true. He didn’t like talking about it. He left the question only partly answered so they could think whatever they wanted. If people prodded him for details, he got testy and cut them off saying it was a “tragic story,” which was also true. But it wasn’t the girl’s fault. If anything, she was the main victim. What happened was this: When Gori was seventeen, he’d started hanging out with a girl in his class. She was a mixed-up kid called Mireia. She and Gori were close and liked being together, often without needing many words. But outside their own little stronghold, Mireia was riding a roller coaster of emotions. She was an only child from a very conservative family, with parents who criticized her about everything, so rebellion was the only state of mind which made her feel alive. More than once when she met up with Gori after some family crisis, exhausted, with red eyes and hands shaking with all the tension, she tearfully told him, “I’m so desperate to grow up!” Upon which he tenderly embraced her.

  Meanwhile, Gori’s big brother had started college. Economics. Their father had told him that if he finished the degree with good results, he’d leave him the family business and a tidy little sum to expand it. It only took six months of living in a Barcelona student residence for his big brother to turn into a pompous loudmouth, a crashing bore. Now, as well as studying like crazy and playing on the faculty rugby team, he was hanging out with a few scions of Barcelona’s haute-bourgeoisie. They had family names that, pronounced at the table during Sunday lunch, made his father’s eyes shine with admiration. Gori, however, listening to all this bullshit, was reminded of the other transformation six years earlier, when his brother had come back from camp a lone-wolf predator.

  One Saturday night around that time, Mireia came to get Gori at home, and there she found his big brother. Gori had gone to play indoor soccer and still hadn’t come back. When he got home half an hour later, the two of them were getting along like a house on fire, laughing, smoking, and drinking beer. Suddenly, against that backdrop, Mireia seemed like another person. Gori never found out what they’d been talking about because neither of them wanted to tell him: “Just stupid things. We were killing time.”

  After that Saturday, Gori’s brother started asking about Mireia. If she and Gori were going out at night to play foosball or hitch to the next town, he joined them without asking if he could. He now had his driver’s license and offered to take them wherever they wanted to go. The first time Gori sat in front and Mireia behind, but it wasn’t long before she asked if she could have the passenger seat so she could choose the music. Then Gori curled up in the back, feeling devoured by the night, concentrating on the sinister songs of The Cure so he wouldn’t have to listen to the conversation the two of them were having there in front of him, his brother’s exploits in Barcelona and all his insinuations. They were never anything more than stupid, banal stories, but he seemed worldlier now that he lived in the city, and Mireia hung on his every word as if he was giving her a marvelous gift. And, yes, this was making her feel more grown-up. If they went to a bar, Gori drank beer as usual but Mireia imitated his brother and asked for Bombay gin and tonic.

  From Monday to Friday, Gori enjoyed having some time to recover lost ground after school. Mireia was attentive again, as if predisposed by the classroom and note-taking atmosphere. They went to the music shop to listen to songs with headphones, new releases by Ultravox, Depeche Mode, and Japan. They laughed and shouted till the salesclerk told them off. They wandered round the park, kissed, felt each other up, and then he walked her home. If he sometimes hinted that they could take the sex a bit further—at his place they’d be alone—she always found excuses. Wanted to, wouldn’t do. She was scared of her parents.

  One afternoon, as they were talking, she casually let it drop that Gori’s brother had phoned her from Barcelona. Gori snorted with rage.

  “It’s no big deal,” she said, trying to calm him. “I know your brother’s full of himself.”

  “But do you like him?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I like you both . . . But I think I like you more.”

  Another day, after school, Mireia told Gori that his brother had phoned and invited th
em to go to Barcelona.

  “He said we could go by train on Saturday afternoon and he’ll bring us back by car later on at night. What do you think? We wouldn’t be home too late. It’ll be like a normal Saturday. I’ll make up some excuse for my folks, like I’m studying for the exams with some girlfriends . . .”

  Her voice had a ring of unconscious pleading. Gori forced a smile and said he’d think about it, but he was sure it couldn’t happen. What an asshole his brother was. He knew perfectly well that Gori had to play a decisive soccer game that Saturday.

  In the end, Mireia went to Barcelona alone. When Gori’s brother dropped her home early in the morning with her feelings in turmoil, her parents were waiting up for her with a whole arsenal of accusations and reproaches. They made such a fuss that they only aggravated the emotional mess she was in, which was bad enough already. In a fit of inconsolable weeping, she left them still railing at her and locked herself in her room. Midmorning the next day, Gori roughly woke his brother.

  “So, did you and Mireia have fun?” He was trying to sound sarcastic. His brother gave him a malicious smirk, which said everything, but went on to inform him that things couldn’t go on as they had been.

  “Last night, Gori, when I left Mireia at her place, I told her she has to choose for once and for all. You or me. She’s playing with us and I’m fed up with humoring her. You get it? If she prefers you, fine. I’ll find another girl. If she chooses me, you do the same.”

  That afternoon Gori phoned Mireia but couldn’t speak to her. “I don’t know what you two did to her yesterday”—her father was really worked up—“but one thing’s for sure: you and your brother will never see her again. Assholes!”

  The uncertainty dragged on for a while, as if some outside power was pushing all of them into the inevitable rural drama. At school, during the week, Gori could see that Mireia was off in another world and was ignoring him. She did things automatically, carrying on as if he weren’t there or as if someone were forcing her not to notice him, because if she did, things would only get worse. On Saturdays, when his brother came back from Barcelona, her parents were more watchful than ever and found excuses to stop her from going out: a family dinner, a visit to some cousins who lived far away . . . As tends to happen, the results of this blocking tactic were the opposite of what they wanted, and Gori’s brother’s ultimatum—“him or me”—was taking on terrible dimensions, becoming the unendurable suffocation of intergenerational strife. And one Monday evening while her parents were out shopping, unable to decide or know what she wanted, Mireia got in the bathtub and slit her wrists.

  Two days after that, Gori went to the funeral. And left home forever.

  * * *

  Gori received his brother’s third letter a week later. His name and address were written in the same hand but this time there was no stamp on the envelope. Someone had come and dropped it through his letterbox. Gori opened the door and looked out into the street but saw no one who might be the mysterious postman. Whatever the case, it was unimaginable that his brother would have come there to ask him for a kidney. Inside the envelope, the text was a little different this time: I really need a kidney, Gregori. It’s very urgent now. It has to be one of yours. Tell me what you want. The check, made out to the bearer, confirmed the desperation, because no figure was written: Write it yourself, Gori.

  In thirty years of exile from his family, Gori had received direct news of his brother on three occasions, once per decade. The first time was when his father died, just three years after he’d left, and instead of making him sad, it made him even surer of the decision he’d taken. The family lawyer had moved heaven and earth to find his address in the South of France, only to give him a will certifying that he wasn’t getting anything except the legitim, a pathetic amount, because, before his death, his father had given everything to his big brother.

  One day, more than a decade earlier, he’d had a surprise visit from a Barcelona journalist. This was the second time Gori had news of his brother. It turned out that, at the age of only thirty-five, he’d been appointed to a big job: CEO of an innovative electronics company. The newspaper had just chosen him as its business “revelation of the year,” and the journalist was writing a profile. In his hometown, the lawyer had told him about Gori, “the distant brother,” and now the journalist had come to see him because he was interested in his character’s rough edges. In the world of business, there’s no winner who hasn’t left enemies along the way, he said. Gori was polite but told him he had nothing to say. He didn’t let him take photos either. Since the journalist kept pressing, he finally said that he and his brother had simply gone their separate ways when they were young. He felt no rancor or anything like that. No affection either. Over the years, the blood relationship that had once united them had shrunk into nothing more than a mere whimsy of chance.

  The journalist left disappointed, but, in the end, these few words had given some critical balance to an excessively laudatory article. Gori read it in the bar one Saturday morning and came to two conclusions. First, he liked being the black sheep of the family, and, second, his brother had aged much worse than he had. Despite the tan he was sporting in the photos, years of constant damage control and bluster had taken their toll.

  Thanks to the journalist’s profile, a lot of people discovered that the great D, man of the moment, had a younger brother. This is what happened with his two daughters who’d never heard of an Uncle Gori. The younger one was the cause of the third occasion Gori had news of his brother. Five years earlier, unknown to her father, she took the occasion of a holiday in the South of France to go and meet her runaway uncle. One morning in August, Gori opened the door to find a girl who looked a lot like his mother. He was dumbfounded! His niece set about trying to bond with Gori by badmouthing her father—a despot, she said. Ever since she’d first heard of him, he’d become a legend for her, the image of freedom she summoned up whenever she was trying to escape from family pressures. Once, in the middle of an argument with her father, she’d said, “One day I’m going to get away, like my uncle did!” Then he really read her the riot act.

  Gori didn’t pay too much attention to his niece’s words, although deep down he felt smug. He was dismayed that his long-gone past should crop up again so unexpectedly, but he also told himself that, if it had to happen, it was better like that, in the form of the girl’s rebellion. When they said goodbye, he promised her they’d phone from time to time, or at least he’d return her calls. But then, when the time came, he didn’t. It would have felt like betraying himself.

  The day Gori received the third letter, someone knocked at his door in the evening. Opening it, he saw his niece.

  “Hi, Uncle Gori. Can I come in?”

  She’d delivered the letter and now she’d come to ask him to help her father. She believed she was the only family tie between the two of them and, feeling this strongly, thought she had to try. Her father’s condition was worsening. It was no joke. He really needed a kidney, so please forget about his arrogance. Gori heard her out without a single interruption. He felt relieved. This had been going on too long. If it was amusing in the beginning, now it was getting annoying. When the girl went quiet, he finally gave her the answer he’d been savoring all along.

  “Tell your father I’m sorry but I can’t give him a kidney. I’ve only got one,” he said. “I had surgery a year and a half ago. Must be genetic.”

  CONSOLATION PRIZE

  An Analogical Tale

  He lets the dog off its leash, whereupon it madly rushes up and down, from one tree to another, capering about and rolling in the damp grass. It’s almost midnight and, at this hour, cool in the park. The sensation of solitude is heightened because it’s almost deserted and the only sound is the disciplined swishing of a distant sprinkler. Now and then, at the end of one of the narrow paths around which the park is structured, he can make out the silhouette of a pedestrian taking a shortcut on the way home, or the shadow of some night-owl sm
oker sitting all alone on a bench. It’s quite a discreet park with no bars fencing it off and the surrounding streets are some distance away, sufficiently hidden for him not to have to worry about the safety of the six-month-old truly kamikaze pup.

  It’s not even a month since Ibon adopted him. One afternoon after work, not yet totally convinced, he went to the municipal dog pound. Checking out the cages amid a chorus of mournful whines and howls, he noticed that he was being watched by the doleful eyes of a small mongrel with a coat of different burnt umber tones (which is probably why he called it Whisky). He immediately saw himself reflected there, the same forlorn expression of a man adrift, which had been petrifying on his face for some time now. It was as if the sedentary life he led totally naturally, without complications but also without major happiness, had decided to sound an alarm.

  Ibon chooses a bench in the park and sits down, keeping an eye on the giddy pup. He calls him from time to time and Whisky obediently trots over for a few seconds but then sniffs out something and is off again. The scene wouldn’t be remarkable if another dog hadn’t appeared just then, a weary, old, slow-moving German shepherd with his owner ambling along behind him with the same listless air. Maybe dogs and their owners do end up resembling each other over time. The stranger (but Ibon will soon discover that he’s called Emili) stops under a lamppost and lights a cigarette. He’s taking his time and, as he goes past Ibon—perhaps prompted by the involuntarily furtiveness of the encounter—stops to say hello. With an automatic gesture, Ibon pulls out his earphones and turns off his Walkman (putting an end to muffled crackling noises) and says hello back. Emili sits on the bench. Without forcing things, they exchange a few pleasantries about dogs and then introduce themselves. Ibon, Emili, plus a series of increasingly personal questions and answers fill ten minutes of conversation. They both live in the neighborhood, go to the same supermarket (but have never seen each other as far as they can recall), and read the same newspaper (but buy it in different newsstands, equidistant from the park).