The Secret of Evil

by Roberto Bolaño

  There could be something invigorating about that table, seen from the kitchen, at seven-thirty or eight in the morning. The plates and the mugs and the bowls and the packets that looked like NASA rations seemed to be saying: “Go out into the street. The day is full of promise. The world is young and so are you.” My brother would sit at that table and open a pamphlet containing the complete works of some Pre-Socratic philosopher, or a magazine, and while his right hand was busy with a spoon or a fork, his left hand would turn the pages.

  “Listen to what this son of a bitch Diogenes of Apollonia says.”

  I’d keep quiet and wait for him to speak, doing my best to look attentive.

  “ ‘When beginning any account, it seems to me that one should make the starting point incontrovertible and the style simple and dignified.’ How do you like that?”

  “It sounds reasonable.”

  “It’s fucking reasonable all right!”

  After breakfast my brother helped me to take the dishes to the kitchen and then he went to work. From the age of sixteen he’d been working at Fonollosa Brothers Auto Repairs, near Plaza Molina, in a neighborhood where people have expensive, complicated cars to fix. I’d stay home a while longer, watching TV or reading one of the Pre-Socratics (we did the dishes at night) and then I’d go to work, that is to the Academía Malú; the name makes it sound like a school (a school for whores, my brother used to say), though in fact it’s a hairdressing salon.

  Why was my brother so rude about the Academía Malú? The answer’s simple but it’s a sore point. My friend or ex-friend Montse García worked there; Enric went out with her for a month or so, two at the most, till Montse decided that they weren’t right for each other. At least that’s how she explained it to me when they split up. My brother just mumbled something incomprehensible and from then on, whenever the Academía came up, he always made some snide or obscene remark.

  “But what happened with you and Montse?” I asked him one night.

  “Nothing,” said my brother. “We were incompatible. It’s none of your business.”

  My brother was like that, and the death of our parents just made it worse. Sometimes, from my room, I could hear him talking to himself: We’re orphans, that’s an irrefutable fact, and we have to get used it, he’d say. And then he’d repeat it, over and over, obsessively, like someone who’s forgotten the real words to a song: We’re orphans, we’re orphans, etc. At times like that I wanted to hug him, or get up and take him a mug of hot milk, but that would’ve only made it worse; my brother would’ve broken down crying for sure, and after a while I’d have started crying too. So I never got out of bed, and he’d go on talking to himself until he was finally overtaken by sleep.

  But in the morning I’d sometimes try to reason with him: “We’re not the only orphans in the world. And anyway, to be an orphan, I mean a real orphan, I think you have to be a minor, and we’re not minors any more.”

  “You are, Marta,” he’d say, “and it’s my duty to look after you.”

  According to Montse García, my brother was immature. I only went out with them twice when they were together, both times because my brother asked me to, and on both occasions I was able to confirm the accuracy of my friend’s or ex-friend’s judgment. The first time we went to see a movie by Almodóvar. Enric suggested a Van Damme movie, but Montse and I refused. We were late because of the argument, and when we arrived the cinema was dark, the film had started, and my brother decided, absurdly, not to sit with us. The second time we went to the gym, the Rosales gym in Calle Bonaventura, right near our place, where my brother works out every day. It wasn’t that he didn’t make an effort; this time, he was trying too hard. He wanted us to see him inserted into all the gym’s contraptions, and in the end one of them nearly decapitated him. I’m fond of my brother, but there are limits, like the doors of the Rosales gym. I’ve never been able to stand bodybuilders; my idea of handsome may keep shifting unreliably, as my brother says, but it has never taken the form of a hulk. I should say that Montse García was with me on this, although at the time she was interested in my brother, and he’d been bodybuilding since he was sixteen (he started just after he got the job at the auto repair shop). I think it was one of the guys from his work, by the name of Paco Contreras, who got him into it. This Paco competed in various bodybuilding championships in Catalonia and then he moved to Dos Hermanas in Andalusia, where he died. Sometimes my brother would get a letter from him and read one or two sentences to me. Then he’d put the letters in a little chest that he kept under his bed, the only place in the house where things could be kept under lock and key. According to Montse, this Paco had perverted my brother. I told her the story myself and regretted it immediately. My brother may be many things but he isn’t stupid, and certainly not simple (who is, really?), and yet the story, the way I told it, badly or partially, did made him look stupid. I never met Paco Contreras. According to my brother, he was an amazing guy, the best friend he’d ever have, etc., etc. So when Montse said that this Paco had perverted my brother, I told her she was wrong, Enric was a serious, responsible, clean-living person, the best brother I’d ever have.

  “Well, what else could you say, you poor thing?”

  Sometimes I wanted to kill her. But I did everything I could to make things work out between her and Enric. I preferred them to go out on their own, of course, though if it had been up to my brother, I’ve have gone along every time. A week after they started going out, Montse and I went to the bathroom at the Academía Malú and she asked me if my brother was sick.

  “He’s super-fit,” I said.

  “Well, something’s not right,” she said, and declined to elaborate, although I knew what she was referring to.

  This happened a few months after the death of our parents. Montse was the first girl my brother had been out with. And there haven’t been any others since. Sometimes I think that he must have been feeling alone and a bit lost in the world. Our parents died in a bus accident, on the way from Barcelona to Benidorm, setting off for their first vacation on their own. My brother was very close to them. So was I, but in a different way. The official who met us at the morgue in Benidorm (he was dressed like a pathologist, though I don’t think he actually was one) told us that our parents’ bodies had been found holding hands, and that it had been quite a job to separate them.

  “It made an impression on us all, and I thought you’d like to know,” he said.

  “They must have been asleep at the time of the crash,” said my brother. “They liked to sleep holding hands.”

  “And how do you know that?” I asked.

  “It’s the kind of thing an older brother knows,” said the official or the pathologist.

  “I saw them, lots of times,” said my brother with tears brimming in his eyes.

  Later, when we were in the hospital cafeteria, waiting for the papers so we could take our parents back to Barcelona, he said that it was all because of the calcination. He said that the crash must have caused an explosion, and the explosion would have produced a fireball hot enough to fuse the hands of our deceased progenitors.

  “They would have had to use a saw to separate them.”

  He said this in a cold, offhand way, but I knew that my brother was suffering as he had never suffered before. So when he started going out with Montse García a few months later, I think one night I even prayed that he’d sleep with her and that they’d form some kind of lasting relationship. But what happened is that Montse, who h
ad seemed keen before she went out with him, gradually cooled off and then she got bitter, and by the time they broke up sixty days later, she was treating me as an enemy, as if I were to blame for the disappointments of her short-lived romance. When she finally decided to break it off, our relationship improved markedly for a few days, and I even thought that we could go back to being good friends like before. But Enric’s shadow kept coming between us whenever I tried to get close to her again.

  “It can’t be healthy to spend all day at the gym. Why would a guy want muscles like that, anyway? It isn’t normal,” she said to me one day.

  “He also reads the Pre-Socratic philosophers,” I replied.

  “Like I said, your brother’s not right in the head. You be careful. One night you might find him in your room with a knife, about to cut your throat.”

  “My brother is a kind person; he wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

  “You’re an idiot, Marta,” she said, and that was the end of our friendship.

  From then on, we only spoke to each other when it was strictly necessary for work: Pass me some clips, can I have the dryer, can you get that color down?

  What a pity.

  II.

  One night my brother turned up with Tomé and Florencio. He’d never invited anyone home: not when our parents were alive, and not in the months since they died. At first I thought they were two friends from the gym but I only had to take a second look to realize that these guys didn’t work out.

  “They’ll be staying here tonight,” my brother said in the kitchen. We were getting dinner ready, and Florencio and Tomé were channel-surfing in the living room.

  “Where?” I said. It’s a small flat, and there’s no guest room.

  “In Mom and Dad’s bedroom,” he said, looking away.

  He must have been expecting me to protest, but I thought it was a good idea, though maybe I was a bit surprised that I hadn’t come up with it myself. Of course: our parents’ empty bedroom. That was fine by me. I asked him who they were, where he’d met them, what they did.

  “At the gym. They’re South Americans.”

  We had salad and grilled steak for dinner.

  Florencio and Tomé looked like they were nearly thirty, but I knew they’d look like that until they were fifty. They were hungry and they sampled every concoction my brother laid out on the table. I don’t know if they were aware of the immense honor he was doing them, putting his stock of supplements at their disposal. I asked them if they were bodybuilders too.

  “We do fitness training,” said Tomé.

  “Do you know what that is?” asked Florencio.

  I don’t like people thinking I’m stupid. Or ignorant, which is worse.

  “Of course I know what it is; my brother’s been going to the gym since he was sixteen,” I said, and immediately wished I’d kept my mouth shut.

  Florencio and Tomé laughed in unison, and then my brother laughed as well. I asked them what was so funny. My brother looked at me, lost for words, with an expression of utter bewilderment, but also of happiness, on his face.

  “Feisty, aren’t you?” said Florencio.

  “Very feisty,” said Tomé.

  “She’s always had a strong character, my sister,” said Enric.

  “And you’ve worked all this out from what I said about fitness training?”

  “From the way you said it. Looking me in the eye. Sure of yourself,” said Florencio.

  “If I had my tarot pack here, I’d do a reading for you,” said Tomé.

  “So you do fitness training and tarot readings?”

  “And a few other things as well,” said Tomé.

  Florencio and my brother laughed again. But in my brother’s case it was, I realized, nervous rather than happy laughter. He was worried, although he was trying to hide it. The two South Americans, however, seemed relaxed, as if they were used to sleeping in a different house every night.

  I finished eating before they did and went off to my bedroom and shut the door. My brother came to tell me there was a good movie on, but I said I had to get up early. I wasn’t sleepy. I took off my shoes and flopped onto the bed, still dressed, with the complete works of Xenophanes of Colophon (“For all things are from earth and in earth all things end”), until I heard them get up from the table. First they went to the kitchen, washed the dishes, laughed again (what was there in the kitchen that could have made them laugh?) and then they came back to the living room and started watching something on TV. I can’t remember falling asleep. But I do remember this: a sentence from Xenophanes (“He sees as a whole, he thinks as a whole, he hears as a whole”) which for some reason I found unsettling. I was woken by noises from my brother’s room. At first, although the light was still on in my room, I didn’t know where I was. Then I heard the shouting and the moaning. It was my brother moaning, I was absolutely sure of that. And one of the South Americans was shouting (in an urgent, imperious, affectionate way), but I couldn’t tell which one of them it was. I got undressed, put on my nightie, and for a while I just lay there listening and thinking. I tried to read Xenophanes, but I couldn’t get past the following sentence or fragment: “wild cherry.” It made me feel very sad. Then I got up and tried to hear what the South American was saying. With my ear to the wall I could hear the odd word or sentence (in a way it was like reading the fragments of Xenophanes): “that’s the way,” “nice and tight,” “careful,” “slowly.” Then I went back to bed and fell asleep. In the morning, for the first time in I don’t know how many years, my brother didn’t have breakfast with me.

  I thought they’d done something to him; I knocked on his door. After a while he said to come in. The room smelt of the hair-removal cream my brother uses. I asked him if he was sick. He said no, he was fine, but he thought he’d go to work a bit later.

  “And the South Americans?”

  “In Mom and Dad’s room, sleeping. We stayed up late last night.”

  “I heard you,” I said. “You went to bed with one of them.”

  My brother surprised me by laughing.

  “Did we wake you up?”

  “No, I woke up anyway, I was feeling restless, then I heard you. By chance. I wasn’t spying on you.”

  “Well, it’s no big deal. Let me get a bit more sleep.”

  I stood there, frozen, watching him, not knowing what to do or say, until I heard voices in Mom and Dad’s room and then I turned around and walked out of the apartment without having breakfast. I worked all morning in a daze, as if I was the one who hadn’t gotten any sleep. At midday I went to have lunch at a Chinese restaurant where some of the other girls from the Academía Malú used to go and then I went walking in the streets around Plaza de España. I thought about when I was seven and my brother was sixteen and he was the person I loved most in the world. One time he told me that his dream was to play Maciste when he grew up. I had no idea who Maciste was, so he showed me a picture of him in a movie magazine. I didn’t like him. You’re much better looking, I said, and he looked pleased and smiled. Then, for some reason, as I was walking around, I remembered him hugging Mom and Dad, giving them all his pay, taking me to the movies (though we never went to see a Maciste film), and doing little poses in front of the mirror in the elevator.

  I must have been feeling terrible that afternoon — though I can’t really remember; I know I was thinking about my brother and our apartment, and my mental images of him and of it seemed to be shackled, sunken, black and white, irreparable — and it must have b
een obvious because even Montse García came over to ask if there was something wrong.

  “What could possibly be wrong?” I said. I guess I must have said it in a way that sounded aggressive, although I didn’t mean to.

  “Maybe that brother of yours has been horrible to you,” said Montse.

  “Enric is going through a rough patch, but he’s gradually getting it together,” I replied. “He’s trying to find his way, which is more than you can say for some.”

  From the way Montse looked at me I guessed that she still felt something for him.

  “Your brother’s a bad person, seriously,” she said. “He’s never satisfied with anything, but he doesn’t know what he wants. He’ll screw things up for everyone else just to make himself happy, but the thing is he doesn’t know how to be happy. Am I making myself clear?”

  “I could kill you sometimes,” I said.

  “I know it’s not easy to hear this stuff. But you’re alone in the world, Marta, and you have to watch out for yourself. I like you. You’re a good person and that’s why I’m saying this, although I know you’re not going to listen.”