by jordi Nopca
Àngels Quintana and Fèlix Palme had to try their luck even beyond the city limits, moving to Hospitalet. They’d been renting an apartment in Hostafrancs for almost two decades, but a few months back they’d had to move to a dirty, narrow street with poor access to public transport, which ironically bore the name of an engineer. They had met when they were both twenty-one, at a training course in a hotel in Platja d’Aro. Fèlix hadn’t been lucky in his career, and he soon accepted that he’d have to take one temporary contract after another in cheaper hotels, where the biggest challenge was keeping the plagues of insects at bay. He wore his hair pulled back in a ponytail, which he let down when he wasn’t working. Outside of work, he also wore leather and steel-toe boots; that way, if he ever had to kick someone, he would cause a little more damage. Àngels had always been more tenacious than Fèlix, and for years she had worked as a hostess for all sorts of events. After that, she had been at a few hotels, where she cleaned rooms and served breakfasts. She had even been a receptionist at a private museum for an entire year. The man who hired her gave her just one condition: While she was behind the desk, helping visitors and answering the phone—“It will ring a lot,” he warned her—she had to keep the two dragon tattoos on her arm covered up.
Since they’d been together, Àngels and Fèlix had spent a good chunk of their income on going out. They both liked whiskey and bars where they could get drunk listening to Alice Cooper, W.A.S.P., and AC/DC. When “Highway to Hell” came on, they would drift away from their friends and exchange lustful kisses.
“Another shot of Ballantine’s!” he would shout out in English.
The barmen already knew his expert vocabulary and tolerated his Anglicisms. But Àngels and Fèlix really only knew enough to order a wide range of alcoholic drinks and find out how many nights clients would be staying at the hotel and whether they wanted to pay in cash or with a credit card. Still, when they howled “My single room is hot!” or “Pour me another tequila,” their friends were dazzled by their cosmopolitanism.
“You guys are amazing. If I were you, I’d move to London and do whatever it took to make it work. I bet you guys would do better there than a lot of brainiacs,” encouraged Victor, who earned a very good living as a stevedore in the port.
They never took their friend’s words seriously, and Victor had up and died one Sunday morning five years back from a brain hemorrhage in the shower.
“At least he didn’t suffer,” commented some of his relatives at the wake.
Meanwhile, Sílvia, his last girlfriend, was smoking one cigarette after the other out in front of the building, which was a neutral, aseptic, and profoundly disturbing space. If she had taken off her sunglasses, everyone would have seen her bloodshot eyes—she had overdone it with the tranquilizers again.
###
When they turned forty, Àngels Quintana and Fèlix Palme started to have a tougher time finding work. Their profiles were increasingly distant from what most hotels and bars were looking for. Barcelona wanted to transmit youth. Tattoos only looked good on fifteen- to thirty-five-year-old skin. Fèlix gave up before Àngels did; his problems with alcohol helped in that.
“The shitty little hotels have raised the bar, too. … Seems I’m already a dinosaur,” he muttered to himself, about to cry, the day he was let go.
Before coming home, Fèlix had bought two bottles of Ballantine’s at the supermarket. He had drunk half of one in a public park, and stopped when he sensed there were cops nearby. He’d continued drinking at home with total self-abandon and, as such, excessively. Àngels found him lying on the sofa, about to start in on the second bottle.
“Angie, sweetie,” he began. “The shitty little hotels have raised the bar, too. … Seems I’m already a dinosaur.”
The dinosaur started to cry lukewarm, disconsolate tears. To calm him a little, Àngels had to drink some whiskey, too.
“The world wants us to die out.”
“Maybe tomorrow will be a better day.”
They fell asleep, holding each other, on the Turkish rug in the living room that friends had brought them from Istanbul some years back.
Àngels continued serving beer, vermouth, olives, and spicy diced potatoes in the Barceloneta until, three months after Fèlix was last laid off, her boss replaced her with a nineteen-year-old Dominican girl whose sinuous hips and low-cut T-shirts were decisive points in the decision-making process.
“That bastard chose the little slut over me,” she told Fèlix over the phone. “He just fired me.”
“You want me to bust his face?”
Àngels knew that Fèlix was incapable of hurting anyone. And she didn’t think a few slaps—much less a real beating—would get her boss to change his mind.
“No need,” she replied. “I’m heading home.”
The next day was one for marking territory. Fèlix shored up the sofa, pretending to be following a talk show that spent an hour commenting on the problems at a new train station and another hour talking about medicinal plants. Àngels had to settle for the room where they kept their books, records, and ironing board. She sank into an armchair that was usually covered in clothes and tried to read, but she got bored. She couldn’t advance more than ten lines without her concentration flying out the window.
A week later, she started looking for work in bars near their apartment. She was lucky they didn’t hire her. Their atmospheres were either depressing (men whose wives had just left them) or too sordid (men who took liberties after the second drink). It was early 2011, and the recession, which had officially begun two years earlier, was really starting to sink its teeth in. Àngels worked for a few months at a restaurant off the highway, near Castelldefels. Soon after she lost her job, Fèlix’s unemployment ran out. That was when they had to put their heads together and make a decision about giving up the apartment in Hostafrancs.
“We’re moving to Hospitalet,” said Àngels the night they said good-bye to their friends at a bar with country music and a cowboy aesthetic.
“Hostafrancs is too much dough. It’s getting yuppified,” added Fèlix.
“A toast to you two!”
“Good luck!”
The half a dozen friends lifted their beer mugs at the same time and clanked them together over the center of the table. Two hours later, when they were leaving the bar, their heads foggy, they promised to see one another soon and went home fairly quickly, as the men needed to take another piss.
###
The apartment they rented on the narrow street that bore the engineer’s name was close to a gas station and a Fecsa electrical utility office.
“Hey, look at that. We’re guaranteed a violent death,” said Fèlix one Sunday morning when they went out for some vermouth and olives at a bar with outdoor tables right across from the electrical fortress.
“Highway to hell!” exclaimed Àngels right before letting out a deep laugh that aspired to being diabolical.
Considering that Fèlix still didn’t seem willing to resume work, Àngels had to pull out all the stops to convince him that he couldn’t just stay home forever. They both started knocking on doors of bars and restaurants all over the metropolitan area. “I’m here to offer my services. … I have a lot of experience in this sector.” He got lucky first. They hired him as a waiter for the lunch shift at a place on the Ramblas. The excessive number of tourists put Fèlix’s bare-bones English to the test, and he sometimes lost his cool and had to go to the bathroom, where he took a sip on the flask of whiskey he hid in one of his pants pockets. Their generous tips compensated for his effort—at least that’s how it was for the first month.
Àngels also found work. She was serving drinks in a bar near the Plaça Universitat, where most of the clients were students in the Literature and Language Department.
“They think they’re going to be famous authors, and they’re barely tall enough to see over the bar,” said her coworker one day. His name was Jose and his expression was always disgusted.
�
�The math majors are worse. One time one of them fell asleep in the bathroom filling pages with formulas. I found him when I was cleaning up. … It really freaked me out.”
Even though at the start she found them a bit arrogant, Àngels would have liked to have more contact with the university students. There were some evenings when she would linger a little as she brought their beers, eavesdropping on the thread of conversations and imagining how they would continue when she went back behind the bar. Generally, they weren’t much to write home about, but the considerable resourcefulness of her brain—stimulated by her beer consumption—allowed her to construct improbable stories. Jose would crack up laughing when she explained them to him.
Her domestic panorama was less entertaining. Fèlix got fired from the restaurant on the Ramblas after working there less than two months.
“They say my behavior is aggressive,” he explained to Àngels over the phone.
His sluggish voice indicated he’d been drinking for hours already.
“Are you okay, Fèlix?”
In the background she could hear strident voices and a television blaring.
“Do you need me to come pick you up?”
“What, you think I’m a baby, Angie? See ya later.”
Fèlix hung up the phone and kept getting drunker. He didn’t show up at home until noon the next day. He stretched out on the bed in his street clothes, even though that was one of Àngels’s pet peeves, and when they saw each other again that evening, he was remorseful, but unable to explain why they’d fired him.
“You told me they’d given you the sack for aggressive behavior. Did you get in a fight with somebody?”
“Where’d you get that idea from?”
“From you. You told me that.”
“I was joking.”
“It didn’t sound like it to me.” “That wasn’t it, Angie.”
Fèlix had lost his patience with a group of ten Norwegians. They’d reserved some outdoor tables, but when they sat down, they were horrified by all the sun. They didn’t try to hide their irritation as they demanded new tables.
“You have to wait fifteen minutes,” Fèlix had had to admit.
“Outdoors? No way!”
The man acting as spokesperson for the group had demanded to speak with Fèlix’s supervisor. He alleged that Norwegians were very sensitive to the sun, and pointed to a woman who was scratching her reddened arms. It was obvious her sunburn predated the five minutes they’d spent at the restaurant’s outdoor tables. Despite this, Fèlix had gone, with no objections, to look for the manager as he imagined the long walk the Norwegians had probably taken along the port. They must have stopped at the terrace of some bar, unable to resist trying the vermouth and the cockles with spicy sauce.
The two sides came to an agreement quickly. The group could be seated at two tables that were reserved for three in the afternoon.
“That’s still at least fifteen minutes off. When the other party arrives, we’ll offer them the tables outside, talk them up a little. We can sell it as a VIP spot, with sea views, even though you can hardly glimpse the water from here. Got it? The idea is to create a reality that serves us.”
Like he’d done so many other times, the manager took the opportunity to lecture Fèlix, who had to bite his tongue until after he’d taken the Norwegians’ order. All ten of them opted for the eleven-euro prix fixe menu, but they ordered three bottles of red wine that added up to the price of another meal. Fèlix went into a small cellar to find them, in the same room where they hid the cleaning products. He took a long sip of whiskey from his flask, and as luck would have it, three drops slid down his neck and soiled his white shirt. When he went back out to the dining room, the spokesman for the Norwegians noticed the stain and made a comment to his companions, who looked at the waiter with peeved expressions. Fèlix was still uncorking the first bottle when one of the three women in the group condemned him for drinking. Just catching three words—drinking, work, and nasty—was enough to send him spiraling out of control. First, he dumped a quarter of the bottle of wine over the woman’s head, and when the spokesman stood up from his chair, both hands in the air, crying out for justice and about to strangle the waiter, Fèlix stepped toward him and splattered his shirt with the remaining wine.
Àngels didn’t know anything about that until a few days later. She waited until Fèlix was half passed out drunk on the sofa to interrogate him a little. Her boyfriend ended up confessing that after attacking the Norwegians, he had punched the manager. Instead of running away, he had stood there and taken the rain of insults. He knew that way, he was much less likely to get reported to the police.
“Proud of yourself, Fèlix? I would be dying of shame, personally,” she complained as she stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray.
On TV, a group of guests on a talk show spoke about the most recent austerity measures suggested by the European Central Bank.
###
Àngels continued serving beer and little plates of fried potatoes topped with spicy tomato sauce and garlic aioli to the Literature and Language Department students. Fèlix no longer had any intention of finding work. In addition to getting drunk, he would occasionally leave the house and go back to Hostafrancs. At first, he would spend his time there strolling nostalgically, but one day he walked all the way to Les Corts and, suddenly indignant over the haughtiness of a woman flaunting a little Pekinese in a public park, he grabbed the leash from her and ran off with the dog in his arms. He ended up tossing the animal into a trash can, aware that he was incapable of taking things any further. The woman was able to get her pet back with the help of a couple of policemen. When asked to describe the delinquent, she repeated the word Romanian three times, even though she admitted she hadn’t seen his face at any point.
“Don’t worry, ma’am. We’ll find the man responsible,” said one of the officers. The other nodded his head. They forgot about the case as soon as they’d crossed the first street.
A few days later, Fèlix acted again, this time in Pedralbes. He circled various blocks of homes, searching for doormen he could mess with. He was planning to steal a uniform jacket and try it on somewhere far from the site of the theft. He gave up on the idea after a little while, shortly after bumming a cigarette from a passerby. As he smoked leaning against a streetlight, he saw a police car appear and felt he was being observed by the two officers inside it. Fèlix knew that even before he’d committed any wrongdoing, they were already convinced he was “a leech, a loser, a roughneck.”
That night, while they ate dinner, he described the scene in detail to Àngels.
“And what were you doing in Pedralbes?” she asked pointedly.
“I was taking a walk.”
“A walk. Great. Instead of looking for work, you’re going for walks.”
“That’s right, princess.”
Having said that, Fèlix got up from his chair and went over to the sofa. Later, he refused to go to bed, and when Àngels got up the next morning, she found him sleeping on the floor by the sofa. He’d probably fallen. Despite sleeping deeply, his hand was wrapped tightly around a nearly empty bottle of whiskey.
“We’ve got problems,” said Àngels, scratching her thigh.
Fèlix continued snoring until noon. He got up remorseful and went to buy some fish at the market and a nice white wine at the only fine foods shop in the neighborhood. That afternoon, he cooked sole meunière and mussels with tomatoes, garlic, and fresh parsley. When Àngels came home from the bar, the house smelled so good that she soon forgave Fèlix.
After the meal, they went into the bedroom. The couple merely held each other, the lights off. He promised he would start looking for work again. She ran a hand through his hair, which he’d washed days of accumulated grease out of that evening, and told him that she loved him.
But one flower does not a springtime make. Fèlix kept drinking too much whiskey and venturing out into various neighborhoods of Barcelona. He spent a day in Gràcia stickin
g bananas into the exhaust pipes of a dozen motorcycles that he believed belonged to designers and pseudointellectuals (for him, a pseudointellectual was either a journalist or a high school teacher). Once the coast was clear for his mission, he rammed a banana into the exhaust pipe, proclaimed some incomprehensible slogan, and continued walking. He stored the rest of his arsenal in a backpack he’d used for hiking trips into the mountains with a group of friends when he was twenty years old. Every time he opened or closed it, he remembered one of those endless, exasperating hikes. He’d stopped going because he’d never been able to win over any of the girls he would fall in love with first thing in the morning and then forget when he said good-bye to them at the metro station or, with a little luck, in front of their homes. He had never gotten anything from those girls, not even one of those hugs that are compassionate and miserable at the same time.
The banana formula was so satisfying that he continued to employ it during his next few criminal excursions. He plugged up exhaust pipes at various points along the Diagonal, starting in Poblenou and ending in the Zona Universitària. Later, he attacked the Gothic Quarter, where he urinated in dirty plazas, and later Sant Gervasi and then Sarrià again. Then one day when he went to buy raw material at a fruit store in his neighborhood, the vendor looked at him askance and asked, “Whaddya want with all these bananas?”