by jordi Nopca
“What’s that?”
The man furrowed his brow. “Didn’t see the news last night, didja?”
Fèlix shrugged. He felt his stomach stabbing him.
“The banana battalion!” shouted the vendor.
“I don’t know … what you’re talking about.”
“They’re sayin’ it’s a kinda protest. They go ’round shovin’ bananas inna exhaust tubes of cars, bikes, or whatever to screw up the engines. Believe me, it’s no protest; they’re just bastards.”
Fèlix agreed with the man, paid for his bananas, and went home, intrigued to find out how much truth there was in the vendor’s words. He poured himself a drink as he turned on the TV and chose one of those channels where they repeated the same news all day long. No mention of the banana battalion. He was about to start in on his second whiskey when he switched to a talk show. The news was slow in coming, but it did, in the form of a feature story. A reporter stood on the street, explaining that various neighborhoods of Barcelona had suffered vandalism.
“A few years ago, in France, thousands of cars were burned in a matter of weeks, but for the time being this Barcelona protest hasn’t reached such drastic consequences. They are starting to get annoying, though.”
The camera was focused on a motorcycle, and it zoomed in on its exhaust pipe. There was a banana jammed inside.
“Motherfuck,” murmured Fèlix.
From that moment on, the news story told of the proliferation of police reports by drivers during the last few days.
“It may seem like an innocent game, but a simple banana will send you to the mechanic, and then you get hit with the bill,” said a man with a gleaming bald pate and smoky glasses.
The reporter was more than happy to fan the flames with such declarations. She had even gone to the trouble of interviewing the owner of an auto-repair shop, who spoke to her without looking at the camera and wore a jumpsuit stained with oil. He claimed he’d had to deal with five motorcycles for that same reason over the last week. Behind him was a wall calendar with a topless girl. It was from 1988, the same year his second daughter was born.
The last part of the news feature was shot in the cloister of the university’s Literature and Language Department.
“Have you heard tell of the banana battalion?” the journalist asked left and right.
Most of the students had. None of them admitted to be willing to do such a thing to a driver. However, some of them did confess that they thought it wasn’t a terrible way to make a point.
“Are we dealing with a new 15-M movement?” inquired the journalist at the end of the piece. “Is this banana battalion another silent way of saying ‘We’ve had enough,’ from a highly qualified generation of those who still haven’t found their place in a job market that’s turned its back on them?”
By the second third of 2012, youth unemployment in Spain was already close to 50 percent.
“Fuckin’ bullshit,” said Fèlix before changing the channel.
He spent the morning drinking whiskey and watching cartoons. It wasn’t the first time he’d found himself captivated by Doraemon’s inventions. In one of the episodes, the cosmic cat pulled the oblivion fan out of his magic pocket so the mother of Gian, one of Nobita’s friends, wouldn’t remember that her son had failed all his exams and so wouldn’t ground him all Sunday.
While Fèlix Palme lamented not being able to count on Doraemon’s efficient help, Àngels Quintana served beer, spicy diced potatoes, and fried calamari rings. That afternoon, the math major who had fallen asleep in the bathroom while doing his homework came back into the bar. Jose recognized him right away. He served him up a slice of potato omelette—“on the house”—because he wanted his thirst to make him finish his beer quickly and order another one.
“Sooner or later, he’ll have to go to the bathroom. I’m just trying to accelerate the process. We can’t deprive him of his power nap. …”
The young man paid promptly at the bar, with two bites of omelette and a little beer still left.
“What’s the rush, kid?” exclaimed Jose.
“I … I have class.”
“That’s what they all say.”
Àngels was too preoccupied to keep up with her coworker’s joke. She’d seen a report on the midday TV news about some vandals who were stuffing car and motorcycle exhaust pipes with bananas. She had promptly linked it to Fèlix, who over the last few weeks had been buying up overly generous quantities of bananas, and the strangest part was that they disappeared from the fridge from one day to the next. She’d observed his behavior but hadn’t said a word. She’d been more concerned with the fact that lately her boyfriend was ingesting more whiskey than water.
“Why are you doing this?” she shouted at him when she got home that evening.
He was lying on the sofa. She had to give him a good shake to rouse him.
“Fèlix. What’s going on with you? What is this banana thing?”
“How do you know about that?”
“I saw it on the news.”
“You can think whatever you want.”
He tried to get up but couldn’t without Àngels’s help.
“Listen,” he said. “Don’t you see I spend all day drinking? What the fuck can I do with bananas? Start a revolution? I can barely make it to the bathroom. I’m done for, Angie.”
Fèlix dragged himself over to the liquor cabinet to serve himself another dose of whiskey. As it turned out, there was none left, and since he didn’t have the heart to go down to Hafiz’s store—which was open until one in the morning 365 days a year—he just took a slug of anisette straight from the bottle. His repulsed expression was impressive.
“I’m going to bed,” he announced.
“So early? Don’t you want supper?”
“No.”
“Fèlix, please.”
Àngels couldn’t find any more words to say until her boyfriend had already left the room. Then, seeing that she was alone, she figured there was no need, so she went to the kitchen to make herself an omelette with garlic and parsley.
###
Barcelona was going through a complicated moment. Two thousand thirteen had just begun, the year the recession was supposed to hit bottom and the country would begin to slowly recover. The Three Kings tiptoed along the alley bearing the engineer’s name, where Àngels Quintana and Fèlix Palme lived. There were entire families out of work, who felt more lost and more useless with each passing day. There were fifty-year-old men who’d moved back in with their parents. There were kids who had no dinner to eat, and tried to distract their hunger with endless PlayStation or Wii.
The banana battalion had experienced a few weeks of euphoria during the spring of the previous year. A few hundred exhaust pipes had been clogged up by squads of young people. There had been a few arrests, which were widely reported by the media. Some had drawn bananas and the words down with capitalism on a few banks. Fèlix, who had inadvertently started the protests, had taken refuge at home, protected by an arsenal of whiskey. His savings had run out in late November. When he’d realized he was flat broke, he’d gone out to look for work again, but his alcoholism was so evident that the bars where he applied shrugged him off, like a nonsmoker flicking away a bit of ash that accidentally landed on his shirt.
His relationship with Àngels had gone downhill, to the point they weren’t sleeping in the same bed anymore. There were some weekends when she went out with their old friends, but he didn’t want to even hear about it; he stayed home, drinking and watching documentaries on the secrets of the Sargasso Sea or the Malagasy civet, the second-largest carnivore on that African island.
Yesterday had been a holiday in Barcelona. Carnival processions danced through the streets of some neighborhoods. Àngels had managed to persuade Jose to let her slip away from the bar early. She called Fèlix to convince him to come with her to see which extravagant costumes were popular that year. He didn’t want to, but he ended up saying yes.
They met up on Paral·lel a few minutes before the parade began. In the middle of the street, there was a healthy group of superheroes, men in kilts, and bogus army officers, all of whom helped conceal the preponderance of the inevitable cross-dressing sector. When the parade began, a fake firemen’s unit inflamed the female erotic imagination. The young men were buff; they must have just turned eighteen. Every once in a while, squads of majorettes and cheerleaders passed, brightened some men’s eyes, the same ones who, when the Brazilian float appeared—those atop it scantily clad, exuberant, wearing fruity makeup—applauded with their gazes. Àngels was waiting for a reply from a couple of friends, Lídia and Pep. They were due to arrive any minute.
“They’re taking too long,” she kept repeating. “They’re going to miss the whole parade.”
“Maybe they didn’t want to come.”
Fèlix’s mouth was pasty. Luckily, he could camouflage that side effect of the whiskey by sucking on one mint candy after the other.
“What do you know about whether they want to come or not? Did you talk to them?”
“If they were as excited about the idea as I was …”
Àngels ignored his provocation and shifted her gaze toward a dozen young women dressed in orange who were doing a choreographed dance in the middle of the Paral·lel. Their cartilaginous heads and curled tails were clues as to which animal they’d become for a few hours. Despite that, many spectators mistook the seahorses’ aquatic dance for a power play between charming, long-extinct Tyrannosaurus rex.
As the parade was finishing, Àngels’s cell phone started to vibrate. It was their friends. They had just come out of the metro and were looking for them. They disconnected when they located one another, thanks to Pep’s and Fèlix’s raised fists. They hugged as the last float paraded down the avenue, loaded with men and women dressed as farm animals.
Instead of going into a bar, Lídia and Pep decided to run down Paral lel so they could catch the beginning of the procession of floats.
“We heard the floats from Paraguay and Peru are really worth seeing.”
“I didn’t catch which ones they were,” Àngels had to admit. “Did you, Fèlix?”
His uninterested expression was so clear than none of them insisted. But as they walked, Lídia took Àngels’s hand and squeezed it. Pep had gone through a similar rough patch a few months ago, but thanks to group therapy, he hadn’t had another sip of alcohol since. He was more affectionate with their daughter. Unfortunately, he hadn’t found work as a sound technician. That had been his field for the last twenty years, at radio stations, universities, and the occasional small concert venue.
“I’m going home,” said Fèlix when they passed a metro station.
None of them managed to convince him to stay. Half an hour after their somewhat leaden good-bye, he reached the alley named for the engineer, determined to implement the idea that had been obsessing him for weeks. He had first thought of it on New Year’s Eve, after toasting with Àngels while fireworks were going off out on the street. “And what if I just took myself off the map?” he had said to himself. Since then, he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it. That very night, stretched out on the sofa, he’d imagined who would come to his wake and what they would say. Would they explicitly censure his suicide? Would anyone dare speak of heroism? After that not particularly optimistic start to his year, on a couple of occasions he’d taken one or two extra sleeping pills before bed, hoping not to wake up the next morning.
Yesterday, Fèlix had arrived home convinced that it was the moment to end his life, but he’d fallen asleep in front of the TV. He’d drunk half a bottle of whiskey and taken three of Àngels’s Valiums. The bottles sat on the coffee table in front of him. He’d drifted off and dreamed he was cleaning mussels in a restaurant kitchen in New Orleans. He found a pearl inside one and slipped it into his shirt pocket before any of his coworkers realized. Then he faked a migraine so the supervisor would let him go home early. On the way, he pawned the pearl at a shop where he’d done business before, then called Àngels to invite her out for dinner, reserving a table at a nice restaurant on the banks of the Mississippi. Some lobster over rice would help them forget all the problems they’d been having lately. They would return home arm in arm. Fèlix caressed the wad of bills he’d gotten for the pearl. He had them stuffed between his pants and his shirt, like a gun. They were of no use to him when an enormous slimy crocodile showed up and bit off his hand. It was his right hand. The good one. The one he most often used to grab a bottle of whiskey.
“You should be ashamed of yourself.”
Àngels was pointing at him with her index finger. Lately, she’d let her nails grow a little too long, which intensified the threat in her stance.
“What’d I do now?”
“What did I tell you to buy today? Water and toilet paper.” Fèlix remembered the instructions, which he’d received while still lying on the sofa, awake but unable to summon enough strength to get up. “Water and toilet paper. That’s all I’m asking of you,” Àngels insisted.
“I forgot,” he had to admit.
“I knew it!” she exclaimed. “Go now.”
“Now?”
“Fine. Stay here, stretched out on the fucking sofa, like always.”
Fèlix’s attempt to get up was halted by a slap from Àngels.
“Don’t even think about moving,” she said before turning tail and leaving.
She walked the length of the entire alley with the engineer’s name until she reached a wider street. Three corners farther down was Hafiz’s store, and he asked after her husband and was a little disappointed when he saw she was only buying water and toilet paper. He was about to ask her if she wanted some whiskey, but he stopped himself in time: Àngels was crying.
Instead of returning home along the shortest route, she decided to take the roundabout way and let her lungs fill with the February air. There was one part of the street where she would sometimes stop to gather strength when she was feeling bad. The only hitch was that depending on the direction of the wind, it would sometimes carry over the stench of the Dumpsters across the street. Yesterday, she’d sat there for five minutes with no hint of olfactory aggression. She thought about Fèlix’s decline. If they didn’t do something about his problem soon, there would be no turning back. He had to find some kind of job and dig himself out of this hole. Maybe, for the time being, he should start with some group therapy, like Pep had. Then, when he was better, he could rejoin the workforce. There had to be some cheap hotel where he could do something. They could try their luck on the Costa Brava. A change of scenery might do them good.
As she thought, Àngels didn’t realize that a twentysomething guy in a green-and-red costume had approached her, an unlit cigarette hanging from his lips.
“Excuse me, do you have a light?”
Àngels gave a start and said no. Before the guy continued on, she added, “Sorry.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
The green-and-red figure headed toward Hafiz’s store. The devil’s tail that hung from his ass bounced blithely with each step. Once he’d disappeared into the store, Àngels started for home, remembering a warning her grandmother would give her every time they ate watermelon.
“If you swallow the seeds, they might grow inside your belly.”
“And then what?” she would ask.
“You’d have to wait for it to get big enough and then give birth.”
Over time, her grandmother had expanded the story. Once Àngels had the watermelon, she’d have to choose between taking care of it and eating it. She always chose to save it.
“And what if it saw you eating other watermelons?”
“It wouldn’t; I’d keep it in the bathtub, always, floating in freezing-cold water.”
“And what if one of us ate it? Your grandpa? Your dad? What if I ate it?”
“Then I would be sad.”
“But you wouldn’t be able to do
anything about it. What’s done is done.”
Àngels had stopped eating watermelon seeds after that, and after a while she grew tired of that red-fleshed, green-skinned fruit altogether, but the young man in costume had made her think of it again.
At home, before she went into the dining room, she filled up the two empty bottles of water that were on the kitchen’s marble countertop. She put a roll of toilet paper in the holder and all of a sudden she remembered that she had to use the bathroom. When she was done, she went to wake up Fèlix. Even if he grumbled about it, she didn’t want him to sleep on the sofa another night.
The placidness on his face made her immediately suspect something was going on. She took a quick glimpse at the coffee table and saw the empty blister of pills.
“Holy hell,” she said, not knowing how many he’d taken.
Since she couldn’t wake him, she stuck two fingers deep down his throat. He vomited up a strange paste of whiskey, pills, and a bag of potato chips he’d eaten that morning. When he was starting to recover consciousness, she dragged him to the bathroom, put him in the tub, still dressed, and showered him with freezing-cold water. She was convinced that, sooner or later, that watermelon would be fine.
A MAN WITH A FUTURE
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d, For ever panting, and for ever young …
—John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
For the last two nights, I’ve been sleeping behind the door, stretched out on a precarious mattress, the same one my aunt Hermínia slept on when she used to live with us, and would leave her dentures everywhere around the apartment. It’s my only inheritance, that and her three sets of sheets. Aunt Hermínia suffered a long, slow decline that took hold in our home but led her to a nursing home in a small town on the coast, to a room with views of the sea. She said that on some nights the water would come in under the window and dampen her slippers. She could only stop the flood by howling. The nurses were pretty fed up with Aunt Hermínia. The day they found her dead underneath her bed, they called my parents first thing in the morning. I don’t know what sickened them more, her demise or having to leave—only for three days—the impenetrable fortress they’d retired to five years earlier, surrounded by country fields my father did his best to keep green and filled with life.