Come On Up

by jordi Nopca

  “I was worried about you. You’re one of my favorite customers.” The other two were sleeping in one corner of the bar, next to the pinball machine. And he added, “Those civilized countries aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. I would never go to Sweden; it’s too fucking cold and you could get sick.”

  “I’m going home,” Carhartt said to him.

  He paid for the drink without adding his usual tip.

  As soon as he’d left the bar, he realized that he wouldn’t be going back for a long time. That is, if he ever went back. Maybe it was his final farewell.

  ###

  It wasn’t even nine-thirty when he got home and locked the apartment door behind him, but Fornarina was already sleeping. The next day, Carhartt brought her breakfast in bed.

  “Your brother called yesterday,” she told him, without a hint of recrimination. Before her father died, she would sporadically complain about how little attention Carhartt paid to his family.

  “Okay.”

  He left the bedroom and holed up in the kitchen to call Ricard. The conversation was short, but the news Ricard had given him was big enough that it was the first thing he mentioned when he went back into the bedroom.

  “They just had a baby.”

  “And what’d they name it?”

  “Onofre.”

  “That’s kind of a weird name. …”

  “That’s the style these days, Forn.”

  “Anyhow, that’s good news: We have a nephew.”

  “We have a nephew, yeah.”

  They got dressed and went to buy a portable video game console for little Onofre. At the hospital, they found Roser and Ricard, their eyes flecked with emotion. They talked to Roser’s parents and aunt and uncle, very obliging folks they’d never had the chance to really get to know. When they left the elevator, they ran into Carhartt’s parents, who were going up to see their grandson with an enormous bag, where they’d stuffed various showy, bulky gifts. Maria hugged her son ardently. Gervasi just gave him a couple pats on the shoulder, as if it were he and not Ricard who’d just had a baby.

  “It’s so wonderful!” shouted Maria as she hugged Fornarina, who accepted Maria’s enthusiasm without offering even a bit of warmth in return. “Been a while since we’ve seen each other.”

  They had some time in the hallway as they tried to sum up the three months it had been since the last family gathering: They asked if Carhartt had found work, they once again lamented Fornarina’s father’s death—the day of the burial they had been so effusive, it seemed that their displays of pain were comedy—they kept asking questions until they gleaned that the portable video console they’d brought as a gift for little Onofre was on sale, and, finally, that Fornarina had lost her job.

  “You guys are going through a rough moment. I’m so sorry,” said Carhartt’s mother.

  “Not at all: We’re better than ever,” responded Carhartt calmly and confidently, not rushing his words.

  “Problems are no longer important,” explained Fornarina.

  “We have each other.”

  “Carhartt quit drinking and left his lover. I don’t need to take antidepressants anymore. When I get into bed, I just close my eyes and forget everything.”

  Her last comment had left Carhartt’s parents stunned. Had they lost their minds? Had they joined a sect? They kept those questions, and others, to themselves, convinced that further examination of the mental health of their son and his girlfriend should be carried out in a more private setting. After saying good-bye, as Carhartt and Fornarina headed off holding hands, Carhartt’s parents look at each other suspiciously. They would speak about it immediately after visiting little Onofre. Those two were not on the right path. They seemed like zombies.

  ###

  They hadn’t yet crossed the first stoplight after leaving the hospital when Fornarina let go of Carhartt’s hand.

  “I have good news.”

  “More?”

  “I haven’t told you any yet.”

  “Sorry: I must have imagined it, that you told me you loved me.”

  “I love you, Car, but that’s not news. It’s reality.”

  The comment was not accompanied by any display of physical affection. They continued walking to the metro without opening their mouths, and right after entering the house, Fornarina stood in front of Carhartt.

  “I have good news,” she said.

  “Me, too.”

  “Me first. Tomorrow I have an interview with the manager of an appliance store.”

  “That’s impossible. With the manager of an appliance store? Since when do you know how to do my job?”

  Fornarina hesitated a few seconds before responding: “I misspoke, Car. I meant that I have an interview in an office. They need a secretary.”

  “Really? That’s wonderful.”

  Carhartt’s comment was spilled like a glass of water on a red-and-white-checkered tablecloth. “I’m sure you’ll have some luck soon, too.”

  “I already have.”

  “Now it’s my turn.”

  “Go ahead, Car.”

  “Tomorrow I have an interview with the manager of an appliance store.”

  “Congratulations. That’s wonderful.”

  The couple looked into each other’s eyes fleetingly. Without even questioning whether they were telling the truth or not, they clasped their hands together and slowly raised them toward the ceiling. It seemed like they were about to start a folk dance. Instead, they both proclaimed at the same time, “We have each other. That’s the most important thing.”

  THE NEIGHBOR LADIES

  Jia had moved to Barcelona seven years earlier, soon after turning twenty-six. During all that time, he’d worked hard to achieve the objective that had led him to leave China: having his own bar. It hadn’t been easy for him; there’d been a number of hurdles along the way. Meeting his future wife, Liang. Moving from Sants to the Eixample. Learning Spanish and a little Catalan, with more success than many of his “compatriots” as he worked in variety stores that gave off an intense smell of plastic and took on extra hours in bakeries that also served coffees and sold bottles of water, lined up along the floor in strict order, as if they were tombstones. Finally, Jia had been able to put together enough money to pay for the first six months’ rent in advance on a place by the Film Archives, at number 33 Avinguda de Sarrià.

  Jia remembers several times a day that he is a lucky man, as he serves a customer, or when he waits, bored, midmorning for someone to come into the bar, or during the preparation of a cold ham sandwich he observes with muted repulsion. Whatever the rhythm of the day’s work, in the last hour he makes a routine inspection of the bathrooms, once again finding that someone has done their business with a display of exasperating creativity and eclecticism. Even then he doesn’t forget that he’s a lucky man.

  Things are going well for him. He’s satisfied with his business and proud to have Liang by his side. They spend much of the day behind the bar, a space with larger symbolic value in their relationship than even their double bed. He could be used as an admirable example of tenacity in overcoming obstacles. A model that the political class could sprinkle into speeches and statistics about “newcomers.” The couple could make it onto a television program featuring world cuisines, where they would explain the Cantonese delicacies they know how to cook and which they eat right there at the bar while their customers sit before a coffee, a beer, or a small plate of spicy potatoes. Some fans of auteur cinema, on the other hand, stop in front of the glass and watch them eat as they line up to buy tickets and recall, with a twinge of nostalgia, some captivating moments in their lives as cinephiles: Kim Ki-duk, Tsai Ming-liang, Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou.

  Jia and Liang’s model immigrant conduct, worthy of all sorts of praise (even in the finest literary realism), does them not a lick of good when that woman with dirty hair and nails shows up in their bar, as she has sporadically over the last month and a half. Her visits are always unpredictable, touche
d by the same sick phantasmagoria that can burst into a dream and ruin a placid night. They’ve never been able to catch her entering the bar; they always find her already inside, sitting at a chair with her head on the table, as if it were a bottle tipped over and just waiting for the slightest breeze to roll off onto the floor and break into 322 shards.

  The first time, Jia touched her shoulder, which was protected by a brown coat that didn’t seem very clean, and when she opened her eyes, he asked her if she was feeling okay.

  “Gin tonic,” she said.

  It was eight in the evening on a Saturday. Jia brought her the mixed drink, which the woman immediately drank in two nervous gulps. Right after, she glued her head back down to the table; it seemed as if she’d fallen asleep. After a little while, Liang went to look for Jia in the bathrooms. The woman had left without paying. She told him that as he assiduously scrubbed a sink.

  Some days later, the strange woman showed up again, in the same brown coat—a little grubbier than the first day—and with the same heaviness dragging down her head. She ordered another gin and tonic, which Jia made weak. The woman complained in slurred words, and after drinking it down, she ordered another, and yet another when she’d polished off the second one. Jia decided to serve her the third drink when he saw that one of the woman’s red, swollen hands held a crumpled fifty-euro bill.

  That day, she paid for her drinks but proceeded to puke them up in the bathroom. The waiter found her gift mid-afternoon, and automatically decided that this woman would not be allowed into the bar again, but a week later, Liang found her red head abandoned on the table. She seemed more drunk than ever. Her nose, covered in lilac veins, was dripping. Her mouth was open and her teeth the yellow of a ten-cent coin. A couple of students who sat near her quickly asked for the check and went to the Film Archives, which was showing a series of contemporary Portuguese films, with the latest from Manoel de Oliveira, João César Monteiro, and João Canijo. Liang cleared away the coffees and, once back behind the bar, told Jia that the woman’s smell was “unbearable.” It was clear they had to eighty-six her. Jia approached but before he could say anything, she opened one eye and said, “Gin tonic.”

  Jia explained that he couldn’t serve her the drink because the bar was about to close. The sun still illuminated some tables; it was only a little after four-thirty. The woman, with great effort, got up and said she was leaving.

  ###

  She came back a few days later. It was midmorning. At the bar was a man about seventy years old, who wore huge plastic-framed glasses with fingerprints on them, and had a mustache that was reminiscent of a crude paintbrush. He visited the bar with considerable frequency and solved the Sudokus in all the newspapers he could get his hands on (Jia and Liang allowed him that vice because he left good tips). It was the older man who noticed the woman’s presence. He indicated it with a sonorous sigh that attracted Jia’s attention. Then Jia saw her, and he also let out a loud sigh, even though he usually made sure to camouflage any bad vibes he felt, especially in front of customers.

  “Do you know her?” asked the man in Spanish, and Jia emitted a yes that was somehow closer to an “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Liang, who was washing dishes at the other end of the bar, looked up from the sink for a couple of seconds and listened as she continued working. The man didn’t say much, but what he said was enough for Jia to decide to approach the woman and, after yanking on her brown coat—dirty as all get-out—asked her if she was feeling okay.

  “Gin tonic,” she said.

  Jia told her that they were out of gin and brought her a Coca-Cola, which she looked at with disdain. She drank it in one gulp and continued sleeping with her head on the table.

  “What a lush …” said the man to Jia.

  He was about to finish the Sudoku. That day, he took longer than usual to solve it, distracted by whether the woman would be thrown out of the bar or not. Jia spoke to Liang in a language the man was unable to decipher, but the bar owner didn’t seem to have made up his mind to take that step. The man paged through the entire newspaper and finally gave up; he went home without finding out how the story ended.

  ###

  Three or four weeks passed before Jia saw the woman again. It was one evening when he’d run out to buy milk. Inexplicably, they were on their last carton, and before getting into an argument with Liang over which of them had been guilty of not making a more generous order with their distributor, he took off his apron and hung it beside the cash register as he said good-bye to his wife. The Christmas lights solemnly announced, beside the reddish blinking of brothel signs, that the commemoration of the birth of Jesus was approaching.

  Jia found the milk and grabbed half a dozen cartons to get through the day. The line to pay was excessively long. He soon noticed the presence of his ghost customer. She was rummaging around in her bag to find the money for a bottle of gin. She either didn’t have it or couldn’t find it. There were people screaming at her, sick of waiting for no good reason. Jia put down the box with the six cartons of milk on the floor, prepared to tolerate the setback patiently. He was surprised when, in a frenzied grapple, the woman tried to wrest the bottle from the clerk’s hands. She didn’t pull it off and she was kicked out of the supermarket by a security guard who appeared out of nowhere.

  The line started moving smoothly as soon as the checkout girl got over her fright. The fiftysomething couple in front of Jia started to murmur about the “souse.” They called her Rosa, as if at some point they’d had some connection with her. Maybe they’d been neighbors in the same apartment building and shared meetings where they’d had to come to some resolution about how to respond to the manager’s persistent inefficiency. Maybe they’d met at church sometimes on Sundays. Jia wrinkled his nose when he found himself imagining that possibility. Then he heard the couple mention the woman’s son, who was named Sergi, and every time they said his name, they added “poor, poor thing”—the repetition highlighted the vast dimensions of the disaster—and they looked at each other with pitying faces as they said what a good student he’d been and how no one could ever have imagined such an early, “inexplicable” end. They didn’t say much more, and Jia stared at them, his curiosity piqued. He was about to ask for some more details, using the excuse that the woman occasionally came into his bar, but he ended up letting it go. And he lived to regret that, because when he was back behind the bar, he could have put a stop to Liang’s chiding—he’d taken a long time—by invoking a strange, memorable story. For the moment, all he could do was sketch out a couple of elements: the strange woman’s son and his tragic end.

  ###

  A few days before Christmas, the Film Archives were about to end a series of films by Raj Kapoor. They were announcing, like every year, their showing of It’s a Wonderful Life, which Jia had seen on TV shortly after arriving in Barcelona, when he saw every movie he could to improve his two new languages. All he remembered about it was that the main character was played by James Stewart. One day, as he was preparing sandwiches, he had the desire to watch it again, and he suggested to Liang that if there weren’t too many customers on the night of the screening, maybe they could make an exception, buy a pair of tickets, close the bar, and go into the Film Archives for the first time. She looked up from the tray where she was dicing potatoes, stared at him, and said, “We’ll see.”

  That evening, the woman made an appearance again. Jia found her sitting in a chair when he emerged from tidying boxes in the back room. She was struggling to keep her head up, and when she saw him, she waved him over.

  “Gin tonic,” she mumbled when he was a few yards away.

  Jia saw that she was sporting a generous bloodstain on the coat she was wearing. He asked her if she was feeling okay, nodding vaguely to where she might have an injury. She vomited out a strident guffaw and repeated the same two words as before.

  “Gin tonic.”

  As he went back behind the bar, the woman let her hea
d drop onto the table. The sound was earsplitting: an explicitly bad sign. Jia grabbed his cell phone and called the police. When Liang heard her husband mention a bloodstain, she looked at the woman and discovered that beside her worn shoes there was a dark, dense drip. They were the only three people in the place, but before Jia finished the call, a small man with a shiny bald head and a curious gaze sat down at a stool along the bar.

  “There’s nothing to be done,” he said to Liang, who had come over to ask him what he would like in basic but credible Catalan. “She’s a lost cause. But don’t worry. Today’s not the day.”

  After that improbable introduction, the man ordered an espresso with milk, and hopping off the bar stool, he approached the woman and said, “Mrs. Rosa. Can you hear me? Hello? Hey!” He shook her a couple of times and managed to get her to lift her head off the table. “You’ve had enough drink for today. Go on home.”

  “I just want a gin tonic.”

  “You know you’ve had enough. You’re all covered in blood, Mrs. Rosa. What happened? Did you fall again?”

  “Don’t give a fuck.”

  “Listen. When I left home, I thought I saw the neighbor ladies in front of your door. I think they wanted to talk to you again.”

  “The neighbor ladies? Wanna talk to me? What do they want now?”

  The woman got up clumsily from the chair, with the man’s help. Jia observed the scene, mouth agape. He managed to lift an arm to bid her farewell. They crossed the bar with dragging feet, leaving a small trail of blood in their wake. The man hadn’t touched his espresso with milk, which was still steaming on the bar as they headed off at a snail’s pace. Neither Jia nor Liang was able to do anything to stop them.

  Ten minutes later, two policemen came into the bar and found the couple sitting silently at the next table over from the one where the incident had taken place. Officer Martínez quickly asked them for an explanation. How could the woman have gotten away from them? Had they ever seen the man who’d appeared at the bar and “hypnotized” the local drunk? Had they noticed if she had anything under her coat? How big did they think her wound was? The officer’s questions were so specific that Jia steeled his courage and asked him if he knew “Mrs. Rosa.”