by jordi Nopca
“Is there anybody in this neighborhood who doesn’t know her story?” replied Officer Martínez as he extracted a pack from one of the many pockets in his uniform, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it with a cocky gesture.
Jia furrowed his brow slightly. The policeman then began to explain the story of the woman and her son, Sergi. They lived very close to the Escola Industrial, five minutes from the bar. The two of them, alone. No one knew anything about the father. Either there’d never been one or he’d vanished so long ago that no one expected him to come back. Rosa was an accountant for a small hotel chain. The boy went to school, alternating class with vacation time, two, six, nine years. His mother turned forty, single. The boy started high school. His mother started to dye her hair the color of copper. As his face filled with pimples, the son smoked his first cigarettes and tried marijuana; he was rapidly breaking out of his childhood shell.
“Their lives were going pretty well,” summed up the policeman. “Until, two Christmases ago now, things went south. Prepare yourselves; it’s bad.”
Taking long drags on his cigarette, Officer Martínez explained to Jia and Liang that one fine day Mrs. Rosa discovered that Sergi had a pellet rifle hidden in the closet. That night, they argued. The boy insisted a friend had asked him to hold on to it for a few days, and that he’d give the gun back soon. His mother had demanded it be gone before the week was out. Otherwise, she wouldn’t give him his allowance. Sergi accepted the threat without much complaint, assuring her he’d return the gun before Monday. He followed through, or at least that was what Rosa thought, and she forgot all about it until, a few days later, when she was doing the laundry, she found traces of blood on her son’s underwear. When she saw him later that day, she asked him if he was feeling ill, and when Sergi said no, she showed him the soiled underwear. “Does this happen to you often?” she asked. The boy blushed and locked himself in his room.
“Surprising, right?” said the second policeman, who was listening to Officer Martínez’s story as he mercilessly chomped on some gum. “Just wait; it gets worse.”
Three days before Christmas, Rosa had decided to go on a date with the manager of one of the hotels in the small chain where she did the books. The man had been pursuing her for some time. They went for a walk along the Port Olímpic and he took her out to eat in an expensive restaurant, where most of the diners spoke English, German, Swedish, and other languages they couldn’t identify. Afterward, he suggested they go somewhere for a drink, and it was there, right on the beach, with a half-drunk whiskey and Coke in front of him, that he made his intentions clear, bringing his lips toward her in a rapid, almost furtive motion. She allowed the first kiss, but during the second one she withdrew, apologized, contrite, and went home.
“She had a premonition,” explained the second policeman, winking at Jia.
“Will you let me finish?” Officer Martínez lifted one hand to stop him. “There are some things you shouldn’t joke about.”
Rosa went into the apartment. When she saw a light on in Sergi’s room, she rushed into the bathroom. She felt she’d done something wrong, and she needed a few minutes to come up with an alibi. She didn’t have to use any elaborate excuse. She went into her son’s room after calling him a couple of times and getting no response, and what she saw there made her lose consciousness. Surrounded by a dozen large stuffed Santa Claus toys, her son was lying down in his underwear, his head blown open. He still had the barrel of the gun in his mouth, and his hands were still gripping the stock. About twenty crickets bounced around. They’d been released from the little boxes they came in from the pet shop. That food for snakes and chameleons had become the devastating props of a spectacular suicide, news of which scampered through the neighborhood the way those sticky insects had on the fateful day. Meanwhile, Rosa became “Mrs. Rosa”—a deferential form of address that marked distance—and just sank lower and lower.
“It’s the worst thing to happen in the Eixample in a really long time,” declared the second policeman. His sour expression was an attempt to convey regret, although his expressive inadequacy made all of his comments seem like wisecracks.
“Have patience with her,” Officer Martínez asked of Jia and Liang before lighting a final cigarette. “She wouldn’t hurt a fly. Now that Christmas is around the corner, everything’s worse for her. We’ll stop by her apartment for a minute. I don’t think anything happened to her, but we have to make sure.”
Jia wanted to ask about the man who had taken her. What was his role in that whole story? He couldn’t manage to get a single word out, from the shock, and when he was left alone with Liang, he made two strong whiskey and Cokes and they drank them down as they let out a few tremulous comments. On one hand, they never really wanted to see that woman again. On the other, they were intrigued to learn more details about her last two years of spiraling, crowned by this possible incident of self-harm—there were still traces of blood on the floor of the bar.
###
Two and a half hours later, after they’d scrubbed the bar thoroughly, the Raj Kapoor movie ended and the place filled with cinephiles killing time before the next screening. Phantom of the Paradise, by Brian De Palma, attracted a considerable number of college students. Jia and Liang served some thirty Coca-Colas and beers in less than ten minutes. The business made them forget the story of Mrs. Rosa and her son, Sergi. Heartened by the cha-ching every time Liang opened and closed the cash register, Jia remembered that he was a lucky man and closed his eyes for a few seconds, savoring the pleasure of that affirmation.
The bar soon emptied out. The uneasiness returned. Liang said that she didn’t feel like seeing It’s a Wonderful Life at all that night. Jia understood. In fact, he didn’t feel like going to see the movie, either.
“In real life, there are no angels to make you come to your senses when you want to commit suicide,” he said in Mandarin, remembering the plot of the film: the being from the great beyond who visits James Stewart to invite him to observe how important he is to others by traveling through moments of his biography.
Jia went out to get some fresh air, but instead of staying in front of the bar, he started walking. At first, he seemed lost. Then he found a drop of blood on the ground and accepted that what he wanted to do was follow the woman’s trail as far as he could. So he did: He walked for two blocks and turned right on Carrer París. The Escola Industrial was right across the street from the sidewalk where he was following the drops of blood. He stopped at a doorway where there was a larger bloodstain, which Officer Martínez and his partner must have stepped in. Mrs. Rosa lived there. If the door had been open, he would have gone up to her landing. Then he would have retreated and gone back to the bar. Since it wasn’t, he turned tail, about to leave, but after a few steps he looked back—instinct—and up at the balconies. Two old women were observing him attentively, muttering something to each other. Jia felt his small hairs stand on end. He crossed the street and went into the yard of the Escola Industrial. Sitting on a bench, he let a few minutes pass, not really sure why he was doing it, just staring at an attractive young brunette walking at top speed and looking at her phone. He retraced his steps, still in a daze, and when he entered the bar, he realized that the small man with the shiny bald head and curious gaze was back.
“Good afternoon,” he said when Jia walked past him.
Jia nodded in reply. Then he looked at Liang, who seemed disconcerted as she prepared an espresso with milk.
The man cleared his throat to attract the couple’s attention to him. He didn’t have to try too hard.
“I apologize for leaving without paying, before. I was forced to by circumstances. That woman … Mrs. Rosa … You understand what I’m saying?”
Liang came over to him with the steaming espresso with milk.
“Here you go,” said the man, handing her a five-euro bill. “Does that cover it? The espresso from before and this one now, please. I don’t like to owe money to anyone.”
Jia p
lanted himself in front of the sink and started washing cups and glasses. Liang began cleaning the coffee machine. Meanwhile, the man paged through a free newspaper and took small sips on his espresso with milk.
Fifteen minutes passed, during which two girls came in—they ordered two tonic waters—and Jia and Liang made a couple of expeditions to the toilet and the back room. They exchanged a few words in Mandarin: She chastised him for leaving for no reason; he replied, at first and unsuccessfully, that he’d gone out because he was feeling woozy, but then he admitted that he had searched for the home of the “mysterious woman.”
“I wanted to know more about her,” he said to Liang.
She replied curtly but bluntly, “It won’t do you any good.”
He could have started his investigation by asking the stranger some questions, but he didn’t dare. It was the man who spoke of his own volition, shortly before he left. He said that he was about to finish a book about his two neighbor ladies, Amèlia and Concepció. They still didn’t know anything about it, he told Jia and Liang. It was practically a secret, and they would find the book one day in their mailboxes, in a modern edition, paperback but elegant. In it, he explained how they’d made his life impossible with their small acts of meanness, until one day he’d gotten fed up, gone out to the glazed gallery, and threatened them with a childish, unmistakable gesture of making his hand into a pistol. Bang-bang. The women had called the cops on him. At first, he took it as a joke. The thing was, there was now an ongoing case, open like an intimate, shameful wound. The prosecuting attorney was demanding a fine of thirty thousand euros and three years in prison. In a month, he would know the sentence.
Jia listened to the entire story without moving a muscle, paralyzed, and finally he asked, “And … Mrs. Rosa? What does she have to do with all that?”
“I’m afraid she’s the neighbor ladies’ next victim. There’s nothing to be done—they’re relentless.”
The man stood up from the stool and waved good-bye. Jia and Liang never saw him again. Not him and not the woman. Not the neighbor ladies, either. Three weeks later, they sold their liquor license and opened up a hair salon very close to the Estació del Nord.
CANDLES AND ROBES
They were not men who liked to give anything away. Less still did they like anything to be stolen from them.
—Roald Dahl, Fantastic Mr. Fox
Dad’s signed up for sax classes. He told us a couple of months ago, after a family lunch, once the guests had left. He had just driven our grandparents to their apartment. Our aunt and uncle were by the front door, cigarettes hanging from their lips, and my other grandma—a widow for the last ten years—observed that lingering teenage gesture disapprovingly. Dad returned just in time for them to make some final comment about politics or sports. Then they were suddenly in a rush and split: They had more than an hour to travel, it was already dark, and the next day was Monday.
My mother holed up in the kitchen, my sister in her room, and I sat down on a corner of the sofa, hoping to amuse myself with some newspaper. I couldn’t concentrate at all. My dad was pacing in the dining room like a wild animal gauging the limits of its cage. He was moving around chairs, dishes, and cups, but on top of it all he was dragging around the news he had to deliver to us. Back and forth. Back and forth. Slow as a procession of ants carrying too much food back to their hill. It took him a good half hour to convene us in order to tell us all, with almost funereal solemnity, “I want to learn to play the sax.”
My mom had to extract the rest of the information from him like pulling teeth. From what he said, he’d visited three music schools and had signed up at the last one, which was very close to my grandparents’ house. He’d even settled on an instrument, a tenor saxophone made in Japan.
We all congratulated him, even though, at least to me and my sister—this became clear as the conversation continued—it seemed like an undertaking that wouldn’t get him anywhere.
“Where will you get the lung strength? You still smoke,” my sister said.
“What are you going to play, when you hardly even listen to music?” I added.
We asked him questions for a while, until it was time to gather around the table for a light dinner of bread and ham and watch our traditional Sunday-night documentary. That week, we got an up-close and in-depth look at the particularities of the new China, the Asian giant, the first world power and “great Eastern threat,” as the voice-over repeated again and again.
###
During the two months that he was getting ready for his first sax class, our father cut down on his smoking (he gained five kilos), bought the instrument, and discovered YouTube. When he was in a good mood, he would free the sax from its case, put it together, give it a gentle caress, hang it around his neck, and try to play it. He could scarcely get any sounds out. When he did manage something, it was just an annoying atonal yelp. He quickly got tired and put it away again.
“I don’t want to bother the neighbors,” he mumbled, making an excuse.
“They’re definitely going to be bothered when he starts really having to rehearse,” my mother, my sister, and I said behind his back. Then he would have no choice but to practice, because he’d have to do his homework to avoid having to repeat the first lesson at the music school over and over, accompanied by an increasingly less motivated teacher. Years back, I’d had a similar experience with the guitar. The classes were so boring and uninspiring that I made hardly any progress over an entire year of study. I liked watching my teacher display his mastery of the instrument more than trying to tame it myself. I was so far from his level that attempting to get there would have been stupid. I ended up giving up the instrument during the second year, which started at the same precarious point where we’d ended the first one, stuck on B minor and the second pentatonic scale. All I got from the experience of playing was the gift of leaking synovial fluid, which deformed my left hand for life. A few years after I quit music, a doctor recommended surgery, without taking into consideration that my scarring problems would leave me with a mark as visible, if not more so, than the lump that had appeared on the back of my hand from about the third lesson.
When I started going to guitar lessons, we still didn’t have unlimited Internet. If we wanted to get online, we had to connect the modem into the wall where the telephone cord went. After a few minutes of endless waiting, the computer announced that we could access the Web. I automatically went straight to Napster and started downloading music, searching for some simple score and trying to scratch it out on the guitar. I sang much better than I played, and that was really discouraging, because I’d never studied voice. My mother would appear in the office after half an hour and ask me to wrap it up.
“We can’t be without the telephone for so long. What if there’s an emergency?”
“They can call on the cell phone, can’t they?”
“Your grandparents won’t think of that if they need to reach us. Is it so hard for you to understand?”
I ended up listening to my mom, even though I wasn’t entirely convinced by her argument. Sometimes I would manage to distract her long enough to finish downloading whatever song I was so set on listening to. Although once I had it stored in the corresponding folder, it lost that magic of risk, the thrill of the music being meted out to me in percentages: 78%, 84%, 88%, 95%, 99% … File complete.
When he signed up for sax lessons, my father had long since gotten ADSL and could download as many songs as he wanted to. The problem was, he didn’t have a particular kind of music to search for. He would go to YouTube and get sucked into indiscriminately watching all sorts of things, from unforgettable concerts to amateur living room performances, extravagantly designed Christmas cards, and static images with a song by Bob Dylan or Stan Getz playing in the background. He would watch everything pulled up by his basic searches, which ranged from “sax” to “sax music” and “jazz sax romantic.”
A lot of days, when I came home from the university, I woul
d find him glued to the computer screen. Sometimes he would force me to listen to some marvelous performance, while I would think that maybe Grandma was right to keep prodding him to find a job, a recommendation that, on the face of it, didn’t make any sense—he’d accepted a good early retirement plan from his former company.
Three weeks before going to his first lesson, my father discovered a Japanese musician who filmed himself playing sax covers of Beatles songs, and he even bought one of the man’s CDs from his website. My Favorite Beatles Songs arrived by messenger eight days after he’d ordered it. It was his first online purchase and he’d read the fine print three or four times, staring suspiciously at the screen. The CD included versions of “She Loves You,” “Drive My Car,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” “All My Loving,” and, inexplicably, “Paperback Writer” and “Octopus’s Garden.” He listened to it nonstop.
One day after an excruciating class on the historical bases of comparative literature, I found him sitting on the sofa, with the lights off and the music blaring. My father had the sax hanging from a ribbon around his neck—as if cradling a baby—and was moving his fingers up and down the instrument to simulate playing “Yesterday.” The Japanese man’s virtuosity was backed up by apocalyptic layers of synthesizers.
I turned on the light in the living room shortly before the chorus.
“Hold on, wait a sec!” shouted my father. “Now comes the best part!”
I obeyed. I peevishly tolerated his fake rendition of “Yesterday.” As the music played, I was reminded that it was one of the Beatles songs I’d hated the most as a kid. I’d first heard it on the red double LP of the first part of their greatest hits. The leap from the slightly irritating optimism of “Ticket to Ride” to the rain-splattered nostalgia of “Yesterday” was too abrupt for the fun kid I once was. I rarely listened to the song all the way through. I was constantly tempted to pull the needle off and start at the beginning of the record, with “Love Me Do.”