“He’s here,” he said, and he stood, went to the bookshelf, took out a book, and opened it. There was a thick sheaf of bills inside. He took out a fifty, put the book back on the shelf, and said, “Give me twenty euros, the cocaine is here.”
I gave him my last twenty euros, and I’m not sure why I trusted him and often wish I hadn’t because of what happened later, but I gave it to him. The worst-spent twenty euros of my life. And I’m sure that if I hadn’t been so busted up I wouldn’t have given it to him, I wouldn’t have been in that rathole of a flat, but we were brothers, both of us with broken hearts. His story, it’s true, was a bit more romantic, but a broken heart is a broken heart, right?
He left the apartment. I walked out onto the balcony, looked down. I could see someone on a moped parked in front. His dark helmet like the head of an ant. Luca exited the building, approached him. A quick transaction ensued. The ant started up the moped and putt-putted away. Luca wheeled around and reentered the building.
I turned around, sat back on the couch. I closed my eyes briefly and felt the moist breeze wending its way, swirling around the room, licking at the cheap dingy white polyester curtains on either side of the window. I looked around the room at the empty cigarette packs, the little inlaid wood box on the table, and the books, lots of books—many books on love, I noticed, many love stories, Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabo, On Love by Stendhal, even this American book, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, and there, splayed in the corner, César Vallejo, my favorite Peruvian poet, who foretold his own death in a poem and died “of exhaustion” in Paris.
I couldn’t help but feel that there was something almost quaint about being so heartbroken and reading love stories and discourses on love and mooning over a capo’s daughter named Camilla who you kissed once. As if there was a solution to any of this. As if closure existed. I mean, we all know that the only cure for a broken heart is time, another lover, or death.
I heard his footsteps coming up the stairs two at a time. The balcony door slammed shut, bang, and Luca came back in with a rattle, windblown and wild-haired. He brought with him a hard-edged street scent with traces of the damp, almost churchlike smell of the stairwell—but most of all, that languorous funky Mediterranean sea air. A warm breeze was blowing in bursts, capricious little European zephyrs; refined, old world. My new friend spun around the room, quite happy to have scored. But there was something else he brought in with him, though I didn’t understand what it was until it was all over.
He sat down, set a little folded piece of tinfoil on the table.
“So did you learn anything?” I asked.
“About what?”
“Did all these books about love teach you anything?”
“Yes, I did, in fact, I did learn something.” He was concentrated, bending over the table, carefully unfolding the foil.
“What did you learn?”
“I’ll tell you later. Let’s have some cocaine.”
He opened the tinfoil, revealing a little pile of tan powder. It did not glisten. He shot me a glance.
“That doesn’t look like cocaine,” I said, and he looked up at me and smiled.
“You don’t think?”
“No, I don’t. It’s brown.” I dipped the tip of my pinkie in the powder and tasted it and it tasted strange. “I’m not taking that. You bought heroin, compadre.”
“You think?”
He went to the fridge and came back with a lemon. He set it on the table. He carefully poured a bit of powder on the spoon, then a little more, and he asked, “Are you sure you don’t want any?”
“Yes.” I was a bit put off by the whole thing. I looked around the room, at the pile of books, at the picture taped to the bookshelf of Luca and his girlfriend (I assumed). She was not how I imagined, she had short hair, little rectangular glasses, a dimple in her chin, mischievous, intellectual … She looked like what I imagined Marcello Mastroianni’s longsuffering wife in 8½ must have looked like when she was younger … beautiful but not bodacious.
I suddenly wanted to get out of there, to go mingle with the tourists and stroll down Las Ramblas and watch the street performers, the mimes, jugglers, acrobats, and pickpockets do their silly tricks, to lose myself in the generalized idiocy, to go down to the beach and watch the Nordic women baring their pale, impeccable breasts slowly get sunburned. I didn’t want to be here anymore. I wanted to call Nina and beg forgiveness again, just hear her voice …
He poured the rest of the powder in the spoon, set it back on the coffee table, picked up a knife, cut the lemon in half, then squeezed juice into the spoon. It flowed down the sides of the little pile of powder, then he started to heat it up with a lighter, and I could see the attraction of it, the ritual of it, the grand tradition, but wanted no part of it, so I just watched him. When the solution started to bubble, he took out a needle from a carved wooden box and set it gently on the coffee table.
“We must let it cool,” he said. “I need your help.”
“Yeah? What do you need?”
“I need you to hold the mirror.” He went to the bathroom and came back with a small round mirror, about as big as my hand, and said, “I’ll tell you where to hold it,” and then he put a little piece of cotton in the spoon and it quickly turned brown, absorbing all the heroin, and then he stuck his needle in the cotton and put it in the spoon and sucked up all the fluid and gave it a couple of flicks with his middle finger and turned to me and said, “Hold up the mirror.”
I did. It was at face level.
“Angle it down a little. There. To the right. No, the right edge toward me. Yes, that’s it.”
With total concentration, he turned his head and looked upward and left, his eyes trained on the mirror. He brought the syringe to his throat, to his jugular. Carefully, slowly brought the tip to his neck, traced it down, paused, his neck muscles tense, and then sank it in. I winced. And he said, “Hold still!” And I did. Then he pulled back on the plunger of the syringe and said, “Shit. Missed it.” He withdrew the needle, grabbed a T-shirt off the couch, dabbed at the blood on his neck.
“Fuck,” I said.
“Help me out,” he repeated, “I need you to help me out.”
I stayed put. He looked up again, held his breath to try and make the vein stick out more, exhaled, said “Higher,” and I moved the mirror, tilted it up slightly, and then he sank the needle in and pulled back the plunger and the needle filled with a rich, slow-moving scarlet that swirled around and was beautiful in its way, and then he said, “Ahhhh,” and pushed down the plunger and moaned. I set down the mirror and he sat back on the couch and his eyes rolled around in his head, and then he blinked, and opened his eyes, an expression of sweet shock on his face. And then he fell off the couch, the needle still in his neck, and I said, “Luca? Luca?”
Let me be honest here. I let him lay there for a bit.
“Luca?”
Everything started moving in slow-motion. I stood over him and bent down. I put three fingers just beneath the needle. I was afraid to take it out for fear that blood would spurt everywhere. His eyes stared up, far away as if at wheeling falcons, as if he saw a blue Neapolitan sky, a single cloud, a sparkling world, a sea breeze, a woman standing over him saying, What? What’s wrong, Luca? Are you okay?
It was too much, those hazel eyes. I peered at them closer and saw the curved reflection of the fan’s lazy orbit, the curtains twisting gently against the wall, blowing out onto the balcony, the silhouettes of buildings against the dark blue sky. I heard the tinfoil skitter across the table, drop to the floor. I touched the top of his head. I felt beneath his ear, traced down his jaw, and found his vein. I did not feel a pulse. I put my ear next to his mouth. Nothing. Not even a wisp of breath. I placed my ear on his chest. Not even the faintest of heartbeats. I pulled him away from the couch; lay him flat on his back. I went to the bedroom, took the dirty orange sheet off the bed. Standing over his body, a sheet corner in each hand, I raised my arms, flicked my wri
sts, and the sheet ballooned up, suspended for a second, then billowed a last time, rippling, settling over his body. He was covered now.
“Luca?” I said. “You there?”
I knelt beside him again. I didn’t want to see his face, those eyes. I set my ear to his chest. I listened in vain for his heartbeat. I pulled the sheet away from his face, put my ear to his mouth, listened for breathing. Heard nothing. A beatific look on his face, a happy look.
Five minutes. Five minutes had passed. I took the mirror and wiped down the edges with the hem of my T-shirt (I don’t know why). I put the César Vallejo book on the shelf. I went to the kitchen, washed my wine glass. Then I went back to the bookshelf, got the Stendhal book (On Love), took out the wad of euros, stuck it in my pocket, put the book back on the shelf, walked out the front door, closed it softly, made sure it was locked. My heart was pounding and there was a tingling feeling that went from my chest to my balls. I wound around the spiral staircase, passed through the narrow foyer, and ended up on the street. I started to walk. Children played soccer, shouted, but I heard nothing. A ball rolled by, rolled under a beat-up Citroen. A slender curly haired boy darted in front of me, crouched next to the car, looking beneath it. Then he got on his belly and wriggled under the chassis until all that could be seen were his skinny, kicking brown legs. I paused, turned around, and stared up at Luca’s balcony, saw a smear of yellow flowers in the window, the curtains trembling in the wind.
That night I put Luca’s money to good use and went to a very high-end restaurant and ate a most excellent dinner. And as the waiter uncorked my second bottle of wine, I had a realization. Nothing, I thought, matters so much to me as love, and yet, right now, as I enjoy this tremendous meal, love suddenly seems almost insignificant. How can this be? Am I that superficial? I felt euphoric for some reason, but couldn’t understand why. I felt filled with life. Overflowing. There was no doubt about it. So without further ado, I opened my legs, reached down, took out my penis, and pinned my scrotum to the chair with a steak knife. An ecstatic, almost sensual feeling washed over me. That, I thought triumphantly, is love. After all these years of heartbreak, I have finally figured it out.
THE STORY OF A SCAR
BY CRISTINA FALLARÁS
Nou Barris
This isn’t something she’ll like, you figure. She’s never been too motherly, and she gets anxious when work gets tangled up with the other thing. I love this story; but it was a waste of time. And you’re right: the scar’s absolutely beautiful; she’s absolutely beautiful, isn’t she? But I’d better tell you the story of the scar and then you can forget it, okay? She doesn’t like it.
It all began on a sultry August morning filled with portent. Why not? It was impossible to sleep, one of those nights when you dream you’re a goat on a spit and you turn, turn, turn, until your soul is dripping—and then she showed up with rings under her eyes that reached her knees, already swaying slightly in a way typical of her state. She was cute, sour-faced, dressed all in black, decked out with glass beads, and that belly and the same motherfucking moves as always. Damn, one stormy beauty.
“Nothing, right?”
This had been her greeting for more than a month. And my answer, a shrug, my eyes nailed on the damned fan. Yes indeed, nothing was going on in Barcelona, no one came by the office, and recently she’d developed a resistance to airconditioning; she was totally against air-conditioning. She was slacking and this upset her more than what the lack of clients was doing to her bank account, something that had me worried too. You know, if she doesn’t eat, I don’t eat either. Well, someone would eventually step up, Victoria already had an established name, and there aren’t that many women detectives; hard to deny there’s some morbid fascination in that, right? An established name, but some folks step back when they see her belly, of course. And besides, August has never been a good month, it’s a shitty month. Oh, but we’re also against normal vacations, you know, and air-conditioning, credit cards, checks, and investigating women’s infidelities. Add to this gloom a six-month pregnancy, thirty-eight degrees Celsius at dawn, and a humidity that liquefies the air … Get the idea? Okay, now add the severed hand of an aging rocker to the mix. Beautiful! Isn’t it?
“Look at the paper. At the concert at the Forum the day before yesterday, someone sliced off that old American’s hand, the one who used to play with those other two, the hippy and the doped-up guy; now he only plays with his band when he’s not too boozed up.”
I told her that to entertain her, because the news was rather amusing, and, I don’t know, maybe her expression would change a little and her kid wouldn’t be born already sour. Who would pay for that, huh? Yours truly. Who else was going to put up with the kid? I had no doubt at all about that. Me. Well, the old gringo was blinder than the black guy who moved his head to get the mic right, and when he saw himself surrounded by a crowd the size of which he couldn’t remember seeing in years, the dumbass threw himself into the audience, just like he used to do, to be received by a sea of arms, he would say, that returned him to the stage, as if gliding on air. He could have cracked his head open; I’m not saying that wouldn’t have been a good ending, to be squashed like a ripe fig against the floor of the Forum. But no, his audience—and who knows where they had come from, a bunch of haggard dudes of every color like we only see during summer in this city—held him up in the air for a few minutes and then put him back on the stage … Up to that point, everything was going just fine, except for a small detail, a gruesome detail, my friend. When the old man stepped on the dais, he noticed that … whoa! … his right hand was missing, the one of the mythic guitar solos that had earned him the name Magic Hand in the ’70s. The motherfucker didn’t notice immediately, the paper said, the big motherfucker had to hear the screaming from the first rows, see how they pointed at the bloody disaster, all of them spattered too, and then follow the direction their fingers were pointing to see that, beyond his wrist, there was nothing. Tourniquet, screams, someone fainting, and then off to Bellvitge Hospital.
The story left her silent for quite a while and me up in the air, because when Vicky isn’t swearing, she’s plotting something or is about to break your heart. They have to go for the kill because of their anger, I say, and who’s always there? That’s right. She grabbed the newspaper, read it, left it on the table, speechless and self-absorbed for about half an hour, then read it once more and threw it on the floor, as usual. By now you’ll have noticed my ability to remain forever in dreamland, not bothering anyone, right? That’s how I was brought up, it’s from my childhood. This chameleon-like quality saved me from more than fifty spankings. When the storm of insults would erupt, I became a rocking chair, or a living room corner; yeah, I could become a fucking living room corner, limestone, and nobody is stupid enough to smash a wall, right? Well, that’s what I did the better part of that morning while sweat began to create blacker black spots on her T-shirt, her forehead shone, and she boiled in her own foul juices.
“Right now that hand is in formaldehyde. Motherfuckers. That hand … Magic’s divine hand, the hand from my favorite memories; it was mine, ours. We don’t matter one fuck now. Motherfuckers. It’s not enough to destroy everything, to torture us with stupid music, to ban breathing, eating, fucking, living; no, they had to tear it out by the roots. Motherfuckers. They have it in formaldehyde, wanna bet?”
And thus began the story of the precious scar, I tell you, which is a waste of time.
Back then, it was called the Bronx. But the splendorous mall had now turned the area into something else. Into what? Basically, into the Bronx with a splendorous mall. The junkies from those days, most of them anyway, were dead now, and shovels of cocaine, mall-brand cocaine with slummy neon lights, had replaced heroin. I staked out a place between the few remaining gypsies who hadn’t been absorbed by the Cult yet and the large colony of Colombians, Dominicans, Moroccans, and so on.
I was going through a bad time, with no clients, in the red, pregnant, and with g
ood ol’ Jesús waiting for me every morning at the office, right on time, so that I would appear and come up with some solution to his life. To his fucking life as a former deadbeat, former drunk, former pusher. Rootless and dirty—the poor wretch was really dirty.
“Looking for something?”
Junkie, I thought. A junkie with money problems and hunting for saps. I looked at her and touched my belly. The gesture didn’t mean anything. Not in that place, and we both knew it. I looked the woman straight in the eye, pitiless. Thirty, I thought, and not looking good for your age at all, girl, with those gloomy rings under your eyes and two teeth fewer than what’s needed for a smile to smile.
I waited, I knew silence was a language.
“I’ve got coke, hashish, and pastis, what do you want? It’s all very legal, sister, I’m very legal. Everything’s okay, sister, you hear me?”
She still had an Andalusian lilt, probably from her parents, and they got theirs from before, from the grandparents, a lilt that came from hauling bags and long train rides. In her family’s case, of course, exodus had not ended in generational success.
“Coke, one gram,” I answered without thinking, and handed her a fifty-dollar bill while I changed my tourist-in-Apache-territory look for an obvious murderous warning. It’s habit. Your gestures, your habits, they stick to you. I had put one foot in Nou Barris and gone right to the Renfe-Meridiana area, to the junkie blocks from days gone by. Well, to one of the many clusters of dwellings scattered in those neighborhoods, where life went on between sale and consumption, yesterday’s heroin, today’s coke and pastis. Habit, my habit: Nou Barris, dealers, blow. Precisely because of that habit, I followed her and was treated to the dazzling mall that had not changed the feel of those blocks, though there was a certain something missing that had nothing to do with the surrounding innovations. The throbbing bundles I remembered huddled in the corners had been swept away by death. I thought, damnitshit, there’s nothing left. I didn’t feel sorry for them—they were already cadavers back then—what hurt me was the shadow of the shopping mastodon next to this desert of city blocks, albeit with its big public swimming pool. And Magic Hand’s hand was part of my memory, the time gone by, the scooter and the delirium; I had been a stupid and feverish youngster back then, keeping time with that hand that seemed like an essential soundtrack. I felt the silence. I felt old.
Barcelona Noir Page 16