I took Rupert’s pulse, and the smell on his arm was Chypre cologne, Dad’s favorite. Of course, I wasn’t fooling myself; the heart has its doubts but there are lessons we must learn: when we come into the world our parents are there to teach us how to live, but then they die before we learn the painful reverse birth by which we leave the earth. I wouldn’t be spared; I was inside death’s magnetic field again. In the light of that emotional impotence, the antagonism between the old horse and the pony, between the father and his son-in-law, was blunted. That I was keeping him company during his final earthly hours as a symbolic payback for having been spared Dad’s sufferings stopped being a crazy idea. It was just a difficult one, the kind we’ve grown used to after so many unforeseen events, coincidences, and randomness.
So it was Dad, using the transitory body of old Daddy Rupert (with his flowery Bermudas in the suitcase, his network of dirty veins, and the harshness with which a nurse with absurd hips removed the oxygen mask to brush his teeth), who taught me how life’s dynamics humiliate us, how our cells vanish one after another, how no one leaves this world alive.
I leaned over Rupert’s body and I spoke to Dad. That gaping mouth now could only be a tube whose other end opened onto the Great Beyond. And I told him (though I’ll deny it if ever anyone hints I could think something like this) that when he left that financial mess sandwiched in a file he had behaved like a pig. To love someone is to want them to go on being, and that tawdry suicide made it very clear that he wiped his ass with our love.
“You showed your true colors, Dad!”
Rupert started to gasp. Only it wasn’t Rupert, it was Dad’s shade trying to answer me, to communicate a message, to respond to my words. But the language of the dead is cold and hard to understand, it’s articulated in broken syntax, and I couldn’t decipher what Dad was trying to say to me in that suffocated murmur. The temperature of the deceased, everything they’ve lost, is pitiful, so I buried my reproaches down deep.
I wondered what good could come to Rupert from taking leave of life in the company of a son-in-law who detested him and who didn’t understand a word of his incoherent German, but I had to set aside those charitable thoughts when the third attack began. Since I didn’t know what people die of—how could I know? with so many pig cells, maybe he was growing a snout—I started shouting for the nurses. And while Rupert’s throat was filling with blood, he looked at me and in his two little eyes shone something dense and indefinable: the point of lucidity that struggles against the end. I felt so sorry for him that I hugged him and shouted:
“Rudolf, it’s Beryl, your brother! You won’t die alone!”
I took the road to the resort for the last time, intending to retrieve the luggage. The floor was covered in streamers and confetti, but the old folks must have been off stretching their carcasses or moving their arms in the pool. I challenged some of the minibar charges, knowing full well I wasn’t in the right, and I cast a last look at the water in the pool, a blue hide wrinkled by the same wind that had dispersed the clouds to spread above me an open sky, dumb and maliciously yellow. Four more documents in the separation process and I would have been free of the Thrushes. I turned off toward the farm. The yard around the pigs wasn’t in good shape: the grass curved drily, the ground didn’t give it enough water, a white fuzz was growing on the tree trunks. The greenery over near the road looked hard and contemptuous, but I was moved at the sight of a majestic tree covered in white flowers that defied the season: the buds were so open that the wind swirled them in small eddies as it pulled them off. I was young, and the timid minutes dancing before me would open into spacious years, a wide and shining time in my life that would be fresh and good.
I left the twisted river behind and started driving with no destination in mind. A savage energy spurred me faster around the curves; I don’t know how I didn’t kill myself. My mind was performing a last dance with Helen, she in the green dress and me in a bluish suede jacket, both of us laughing hard, our faces reflected in the crystal glassware scattered around Bicente’s apartment. Through the windows shone a reddish light that fell over the treetops of Retiro; Helen’s skin exuded the warm glow of grand occasions and we kissed, happy to have met each other, and to never see each other again.
I parked the car on a bend where the cliff overlooked the valley. If I squinted, those dotted rural houses could be taken for dice scattered randomly under a lemony light. I rolled up my shirtsleeves (they were too long) and leaned against the chassis; I hadn’t turned the engine off, I liked to feel it vibrate. It must have taken a lot of energy to excavate that fissure between the hills, not to mention patient long-term planning, waiting thousands of years for the meltwaters to erode the earth until it finally molded the valley where, at that sunset, a handful of men turned on their lights below my young, eager gaze, illuminating the little plots of land that coincided with their notion of home.
I took out Rupert’s letters. My plan was to destroy them without reading them. However, though I no longer thought of myself as his adversary, or felt I held in my hands the entrails of the man who did so much to corrupt my first attempt at happiness, I was too full of life and curiosity to let that fountain run dry. I wanted more, I felt I was capable of devouring the world; we’re just passing through, we breathe for a time, we want to win, we don’t know how to quell the desire, and no one wants to.
The last time I thought about those letters (an insignificant stream of demands from the woman that clearly showed Rupert had ended the affair, and badly) was when I left Pedro-María’s place, the night of Sónar. The accusations of some woman I’d never even seen got mixed up with the story of Cris, of Isabel, of my black year living with Helen, with my asymmetrical, futureless mess, and with you (with you, of course), and it was like following a trail of virile suffering, of overflowing masculinity. The morning broke charmless; I didn’t want understanding or support, nor did I feel like walking home or going down into the metro. The last night buses smell like armpits and the toxic substance they spray to make the smell less noticeable, and the people who ride them are so worn out it makes my soul ache. I saw the taxi’s green light approaching and I deployed the elegant gesture that cabdrivers the world over respond to by braking. I opened the door, composing an aristocratic face in greeting. I was still furious at you, and thinking about Helen wasn’t helping, but a playful mood danced in my chest.
“I’ve got forty euros, take a spin for that price and end the trip on Rocafort. The Adam nightclub.”
“Sure. Are you an actor, by any chance?”
“Do actors ask you to do that a lot?”
“You see a bit of everything at night around here. Are you a musician? Trying to calm down? I can suggest better places than that. You seem like a man of good taste, sir, are you one of those five-star chefs?”
“Warm. Are you from here?”
“From Barcelona? No—as if. I’m a transplant. My parents are from Zaragoza.”
“The one and only. I had a friend in Murcia, he worked for El Adelantado or La Atalaya, something like that. He didn’t want to come to Barcelona because he was scared of the Catalan. How silly, has anyone ever gotten out of your cab because you didn’t ask where they were going in Catalan?”
“Well now, truth is they haven’t.”
“The language, the sardana, those nationalists are always going on about the same shit. But no one warns newcomers about the real dangers in this city. I told him: ‘Pedro’—because my friend’s name is Pedro—‘if you like girls, welcome to paradise.’ ”
“But that’s a good thing.”
“Do you mind if I speak frankly? Taxis are perfect for confessions. What this excess of women leads to is lust, amour fou, and that emotional turbulence is dangerous. There are some great books, scientific and literary ones, about this. It’s hermaphroditic species that are the advanced ones. Let’s take another turn.”
“Should I take the Ronda?”
“As you like. Are you married?”
“Divorced.”
“So things haven’t gone well. Perched in the back here like chickens I bet they look so pleased with themselves, showing off their youth and beauty as if those qualities were theirs forever, and not something they have to gradually trade in. When they feel your eyes on their little bodies, and that hair they work so hard on and soak in so many chemicals, and their carefully exposed curves—you can’t deny that we men are more elegant and discreet about our attributes—they seem so distant, raised up to a higher plane, like they’re the ones in the driver’s seat. But you know what you’d find if you looked closely, if you penetrated their little moral consciences?”
“Well, when you put it that way—”
“What did you do this morning when you left the house?”
“I went to the store to buy a pack of—”
“Then I’m sure you’ve seen her. I mean the cashier who in the middle of an order turns a furious face to the mirror just to be sure the crust of makeup is thick enough to hide the craters in her skin. I’m sure you saw one or two of those old women—they’re like noxious warnings, covered with wrinkles and folds. The young girls see them, too, but do you think they identify with them? Not a chance. There you have them: painted, dressed, fixed up, hair done, fighting to hold one more gaze for a second longer, their heads teeming with local and international contests for the house and the car, for the best ass and the second home and the bank account, going up against their cousins, sisters-in-law, neighbors, and colleagues. And they always hitch their wagon to the same donkey in all those races: the boyfriend, the lover, the husband, the hometown idol. This afternoon, after closing up at the practice, I crossed paths with one of them, clutching her protector’s arm. She looked at me with those dreamy little eyes I know only too well—they’re all the same species, you can ask any geneticist. They notice only the breadth of my shoulders, my full head of hair, and when these impressions are transmitted to their brain, they trigger the primitive response that identifies me as a healthy inseminator, fit for the daily struggle, and they fill my splendid carcass with their fantasies. In this city, if you’re over five foot eleven and you keep your waist down to a thirty-four, you’re going to be lusted after every day by women who don’t know you, and who haven’t learned to detect in you the same habits (messiness, procrastination) that make them badger their men at home nonstop. The youngest, the ugly ones, the ones who get old (OK, they all get old), they’re all united by a common force: the dream of attracting a man, of being courted and enticed with gifts. They’re convinced that the love they feel for themselves can spill out over other people, to dominate them and win their favor, that the trick of love will be enough to control life. Has controlling life ever occurred to you? Why would we ever think about controlling life?”
“Hang on, I’ve got it…psychologist?”
“You’re a real sage, very perceptive.”
“Like I said, you see it all in the taxi.”
“But you didn’t quite hit the bull’s-eye. I’ll give you a clue: in my line of work we see only the one thing, over and over, though of course it’s the most important thing in creation.”
“Physicist?”
“Gynecologist. Doctor Bicente. Gay clubs are the only places I can take a break from my work—they’re philanthropic spaces.”
“I understand, sir. My name is Carlos. I like girls, too.”
“Intimate and professional contact with the Mystery has changed my relationship with life, Carlos. People, even married people, forget that every woman on earth has one, that they all carry around that little oven for the seed to go in, and nine months later they expel little people. Little, live people. You see that girl who’s about to fall off her high heels? She’s got one, and that woman reaching her hand in her bag for some cosmetic minion, she’s got another, and those two crossing on the red light, assuming you won’t speed up and run them over, they’ve got one each. From the moment they’re born until they die they all have a model for peeing, for fucking, just to have it and do whatever it is they do with it: their personal care, their hygiene, their bleeding, wetness, dryness…they’re even contradictory in that. When you are forced to think about it professionally, when the cunt becomes, so to speak, your office, your perspective changes, the way you approach life. If you aren’t careful you can go crazy.”
“I understand. But it seems strange. At the stand, while we wait for customers, we talk about a lot of things. Sometimes we think about other jobs, and yours has always seemed like a fun one.”
“Fun? I’m sure when you’re with those brutes you use different words, but I appreciate that you don’t want to hurt me.”
“You can’t deny that you must have moments…”
“No, Carlos, forget about the women you cart around, they’re irrelevant. What do you think they are? Women. Just women. There are three billion of them, for the love of God. They didn’t decide to be women, they don’t think about it. The amazing thing is that open wound in their flesh, its design. Have you ever cut into the lobe of a dog’s ear? It ends up with a hole in the skin, a crater. It’s the same concept. Evolution may be lazy, but it worked with some sense of beauty. The important thing, the relevant thing, isn’t the organism that surrounds it and has a name, the nature of all that blah blah blah; the important thing is what’s seething inside them as soon as you move aside the labial sucker, all those bacteria, defenses, fluids, and ruptures.”
“I don’t know that we’re on the same page, boss.”
“You know what happens when you look at one closely, concentrating all your faculties? Doctor Bicente will tell you the truth: some strange edges like flaps surrounding the void, a dark pipe from which the skull emerges first, then the trunk and the little legs and the feet with those sad baby toes, a complete ensemble all covered in a nourishing mucous. A child is an organ, Carlos, an organ that has come from the mother and slid out through the wetness to claim its independence. Have you ever seen a chicken farm? Don’t miss it, man. Take the kids to one this weekend, or whenever you’re free. The chickens are in their pens, narrow little cages, and the poor things must think they were put there to see and to live life, but that couldn’t be further from the truth, their mission is to lay eggs, white or brown ones, all of them dirty. If you put those chickens next to some Bozeman forceps—the idea of the chickens next to the idea of the forceps, you don’t need to bring forceps to the farm—you’ll never think of a city the same way again. Look out the window, what do you see? A city infested with lights, theaters, restaurants so ethnic they’ll start allowing cannibal dishes as exotic cuisine any day now. Jewelry, champagne, that’s how we distract ourselves. Think of the pregnant women who get into your cab: flesh wrapped in flesh. Cities are giant birthing grounds, human-being farms, nurseries where some genes are incubated and others expelled so the species can continue apace, so nature can safeguard consciousness, its little mirror, its favorite toy, much more elaborate than the tortoises and chimpanzees. You’ll only hear this from a gynecologist. Only someone like me could know. That’s why they don’t invite us on TV: we are reality tutors. Even if it hurts, a gynecologist will always tell you the truth.”
“I hear you.”
“And the truth is that, when they aren’t giving birth, that whole tide of out-of-control women is like an infection. I won’t tell you they’re all crazy, you won’t hear that from Doctor Bicente, because I’m a lover of precision and confirmed data, and statistics are lacking when it comes to women, Arabs, and the Eskimos who spend the day cleaning fish with their teeth. But in our cities it doesn’t matter if the newspapers plaster their front pages with sporting triumphs or the latest about the supposed crisis—what do those political clowns matter to us! Go to a cinema, go to a shopping center, get on the metro, line up to buy two tickets to the stadium, pay attention to the workers, to the couples going out to have fun, the groups downing their drinks in bars. Forget about words—sentences are spiderwebs of hope. Just look at how th
eir lips move, how they wave their hands when they think no one is looking, the dampness of their eyes, the slow blinking: you’ll see greedy women and diminished men. It doesn’t matter if they’re in pairs, alone, reconciled, living with children who flow onward like tributaries until they spill into the river of a brand-new couple. Add clear and smooth skies so the picture doesn’t look so sinister, you still get the same exhaustion. They enter our manly young bodies and drain us of enthusiasm, energy, innocence, vigor. They rot our pulp, millions of healthy men reduced to slices of dried-out fruit. Haven’t you ever wondered why they live longer than us? When are we going to start really demanding our rights! Will no one come and rescue Western man?”
Carlos stopped the taxi at my door on Rocafort and vanished up the street without answering my questions. I hunted for my keys among the crumbs that had colonized my coat pockets. I climbed the stairs with my heart pounding, but I managed to get the door open. I poured a glass of rotgut, straight. I opened the window, and on the opposite pavement the abiding, luminous sparkle of the Adam nightclub was waiting. The night’s event was called an “On Fire” party, as if the rest of the week they just said their prayers. Those people really have a competitive spirit; maybe the thing involved sticking lightbulbs up their asses in tag teams. I raised my glass in a toast to the soda fountains where the poppers flowed freely: happy are the queers, for they shall inherit a nervous system free of feminine temptation. And like the aromatic vapor rising from a stew, the shouts of my new neighbor talking on the phone reached my ear; it sounded like she was hysterical and begging for help. Mother of two with the third on the way (what an idiotic expression, as if the fetus were traveling), chatting with a girlfriend about some guy with the proverbial blue eyes that drive you women crazy with the desire to swim in them. And according to this woman he had looked at her, which isn’t surprising if you consider the size of the eight-month-old ball growing between her hips. Scheming, fantasizing, implicating, and she only hung up because she thought the oven timer (she was making popcorn and it burned) was her husband coming home.
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