by Toni Sala
He was already stepping on the gas when he heard the motorcycles behind him. He saw them in the rearview mirror, and slowed up again to wait for the teenagers to pass him. When they were out of sight he exited the highway at the first road he came across, turned around, and went back to the scene of the accident.
He swerved his Megane onto the shoulder. He parked where the motorcycles had stopped before and found it all banal: the black S’s on the asphalt, the bouquet of flowers tied with a white ribbon around the wounded tree trunk, and the smattering of glass on the ground. The violence of the accident—the extinction of two lives—had nothing in common with the stillness of the tree nor with the cement mass of the Montseny in the background. He remembered the car in the photograph with its engine on the ground, the mourners, the parents’ sobs. They had nothing to do with it either.
The highway that linked Vidreres with the main freeway had little traffic. He heard the rhythm of some music a kilometer away. He looked up. The girl from before was dancing, holding her cell phone to her ear. It was just a moment, the music rode in on a gust of wind. He could no longer hear it, but he was captivated by the sight of the girl’s hair and white dress, silhouetted against the fields and little houses of Vidreres. The distance made her dancing more precise. The flame of a candle in memory of the boys. Suddenly, the girl was still. A truck was approaching. It was the truck that was loaded down with hay before. Its turn signal flashed and it slowed. The girl got excited and took up her dance again, more joyfully, to convince the client, or maybe to show him that she wasn’t dancing for him.
The truck left the highway onto the access road, and stopped just past the girl. The driver stuck his head out of the window and looked back without turning off the engine or his turn signal. Ernest recognized him. The girl continued dancing. The truck driver started waving to get her attention. He must have been shouting at her. The girl danced as if she didn’t hear him, with her cell phone against her ear. The driver disappeared back into the cab of his truck. He shut off the engine. He got out and stood by the door, hands on his hips. The girl didn’t even look at him. The driver put a hand in his pocket, pulled out his wallet, opened it, and held out a bill to her. He waved it at her. The girl stopped. The trucker put the bill back in his wallet. The girl walked toward him. Then he leaped into the cab and started the engine. When she reached the driver’s side door, the truck’s horn blared with such violence that the girl jumped onto the highway without looking. If a car had been passing just then, she would have been hit.
The truck backed up a few meters. The girl followed it. The truck accelerated. Finally, the girl stopped. The truck stopped too. The girl again walked toward the truck. When she was beneath the driver’s side window, he honked the horn again. The girl covered her ears. She turned to leave. Then the trucker stuck his arm out of the window and closed his hand, leaving his middle finger raised. The girl turned, made the same gesture, and started to shout, but over the noise of the truck she couldn’t be heard.
The truck driver advanced slowly until he reached Ernest’s car. He stopped the truck behind it and got out.
“What a whore,” he said. “Did you see that? When I showed her the bill it got her attention . . . fucking whore. Maybe she thought I’d pay her a hundred euros! Who knows what she’s on. Look how she’s dancing.”
She had turned to dance facing them, to provoke them. The truck driver lifted his arm.
“Little whore! . . . Littttle whooore! . . . Come here, you little pussy! . . . There are two of us! Litttle whooore! . . . Come here, littttle whooore!”
The girl made another rude gesture, turned her back to him, and kept dancing.
“When they’re high they don’t concentrate,” said the truck driver. “But I have to admit she’s really hot. You gotta admit she’s really hot. Thin with small breasts, easy handling . . . A little ass the size of my hands. An easy little pussy. There aren’t many like that. You see, over on the other side of the highway?”
There was a white van half-hidden behind a tree.
“She’s new. They’re keeping an eye on her. I’m not surprised, she’s out of this world that whore—I could lose my mind over her. Am I right or am I right? What do you say? Sure is a coincidence to find such a nice piece, just the way I like ’em, isn’t it? Let’s see. How can it be that I’d find her here, on this bit of lost highway, right as I’m passing by, when I never go this way? A new girl? Was she waiting for me? Right now if somebody said: Tell me, Miqui, what kind of girl are you looking for exactly? Ask for whatever you want. How do you want her? Like this one, yes or no? Would you change anything about her? No. Could you improve her? Impossible. Well, here you go. All for you. Seriously, man, wouldn’t you be suspicious? Really, I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t be suspicious. But I’m cranky. I’ve had a crappy morning. Maybe it’s instinct. A man can get it on with a goat, with a hen, with another guy, if need be. I don’t know, maybe she’s not as hot as she looks, you know what I mean? What do you say? What do you think? Look at her. Is she fine or what?”
“Too young.”
“She’s super hot. It’s so obvious. What, you like old ones, or what? The problem is she’s high. When they’re high they don’t concentrate.”
Then the truck driver saw the bouquet of flowers on the tree.
“Shit,” he said. “They must be fresh, too.”
“I didn’t know them,” said Ernest, as if he’d been caught taking advantage of a tragedy. “I don’t know anything about it. I work in Vidreres, but I’m not from here.”
“Well, it’s lucky not to be from here today. Unless you’ve got my bad luck, because I had to deliver some bales of hay to the house of the girlfriend of one of the guys who died at this tree. There were two of them. This was their final stop. I had to spend the morning in the social club’s bar, scratching my ass with the girl who works there, and then her dad told me they just came from the burial of a very close friend of their daughter’s. Then I saw the daughter. . . oh man.”
A few cars passed, coming from town. The drivers slowed down and glanced at the tree.
“We’re idiots,” said the trucker. He walked past the plane tree and pissed behind the trunk. “We should be used to it by now. You think thirty or forty years will make a difference? Even fifty, you think that’ll make a lick of difference?”
“The years don’t belong to you, no.”
“They never belong to you,” said the truck driver.
“When I got here, there were some kids,” he said in his defense.
The trucker came around the plane tree, zipping up his fly. He stepped on the broken glass, extended his hand, and pulled a flower out of the bouquet.
“We must be taking turns. First the kids, then you, then me. . .” he said. “Do you know Cindy?”
“Cindy from the club?”
“She is a fox, too, isn’t she?” He plucked another flower and turned. “I don’t get it. Why do people put out flowers? It’s bullshit. Where do you usually die? At home or in the hospital, right? And no one puts out flowers there. These bunches of flowers bug me. Dead people don’t give a shit about flowers. You take flowers to the cemetery, not the highway. Two days from now nobody’s even going to remember. It’s disgusting, rotting flowers all over; I see them everywhere. We should be happy, shit, two more chicks for us; let’s worry about the girls. Damn, that one over there was nothing to sneeze at. She was begging for some tenderness.”
Ernest went toward the car. Sometimes it seemed that men chose him. Even old ones, they looked back and said to him: Ah, when I was young! Ah, if I were young again! At the bank he was used to guys bragging about money, clients who puffed up their chests and looked at him arrogantly—he spends his days touching other people’s money, poor loser!—without imagining that in the very chair where they were then sitting, still warm, the last client had moved fifty or a hundred times more money than those braggarts, money that these show-offs couldn’t even imagine was flowing through Vi
dreres. But sexual vanity had an arrogance and a defiance to it that vanity over wealth didn’t. You can’t live without money, but you can live without sex, so these sexual creatures boast about something more gratuitous, more pure and free. And if it’s just their nature, then it’s even worse to brag. There was nothing to brag about then. They want to get you mixed up in their lies. He gave thanks for the success of his marriage, for the modesty of his desires, for the unequal distribution of things: how nature makes skinny gluttons and fat ascetics, and he was one of the former. He had always been like that, it wasn’t a question of age.
The trucker pointed with the flowers to a dent in the truck’s fender.
“I would have made mincemeat of that tree,” he said. “Get into the cab for a minute, come on, you’ll see how different it is than a car.”
He said no, but accepted a cigarette. He saw that the girl had left. He hadn’t smoked since his second daughter was born. Twenty years. Now, the sting made him feel the outline of his tongue, the walls of his mouth. He wanted to think it was his family and friends who helped him to be himself, but the two dead boys, the unhinged truck driver, the very taste of the tobacco was helping him much more. Otherwise, what were they doing there? What made him stop there? Now, after a delay, he thought he understood what had happened. Before the truck driver showed up he had the impression of his life being captured within walls of the dead, of feeling compressed by the death around him, the dead turning into his skin, his shape, his protection against a chaotic and ephemeral world; the cadavers converted into the only breakwater against the waves of time. The dead gave life shape: everything outside of Ernest was dead, the dead were dead, but the tree was also dead, and the truck driver was dead, and the prostitute was dead too. That was why he felt so bad and so alone, but also why he had to endure. If he went home and found his daughters and wife dead, he wouldn’t have lost an arm, or a lung: he would keep breathing, keep going to work at the bank every day. He would still be whole, even more whole then, with more experience. Ernest had a potbelly but was in good health. Why worry about the dent in the fender the trucker was pointing at? Why worry about the deaths of people he’d never met? Was suffering necessary? Or did he enjoy it? The trucker was right. We are idiots. How embarrassingly gratuitous suffering is, how contemptible. Keeping everyone who was dying at that moment present was an insult to the luck of not being in their skin. He didn’t suffer for the dead boys; he didn’t suffer for his daughters. He suffered for himself, for his cowardice, and he was eaten up by shame.
“What’s the dent from?” he asked.
“I don’t know. A couple of months ago I made a trip to Breda with construction materials. Because now you never know where you’ll get sent, any day I’ll have to go to Belgium or the ends of the earth, and that’s if I’m lucky. The fucking construction bust, it’s worse than they say, it’s all illegal trucks now, everybody’s a trucker now that there’s nothing to transport. So I had to go to Breda. It was already dark on the way back, I felt a jolt, but I didn’t stop. If it was a dog or a boar, it was dead. I glanced in the mirror and didn’t see anything on the road. Anyway, when an animal crosses the highway, the last thing you should do is try to dodge it, unless you want to have an accident. I don’t know what it was, maybe a ball. It wouldn’t have been the first time I’ve had an animal stuck to the fender, but when I got home there was nothing there. I know a trucker who once brought back a roe deer from the Pyrenees. He didn’t find it until the next day. He saw a stain on the ground, he thought his truck was losing oil, but it was a roe deer that was still breathing.”
The trucker climbed into the cab, put the flowers on the dashboard, lowered the window, and said, “Hop on in, you’ll see.”
“I’ve gotta go.”
“Look,” said the truck driver. “You can leave with a clear conscience. They’re coming to relieve us.”
At first he didn’t recognize him. Then he saw that it was Mr. Cals. He was walking with a cane that he’d never seen before. He looked mechanical, black and robust like a spider.
“You came to see the tree too?” said Mr. Cals.
He felt like a tourist at a concentration camp. Mr. Cals must have more reasons for being there. He lifted his cane and aimed it at a point amid the fields, with the mountains of the Ardenya in the background.
“Every day after lunch I stretch my legs, walking all the way to Clar stream,” he said. “You won’t find a flatter plain anywhere . . . take a good look. Those trees over there are Puig’s forest. That’s Cal Borni. There, Can Batllosera. Do you see anything special?”
This eighty-year-old spider is voracious, thought Ernest, he’s very experienced, he rams in his chelicerae, waits for the poison to hit the insect he’s hunted, and then he eats it.
“The lands of Can Batlle,” said Ernest.
“Can Batlle is on the other side of town. No. These fields . . . You see how flat they are? In 1937, during the war, they made an airfield here. Workers started to come, mostly from Sant Feliu, three hundred men showed up. Vidreres, in those days, was no more than two thousand, and that’s counting the two hundred war refugees from Madrid who’d already arrived. The clouds of dust they raised, moving all the earth, the tractors . . . They still filled the trucks with shovels! They changed the course of Rere Pins and Can Canyet’s irrigation channel, they buried storehouses for bombs and gas tanks . . . and in ’38, in March, it must have been about six, because we were coming out of school, we saw planes with four wings coming in from the west, and they landed, and they were still running along the strip when Ballartet, who was a kid like me, Ballartet lifted his finger to the sky, and we saw a silvery dot, like a needle. It was an observation plane—the kind we called Pava—from Franco’s forces, with three escort planes. The excitement didn’t last long. Within four days the first bombing began. Three planes at nine in the morning. A bomb fell where Can Met is now. Antoni Amargant and Pep from Casa Nova, who are dead now, were going to the village on bicycles, and when they heard the planes they threw themselves to the ground. And Pep was on the side closest to the road, and the shrapnel hit him and he lost an arm. Spent the rest of his life in Vidreres with one empty sleeve. Bombs fell where Can Rafel is now, breaking all the windowpanes, and on one of Torre’s fields, on Modeguet and Can Castelló; it’s a miracle they didn’t kill Encarna Mauri. It was a bad spot for an airfield, one of those ideas the Republic had, putting a field here just because it was flat. The National forces came from Majorca, and when they passed Mont Barbat they were right over us . . . There was no time to do anything: when you heard the roar of the engines the bombs had already started. Five days later, a couple more planes attacked us. I remember that it hadn’t rained in a long time, and the earth was so dry that the bombs sent chunks flying higher than the tops of the pine and cork trees, so much dust, and a bomb fell on the woodshed of Can Súria, everybody was in the shelter except for Genové and Miquel Vives from Sils, who were working in the field, and both got killed.” Mr. Cals grabbed Ernest by the arm. “First thing the next morning they attacked the field again, because it was April 14, the anniversary of the Republic. I was headed to school. I saw the middle of the field all lit up. . . and the planes ran along the strip so they wouldn’t get hit—the lights were bombs . . . Ambulances ran all morning. They blew up the gas tank at the Campsa, they killed three pilots and a lieutenant, four dead . . .”
“I have to go for lunch,” shouted the trucker from his cab, starting the engine. “Come along. Trust me!”
“You know where there was a shelter, during the war?” continued Mr. Cals. “Right in front of your bank, in the church square . . . When they dug it they found human bones, that always happens when you poke around near a church . . . We went in there to play, I remember it as if it were yesterday.”
“Follow me!” shouted the trucker from his cab.
He left Mr. Cals there, obviously still wanting to reminisce, and headed to his car.
He followed the truck to get
away from Mr. Cals. He was headed away from his house, but before he could make up his mind to turn around, the truck pulled into the parking lot of a restaurant on the side of the highway.
The chalkboard advertised a nine-euro prix fixe menu. He parked. He called home so they wouldn’t expect him for lunch. Some unexpected work had come up at the office. He was staying with Jaume to go over some accounts that didn’t add up. He got out of the car and entered the restaurant with the trucker. At the very back was a lit fireplace. Most of the customers were truck drivers. They were talking from one table to the next, shouting because they’d been drinking and had time—the tachometer was in charge, they had to take their required hours of rest. But the shouting could also have been from excitement, from truckers who had no time to waste.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said out loud.
“Order the lamb and you’ll know. This is definitely better than standing there staring at some bullshit tree. You work this afternoon? I’m done for the day. I sometimes have days with nothing to do. Tomorrow I have to go pick up a boat, next Monday I go to Vic to load up some scrap metal, after that we’ll see. I’ll give you my card, you never know.”
Was there sexual tension coming from the trucker, or from him? He lowered his gaze, saw his potbelly, and decided there wasn’t.