The Boys

by Toni Sala

  “I’ll bring you another beer,” said Marga, getting up.

  Thinking wasn’t a question of time, but rather a question of space, of intensity. You could think about two contradictory things without any contradiction, in closed compartments, because the brain worked in layers. There’s a party going on upstairs; on the floor below, someone is trying to sleep. You hear the music from the party, and those up there know that every stomp, every dance step, will be heard down below. Regrets above and headaches below, but each private, without being communicated. Most of the time, the brain isn’t a two-story house, but a skyscraper forty or two hundred floors tall, with a different landscape out each window. If it were just one floor, it wouldn’t matter which one. Being forced to live on more than one simultaneously gets you used to relativism. You have forty, two hundred thousand lives. But, on the other hand, you have to choose, because you have to be someone, you have to be a role model for your daughters, at least, for the people you love, you don’t want to be an example of solitude, you don’t want to leave them alone, you want them to know that you are here, in one window or another. You aren’t an irresponsible cad. And so what does he decide? To take advantage of the fact that the girl is in the kitchen to stand up and flee? What is going with the flow? Staying or leaving? What does he want? Shouldn’t he know that? Otherwise, what’s he doing here? How could he not know? Doesn’t he know if he wants it? Isn’t indecision a worse sin? If you’re going to make a mistake, at least save yourself the suffering! If only you could leap! From the twenty-first floor! From the car speeding toward the tree!

  He suddenly remembered something one of his cousins once told him at the tail end of a wedding reception, when the dancing had begun and there were only three people left at their table: his cousin, a bearded man, and him. The bride passed near them, and the bearded guy made some comment about her ass. His cousin’s face changed suddenly, and he told him he could cut out the crassness.

  “That kind of comment,” he said, looking into the eyes of the bearded man, who was at least as drunk as he was, “always comes from guys who aren’t getting any, guys who resent women.”

  The bearded man was slow to grasp what he’d just been told, but then he answered with the same rudeness he’d used to describe the girl’s ass—and which made his cousin realize that the comment wasn’t coming from carefree joie de vivre, but was tinged with self-indulgence and in bad faith—and, still smiling: “There’s no merit in getting some if you have to pay for it.”

  “No one’s talking about merit here,” answered the cousin. And then he said the words that haunted Ernest for weeks, to the point that it changed the frequency of his sexual relations with his wife. His cousin said: “I look for a bit of life without hurting anyone. That’s why I pay for it, but I don’t recommend it to others.”

  The girl came back with more beers.

  “What?” she said, taking his hand.

  She didn’t know how to take an old man’s hand; she took it in hers carefully, like a teenager, and tried to tug. He pulled it away. He emptied his beer in three gulps. A happy feeling of release washed over him. As he waited for her to finish her beer, he saw the other girl’s hair at his friend’s waist.

  “Let’s go to a room,” he said.

  Learn to live for once. For once, learn to think about your family from many floors up or down, move away from the windows, learn to live without them for the day you’ll have to leave, for the day they leave.

  In the girl’s room there were towels from the shower and scattered clothes. Some pants, a skirt, and a blouse. The furniture in there was new too, and there was nothing hanging on the walls. They didn’t live here. But the door to the closet was half open, revealing colorful dresses and shoes.

  The girl drew the curtains and turned off the light. The room was left quite dark. He took off his clothes, imitating her. He got into the bed. He was embarrassed by his body. The age difference was obscene, and he would have preferred she approach him dressed, because he also desired her clothes. She wore a purple lingerie set. She had a tattoo at the base of her neck, ivy that went down the middle of her back.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Close the door. Don’t talk.”

  “All right, but close your eyes.”

  Ernest closed his eyes and waited. The bed started to warm up, the sheets were clean; no one had slept there.

  He heard the trucker laugh on the other side of the door. What was taking her so long? Was she going to get into bed with him or pull the covers off him?

  Women don’t know their power, nor how to depersonalize that power. The less they are like themselves, the stronger they are. The girl moved around the room, but he resisted opening his eyes until he remembered that he had left his wallet in his pants, with his ID and four fifty-euro bills.

  He opened his eyes. He saw some sort of angel in front of the wardrobe. He closed his eyes and opened them again. The girl smiled in the half-light. She was wearing the purple lingerie set, the earrings, and some white wings with plastic feathers.

  He had seen those wings in Vidreres, in the window of the sex shop, and now he understood why there was a sex shop in a small, rural town like Vidreres: for prostitutes and their clients.

  It seemed like everything was becoming clear.

  “Tell me one thing,” he said. “What did you do this morning?”

  The girl didn’t answer. She knew the two boys. She was in the square, she was at the church, she had accompanied them to the cemetery.

  “Answer me.”

  “You told me not to talk.”

  The wings were as violent and awkward as plowshares. The girl knew the two dead boys. Both girls knew them. How could they not? They were the same age. Everyone had gone to the funeral.

  “Where were you earlier today?”

  The girl no longer laughed.

  “What do you care?”

  He got up from the bed. His daughters had grown up, and he’d had to learn not to raise his hand to them. But there were moments when you had to. When you have children you spend your life risking your dignity. Your existence lies in the hands of someone else. That’s what children are. They destroy you. There should be some way to retire after having them. Retire from being a parent. Since there isn’t, you have to stay in shape to deal with them. Deal with your children; deal with the young. The girl could have been his daughter. And just as he would have with his daughters, he got up from the bed and planted himself in front of her. One more rude remark and he’d slap her.

  “Get back in bed,” she said. She had lowered her gaze. “Get back in bed, will you? Close your eyes again . . . try to relax . . . We were out—in the winter this place is dead—we were in Barcelona earlier, at a gym, if you really want to know. Okay? Do you mind? What’s wrong with you? This was a special surprise for you.”

  She meant the wings. Ernest got back in bed and closed his eyes. The girl lay down beside him. She kissed him on the cheek like a daughter, until he turned toward her and opened his eyes and hugged her and stroked her. She had taken off the wings but still wore the lingerie set, and she was smiling again. Innocent as animals, he thought. They live in Barcelona, they come up here to work, and then they go back. It’s a parenthesis. An upper floor. They are named Clara or Sònia or Judit, and they go out with boys who take them to the gym and know nothing about all this. Or do know and stay out of it. They live with their parents. They go to college.

  He let his eyelids drop again, letting his hands take the lead, he felt her and went to her sex as was his wont—headfirst into the river—and the shock was as imminent as the tree trunk was for the two brothers. Knock up your daughter, make her a mother and grandmother, take her out of the running. Lives kept coming and going and now a new one shows up. The accident hadn’t cut short a long life, but rather two short lives that had yet to branch out: pure miscarriages. It was nothing. He put his hand on her sex, proof that the living are made to be with each other, the bodies th
emselves deformed to fit together—needing to talk, sometimes, on their own. Not even pregnancy lets us escape that. It was death, what brought them together. All bodies, dead or alive: plants, rocks, horses, and mountains. They followed the sway of sex, the movement of skeletons, as if it could shut off their consciousness and give comfort in the company of a shared night. But the more he wanted to get those thoughts out of his head, the more they imposed themselves. It seemed he might shake them off with a violent lurch, but he knew he couldn’t, his head was loaded down with years, with floors and stairwells, each day the same as the last, all the boredom that must have started one day—perhaps when he signed his first contract to work at the bank—the desperate life of an older man, everything ending, just remnants, Mondays waiting for Fridays, Fridays waiting for Mondays, and, thank you ever so much; when he retires he won’t even have that. The dead fell from the trees onto the boredom of the living, and every once in a while a muffled clarification: the temptation of suicide, sometimes like a compassionate light and sometimes like a bitter, soiling cowardice. Waiting behind soundproof glass and waiting, not doing anything but waiting. Meanwhile, on top of him—with reins and a crop, sinking spurs into his belly, riding him at a gallop until he’s worn out—is his own tedium, the exhaustion of him as a person.

  But now the tedium had been cracked open. He had wished for a car accident a thousand times, as a reward for all those trips to Vidreres. And those two poor kids had the accident. The two young brothers had the accident. They’d mocked him. Here he had the consolation of the girl they left behind. If she hadn’t showed up in those wings, maybe Ernest would have told her what he wanted: pain. Not wings, but shoes. Shoes leaving tread marks, rubber tracks on his back, the conscious braking. A payment for being here, for remaining, for having escaped the car in place of the brother who was driving.

  He filled his hands with the girl’s flesh, and his eagerness was because the dead wanted sex: it was a child’s game, religious, familiar, and worn. He opened his eyes and finished undressing her, and he didn’t care anymore about being under the sheets. Guilt is the marrow in life’s bones, the only consistent thing in life, blessed, beloved guilt, the material we are made of, the dead, children, parents of the dead, their deaths a gift from our unconscious, and it was becoming urgent that he ejaculate. He ran his hand over the girl’s straight hair, shiny and clean, with the grooves from the comb visible, still damp, and he looked around the bed for satellites of her, pieces of clothing, her purse, dresses, shoes—the shoes he would have liked to feel on the skin of his back, hard and painful enough to keep him from thinking—the vanity case, the silvery cell phone, the short jacket that would end up at the back of the closet and then in the trash, and which she’d see someday, when she was his age, in the photographs of her youth, like his daughters will see him in photos after he’s dead.

  So distract yourself, celebrate the boys’ destruction, celebrate with their parents as if the boys were your daughters; swallow the incest, the necrophilia, it’s over, they won’t die again, move toward her, sink yourself deep inside.

  A thrust for his life in the office, two thrusts for the boys’ lives, and one each for the short jacket, the earrings, the wings, a thrust for the ivy tattoo on her back, and another for not crying, for life to live, for life impossible to live, for the lure of life that kills you and nourishes you, for the guilt of feeling guilty, for the shouts and the chains, for life where the only joy is in deception, for life sunk in muddy quagmires filled with drowning, crying babies, for life that knows no pain or rapture, and a thrust for each closing coffin; he had to ejaculate, to rid himself of that intention, and he asked the girl to give him a hand.

  Had the dead boys been released from inside him with his orgasm? Can there be consciousness of the unconscious? She got up, grabbed a towel, and left the room. She wasn’t that professional. She left the men alone too soon.

  He heard the voices of Miqui and Cloe on the other side of the door, and a laugh. Water ran through the pipes. Marga was showering. She would come back into the room soon to get dressed. He couldn’t allow himself to sleep, but his eyelids were heavy. He’d drift off, he wouldn’t think about anything, he would melt . . .

  He heard a door open and gave a start. It was the trucker coming into the bedroom, buckling his belt.

  He covered his belly. He sat up against the headboard. The trucker extended a hand: “Buddy, I gotta go.”

  “You’re going?”

  “I’m leaving you in good hands. For a hundred euros, you couldn’t ask for more.”

  “Do you get a commission?”

  “I don’t want any misunderstandings.”

  Ernest got dressed and got the money. He took a last look at the jacket and wings on the floor. He rushed. He didn’t want to see her again. He would give the money to the other girl. He would get home, have dinner, a shower, and go to bed. Maybe he’d have a bath. The next day, he’d go back to the office. He would start the week over. The truck heading off blended into the persistent sound of the shower. He wondered if he’d gotten her that dirty.

  As he left the house, the water was still running through the pipes.

  After a few kilometers he stopped the car. The wheels skidded as if it had been raining for weeks and the highway was flooded with mud. He got out of the car and found the asphalt soft, but it wasn’t mud, it was flesh. He looked around. Mountains, trees, and houses of flesh. Blood flowing in the rivers, the clouds were blubber, everyone had gotten out of their cars, there were worms everywhere.

  THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL

  I

  He yawned, let his pajamas drop to the floor, and put on the sweater he’d worn the day before, with wisps of hay still on the elbows. It was eleven in the morning, and he had been up past five chatting online with a girl in Seville, a nice set of jugs if the photo was actually her—and if not, whoever was typing in her name had good taste, they’d chosen a very warm, summery photo. Even though now it was winter, the girl in the picture wore a red tank top, the sides open in wide ovals from the shoulder to the waist, with no hint of a bra, the neckline revealing incredible orbs of flesh that lifted the fabric. The best jugs on the market. If they weren’t hers, they must have been chosen by a man or a lesbian. But that didn’t matter, you went online to be altruistic, to find and offer generosity, to forgive from the get-go, to give yourself over to the gratuitousness of a limitless, empty planet devoid of responsibility—created by man, though, and therefore not infinite, just beyond your reach. The Internet didn’t have nature’s independence; tied to humans, it could only be fantasy up to a certain point. And it contained a world of altruism—you could be talking to the scum of the earth, to the worst criminals, serial killers, and terrorists, bad people who, if they caught you in the forest, would crush you without thinking twice—but that’s just how the Internet is, it redeems and purifies them. And how many imposters do we come across every day without even realizing? Who wasn’t covering up their belly, the folds we want to hide even from ourselves, since we can’t go around showing them? But if all you get from the imposters is a sham, what sham are we even talking about? The mask is the truth, they don’t cheat you on the Internet: whores who don’t charge aren’t whores.

  He posted different photographs depending on the day, out of generosity. He used the name “Miqui” so he felt more identified with the photos, and he updated them depending on his mood. He had folders full of faces to choose from. The best photo was of an executive with very short blond hair and a gleaming new shirt. Chicks drooled over guys like that. It had taken him months to find a photo that fit his personality so well. Our outsides and our insides never match up. The earth is a chaos of seven billion outer shells and seven billion personalities; faces never perfectly fit their owners, souls and bodies do their own thing; the dead, the living, the young, and the old in a tangle of locations and moments, all chaos and orgy. Who was that blond jerk whose face Miqui’d swiped? What country was he from? What year was the pho
to taken? Maybe the blond was bald now. And what if that exact blond guy had a personality that matched Miqui’s face? What if the blond guy’s personality—from inside Miqui’s shell—was punching and kicking at the walls of his prison of a face? Who knew what son of a bitch was wearing the blond guy’s façade. Who knows whose boobs those really were or what kind of narcissist hid behind the sweet smile of the waitress at the social club yesterday.

  They can do face transplants. They transplant the whole kit and caboodle: the forehead, eyebrows, eyelids, nostrils, cheeks and lips, moles, chin. They resuscitate the dead face for the blank head of a poor wretch who’s lost his. They take off what’s left of the old face, file down the bones, and slip a new face on like a sock. The transplantee washes it every morning in front of the mirror. He’s the same, he just looks different. His face sweats or is cold like always, it itches or it stings, he feels the sun beating down on it, he feels the rain falling on it. He gets blackheads, inflamed pimples, his beard grows . . . but wait a second: whose beard is that? His hairs and his tears go through someone else’s skin. If it’s a woman who receives the transplant, who does she put her lipstick, eye shadow, foundation, and sunglasses on? More masks atop the mask. Her boyfriend doesn’t know who he’s caressing. Who’s he kissing if he kisses her on the cheek? The flayed skull of a cadaver buried a thousand kilometers away. And when he kisses her on the mouth, whose lips does his tongue slip through?

  There’s a whole business around it. They bring faces from far away, just in case, but they can’t bring them from too far off, from some continent with other races; for example, they can’t put an Asian face on a European body. But the faces travel to and fro, there are markets, they organize swaps and fairs on sporting fields, with stands filled with faces, butcher shops of masks, wholesale or retail—How many would you like, doctor? That makes a kilo—and right now trucks like his, filled with faces, drive down the streets, roads, and expressways. There are stockpiles of faces traveling on planes, trains, and boats. In portside warehouses, containers filled with faces wait for a semi to come pick them up. Flesh masks hang on hooks in refrigerated rooms beneath clinics and hospitals, surgeons handle them with surgical gloves, spin them on two fingers like pizza dough to air them out so they’ll give a bit as they’re sewn on the head. There are catalogues of masks, categories, supply, demand, swaps . . . You like this one? It’ll suit you perfectly. Would you like to see the photo of its previous owner to get an idea of what you’ll look like?