Oh well, too bad. Brothers and sisters. So far, there’s been one definite disappearance (death is always definite), that of Germán, and two less strident disappearances, two subtle, gradual, stealthy escapes: that of Carmen and of Juan, familiar shadows moving in the distance, too far off for their presence to warm us: Juan sends out few signals from his nomadic and, as I imagine, turbulent existence, although perhaps, with time, he’s calmed down a little: time tames us all, calms us, sedates us, lulls us gently to sleep. When Juan last phoned, a few years ago now, it was to announce that he’d become involved in property management or something of the sort in Málaga. That’s what he told me. Everything’s fine, really good, he said in the voice of a snake-oil salesman. I’ll tell you all about it later. Put Dad on the line, will you. But Dad didn’t want to be put on the line, he made a gesture with one hand as if batting away a wasp. Dad’s not here right now, I said, he’s gone out and won’t be back until late. What’s wrong, Juan said, doesn’t he want to speak to me? I said nothing. Silence. He cleared his throat and: Well, you can both go . . . he began to say as he was about to hang up, one tenth of a second after I had hung up on him, without waiting to hear what it was that we could both go and do. Ever since, silence. I’m sure he was lying then too, there was no Málaga, no property to manage, no everything’s fine. He hasn’t told the truth once in his more than sixty years of existence. He could be anywhere, in La Coruña, in Bilbao, in Bangkok, dealing cards in a gambling den in the private room of a roadside casino, a cigarette in his mouth and a line of cocaine waiting for him in the toilet for when he’s finished his round; clipping his toenails in a prison cell or pressing his elbows hard into a mattress as he struggles to elicit a moan of pleasure from some international piece of ass. Or else he’s just been released from jail and is phoning someone because he senses that tomorrow he might land up in another jail, and he has to make the most of this moment when he has access to a phone booth and enough money to make a call and try and persuade someone to stand bail for him and get him out of tomorrow’s prison. The last time he came here, he turned up with a Ukrainian woman, to whom, according to him, he was married (she must have been about thirty years his junior); this, it turned out, was a lie, there had been no wedding, no happy couple, not even a relatively stable relationship: she was just a prostitute who had joined him on the journey, because he’d happened to meet her on the road a few days before, she was a whore and he was a crook, she was merely an accomplice he had brought along to assist him in whatever thieving opportunities came his way, including thieving from us. This fake couple moved in and stayed for a month or two: flies buzzing around us, repeating over and over the word “money,” because that’s what they wanted, the money that my brother said he needed in order to set up some deal that would bring him stability and us wealth. Although in order to launch this fabulous business opportunity he needed cash, moola, dough. They want money up front, he told me and my father, to set up this big deal, and because, as everyone knows, banks don’t give credit without guarantees, he wanted us to sign over all our money to the bank as a guarantee for the mountain of crisp banknotes he would receive in exchange. You just lend it to me (he had forgotten all about
give me my part of the inheritance now, and I’ll sign whatever I need to sign
, that trick hadn’t worked). Or, easier still, I don’t even touch your money, you sign a document saying that the bank can keep it for a fixed term while I pay back what they lend me. A kind of guarantee that wouldn’t be a guarantee, that would continue to give you interest, more or less the same as happens now, I imagine, because I’m sure you have a money-market account somewhere, don’t you? Everyone does. What I’m proposing is really simple, and you don’t have to release your money or put it at risk. It’s a kind of guarantee that doesn’t endanger your money. The smell of money—for someone who knows that it’s near, but not exactly where or how to get at it—must jangle all the other senses, because I don’t know how he could possibly imagine he was going to get a single céntimo out of our father, because there was no way he was going to fool him into doing that. No con trick, no hustle, no scam would work, no one has ever got anything out of him with kind words or begging or threats. Not even the approach of death made my father generous. What does the old fool want the money for anyway? my younger brother would ask, hoping to make me his accomplice, as if we were both driven by the same interests rather than by entirely opposing interests, what you gain I lose and vice versa: that tired old Cain and Abel story yet again—when is he ever going to spend it, and on what, because there’s no money in the next world. Besides, he would conclude, he’s a communist and doesn’t believe in the after-life. I just played dumb: you can see how he treats me, I would say, he virtually keeps me on bread and water. Although I was also careful to look after number one: I don’t honestly think he’s got that much money. My brother: but the workshop’s doing well, isn’t it? Hmm, I said, meaning only so-so. Needless to say, he wasn’t going to get money out of us by feigning affection. He wasn’t going to get anything out of our father or me, because during the months he was with us, I didn’t even give him money to buy cigarettes, as he sometimes asked me to. He would say, lend me five hundred pesetas to buy some cigarettes, a coffee, a beer, we’re completely broke. Me too, I would say. I never gave him anything, but I would see them smoking (the Ukrainian woman smoked even more heavily than he did), or drinking beer in La Amistad, the bar opposite our house, and sometimes they would roll up in a taxi from Misent. I preferred not to know what they got up to, where they got their money. At any rate, as far as food goes, they didn’t go without. When it suited them, they ate with us. We did allow them that. The old man may have been strict, but in that respect he was a good father. Meals were for the whole family, everyone got the same portion of rice, greens, fish, the same slice of potato omelette that was there for anyone to take. Nothing luxurious, but nutritious. Justicialism: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. Pure Marx. But apart from that, apart from providing food, at least as long as my father kept his marbles, no one ever got a céntimo out of him. His method is very simple: he doesn’t show you the money, he doesn’t talk about it, he doesn’t think about it, it’s as if it didn’t exist, and as long as his mind was intact, it didn’t exist (we are neither exploiters nor speculators). And that’s what drove Juan crazy, knowing that it must exist, that it was there somewhere but not knowing where. He assumed there must be some money, either a lot or a little, and it drove him to distraction, smelling it: like a dog getting all worked up because it can smell the hare’s urine, skin and even the blood beating in the hare’s little heart, but can’t find the entrance to the hole where the animal is hiding. The dog pants, growls, scratches at the ground. I did know where the entrance was, I could see its mouth, but I couldn’t take one step inside. In fact, the hare wasn’t very large, it was a tiny creature hidden away in three separate holes, the Caja de Ahorros del Mediterraneo, the Banco de Santander and the Banco de Valencia. As far as I knew, there was no money in the house, no locked cashboxes, no wall safe concealed behind a painting. It was a bit like the Holy Trinity: the money was one in three, glowing dimly in three different bank accounts, that’s where the suppliers’ invoices got paid, where we deposited customers’ checks, where the electricity and water bills and the council tax had their home. And our father had exclusive use of the key to those three doors. He did as he pleased. He was the sole signatory. When, two years ago, I took out the money I needed to become a partner in Pedrós’s business and, shortly afterward, withdrew the rest in order to buy a still larger share, I was terrified by the thought that my father might suddenly regain his reason and speak and call me a thief. Although calling what I did theft is not quite accurate. It would be fairer to call it restitution, an advance on or a settlement of what he owes me, an historic debt as the politicians in the autonomous regions call it when they demand more capital transfers from the State. That I made a mistake, took too great a risk, is quite another matter, but what could I do, who could possibly have foreseen what happened, that what seemed like an unstoppable rise, a hot-air balloon, would deflate and fall to earth and burst into flames? I needed to see the tiny bit of capital I’d been saving for so many years grow larger, to see our own hot-air balloon take off and fly along with the others I could see drifting proudly across the sky, money that was as much mine as his, the fruit of our work in the carpentry workshop; I needed it to grow more quickly to ensure myself a dignified ending. I needed to pay for our euthanasia, his and mine, our place of rest, home care (or independent living to use the term invented by the social democrats my father has always so wholeheartedly loathed) or palliative care, and the deal with Pedrós would have the same effect as anabolic steroids, it would help build up our flaccid accounts: that was all, but it was my money
and
his, our money. I was the hare, I was my own urine and skin, I could smell my own trail, I was hunting myself. When I finally caught myself, I also lost the prey. Oh well.
My brother: If you don’t like any of the solutions I’m proposing, all you need do is sign a guarantee written in such a way that the bank can never trace it back to you. I know how to do it—he insisted tirelessly—a guarantee that passes the ball to someone else, a sort of chain guarantee—he went on. I have a friend in Barcelona who has drawn up a few trick contracts of the kind that has the bank tearing its hair out for ever having signed them: that’s how he tried to get round us, to deceive us, but when has anyone passed off a false guarantee to a bank? The bankers can cheat you, but you cheat them? Ha. Still he goes on: I’ve never asked for anything. Another of his lies: he’s done nothing but ask ever since he was a child. He was always asking, in all kinds of ways, on any excuse, adopting every possible tone of voice: seductive, threatening, pleading, imploring. He was asking from the moment he learned how to speak, and before he could speak, he used gestures. He used to wheedle things out of my mother when she was still alive; and when I was an adolescent, he still managed to get the odd bit of money out of me too (not much, I never had much: for sweets or for the cinema when he was small; for cigarettes and the occasional beer once he started shaving), he may even have got something out of my sister (and though she may be an utter cow, you can milk her as hard as you like and you won’t get much out of her dried-up teats), he tried to cajole money out of neighbors and friends, and we never did find out how everything slipped through his fingers so very fast. So young and such a spendthrift, such a scrounger, such a layabout. When he was twelve, he discovered where my mother hid her money and he stole it to buy a racing bike. He had to take the bike straight back to the shop, but they couldn’t accept it, because he’d already managed to scratch the saddle.
On that visit, his last, he would either be talking about this latest new business opportunity or, a couple of days later, bemoaning the fact that he was getting older and really
needed
to buy an apartment, to have somewhere of his own to live so that he wouldn’t find himself a penniless old man, living on the streets, it really frightens me the thought of ending up homeless, eating in soup kitchens and sleeping in hostels, or, worse still, sitting in a doorway, covered by cardboard boxes, with only a piece of stale bread to eat and a carton of red wine to stave off the cold. There was such anguish in his eyes, it broke your heart. He just needed a really small apartment, the bare essentials. He would look for a job and retire to live somewhere near us. I said: We have empty rooms here and you could work in the workshop. But no, that wasn’t what he wanted: a little apartment just for me, he said pouring all his tenderness into that word “little.” My father continued eating, staring down at his plate; he paused for a moment, a spoonful of succulent rice suspended between plate and mouth, his gaze fixed on the minute hand of the clock on the wall: Juan’s torpedo had missed its target again. He changed tactics. A day or so later, what he wanted was to
rent
an apartment, yes, he would settle for that: he’d seen a tiny third-floor one-bedroom apartment, nice and bright, with a kitchen-cum-living room and a bathroom with a full-length tub, and it was a great deal, the owners were asking almost nothing for the sale price and an equally ridiculous sum for the rent, but there was one small problem: they were demanding a guarantee for the very large deposit they wanted, and not only that, they also required payment of the first four or five months’ rent in advance and, until he managed to get himself organized and find a job locally, that was what he was asking us to provide in order for him to fulfill his dream: having a little place of his own to live. Another torpedo is launched, the spoon pauses, suspended in the air, my father’s eyes are fixed on the clock, and again, nothing. The ship remains afloat, impassive, sailing straight ahead. My father raises to his lips the spoon containing the saffron-flavored stock and the grains of rice and makes more noise than usual as he slurps it up. Hot stuff, he says. And one assumes that when he says this, he’s referring to the rice. Days later, Juan had come down to earth and what he wanted now was to buy a ground-floor business premises, a warehouse—or rather than buy it, he wanted to rent. We’re no longer on the third floor (in the cozy, comfortable one-bedroom apartment with the full-length bathtub), but on the ground floor; his business ambitions drop several stories and hit the ground when he sees that, once again, my father fails to avert his gaze from either his spoon or the clock, while I raise my eyebrows to form something like an ironic question mark. He was finally about to achieve his life’s ambition. In the last few weeks he had pulled out all the stops, done everything he could, and, eureka, the miracle had happened (he addressed that word “miracle” to my father, who, for a millisecond, interrupted the journey of spoon to mouth, he’s never believed in miracles, you idiot, but in Marx, the republic and the class struggle), and the chance for him to open a car dealership was within reach. He had all the municipal paperwork in order, the approval of the manufacturer, the paperwork for the franchise was ready to be signed, but to do that—who would have thought it—he needed, surprise, surprise, a certain amount of money. Not much, just the deposit and the first three months’ rent in advance for the premises plus the deposit and the guarantees that would allow Hyundai to release the cars to him. He realized that this was much more than he had asked for the deposit on the apartment, about a thousand or two thousand times more, but, of course, this was something really important, not a loan, not a guarantee, but a family business with guaranteed short-term profits, profits that he would, of course, share with us. It would be shared out equally, I would just be the employee, the manager, and you would be the capitalists. We would immediately be able to begin paying back the large loan we had asked for and begin putting coins in our piggy banks.
Dinero,
argent
, money,
flus
,
Geld
. That’s what he needed, that’s what we would have to pay back and that’s what we would share out and, in our free moments, we would be happy. All paths led to the same place. To the hare’s hiding place, where the fuck
was
it? I can smell it. He wasn’t asking very much. A few days later, another change of direction, while the Ukrainian was sticking her knife into a meatball, tasting a mouthful and saying: it’s good, really good, and in Spanish you call this a
pelota
?—they had something similar in Ukraine and called it by a name that was either much longer or a little shorter. Meanwhile, he was still intent on finding that hare. Trying every trick in the book. The hare with its agile legs, its twitching mouth behind which you could see its sharp teeth: the stiff little mustache, the nice ears, and the back feet with which it scratches its nose. He told us that he had been given the Hyundai concession for the whole region—he apparently had exceptionally good contacts in the land of the rising sun—this was, quite simply, an unmissable opportunity. He said this with an absolutely straight face, as if I hadn’t driven past the Hyundai concession a hundred times when leaving Misent. Whenever I have a delivery to make there, I see those second-hand Japanese cars glinting in the sunlight, warming their undersides on the heat coming off the tarmac, and I see the signs with the price written in bright red and the slogans,
UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY
emblazoned in garish colors on the hoods of the second-hand cars:
BARGAIN OF THE YEAR
. They keep the new cars inside, behind the big smoked-glass windows, and there they sit, cool and protected by the air-conditioning, neatly lined up, gleaming, and saying: Buy me if you can. Take me, I’m yours for €25,000.