And he continued in English as if he hadn’t heard my question. “What are you drinking? Let me get it for you.”
He raised a long finger and one of his thick and wickedly arched brows and instantly got the busy barmen’s attention. I assumed he was a man who never had to wait for much.
“
Quiero un whiskey
,” I said, insisting on speaking in Spanish.
Sergi faced the bar looking away from me, staring stone-faced into the mirror in front of us. In the mirror, I saw people around us recognize him, subtly pointing as they whispered to each other. They must have recognized him from all the pre-Sant Jordi media blitz he had done. He ran his hand through his long and wavy hair with hints of grey in it and looked down at the floor momentarily before turning back to me. He was a man used to having eyes on him. And I was stunned by how good it felt to be the woman standing next to him.
“You are an absolutely stunning creature when you’re naked. Has any man ever told you that, Anna?” He was still speaking to me in English, our drinks in hand, when he turned to face me.
I felt my sex draw back into itself, tight and tense. I just stared at him.
“I watched you and David fucking this afternoon,” he said. “I want you to know I really got off on it. I’m surprised you didn’t sense me there on the balcony,” he said, incredulously.
“No, I didn’t,” I said back in English, in an icy, even tone. “David didn’t tell me his brother was a stalker.” Sergi registered my comment by looking away. I tried to remain cool, wondering whether David had known he was watching. Our lovemaking was especially acrobatic, David taking me, turning me every which way he could on to him.
We were silent, as partygoers pushed and bumped up to us like small pesky waves out in deep water. We just stood there, feet an chored to the ground, enveloped in a sticky net of paralysing hate for each other.
Then a young woman with a dark tan and a tight white sleeveless dress stepped between us, leaning into Sergi seductively to say some thing in his ear. He said OK. It was time for his speech. Before I could say a word, she pulled him away from me.
Sergi’s speech was predictably stagey.
I looked for David as Sergi started his talk, his devoted listeners hanging on every word. And no one was more attentive than David, his most loyal fan, who I found standing at the corner of the stage.
“Look sweetie, it’s Sergi.” He giggled like a proud mother at a first dance recital. He was so proud of his conceited brother that I decided not to tell him about our conversation. He did not see him as I did, he never would. David and I had exchanged fluids. As had they. But they were flesh and blood. This was a battle between Sergi and me.
So I just stood there, next to David, and imagined Sergi naked, jerking off, coming pathetically into his hand, watching us. I imagined me sucking his oversexed sanguine cock with bravado. I couldn’t deny the fact I found him attractive. I imagined David walking in on us fucking secretly in the marbled men’s toilet of the Ritz, staring at us with repugnance and utter joy.
When the open bar at the Ritz closed, the three of us left with a large pack of horny literary alcoholics trailing behind us. They were middle-aged and preppy, sputtering vulgarities at the end of every sentence.
On the way out, Sergi swiped two long-stemmed roses from the Ritz’s vases and presented them to David and me. “To my favourite lovers on Sant Jordi,” was all he said before doing a disappearing act into the crowd behind us. I caught his sleazy double meaning. We flooded the streets with a group of about fifteen, half of whom, it seemed, had slept with either David or Sergi (or both) at one point or another. The babbling women were eager to share their nights of as phyxiating surrender to the Canettis’ charm with me. The men were more reserved, but they eyed me like a woman would her ex’s new conquest.
Then, without warning, David let go of my hand and clasped his rose between his teeth to jump into a comical flamenco dance in the middle of the street. My pulse raced, and I dropped Sergi’s rose to the ground, letting it slip naturally from my hands. Then I flicked my cigarette butt at it. Our group shouted
olés
, and some joined him, while Sergi and I stood back and watched. He looked on with feigned amusement. I knew that he had watched me drop the rose. I clapped harder, faster, as David stomped furiously for his finale. Sergi burned holes through my suit with his eyes all the while.
We moved our parade to the next place. We drank rounds of whiskey at tavern after tavern as we walked from the architecturally breath taking streets of upper Gracia to the piss holes of lower Barrio Gótico. The night’s path paralleled my degenerative transformation into a walking oral fixation. I chain-smoked, accepted drinks from strangers, chatted up the group, and made out with David wherever I could. I was mad with the new-found freedom of Barcelona’s street life and being surrounded by people who didn’t know me. I felt grotesquely alive.
Sergi never strayed too far away from David and me. But he avoided talking to me alone at the bars. He liked standing next to me silently, making me uneasy. I heard him breathing. I could smell his odour of perspiring figs as he’d rub his pelvis as close to my body as possible when we were standing together cramped in a group.
He also enjoyed interrupting me. I was commenting on how much I liked Spanish writer Javier Marias’ long run-on sentences and closeted narrator to an editor couple in our group when Sergi cut me off in mid-sentence. He said that Americans couldn’t possibly understand Marias’ genius. He liked attacking Americans’ ignorance of foreign literature, making it clear that when he said “Americans”, he meant me. He carried on and on, in love with the sound of his voice. But I was a snake as slick as he. When he finished, I asked him if he had been able to find an American publisher yet to translate his books into English. He smiled, his eyes said touché. But I could tell he was annoyed. He said that he hadn’t found a publisher. I gave him my sympathies, excusing myself to find David.
Around 3 a.m., I opened my eyes in the midst of a room-spinning kiss with David and saw Sergi standing behind him, looking me directly in the eye. We were at a dive bar called Kentucky, and the group was down to a total of five, including the Canettis and me. Testing how far Sergi would go to follow us, I dragged a very drunk David to a dark corner of the bar by the bathrooms.
I had never seen him so wasted. The night’s tension of having me and Sergi in a room together had driven him to it. I had watched him drink whiskey after whiskey to keep up with Sergi. But his body weight could never match his brother’s. So as David got sloppier and sloppier, Sergi appeared in complete and eerie control.
David had asked me repeatedly throughout the night if I was happy, if I liked Sergi, and if we could all be friends. I lied and said yes to all his questions, assuaging his doubts. Standing by the bath rooms, he swayed like a palm tree at the mercy of a Caribbean windstorm. I held him still.
“Let’s go,” I said. “Let’s put you to bed.”
“No, I’m fine. Just touch me.”
I pressed my body against his; I wanted him to feel my breasts. I began chewing on his ear and rubbing his cock over his trousers. And just as I suspected he would, Sergi appeared and leaned himself up against the wall in front of us. He was our one-member audience, standing in between two doors with the male and female gender symbols on them.
David’s eyes were shut tight in ecstasy. I elongated my tongue, showing Sergi how long I could stretch it out into David’s ear. I was waiting for some kind of response from Sergi. He watched without expression. It drove me mad.
David opened his eyes slowly. He saw Sergi and calmly asked, “Hey, man, what’s up?”
“I need another drink. Do you have any cash?” Sergi asked, balancing open a sheet of rolling paper and sprinkling in the loose to bacco.
“We’ll be right there,” David said, finding my hands so I’d continue.
Sergi licked the cigarette shut, exposing a long pink tongue. Then he nodded and took his time walking away. I punched David in the arm, disgusted by his passiveness.
“What?” he said.
“You’re going to fucking just let him interrupt us?”
He looked at me with eyes as glazed as glass marbles and began rubbing my crotch. He pushed the side of his hand in the crease of my pussy, calming me in an instant.
“Do you like it when I do this to you?”
I pushed his hand away. “We gotta go, remember?” I said. “Sergi needs his bottle.”
The bar was getting ready to shut down as we went out into the main room to look for Sergi. The other couple had gone home at this point, and we found Sergi standing outside talking to a sweet-looking woman with long black curls. We waited for him to finish and when he said goodbye to her, she looked very disappointed. I pitied her.
Sergi’s hands were tucked into the pockets of his blazer, his hair pulled back now into a messy stump of a ponytail. With his head tilted to the side he looked directly at me, ignoring David. “Shall we continue this journey?”
My anger neutralized with the thought of another drink and I had liked the tone that Sergi had addressed me with. “Sure,” I said nonchalantly, and we began to walk towards some underground after-hours bar that both he and David seemed to know.
It was just the three of us now. A trio, a tribe, a
tribu.
Primitive cultures knew that when there were more than two people to a group, a new set of laws had to be established to maintain order.
Nobody was walking a straight line any more. Neither was the rest of Barcelona at that time of night. David was sputtering nonsensicalities about the dragon and Sant Jordi that made us laugh. We were some how bonding over David’s amateurish inebriation and our love for him.
I kept David’s step steady with my arm as Sergi led the way to the next whiskey bar. David belted out the lyrics to an old Joy Division song in his bad British English. And I joined in. We were happy as could be.
We turned on to a dingy street in el Raval lined with African prostitutes giving us some serious come-hither looks. Sergi knocked on a nondescript rounded wooden door and a man popped his head out. After Sergi gave him some mumbled password, we were let into a cavelike lair blasting eerie opera music below. We ordered some Scotch, smoked the hashish that was passed to us, and all fell mute.
Sergi eventually left us to go wander in the back room while David and I zoned out to the music and to rubbing the skin on each other’s arms.
Time went by; I can’t say how much but I had the urge to pee and excused myself. As I walked to the back, I remember noticing that I was the only woman in the place. I climbed some rickety spiral stairs to an upper room with a cheap exposed red light bulb hanging in its corridor. Before I opened the door where the toilet was, I saw two men embracing, deep in a hungry kiss, leaning against the communal sink. The men hadn’t sensed me there. But from the blazer and small ponytail, dark designer blue jeans, fine shoes, I knew it was Sergi.
I studied them, entranced by the forcefulness of the kiss. The other man was Latino looking, black shiny straight hair, olive skin, a long mestizo nose that thickened at the base and led into full bitable lips that Sergi was devouring. The other man noticed me but didn’t stop what he was doing; he couldn’t. Sergi now had his hand on top of the man’s head and right shoulder, lowering him down to exactly where he wanted him. I suddenly thought I could do better and was stunned to feel myself turned on. Sergi was in total control. I backed out of the hallway as fast as I could. Forewent the peeing.
I told David the bathroom was broken and that we had to go. He asked if I had seen Sergi, and I told him he’d probably gone home already. It was around 5 a.m. and the streets were still littered with drunken Euro hipsters. We found a dark alleyway to piss in by some old Gothic church. David took it out and aimed at the wall beside me as I squatted and pushed my crotch out towards the wall, spreading my legs so the urine wouldn’t slide under my shoes.
“So I saw Sergi sucking face with some guy at the bar,” I said from below, getting up to zip myself up. I was surprised by how upset I felt again. “Sergi’s a full-fledged bisexual, huh? Just like Hadrian, the Roman emperor.”
“No he just fucks around occasionally,” David said.
“Then you could say he’s gay then?”
“The man is not gay, Anna. He loves women. He just likes flesh. Flesh is flesh, right?”
“Maybe it’s more like he’ll fuck anything that moves, including his own brother,” I shot back.
I wanted to hit him from frustration. I wanted to ask him if he fucked men on the side. But I refrained. Then he grabbed me by the hips and drew me closer.
“Stop it, Anna. Don’t be mad at me, but he told me he wants to sleep with you.”
I could tell David was turned on, his hands caressing my ass, his pupils huge in the night’s fading moonlight.
“And what did you say?”
“I told him to go to hell and that I’d never let him. He found you fascinating. What did you think of him?”
“Honestly, I think he’s an asshole.”
“No, I think you like him,” he drawled drunkenly, his hands had moved to the sides of my breasts.
“No I
don’t,
David.” But I wasn’t so sure.
“Yes, you do, all the girls do. But he can’t have you, you’re mine.” He licked my neck.
“And he can’t have you, either, you bastard,” I said, wanting to possess him, completely.
Then a German couple walked in on us and kindly asked for directions.
We walked home in silence, still floating on a cloud of hashish. We passed minivans stocked with hoards of red roses and empty tables waiting for the books that would be displayed and bought to morrow by idealistic, unassuming women for their seemingly perfect, Spanish men.
Our bedroom was encased by the purple glow of dawn when I awoke. We had been asleep for a half-hour, maybe a deep ten minutes, when I heard Sergi’s footsteps in the hallway coming in the front door. I couldn’t tell if he was alone or if he had brought some one back. Aroused instantly by his presence, I sat up in bed, fully awake, and listened.