He was the third, the best of the three, the most intelligent, but still the third. Sometimes the most defenseless, sometimes the most powerful, sometimes insensitive and egotistical—that was him. But now it was Maribel who was on the losing side.This was why Juan Olmedo couldn’t make sense of it all, still wondering why pain and guilt, error and blood, had to repeat themselves in his life, the life of a man who had only ever wanted to be a good boy.“I should have killed him,” he told himself, and it didn’t frighten him, so he repeated it:“I should have killed him.”
He had time to think and he wanted to think. But when they brought Maribel up from Recovery, conscious, with all her vital signs under control, one thought was at the forefront of Juan’s mind, coexisting with alarm and relief, fear and guilt, good memories and bad, and even with the first hint of a feeling of possession that had been born with the stabbing of a knife, a feeling that had never flourished while there was only one woman in the world, and that woman wasn’t his. Seeing him, nobody would have guessed any of this, neither the porter who took Maribel up to her floor, nor the nurse standing by the door of one of the quietest rooms, where a hand-drawn cross on one of the two identification labels revealed that the other bed inside was to be kept empty. “I’ll take care of everything,” Miguel Barroso had said and Juan smiled when he saw how completely he’d kept his word. Once Maribel was comfortably installed, Juan’s eyes met hers. He took a step forward, stroked her face, and asked her how she felt. She responded by resting her face against his hand.At this point, the porter and the nurse both left the room quietly. Nobody watching the scene would have guessed, but then, and later, Juan Olmedo was thinking only one thing:“Don’t cross me, Mr. Tasty Bread, do not cross me.”
By the time Damián Olmedo crossed his brother Juan for the last time, Tamara was ten years old.“Well, if it isn’t Mother Teresa of Calcutta herself! What’s the matter? Look, Juanito, one of these days I’m going to punch you so hard you won’t know what’s hit you, is that clear? I’m a grown-up. I’m thirty-seven years old and I can do what the hell I like, get it? I don’t have to justify myself to anyone, least of all you, so get out. Now!” El Canario’s real name was Amador, but he liked to say that there was no one in the whole of Villaverde with the balls to call him that. Tamara hadn’t liked the doll’s house. It was very big, very pretty, and, above all, very expensive—a crazy, ridiculous present for a little kid who wouldn’t know how to appreciate it—but it was what she wanted. Damián had told him so two days earlier on the phone: “She wants a doll’s house,” so Juan had bought her one. “I don’t know what the hell you think you’re doing in my house at this time of night, waiting to tell me off.What are you, my wife or something? Who do you think you are, you wanker?” El Canario had never known his father, and would probably have preferred never to have known his mother. Everyone knew her, her name was Benigna, she worked in a bar and she drank—anis, wine, vermouth, beer, whatever was left in the customers’ glasses. Of course she wanted a doll’s house! Tamara was crying, in her new dress with tiny bunches of grapes embroidered on the collar, a green ribbon in her hair. “I wanted my daddy to give me the doll’s house, not you, my daddy.” “Why don’t you just fuck off, Juanito? I didn’t get home earlier because I couldn’t. So what? If Tamara’s in a mood, she can just shake herself out of it.What’s the problem? You were here, weren’t you? You’re the saint, after all, everyone’s grandmother.” El Canario wasn’t from the Canary Islands, he was born at the Doce de Octubre Hospital, like everyone else in the area, and his mother was from Valdepeñas de Jaen, but they called him that because he went to a gym to do Canaries wrestling. It was one of Benigna’s lodgers who introduced him to it, a sales rep from Teruel known only by his surname, Parra, who was fond of the boy. Because of this, and because he’d met a boxing coach by chance, and because he watched lots of films on TV, and because El Canario was always bunking off school and hanging around on the streets, smoking joints and kicking empty bottles about, he took him to the gym.The boxing coach could see immediately that El Canario would be no good at boxing—he wasn’t agile or flexible enough—but he suggested that with such a great big body, the boy should maybe try Canaries or Greco-Roman wrestling. Damián hadn’t appeared all afternoon. By the time Juan arrived at around six, his sisters were there with their children and some of Tamara’s school friends. Others arrived over the next quarter of an hour. After that, no one else arrived until the children’s parents came to collect them at around eight thirty.The birthday cake was still sitting, untouched, in the middle of the dining-room table, with two red candles in the shape of a one and a zero.Tamara refused to blow out the candles and cut the cake until her father arrived, but her father didn’t arrive, and some of the children kept asking if there wasn’t going to be a birthday cake at this party. To play for time,Trini brought out the
piñata
, and then, at eight o’clock, Paquita ran to the nearest shop, bought the first cake she saw, ran home with it and gave each child a slice, except her niece who had a terrible tantrum and locked herself in the bathroom, crying because her father wasn’t there. The second cake was as big as the first, but when Juan offered to pay his sister for it, she said there was no need. It hadn’t cost her a penny because the nearest cake shop was, of course, Damián’s. “Come on, let’s have the cake now.” “Are you sure?” “Yes. I’ll grab Tamara, we can sing Happy Birthday to her and have the bloody cake, even if it is three in the morning and her birthday was yesterday, I don’t care.”“You know what, Juanito? Do you remember Papa? Well, I’m starting to feel like him—I’ve had it up to here with your superior little tone, up to here!” El Canario respected Parra because he didn’t sleep with Benigna, and for a time he took going to the gym quite seriously, although he refused to give up smoking or drinking beer, and he stopped running when he’d had enough rather than doing the extra five or six kilometers he was supposed to. But somehow he won his first fight.Then he lost three, won another two, lost three fights in a row and gave it up, but his record was more than enough for a legend to grow.“You’d better watch out, that guy’s a champion wrestler!” El Orejas, a skinny boy with glasses who was always keen to play the role of right-hand man, would warn whenever El Canario lost his temper. And whoever heard him would be out of there like a shot, but not before hearing the phrase that El Canario, the hardest gang member in Villaverde Alto, made famous in all the districts this side of the river:“Don’t cross me, boy, don’t cross me.”Tamara was refusing to come out of the bathroom. Meanwhile her friends were getting their coats and their goody bags, leaving without asking any questions, but looking at their parents with an expression that spoke volumes. Juan had lost count of how many drinks he’d had.
He got himself another one and then sat down in the corridor outside the bathroom, attempting to talk to Tamara. Before this, he’d said goodbye to his sister Trini, who rushed off saying she had to give the kids their baths and supper.As he watched them leave, he reflected that he really ought to do the same. He had a dinner date and nothing was forcing him to stay there in Damián’s house, trying in vain to reason with a distraught child, when he was pretty sure it would do no good.Tamara had become unbearable recently—capricious, tyrannical, irritable—an expert at emotional blackmail, although she didn’t yet know that it worked because her victims were aware that she was alone, and that her mother’s death had brought the sudden, spectacular abandonment by her father in its wake. Juan should have left, he should have decided to ignore Tamara’s tantrum, but he stayed, and spoke for a long time outside the locked door. He talked about traffic jams and unforeseen events, of the pressing business that adults engaged in and the way things became complicated, of what it meant to love someone. At a quarter to ten, Paquita said she had to leave, but Tamara refused to say goodbye to her. Juan poured himself another drink, drank it, ate a tuna sandwich and a handful of chips, and had time to refill his glass again before Tamara finally emerged from the bathroom with a red, tear-stained face. Juan should have left, he should have turned his back on it all, but he stayed, because that was his nature, his character. As she came out of the bathroom, his niece told him that what she’d said earlier wasn’t true, that she had liked the doll’s house, a lot, and Juan Olmedo reflected that the world would be a better place if his brother Damián weren’t living in it.“So what if Tamara’s unhinged? What d’you think I am? Every time I see her, I see her bitch of a mother. I can’t help it, I just can’t. It’s not my fault, Juan, I didn’t want to have any children, you know that.When Charo got pregnant, I didn’t want children. But that’s the least of it. Marrying that woman was the worst thing that ever happened to me, it was the worst fucking decision I ever made. So leave me alone and stop pissing me off, will you?” El Canario’s enemies said he liked to be hit, that he looked for it, and that’s why he only fought with opponents who were stronger and more dangerous, more violent than him. It was true that he often took a beating and was out of circulation for a few days afterwards, reappearing with split eyebrows, reeking of disinfectant. But Juan Olmedo preferred the other version, the one his friends, his loyal followers put about—the official myth of the local hero who never picked on the weak, never mistreated anyone he had an advantage over, but just dealt with insults from any fool who dared challenge him.The most he’d do would be to lift someone by the lapels and then drop him, giving him a couple of slaps and the same warning as always: “Don’t cross me, boy, make sure you don’t cross me again.” Juan really admired him for it, and felt a strange sympathy towards him.The others—El Rubio, El Chino, El Choto, El Toledano, the leaders of the other gangs—scared him, and he crossed the road when he saw them, but not if El Canario was around. Like every other kid in Villaverde Alto, Juan knew that no one would dare make fun of him. Damián, on the other hand, didn’t like El Canario at all. He thought he was weird, vicious, that he had an insane glint in his eye, as if his mind were always elsewhere. Juan didn’t find El Canario odd, only sad sometimes, a strange, intense melancholy that he recognized only many years later, and which could be summed up in a single word: tormented. Juan had had too much to drink. He knew he’d had too much, but he went on drinking, and eating methodically between drinks so as to diminish the effects.The alcohol plunged him into a blank, elastic state in which he was selectively lucid.A couple of weeks earlier, the maid who worked at Damián’s had phoned Juan at eight thirty on a Sunday morning.The master of the house had got home an hour before to find Alfonso still up, masturbating in front of the TV, watching an Open University program in which a young, pretty teacher was explaining the correct use of the preposition “off.” Damián had flown into such a rage that he’d gone to the kitchen for scissors and threatened Alfonso with them. Alfonso’s screams had woken Tamara, who’d seen her father brandishing the scissors, and had started screaming even more loudly than her poor uncle. The maid didn’t know what to do. By the time Juan got there, smiling, he’d gotten over the shock at his younger brother’s grammatical perversion, Damián had gone to bed, Alfonso was still crying on the sofa, and Tamara was attempting to comfort him, as if he were some monstrously large doll. Juan took them out and spent all morning telling them stories about Damián, when he was still called Dami and was the quickest, the most cunning, his best friend.They arrived home for lunch in a much better mood.As they were having pudding, Damián appeared in his pajamas, with a big smile, wanting to put everything right. But he didn’t apologize. In this, he resembled Charo—she never apologized either.
“Don’t bring up the business with Alfonso now, for fuck’s sake.You didn’t really think I was going to cut off his prick, did you? Though frankly, for all he uses it . . . I just wanted to give him a fright, that’s all, a bit of a shock, it’s the only way he’s going to learn. If he lives in my house he’s got to follow my rules. I pay for his upkeep, for everyone’s upkeep around here, and I don’t want him sitting around wanking all day. It drives me crazy, seeing him go at it like that, with that stupid look on his face.And don’t say you’ll take him to live with you, because you’re not taking him, and you’re not putting him in any kind of home either. He’s going to carry on living here and I’m going to make him stop doing it, because if he doesn’t, I’ll have him operated on and that’ll fix him. One less problem for him and for me. I’ve already made enquiries—it’s not difficult or dangerous. And don’t give me your opinion because I don’t need it. Some doctors believe in . . .What’s the matter? Why are you staring at me like that? Don’t you dare look at me like that again, d’you hear me? I’ll fucking punch you, Juanito.” The only thing Damián admired about El Canario were the girls he hung about with. Juan had noticed them too, it was impossible not to, like not noticing a shiny red Ferrari stopped at traffic lights. Sometimes they were blonds, sometimes they were brunettes, once there was even a redhead with tiny freckles on her cleavage—it made you dizzy just looking at them, let alone imagining what she was like lower down.They were spectacular, amazing girls, but none of them lasted very long with El Canario.You’d just got used to seeing one when he’d appear with another, and by the following weekend he’d already found a new one, drop-dead gorgeous like all the others. It was as if, instead of a diary, he had one of those salacious girlie calendars, but with real women, just for him, and he tore off a new page whenever he felt like it.The truth was that afterwards, those girls didn’t seem all that great. Juan realized it one afternoon when he saw the redhead in the street. She was on her own, in jeans and a navy T-shirt, hair tied back, wearing no make-up—an ordinary girl, like so many others, in white sneakers, carrying a shopping bag in each hand. But it was her, the same girl who’d set the pavement on fire two or three weeks earlier, in the days of her ephemeral reign, when El Canario had his arm around her, stopping to feel her up every so often, because he liked that, pawing his girlfriends, kissing them, displaying them in public for all to see. And the girls reflected the light of the local hero, it shone through their bodies, enveloped them like a benign spell, making it impossible not to look at them and desire them, so pretty, so made-up, in high heels and the tight clothes they wore for him, smiling—sluts, favorites, smug whores with a big smile on their faces because they were so pleased with themselves. Juan Olmedo knew that Damián didn’t mean what he’d said about Alfonso. He wanted to believe that Damián didn’t mean it. But Damián had indeed considered having Alfonso operated on, perhaps he’d even consulted someone about it. Standing at the top of the stairs, leaning one hand against the wall and gripping the banister with the other to block Damián’s path, Juan remembered a piece of paper, and Nicanor stuttering as he tried to explain, eyes fixed on the carpet. He couldn’t understand what Nicanor wanted, or how he knew this doctor whose surname was Miguel (at first Juan thought it must be his first name), or what his relationship was with him that he was asking Juan not only to sign a mysterious letter of support, but to pass it round his colleagues at the hospital as well.“Give it here,” said Damián impatiently.“Look, Juanito,” he said,“I’ll explain everything. It’s all been a misunderstanding, a huge and terrible misunderstanding. The loonies adore him, they adore José Antonio. It’s logical, they’re alone, they’ve been abandoned by their families, most of them don’t have anyone at all, so they pay for the residential home out of their pensions or their savings.”“Who’s José Antonio?” interrupted Juan.“Miguel, José Antonio Miguel,” clarified Damián, and then Juan understood, the strange combination of names jogged something in his memory. Someone at work had mentioned the case and he’d heard something about it on the radio—a very profitable, and particularly repugnant racket dreamed up by one or more of the psychiatrists at a private clinic not far from Juan’s hospital. They obtained legal guardianship of patients who had no relatives with the excuse that it was necessary to preserve the interests of the patient, but then they sold their property and pocketed the proceeds. On the surface, it appeared clear-cut, easy, legal.“He’s their heir, d’you see, Juan? José Antonio’s their heir because they’ve left it all to him. Poor things, they’re alone, they don’t have anyone, and the loonies adore him so they leave everything to him. He looks after them, takes care of them. It’s all been a huge misunderstanding.” “Nicanor’s getting a cut,” Juan realized then,“I bet he gets a cut.They get him to check things out, and in return, he gets some of the proceeds.”