One evening, he asked me to drive him to the local brothel. He went upstairs with one of the women, but didn’t even take his clothes off: how can I take my clothes off with all this flab hanging off me (he had continued to put on weight, widowhood had made him greedier, his eyes grew smaller, pillowed in fat) and all these bulging veins. He rolled up one trouser leg and showed me his varicose veins, which covered the complete color spectrum, from sky blue to navy blue, from lilac to black. He paid, sat down on the bed, looked at the naked girl for half an hour, reached out to touch her, a single caress, and came unsteadily back down the stairs, one hand pressed against the wall to support himself. On the way home, I looked at him out of the corner of one eye, where he was sitting in the passenger seat, and I saw his flushed face and the tears rolling down his cheeks. How could those two men possibly be brothers, the sensual man who, in his old age, could still take pleasure in merely looking at a woman’s flesh, and who had only fallen out with life because he loved it so, and then my father, that lugubrious bat who often didn’t leave the house for weeks on end and kept the windows closed to avoid the sun’s dazzling gaze. And yet, with the universe’s usual senseless logic, the one who was full of life was the first to die, while the other has lingered on, growing ever sourer: the one who for more than seventy years has shown no interest in life is still slowly rotting and infecting everything around him with his bitterness.
My older brother Germán and I weren’t alike either; a variant on the same Biblical theme, Cain and Abel, dark and light, although, in this case, I was the bat who survived, while he died of incurable lung cancer (and he didn’t even smoke). Right from the start, he said he didn’t want to be a carpenter. He liked mechanical things, taking cars and motorbikes apart and putting them back together again. Initially, my father was adamantly opposed, but finally gave in and helped Germán open a garage which ended up in the hands of Germán’s wife and her brothers, an unseemly, rather tawdry ending. It’s hard to understand how that young woman, Laura (apparently her father named her after the film, which came out the year she was born, she was seven or eight years younger than my brother), who was apparently so in love, always taking my brother’s arm and giving him sloppy kisses, how that cheerful, helpful girl, so ready to help with the lunch and serve at table, always so house-proud and considerate, especially when it came to our family, giving my mother presents and calling her Mama, kissing my father and calling him Papa, the only one who could ever kiss him without him groaning and who could get his eyes to fill with tears when he received her gift of socks or a sweater, how that same selfless, hard-working woman became the one to cut all ties with our family as soon as Germán died. She’d been almost as ruthless with her husband when she found out that his cancer was terminal. She became cool and indifferent toward us, her in-laws, and even toward him. My mother took better care of Germán than she did, for she was too busy during his final days, rushing about between the land registry and the bank, from the notary to the lawyer’s office, determined not to leave any loose ends, and getting my brother to sign papers when he was almost too weak to hold a pen. She even phoned up my father to get him to sign a few documents too. It’s for the children’s sake, she said, by way of justification. In the end, she managed to keep the garage and the house my brother had set up with our father’s money. For several years, my father had to continue paying the mortgage. So, what was it all about, then, the soft voice (she wasn’t remotely like the highly stylized Gene Tierney who’d played Laura in the film, she was short and chubby, but with a very animated face), the domestic hyperactivity whenever they came to lunch at our house, the eagerness to lay the table, to smooth and iron the table cloth, and help in the kitchen, the charming, industrious little ant who called my parents Mama and Papa, and kissed my brother and straightened his collar and patted his bottom, put her arms around his waist, intertwined her fingers with his while she gazed adoringly into his eyes. Was it all an act? Are we all just actors, who might at any moment grow tired of the role we’re playing and remove our disguise? Or are there also real people? But what does that mean? What does “real people” mean? And if it means nothing,
is nothing, what sense is there in life? What happens to us if real people don’t exist? We tend to think that people’s true nature comes out at decisive moments, when the going gets tough, when they’re pushed to the limit. The moment for heroes and saints. And yet, strange though it may seem, at such moments, human behavior is usually neither exemplary nor encouraging. The group who elbow their way to the head of the line where the concert tickets are being handed out; the spectators who flee the burning theater, trampling over the weaker members of the audience, not even noticing them, the child, the withered flesh of the old man, crushed beneath the soles of the anxious fugitives, pierced by the heels of young women elegantly dressed for an evening out; the honest citizens, including the women — from middle- and working-class families, there’s no difference — who use their oars to furiously beat back the other shipwreck victims trying to clamber into the overcrowded lifeboat. It’s every man for himself. As we know, Dad, it’s not hard to arrive at the point where you are now; day after day, life insists on proving you right. The great human family. Of the two grandchildren your older son gave you, we haven’t heard a word — they’ve vanished. My mother would occasionally weep for them: I do have grandchildren, but it’s as if they had never existed. That shameless hussy (she was a hussy now, no longer my dear, I’ve put some croquettes by for you so that you can fry them up later this evening when you get home, because the children love them freshly cooked, nice and hot), that shameless hussy, my mother would say, she took them from me. She stole them. Just as she stole everything that belongs to our son. Just as she stole what was ours.