A breeze had picked up and all the clothes hanging in the balconies fluttered and danced in the wind and a dog ran by, almost got hit by a little red Renault which swerved and honked and did not slow.
“Damn,” Luca said, “that’s one lucky dog,” and we continued walking — quickly, with purpose. The façade of his building was covered in old blue tiles and some had fallen off and showed the crumbling tan stucco underneath. We walked up the five flights of stairs. He opened the door and waved his hand toward the tumbledown couch in the living room and then went into the kitchen and started looking for something. I sat down and glanced around. The white paint was peeling off in places and there was a large ocher stain on the ceiling near the window. A single lightbulb hung from the middle of the ceiling, a fading light washed the left side of the room. A clay pot on the windowsill held yellow daffodils, insolent in their brightness. I could hear voices coming off the street, distant cries of children playing on the beach, so faint as to almost be imperceptible.
His phone rang. Two rings before going silent. He walked over to the coffee table, looked at the number, and picked it up.
“He’s here,” he said, and he stood, went to the bookshelf, took out a book, and opened it. There was a thick sheaf of bills inside. He took out a fifty, put the book back on the shelf, and said, “Give me twenty euros, the cocaine is here.”
I gave him my last twenty euros, and I’m not sure why I trusted him and often wish I hadn’t because of what happened later, but I gave it to him. The worst-spent twenty euros of my life. And I’m sure that if I hadn’t been so busted up I wouldn’t have given it to him, I wouldn’t have been in that rathole of a flat, but we were brothers, both of us with broken hearts. His story, it’s true, was a bit more romantic, but a broken heart is a broken heart, right?
He left the apartment. I walked out onto the balcony, looked down. I could see someone on a moped parked in front. His dark helmet like the head of an ant. Luca exited the building, approached him. A quick transaction ensued. The ant started up the moped and putt-putted away. Luca wheeled around and reentered the building.
I turned around, sat back on the couch. I closed my eyes briefly and felt the moist breeze wending its way, swirling around the room, licking at the cheap dingy white polyester curtains on either side of the window. I looked around the room at the empty cigarette packs, the little inlaid wood box on the table, and the books, lots of books — many books on love, I noticed, many love stories, Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabo, On Love by Stendhal, even this American book, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, and there, splayed in the corner, César Vallejo, my favorite Peruvian poet, who foretold his own death in a poem and died “of exhaustion” in Paris.
I couldn’t help but feel that there was something almost quaint about being so heartbroken and reading love stories and discourses on love and mooning over a capo’s daughter named Camilla who you kissed once. As if there was a solution to any of this. As if closure existed. I mean, we all know that the only cure for a broken heart is time, another lover, or death.
I heard his footsteps coming up the stairs two at a time. The balcony door slammed shut, bang, and Luca came back in with a rattle, windblown and wild-haired. He brought with him a hard-edged street scent with traces of the damp, almost churchlike smell of the stairwell — but most of all, that languorous funky Mediterranean sea air. A warm breeze was blowing in bursts, capricious little European zephyrs; refined, old world. My new friend spun around the room, quite happy to have scored. But there was something else he brought in with him, though I didn’t understand what it was until it was all over.
He sat down, set a little folded piece of tinfoil on the table.
“So did you learn anything?” I asked.
“About what?”
“Did all these books about love teach you anything?”
“Yes, I did, in fact, I did learn something.” He was concentrated, bending over the table, carefully unfolding the foil.
“What did you learn?”
“I’ll tell you later. Let’s have some cocaine.”
He opened the tinfoil, revealing a little pile of tan powder. It did not glisten. He shot me a glance.
“That doesn’t look like cocaine,” I said, and he looked up at me and smiled.
“You don’t think?”
“No, I don’t. It’s brown.” I dipped the tip of my pinkie in the powder and tasted it and it tasted strange. “I’m not taking that. You bought heroin, compadre.”
“You think?”
He went to the fridge and came back with a lemon. He set it on the table. He carefully poured a bit of powder on the spoon, then a little more, and he asked, “Are you sure you don’t want any?”
“Yes.” I was a bit put off by the whole thing. I looked around the room, at the pile of books, at the picture taped to the bookshelf of Luca and his girlfriend (I assumed). She was not how I imagined, she had short hair, little rectangular glasses, a dimple in her chin, mischievous, intellectual... She looked like what I imagined Marcello Mastroianni’s longsuffering wife in 8½ must have looked like when she was younger... beautiful but not bodacious.
I suddenly wanted to get out of there, to go mingle with the tourists and stroll down Las Ramblas and watch the street performers, the mimes, jugglers, acrobats, and pickpockets do their silly tricks, to lose myself in the generalized idiocy, to go down to the beach and watch the Nordic women baring their pale, impeccable breasts slowly get sunburned. I didn’t want to be here anymore. I wanted to call Nina and beg forgiveness again, just hear her voice...
He poured the rest of the powder in the spoon, set it back on the coffee table, picked up a knife, cut the lemon in half, then squeezed juice into the spoon. It flowed down the sides of the little pile of powder, then he started to heat it up with a lighter, and I could see the attraction of it, the ritual of it, the grand tradition, but wanted no part of it, so I just watched him. When the solution started to bubble, he took out a needle from a carved wooden box and set it gently on the coffee table.
“We must let it cool,” he said. “I need your help.”
“Yeah? What do you need?”
“I need you to hold the mirror.” He went to the bathroom and came back with a small round mirror, about as big as my hand, and said, “I’ll tell you where to hold it,” and then he put a little piece of cotton in the spoon and it quickly turned brown, absorbing all the heroin, and then he stuck his needle in the cotton and put it in the spoon and sucked up all the fluid and gave it a couple of flicks with his middle finger and turned to me and said, “Hold up the mirror.”
I did. It was at face level.
“Angle it down a little. There. To the right. No, the right edge toward me. Yes, that’s it.”
With total concentration, he turned his head and looked upward and left, his eyes trained on the mirror. He brought the syringe to his throat, to his jugular. Carefully, slowly brought the tip to his neck, traced it down, paused, his neck muscles tense, and then sank it in. I winced. And he said, “Hold still!” And I did. Then he pulled back on the plunger of the syringe and said, “Shit. Missed it.” He withdrew the needle, grabbed a T-shirt off the couch, dabbed at the blood on his neck.