“Fuck,” I said.
“Help me out,” he repeated, “I need you to help me out.”
I stayed put. He looked up again, held his breath to try and make the vein stick out more, exhaled, said “Higher,” and I moved the mirror, tilted it up slightly, and then he sank the needle in and pulled back the plunger and the needle filled with a rich, slow-moving scarlet that swirled around and was beautiful in its way, and then he said, “Ahhhh,” and pushed down the plunger and moaned. I set down the mirror and he sat back on the couch and his eyes rolled around in his head, and then he blinked, and opened his eyes, an expression of sweet shock on his face. And then he fell off the couch, the needle still in his neck, and I said, “Luca? Luca?”
Let me be honest here. I let him lay there for a bit.
“Luca?”
Everything started moving in slow-motion. I stood over him and bent down. I put three fingers just beneath the needle. I was afraid to take it out for fear that blood would spurt everywhere. His eyes stared up, far away as if at wheeling falcons, as if he saw a blue Neapolitan sky, a single cloud, a sparkling world, a sea breeze, a woman standing over him saying, What? What’s wrong, Luca? Are you okay?
It was too much, those hazel eyes. I peered at them closer and saw the curved reflection of the fan’s lazy orbit, the curtains twisting gently against the wall, blowing out onto the balcony, the silhouettes of buildings against the dark blue sky. I heard the tinfoil skitter across the table, drop to the floor. I touched the top of his head. I felt beneath his ear, traced down his jaw, and found his vein. I did not feel a pulse. I put my ear next to his mouth. Nothing. Not even a wisp of breath. I placed my ear on his chest. Not even the faintest of heartbeats. I pulled him away from the couch; lay him flat on his back. I went to the bedroom, took the dirty orange sheet off the bed. Standing over his body, a sheet corner in each hand, I raised my arms, flicked my wrists, and the sheet ballooned up, suspended for a second, then billowed a last time, rippling, settling over his body. He was covered now.
“Luca?” I said. “You there?”
I knelt beside him again. I didn’t want to see his face, those eyes. I set my ear to his chest. I listened in vain for his heartbeat. I pulled the sheet away from his face, put my ear to his mouth, listened for breathing. Heard nothing. A beatific look on his face, a happy look.
Five minutes. Five minutes had passed. I took the mirror and wiped down the edges with the hem of my T-shirt (I don’t know why). I put the César Vallejo book on the shelf. I went to the kitchen, washed my wine glass. Then I went back to the bookshelf, got the Stendhal book (On Love), took out the wad of euros, stuck it in my pocket, put the book back on the shelf, walked out the front door, closed it softly, made sure it was locked. My heart was pounding and there was a tingling feeling that went from my chest to my balls. I wound around the spiral staircase, passed through the narrow foyer, and ended up on the street. I started to walk. Children played soccer, shouted, but I heard nothing. A ball rolled by, rolled under a beat-up Citroen. A slender curly haired boy darted in front of me, crouched next to the car, looking beneath it. Then he got on his belly and wriggled under the chassis until all that could be seen were his skinny, kicking brown legs. I paused, turned around, and stared up at Luca’s balcony, saw a smear of yellow flowers in the window, the curtains trembling in the wind.
That night I put Luca’s money to good use and went to a very high-end restaurant and ate a most excellent dinner. And as the waiter uncorked my second bottle of wine, I had a realization. Nothing, I thought, matters so much to me as love, and yet, right now, as I enjoy this tremendous meal, love suddenly seems almost insignificant. How can this be? Am I that superficial? I felt euphoric for some reason, but couldn’t understand why. I felt filled with life. Overflowing. There was no doubt about it. So without further ado, I opened my legs, reached down, took out my penis, and pinned my scrotum to the chair with a steak knife. An ecstatic, almost sensual feeling washed over me. That, I thought triumphantly, is love. After all these years of heartbreak, I have finally figured it out.
The Story of a Scar
by Cristina Fallarás
Nou Barris
This isn’t something she’ll like, you figure. She’s never been too motherly, and she gets anxious when work gets tangled up with the other thing. I love this story; but it was a waste of time. And you’re right: the scar’s absolutely beautiful; she’s absolutely beautiful, isn’t she? But I’d better tell you the story of the scar and then you can forget it, okay? She doesn’t like it.
It all began on a sultry August morning filled with portent. Why not? It was impossible to sleep, one of those nights when you dream you’re a goat on a spit and you turn, turn, turn, until your soul is dripping — and then she showed up with rings under her eyes that reached her knees, already swaying slightly in a way typical of her state. She was cute, sour-faced, dressed all in black, decked out with glass beads, and that belly and the same motherfucking moves as always. Damn, one stormy beauty.
“Nothing, right?”
This had been her greeting for more than a month. And my answer, a shrug, my eyes nailed on the damned fan. Yes indeed, nothing was going on in Barcelona, no one came by the office, and recently she’d developed a resistance to air-conditioning; she was totally against air-conditioning. She was slacking and this upset her more than what the lack of clients was doing to her bank account, something that had me worried too. You know, if she doesn’t eat, I don’t eat either. Well, someone would eventually step up, Victoria already had an established name, and there aren’t that many women detectives; hard to deny there’s some morbid fascination in that, right? An established name, but some folks step back when they see her belly, of course. And besides, August has never been a good month, it’s a shitty month. Oh, but we’re also against normal vacations, you know, and air-conditioning, credit cards, checks, and investigating women’s infidelities. Add to this gloom a six-month pregnancy, thirty-eight degrees Celsius at dawn, and a humidity that liquefies the air... Get the idea? Okay, now add the severed hand of an aging rocker to the mix. Beautiful! Isn’t it?
“Look at the paper. At the concert at the Forum the day before yesterday, someone sliced off that old American’s hand, the one who used to play with those other two, the hippy and the doped-up guy; now he only plays with his band when he’s not too boozed up.”
I told her that to entertain her, because the news was rather amusing, and, I don’t know, maybe her expression would change a little and her kid wouldn’t be born already sour. Who would pay for that, huh? Yours truly. Who else was going to put up with the kid? I had no doubt at all about that. Me. Well, the old gringo was blinder than the black guy who moved his head to get the mic right, and when he saw himself surrounded by a crowd the size of which he couldn’t remember seeing in years, the dumbass threw himself into the audience, just like he used to do, to be received by a sea of arms, he would say, that returned him to the stage, as if gliding on air. He could have cracked his head open; I’m not saying that wouldn’t have been a good ending, to be squashed like a ripe fig against the floor of the Forum. But no, his audience — and who knows where they had come from, a bunch of haggard dudes of every color like we only see during summer in this city — held him up in the air for a few minutes and then put him back on the stage... Up to that point, everything was going just fine, except for a small detail, a gruesome detail, my friend. When the old man stepped on the dais, he noticed that... whoa!... his right hand was missing, the one of the mythic guitar solos that had earned him the name Magic Hand in the ’70s. The motherfucker didn’t notice immediately, the paper said, the big motherfucker had to hear the screaming from the first rows, see how they pointed at the bloody disaster, all of them spattered too, and then follow the direction their fingers were pointing to see that, beyond his wrist, there was nothing. Tourniquet, screams, someone fainting, and then off to Bellvitge Hospital.