I went in. “I’m not staying long.” I touched my belly: It’s just a moment, little one, a couple of minutes.
“My queen, even the day you show up here legless, dragging yourself, dry like an empty wineskin, I’ll still want you. You know that.”
But the Go-Getter didn’t want anything. He had it. He had started back in the day, in Santo’s day, buying and selling what drugs he could find and even those he couldn’t. He was the only opium dealer in Barcelona. He was flexible, and that worked in his favor. When the girls didn’t have money, he accepted payment in long, complicated fucks. They were anxious. Barely wet, just sex machines. Then he started to make tapes. Later he set up the mirrored room. Only the dirtiest couples and the men knew about that. They could stay behind the glass in the next room and watch feats with hi-tech dildos and latex costumes in which young girls, who were new to the needle, faked contortions while getting fucked, and generally let anything be done to them. He managed to get quite a clientele. The rest came later, and by then he was already the Go-Getter. Everything, everything you couldn’t find through legal channels, everything you could imagine — unmentionable whims were sold in that flat in the slums.
“I want a hand. The hand of an aging rocker who’s dying.”
He laughed. He always knew.
“I don’t have any hands, my queen. I don’t deal in them... I don’t know anything about that business.”
“How can you cut a hand so cleanly, so quickly, in the middle of a crowd?”
“You’ve always been a romantic—”
“How?”
“Look for a reap hook. And above all, a really fucking first-class specialist.”
“Where?”
“At the aviary, the old civic center in the Cañellas area... And come back.”
A reap hook, no less. Do you know what a reap hook is? One of those fucking knives shaped like a sickle, like Arabs have, the blade on the outside, painful just to look at, infallible, zaz! She came into the office out of breath, swinging twenty necklaces over those two juglike tits; yum, I swear, yum, yum! She told me we were going to Cañellas to look for a reap hook. Cañellas, no less. That’s how it is with her. And why? Don’t ask.
Located on the fucking outskirts of town, it’s well known that the only outskirts that are any good are the ones with swimming pools. But people in Cañellas hadn’t seen any pools other than the puddles made by their own piss walking back from dives in the middle of the night. It was next to the woods, close to the foot of the Collserola range, where Barcelona ends, but on top, on the upper part. Cañellas was so far out on the fringe that they hadn’t even been able to put up a shitty mall, if that gives you an idea. And the worst of the worst were the small barracks — that’s what they called them, barracks — that the socialist city council had set up when there were still placard-carrying neighbors around. She loved that, the placard-carrying neighbors, but now there were no more neighbors and no more placards, there were only unemployed fuckers, and the children of the bitterly unemployed with their stupid graffiti.
We went to what had been a youth center and was now... how can I explain it to you? It was at the foot of a hill that, if I took a picture and showed it to you, telling you it was Barcelona, you’d burst out laughing. There appeared to be a hen coming out of it... it was full of bums. Shit, Moorish bums, you know, in case you wanted a rug or some couscous.
They were waiting for us.
“Everything’s fine here. You don’t want anything here.”
They were talking to me, of course, because you can imagine that a woman like Vicky, and with that belly to top it off, would surely make the hair on their asses stand on end. She wouldn’t say a word to them. And so, well, I had to talk.
“Go-Getter sent us. He says perhaps you might be able to help us with what happened with the rocker’s hand...”
The fucking rocker’s rotten hand, what the hell did we care about the stupid hand, it was only going to cause us problems and not make us a cent. You can’t understand women and, besides, when they’re pregnant, they’re fit to be tied, fit to be tied... Of course, I was the one who had to talk, she couldn’t; the last thing we needed was to piss off the Moors... But she talked, of course she did. I think that as soon as she saw it was going to happen, she couldn’t not talk. She started, and that’s when things got bad for us — because as soon as Vicky opened her mouth, another five Moors came out, all very serious, bearded, barefoot. And I said to her, Victoria, you’re fucking us up. Vicky, cut it out, these guys aren’t kidding around, what the fuck?
“I’m here to find out who contacted you to cut the poor old man’s hand off. I’m not interested in anything else. You know who I am. I couldn’t care less about the old man. I couldn’t care less about the guy who did it either. And I don’t care about you. What I want to know is who has the hand? Who paid for the hand, the collector?”
I still wonder what got into her about the rocker’s hand. I swear, I still don’t know why, or who the collector was, or what the hell, but the fucking hand almost cost us big time, you understand? You get my meaning? It was just a scar but it could’ve been a prayer for the dead, right?
There we were, me shitting in my pants and her with a flashiness that already smelled like a run through the woods, surrounded by guys murmuring the way they do, which no god other than their god can understand. Then, in an attempt to warm up to them, she tells them it’s okay, and she takes a bag out of her back pocket. Why don’t they offer her some tea while she lays out some lines? Tea! Lines! I swear, I couldn’t believe it. The chick was out of her mind. She thought she was in our neighborhood, because we all know the Moroccans in the corner shops are Moroccans, but it doesn’t matter, because nothing ever does in those places, but everywhere else, with those beards, they’re another kind of Moroccan, you understand what I’m saying? They looked at each other and whispered amongst themselves again, and yes, she can go with them, but I have to stay outside.
“The ugly dude can’t come in.”
It was the spokesman who said this, and you had to see him, the guy thought he was Omar Sharif. Do you think my objections had any weight? Oh, it would be better if she paid attention to me sometimes. I’ve been around the block a few times but she’s a know-it-all, she does everything on her own, and whatever she gets, she earns unassisted. Unassisted. I stood there like a jerk, looking at the sign on the door where you could still see Centre de Joventut de Canyelles. I had no time to come up with a plan because my lovely eyes were still on the sign when I heard her scream and saw her rush out, her hand covering her bleeding face. God, I ran after her as fast as fear allowed; it didn’t even cross my mind to go in and ask who the fuck had hurt my boss. I didn’t even consider it. If those Saracens already thought my face was so ugly, I sure didn’t need a scar. I wasn’t going to be the one to tell them they were wrong, no fucking way.
The Go-Getter had sent me to the slaughterhouse. Why? They could have hurt me even worse, but the cut on my nose would leave a mark. I didn’t want to think about it. They almost sliced it off, damn them, eight stitches. And my pride. Nou Barris was built on the backs of Andalusian, Extremaduran, Galician immigrants, with strikes, demonstrations, and civil guards, but now there was only shit left, nothing of that area from the ’70s full of small struggles and early drug usage, all to the tune of long-haired guitars. There was nothing worthwhile left of old Magic Hand. There were two zeros left in my checking account, sort of like my possibilities. I cursed the moment in which fucking nostalgia gave way to that fit of passion.