“Tell me one thing,” he said. “What did you do this morning?”
The girl didn’t answer. She knew the two boys. She was in the square, she was at the church, she had accompanied them to the cemetery.
“Answer me.”
“You told me not to talk.”
The wings were as violent and awkward as plowshares. The girl knew the two dead boys. Both girls knew them. How could they not? They were the same age. Everyone had gone to the funeral.
“Where were you earlier today?”
The girl no longer laughed.
“What do you care?”
He got up from the bed. His daughters had grown up, and he’d had to learn not to raise his hand to them. But there were moments when you had to. When you have children you spend your life risking your dignity. Your existence lies in the hands of someone else. That’s what children are. They destroy you. There should be some way to retire after having them. Retire from being a parent. Since there isn’t, you have to stay in shape to deal with them. Deal with your children; deal with the young. The girl could have been his daughter. And just as he would have with his daughters, he got up from the bed and planted himself in front of her. One more rude remark and he’d slap her.
“Get back in bed,” she said. She had lowered her gaze. “Get back in bed, will you? Close your eyes again. . try to relax. . We were out — in the winter this place is dead — we were in Barcelona earlier, at a gym, if you really want to know. Okay? Do you mind? What’s wrong with you? This was a special surprise for you.”
She meant the wings. Ernest got back in bed and closed his eyes. The girl lay down beside him. She kissed him on the cheek like a daughter, until he turned toward her and opened his eyes and hugged her and stroked her. She had taken off the wings but still wore the lingerie set, and she was smiling again. Innocent as animals, he thought. They live in Barcelona, they come up here to work, and then they go back. It’s a parenthesis. An upper floor. They are named Clara or Sònia or Judit, and they go out with boys who take them to the gym and know nothing about all this. Or do know and stay out of it. They live with their parents. They go to college.
He let his eyelids drop again, letting his hands take the lead, he felt her and went to her sex as was his wont — headfirst into the river — and the shock was as imminent as the tree trunk was for the two brothers. Knock up your daughter, make her a mother and grandmother, take her out of the running. Lives kept coming and going and now a new one shows up. The accident hadn’t cut short a long life, but rather two short lives that had yet to branch out: pure miscarriages. It was nothing. He put his hand on her sex, proof that the living are made to be with each other, the bodies themselves deformed to fit together — needing to talk, sometimes, on their own. Not even pregnancy lets us escape that. It was death, what brought them together. All bodies, dead or alive: plants, rocks, horses, and mountains. They followed the sway of sex, the movement of skeletons, as if it could shut off their consciousness and give comfort in the company of a shared night. But the more he wanted to get those thoughts out of his head, the more they imposed themselves. It seemed he might shake them off with a violent lurch, but he knew he couldn’t, his head was loaded down with years, with floors and stairwells, each day the same as the last, all the boredom that must have started one day — perhaps when he signed his first contract to work at the bank — the desperate life of an older man, everything ending, just remnants, Mondays waiting for Fridays, Fridays waiting for Mondays, and, thank you ever so much; when he retires he won’t even have that. The dead fell from the trees onto the boredom of the living, and every once in a while a muffled clarification: the temptation of suicide, sometimes like a compassionate light and sometimes like a bitter, soiling cowardice. Waiting behind soundproof glass and waiting, not doing anything but waiting. Meanwhile, on top of him — with reins and a crop, sinking spurs into his belly, riding him at a gallop until he’s worn out — is his own tedium, the exhaustion of him as a person.
But now the tedium had been cracked open. He had wished for a car accident a thousand times, as a reward for all those trips to Vidreres. And those two poor kids had the accident. The two young brothers had the accident. They’d mocked him. Here he had the consolation of the girl they left behind. If she hadn’t showed up in those wings, maybe Ernest would have told her what he wanted: pain. Not wings, but shoes. Shoes leaving tread marks, rubber tracks on his back, the conscious braking. A payment for being here, for remaining, for having escaped the car in place of the brother who was driving.
He filled his hands with the girl’s flesh, and his eagerness was because the dead wanted sex: it was a child’s game, religious, familiar, and worn. He opened his eyes and finished undressing her, and he didn’t care anymore about being under the sheets. Guilt is the marrow in life’s bones, the only consistent thing in life, blessed, beloved guilt, the material we are made of, the dead, children, parents of the dead, their deaths a gift from our unconscious, and it was becoming urgent that he ejaculate. He ran his hand over the girl’s straight hair, shiny and clean, with the grooves from the comb visible, still damp, and he looked around the bed for satellites of her, pieces of clothing, her purse, dresses, shoes — the shoes he would have liked to feel on the skin of his back, hard and painful enough to keep him from thinking — the vanity case, the silvery cell phone, the short jacket that would end up at the back of the closet and then in the trash, and which she’d see someday, when she was his age, in the photographs of her youth, like his daughters will see him in photos after he’s dead.
So distract yourself, celebrate the boys’ destruction, celebrate with their parents as if the boys were your daughters; swallow the incest, the necrophilia, it’s over, they won’t die again, move toward her, sink yourself deep inside.
A thrust for his life in the office, two thrusts for the boys’ lives, and one each for the short jacket, the earrings, the wings, a thrust for the ivy tattoo on her back, and another for not crying, for life to live, for life impossible to live, for the lure of life that kills you and nourishes you, for the guilt of feeling guilty, for the shouts and the chains, for life where the only joy is in deception, for life sunk in muddy quagmires filled with drowning, crying babies, for life that knows no pain or rapture, and a thrust for each closing coffin; he had to ejaculate, to rid himself of that intention, and he asked the girl to give him a hand.
Had the dead boys been released from inside him with his orgasm? Can there be consciousness of the unconscious? She got up, grabbed a towel, and left the room. She wasn’t that professional. She left the men alone too soon.
He heard the voices of Miqui and Cloe on the other side of the door, and a laugh. Water ran through the pipes. Marga was showering. She would come back into the room soon to get dressed. He couldn’t allow himself to sleep, but his eyelids were heavy. He’d drift off, he wouldn’t think about anything, he would melt. .
He heard a door open and gave a start. It was the trucker coming into the bedroom, buckling his belt.
He covered his belly. He sat up against the headboard. The trucker extended a hand: “Buddy, I gotta go.”
“You’re going?”
“I’m leaving you in good hands. For a hundred euros, you couldn’t ask for more.”
“Do you get a commission?”
“I don’t want any misunderstandings.”
Ernest got dressed and got the money. He took a last look at the jacket and wings on the floor. He rushed. He didn’t want to see her again. He would give the money to the other girl. He would get home, have dinner, a shower, and go to bed. Maybe he’d have a bath. The next day, he’d go back to the office. He would start the week over. The truck heading off blended into the persistent sound of the shower. He wondered if he’d gotten her that dirty.