The truck backed up a few meters. The girl followed it. The truck accelerated. Finally, the girl stopped. The truck stopped too. The girl again walked toward the truck. When she was beneath the driver’s side window, he honked the horn again. The girl covered her ears. She turned to leave. Then the trucker stuck his arm out of the window and closed his hand, leaving his middle finger raised. The girl turned, made the same gesture, and started to shout, but over the noise of the truck she couldn’t be heard.
The truck driver advanced slowly until he reached Ernest’s car. He stopped the truck behind it and got out.
“What a whore,” he said. “Did you see that? When I showed her the bill it got her attention. . fucking whore. Maybe she thought I’d pay her a hundred euros! Who knows what she’s on. Look how she’s dancing.”
She had turned to dance facing them, to provoke them. The truck driver lifted his arm.
“Little whore!. . Littttle whooore!. . Come here, you little pussy!. . There are two of us! Litttle whooore!. . Come here, littttle whooore!”
The girl made another rude gesture, turned her back to him, and kept dancing.
“When they’re high they don’t concentrate,” said the truck driver. “But I have to admit she’s really hot. You gotta admit she’s really hot. Thin with small breasts, easy handling. . A little ass the size of my hands. An easy little pussy. There aren’t many like that. You see, over on the other side of the highway?”
There was a white van half-hidden behind a tree.
“She’s new. They’re keeping an eye on her. I’m not surprised, she’s out of this world that whore — I could lose my mind over her. Am I right or am I right? What do you say? Sure is a coincidence to find such a nice piece, just the way I like ’em, isn’t it? Let’s see. How can it be that I’d find her here, on this bit of lost highway, right as I’m passing by, when I never go this way? A new girl? Was she waiting for me? Right now if somebody said: Tell me, Miqui, what kind of girl are you looking for exactly? Ask for whatever you want. How do you want her? Like this one, yes or no? Would you change anything about her? No. Could you improve her? Impossible. Well, here you go. All for you. Seriously, man, wouldn’t you be suspicious? Really, I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t be suspicious. But I’m cranky. I’ve had a crappy morning. Maybe it’s instinct. A man can get it on with a goat, with a hen, with another guy, if need be. I don’t know, maybe she’s not as hot as she looks, you know what I mean? What do you say? What do you think? Look at her. Is she fine or what?”
“Too young.”
“She’s super hot. It’s so obvious. What, you like old ones, or what? The problem is she’s high. When they’re high they don’t concentrate.”
Then the truck driver saw the bouquet of flowers on the tree.
“Shit,” he said. “They must be fresh, too.”
“I didn’t know them,” said Ernest, as if he’d been caught taking advantage of a tragedy. “I don’t know anything about it. I work in Vidreres, but I’m not from here.”
“Well, it’s lucky not to be from here today. Unless you’ve got my bad luck, because I had to deliver some bales of hay to the house of the girlfriend of one of the guys who died at this tree. There were two of them. This was their final stop. I had to spend the morning in the social club’s bar, scratching my ass with the girl who works there, and then her dad told me they just came from the burial of a very close friend of their daughter’s. Then I saw the daughter. . oh man.”
A few cars passed, coming from town. The drivers slowed down and glanced at the tree.
“We’re idiots,” said the trucker. He walked past the plane tree and pissed behind the trunk. “We should be used to it by now. You think thirty or forty years will make a difference? Even fifty, you think that’ll make a lick of difference?”
“The years don’t belong to you, no.”
“They never belong to you,” said the truck driver.
“When I got here, there were some kids,” he said in his defense.
The trucker came around the plane tree, zipping up his fly. He stepped on the broken glass, extended his hand, and pulled a flower out of the bouquet.
“We must be taking turns. First the kids, then you, then me. .” he said. “Do you know Cindy?”
“Cindy from the club?”
“She is a fox, too, isn’t she?” He plucked another flower and turned. “I don’t get it. Why do people put out flowers? It’s bullshit. Where do you usually die? At home or in the hospital, right? And no one puts out flowers there. These bunches of flowers bug me. Dead people don’t give a shit about flowers. You take flowers to the cemetery, not the highway. Two days from now nobody’s even going to remember. It’s disgusting, rotting flowers all over; I see them everywhere. We should be happy, shit, two more chicks for us; let’s worry about the girls. Damn, that one over there was nothing to sneeze at. She was begging for some tenderness.”
Ernest went toward the car. Sometimes it seemed that men chose him. Even old ones, they looked back and said to him: Ah, when I was young! Ah, if I were young again! At the bank he was used to guys bragging about money, clients who puffed up their chests and looked at him arrogantly — he spends his days touching other people’s money, poor loser! — without imagining that in the very chair where they were then sitting, still warm, the last client had moved fifty or a hundred times more money than those braggarts, money that these show-offs couldn’t even imagine was flowing through Vidreres. But sexual vanity had an arrogance and a defiance to it that vanity over wealth didn’t. You can’t live without money, but you can live without sex, so these sexual creatures boast about something more gratuitous, more pure and free. And if it’s just their nature, then it’s even worse to brag. There was nothing to brag about then. They want to get you mixed up in their lies. He gave thanks for the success of his marriage, for the modesty of his desires, for the unequal distribution of things: how nature makes skinny gluttons and fat ascetics, and he was one of the former. He had always been like that, it wasn’t a question of age.
The trucker pointed with the flowers to a dent in the truck’s fender.
“I would have made mincemeat of that tree,” he said. “Get into the cab for a minute, come on, you’ll see how different it is than a car.”
He said no, but accepted a cigarette. He saw that the girl had left. He hadn’t smoked since his second daughter was born. Twenty years. Now, the sting made him feel the outline of his tongue, the walls of his mouth. He wanted to think it was his family and friends who helped him to be himself, but the two dead boys, the unhinged truck driver, the very taste of the tobacco was helping him much more. Otherwise, what were they doing there? What made him stop there? Now, after a delay, he thought he understood what had happened. Before the truck driver showed up he had the impression of his life being captured within walls of the dead, of feeling compressed by the death around him, the dead turning into his skin, his shape, his protection against a chaotic and ephemeral world; the cadavers converted into the only breakwater against the waves of time. The dead gave life shape: everything outside of Ernest was dead, the dead were dead, but the tree was also dead, and the truck driver was dead, and the prostitute was dead too. That was why he felt so bad and so alone, but also why he had to endure. If he went home and found his daughters and wife dead, he wouldn’t have lost an arm, or a lung: he would keep breathing, keep going to work at the bank every day. He would still be whole, even more whole then, with more experience. Ernest had a potbelly but was in good health. Why worry about the dent in the fender the trucker was pointing at? Why worry about the deaths of people he’d never met? Was suffering necessary? Or did he enjoy it? The trucker was right. We are idiots. How embarrassingly gratuitous suffering is, how contemptible. Keeping everyone who was dying at that moment present was an insult to the luck of not being in their skin. He didn’t suffer for the dead boys; he didn’t suffer for his daughters. He suffered for himself, for his cowardice, and he was eaten up by shame.