His favorite books were Kabyle Customs by John Hodge and all the volumes of Professor Ramiro Lira’s Works of the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (which are more like pamphlets, really, but my brother explained that this was because the works of those poor philosophers had been swallowed by the black hole of time, which is what will happen to all of us). And others.
“No hole’s going to swallow me,” I’d say to him.
“It’s going to happen to both of us, Marta, there’s no avoiding it,” he’d say, without a hint of sadness.
But I think it’s a very sad thought.
It was usually over breakfast that we talked about the Pre-Socratic philosophers. The one he liked best was Empedocles. That Empedocles, he used to say, he’s like Spiderman. My favorite was Heraclitus. We almost never talked about the philosophers at night, I don’t know why. It must have been because at night we had much more to talk about, or because sometimes we were both too tired when we got back from work — you need to be sharp if you’re going to talk about philosophy — though little by little, and especially after the death of our parents, that began to change as well, and our nighttime conversations gradually became more grown-up; we started talking more seriously, as if our words were venturing into much more open and hazardous territory, now that our parents were no longer there to anchor them. But in the mornings, both before their death and after, our favorite topic was the Pre-Socratics, as if the start of a new day (though, if you think about it, the day begins long before that, at midnight) had restored the energy we had as kids and made everything different, better, refreshed. I remember our breakfasts: a cup of coffee with milk, bread with tomato and olive oil, a steak, a bowl of cereal or two tubs of yogurt with honey and muesli, Super Egg (100 % egg protein), Fuel Tank (with megacalorie protein: 3000 calories per dose), Super Mega Mass, Victory Mega Aminos (in capsules), Fat Burner (lipotropes to help dissolve fat), and an orange, a banana or an apple, depending on the season. That was for Enric. I don’t eat much: I’d have maybe half a biscuit, the kind my brother used to buy, made with whole wheat flour and enriched with some kind of vitamins, and a cup of black coffee.
There could be something invigorating about that table, seen from the kitchen, at seven-thirty or eight in the morning. The plates and the mugs and the bowls and the packets that looked like NASA rations seemed to be saying: “Go out into the street. The day is full of promise. The world is young and so are you.” My brother would sit at that table and open a pamphlet containing the complete works of some Pre-Socratic philosopher, or a magazine, and while his right hand was busy with a spoon or a fork, his left hand would turn the pages.
“Listen to what this son of a bitch Diogenes of Apollonia says.”
I’d keep quiet and wait for him to speak, doing my best to look attentive.
“ ‘When beginning any account, it seems to me that one should make the starting point incontrovertible and the style simple and dignified.’ How do you like that?”
“It sounds reasonable.”
“It’s fucking reasonable all right!”
After breakfast my brother helped me to take the dishes to the kitchen and then he went to work. From the age of sixteen he’d been working at Fonollosa Brothers Auto Repairs, near Plaza Molina, in a neighborhood where people have expensive, complicated cars to fix. I’d stay home a while longer, watching TV or reading one of the Pre-Socratics (we did the dishes at night) and then I’d go to work, that is to the Academía Malú; the name makes it sound like a school (a school for whores, my brother used to say), though in fact it’s a hairdressing salon.
Why was my brother so rude about the Academía Malú? The answer’s simple but it’s a sore point. My friend or ex-friend Montse García worked there; Enric went out with her for a month or so, two at the most, till Montse decided that they weren’t right for each other. At least that’s how she explained it to me when they split up. My brother just mumbled something incomprehensible and from then on, whenever the Academía came up, he always made some snide or obscene remark.
“But what happened with you and Montse?” I asked him one night.
“Nothing,” said my brother. “We were incompatible. It’s none of your business.”
My brother was like that, and the death of our parents just made it worse. Sometimes, from my room, I could hear him talking to himself: We’re orphans, that’s an irrefutable fact, and we have to get used it, he’d say. And then he’d repeat it, over and over, obsessively, like someone who’s forgotten the real words to a song: We’re orphans, we’re orphans, etc. At times like that I wanted to hug him, or get up and take him a mug of hot milk, but that would’ve only made it worse; my brother would’ve broken down crying for sure, and after a while I’d have started crying too. So I never got out of bed, and he’d go on talking to himself until he was finally overtaken by sleep.
But in the morning I’d sometimes try to reason with him: “We’re not the only orphans in the world. And anyway, to be an orphan, I mean a real orphan, I think you have to be a minor, and we’re not minors any more.”
“You are, Marta,” he’d say, “and it’s my duty to look after you.”
According to Montse García, my brother was immature. I only went out with them twice when they were together, both times because my brother asked me to, and on both occasions I was able to confirm the accuracy of my friend’s or ex-friend’s judgment. The first time we went to see a movie by Almodóvar. Enric suggested a Van Damme movie, but Montse and I refused. We were late because of the argument, and when we arrived the cinema was dark, the film had started, and my brother decided, absurdly, not to sit with us. The second time we went to the gym, the Rosales gym in Calle Bonaventura, right near our place, where my brother works out every day. It wasn’t that he didn’t make an effort; this time, he was trying too hard. He wanted us to see him inserted into all the gym’s contraptions, and in the end one of them nearly decapitated him. I’m fond of my brother, but there are limits, like the doors of the Rosales gym. I’ve never been able to stand bodybuilders; my idea of handsome may keep shifting unreliably, as my brother says, but it has never taken the form of a hulk. I should say that Montse García was with me on this, although at the time she was interested in my brother, and he’d been bodybuilding since he was sixteen (he started just after he got the job at the auto repair shop). I think it was one of the guys from his work, by the name of Paco Contreras, who got him into it. This Paco competed in various bodybuilding championships in Catalonia and then he moved to Dos Hermanas in Andalusia, where he died. Sometimes my brother would get a letter from him and read one or two sentences to me. Then he’d put the letters in a little chest that he kept under his bed, the only place in the house where things could be kept under lock and key. According to Montse, this Paco had perverted my brother. I told her the story myself and regretted it immediately. My brother may be many things but he isn’t stupid, and certainly not simple (who is, really?), and yet the story, the way I told it, badly or partially, did made him look stupid. I never met Paco Contreras. According to my brother, he was an amazing guy, the best friend he’d ever have, etc., etc. So when Montse said that this Paco had perverted my brother, I told her she was wrong, Enric was a serious, responsible, clean-living person, the best brother I’d ever have.
“Well, what else could you say, you poor thing?”
Sometimes I wanted to kill her. But I did everything I could to make things work out between her and Enric. I preferred them to go out on their own, of course, though if it had been up to my brother, I’ve have gone along every time. A week after they started going out, Montse and I went to the bathroom at the Academía Malú and she asked me if my brother was sick.