“He’s super-fit,” I said.
“Well, something’s not right,” she said, and declined to elaborate, although I knew what she was referring to.
This happened a few months after the death of our parents. Montse was the first girl my brother had been out with. And there haven’t been any others since. Sometimes I think that he must have been feeling alone and a bit lost in the world. Our parents died in a bus accident, on the way from Barcelona to Benidorm, setting off for their first vacation on their own. My brother was very close to them. So was I, but in a different way. The official who met us at the morgue in Benidorm (he was dressed like a pathologist, though I don’t think he actually was one) told us that our parents’ bodies had been found holding hands, and that it had been quite a job to separate them.
“It made an impression on us all, and I thought you’d like to know,” he said.
“They must have been asleep at the time of the crash,” said my brother. “They liked to sleep holding hands.”
“And how do you know that?” I asked.
“It’s the kind of thing an older brother knows,” said the official or the pathologist.
“I saw them, lots of times,” said my brother with tears brimming in his eyes.
Later, when we were in the hospital cafeteria, waiting for the papers so we could take our parents back to Barcelona, he said that it was all because of the calcination. He said that the crash must have caused an explosion, and the explosion would have produced a fireball hot enough to fuse the hands of our deceased progenitors.
“They would have had to use a saw to separate them.”
He said this in a cold, offhand way, but I knew that my brother was suffering as he had never suffered before. So when he started going out with Montse García a few months later, I think one night I even prayed that he’d sleep with her and that they’d form some kind of lasting relationship. But what happened is that Montse, who had seemed keen before she went out with him, gradually cooled off and then she got bitter, and by the time they broke up sixty days later, she was treating me as an enemy, as if I were to blame for the disappointments of her short-lived romance. When she finally decided to break it off, our relationship improved markedly for a few days, and I even thought that we could go back to being good friends like before. But Enric’s shadow kept coming between us whenever I tried to get close to her again.
“It can’t be healthy to spend all day at the gym. Why would a guy want muscles like that, anyway? It isn’t normal,” she said to me one day.
“He also reads the Pre-Socratic philosophers,” I replied.
“Like I said, your brother’s not right in the head. You be careful. One night you might find him in your room with a knife, about to cut your throat.”
“My brother is a kind person; he wouldn’t hurt anyone.”
“You’re an idiot, Marta,” she said, and that was the end of our friendship.
From then on, we only spoke to each other when it was strictly necessary for work: Pass me some clips, can I have the dryer, can you get that color down?
What a pity.
One night my brother turned up with Tomé and Florencio. He’d never invited anyone home: not when our parents were alive, and not in the months since they died. At first I thought they were two friends from the gym but I only had to take a second look to realize that these guys didn’t work out.
“They’ll be staying here tonight,” my brother said in the kitchen. We were getting dinner ready, and Florencio and Tomé were channel-surfing in the living room.
“Where?” I said. It’s a small flat, and there’s no guest room.
“In Mom and Dad’s bedroom,” he said, looking away.
He must have been expecting me to protest, but I thought it was a good idea, though maybe I was a bit surprised that I hadn’t come up with it myself. Of course: our parents’ empty bedroom. That was fine by me. I asked him who they were, where he’d met them, what they did.
“At the gym. They’re South Americans.”
We had salad and grilled steak for dinner.
Florencio and Tomé looked like they were nearly thirty, but I knew they’d look like that until they were fifty. They were hungry and they sampled every concoction my brother laid out on the table. I don’t know if they were aware of the immense honor he was doing them, putting his stock of supplements at their disposal. I asked them if they were bodybuilders too.
“We do fitness training,” said Tomé.
“Do you know what that is?” asked Florencio.
I don’t like people thinking I’m stupid. Or ignorant, which is worse.
“Of course I know what it is; my brother’s been going to the gym since he was sixteen,” I said, and immediately wished I’d kept my mouth shut.
Florencio and Tomé laughed in unison, and then my brother laughed as well. I asked them what was so funny. My brother looked at me, lost for words, with an expression of utter bewilderment, but also of happiness, on his face.
“Feisty, aren’t you?” said Florencio.
“Very feisty,” said Tomé.
“She’s always had a strong character, my sister,” said Enric.
“And you’ve worked all this out from what I said about fitness training?”
“From the way you said it. Looking me in the eye. Sure of yourself,” said Florencio.
“If I had my tarot pack here, I’d do a reading for you,” said Tomé.
“So you do fitness training and tarot readings?”
“And a few other things as well,” said Tomé.
Florencio and my brother laughed again. But in my brother’s case it was, I realized, nervous rather than happy laughter. He was worried, although he was trying to hide it. The two South Americans, however, seemed relaxed, as if they were used to sleeping in a different house every night.
I finished eating before they did and went off to my bedroom and shut the door. My brother came to tell me there was a good movie on, but I said I had to get up early. I wasn’t sleepy. I took off my shoes and flopped onto the bed, still dressed, with the complete works of Xenophanes of Colophon (“For all things are from earth and in earth all things end”), until I heard them get up from the table. First they went to the kitchen, washed the dishes, laughed again (what was there in the kitchen that could have made them laugh?) and then they came back to the living room and started watching something on TV. I can’t remember falling asleep. But I do remember this: a sentence from Xenophanes (“He sees as a whole, he thinks as a whole, he hears as a whole”) which for some reason I found unsettling. I was woken by noises from my brother’s room. At first, although the light was still on in my room, I didn’t know where I was. Then I heard the shouting and the moaning. It was my brother moaning, I was absolutely sure of that. And one of the South Americans was shouting (in an urgent, imperious, affectionate way), but I couldn’t tell which one of them it was. I got undressed, put on my nightie, and for a while I just lay there listening and thinking. I tried to read Xenophanes, but I couldn’t get past the following sentence or fragment: “wild cherry.” It made me feel very sad. Then I got up and tried to hear what the South American was saying. With my ear to the wall I could hear the odd word or sentence (in a way it was like reading the fragments of Xenophanes): “that’s the way,” “nice and tight,” “careful,” “slowly.” Then I went back to bed and fell asleep. In the morning, for the first time in I don’t know how many years, my brother didn’t have breakfast with me.