I thought they’d done something to him; I knocked on his door. After a while he said to come in. The room smelt of the hair-removal cream my brother uses. I asked him if he was sick. He said no, he was fine, but he thought he’d go to work a bit later.
“And the South Americans?”
“In Mom and Dad’s room, sleeping. We stayed up late last night.”
“I heard you,” I said. “You went to bed with one of them.”
My brother surprised me by laughing.
“Did we wake you up?”
“No, I woke up anyway, I was feeling restless, then I heard you. By chance. I wasn’t spying on you.”
“Well, it’s no big deal. Let me get a bit more sleep.”
I stood there, frozen, watching him, not knowing what to do or say, until I heard voices in Mom and Dad’s room and then I turned around and walked out of the apartment without having breakfast. I worked all morning in a daze, as if I was the one who hadn’t gotten any sleep. At midday I went to have lunch at a Chinese restaurant where some of the other girls from the Academía Malú used to go and then I went walking in the streets around Plaza de España. I thought about when I was seven and my brother was sixteen and he was the person I loved most in the world. One time he told me that his dream was to play Maciste when he grew up. I had no idea who Maciste was, so he showed me a picture of him in a movie magazine. I didn’t like him. You’re much better looking, I said, and he looked pleased and smiled. Then, for some reason, as I was walking around, I remembered him hugging Mom and Dad, giving them all his pay, taking me to the movies (though we never went to see a Maciste film), and doing little poses in front of the mirror in the elevator.
I must have been feeling terrible that afternoon — though I can’t really remember; I know I was thinking about my brother and our apartment, and my mental images of him and of it seemed to be shackled, sunken, black and white, irreparable — and it must have been obvious because even Montse García came over to ask if there was something wrong.
“What could possibly be wrong?” I said. I guess I must have said it in a way that sounded aggressive, although I didn’t mean to.
“Maybe that brother of yours has been horrible to you,” said Montse.
“Enric is going through a rough patch, but he’s gradually getting it together,” I replied. “He’s trying to find his way, which is more than you can say for some.”
From the way Montse looked at me I guessed that she still felt something for him.
“Your brother’s a bad person, seriously,” she said. “He’s never satisfied with anything, but he doesn’t know what he wants. He’ll screw things up for everyone else just to make himself happy, but the thing is he doesn’t know how to be happy. Am I making myself clear?”
“I could kill you sometimes,” I said.
“I know it’s not easy to hear this stuff. But you’re alone in the world, Marta, and you have to watch out for yourself. I like you. You’re a good person and that’s why I’m saying this, although I know you’re not going to listen.”
For a moment I was tempted to tell her about what had happened the night before, but I decided that it was better to keep my mouth shut.
That night, when I got home, Enric, Florencio and Tomé were already in the living room watching TV. I made a coffee and sat as far away from them as I could, at the end of the table, near the window, where my father used to sit. Enric and Tomé were sprawled on the sofa and Florencio was in the armchair, which is where I normally sit to watch TV. There were containers of high-calorie, high-protein food scattered over the table, the kind my brother eats, but these were new. I also saw a baguette, ham, cheese, and several bottles of beer.
“The guys brought some supplies,” said my brother.
I didn’t respond. The containers of food, the pills, the Fuel Tank and the Super Egg (vanilla and chocolate flavored, respectively) were expensive, more than five thousand pesetas a tub, and I couldn’t imagine that scruffy pair having so much money. It would have cost them more than fifty thousand pesetas all together.
“Where did you steal it from?”
“I like your sister,” said Florencio.
My brother looked at me and then at them with a half-amused, half-incredulous expression on his face.
“We went to get some stuff from our place,” said Florencio. “And we decided to pick up some food on the way.”
“I brought my tarot cards as well,” said Tomé.
“If you have a place of your own, why do you want to move in here?”
“That was just a manner of speaking,” said Florencio. “Actually, it’s a boarding house. When you don’t have a place of your own, you end up calling any place home, even a shithole like that boarding house. Enric invited us to stay here for a few days, till we see how things work out.”
“In other words, you’re broke.”
“You could say our finances are tight.”
At that moment, for some reason, they looked handsome to me. Both of them had just taken a shower. Tomé’s hair was still wet, and his manner was unassuming but self-assured. Everything seemed to be much simpler and clearer for them than it was for my brother and me.
“So you stole that food.”
“Well, yeah, that’s right, we did,” said Florencio.
“We thought it would be rude to turn up empty-handed, and Enric likes that stuff; he spends a fortune on it.”
“It isn’t cheap, that’s for sure,” said my brother.
“We went to a store on Avenida Roma, near the Modelo Prison, a store that specializes in bodybuilding supplements, and we took whatever we could.”
“You shouldn’t have done that, guys,” my brother said.
“Hey, it was the least we could do,” said Tomé.
My brother smiled happily: “Now I have supplies for like five months.”
“What if you’d been caught?” I said.
“We never get caught,” said Florencio.
“We bought a packet of soy cookies,” said Tomé.
Suddenly I ran out of arguments. I would have liked to ask them how many days they were planning to stay at our place, but I didn’t want to go too far. It’s one thing to be frank and another to be rude. It’s one thing to be aggressive and another to be hospitable. So I kept quiet, sitting on my father’s chair, staring at the bottom of my coffee cup and occasionally glancing up at the game show they were watching on TV (Florencio and Tomé knew all the answers) until it was time to eat.
“The guys made dinner tonight,” said my brother.
Poor fool, I thought, without getting up. That night we ate rice and vegetables. My brother, who always eats meat, didn’t complain; on the contrary, he praised the flavor of the meal and went back for seconds and thirds. Florencio set the table, and Tomé served the food. They opened a bottle of expensive wine (“You stole this too?” I asked — “Naturally,” replied Florencio) and we all had some.
“Let’s drink a toast to Marta and Enric,” said Tomé. “Two very special people. There’s no else like you two.”
I could feel myself blushing. I’m not used to drinking wine (my parents were teetotalers, my brother too, until yesterday, anyway) and I’m even less used to public compliments.
Translator’s note: The quotations from Diogenes of Apollonia and Xenophanes of Colophon in “Muscles” are given in Jonathan Barnes’s translation, from Early Greek Philosophy (London: Penguin, 1987).
THE TOUR
My idea was to interview John Malone, the musician who’d disappeared. Five years earlier, Malone had already slipped out of the dark zone where the legends live, and he wasn’t really newsworthy any more, although the fans hadn’t forgotten his name. In the seventh decade of the twentieth century, along with Jacob Morley and Dan Endycott, he’d been a founding member of Broken Zoo, one of the most successful rock groups of the time. Broken Zoo recorded their first LP in 1966. It was a magnificent record, up there with the best stuff coming out of England — and this is the mid-sixties I’m talking about, with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in top form. The second LP came out soon after and, to everyone’s surprise, it was even better than the first. Broken Zoo did a tour of Europe and then a tour of the States. The North American tour went on for months. As they traveled from city to city, the record climbed up the charts and finally reached number one. When they got back to London, they took a few days off to rest. Morley shut himself up in a house that he’d recently bought on the outskirts of London, where he had a private recording studio. Endycott kept himself busy getting off with all the pretty groupies who came swarming around the band, till one of them got off with him, and they bought a house in Belgravia and got married. As for Malone, he seemed more lethargic. According to some of the books about Broken Zoo, he attended “weird parties,” though what the authors meant by weird is not exactly clear. I’m guessing it’s what they said back then to indicate a mix of sex and drugs. Shortly afterward, Malone disappeared. And after sensibly allowing a month or two to elapse, Broken Zoo’s manager called a press conference, at which he admitted what everyone already knew: John Malone had quit the group without a word of explanation. Not long after that, Morley and Endycott, along with the drummer Ronnie Palmer, and another band member called Corrigan, came out with their own versions of the events. Malone hadn’t been in touch with anyone except Palmer. He called him three weeks after his disappearance, just to say that he was fine, and to tell them not to wait for him because he wasn’t planning to come back. Many people thought that this would be the end of the group. Malone was the best of the lot, and it was hard to imagine Broken Zoo going on without him. But then Morley shut himself up for a month or so in his mansion, and Endycott went there too and worked ten hours a day, and they put together the group’s third LP. Contrary to the expectations of the critics, Broken Zoo’s third record was better than the first and the second. Seventy percent of the material on the first record was written by Malone: lyrics as well as music. On the second record, it was seventy-five percent. The rest was provided by Morley and Endycott, except for one track, which is something of an anomaly, with lyrics co-written by Morley and Palmer. For the third record, however, Morley and Endycott wrote ninety percent of the material, and the remaining ten percent was contributed by Palmer, Morley, Endycott and a new member, Venable, who’d joined the group when it was clear that Malone wouldn’t be coming back. One of the songs is dedicated to Malone. There’s no bitterness in it. Just friendship and admiration. The title is “When are You Going to Come Back?” It was released as a single and in less than two weeks it went to the top of the charts in London. Malone, of course, didn’t come back, and although, at the time, various journalists went searching for him, all their efforts were fruitless. There was even a rumor that he had died in a city in France and been buried in a pauper’s grave. Broken Zoo’s third album was followed by a fourth, which was greeted with unanimous praise, and after the fourth came a fifth and then a sixth, a flawless double album, the group’s apotheosis, and after that they didn’t play for while, but then they brought out a seventh LP, which was pretty good, and then an eighth, and in the middle of the eighties they made their ninth album, another double, and Morley and Endycott must have signed a pact with the devil, because this record swept the world, from Japan to Holland, from New Zealand to Canada, tearing through Thailand like a tornado, which is really saying something. Then the group broke up, though every now and then, on a special occasion, they’d get back together to play their old songs at a select venue. In 1995 a journalist from Rolling Stone found out where Malone was living. His article stunned the die-hard fans of Broken Zoo, who cherished the group’s first vinyl LPs. But most of the magazine’s readers didn’t really care what had happened to a guy who was widely assumed to be dead. In a way, Malone’s life during all those years had been a living death. When he left London, he had simply gone back to his parents’ house. That was all. He stayed there for two years, doing nothing, while the members of his old band set out to take the universe by storm.