M
USCLES
I.
I don’t know if my brother was a cultured or civilized
person, though some nights I think that he probably was and that being civilized
is probably what saved him from suicide.
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.
“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.
II.
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.