Free The Barcelona Brothers by Carlos Zanón, John Cullen Page B

doesn’t know. They hang up. Epi lets the conversation end without answering his brother’s question, because he doesn’t want to tell him where he’s in such a hurry to get to. Now, sitting on the chair beside the little table the telephone has always rested on, Epi wonders how long it’s been since the last time he sat there. He looks at the wallpaper in that part of his home. There was a time—so long ago now—when it was the fashion to wallpaper everything, absolutely everything. As a boy, Alex stared at that wallpaper so much he could see things in it, things nobody else could see—just like he does now. Antelopes escaping from ferocious lions, clouds in the shape of gigantic winged creatures, elephants with huge ears, Egyptians with perfect profiles, heroes struck down by treacherous arrows. Epi makes a vain effort to find some of those things in the wallpaper. No doubt, the figures are all angry with him for his stupidity and disdain, for always passing in front of them without paying them the least attention, but the fact is, he never could see what Alex saw. Epi always admired his brother for being able to do such things. It took time for him to become convinced that many of Alex’s accomplishments, which Epi had considered brilliant when he was young, were nothing but a series of malfunctioning circuits in his brother’s head.
    Back in his room, Epi opens the closet and takes out the first T-shirt he comes across. He puts it on and then pulls on a second T-shirt over it, in case he gets cold. He looksfor a different jacket; he wants to avoid being connected not just with what happened in Salva’s bar this morning but also with what happened last night with the whores. Until this moment, he hasn’t thought about that. And he prefers to keep on not thinking about it. Maybe he can use it in his defense. Everything’s piling up in his head like shapes in a nightmare, swelling until they can no longer fit inside the narrow confines of his brain. He puts the bloody T-shirt in the pocket of the jacket and promises himself to get rid of the shirt as soon as he’s outside. A sewer would be a good place for it.
    Tiffany must be waiting in the apartment already. He ought to get a move on. He’s very thirsty, so he goes to the kitchen and drinks two glasses of water. The sink is piled with pans, plates, cups, and cutlery. He takes the opportunity to put the stopper in and fill the sink with boiling hot water, as if it were still possible to preserve a certain sense of routine on a day like today.
    He dials Alex’s number again on the landline, but at that very moment his cell phone display announces that Tiffany’s calling him. Epi has to choose. He searches his desk for the charging cable again but doesn’t find it. By the end of the search, Tiffany has hung up. Cursing, he leaves the apartment. When he steps out onto the street, he’s lucky enough to find a cab right away. In five minutes he can be with Tiffany. The traffic lights help. He has a pain in the center of his chest. Maybe from a blow, or maybe it’s his heart. He should have followed his first impulse and gone straight to Tiffany’s place. The cops don’t move all that fast.
    “Drop me off right here.”
    He strides quickly to the building on Granada Street and enters the lobby, determined to go up as fast as he can to the apartment where he’s sure Tiffany is, doing what she least likes to do: waiting. At that moment he gets a phone call. Alex again. He can barely hear his voice.
    Alex is in front of his apartment building. He’s been inside and seen that Epi was there but isn’t anymore. And now Alex is standing as if planted on the sidewalk with no idea of what to do. He’s like an ungainly antenna, waiting to pick up some transmission, some signal that will tell him where to go, where to start looking. It’s so frustrating. He touches his face with his hands. He takes a few steps to one side and then to the other, trying not to lose