The Barcelona Brothers by Carlos Zanón, John Cullen

control. Whatever he decides, it would be a good idea to take his medication again, though it’s been hardly any time since the last dose. But he knows his stomach will burn and phlegm will fill his throat. He sits down on the curb in the space between two parked cars. His cell phone’s in his hand, because he’s waiting for Epi to call him back, and Alex wants to be sure it’s him calling before he answers. Suddenly, a pair of legs is standing in front of him, blue, spread legs that end in two impeccably polished police boots. The legs call him by name. Apparently, a neighbor woman has pointed him out as Alejandro Dalmau, and Alex doesn’t have the nerve to deny a thing like that.

8
    NIGHT IS NOT A LOYAL ALLY. AND ON MOST OCCASIONS , waking up’s a relief. Epi hadn’t trusted the dark for a long time. Even so, that night, barely a few hours earlier, he’d raised his arm as though trying to touch the darkness. He’d stretched out his hand until his fingertips met the windshield. The effort appeared to calm him down. Or maybe disappointment was what shone in his face, disappointment at not having been able to dip his fingers into that enormous liquid plasma screen, which was what the night sometimes seemed to be when he was behind the steering wheel of his van.
    Everything that happens at night seems incomprehensible later in the sun. By night, things are done that wouldn’t be done by day. And on the following day, you don’t believe you did most of the things you did the night before. Maybe everything can be summed up in those two worlds his father used to speak about. Two opposed worlds: one dark, theother luminous. Crimes and sexual acts perpetrated at night shouldn’t be judged, punished, or kept up in the light of day. When the sun shines, white lines on asphalt can’t be seen.
    In addition to being disloyal, night wears you out. At night, it’s a mistake ever to come to a stop. You go to pieces. Ghosts chase you. When you’re young, you don’t realize it, but little by little you begin to learn. Not that he’s so old. Twenty-something years aren’t much, but they’re not nothing. If he could take all his nights, with their parties and drunkenness, their many disappointments and few fucks, if he could take them all and line them up the length and breadth of this avenue, he could almost fill it.
    The problem occurs when you find what you want and then lose it. Without warning. You find it on an ordinary night, almost by chance. You recognize it, it’s yours, and despite trying to hold on to it with all your strength—as in his case—you lose it. Then you grow old abruptly, then you’ve seen and known and you can’t go back to not seeing, not knowing. And of course, you have to keep setting out every evening in hopes of finding again what made you happy the first time, as if miracles were frequent occurrences, but you suspect that nothing will be as good as what you had. No matter how much you seek and seem to find, you think it will always taste, in the end, like failure, like too late, like a mistake.
    His brother says if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. But he also says the best thing Epi could do would be to forget her. Alex says so many things, too many things. In fact, everybody talks too much. There’s a reason why talking is free. It’ssomething that has impressed him ever since he was a boy. On television, when a question is posed, the person being asked always knows how to answer rapidly and at length, to establish links, to give his reply a convincing appearance of the purest truth. However hard he might try, Epi could never find so many words in his mouth. He doesn’t trust them. There are people who hide behind words. People who use them like cords, like electrical tape they wrap around your body and over your lips until you’re immobilized and speechless. People like Tiffany. People like Alex.
    Words had never helped Epi. It didn’t matter how much of an effort he