The Barcelona Brothers Read Free Page A

slowly press her down until she was on her knees and waiting for him to put it in her mouth. Both of them liked everything to seem asthough they were doing it for the first and last time. Tanveer Hussein’s member pounded the inside of her throat; the more violent thrusts made her gag, but she said nothing. She’d get her payback later. When he’d raise her up, his hands clasping her ass, and make her explode with pleasure. When they’d hit the pavement at night with a group of people who were more or less friends and destroy themselves with gin and cocaine and laughter. When they’d go up and down other streets, streets outside the barrio. When he’d buy her clothes, dinner, and drinks, whatever she wanted, as the price for her sex and her freedom.
    Sometimes Tanveer would cross the line, going beyond the agreed limits in the demonstration of his power and her submission. On occasion, something she misinterpreted or something he deemed a lack of respect was enough to set him off. At such times Tiffany would have liked to annihilate him, to tear him apart with her own hands like a clay figure. That sort of thing always ended in the wee hours of the morning, with her clinging to her poor mother’s arm at the police station. The
Moro
would be arrested, and he’d leave the court with a restraining order against him. But neither he nor she could obey it, and the whole thing would become just one more papier-mâché prop on the stage behind the two protagonists. Nevertheless, it left Tiffany with a certain power over her man, a power whose savor was acrid in her mouth and aroused her senses, as if she could turn it into something physical. One call from her, and Tanveer would go to jail for violating a court order. Another kind of call, and they’d shut themselves upfor the entire evening in Tiffany’s room or in the safe house the Moroccan shared with people nobody knew at all. Tanveer was aware of both aspects of the game, and although it enraged him to lose the initiative, he felt something like the peace, the sense of order, the security that come from knowing that jails, stool pigeons, and guards still exist.
    Before and after her meetings with Hussein, Tiffany hated herself. As she lay on the bed, alone, inhaling the scent of sweat and violence that emanated from the cotton bedspread, she’d think about what she’d done and felt and find it difficult to recognize herself, in the same way as when they were out in the street and she’d see him being so loud and boisterous, she’d look at him and remember asking him to describe fragments of a childhood neither of them could have had. At those moments, when their eyes met in the street, there was nothing more for them to say to each other. He knew that she knew, and vice versa. It was as if each of them had kidnapped the other’s secret and neither of them had the slightest intention of paying the ransom.
    And yet Tanveer, too, hated himself. For getting attached to Tiffany. For desiring her, and at the same time for getting her so easily. For not having been the first, and for knowing he wouldn’t be the last. Hussein’s mother was a Spanish woman from Tangiers. His father, a
Moro
and a Muslim—as his mother never failed to point out—had died several times, and it was therefore probable that he was in prison or that one day he had escaped from that woman forever. Tanveer was never able to get a clear answer about what had happened, but in hisheart he knew the truth: Spanish women aren’t generous, they make deals for everything, everything’s a negotiation, and so no way his father would have stayed. He likewise knew that one day his father would come back for him, and that when that day came, he’d break the old man’s jaw before deciding whether or not to return with him to Morocco.
    Tanveer believed there was nothing that couldn’t be stolen and no one who couldn’t be fooled. The only exception, if he had to make one, was the ethereal figure of his