The Barcelona Brothers Read Free Page B

paternal grandmother, who along with his mother had raised him after his father abandoned them. They lived in an adobe brick house, or at least that was the way he remembered it. In that house, and in those years of his childhood, Tanveer Hussein had left everything, absolutely everything: the Future, Propriety, Truth, Law. The streets, the money, the easy women, the poor saps who almost begged you to rip them off, the television shows, replete with tits, colors, and cars, that humiliated his family, or, much worse, the ones that sugarcoated reality with feeble, paternalistic speeches—all that was nothing but city lights, as attractive as only the devil can be. And in the end, they ruined the good boy from the country who only wanted to have a good time for a while over the holidays. They doomed the skeptical kid who didn’t know how to get home after the first few drinks and so had to keep on going. Tiffany was a part of the pleasure trap that had orchestrated his life. Tiffany was the vice you don’t give up today because you think you’ll be able to give it up tomorrow. A weakness he would have been ashamed to confess tohis grandmother, sitting at dusk in her whitewashed adobe brick house.
    Tanveer was tall and dark. From the first moment he arrived in the barrio, he never tried to be inconspicuous, not that he could have succeeded had he tried. He’d swagger around with his shirt off, exhibiting tattoos, medals, bracelets, and abdominal muscles. He’d run here and there in his Nike sports shoes, doing a lot of drugs and drinking unspeakable quantities of alcohol. He bummed Winston cigarettes, he was good with a knife, and in street fights he’d land some really impressive whacks, the kind that ring out, bounce off the sidewalk, echo, and then climb buildings floor by floor. And every now and again, he worked with some guy who was in construction. He dealt drugs, of course, he’d had some prior arrests as a juvenile that counted against him as an adult, and he got to know the inside of a cell for a few months. If he felt like dressing up to impress a woman, he’d put on a tracksuit that cost as much as the rent on the apartment his mother paid for, bless her soul, by working in a plus-size clothing store; if he was bored, he’d go looking for trouble, robbing the exchange students in the barrio, terrifying people at random, or picking up whores with Epi around the city morgue. As he did the night before the morning when his companion in debauchery would, to his surprise, dash out his brains.
    When Tanveer arrived, things in that part of the city had already begun to change. It was one of those moments when you perceive that everyday life has shifted, has been shaken up, and will be put back together again but in a differentshape. The environment was changing, tenaciously, inexorably, and as the image of the barrio was altered, the older residents started feeling uncomfortable. Because little by little they found themselves being shut out of bars, squares, and streets, while—as they saw it—the others, those who had to suffer humiliation and to be grateful to find a job and a future, were getting government assistance, obtaining permits to hold bazaars on Thursdays, and taking up a lot of television time.
    It was true that new renters had been succeeding one another in those buildings for years, entering and leaving, occupying the residences of those who once were alive and today were dead, of those who’d lived together there and whose names are now all that remain of the families that fled. Now there were strange kinds of music, unfamiliar words, and the newcomer’s disagreeable determination to conquer the new world for himself. And what happened was that one fine day the original inhabitants of the barrio who still lived there reviewed the situation and realized that they’d been abandoned to their fate. They saw that many others, the farsighted ones, those with children gone from the barrio, had escaped