The Boys Read Free Page A

names, or was that not necessary? We live fighting against randomness: there has to be a protocol. Would it be the older brother who entered the church first—first to arrive, first to leave? The same employees carried out the same task. Afterward, the second car left the church doorand parked beside the other one, in the middle of the square.
    He switched off the radio. He wanted some excuse to call home. He let the feeling pass through him, the way he let mornings in the office pass. He didn’t want to turn himself into a bell tower. It was sunny, no one was left on the street, the kiosk and the bakery were shuttered. He thought of the priest, the poor guy, having to serve as a hinge, having to speak when there’s nothing to say. He thought of that little man he watched go in and out of the church each day, thought of his self-censure, of his self-control, of a priest’s forced cerebral mutilation, of his sacrifice for his parish, his loyalty to lies and ritual. Unless he was a con man and lived off others’ weakness.
    Most people hadn’t gone to the wake, but some of them, the closest relatives, had. They had seen the boys displayed in their two coffins, humiliated like stuffed animals in the double zoo of their death: caged by rigor mortis and caged by the glass-topped coffins. Or perhaps it was their victory, their revenge, and it is the dead that watch over us.
    And then he heard an engine approaching the square, a truck, it had to be from somewhere else, on that day, and it was already strange that it was squeezing its way down such narrow streets. He approached the door to watch it pass. It was carrying a load of hay bales. Bales of hay in January. You saw them going back and forth in June and July, after the harvest, or in the months following, but never at this time of year. . . They were the old style of bales, rectangular and small; someone must have ordered them for the animals they kept, they must be coming from Llagostera or Cassà, the truck driver was confused, he was looking for someone toask what was going on, where were the owners of the house where he was scheduled to drop them off, why had he found it locked . . .
    When he saw that he’d reached the church square, the driver put the truck in neutral in the middle of the street and got out of the cab. He was a tall man, about thirty years old, with short hair and a Van Dyke beard, and the strong body of a young hauler. He had bits of straw stuck in his blue sweater. Ernest half hid behind a column, and the truck driver looked toward the closed bakery and kiosk not understanding a thing. He checked his watch and then walked slowly over to the community social club. The door was open. He found the place empty except for Cindy, the South American girl who worked behind the bar. She must have explained to him what was going on, must have told him he should park and have a coffee while the funeral finished, because after a second the truck driver left the club, got into the cab, and parked down the street.
    They died so young they took the whole town’s life with them, the trucker must have thought. He hadn’t parked in Vidreres, he’d parked in the Vidreres cemetery, with niches like houses; a cemetery with a kiosk, a bakery, and a bank; a cemetery with streets, with a church; a cemetery with a cemetery; with a club and a parking lot filled with empty cars. That’s what the afterlife must be like: solitude and walls.
    Meanwhile, the priest spoke, and no one took their eyes off the two coffins, placed perpendicular to the altar at Christ’s feet. And while the entire town of Vidreres, locked up tight in the church, struggled not to imagine the dead brothers’ bodies, their faces, while they all tried to shrug offtheir curiosity, tried not to want to know what clothes the poor saps were wearing, nor who’d had to decide on the shirts the boys would wear to their own funeral and pull them out of the closet