Andrés Barba - August, October

“But — you’re not going out, are you?” (Mamá)

“Yes.”

“Oh, how could you?”

He still had childlike reactions; suddenly he was afraid he wouldn’t be allowed.

“Just for a little while.”

“Let him go, let him do what he wants.” (Papá)

And when he got outside, the feeling intensified; the esplanade with its huge, white tiles was a giant skating rink. Anita had accompanied him to the door and asked if she could come too. Without a word, he’d pushed her out of the way, as if she were some bothersome angel who’d approached him extending a gentle, knowing arm.

“At least tell me where you’re going.”

“Move.”

When he met up with them, it was already dark, and since it was a Saturday, the bars were packed. All along the esplanade, sidewalk cafés and snack bars formed a refulgent wake, as though a luminous ship, tall and elegant, had sailed through town from one end to the other, as though the houses were actually aquatic, enormous buoys bobbing in the water.

“A kid drowned here last summer,” Rivero said.

They hadn’t even smartened up to go out. He had, and therefore looked slightly ridiculous, as if it were his first communion and he were still dressed as a little sailor when everyone else had already changed into more comfortable clothes. The comment precluded most all conversation, so no one said anything.

“So you’re leaving tomorrow?”

“Yeah, tomorrow.”

“We’ll have to give you a proper sendoff.”

“No need.”

“Oh, we have to have a sendoff for the princess who wanted to break our noses with a rock.”

They laughed. In other circumstances he might have felt obliged to smile, a little humiliated, maybe. Deep down, he’d been so trained to please, to be liked by everyone, that fear of not being liked was the one thing that had most notably formed his character. He saw, now, that almost everything he’d done his whole life he’d done specifically to be liked, or for fear of not being liked, and that that had now changed. Since Aunt Eli died, he’d had not a single purely considerate thought — not even about himself, and certainly not about Pablo, Marcos, Tejas, and Rivero. In fact, he felt like he held them in contempt a little now, or like his rage had slid a sort of film of discontent, or violence, between them and him.

They bought a few bottles of booze at a Chinese corner store and sat by the estuary. They took the meth Tejas had brought. The violence actually began there, timidly, like a blood transfusion from his veins to theirs. The alcohol and the meth interfered with one another, throwing things into and out of balance, but he didn’t feel heavy, he felt instead cold and lucid, like a hunter polishing the barrel of his gun with controlled intoxication.

“What about Frani? Aren’t you going to say goodbye to her?”

“Leave him alone, man. Can’t you see he’s a total virgin? Like a five-year-old. For now all he does is eat pussy. Frani wouldn’t know where to start with this kid.”

It was working. A sort of fervor was being roused in them, too; they, too, were caught in its talons. They were no longer sitting as they talked by the estuary but had stood, restless; the meth had worked its mysterious effects and now hit them, rising like liquid in a test tube held over a flame. Icy, blue liquid. Marcos threw a bottle into the water and picked up another.

“See that boat there?”

And he threw it, hard. The bottle shattered against the hull.

“You couldn’t do that again if you tried.”

“But that’s going to end tonight,” he suddenly blurted.

His response had been a bit delayed. It had traveled the entire length of his nerves, his stomach, his brain. More than an idea or even a response, it was a messianic vision on a night moving inexorably forward, its minutes dropping off into the darkness. It was going to end that very night.

“What’s going to end?”

“I’m going to fuck tonight.”

“Frani?”

“Or whoever.”

It was like standing majestically before an army that was whipping itself into a frenzy. He needed a little death, a little nobility around him, something to attest to the grandiosity of the idea, something to keep him from being alone with it. The idea suddenly overrode all other sensations. For a few minutes it wasn’t even attached to the desire to have sex, but to possess or explode. Its slightly hazy contours, slowly sharpening into a concrete image, made it even grander, more powerful if anything, as though his mind were crowded with hundreds of bodies floating blindly, uncontrollable.

“We’ll have to go find the girls.” (Pablo)

“They were outside at that café, I think.”

“Let’s go.”

The distance between the boys and their destination was covered in silence. Determination had dripped down inside them. The town’s physical reality, too, had become altered. He looked around, and it was as if all the people sitting at outdoor bars and cafés, all the people strolling along the esplanade and moving behind well-lit windows were possessed by that same sentiment, too; they were servile, tormented by it, no matter what they said, whether the poses they struck were more restrained or less, they were all possessed by the same nervous impatience. When he turned back to them, he got, for the first time, the strange feeling that he was their leader, as if his body were channeling their fury. Marcos laughed nervously, and Rivero put a hand on his shoulder. Rivero’s hand, like a taut cable.

But the girls weren’t there. Nor were they at the other outdoor café they often hung out at.

“Where are those tramps?”

“They must be somewhere.”

Hunger was snapping at their heels. They spent an hour searching for them, flummoxed. They tried, with no luck, to pick up another group of girls at a café and very nearly caused a fight at a bar they ended up getting kicked out of. Lust abated slightly in the face of reality, but not rage. Rage was still there, frozen, like a feeling superior to all others.

“Let’s go back to the estuary and set a boat on fire,” Pablo said.

But on their way to the estuary, they saw a shadow in the distance. An awkward shape lumbering toward them, emerging from the dark.

“No fucking way.”

“What?”

“It’s Marita.”

Sometimes the memory begins there, in that final, softly-illuminated shadow on the esplanade, on tiles white as blocks of ice, as if there were not one dock but dozens, hundreds of rows of docks, all lined up and glazed by the electric light of the street lamps lining the way. Other times the memory begins later, when they’re already heading into the dunes. Marita’s feet, from behind, are clumsily large, as are her arms, their volume disproportionate to any other part of her body. She’s wearing a maroon skirt and a blue Tshirt that don’t match, and black flip-flops with the Brazilian flag on them. Every time she takes a step, he can see the flags on the soles of her flip-flops. She’s a sullen person — not a person but a cylinder of flesh all out of proportion — and bulges out here and there as she walks. In the memory, he’s behind her for a time and then he moves up beside her. Or is she the one who moves beside him? It’s odd — during that space of time there is almost no sign of Marcos, Pablo, Tejas, or Rivero. And, when he looks at her, her mouth is more lusterless and rougher than it ever has been before, like a low sound in the middle of an inexpressive face. Most of the time, though, the memory is not made up of images but of sensations. The plants and branches in the memory are a tangle of dense, jungle-like vegetation that obeys a law of its own, one that has nothing to do with him. It’s as if the world itself were at a critical juncture in the memory, unable to keep going, as if norms and infractions were suspended there, or had conspired to create a strange testing ground, a zero-gravity capsule. In the memory his heart is cold, like an actor in a movie who he knows doesn’t have long to live.