Toni Sala: The Boys

Now it seems we blame everything on the recession, but the recession wasn’t to blame for the display of prostitutes out on the shoulder of the highway, out past the halted construction meant to split it in two, past the half-built bridges with faded circus posters and the spray-painted words N-II HIGHWAY OF SHAME, DIVIDE IT ALREADY, past that stretch of highway with its sketchy mirror version, unpaved and separated by a low wall of concrete blocks, past fields flooded by black water and crowned with shocks of grass. .

The recession wasn’t to blame for that display case filled with fresh meat, a whore every hundred meters; the recession wasn’t to blame, because the whores were there before — it was during the years filled with cranes that the business extended like an oil spill. But morality doesn’t move as fast as money and, with the good years behind them, the girls were still there, resigned like the rest of us to the hardships of the new times.

Club Diana announced the beginning of the display as you travel north on the national, before you get to Tordera. Fifteen kilometers later, on the outskirts of Vidreres, a similar building — another old block of rooms at the foot of the highway, the Club Margarita — presaged the end. They were the landmarks at each extreme. Despite the distance and mountains that separated them, at night, when their neon signs came on, it seemed the two buildings spoke to each other in a code of blinking lights. On the roof of Club Diana a yellow arrow lit up, flying right into a red pubic triangle; on the roof of Club Margarita a giant daisy lost its petals, one by one, until it suddenly bloomed again among the dark fields.

And there had to be some relationship between the two brothels, because in the Club Margarita parking lot he often saw vans advertising Club Diana: the silhouette of a naked girl dancing on the circles of a bull’s-eye. He always passed the brothels in the daytime, when they were still closed — the blinds were always lowered, but he could tell from the deserted parking lots — and the girls, perhaps the same ones who worked in the clubs at night, waited by the side of every road that led to the national highway, sometimes sitting on plastic chairs, with parasols in the summer and umbrellas in the winter or if it was raining. When they were busy they left a towel and a rock on the white plastic chair so it wouldn’t move. When they weren’t, they talked on their cell phones and smoked with the patience of fishermen on a riverbank until some driver flipped on his turn signal, negotiated a price with the girl from his car, and then took her along the dirt road to behind the first trees, or sometimes not even that far: then he’d see the stopped car and the back of a man’s neck through the window, facing away from the highway. He had seen every make of car stop, vans, trucks, trailers, and motorcycles, and once he saw a black guy walking toward the trees with one hand on his bicycle and the other around a girl’s waist.

Yet the girls all seemed cut from the same cloth, none of them older than twenty, all attractive and always wearing makeup, with clean, combed hair, snugly fitting party clothes, and naked from the waist down to their boots at the slightest hint of sunshine. He would see them after lunch on his way back to work, and from the way he studied them he surely knew them better than even their clients. When there were new girls — because the bosses changed them often — they would tempt him with a wink. He’d smile back and, if he was in the mood, he’d blow a kiss, and then he’d wonder if that was taking advantage of the girl, or if she’d understood it as the sign of affection and solidarity that it was, if, deep down, it really even was that at all. The one thing he knew for sure was that they cursed him when they saw he wasn’t stopping.

The gesture lasted as long as it took his car to pass by them, like a reminder of youth and the joys of the flesh. He was nearing sixty years old. Did he want something more? Did he desire those bodies? How could he know? They were girls like any others but, luckily, the distance between their lives was vast. Was it better that they were out in the open, or should they be forced to work hidden away? It wasn’t good for people to get used to dehumanizing girls, but wasn’t having to see them a good punishment? When his girls were little, if they were ever sitting in the back seat when he had to go down those fifteen kilometers of sex on display, he made sure not to take his eyes off the license plate of the car in front of him, not out of shame, but to ward off the jolts life brings.

Past the Tordera Bridge, the highway lost its sea views and climbed behind the backs of Blanes and Lloret until, after a blind hill, it opened up on the plain of La Selva, with the luminous teeth of the Pyrenees in the background.

He’d traveled that route every day for the last fifteen years, ever since they’d transferred him to a small branch of the Santander Bank in Vidreres. He knew it better than the back of his hand: the patched highway, the ghost gas stations and warehouses, the large rusty silo, the trees with sawed branches whose trunks almost touched the asphalt, the descent to the plain of La Selva, and Vidreres like a tiny island among the fields, with an antique tractor and a Catalan flag at the traffic circle as you enter, and a small spiderweb of streets and people. He knew what he had to know about the town where he earned his living, which family each client belonged to, who had money and who didn’t and who someday might, who was important in town hall and who wasn’t, that sort of thing. He used the slow, gentle accent of the local dialect when speaking with them, aware that he would always be an outsider there, no matter how many years he spent working right across from the Santa Maria church at a job in which he was privy to more of the town’s secrets than the rector himself, or even the girls at Club Margarita.

Money moves between men like a gust of wind. In a small town, where the amount of money is always the same, you can watch it just move from one account to another like birds changing branches. That was the only appeal of the job, watching the deposits and withdrawals, the incoming salaries and the unexpected expenses, those intimate movements of money — he had access to private spaces. He controlled the movements in the bankbooks, the investments, the gambles, the timed deposits, the pension plans, the mortgages, and the loans. He and his coworker speculated on where the money came from and where it was headed. Nothing surprised him. They foretold which businesses would do well or go under; they worked in the most predictable office in the world, with the most conservative clientele on the planet, and, even still, it was fun.

He reached the office as the bell tower rang eight o’clock, as usual. His colleague was from the town — sometimes it was like having the enemy in your home — but they were the same age, which is similar to being born in the same place.

He let his coworker raise the shutter and pick up the newspaper, as he did every day. This time he just stood at the door and turned the pages until he found the news he was looking for.

“Heaven help us,” he said, and gave a whistle. “What a sight.”

Ernest looked over his colleague’s shoulder at the newspaper. A photograph showed a black Peugeot with the hood crunched and the windshield shattered. The radiator grille had come off and the engine was beside the car, because it had fallen out in the accident. They had carried it separately to the municipal morgue where they took the photograph. Two brothers die in an accident in Vidreres. The savage jolt that, only through some miracle of elasticity, avoids ripping apart the spiderweb of a family or an entire town.