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.
Jaume was shaking his head.
“They drive like madmen,” he said. “I’m surprised more of them don’t get themselves killed.”
You wouldn’t say that if the dead boys were your sons, thought Ernest.
During the first few hours on a Monday, Vidreres is still warming up, few people come into the office, and you can spend a good chunk of the morning watching the other side of the street from your desk: the little paved square with four benches and four clipped trees, dry parterres, and the large door to the Santa Maria church.
The reinforced glass of the branch’s windows scarcely echoed the vibration of the few cars that circulated on the pedestrian street. They had modernized the town center four years earlier. People from the outlying areas of Barcelona bought places in the housing complexes, and Vidreres grew the way all towns near highway exits do. But the town center continued to have the same families as ever, and every morning from behind the glass he saw the same soundproofed women heading toward the bakery and the butcher’s shop. Hourglasses with baskets, little figures in a clock dragging the shadows, sundials. At ten on the nose, Mrs. Garcés passed by. Five minutes later, Marta came out of her house. Five seconds after that, Mrs. Dolors turned the corner. They stopped to greet each other, following an ancestral routine, commenting on the television programs they’d seen the day before. From their gestures he guessed at whether Enriqueta’s bones were aching that morning or not. Mr. Vidal railed against the politicians: “The young people are right to protest! Just you wait until they get fed up! Just you wait!” Miquel Sr. warned of some clouds coming from Girona with a nod of his head. They had farming in their blood. They never missed the weather report.
That morning, the conversations went on longer than usual. Heads shook and hands opened. Miquel Sr., who usually read the newspaper at the community social club, carried it under his arm. If they hadn’t thought to order more for the kiosk, the local papers would sell out. Into the silence of the sun and winter frost, in a corner of the office, at low volume, Radio Vidreres repeated the news of Saturday’s accident every hour. The host spoke in a thin voice, and without naming names he announced that the funeral was that afternoon.
“Why do they have to keep going on about the accident,” grumbled Jaume.
He wore black shoes, black pants, black tie, dark shirt.
“Are you going to the funeral?” asked Ernest.
On the street there was also a lot of dark clothing.
“Don’t expect any clients.”
“Did you know them?”
“Everyone knew them. The only sons in the Batlle family, over in Les Serres. Their father works for La Caixa bank. Did you see the marks?”
“What marks?”
“I’m surprised you didn’t notice them on your way in. You can still see the skid marks on the asphalt.”
Then Mr. Cals came in, like he did every Monday at that time, to take out fifty euros. There’s no way Mr. Cals, who was retired, lived on so little, especially since they saw him pass by the office every day with a small lit cigar. But every Monday he came to get his fifty-euro note and didn’t come back for the rest of the week. Once the water and electricity bills were paid, the rest of his pension piled up in his account. Today he was dressed in mourning clothes that were out of style and had been ironed too many times. He gave off the scent of mothballs and his shoes were shiny. Ernest remembered the suit as the same one he wore at his wife’s funeral.
“You see, Jaume, that’s life,” said Mr. Cals. “Twenty, twenty-one years old? And what are they gonna do at Can Batlle without those boys? Goddamn it all to hell, isn’t that just the way it is. Those poor people. Who could’ve ever even imagined such a thing! Now it’s Lluís’s moment. I told him, I did. Wait, be patient, life takes many twists and turns, holy hell does it ever. Twenty million he offered them, fifteen years back! Twenty million pesetas, twenty years ago! Let’s see what old Batlle can get for that land now. I already told him: you, now, keep quiet as a mouse. Lucky bastard. You can just imagine the party going on yesterday at the Margarita, goddamn it to hell.”
Mr. Cals put the banknote in his wallet and the wallet in his pocket. He couldn’t stop talking.
“I’m old and don’t care about anything now; otherwise, if I were twenty years younger, maybe that bastard Lluís wouldn’t be fast enough and I’d get the land. He can shove it up his ass. When you see these tragedies you say fuck it all, man, come on, to hell with it all, shit, to hell with all of it, and God and his virgin mother, fuck, I wouldn’t want to be in Batlle’s shoes right now, holy hell, or Llúcia’s, because that’s some real bad luck, both sons, goddamn it, both of them, holy shit. And where were those poor kids coming from so early in the morning?. . . I guess I’ll be seeing you later, holy fuck, goddamn, shit, holy shit, fucking hell.”
He left the office cursing.
“Boy, is he mad!” said Jaume. “He can see it coming. Lluís is going to buy up the lands of Can Batlle. It’s killing Cals. He’s obsessed with land. Don’t you see he’s still saving up? I don’t think he has enough. He’s got some, but not that much. And with today’s prices . . . Or maybe he does have the dough, and that’s why he’s been telling the other guy to keep quiet and wait. We still might get a surprise. You never know with these old guys. Maybe he has an account in Andorra or a fortune under his floor tiles. I know him all too well; I’ve had to put up with him all my life. When I was a kid we walked past his field on the way to school, and we were all scared of him. He would be digging, and he’d look up and wouldn’t bend over again until we were gone. And there wasn’t even anything there for us to touch. Just a fig tree by the road, the one that’s still there.”
On the other side of the glass, the square was filling up. Mourners arrived from every street. It didn’t seem like there were this many people in Vidreres, a little town where the streets were always pretty much empty—in summer because of the heat off the plain and now in the winter because of the cold air from the Montseny and the Pyrenees and sometimes the fog. He was no longer listening to his coworker. Jaume was going on and on about the old man’s stinginess, as if the time had come to account for the debts of an entire lifetime. It was the swarm of words that death attracts, and Ernest let him talk, trying not to listen, until he couldn’t take it anymore and cut him off: “Do you really think today’s the day to be talking about that?”
His coworker let a moment pass before standing up. No one likes to be told they’re petty. When you speak of petty things it’s because you want your interlocutor to join in, you are offering him a bit of freedom from his prison of niceties. When you open that door to invite him to share in your baseness, when you are standing there, exposed to the elements, it’s not pleasant to be reminded that not everyone is from the town, that there are outsiders who only come