He was right beside him. He was with him. His hair stood on end when he grasped that. His brother with eyes wide as saucers, scared out of his wits just like him, and he suddenly realized that it was all over. His brother trusted him—he had no choice—but he couldn’t give him the steering wheel, and he thought: Now how do I let him know there’s nothing to be done, when my body is so slow that I don’t even have time to open my mouth. I only have half a second! How do I tell him that I want to leap out of the car and leave him alone here, that I’ve lost control, that it’s my fault, this accident, that I’m the one who will plow us into the tree? How do I confess to him that I’ve taken my foot off the pedal and if I can, I’ll abandon him without even saying good-bye?
The car, flying toward the tree’s trunk.
Ernest took his foot off the accelerator.
Two days earlier, on the morning of the accident, he was many kilometers from there, at home, sleeping with his wife, in a room that shared a wall with his eldest daughter’s bedroom.
There was a bouquet of flowers tied to the trunk. He would have liked to stop and have a calm look around. He would have liked to keep thinking about the deaths, searching for signs of the dead boys scattered amid the bits of glass and plastic around the trunk. He had made a discovery: thinking about them calmed him down. His thoughts were alive, impossible to kill. He would die before his thoughts. The boys, in his head, were immortal. Perhaps he should tell their parents. A stranger was protecting their sons.
But he didn’t stop when he saw the plane tree. They had beat him to it. A couple of teenagers were looking at the bouquet from their motorcycles, stopped on the side of the highway with their mudguards pointing toward the tree.
He continued slowly, driving more through the landscape than along the highway, as if he wanted to save himself from the accident, as if he was now accompanying the two brothers and passing by death, taking them—sitting in his back seat—along a highway of embers, unable to stop, open to the landscape just like every day as he went from his house to the office and from the office to his house, his favorite times, in the summer because it was summer and in the winter because it was winter, but today with an intensity that surpassed him: saving himself, leaving the plain behind. He was fleeing. He was finishing off the two boys. They were no longer there. He had taken part in the brothers’ deaths. He had designed and poured the highway’s asphalt; he planted the tree. He was guilty of two deaths, his guilt made it all make sense, so he could escape from it, because it was all programmed, it headed toward his own salvation. Farewell, see you never. He sacrificed the two boys for his family.
He was already stepping on the gas when he heard the motorcycles behind him. He saw them in the rearview mirror, and slowed up again to wait for the teenagers to pass him. When they were out of sight he exited the highway at the first road he came across, turned around, and went back to the scene of the accident.
He swerved his Megane onto the shoulder. He parked where the motorcycles had stopped before and found it all banal: the black S’s on the asphalt, the bouquet of flowers tied with a white ribbon around the wounded tree trunk, and the smattering of glass on the ground. The violence of the accident—the extinction of two lives—had nothing in common with the stillness of the tree nor with the cement mass of the Montseny in the background. He remembered the car in the photograph with its engine on the ground, the mourners, the parents’ sobs. They had nothing to do with it either.
The highway that linked Vidreres with the main freeway had little traffic. He heard the rhythm of some music a kilometer away. He looked up. The girl from before was dancing, holding her cell phone to her ear. It was just a moment, the music rode in on a gust of wind. He could no longer hear it, but he was captivated by the sight of the girl’s hair and white dress, silhouetted against the fields and little houses of Vidreres. The distance made her dancing more precise. The flame of a candle in memory of the boys. Suddenly, the girl was still. A truck was approaching. It was the truck that was loaded down with hay before. Its turn signal flashed and it slowed. The girl got excited and took up her dance again, more joyfully, to convince the client, or maybe to show him that she wasn’t dancing for him.
The truck left the highway onto the access road, and stopped just past the girl. The driver stuck his head out of the window and looked back without turning off the engine or his turn signal. Ernest recognized him. The girl continued dancing. The truck driver started waving to get her attention. He must have been shouting at her. The girl danced as if she didn’t hear him, with her cell phone against her ear. The driver disappeared back into the cab of his truck. He shut off the engine. He got out and stood by the door, hands on his hips. The girl didn’t even look at him. The driver put a hand in his pocket, pulled out his wallet, opened it, and held out a bill to her. He waved it at her. The girl stopped. The trucker put the bill back in his wallet. The girl walked toward him. Then he leaped into the cab and started the engine. When she reached the driver’s side door, the truck’s horn blared with such violence that the girl jumped onto the highway without looking. If a car had been passing just then, she would have been hit.
The truck backed up a few meters. The girl followed it. The truck accelerated. Finally, the girl stopped. The truck stopped too. The girl again walked toward the truck. When she was beneath the driver’s side window, he honked the horn again. The girl covered her ears. She turned to leave. Then the trucker stuck his arm out of the window and closed his hand, leaving his middle finger raised. The girl turned, made the same gesture, and started to shout, but over the noise of the truck she couldn’t be heard.
The truck driver advanced slowly until he reached Ernest’s car. He stopped the truck behind it and got out.
“What a whore,” he said. “Did you see that? When I showed her the bill it got her attention . . . fucking whore. Maybe she thought I’d pay her a hundred euros! Who knows what she’s on. Look how she’s dancing.”
She had turned to dance facing them, to provoke them. The truck driver lifted his arm.
“Little whore! . . . Littttle whooore! . . . Come here, you little pussy! . . . There are two of us! Litttle whooore! . . . Come here, littttle whooore!”
The girl made another rude gesture, turned her back to him, and kept dancing.
“When they’re high they don’t concentrate,” said the truck driver. “But I have to admit she’s really hot. You gotta admit she’s really hot. Thin with small breasts, easy handling . . . A little ass the size of my hands. An easy little pussy. There aren’t many like that. You see, over on the other side of the highway?”
There was a white van half-hidden behind a tree.
“She’s new. They’re keeping an eye on her. I’m not surprised, she’s out of this world that whore—I could lose my mind over her. Am I right or am I right? What do you say? Sure is a coincidence to find such a nice piece, just the way I like ’em, isn’t it? Let’s see. How can it be that I’d find her here, on this bit of lost highway, right as I’m passing by, when I never go this way? A new girl? Was she waiting for me? Right now if somebody said: Tell me, Miqui, what kind of girl are you looking for exactly? Ask for whatever you want. How do you want her? Like this one, yes or no? Would you change anything about her? No. Could you improve her? Impossible. Well, here you go. All for you. Seriously, man, wouldn’t you be suspicious? Really, I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t be