The Barcelona Brothers by Carlos Zanón, John Cullen Read Free Book Online

How much love she must have pent up inside, waiting for someone to let it escape! To penetrate her, to hear her moan in her little girl’s bedroom. But without Alex’s knowing exactly why, the erotic image he’s contemplating suddenly turns miserable.
    “I, I, I don’t know—”
    Alex defends himself against his own meanness, thinking that if Jamelia is to become a woman a man can desire, she’ll have to stop bleaching her hair, get rid of her fuzzy sideburns, and give up looking at people with those demented eyes, which are now looking at him as she begins to speak.
    “I—”
    The worse thing about loquacious interior voices, loud music inside cars, and sexual fantasies is that they distract you. That may be the reason why Alex realizes too late that he’s being lifted off the ground by the crotch and shaken.
    “What’s up, man? What are you doing so far from your burrow?”
    “Son of a bitch, you scared the shit out of me!”
    “Have you heard about Tanveer?”
    Allawi’s an Algerian, a handsome guy with slightly Asian features. He’s also the only person alive on earth today who still drinks Diet Coke with Lemon. He’s the official barber of the barrio, and he sports a vertical tattoo that runs from his right ear to the base of his neck and reads, in English,
I LOVE VANESSA
. But if there’s anything Allawi doesn’t like, it’s people inquiring about the said Vanessa. He’s calm and congenial, as if the lotions he inherited from the previous barber, Señor Juan, a man known for calmness and congeniality, had promoted these qualities. From inside the café on the corner, Allawi spotted Alex and decided to step out and talk to him. Today he’s wearing his hair short and dyed platinum blond, but there’s a good chance that tomorrow he’ll have a different color and a different style.
    “What about Tanveer?”
    “He was killed in Mari’s this morning.”
    Alex glances over his shoulder at Jamelia’s terrified face. He wants to get rid of the Algerian as soon as possible so he won’t lose his chance; the girl seemed to want to talk. As ifAlex doesn’t have enough problems, Percy José starts singing his little song again: “Epi, Epi, Epi …”
    “They shot him a couple of times.”
    “Holy shit …”
    “It was the cops. Those fuckers are going to kill us all, because we’re not lily-white like you.”
    “Are you serious?”
    “Apparently they tried to frisk him, and Tanveer wasn’t up for that. You know how crazy he could be sometimes and … hey! Kid!”
    Percy has run away, heading back toward the apartment building where he lives. When Jamelia takes off after the child, Alex prevents her, figuring that the boy will stop when he gets to the main door. But that’s expecting a lot of him. Percy reaches the building, keeps on running, turns right at the corner, disappears. Alex lets Jamelia go after him. She runs awkwardly in her low-slung shoes, which are no match for Percy’s sneakers.
    “They took him off to the hospital. The police don’t do things halfway, as you know. Apparently the problem is us Africans. We’re fucking up everything. Because of us, there are more cops around here than ever before. You’d think we blew up the
Sagrada Familia
.”
    “It wouldn’t surprise me.”
    “You’re a racist Catalan pig.”
    Alex has failed to take into account the barrio’s extraordinary capacity for inventing fables. But he tells himself he’d do well not to confide in anyone. He remembers the Coyote. Theenormous boulder that seems to be rolling away can reverse direction and squash not only Epi but also himself. It’s not for nothing that he’s the murderer’s brother, or that he was there when Tanveer’s head got itself split open.
    “Will you come in and have a drink with me?”
    Alex is on the point of refusing the offer, but he knows Allawi’s powers of persuasion are practically invincible. Besides, it occurs to him that it would be a good idea to start damming the