This Is Not America

by Jordi Puntí

  “Hello,” she says. “My name is Carola and this is my son, Àlvar. Would you like to come up to our place? Vol pujar a casa nostra?” She says it in English and Catalan, to be sure.

  “Why?” he asks. His voice is higher than you’d expect.

  “To have a bath in our bathtub.” Àlvar beats her to it. “You smell.”

  * * *

  The man without a name still isn’t answering any questions. When they move off, he meekly follows, leaving on his patch of sidewalk a sheaf of newspapers and a trash bag full of whatever it is, and which nobody would dare to touch. At the entrance of their building, the janitor greets them with some misgiving and asks if everything is all right. Carola nods with a reassuring smile. They go up in the elevator without saying a word, and, once inside the apartment, the man follows Carola’s instructions, goes into the bathroom, and closes the door. Half an hour later, wearing the same dirty clothes but with his hair combed and smelling of Àlvar’s shampoo, he comes out and wanders around the apartment looking for them. They are in the kitchen. Àlvar is eating a potato omelet and, on seeing her guest, Carola asks if he wants some. He shakes his head. A few minutes go by and he just stands there, as if taking in what’s happened so far.

  Àlvar keeps eating, his attention captured by a children’s program on television as his mother feeds him small bits of omelet. Carola’s head is seething with questions rehearsed a hundred times, but when she tries to get them out, they crash against the granitic expression of the nameless man before they leave her mouth. Gradually, like a magnetic pole, his silent, static presence is exerting its power over everything around them. And what if time has stopped? No, that’s not possible, Carola thinks. A few more minutes go by. Then, without warning, the man moves his arm and grabs the remote control.

  As he’s seen Àlvar do, he starts pressing the different buttons. Television channels flip by and in no time a rhythm is born. The screen keeps blinking. At first he never stays on one channel for more than five seconds. Then he lingers longer. Ten seconds, twenty, thirty. Carola watches, fascinated. Àlvar starts sniveling.

  “Matter obeys God,” the nameless man mumbles.

  “What are you saying, Bill? What does that mean?” Carola asks.

  Silence. He looks at her for a second and then concentrates again on the screen, as if he wants to tell her that the answer’s in the television. One channel follows upon another. In his mind, words and images mingle to create sense. Everything is becoming ordered. It seems that he’s been waiting years for this moment. His face, jaw, and cheeks relax. He takes some of the torn-out photographs from his pocket and spreads them on the table. Everything’s becoming ordered more quickly. He points the remote control at the photos and presses the buttons. Àlvar sobs and sobs but doesn’t appear to be suffering. It’s more like an unconscious reaction, as if he, too, were part of the game. Carola shuffles the photographs. Maybe that will help him to find some rhythmic sequence in the images. The hands of the nameless man, or Bill, or whatever he’s called, stop moving and he closes his eyes. You’d think he knows what’s going to happen in the future.

  * * *

  So let’s see what’s going to happen quite soon. Daniel will come home from work. He’ll open the door of the apartment and find the three of them in the kitchen. Àlvar, who will have stopped crying, will hug him. Carola will smile and tell him that their guest is a famous sculptor who disappeared many years ago. Daniel will take the remote control from the nameless man, turn off the television, and call the police, but at the last minute he’ll change his mind and hang up. Then he’ll take the vagrant to the elevator, out into the street, and escort him to his corner. Carola will be very angry. The days will go by. Daniel might have an affair at work after all. Some mornings, while she’s working on her thesis, Carola will have the urge to go out on the balcony to see if Bill’s on his corner. But he won’t be there. More days will go by without any sign of life from Bill. One night, the new program produced by Daniel will be premiered. Àlvar will be in bed asleep—he’s going to have nightmares—and Carola will be sitting alone in front of the television. The program is called I See, I See and she’ll soon discover that it is, in fact, a competition for seers. In the first round tonight, two contestants compete to get on the next program, convinced they’re on the way to getting a place in the grand finale. A meiga from Galicia who says she can see the future in the sheets and blankets of an unmade bed is challenged by a solemn, enigmatic gentleman who has a highly original method for predicting the future: interpreting a series of images obtained by random surfing through TV channels. Viewers will be able to vote for him by sending messages on their cell phones. They only have to dial the number 7878 and then write “I See, I See Mr. Matter.”

  THE MIRACLE OF THE LOAVES AND THE FISHES

  Not long ago, one afternoon at the beginning of summer, I ran into my friend Miquel Franquesa, who now calls himself Mike. Saying he’s a friend is probably an exaggeration, because in fact we’ve seen each other just a couple of times in three years, but it’s also true that our contact was never only sporadic and casual but has involved the exact degree of trust and perhaps intimacy—especially on his side—resulting from shared money.

  I say I ran into him, but actually he was the one who saw me first. I was walking along Passeig Marítim toward La Barceloneta, when someone coming in the opposite direction stopped in front of me and blocked my way with a smile. It took me almost ten seconds to recognize that face, the time I needed to salvage it from memory and understand that it had aged and was the worse for wear. I greeted him, trying to mask my surprise. The Miquel I’d met three years earlier had been thin, if anything, was well into his thirties, with gentle evasive features and a ferrety look about him. His laid-back cheerfulness was emphasized by the fact that his shirt was nearly always half hanging out. But the Mike who was now standing before me reminded me of a boiled fish, a salmon, swollen and flabby rather than fat, his skin sporting an orangey tan. He was wearing a Yankees cap, a stain-spattered sky-blue polo shirt tucked into his jeans, and multihued sneakers.

  We shook hands and exchanged a few polite words of greeting. His voice sounded less anxious than I remembered it, as if well tuned by tranquilizers. He said it was more than six months since he’d come back for Christmas holidays and had decided to stay, although everyone had advised him not to. Bloody crisis. But he’d even found work.

  “So I guess you’re on your way to the casino,” I ventured with a touch of mischief, because we were nearby and that was where we’d first met.

  “Yes,” he said, “but it’s not what you think. I stopped gambling. Now I work there.”

  I must have given him an incredulous look, because he then invited me to have a beer with him. So, while he’d have something to eat, we’d have a long chat and caught up on each other’s news. His shift didn’t start for another hour and a half.

  Miquel told me that, in those three years, he’d traveled thousands of miles and had met dozens of people. He’d had an ardent lover and had managed to escape in the nick of time from the perils personified by the cuckolded husband. He’d propelled a gondola through the canals of Venice, had driven a Ferrari, and had been tempted by the idea of killing himself by jumping off the Eiffel Tower. In the end he’d always survived. Maybe that’s the word that best captures the ups and downs of his life. In spite of himself, he was a survivor. And now he was back in Barcelona. Before I get into his story, though, it’s worth recalling how we met . . .

  Let’s begin, perhaps, by saying that Miquel was a regular at the Barcelona casino. In August 2008 I was writing a novel and had decided that I needed some cardplayers in an important chapter. For days I’d been struggling with the scene in which I had to describe a poker game. I knew how to do the atmosphere but couldn’t get the players’ expressions when they first see their cards, their faces during an especially tense round, the complacent silence of the winner, knowing he’s cheated . . . One very hot Friday evening, then,
I headed off to the casino to watch the blackjack players and, while I was there, enjoy the air-conditioning. I know myself and, since I’m a sucker when it comes to games of chance, I left my credit cards at home and took only sixty euros in case I was tempted to play.

  Once I got inside the casino, my plan to watch the card players became an unfulfilled wish. Blackjack games were off-limits to the public. The tables were cloistered away from the rest of the room by a discreet wooden partition and a security guard who let in only accredited players. For a few seconds I wondered whether I should go back home, but the comfortable feel of the casino and the heady, roiling atmosphere you breathe when money’s at stake kept me there a while longer. I asked for a gin and tonic and, with the glass in my hand, strolled around the roulette tables as if I owned the place. (Yes, I’ve seen a lot of movies.) It was then that, at one of the tables with more people gathered round it, I noticed Miquel Franquesa for the first time. His body-and-soul surrender to the game fascinated me, and, trapped in this magnetic field, I couldn’t take my eyes off him for over an hour. In which time he lost everything.

  I don’t know how much money it was, though I figured it was close to two thousand euros, but not a flicker crossed his face. In the end, when he lost his last chip and the croupier languidly swept it into his territory, I noted a small grimace of disgust but nothing more than that. He got up, waved at nobody in particular, and left. Naturally, I followed, and saw him going into one of the restrooms. I went in too and, trying to look as if I wasn’t tailing him, went to wash my hands. After pissing, he came over to wash his.

  “So you feel sorry for me, huh?” he asked from the mirror.

  “No,” I said. “I’m impressed. How can you lose so much, just like that?”

  “Bad luck. It’s always bad luck. Luck comes and goes. I played 12 all afternoon because today’s the twelfth, and as you saw, I lost every time. But if we went back now and bet on 12, there’s nothing to indicate that we’d lose again.”

  “Or that we’d win either . . . ,” I suggested.

  “Exactly. Shall we try? Do you have some money

  on you?”

  I left his invitation hanging in the air for a few seconds, long enough to dry my hands under a rasping dryer. Since I hadn’t quite decided, Miquel repeated his question, now with a slightly different slant. “Do you have some money on you? Will you lend it to me?”

  “Yes, I do. Fifty euros. But you won’t get far with fifty euros.”

  “You’re wrong about that,” he said. “As I see the game, fifty euros hold out the promise of more loot. You only have to know how to work them and luck will be with you. It’s like when Michelangelo stood in front of a block of marble and saw what there was inside. David, Moses . . .”

  “No, man, it’s not really the same thing,” I objected, but I admit I was amused by the comparison and was therefore indulgent. He must have noticed, because he tried again. “Lend me the fifty euros and we’ll go halves. Or, better still, lend me fifty euros and I’ll give you a hundred back. Which would be tomorrow. A twenty-four-hour loan at a hundred percent. It’s a great offer.”

  He was so persuasive, I couldn’t resist. I shrugged and gave him the fifty-euro bill. He quickly stuffed it in his wallet as though the money might burn his fingers or bring bad luck just by looking at it and thanked me with a trusting, almost comradely look. We left the restroom together and I followed him to the gaming table, but after a few steps Miquel turned and said he’d see me the next day. It was a polite way of saying he didn’t want me there, that lending him the money didn’t give me the right to watch him gamble it, my investment in his talent, so I left convinced I’d never see my fifty euros again.

  The next day, however, curiosity drove me back to the casino at the same hour. Miquel was waiting for me outside. He was wearing sunglasses as if trying to cover up the tiredness on his face.

  “No need to go in,” he said, handing me two fifty-euro bills.

  “Well, I’ll be damned. I didn’t expect that. So you got on a winning streak . . .”

  “No, hell no, I lost everything,” he admitted with a rueful smile, “but I’m a man of my word. Thanks to your fifty euros, I played for more than four hours and made myself a nice little fortune, about a thousand euros, but I couldn’t stop, so I ended up losing the whole lot again. That’s life for you.”

  I now understood that, as well as being a man of his word, Miquel Franquesa was impetuous, stubborn, and hooked on the adrenaline of impulse, even if it meant his own perdition. To round off the clinical report, he was also a dauntless optimist, the sort who’d dive into a swimming pool without checking to see if there’s water in it. I looked at him and, feeling sorry for him, tried to return one of the two bills, but he wouldn’t accept it. On the contrary: he turned serious and told me that I’d inadvertently earned the money. My fortuitous intercession had been “therapeutic and enriching” (his words). Then he told me that, going home in a taxi, crushed and with empty pockets, he’d had an epiphany. The taxi driver was listening to the radio, one of those light-entertainment programs talking about Catalans scattered round the world. Then the presenter had said there were about a hundred of our compatriots living in Las Vegas, “capital of gambling and endless entertainment.” Miquel took that as a challenge. If he wanted to stop gambling for good, the best place to kick the habit was Las Vegas.

  “Are you serious?” I dared to interrupt.

  “Absolutely. There’s nothing like getting burned to keep you away from fire for the rest of your life.”

  Once again, I thought his example was far-fetched, but I could see that his eyes were shining with an excitement so pure, I’d almost call it faith, and, anyway, I had no right to question his decision. Moreover, he was all ready to go. That morning he’d withdrawn the few savings he had left, sold his laptop at a ridiculously low price (after saving all his documents on a flash drive), placed an online ad to rent his apartment, and got a ticket to fly to Las Vegas in three days’ time. One way only.

  “Thanks a lot. I’m really grateful,” Miquel said, clutching my hand with unhealthy sincerity as we took our leave. “Thanks for everything.”

  I watched him walk away, determined, an explorer with a mission. Then, maybe in homage to his guts or his folly, I went into the casino and lost the hundred euros he’d given me.

  * * *

  As I said before, Miquel now calls himself Mike. This pared-down name, which seems essential for understanding his character today, was a product of his life in the United States. When I met him on Passeig Marítim, it was as if that raw enthusiasm of three years earlier had shrunk to nothing in the daily reality of Las Vegas, yet the words came out of him without the slightest sign of bitterness or remorse.

  “Las Vegas is everything you want,” he continued as we savored the cold beer, “and, what’s more, it’s never-ending. I guess you know that sociologists tend to refer to it as a non-place. Yeah, well, it is, but it’s also a non-time. The hours go by any old how and often you can’t tell day from night. Outside, it’s always light, whether it’s the glare of the desert sun or thousands of lit-up signs decorating the city after nightfall. If you haven’t seen a rosy sunset sky profiled against the green neon lights of the MGM Grand Hotel, you haven’t seen anything. And inside the casinos there are no clocks, so time slips away or stops, depending on the mood of the game.”

  The reference to casinos made me raise my eyebrows.

  “Yeah, right, I know. You’ll find this difficult to believe, but I didn’t set foot in a gaming room until six months after I landed in Las Vegas,” he explained. “Outside the famous Strip, which everyone knows from the movies, behind the showy decoration, there’s a city made of houses that look like prefab, all of them almost exactly the same, spreading out into nowhere. When I arrived, I found a cheap motel, the Blue Cockatoo, and stayed there for two weeks. Just for the thrill of it, I registered under a false name, Mike Picasso, and the receptionist didn’t bat an eyelid. Good
sign. I had a tourist visa, but my intention was to find a job so as not to use up my savings too fast. I could describe the motel now, the king-size bed, the swimming pool with greenish water (always with a plastic ball bobbing around), the ice maker in the corridor, the drifters like myself, the sexual feats, the nighttime battles on the other side of the thin wall, almost certainly over money. But I won’t. You can imagine it for yourself.”

  “I can imagine it very well. You’re right.”

  “The first five days I didn’t leave the motel,” he went on. “I was overwhelmed by everything. I could hear the constant buzzing of the city out there, could see the lights from my window, and I told myself I wasn’t ready to face it. I spent hours in the pool, lounging about in a deck chair, eating only fries and chili chicken wings, which I had sent up to my room. From my open-air observation post I could monitor the casino losers coming and going, leaving in the morning with hope written on their faces and stumbling back at night as human wreckage.

  “The fifth day I got up feeling stronger, as if completely cured of my gambling habit. I felt that I was part of that world, no longer a raw recruit, and that with my self-imposed abstinence I’d earned the right to live there. Then it struck me: I didn’t know where to start.”

  “If I remember rightly, you were going there to look for Catalans . . .”

  “Yeah, well, that was just an excuse, but it’s true it worked for me in the end. One morning I took a free shuttle bus to the Bellagio fountains, which are spectacular, and then walked along the Strip: Caesars Palace, Bally’s, the Tropicana . . . mythical names I’d heard a thousand times, offered up to me as a temptation . . . And, man, this was really temptation. It’s a gambler’s paradise. Luckily I was clear about my objective. I watched the people going in and leaving and sometimes when they walked by I sang “Baixant de la font del gat” or “El meu avi” out loud, in case one of those Catalans apparently residing in Las Vegas heard me warbling on about walking down from the cat’s fountain or my dear old granddad. But no luck. No one took the bait. Then, just when I was about to give up, someone called out, ‘Hey, Catalan! Barcelona és bona si la bossa sona . . .’ I turned around. Barcelona’s good if your pocket jingles as it should. Who’d come out with that old saying? He was an elegantly dressed bearded guy, of Cuban origin and the grandson of Catalans whom he’d heard singing havaneres—the Catalan-Cuban-African version of the old English-French contredanse—when he was a kid. His name was Bonany and he was doing a balancing act on Rollerblades at the exit of one of the casinos, handing out leaflets trying to convince the clients to forget about gambling for a while and go to see the musical Les Misérables. I invited him to a slice of pizza, basically to have someone to talk to, and told him I was looking for work but not sure how to go about it. ‘Well, you found the right man, bro,’ he claimed. ‘But let me ask: Can you speak Spanish with a Latino accent?’ I said I could, that I could imitate Mexicans, Argentines, and maybe Venezuelans. The next day I had my first job in Las Vegas. Not legal, naturally.”