by Pablo Tusset
‘Well, he’s the son of the same parents as me, let’s just keep it at that,’ I pointed out.
‘Delighted to meet you,’ Fina replied. ‘I’m Josephine. I’ve heard so much about you.’
‘So much? Where would you have heard “so much” about him? Not from me …’
‘My goodness, your poor face …’
‘It’s nothing, a bit of a bother, that’s all. They tied me to a chair and grilled me for a while.’
‘… I don’t remember ever having told you about him … are you listening to me?’ I asked.
‘It must hurt something awful …’
‘Not at all. It’s a question of self-control. A properly trained mind can actually reinterpret pain signals.’
‘Fina … yoo hoo … do you hear me?’
‘Yes, yes – what do you want, Pablo, for God’s sake? Can’t you see I’m talking to your brother … and by the way, I’m extremely annoyed with you. How dare you stand me up last night! Two guys got out of a car and shoved a handkerchief in my mouth …’
‘He stood you up, did he?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, don’t pay him much mind. He is a bit fond of alcohol, if you know what I mean.’
‘A bit? I’ve seen him drain an entire bottle of vodka in the space of two hours.’
‘All right, enough’s enough, now.’ I had to intervene at this point. ‘This is not the time for cocktail conversation.’
The First then announced that he was going to finish packing up our collection of gadgets and left me alone with our rescued princess.
‘You never told me you had such a handsome brother.’
Handsome. She said ‘handsome.’ Not ‘good-looking’, not ‘cute’, not ‘brilliant’ – she said ‘handsome’, just like in the soap operas.
‘Fina, please. His face looks like a roadmap.’
‘Maybe so, but he’s got good raw material. He’s a stud. Under normal circumstances, he’d be a hunk, you can tell. And now that you’ve got a new lady friend … don’t think I’ve forgotten about that … Anyway, his big blue eyes are soo incredibly sexy.’
‘Right. Just like me.’
‘Oh, what do you care … Anyway, you do have about forty extra kilos on your frame,’ she said. After that, kind of suddenly, a look came over her face, that expression that contemporary males and females get when they need to bring up a delicate subject but don’t want to come off sounding embarrassed.
‘Listen, I need to ask you something – there wouldn’t be any maxi pads, or tampons, or something like that in there, would there? I think I’m about to get my period.’
Never, never would Princess Leia Organa get her period in the middle of a rescue mission, nor would Lady Marian, nor Helen of Troy. But Fina did: Fina had to go and get her period.
‘Real nice. You dream about Mr Sexy’s blue eyes but you get the fat guy to find you your tampons …’
I left her blowing me insipid kisses as I went over to where The First was assembling our goods. I then entered the medicine closet to take a look, but there was nothing in there that even remotely resembled tampons or maxi-pads. I did, however, find a pile of pillowcases in one of the closets. Maybe one of those would work for her. I returned to Fina with the pillowcases under my arm.
‘What am I supposed to do with a pillowcase? Make a Ku Klux Klan hat?’
‘Shit, Fina, I don’t know … Before they had Tampax and that sort of thing, women used rags, didn’t they? You figure it out …’
Anyway. A long time must have gone by until we were finally ready to leave there. Not only did we have to wait until Fina declared herself “presentable”, but she also needed an intensive course in weapons-handling, a duty that fell to The First, Magnificent Instructor that he was. His student exhibited an uncommon level of comprehension for her sex and seemed to breeze through the theory part (where the bullets came out, etcetera), but once she actually had to handle the weapon in the more practical phase of the instruction, she clutched it as if it were a jar of honey. Some little scenario. After a while, we were ready: the illustrious commando unit comprising one studly warrior with two pillowcase-saddlebags, Doris Day with a pistol tucked into the belt of her bathrobe, and one Magilla Gorilla who limped along, loaded down with replacement sanitary napkins. Together the three of us advanced beyond the door with the bars on it and into the incipient darkness of that absurd edifice.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked, for some reason.
‘To explore the labyrinth,’ said The First.
Lovely. An adventure. The only thing missing was Darth Vader. But, he didn’t take long to materialise.
Given that we weren’t actually in a real labyrinth, all we had to do was to stick to the areas lit up by emergency exit signs, which eventually led us to a kind of subterranean tunnel that was sort of the backbone of the building. It clearly led to somewhere because there was a truck and an excavator on the side. In other words: the tunnel was massive.
‘Holy shit!’ was my preliminary evaluation. The First, ever the wise hero, went over to examine a mess of crossbeams and some other construction materials that took up as much space as yet another vehicle sitting behind the excavator. When he returned, he was sporting that annoying, everything’s-under-control attitude.
‘Our best option is to follow the truck’s tyre tracks. It must have to go somewhere to unload all that dirt.’
‘Oh, really? You think someone could have removed all that dirt using that little baby truck?’
‘They’ve had plenty of time to do it. Come on, we may have quite a walk ahead of us.’
Clearly it wasn’t enough for Captain Thunder to go around making up little mysteries for everyone to solve, now he had to go and start giving out orders. Anyway. I let him take the lead and I held up the rear, behind Fina. We moved forward like that through the tunnel for a while, sticking close to the wall, given the lack of illumination. It was almost completely dark but there was just barely enough light for us to see where we were stepping. My God, it was just like the Temple of Doom, although ours was more the low-rent version – no boa constrictors or subterranean waterfalls or anything. Here and there we would step into little pools of water that had slid down the humid, subterranean walls, which made it downright Arctic in there. I could have done with a windbreaker or something.
Rather quickly, about two or three subterranean city blocks away, we arrived at a point of entry to the tunnel, a sudden widening of the path that broke the monotony of our walk. At first I didn’t recognise the place because I was far too taken aback by the structure of semi-buried arches underneath which we could make out a choice selection of human refuse. Coca-Cola bottles (classic dump items), used condoms, an old umbrella, dog-eared magazines … But as soon as I spied, among the various bits of garbage, an aerial shot of an enormous pair of tits jerking off a cinnamon-coloured fellow, I realised exactly where we were: in the ruins of the Bóbila, that old abandoned ceramics factory buried beneath the park that was built above it in the eighties. And so, most likely, we were somewhere beneath the street known as Numancia, no doubt quite far below sea level.
I mentioned this to The First. And though I doubt that my Magnificent Brother would have ever been caught jerking off in the Bóbila, arousing himself with stolen girlie magazines, he did venture to guess the location.
‘Well, we know there’s a way out at Jaume Guillamet 15, and that’s about two blocks from where we are now. We might be better off leaving the tunnel and heading onto the next access path to the buildings and trying our luck.’
We didn’t have time to ponder our various options. Fina advised us of this by shouting, “Someone’s coming from in there!” She rushed to our sides, pointing toward the direction we were going in. Then I heard a “Stop!” come from somewhere far away. The First slung my arm around his neck to help me walk and ordered Fina to start running, as fast as she could down the last exit path we had gone by. I squirmed away from my helper so tha
t I could jump up a bit faster. Fina had already reached the access ramp and was now shouting us on, sticking her head out to check on our progress. Finally we reached her before whomever following us could catch up with us, and we entered at some floor of the car park, as insane as the rest of the place, then Fina ran toward what seemed to be the doors to a lift, and then frantically press the call button. The First disentangled himself from me and told me to continue on by myself. When I turned halfway around to see where the hell he was going, I saw a guard in blue coveralls enter from the tunnel. He stopped very suddenly, surprised by the fact that one of his fugitives had turned around and started running towards him. The guy, moving his arm as if about to throw a javelin, raised his club to slam it into The First, but my Magnificent Brother did something that I am sincerely chagrined that I was not able to record on video for posterity. The long and the short of it is that, following a brief magician-type manoeuvre launched by my brother, the guard found himself with a humungous knee in his balls while my Magnificent Brother was still fully intact and in possession of the guy’s club, which he had somehow caught under his left arm. With his right hand, The First pulled the club out in one clean, quick, dry movement to the right and could have easily cracked his opponent’s head before the poor slob could utter the long ‘uhhhhh’ that followed his surprise ball-blasting. The First, however, just nudged him a little and the guy ended up writhing around the floor a bit. That was when a second guard appeared, running toward my brother. But The First didn’t even have to touch this one: once the guard saw how his colleague had ended up, he looked at my Magnificent Brother, brandishing that club as if it were a majorette’s baton, and he turned halfway around and disappeared back to wherever he had come from.
The First then took advantage of the moment to stride rapidly down the hall toward the lift, where Fina and I were waiting for him, our fingers ready to hit the uppermost floor.
‘Excuse me, would you mind signing an autograph?’ I said, to lighten the mood a bit.
‘Shut up with your nonsense. The guy who came running after the first one had a radio on him. We’re in for trouble.’
The lift went up full-speed – you could see the little numbers illuminating the panel – straight to the sixth floor. The building had fourteen floors, but from the sixth floor up you needed a special key to gain access. It appeared that we were being held hostage in a very posh building. For God’s sake.
‘Don’t take out the pistols, if they see we’re armed they might get nervous and pelt us with bullets. Josephine, hide yours in your pocket.’
Fina obeyed, dumbfounded. Then, all of a sudden, something that sounded like a red-alert on a combat submarine began ringing through the air – moook, moooook – so freaky it made my skin crawl. By the time we reached the sixth floor we were frantic. The doors opened automatically – dong, bsss – and for a moment we remained there, glued to the back wall of the lift. Mooook, moook: that alarm wouldn’t quit. The First leaned out the door to scope out the scenario, but I already knew that someone was there waiting for us. At the far end of the hall, behind a glass door that revealed what looked like the reception area of an elegant office, I spotted a girl rise up from her chair in an effort to see what all this fuss was about.
‘Get out of the lift!’ The First said to me and Fina.
We got out. My Magnificent Brother immediately began hacking away at the call button with the butt of the pistol, not stopping until a number of coloured wires emerged from the panel, and he tugged on them until they were rendered completely useless. Then he surveyed his surroundings in search of something (I didn’t know what, exactly) and finally settled on a rather innocuous planter containing a little tree, which he uprooted, smashed the clay pot against the floor and shoved one of the shards in front of the door to the other lift, which was parked on our floor. It all happened too fast for me: any decision that can’t be made while sipping a beer is generally too fast for me. As such, I let The First, who was used to stressful situations, take control of this one for the moment and instead focused my attention on the fact that behind the glass doors, just beyond a little set of sofas where the reception girl was, a massive picture window revealed both the outside world and the building next door. Twilight was falling now, and we could hear the sound of firecrackers beneath the moook-moook of the alarm. The moment seemed to last a lifetime, because all I wanted to do right then was stick my head out that window and see that the world still existed. Once he’d immobilised both lifts, The First came over to us. The girl, frightened by this lunatic advancing toward her, with a face that looked like a map of the Alps, tried to hide behind anything and everything she could as she retreated from him.
‘Don’t be afraid, we don’t want to hurt you,’ The First said to her, in an unsuccessful attempt to calm the girl, who now brandished a staple-gun in front of his face. Fina’s attempt, however, met with more success.
‘Relax, we’re friends,’ she said. A somewhat absurd comment given the circumstances, but the fact that she was a woman, her mere presence in between two hulks whose appearance would have been the envy of any member of the Hell’s Angels, must have held more sway with the girl.
‘Don’t worry,’ Fina insisted. ‘We’re just trying to get out of here. They’re after us.’
The First had moved over to the picture window and I followed suit, pressing my nose against the glass. I could just barely make out the sight of an interior patio and, against the slender strip of summer-solstice sky, the luminous explosion of a rocket soaring through the air. Suddenly the alarm stopped ringing and we heard the sound of footsteps pattering toward us from the area where the lifts were.
‘Take cover!’ shouted The First, offering no other specifications.
Nobody in my life had ever given me such an instruction, but something about the contextual universe in which we found ourselves told me that he wasn’t advising us to protect ourselves from a summertime sunshower, but that we had best find some kind of bullet-proof barrier to place between ourselves and the rest of the world. I wondered if Fina had understood the command or if she was looking for a rainslicker of some sort. I tried to ascertain this, but I couldn’t seem to locate her. Then I realised that she was crawling along the floor behind the reception counter, preceded by the staple-gun girl, and then I saw the two of them slink through a double door that looked as though it led into some kind of office. Once I saw the girls’ manoeuvre, I decided to barricade myself behind a sofa, imitating my Magnificent Brother. Would a sofa be able to protect me from a shower of bullets?, I asked myself. It was a Chesterton of a difficult-to-describe colour, but I don’t suppose the colour was very critical to the sofa’s capacity as an improvised bunker. The First, meanwhile, seemed to be following a vaguely different line of thinking.
‘Don’t move! We’re armed!’ he shouted, flashing his pistol once again, this time not as a hammer for destroying office fixtures but the more conventional form of firearm usage.
To reinforce his threat, he fired a shot toward the ceiling, producing a sound similar to that of a pellet-gun, which was all but drowned out by the summer solstice firecrackers exploding away outside, beyond the picture window. Nevertheless, I suppose that the chunk of plaster that suddenly crashed down from the ceiling was ominous enough to communicate his intentions.
‘Didn’t you say not to take out the pistols?’ I asked. You never do know what to expect with The First.
‘Well now you can, idiot.’
‘Listen, you sack of shit …’
‘Shut up, will you? I’m trying to repel an armed attack.’
‘Well, don’t worry, you’re already repellent enough on your own.’
Just in case I rummaged through my pockets for the pistol and I pulled it out, along with a wad of fifty-euro bills that went fluttering across the floor. If I could have chosen my weapon, I would have preferred to wage battle with the porcelain poodle, but I certainly didn’t want the bullets to start flying and end up dead with an
unused pistol in my pocket, either. I remembered the basic precaution of pulling the trigger with the gun facing forward and tried to imagine what John Wayne would do in this type of predicament. I had scarcely even worked up my first wad of spit to splatter on the floor when a voice came booming out from the depths of the entrance hall, not far from where the lifts were. It sounded like one of those megaphones that people yell from on the tops of cars that drive around the city during political campaigns. And it was, indeed, a megaphone.
‘Surrender your weapons. I repeat: surrender your weapons and come out with your hands up or we will proceed with the release of gases.’
I am of the opinion that if someone not only threatens you with the word “gases” but, in fact, alludes to the possibility of proceeding with such gases, he or she should be taken very seriously. I didn’t know what kind of gases were involved in this threat, but I was sure that they would be fully deleterious to our collective health.
‘What do we do now? I get sinusitis from gases, I don’t even like pine-scented room freshener.’
‘What do you think? Surrender.’
It was a good thing we did. Anyway, the Greenpeace people would have thanked us for it, I guess. The First also took care of the formalities of our armistice, which was a good thing, because protocol is most definitely not my strong suit. He asked me for the pistol and with both weapons in his hands he shouted all right, fine, we surrender, here are the weapons. He slid them across the floor beneath the sofa and raised his two hands from behind the backrest, though not before nudging me first to follow suit. I had a bit of trouble raising both arms because my stiff knee made any and all movements rather difficult, but I managed it somehow.
‘Where’s the girl? I repeat: where’s the girl?’
The megaphone again.
‘Over there, inside,’ I said. ‘She surrenders, too. And whoever touches her, watch out or I’ll pop you one. Fina: can you hear me?’
‘Yeees. What should I do?’
My Magnificent Brother took over from there.
