August, October by Andrés Barba

Author:Andrés Barba [Barba, Andrés]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788494365812
Publisher: Hispabooks
Published: 2015-07-26T04:00:00+00:00

The warmth of the sun, the faint whisper of waves they could hear from the balcony of their rental house—all of it had become sort of removed. All that afternoon, he felt as if the four of them had turned into some wide-open, gaping thing, as if despite the fact that they didn’t part company for the rest of the whole day, they were no longer a unit, as if each of them had become aware of their own skin and their own name and it couldn’t be shared with the others, as if there were a plaster wall between them. When they addressed one another, their words, too, hung haltingly in the air. The darkening of their voices, the sudden remoteness of everything, the conviction that that was what death was, or at least how death began, made even their movements seem sluggish, solemn.

There were lots of things to be done, but he told his father he wanted to go for a walk. He texted Rivero, and then Tejas. They were at the dock. He’d have liked to think he was going to confide in his friends, but he knew they weren’t his friends and he didn’t even plan to tell them. There were only three days left of summer. Suddenly, it occurred to him that his pride could only be salvaged if he didn’t mention anything about Aunt Eli. Before leaving the house, he locked himself in the bathroom and tried to cry, but he couldn’t. He felt full, and enthralled by his own strange self-awareness, as though he were on the verge of making a discovery and in order to do it had to avoid conventional responses and wait, attentive.

Pablo, Marcos,Tejas, and Rivero had changed a little, too, or at least that’s how it suddenly seemed to him when he saw them on the dock. They struck him as subtler, shrewder, more somber. Up until then he’d felt conscious of the limits of their intelligence; now, in a way, he saw himself as less intelligent than them—diminished, somehow. Rivero’s beauty and strength struck him as near mythological.

“Where you been, princess? Haven’t seen hide nor hair of you for five days.”

“At the hospital.”

Now they’d ask him, he thought, and what could he say?

“Why?”

“My aunt, she died this afternoon.”

Tejas spat.

“Well, well, well,” said Pablo.

“His father died, too, two months ago—had a bad trip,” Rivero said, pointing to Marcos. “The guy was a bastard.”

“He was always a bastard. Now he’s a dead bastard,” Tejas remarked.

Marcos didn’t say a word. He sat down and stared at the dock, as though he were authorizing the conversation but didn’t want to encourage it. In a way, it was as if from within the habitually serious and inexpressive person that Marcos was, there had materialized an ordinary, easily wounded, delicate boy.

“They found him in the estuary. He must have gotten wasted, and the tide dragged him out and then brought him back to shore over by the breakwater, by the sea.”

“No one wanted him, not even the sea,” Tejas said.

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