The Barcelona Brothers by Carlos Zanón, John Cullen Page B

she has to. She has to look around and interpret the things, the words, and the signs she finds here and there. And she must remember. Like running backward, that’s how she must do it. But it’s hard for her to keep her attention on her thoughts, to keep a steady balance as she goes backward.
    Sometimes images assail her like flashes, and she doesn’t know if they’re real or fantasies. But if she thinks they can do her harm, she shoos them off with a wave of her hand, as one does with pigeons in a public square. On one occasion, Epi’s mother explained to her that in former times there never used to be pigeons, neither in Barcelona nor anywhere else in Europe. That pigeons were brought from the East to cure a rich woman’s melancholy. And that they never went back home. To this day, something keeps them in our squares and on our roofs. As if they were prisoners of something indistinct and unknown. A little like Tiffany herself.
    She has always been the one who got to choose. The one who made others wait. Giving free rein to her whims, making things happen, causing earthquakes, and—if she felt like it—healing wounds and repairing losses. But she wasn’t unfair, or at least she doesn’t see herself that way. She never got a guy hot just to leave him hanging, the way other girls would. Nor did she ever deceive anyone or act in bad faith. Of course, sometimes she liked to have fun, all girls did, but she didn’t go much beyond that.
    She’s sitting on the floor in the half-empty apartment Epi asked her to meet him in. The window shutters are down, but the slats have so many holes they look bullet-riddled, and the first direct light of the morning enters through them. The dust is getting into her throat. She remembers the time when bees built a hive in the housing above some other shutters. Where did that happen? Was it just after they arrived in Spain? Yes, on the second floor, where they lived in practically completesecurity. Papa didn’t let anybody go into the room. He sealed it by stuffing cloths under the door so that the bees, once they were driven mad, couldn’t escape. The action wasn’t particularly heroic. The nest was treated with poison, after which there was nothing to do but let a few days pass and then check the honeycomb to see that it was empty. But to Tiffany, the long wait on the other side of the door, then her father coming through it with that strange construction in his hands, and the floor of the room thickly littered with insect carcasses—all that seemed to provide yet another demonstration of the value and authority her progenitor exuded at certain fixed hours of the day. That was her father’s good side, which on no account compensated for the other one.
    Now she regrets having added so much fuel to Epi’s flame. She reflects on his unexpected call, his apparently urgent need to see her, his almost literally yanking her out of her apartment and summoning her here, to the safe house Tanveer Hussein and his pals use. Epi tricked her, assured her that she absolutely must not remain at her place, because they’d be coming for her, too. But who? And why? Tiffany didn’t understand a thing. But she was mixed up in so many shenanigans that she decided to err on the side of caution rather than incredulity.
    “What’s that supposed to mean? What happened?”
    “Nothing, honey, nothing. I’ll explain when I see you.”
    Tiffany hated it when Epi called her “honey.” It wasn’t just a casual, unimportant filler word—far from it. Epi deployed it to reconstruct a familiarity that no longer existed between them, to go back, little by little, to that part of their lives. Itwas a bit like a little story she remembered from her stay in the convent school. The camel, which is sin, stands outside your tent and begs you to let it enter because a terrible storm is raging. First it thrusts in one foot, then another, then its head, and eventually, almost without your noticing, the damn