Welcome back to the Tall Tales series on you’re listening to radio revel. This series is a showcase of the short stories and sometimes novel excerpts I’ve written and am writing over the past 40-some years. Today’s story is called Almost brothers and is an appropriate one to slip in this slot, as it was written during the period of time I talked about last week, that short life experience in Northern Spain, in Ávila. This story is a little less dark than the last story, but if you’re offended by flatulence, you may want to skip it, there’s many references to “cutting the cheese”! Enjoy.
José was getting old. It was about the only thing left to him: he had already gone bald, lost most of his teeth, become fat, so that becoming an old man was no surprise and seemed to be the natural end of it all. That’s what José thought anyway, when he bothered to think, which was not too often. He was married to a dull woman, Teresa, who was also fat and bald and toothless and just about as unconcerned as he was about such matters. She had her routine to occupy her thoughts.
Teresa’s daily routine was always the same: waking to her husband’s farts to fix him coffee, run to the market to argue over the price of lettuce and return home to prepare lunch, then drag it over to José’s parking garage where José would eat it while she waited, then run home and do up a load of laundry if it were Thursday, or dust her silly collection of Santa Teresa figurines if it were Tuesday, or especially to chat with her mother for an hour or so across the patio if it were any day of the week, to end the day fixing dinner and then washing up.
This was a routine she had now kept and nourished for the past thirty-nine years, without the occasional variation of giving birth or raising little ones. It left her numb to such things as growing old. Today, for example, she had found that two days before the New Year, María Carmen (the chicken stand owner in the Mercado Chico) had raised her prices two pesetas each egg and Teresa had spent ten minutes complaining to María Luisa (her neighbor) that they would probably end up paying a full five pesetas more as María Carmen would surely raise her prices again with the New Year.
Then, after she had returned home from the garage with the dirty plates from José’s lunch, just as she was finishing placing the 21st Santa Teresa in her space on the shelf after clearing away a week’s accumulation of dust, her mother called at her from across the way and they spent a good hour and a half talking about that radio program that aired at 10:33 every morning: “Problems in the Home.” Today, there had been a special topic of interest to any over-worked alma de casa, and when she heard the topic from her mother, Teresa moaned in disappointment for having missed the program arguing with Santo (the butcher) about the rancid ham he had sold her two days earlier.
The topic had been “Stains,” and of special, special interest to any overworked housewife was how to rid oneself of those ugly, rust-colored stains from one’s delicate underthings. Teresa’s mother would have taken notes for the procedure if she had known how to write, but as she didn’t she had listened carefully and tried to repeat the formula over and over to herself so that she would be able to share it with her daughter. The only problem was that the procedure so resembled the way she cooked lentils with sausage, a staple dish which she prepared every Tuesday, that as she explained it later to her daughter, Teresa got the firm and somehow comic impression that she was to cook her panties for three days in olive oil with garlic in order to rid herself of the housewife’s nightmare of menstrual blood stains on her underwear. It didn’t matter that Teresa hadn’t left such stains for years, this was simply good information to have, she could certainly use it on José’s boxers.
Thus was a normal day. Such activity in the first eight hours, with six left to fill with meaningful household tasks, left Teresa listless and uncommunicative when José came home for supper: they usually ate in the silence created by the evening television programming then went to bed, where they only slept side by side touching because their combined weight was enough to sink the wool mattress into a considerable valley in the center.
José would usually wake up around 7:45 and reach to the bed-side table for the glass of water his wife always left for him the night before. He emptied the glass and felt the first gurgling of his digestion catching up with his consciousness. He then opened the small drawer in the same bed-side table and pulled out his first cigar of the day. Lighting up, he would begin to feel hungry, would begin to think of food, would begin to salivate, fully stimulating the peristaltic action. The first gaseous delivery would come with a total relaxation and a slight lifting of the knees. A small, introductory — puff — would be followed by a deep rumbling, beginning within his bowels and migrating down to translate into a vibration of his generous cheeks. From there he could roll a little to his left, lifting up on the low side, and shoot his emissions directly at his wife’s back, who, through their abrupt regularity and their fetid, fermented lentil and onion and beer and coffee smell would sense that it was time to get up and make his coffee, his first at least, with his little glass of brandy. Teresa didn’t mind not counting brandy as one of his vices, because her mother had shouted at her across the way one day, without warning or pretext:
— Brandy is good: it makes them smell sweeter.
This unsolicited comment made Teresa wonder if José’s morning emissions were audible to the neighbors, then she turned her mind back to whatever routine task she had before her, not to think of it again.
Some days Teresa just wanted to lie in bed, pretended to be asleep throughout the lengthy onslaught of hot air. In the first years of their marriage, she would wonder how long those forays would go on. She then began to associate particular foods with the length of the attack. If she served lentil soup with a lot of tomato sauce for dinner and oranges for desert, then within ten minutes of awakening the following morning José was heaving out bursts that she could almost perceive as blasts of spray. This was important because she realized that at the first signs of humidity, José would always get up and sit on the stool for a while; if José got up before Teresa, then he’d figure she was leaving a few wasted rust-colored stains on her delicate underthings and leave her in peace. He’d simply dress quietly, leave the house and have that first morning coffee with brandy at the bar next to his parking garage. On getting up and using the toilet after him, Teresa wondered if her mother really believed that bit about the brandy.
This morning seemed to be one of those particular mornings in which she had no plans of getting out of bed. José was like a stone when faced with interpreting his wife’s behavior. Actually he liked his wife’s lentil soup and did not associate having dined lentils with going to the bar the next morning for his coffee with brandy. This morning it was cold, they had gotten down to -9º; at this hour the sun had not yet topped the city wall and so it was only -3º, but José didn’t notice. He had been born here and had never lived anywhere else: in the first place, he was naturally immune to the temperatures of early winter, actually noticed more when it was unnaturally warm, as it had been this Christmas, some 15º, unheard of; in the second place, his vital organs were well protected within a hermetically sealed cholesterol-fatty tissue balloon that he had cultivated as the best front he had against the world.
As José entered the bar, his belly brushed against the coat of the man who was always sitting at the door — José did not know the man’s name, perhaps had heard it once or twice, but rarely engaged in any more exchange with him than a good morning grunt. Today the man made some remark about the temperature being down where God orders it to be and José made a semi-polite snorting noise with his eyebrows lifted ironically, which was supposed to mean that he agreed, but was interpreted to having meant that he hadn’t noticed and wanted more details. José didn’t want to listen to this man this morning, and he found himself more and more distracted as he fixated on the man’s rotting front teeth. He broke away abruptly when Antonio (the barman) brought him his coffee and brandy, and as he lit up his second cigar, Pepe came through the door.
Poor little Pepe was feeling particularly mortal this morning. The New Year’s holiday meant that he was condemned to spending a long weekend off from work and so was home with only his simpleton wife and his mother-in-law. He actually had had to sneak out this morning before the old widow got herself out of bed to check on his only child, a daughter who seemed to not only have inherited her mother’s dimness, but her father’s twisted frame, as well as her grandmother’s stubbornness. Pepe was always outnumbered by women and felt himself sometimes so soft, so bland that he knew he really only truly existed when he was at work, a job so dull and routine that Pepe easily forgot what it was he did and so no one knew where he went every morning, how his day had been, how was work, because his answer would invariably be
— What do I know?
Pepe had married into the family through a sexual accident, a drunken night’s wager that led to a pregnant dim-witted teenager, whose widowed mother was looking for a husband for herself but couldn’t remarry because she was a good Catholic. Pepe was a good Catholic as well so stoically accepted his lot with silly good humor. This good humor, usually easy for Pepe, was being put to a test this weekend though, because Cisili (his mother-in-law’s oldest daughter) was home from the convent for a holiday visit. She was being transferred to the home land and had swung permission for a six month leave. How wonderful, Cisili was going to be with the family for a good, long, time, there is so much to catch up on!
Pepe was glad to see José holding the match to the end of a fresh cigar, that would give him a good twenty-five minutes to relax and chat with the only person he knew who was a good listener. Besides being wasted most of the time on the brandy, smoke, cuisine, little liver pills of his daily existence, José was a man of no words whose only communication with his fellows was done through facial expressions, hand gestures and grunts. José had given up the vocalization of his thoughts several years earlier when someone had caught him saying something foolish, and José was forced to eat his words, words so indigestible that the next morning he hesitated lighting his cigar in bed for fear of an explosion.
Pepe’s mother-in-law had been on his back all last night, insisting that he ask José if Jesús (Pepe’s brother-in-law) could bring his car (a beat-up, rusted-out SEAT from the end of the Franco era) to José’s parking garage to fiddle with the carburetor and change the oil. She (the mother-in-law) had decided that it was too cold for Jesús (her only son) to be working on the car in the street, he might catch his death, and José had a garage, surely there would be one corner inside where Jesús could tinker around a few hours one day, it wouldn’t hurt for Pepe to ask, would it, go on, what were friends for anyway?
Pepe did not want to ask because he knew that José detested anyone using his parking garage for such activities. José rented space to people from Madrid with weekend houses here, and rented a few spaces during the week for spending money. All José had to do was sit in his small, glassed-in office, drink brandy, smoke cigars, listen to the radio and watch the entryway. José did not like friends or relatives or relatives of friends dismantling their cars in a space that may be open Thursday afternoon but is surely occupied Saturday morning, with the certain risk that any amateur mechanic might not get the car to work once it was put back together. José of course had never said this in so many words — Pepe had gathered such ideas together from the various expressions José made with his throat and his face whenever anyone else brought the subject up.
Pepe climbed up onto the stool next to José, who always stood because sitting he would have overhung. In this manner, Pepe’s head nearly reached José’s neck. He asked Antonio to make him a coffee with milk, as well as get José another coffee and glass of brandy. Pepe wanted to have downed at least one coffee and invite José to his second before making the ask. When Antonio put the cups before the two men, José accepted his with a look directly into Pepe’s eyes, accompanied by a cautious grunt. That simple grunt, with that upward twist of the left eye-lid, suddenly made Pepe feel queasy. He wished he could just lie to his mother-in-law, tell her that José had said no, but that would be unquestionably bad behavior. Pepe figured he may as well cut the shit and get the question out, the permission denied, so that they could enjoy their coffees in silence.
José listened to Pepe attentively, then hummed something, put sugar in his coffee, cleared his throat, blew his nose, stirred his coffee, hummed again, sucked in his upper lip, tapped the ash off the stubby cigar butt with an equally stubby finger, downed the coffee, followed that with half the brandy in the little brandy glass, cleared his throat again and said simply:
— Yes.
but indicated with gestures that it would have to be the next day and good and early. That was all right with Pepe but it was his brother-in-law who had the car, so Pepe had to jump down from the stool and waddle over to the payphone to call his mother-in-law to tell her to call her son and have him call Pepe at José’s garage in about an hour to say yes or no. Jesús was delighted to agree to the plan, because the next day was New Year’s Day and he was certainly not looking forward to spending the entire day crammed into the tiny sitting room in that tiny apartment with his mother and sisters and niece and brother-in-law.
This turned out to be José’s motive for saying yes as well: Teresa’s mother had invited herself to help Teresa with lunch for which she was of course staying, and José needed a good excuse for not being at home, a better excuse than going to the bar to buy some cigarettes or read the newspaper. So tomorrow, New Year’s Day, at seven o’clock, José would be waiting at the garage for Pepe to bring Jesús around.
The Noche Vieja, New Year’s Eve, was the same paganistic, almost sacred affair in José’s house as it was across the country. It began with vermouth, followed by dinner with wine, followed by Champaign, followed by coffee with brandy, followed by more wine and Champaign and chocolates and other sweets, culminating at midnight with the ritualistic eating of the twelve grapes, one for each toll of the clock that brought in the new year. For Teresa, this night was the forewarning of the worst morning of all the year because José refused to peel his grapes as everyone else did. She could anticipate that those grape skins would bring about a morning attack of flatulence that would shake the stones of their house and leave piles of mortar dust at the bases of all the walls. José liked grapes, but because his memory was short, and because he never spoke to his wife, he never asked her to serve them. Tradition made them unavoidable on New Year’s Eve though, and so.
That next morning of New Year’s day, Teresa got out of bed at 6:00 and ran over to her mother’s house across the way to await an end to the eventual bombardment. José did not wake up when his wife rose, only did so when he felt his boxers clinging uncomfortably to the insides of his over sized thighs. He got up and sat on the stool for some ten minutes with the bathroom window open until he finally felt he could control himself enough to pull on some clean boxer shorts and long johns and head out to the bar and then the garage. He did not notice that his wife wasn’t home.
José managed to get to the garage with what would have been a small stomach cramp for anyone with a small stomach. A cloud of foul smelling air hovered around him, quite visible, a mixture of his fermenting New Year’s dinner, his frozen breath into the frigid air, and the smoke from his third cigar. He definitely did not feel well, but was not concerned because it would not be the first time he had felt this way and he knew he would not have to do anything other than park his ass in his large office chair, smoke, drink brandy and watch the clock, make sure that Pepe’s brother-in-law finished up before mid-day, when they were all expected, under threat of excommunication, for lunch with their womenfolk.
When José got to the garage, he found Pepe and Jesús waiting out front for him in a pale, sun burnt, once avocado green SEAT four-seater with a dirty shirt sleeve hanging out of the hole where a long lost gas cap should have been. José kept his opinion to himself, but wondered what exactly was holding the old jalopy together, spit or shit or semen? José opened the big double door and indicated with hand gestures that they should park over in that far corner at the other end of the garage. The beat-up SEAT belched a bluish black smoke from its exhaust pipe that reminded José of his own fumes, but he was afraid of staining his boxers again, could not leave these two alone to go home to change, he tightened his sphincter muscles and felt the air bubble up through his intestines ending in his midriff. Once these two were installed in that corner over there, he would head for the john.
This was where José was when he heard the crashing sound, something dropping a short distance onto the cement. In his nightmares later that night he would imagine that he could hear the crunch of rib-bones and the pop of punctured heart membranes, but in the actual moment he only heard that crash, and the deep bellows of his bowels as they spat out the remainder of the previous night’s grape skins. He pulled the chain down, pulled his pants up, opened the door to the water closet and walked around the corner to see just what all the noise was about.
The first thing he noticed was the pool of what he thought was motor oil. He began cursing inwardly, knowing what a bitch it was to clean motor oil up from the cement floor. He liked to keep the garage clean for his faggot clients from the city who did not like to stain the soles of their delicate little leather slippers stepping out from their BMWs or Mercedes Benzes. Pepe was on his knees in this same pool of nearly black liquid, pulling frantically on what appeared to be an arm and which later turned out to be an arm, his now dead brother-in-law’s left arm. When José added up everything he was seeing, he muttered his first complete sentences in decades:
— Leave it be, he’s dead. Let’s go figure out what to do.
He lifted Pepe by the shoulders, nearly dragging him to the office. There he poured each of them a nice full glass of brandy and they set themselves to pondering their alternatives.
Pepe nervously smiled as he described to José how Jesús had jacked the front end of the car up, scooted under it on his back with wrench in hand meaning to remove the oil filter. Each time Jesús pulled on the wrench under the SEAT, the jack danced from side to side. Pepe told Jesús to take it easy but Jesús was as stubborn as his mother, as stubborn as the oil filter that had fused itself permanently to the underside of the car with age and vibration and rust. Jesús pulled one more time with all of his strength, the car jumped the jack bouncing onto his chest, killing him with less suffering than José and Pepe now contemplated.
The best plan the two men could come up with was to fake a car accident. They lifted the car back up with the jack, pulled Jesús’ crushed torso from the narrow space beneath and loaded his corpse into the trunk. Pepe, who knew the car better than José, pulled a thick telephone directory from under Jesús’ body, dropped it onto the driver’s seat, climbed onto it, while José forced himself into the passenger seat, overhanging both sides.
Pepe started the car and drove out into the surrounding countryside, looking through the steering wheel despite the telephone book riser, until they found an appropriate tree standing alone by the road. They pulled Jesús out of the trunk, set him behind the steering wheel, lit the rag hanging out of the gas tank, put the auto in gear, and ran it into the tree, where two minutes later it exploded. They trudged the five kilometers back to town slowly, to dump kitty litter on the blood-stained cement floor then go to their respective homes just in time for New Year’s lunch.
Pepe told his mother-in-law that Jesús hadn’t shown up, Pepe had waited at the garage until he figured that Jesús had overslept. The State Police showed up at their door later that afternoon to communicate the tragic accident. It seemed no one suspected foul-play. José ate more than a normal person would have consumed under similar circumstances at lunch, spent the afternoon in worse than his usual bad temper, slept fitfully with nightmares and, in the midst of his regular attack of flatulence the next morning, died of a perforated ulcer.
Teresa had spent two days at her mother’s house after José’s death, and as she was changing her bedclothes to return to what was now her widow’s bed, she found that the bed sheets, as well as the back of her nightgown were spotted with rust-colored stains, and she cursed herself again for having missed her regular radio program only five days earlier.
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