By CARLOTA GURT
Translated by ADRIAN NATHAN WEST
The three of you get into the car. The girls buckle their seatbelts. You turn the key. The spark plug ignites the fuel in the combustion chamber. You depart. It is only thanks to fire that you’re moving.
“Mom, how long is it gonna take?”
On June 6, 1981, the department store El Águila, located on the Plaça de la Universitat, burned to the ground. The fire was talked about all over. The mythical building, crowned by a statue of the homely bird that gave it its name, collapsed, imperial fowl and all.
That same day, at midday, just a few minutes after the fire started, exactly ninety meters in a straight line from the origins of the fire, you were born in the Santa Madrona Clinic. Your mother used to always tell you the stench of soot reached all the way to the delivery room. She thought it was her pussy, which was on fire from the pain: you were her first child, and she was doped up on Pentothal and delirious.
You had spent nine months in her belly, unlike most fires, which are gestated in seconds. There are others, of course, that take days, years, decades to declare themselves. More than four, in some cases, like yours.
“Did you grab the bag with the fireworks?” your eldest daughter asks you.
And you say yes, but you aren’t sure.
See, the trace of gunpowder begins the same day as your birth, even if you never smelled it till now.
For example: Age twenty. Nine lines of blow. Two vodkas with Red Bull. A deserted highway. Twenty minutes to reach the guts of your city, the capital. You drop off two friends in the suburbs. In the rearview, all you see is the proletarian outlines of the towers, identical, overstuffed with ramshackle apartments and a multitude of eyes and hands and elbows dripping sweat as they push life along. Whereas you, life’s still pushing you along. Sometimes you feel guilty over your privileges.
It’s two-thirty in the morning on a day midweek, maybe a Tuesday at the end of June: exams are over, and the match of summer has been lit but won’t quite catch. Tuesdays are graceless days; they require the garland of madness to doll them up and make them somewhat memorable. You left your two friends there kissing. Each other. They must be fucking now, you think. You won’t fuck today, same as usual, but you’ll use handicraft to take the edge off the white powder. You fuck infrequently and badly; it’s hard to fuck well when you don’t love the other person. And it will still be hard long after you’ve stopped loving them: the unpredictable highwire act of orgasm, where you never know if they’ll slip off due to the mediocrity of routine or whether they’ll pull off a bit of glorious acrobatics in the end.
The lanes of the highway––four––reach their vanishing point too soon. The road has the shape of a funnel. It’s the powder that sharpens your gaze. Or maybe the world’s turned to a chute emptying into the wood chipper of time. You’re driving in one of the middle lanes, gripping the wheel with both hands. No, you’re not driving—you’re flying. One day, the daughters you don’t yet have will talk to you about flying cars, not knowing that you used to drive one. Today you’ll take a caravan, but on that night twenty years before, there are no cars and you need to feel your wings. At a hundred miles an hour, they unfurl. You sing till your throat’s raw.
They say nightingales sing at night. And they say they can’t survive in captivity. You only sing to keep from hearing yourself.
Then, some clichés: the black highway––a tongue of cold lava––surrounded by the perennial twilight of the city and a myriad of lights, stars, streetlamps, windows of homes, shiny pupils of the few people looking outward that night, scintillating desires. Your eyes are shining, too—we don’t know if from agitation or grief. Or from the white venom. In your head, you hear a sound that cradles you. It sounds far, far away. Too far, as though you were inside a bubble. The bubble of the car’s body. The bubble of the ego. The bubble of stupefacients. The stupefaction of being twenty. You roll down both windows and hang out an arm. You’ve always liked stroking the docile spine of the air.
The highway reaches Nus de la Trinitat, the knot of the trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The knot of testosterone. The trinity of dicks. The first hatchway to Barcelona. The epiglottis where everyone gets stuck and nobody is ever swallowed. Choked on at rush hour, but never swallowed. You live in a city that struggles gravely with deglutition.
Then you see it, high on the curve of the bridge, under the pylons, on the roadside, with the unreal air of visions. In flames.
Night stops before the fire, turns darker, to make brighter the burning vehicle enveloped in a cloud from hell. The flames form volutes two or three meters high. The fire is insatiable.
You take your foot off the gas and everything slows down: reality, you, the fire. You would stop. But. What if it explodes? What if there’s someone in there smoldering to death, someone who’s screaming, someone you won’t be able to help, and their charred face will stalk you until you die? You drive past at five miles per hour, turning your head, open-mouthed. Fragments of the vehicle’s body emerge amid the flames. You imagine it red: a body the color of blood. A breath of burnt rubber enters through the window.
“Mama, it smells,” the littler one says.
“It’s the factories, the chemicals they use.”
“They pollute the rivers, too,” the older one says.
“That’s right: they pollute the rivers.”
“They kill the fish.”
“And the birds,” you add.
That memory from twenty years ago is literally burnt into you. Once home, you crawled into bed and stayed there late into the next day.
Even today, after so many years, you remember it every time you come to the bridge; today, too, on Saint John’s Day, with your girls in the back seat, and the fireworks not in the trunk where they’re meant to be––though you don’t know this yet––because you left them at home. The barbecue lighter, which you bought so you wouldn’t burn your fingers, is jiggling in the passenger’s seat. What’s it want from you?
You haven’t even made it out of town, and the older one’s already complaining: how much longer and so on. The little one is counting the blue cars, only the blue ones, the color of salvation. Neither of them mentions their father, though this will be the first holiday you’ll celebrate without him. The moron.
You don’t know anything about firecrackers; you don’t even like them. Today you’ll have to fake laughter and pyrotechnic prowess, but, same as every year, you’ve got a tube of panthenol ointment in case anyone gets burned. You’ve yet to crack the seal on it.
“Did you buy firecrackers, Mama?”
“Yes.”
“Bottle rockets?”
“Yes.”
“Cherry bombs?”
“Yesssss.”
“How many packs?”
“Three.”
“Just three? Dad always….” You tune her out.
Before the fire on the bridge, there was that other one you dreamt of as a girl. But if it was only a dream, maybe it doesn’t count. Why shouldn’t dreams count, though, since we live them, too? What about nightingales––do they dream?
You’re on a school camping trip. You’re sleeping with Àgata. You’re not even ten yet, but it’s occurred to her to stick her tongue in your mouth. You couldn’t wriggle away, and now there you are in bed with her tongue inside you. It tastes weird, like yesterday’s vegetables: a viscous strip of boiled zucchini. Suddenly, the giggles of the enemy reach you from outside. You know it’s the enemy not because of how it sounds, but because you’re dreaming, and in dreams you can know anything you want. You can even know everything. Àgata leads you out of the room. You walk on tiptoes between your classmates’ beds; they’re sleeping instead of sticking their tongues where they don’t belong. You have the sense that all of them are dead. Your teacher, too. You and Àgata are the only survivors. You, Àgata, and the enemy.
The wooden door of the country house is ajar. You peek through the crack at the bright lights of outside, Àgata standing, you on your knees. In the middle of a sandy esplanade in front of the house is the bus that brought you there this morning. It’s white all over, with no stripes and no logo. An airplane without wings, lit up by a spiderweb of light formed by the glow of the lanterns that surround it and penetrate it. The enemy is invisible in the darkness. But you hear voices. Spray the tires, they say. Where’s the gas tank? a girl asks. A gust of wind bears the odor of gas, and you cover your nose.
At that moment, you can hear someone’s hurried footfalls on the inside steps, but the two of you remain standing at the cracked door, observing more intensely, as if in that way you could speed up time and arrive at the part that interests you: the fire, the explosion. How pretty it will be. And how scary. Whoever it was is already in the hallway, and the enemy has just lit a single match the size of a tiny torch. He touches it to the shimmering rivulet on the ground. And, a fraction of a second before everything bursts into flames, Miss What’s-Her-Name shouts and pushes you away from the door.
The jarring awakens you. No flame has reached your retina. But you know the bus is already burnt to a crisp.
“Mama.”
“What?”
“…”
“What?”
The little one’s fallen asleep. You’re backed up at the tollbooth, one of a pile of cars full of fireworks and gas under the torrid sun: a long, straight line of would-be bombs. Seen from above, they could form a symbol. A lifted middle finger. Fuck you, traffic jam. Fuck you, tollbooth.
At this moment, the older one, the supposedly older one, shoots to kill:
“Why didn’t you want Dad to come?”
The line is still, but you need it to move to leave that question behind, crushed flat under the wheels, to let you distract yourself by shifting gears, or to say, I need my card, Martina—pass me my purse. But no. The line. Immobile. You’d say the whole entire world had stopped, and now everyone’s observing you: the passengers in the other cars; the toll collector, who’s shielding his eyes with his hands and staring straight at you; the traffic helicopter hovering above and framing you in its lens; the seagull hunting for carrion too many miles inland from the sea. All of them are eyes that are glaring at you.
“We’ll talk about it later. It’s not a good time, here in the middle of the road, with all this noise.”
Luckily, a wave of indignant honking horns comes to your rescue.
“But, Mama…”
“Can’t you see your sister’s sleeping?”
“He could spend the holiday with us, couldn’t he?”
“No.”
“Mom, he’s gonna be all by himself.”
“No, okay, not now. The three of us can talk about it tomorrow.”
“It’s not fair.”
“…”
“Plus, he says he misses us.”
“Enough!” you shout, furious.
You don’t want to yell at her. Getting yelled at is what a child needs least when her parents divorce. But what are you supposed to say? What can you say? How can you explain it to her? What’s better: you looking like a hysteric or her knowing what her father’s really like? You’re starting to fear the day she’s a teenager and she needs to hate you.
Teenager. Another fire: in the summer village when you were thirteen. It rained ash the morning you buried your grandfather (beret, long underwear, the schnoz like a potato). It was that same August when your grandmother started losing her mind and her dignity, the same summer when a mother coldcocked on antidepressants cried because you, prey to an unhinged adolescence, let a red-hot half-wit with tyrannical hankerings burn out a piece of your soul. You remember how scared the neighbors were, you remember the stink of your cauterizing youth. Too many fires: how were you supposed to remember them all?
Now you take your card out and pay the toll. One toll after another. Financial. Professional. Familial. Sexual. Existential. Whatever. Fuck you, life. The arm rises, you drive through the little orange hut, and behind the guardrail stands the tower of an obsolete power line to receive you. A giant, dozens of meters tall, waiting with outstretched arms for the thousands of volts that would bring it to life, but that will never arrive. Without cables, it is a useless monster waiting for electricity to give it life. One day some workers will come take it down, and that’ll be it.
The last one must have been a few months ago. When you remember it now, it seems like a prophecy. You like to overinterpret the world. It consoles you. Imagining that everything has been written, that not even your own life is in your hands. That relieves you. Exonerates you. Absolves you. Sometimes you repeat to yourself that none of this is happening, that it isn’t real. What are you doing alone with your children? You miss being part of a family, having another adult next to you to ride out the dull moments, to bear the burden of educating, to share journeys and the future yet to be discovered. What you don’t know yet is that it will take you months, maybe years, to dismantle your life and find a new high-tension cable. So much effort, then one day they turn off your lights, and you better get it together and learn to feel your way around.
The last one, though: the prophecy. You were going home––where you were coming from, you no longer remember––and you had to turn off to go to a gas station. You, always in a rush. You took a back route through the woods, a narrow road with no shoulders. The fuel light was blinking.
You filled the tank. Paid. Left.
And when you were already pulling out, you found it, some fifty meters behind the station. An Audi, torched. The hubs of the wheels without tires like four stumps. The open hood like a screaming mouth. The windows gone. The sockets of the headlights empty. A blind machine, which the rust had begun to devour.
That day you did stop. I’ll write a story about it, you thought. You took pictures. You’re looking at them now as you write. You have them pinned to a corkboard by your desk. As if they were the evidence of a crime you were investigating, and it frightens you to wind up discovering the pyromaniac is you. The wheel was just a black metal hoop. You observed it from all angles, hypnotized, deaf from all the screams exhaled by the burnt leather: who, when, how, why. Audi, which means listen.
Why. Why. Why.
If one day you pass by there again, you’ll ask the girl at the gas station. That afternoon, you didn’t dare: it felt like too much, and you had no way of knowing at the time it was a prophecy. If that’s what it was.
You could go back there now—it would only take you twenty minutes. But no. The girls. The holiday. The friends waiting for you. And besides, who gives a fuck about the story of an unknown car. Make the story up yourself. It’ll turn out you’re just a copycat.
You could say it was a tank and not an Audi.
You could explain how you’re crazy about tanks.
You could confess that you burned it yourself to avoid the temptation to stay there living in it.
You could even write a story about life inside an armored vehicle. It could be called “My Tanks,” and everything would be repellently obvious and repellently true.
The truth, though, is that it was an Audi that belonged to a family. The father of the family was by himself, he stopped for gas at midnight, and while he was filling up, utterly innocently, as is the way with imbeciles, he took a few hits from a half-finished joint. The cherry fell to the ground, just where there was a puddle of gas, left behind by thousands of men just like him, and—wonder of wonders—it caught fire. He ran as the fire spread. And he stood there, alone, waiting on someone to rescue him. He didn’t even have his phone; he’d left it in the passenger’s seat. His hands clutched the keys, which no longer opened any car and would no longer take him anywhere again. But when he tells the story, he changes it. The truth makes him feel ridiculous. Often he says it was drunken radicals, and that makes him look like a hero.
“What’s that smoke?” your daughter asks.
“The village people—they’re burning the leftover leaves and stalks from the harvest.”
You see the fear on her face.
“It’s fine. It’s a controlled burn.”
Controlled burn, you think: all those lies.
Soon, you reach your friends’ house. You let the little one sleep a little longer. It’ll be a long night, and this way she’ll get through it better. The older one frowns. She asks for your phone to call her father and walks away.
“How are they taking it?” your friend asks.
“What am I supposed to say?…”
“Sure…”
“You know, if it hadn’t happened like that, I’d never have known a thing. I’d still be living with him and the girls. Laughing and playing all day, and now we’d be going on vacation to Norway, et cetera. It’s horrifying. All the things he thinks about me, all that he’s saying.”
She doesn’t respond. I mean, how could she respond?
“He won’t even look me in the face. In front of the girls.”
“…”
“And if I die right now, they’ll go live with him and his twisted version of things. Until they learn to hate me.”
“…”
“There are days when I want to kill myself. Kill all three of us so that will never happen.”
“He’s resentf––“
“Bullshit!”
This friend quiets down. She knows you’re right. Not even resentment justifies it.
You get your phone back and check your email. You need someone to read it, so that if you die, there will still be another person to tell the story. A modern horror story. One of so many.
“Here, read this.”
And you force your friend to make her way into the viscera of your relationship until even her hair smells like shit.
“Phh… And he definitely…?”
Here, you detail the collapse. Long story short: Love is not fireproof.
“Sometimes, I wish he’d disappear.”
“Come on. I’ll help you unload everything.”
You open the trunk, and the fireworks aren’t there. You’d swear… but no. The older one’s going to kill you. She’ll think you did it on purpose because you don’t like them. She’ll hate you, not him, for this holiday without fireworks and without a father. For this farce of a celebration. Again, the tears: liquid gunpowder from the fire that’s blazing inside you. Impotence is flammable.
When you tell the older one, it will be all weeping and promises of a substitute holiday a few days later, but in the end, you’ll fold and wind up going into town. You’ll wait in line an hour so the girls will have their cherry bombs and firecrackers, so they won’t feel the sharp edges of an absent father. Sparks and joy in exchange for stolen happiness. Your friends will help you put on the show: firecrackers, cake, cava. But they’ll avoid the minefield: maybe it’s better to pretend it doesn’t exist. Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.
Then the gin-and-tonics will come, with the girls running wild outside, and someone will ask you, and you’ll repeat the litany of disbelief and aggression, manipulation and grief. You’re tired of regurgitating it, but there’s just no way to digest it. You’re going to wind up with an ulcer.
“Who could imagine that from him, right? Even our friends don’t believe me. Of course, it’s his word against mine.…”
None of them contradicts you. Do they really not believe you?
“I don’t know who the girls will live with. It tor—”
Shrieks interrupt you.
“Moooomm, come quick!” your little one yells.
“A scorpion!” your friend’s son says.
That word opens a secret chamber in your head. Open sesame. And you sink in to find the treasure you need.
“A scorpion!” you shouted.
You were with your brother. You were eight; he was twelve. You were at your grandmother’s house, in the country. You’d found a scorpion in the yard. Your brother went running for alcohol and told you to wait and keep an eye on it. You were scared it would take off running toward you and kill you. You didn’t even dare blink, in case the scorpion might disappear for the second when you closed your eyes. But it didn’t move. Your brother was soon back with what he needed. He poured the alcohol in a circle around the scorpion and lit it with a match.
“You’re going to kill it!” you shouted.
And he told you: “Yeah, that’s the idea, genius. Or do you want it to come kill you in your sleep?”
“No, but…”
“A scorpion!” another child repeats.
And you, turning to the hosts: “Do you have alcohol?”
No one dares oppose you; things are going so bad for you, and now, all of a sudden, you seem to have pepped up, and no one wants to ruin the moment.
“‘No, but…’ what?” your brother asked you.
And already you have the alcohol and matches in your hand. You hem it in, you light; the trail of gunpowder extending from El Águila all the way to the scorpion has been burning for decades. It consoles you to imagine everything was already written. It relieves you. It exonerates you. It absolves you. And besides, if there’s a flame, that means there’s still oxygen.
“You’re going to kill it!” your older daughter says.
“Yeah, that’s the idea. Or do you want it to come kill you in your sleep?” you respond.
“It’s not even in the house,” protests your daughter, protested you.
“Not until it is.”
Carlota Gurt is a professional translator with over ten years of experience. She made her fiction debut in 2019, when she won the Mercè Rodoreda Award for her short story collection We Will Ride All Night. She also published a novel, Alone, and a second short story collection, Biography of Fire.
Adrian Nathan West is an essayist, the author of the novel My Father’s Diet, and a translator of dozens of books from Spanish, German, and Catalan.
