Chapter Text
There was once a type of cancer so terrible that the sufferer could not bear to be touched, and the disease was thus called noli me tangere (Latin: “do not touch me”) – Rizval, The Social Cancer
I. May
When Andrés receives the diagnosis, within the bland, undecorated walls of the hospital waiting room office in Oviedo, he does not feel any strong emotion. On very few occasions has he felt any emotion, truly. Adults had remarked upon it when he was a child, that he seemed composed in the way to already be an adult. Andrés grew up aware he was lacking something, that it was not a compliment, that people expected things from him that he could not deliver. The first time he became aware of the difference was when, after coaxing a school friend of his during his first year of primary school to climb the brick school wall during a break and play hooky, they had both slipped and fallen onto the pavement below. As soon as they had hit the ground, his schoolmate had started sobbing, high wailing sobs that had brought the school attendant running, but Andrés had simply blinked in disbelief and slipped away as quickly as possible, leaving his friend to take the punishment, aware in a distant way, that his own knee and shin were throbbing. His mother had scolded him, afterwards, for running away. Did you not feel bad, she had asked, to leave your friend to face his fate alone? He had been aware of her look of disappointment when he had replied truthfully, but even that look hadn’t made him feel bad about it.
As he became a teenager and then an adult, it had caused problems in his relationships with women. They accused him of a lack of romance, as if the flowers and paintings he gifted them with were not the highest of all romance, of art. They wanted something more intangible on certain occasions, some feeling of longing he lacked. For him to miss them while he was away. But this, Andrés, had learned, was something of which he was incapable.
He could not even say that he had felt much when his mother finally succumbed to the same disease now staring him down, lying on a single bed in a small, dingy room in Madrid, her always trembling fingers that used to rest on his forehead when she sang him to sleep, now quiet and lifeless in his own hands. Nor when, from a faraway boarding school, on scholarship, he received the letter from Sergio announcing their shared father’s death, a disappointingly simple headline and article buried on the back pages of the newspaper. Nor when he picked up his younger brother from the group home he was staying at afterwards, and hugged him tightly, as he knows that an older brother ought, and rescued him from his bland future into their life of romantic adventure. Not even when he left prison for the first time after three years, after their fifth heist went off the rails, and hugged his brother for the second time in his life.
He wishes that on this similarly momentous occasion he might more suitably play the tragic hero. He wishes that the news might cause him to faint, with sadness or terror. That it might cause his heart to ache for the beauty of the world, like it did Keats. That it might rise up over him with the strength of a wave in the Gulf of La Spezia, crashing over Lord Byron, the same wave that would later doom Shelley. But nothing comes. Perhaps the best he can do, the best he can ever do, is irritation. This is, in itself, irritating. And irritated, he pinches the skin of his wrists with his fingers, fingers which already have started to betray him, have already started not to do the things he asks them to do. He stares at the red marks they make, and tries to imagine what real pain or grief might feel like.
But this lack of sentiment, this inability to feel things properly that curses Andrés will not impede his artistic performance. Especially now that he’s been blessed with such a special role to play. In an effort to cultivate his character better, once Sergio has come to pick him up in his small hatchback, has looked quietly at the doctor’s lab records when Andrés passes them over, and they have haltingly, practically, discussed ways of acquiring the necessary medications while Sergio’s hand slides anxiously over the stick shift, he suggests that they move to France.
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II. June
On their first evening in Paris, Andrés makes some discrete inquiries and finds his way to a seedy enough bar with a certain Bohemian flare that suits the announcement of his newly acquired fate. The kind of place frequented by students, petty drug dealers and wannabe poets rather than the more sophisticated white collar criminal set Andrés is used to dealing with. He has dressed appropriately, in a suit jacket and tie, but with the tie loosened, in a more rakish manner than he usually adopts and, against his natural inclinations, his shirt is un-ironed and still as wrinkled as when he pulled it out of his suitcase. He notices the piano in the corner of the basement level bar when he enters, but it is too early for anyone to be playing yet. Still, it is already crowded, and the din of conversation that hums within is entirely French, as Andrés has discovered is typical of this otherwise cosmopolitan city.
He has been sitting for an hour or so, nursing a glass of surprisingly decent wine, attempting to absorb the ambience, when the first recognizable words of the evening—spoken in Spanish but with a heavy Argentinian accent—cut across the din. It does not take long to follow the sound of them back to their owner, seated at one of the corner tables and seemingly engaged in a heated philosophical debate with a few other men.
Despite the impression given by his tone, he is not that imposing of a man, physically. Among the three of his companions, he is the shortest. His nose is slightly too large for his face, his belly slightly too soft for typical handsomeness, his clothing plain and slapdash. Yet something about his demeanor makes Andrés’ fingers itch with an urge to paint he has not felt in a while. The argument the man is engaged in seems to be on the subject of love, for Andrés overhears his words more clearly when his voice rises again—
“Love is the root of all suffering, eventually. It is better to take many lovers and care for none of them, than to let yourself become attached to someone who, being human, and therefore, selfish, will only hurt you in the end.”
The words hit a sore point within Andrés, and he finds himself rise and walking over to the table. He clears his throat, to gain their attention, and says in his own proper Castilian accent, “Is that not what defines Love, though, its very selflessness?”
The man’s eyes look up and narrow at his interruption, but his friends invite him to sit down, happy to have a scapegoat to divert the attention from them. They coax him with the bottle of Absinthe they are sharing, but Andrés declines, while he finds himself the subject of an intense lecture by their undeterred companion on the higher emotions. Andrés returns his verbal salvos in kind, calmly, perhaps a touch arrogantly, which only sets the man off further. Andrés realizes eventually that he is deliberately playing up the clinical tone of his words simply for the joy of observing the opposite, less concerned for truth than for his adversary’s reaction. It works for a while, until suddenly, the man, perhaps sensing that Andrés believes his own words less and less, and has been painted into a corner of arguing the absurd, laughs loudly instead. He extends a hand as if calling a truce, and introduces himself as Martín. Andrés is so charmed by the sudden shift in his demeanor, now being showered with just as much warmth as previously he had been ire, that he gives his own real name in response.
Their conversation becomes less combative after that, but no less intense. Martín’s companions eventually make their excuses as the evening wears on into night, and the piano begins a soft background melody. But Martín stays. It has been a while since Andrés has had someone with which to converse on these kinds of intellectual matters, and he is loath to end the night as well. When their conversation shifts to the subject of the arts, and to architecture specifically, he slips up a little again. Cannot resist the temptation to tell Martín about a particular building that fascinates him, El Banco de España, and some of the reputed oddities of its design. He even makes a comment about the impossibility of stealing the gold kept under it with what he hopes is just enough of a joking tone to allow for plausible deniability.
It turns out that Martín has studied engineering at university, and this observation prompts another lecture upon the intersection of the fields of engineering and architecture, of style and practicality. In the middle of this soliloquy, Andrés grabs his wrist, offhandedly, to stop a particularly effusive hand gesture that threatens to knock the contents of both of their drinks onto the floor, and Martín freezes and looks up at him. There is a vaguely fragile, vaguely longing look in his drunken, watery eyes that Andrés wants also to steal. This is the moment that The Plan begins.
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III. August
It is the hottest part of summer, the city is quiet except for the hordes of tourists that have taken over certain parts, especially near the Notre Dame, and their apartment lacks air conditioning. It turns out that Martín had no steady job or domicile in the city at the time of their meeting, was only crashing with friends, and so he has taken one of the two single beds in Andrés’s room of the split level, two bedroom apartment he and Sergio have been renting. It is a convenient arrangement because they can resume their scheming as soon as they wake up in the morning, and continue as long as they want into the night.
It is noon now. Sweat has already made Martín’s shirt damp, sticking in places to his back. His hand is steady on the chalkboard, but his tongue is not. The stream of innuendo it is firing at Sergio contrasts with the strict mathematical formulae that scrawl across it, their mysterious numbers and letters and symbols intractably spelling out the possibilities of an even more subversive act.
As much as the comments delight him, Andrés prefers the quiet obscenity the equations spell out even better, a soon to be felt shock for all the stuffed shirt bankers and their yes men whose sons so shunned him as a teenager at boarding school, who ever looked down on him for his broken home, though they lacked half the natural refinement that Andrés himself possessed.
Martín, he has come to realize, is the embodiment of every hidden desire Andrés ever had, and he does it easily and effortlessly, without a concern for consequence. Sergio is beginning to look like he is about to convulse after the latest of his comments about fellatio, however, and so Andrés goes over to rescue him, sliding an arm over Martín’s shoulder and dragging him back over to the plans he has been working on.
“You must leave Sergio be for a while, Martín cariňo. My little brother has never once met a man or woman he was attracted to, and I pulled him out of school too early, he never got a proper education in the arts of lovemaking. You will shock his innocence ears.”
Sergio only rolls his eyes at both of them. But Martín lets himself be distracted and lead docilly over to inspect the bank’s structural plans that Andrés has been trying so painstakingly to copy, so that the originals can be returned before their absence is noticed. Martín praises his work effusively, but fusses when he notices the ink stains on Andrés’ shirtsleeves, and promises to wash them out for him later. Andrés does not understand why Sergio has been so slow to warm up to Martín, when he is quite possibly the most charming and intelligent man that Andrés has ever met. And if Sergio cannot appreciate his genius because he dislikes his charms, or if he cannot put up with his occasional flirtatious comments, well that is his problem to deal with.
Martín never directs one flirtatious comment at Andrés himself, however. He hasn’t, since the first few weeks of their friendship. He knows Andrés has been seeing a girl he met recently, a waitress at a nearby café whose name is Céline. Sergio had disapproved, when he’d heard about her, thinking it could jeopardize the plan, but Martín had been wonderfully supportive of his choice.
“The sweetest thing!” He had said. “We must all have a picnic together sometime. Sergio, you can be my date.”
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IV. November
After five months of planning, Sergio decides that they are ready to bring in the rest of the team. Andrés leaves the recruitment up to him. The HR side of their job has never interested him. If he could, he would someday devise a plan that the two—or three—of them could carry out alone. That would be truly the most perfect plan, Andrés thinks, perfect by measure of its efficiency of method rather than by measure of its reward. They will steal the gold this time, he thinks, and then after that, there will be no need for money. Their next job will be done for the sake of beauty alone.
But their current plan is too ambitious for that, and so Sergio brings in four others in the end, a father and son, and two women. They are introduced under pseudonyms only, as a precaution, in the basement studio apartment Sergio has rented on the other end of the city to serve as their meeting place: Tokio, Nairobi, Denver, and Moscow. Andrés has chosen Berlin as his own name, and Martín, Palermo. Andrés wonders if the choice by Martín is a deliberate comment about their respective temperaments.
When Palermo first meets Nairobi, they immediately hit it off, being of similar natures, and Andrés finds himself suddenly demoted to the position of second best friend, no longer with a monopoly upon his time. Martín is finished with the hydraulic calculations he had been making in order to enable them to reach the gold in the underground chamber by now, and his time is in less demand. Instead of the nights they used to spend together over the plans, he spends them out with Nairobi and the others at the nearby clubs instead. Comes back to their shared bedroom drunk, disheveled, and with strange marks on his neck that Andrés tries not to dwell on. He tries to ignore as well thinking about the speech that Martín had been giving on the virtues of sleeping around when they first met.
Martín, who is usually so attentive to his moodiness, seems oblivious to Andrés’ discontent about the matter, however. He even invites him along on occasion as if nothing is the matter. Just earlier that evening, in fact, Andrés had received a text message inviting him to join them at a bar tonight. But it is a group outing, and his attention will be half diverted rather than on Andrés alone, and so Andrés makes an excuse.
He calls Céline, who he has been ignoring of late, and invites her out to dinner instead. The reservation he makes is at a more upscale restaurant than he has frequented since arriving. He even irons his shirt and puts on one of his velvet jackets which until now has been hanging unworn in his closet. The jacket is one of his favorites, but when he shrugs it on, he finds it suddenly constricting, and the collar too tight and scratchy around his neck. Perhaps he has been putting on weight with all of his confinement within the apartment, he thinks. The jacket has become so deeply irritating by the time he makes it to the venue, that not even Céline’s chatter or the impressive plate of appetizers is enough to keep his mind from distraction. By the time they have reached the main course, she senses this, and interrupts the most recent story she has been telling to complain.
“I haven’t seen you in weeks and you don’t even want to hear about what I did with my friends while you were away?” she asks, pouting.
Andrés is offended. “I was hoping you would be more interested in me,” he returns in kind.
“Just some indication that you cared about my life would be nice,” she says, and frowns.
He gestures to the restaurant and the table before them, “Is all this not enough for you, dear?”
It is not. A few delicate tears have started to slip down her cheeks. Andrés recognizes the affectation, the artifice in them and is disgusted. She excuses herself to go to the bathroom, and when she returns, her cheeks are blotchy and red, her mascara smeared, her face no longer holding the beauty that had caught his attention when they had met. Make up is another trick of women, he thinks, they use it to deceive you with a false patina of beauty, only to reveal themselves as pale and empty and slightly grotesque underneath.
He may say words to a similar effect, when he breaks off their relationship before they can make it to dessert. She leaves in a huff, shouting that he is the worst man she has ever dated. The waiters look on with scandalized and disdainful faces, and hurry him out as well after they have made sure he has covered the check. The scene she makes further convinces Andrés that he has made the right decision. He pinches his wrists through the velvet of his jacket once he is unceremoniously ejected onto the sidewalk, but it is too thick to feel anything through.
What is the sadder fate for him, he wonders, to be doomed or to be doomed to a subpar adaptation, to a subpar supporting cast? The whole incident disturbs him enough that rather than call a taxi, he walks all the way back across the city in the rain, without an umbrella, and into the bar whose address Martín had sent him earlier.
When he enters, the place is humming with music and conversation. He removes his sodden coat and suit jacket, spreading them across a nearby chair to dry. Across the room, Martín is dancing with Nairobi and Tokio. He turns at the fluttering movement Andrés’ coat makes, and looks across briefly over his shoulder. When he recognizes who it is, he sends a small, private wink. A little spark of something inside Andrés lights, but he stays, seated sulkily in the corner, watching the dance floor and sipping a drink.
He watches as Tokio and Nairobi beg the bartender for more shots, their lips close but not quite touching as they bite into the lemon between them, their hands wrapped tightly around each other’s shoulders, in an almost maternal gesture that reminds him of his mother’s hands. He watches the fierce light in Martín’s eyes as he lectures them about music, coaxes the band in the corner to play one more song, dragging them both to dance once again to the rapid beat, until the owner finally shews them out at closing time.
Nairobi and Tokio are staying in an apartment in the other direction and make their goodbyes, tripping over each other as they stagger down the narrow cobblestone street. Despite how much he must have also been drinking, Martín is still light on his feet. They walk companionably home. Andrés’ jacket has dried, and the rain has stopped and the streetlights instead glitter against the stones of the street and buildings. The twinkling of them reminding Andrés that it is only a few weeks until Christmas.
When they are back at the apartment, Martín loosens his own scarf and the buttons on his coat, then reaches to help Andrew with his own, his touch along his shoulders warm.
“You didn’t dance tonight,” he remarks.
“Mmm.”
Martín puts both of their coats in the closet, turns to the little turntable he has brought that sits on the small table against the wall and lifts the needle, pushes a button. A soft, slow, syrupy rhythm fills the sitting room. Martín’s hand is back on his shoulder.
“Dance with me.”
Andrés smiles, squarely, nervously. “I’m not sure if I’m in the right mood.”
“Cobarde,” Martín says, and grabs his hand in his, the other hand on his shoulder tightening and giving him a slight push, forcing Andrés to take a step back. The spark grows. His hand tightens around Martín’s and soon they are stepping around the tiny room, Martín in the lead.
Mercifully, he doesn’t try to make conversation, just hums softly along with the music. Andrés finds it is quite relaxing not to have to make all the plans or arrangements for once, not to have to think about his next move, to just let himself be lead where someone else wants to go. Women indeed have it very easy, he thinks. Martín has a barely concealed smile on his face that he suspects is for him, but it doesn’t bother him. It bothers him even less when he is tugged closer than Andrés might allow were they in a public place. When the song ends, Martín’s tucks his head in against his shoulder, and they remain rocking slowly against each together in the dark.
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V. Christmas
Everything is going very smoothly again after that, perhaps even more smoothly than before. Martín no longer goes out clubbing with Nairobi and Tokio, but spends his evenings in their bedroom chatting and sharing a bottle of wine, while Andrés paints in the corner. When Andrés asks him why he doesn’t join the others anymore, he says only that he is getting too old for that. That he is going to take up a more refined, more mature lifestyle now, and that it is about time. And how much easier it will be when they have the money from this heist.
Andrés agrees, pleased with the thought. “Only the best wines for you then, my friend, I’ll take you to the most elite clubs in Spain afterwards. We’ll buy exquisitely tailored suits before we go. Everyone will want to dance with you.”
Sergio, or rather, The Professor, as Andrés has learned to call his brother in public now, with very little need for acting, gives them Christmas Eve and Christmas Day off from the usual training sessions they’ve been holding in the studio. Tokio thanks him when she hears the news, and then pats him on the head, jetting before Sergio can regains his speech to complain, taking Nairobi and Denver with her and mumbling something about ice skates. Moscow says he is too old for that, but that he might use the time to take a walk around the city and to get himself some fresh air, that he will see them in a few days.
When the rest have departed, and they are back in their two-bedroom apartment, Sergio takes him aside and tells Andrés that the real reason for the holiday is that he has a lead for a teenager with some computer skills he wants to follow up on. He will take his car and be back the day after Christmas. As Andrés watches him load his suitcase into the hatchback, Sergio warns him not to get in any trouble while he is away.
“Do you think Martín and I are like the rest of your little students, Professor?” Andrés scolds. Sergio does not dignify that with a reply, sliding into the driver’s seat and heading off without a backwards glance.
He and Martín end up with the apartment to themselves. Andrés spends the morning before Christmas baking in the kitchen downstairs, while Martín reads some engineering magazines he’s recently acquired in the sitting room. He has found a record of some old chorale music, sung by Benedictine monks, and it is playing softly over his record player.
It all feels very serene and domestic in a way that Andrés is not accustomed to until it doesn’t.
Andrés had often imagined what an argument with Martín would be like. In his head, he’d imagined it would involve a great deal of both of them shouting, perhaps Martín throwing objects at him along with his extensive vocabulary of curse words. He’d assumed also that it would all be over quickly, and that they would be back to laughing together about it after a short time. In actuality, it happens exactly the opposite as he’d envisioned.
It starts out innocuous enough. So much so that Andrés doesn’t even realize it is happening until it is, and wonders afterwards if it really did happen. He is headed to the door on Christmas Eve, thinking to make a run to the store down the street if it is still open to buy some fruit for them for breakfast, when Martín suddenly looks up from his reading and asks--
“Is Céline spending the holidays away with her family? I haven’t heard you mention her in a while.”
“We broke up last month,” Andrés says, with a dismissive wave of a hand.
Martín stills and his face softens. “You broke up with Céline? You didn’t say,” he speaks carefully.
“I didn’t think it was relevant.” Andrés says, and he reaches into the closet for his hat.
It is the wrong answer. When Andrés turns back around, Martín’s face is no longer soft.
“Is there any other irrelevant information you forgot tell me,” he asks, his voice going deceptively low and pleasant. “Like maybe the fact that your brother is off recruiting a computer analyst because he doesn’t trust my hand calculations and wants someone else to rerun them?”
“What?!”—Andrés huffs in the middle of settling the hat on his head, and then--when Martín continues to gaze back at him unperturbed--“For God’s sake, Martín, that isn’t the reason he’s doing it. And must we discuss this now? It isn’t that big of a deal.”
“If it isn’t that big of a deal, I don’t know why you two had to hide it from me. I’d appreciate you humoring me and explaining it to me now, though.”
“Martín,” Andrés says, trying to soften his voice, aiming to be conciliatory. “You know how you get sometimes when you run your mouth off. Sergio thought it was best to limit everyone’s knowledge about new recruits in case they don’t work out or tip us off to the police. And if anyone ever gets arrested, the less we know the better. We only wanted to protect you.”
“No, I get it very clearly. I’m to be lumped in with the rest of the students, now that I’m no longer needed. Maybe I should just take the plans with me, if I’m so extraneous. You can hire the other guy and toss me completely.”
“Martín, don’t be ridiculous.”
“Am I?”
“Come now, is this really what you are so upset about?” Andrés wheedles. “You were quite happy, as was I, to leave the recruiting to him before. Is this actually about that, or is it about the fact that I didn’t tell you about Céline earlier. What, were you expecting that I would leave her and then run straight into your arms afterwards?”
He manages an incredulous laugh, at that final suggestion. Andrés means it to highlight the absurdity of their argument, but instead it seems to suck all the air out of the room. Martín does not deny it, which Andrés resents. And his resentment drives his tongue further, attempting to fill the uncomfortable space that Martín is refusing to fill with a witty or scathing reply of his own.
“Listen, Martín. I think maybe you like me too much, and it’s causing you to get paranoid. Perhaps it’s better if you take a break from”—he gestures around the apartment—“all this. As you said, we have your calculations, your presence isn’t needed. Go spend some time with Nairobi or Tokio. Find someone else to take your mind off it. And then when you come back, we can be like we were before.”
He is reminded of what he had said in their first conversation about Love, and adds, more tentatively--
“I understand that I am handsome, and that someone--like you--might find me distracting. I’ll understand even if you want to get out of the Plan entirely.”
“You asshole,” Martín finally says, but he sounds defeated rather than angry. “You are your own worst enemy. I was quite happy to aid and abet you when your enemies were just other people. But I won’t help you with this.”
Andrés wonders what he means by that. He is fascinated by the tears streaming from Martín’s eyes as he says it, tears that he doesn’t bother to hide. He feels a strange, unprompted desire to grasp him by the back of his head, and to put his tongue against them, to taste their saltiness and confirm they are not a crocodile’s. And then to drag his tongue further down across the rougher surface of his cheek, where he has not shaved for two days. That final thought startles him.
“I’m going out to the store,” he says, and he grips the doorknob instead, twists it, and leaves the apartment.
When Andrés returns, it seems that Martín has indeed taken his suggestion and left. All of his scant belongings, including the record player, are now missing from the bedroom and the apartment, and his jacket and scarf no longer hang in the closet. The only things of his left are his calculations and plans, still lying open on the desk. There is no other note.