The second year of their separation was harder for Joachim than the first, because his brother’s promises to come to Paris no longer sounded convincing, and Joachim was beginning to fear Javier would never come. Joachim wanted to visit Javier during the summer, to convince him in person, but Francois got Joachim a summer job, working for one of his friends at an auction house, carrying artwork on and off the stage during the auctions. It was hard work, and only manual labor, but it paid well, and Joachim didn’t want to let his stepfather down and back out of the job. Javier said he was gone all the time anyway, driving the truck, so he would have seen little of him. He did all he could to discourage Joachim from coming, and the chasm between them seemed wider than ever. Joachim felt it like a loss, and feared they would be separated forever. He mourned their boyhood closeness, which had been the happiest days of his life, having his identical twin always near him, and now it was all over.
Joachim started his second year at the Sorbonne, studying literature and art history, at his mother’s suggestion. They hadn’t heard from Javier for two months by then. The home number they had for him had been disconnected, and the main office of the freight company said simply that he was “probably on the road” and they would give him a message. Two months later, his family still hadn’t heard from him. To put Liese’s mind at rest, Francois hired a detective firm with an office in Argentina to track him down. They heard back from the agency a few weeks later. He confirmed that Javier was still working for the same freight company, driving between Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay, and Brazil, as he had said, but he was based now in Colombia and living in Bogotá. Discreet inquiries with the friend he had lived with revealed that they had had a falling-out and lost touch. The friend said that Javier had been too hard to live with and had caused problems with his parents. The parents had told their contact in Buenos Aires that Javier was disrespectful, followed no rules, and had fallen in with what seemed to them like bad company. He accepted no supervision or control whatsoever. Further inquiries supported the theory that he was hanging out with a bad group, and it was possible that drugs were involved, but there was no proof of it. At no time had the detective in Buenos Aires been able to lay eyes on Javier or connect with him. He had successfully slipped through his family’s fingers. Liese wanted to go to Bogotá to try and find him herself, and Joachim volunteered to go with her, but the detective thought they would not be any more successful. Javier was on the road or in Colombia most of the time now. None of his old school friends had heard from him. He was leading a very different adult life from his peers or past connections. The detective’s suspicion was that he might be transporting drugs, had fallen in with disreputable people, and would hardly welcome a visit from his mother and brother if that was the case.
The mood in the house was heavy after that. By Christmas, they hadn’t heard from him for six months. He called Joachim late one night. He sounded high or drunk, and tried to pick an argument with him. There was no longer any question of him promising to come to Paris. He accused Joachim of still being a child, tied to their mother’s apron strings, and bragged that he was a man now. He said he was earning a decent wage, better than what he could earn in Paris, but he was vague when Joachim asked him what he was transporting. All he was willing to say was that he was well paid for it and sounded like he was bragging.
Joachim was haunted by their conversation and reported it to his mother. Francois engaged the detective service again. They were able to find out very little, except that Javier was alive, spending more time in Colombia, and only occasionally in Buenos Aires. The detective still suspected that he might be working for a drug dealer. Their contact with Javier was sporadic from then on. He would disappear for months, surface, and then vanish again. He called home very rarely.
Once on Christmas, he called his mother and started a heated argument with her when she complained about how elusive he was. It ruined the holiday for all of them. He called her on her birthday, and she cried for weeks afterward. Everything in her life was going well, except for the son she could no longer see or touch. He was lost to them, which was how Javier wanted it. He had ranted about politics to Joachim during one of their phone calls. He sounded revolutionary in his ideas and hostile about the middle and upper classes and the Establishment and referred to Francois and his mother as “bourgeois.” He was a changed person, and no longer the boy Joachim had come into the world with and grown up with and had loved so fiercely. And eventually, Javier stopped calling entirely and they had no way to reach him. It was agony for Joachim and his mother, a wound that never healed, always hoping to hear from him.
When Joachim’s flight landed in Buenos Aires during the Argentine summer, it had been twenty-five years since he had seen his twin brother, and more than twenty years since he had spoken to him. Their mother no longer had any contact with him either. Francois had hired the detective a few more times, but they finally all agreed that it was a waste of money. Javier had disappeared into another world, another life, and until he wanted contact with them, it was unlikely that they would find him. He had slipped into a dark underworld where it was easy to hide and disappear. Liese wasn’t even sure that she would know if he died, since no one he knew would know how to find her. They checked prison records, but he hadn’t been in prison so far, and with the kind of people he worked for, if they wanted to get rid of him, or he betrayed them, or let them down, they would have him killed, and his family in Paris wouldn’t know that either. Joachim had lived with Javier’s silence for almost twenty-three years, and his mother for just as long. It was a bond between Joachim and his mother, the agonizing loss they both lived with, of brother and son.
For a long time, it felt like a death to Joachim, to have lost his identical twin, like losing a part of himself. He could no longer contact his brother, hear his voice, or see him. He had no idea where he was, or if he was alive on any particular day. And given the rough people he was involved with, it was never a certainty that he was still alive, or for how long that would last. It disrupted Joachim’s life in countless ways. He couldn’t concentrate on his studies at the Sorbonne, which seemed meaningless to him. He didn’t care about art history or literature and had only taken those classes to please his mother. He didn’t know what he wanted to do for a career. He often wondered if his brother was right, and he was being a “baby,” still close to their mother. And finally, with failing grades, he dropped out of the Sorbonne, feeling lost and aimless, and unsure which way to turn.
Francois got him minor temporary jobs, as an art handler at the Louvre, then working in one of the restaurants there. Joachim went back to the auction house for a while but was nothing more than a furniture mover. He took a job running the Ferris wheel at a carnival one summer. Liese told Francois that was the bottom of the barrel. Joachim was intelligent, and capable of much more than that, but he seemed lost without Javier. But they all had to live with it. It was Javier who had distanced himself from them, severed all connection, and wanted it that way.
Joachim was nineteen the last time he heard from his twin, and spent five years after that doing odd jobs, going nowhere. He rented a tiny studio apartment in a dilapidated area of Paris. The building smelled bad, and the apartment was barely bigger than his bed, with a small battered fridge and a hot plate and sink, a toilet, and tiny shower. Liese hated to see him live that way, but he didn’t want to take advantage of his stepfather. He felt that he should be independent by then, and living on his own, although Francois would have been happy to house him. He enjoyed having him around, and it made his mother happy.