(2008) Mister Roberts (16 page)

In Bar Noche Azul the two
TVs and the stereo were turned up even higher than usual to try and drown out
the screaming of the pigs, the curses of the men and the rushing and sizzling
sounds of the blow torches that were used to singe the hairs off the animals’
skin. The British could do nothing to stop the smell of burning flesh and
scorched hair from seeping through the tightly closed doors, except to attempt
to dull their senses with drink. Every time somebody came in they would shout
at them, ‘Shut the door! Shut the door!’

Fabien
and Armando had taken their children to see the slaughter and had left the bar
in the care of a disgruntled, inefficient and lazy nephew so the
Comunidad
Ingles
were having difficulty getting enough anaesthetising alcohol down
their throats. For once there was not a single Spanish customer in there.
Frank, Kirsten, Li Tang, Janet, Miriam, Leonard and Laurence had all arrived by
eight thirty Only Nige wasn’t present, she hated the matanza so much that she’d
driven to Algeciras the night before and caught the ferry to the Spanish Muslim
colony of Melilla.

Donna
had appeared about nine with Mister Roberts walking silently behind her. To
Laurence she seemed very wound up. When the disgruntled nephew was too slow in
serving her she pushed her way behind the bar, accompanied by the giant
boyfriend, and they began rapidly serving everyone with drinks. The nephew
thought about interfering but one look at Donna’s companion rapidly changed his
mind.

‘Look,’
she said to the boy, ‘why don’t you sod off to the matanza? I’m going to pay
for everybody’s drinks all day, I’m sure Armando and Fabien won’t mind.’

For
further emphasis Donna produced from her back pocket a wad of wrinkled Euros
and waved it under the boy’s nose. The teenager needed no more encouragement to
scuttle out of the back door, which Donna locked behind him. Turning back to
the British she announced, ‘Right, you bastards, let’s get this party started!’

There
was a momentary hesitation. Laurence rose asking, ‘Donna are you sure you want
to be paying for everybody?’

‘Yeah,
why not?’ she said. ‘I’m feeling generous. I’ve just come into a bit of money,
as you can see, and I’d like to spend it on my friends.’

The
lure of free drink was too strong for them. Laurence said, ‘Well, all right
then.’

And
they all put in their orders.

La Matanza

A little while later the
day was beginning to turn into another of those stop/start DVDs and Laurence
was just thinking that somehow this party was a lot like the day when Mister
Roberts first appeared and they’d all got drunk after dumping Sergei at the
clinic in Durcal, when, seemingly simultaneous with that thought, the door
crashed open and framed in the doorway was the oddest little group he’d ever
seen. At the front, as if he was somehow their leader, was little Stanley
looking all strange and nervous, his fists clenching and unclenching. Behind
him was Adey the African merchant and behind him stood a man and a woman, who
to Laurence, in his confused, drunken state, looked very similar to two
characters he’d designed clothes for years back for a film about the life of
the young wife of Karl Marx that had come out at exactly the same time as
another film about the life of the young wife of Karl Marx. Neither film was a
success though both had won awards at different film festivals in Venezuela.

The
group advanced until they stood amongst the tables and chairs, halfway between
the counter and the door. Detaching himself, Stanley approached the bar and
picking up the remote controls which lay on top of the pile of Spanish
newspapers switched off the two TVs and the stereo. In the sudden silence it
felt as if they were all passengers in a speeding train that had come to an
abrupt halt in the middle of the countryside. Then the sounds from outside, the
screaming and the sizzling began to filter in and Miriam jumped up shouting,
‘Turn up the sound! Turn up the sound! Turn the sound back on!’ like an
overexcited teenager whose music programme had been switched off.

‘Be
quiet, please, Miriam,’ Adey said without turning his head.

Frank
who became belligerent and racist when he was drunk, rose and weaving towards
the group shouted, ‘Hey, mind how you speak to a white woman, boy!’

With
what appeared to be a minimum of effort the woman in the bonnet took hold of
him as he passed, and with the flat of her hand pushed him back down causing
his wooden chair to shatter into splinters beneath him and his head to bounce
off the floor, sending Frank into unconsciousness.

This
got the attention of even the most drink-sozzled; everyone stopped talking and
stared at the strange quartet.

Stanley
planted himself in front of his mother and Mister Roberts. ‘These people, they
want him back,’ he said.

Donna
appeared self-possessed, though Laurence noticed she kept her hands flat on the
sticky bartop and her eyes flickered around the room, from the two Victorians
to the gaggle of watching Brits to Mister Roberts and then back to her son.

‘Not
once, for a minute, did I think you’d do this,’ she said.

‘Let’s
say I’m doing it for your own good.’

Donna
smiled a sad little smile. ‘That’s what I said to you, wasn’t it? I suppose
it’s what everyone says. Funny though, with everybody going around doing good,
how the world’s so messed up.’

Stanley
had thought he possessed all kinds of sophisticated arguments which he’d
planned to deploy against his mother but found himself simply saying, ‘He was
mine. You had no right to take him.’

Rather
than the hysterical shouting he was expecting, Donna, in return, looked
directly at him and asked in a calm voice, ‘That’s it? I took your toy away?’

‘No,
there’s other stuff. I can’t remember right now … It’s all about …’ With
some confusion the boy looked at Adey and his two companions but they remained
immobile, waiting for a signal from him. For the moment this was his play On
the way he had told them that his mother was likely to fly into a rage and they
should perhaps let him try and persuade her to give up Mister Roberts without
provoking a fight but now her calm had thrown him.

Laurence,
struggling to understand what was going on, recalled when he had first come to
live in Spain, when his understanding of the language had been quite patchy He
would read a newspaper article in
El País
or
ABC
and think that
he’d understood it completely, certain that it was about an elephant which had
escaped from a zoo in Seville and had trampled on a car, then he would read it
again a little later and would be just as convinced that in fact it was about
the EU and its policy towards the performing arts. This argument between Donna
and Stanley was a lot like that. Constantly shifting. At one moment it seemed
to be about some object that Mister Roberts possessed then a few seconds later
it appeared to be about the man himself.

Donna
continued, seizing the moment of her son’s uncertainty, ‘After you said you
were going to let me down with Mister Roberts, I understood you didn’t have
what it takes to help us make our fortune. I’d have to do it all myself.
Honestly it’s nothing to be ashamed of Stanley, being weak, but I need strong
people around me, around us. I thought back to that day in Granada with the
gypsies. There were so many of them and they were so fierce in looking out for
each other.’

Laurence
was completely perplexed by this swerve into talk about gypsies; any sense he’d
had of what was going on evaporated.

Donna
said, ‘It struck me, that’s what we needed:

a big
bunch of people who’d sacrifice themselves for him, for us. Where do you find
people prepared to do that? Then it hit me. I mean once you think of it, it’s
obvious, isn’t it Stan? Religion! People when they get religion, even really
clever or talented people, will do the most stupid things. Footballers kiss the
soil and make crosses on their chests before a game, scientists walk on their
knees to Santiago de Compostella, doctors drive their cars into airport
departure halls and blow themselves up.

‘Now
the one thing they put some effort into teaching us at school was religion.
They had believers from loads of faiths come in to give us talks: there was an
African who worshipped stones, a white witch who worked in telesales during the
day I saw one of our guest speakers recently on the telly, broadcasting from a
cave in Pakistan.

‘All
these people believed just on the basis of what they had read or what someone
had told them. So I’m thinking: wouldn’t it be much more powerful if somebody
could perform real miracles, right in front of people? That’d convert them on
the spot. What wouldn’t they do for you then? Get Mister Roberts in front of a
mob and he would be able to do things there’d be no explanation for. You might
as well call them miracles, because that’s how they’d seem. Then that crowd
would become his disciples. Do whatever we told them to without giving it a
moment’s thought. Now who would Mister Roberts’ followers be?

‘Well,
disciples always seem to come from the dispossessed, the poor and the ugly I
guess the rich and handsome are pretty satisfied with whatever set-up they’re
born into.

‘So
who’s the dispossessed around here? Not the Spanish anymore, maybe thirty years
ago, but not now. The gypsies? Well, there’s a problem with that. So who? Who
would it be?’

As
she’d gone on Donna’s delivery had become more impassioned; all those in the
bar, though they hadn’t a clue as to what she was talking about, were
transfixed by her fervour. Sometimes, when Laurence had worked on a film, he
could recall witnessing a moment of pure magic. The assistant director would
call action on a take which required an actor to complete a long and complex
monologue. Slowly, with the camera whirring and the lights gently clicking,
everybody on the set gradually got drawn into the majesty of what was
happening. Of course, the words themselves played a part, the words cast a
spell. But there was also something monumental in the sight of this person
struggling to deliver what they had to say, while coping with so many obstacles
of memory and self-consciousness. Inevitably, when they finished, the actor
would receive a spontaneous round of applause. So it was with Donna’s speech.

Though
he still had no idea what she was going on about, as Donna continued to plead
her case a majestic and demented grandeur had crept into what she was saying.

Laurence
reminded himself that in the viewing theatre the next morning, when the
previous day’s filming was reviewed, the footage of the speech which had gained
the round of applause always now appeared overblown, bombastic and fake and
never made it into the final cut of the movie.

‘So,’
Donna continued. ‘I reckon the closest we’ve got to Biblical slaves round here
are those South Americans who work up in the
plasticas.
Think about it.
They’re forced from their home country they live in terrible conditions,
everybody despises them. At first I didn’t know where to find any but then
remembered whenever I drove to the coast with Laurence he’d go on and on about
the spread of the
plasticas.’
She turned to him with a crooked smile.
‘Do you remember, Laurence? You’d say you often saw little groups of them in
the Latin American products aisle at Carrefour.

‘So
that’s where we went yesterday I half expected that they wouldn’t be there, but
there was a little clump of them, just like Laurence said, small brown men and
women, silently fingering the packets of enchiladas.

‘It’s
an odd thing to try and say to people you don’t know, “Hello, this is God, or
the son of God or God’s best friend. I want you to follow him and become his
disciples.” I just stood there staring at the little group of Incas and they
stared back.

‘But at
least they didn’t move. It was Mister Roberts who kept them there of course,
they were so small and he was so big and he has this … well, everybody can
feel it … this presence.

‘Do you
remember? Years ago, when you landed at Malaga airport a little van would pull
onto the runway, in front of the plane, with a flashing orange sign on its roof
that said, “Sigame, Sigame” — “Follow me, Follow me”. I just said that to them: