A Shortcut to Paradise (16 page)

“Come in, Paquito, sit down, please,” the director began, trying to be pleasant when the latter knocked on his door.

“Very sorry, Director,” responded Paquito limply. “I didn't know what it was all about, except that I'd put my foot in it.”

Paquito Expósito had been in the Model five years. He was around fifty but looked ten years older. All his teeth were decayed and he was a former heroin addict
inside for drug trafficking and the illegal possession of firearms. He had one year to go until his release, if he was lucky and didn't land himself in it. The director knew he was playing with an advantage.

“Come on, Paquito, tell me where the fuck this story about Amadeu Cabestany being a cannibal came from. I've heard it was you who spread the rumour…”

“You mean Hannibal? The lad in the fifth?”

“Yes, he's hardly been inside a fortnight,” the director continued.

“But I ain't spread nowt, Director, sir. I swear I ain't. I just told a mate what I'd read in the newspaper.”

“Paquito, the newspaper didn't say Amadeu Cabestany was a cannibal.” The director knew he had to be patient with Paquito.

“Oh, yes, it did, Director, sir! Maybe not like that, but that's what it said: that he'd bashed a woman to death with an apple. I read that. And the guy ate the apple.”

“What do you mean, he ate the apple? Where did you get that from?”

“The photo,” responded Paquito, as if it were self-evident. “You could see from the photo that he'd bitten a chunk out.”

“But Paquito, it wasn't a real apple. It was a statue. A prize.”

“Nah. How could he bite it if it woz a statue? Besides, excuse me, Director, sir but the prize woz wine.”

“Wine? What do you mean, wine?” the director frowned.

“The paper said it plain enough: wine's the prize. And it must have been a good'un because it woz in capitals,” Paquito wriggled his way out.

“This is beyond me.”

Although the air-conditioning was blasting away, the director began to sweat. He now had an inkling it was all one massive misunderstanding that had snowballed and snowballed because no one had bothered to stop it in its tracks.

“Director, sir,” the minion who was standing by the door interrupted his flow of thought, “perhaps Paquito is referring to the fact it was the sixth Golden Apple award, which was written in Roman letters and could be read as ‘VI' in capitals.” This minion was a marine biologist who had rashly returned from the States a couple of years ago, hadn't found a decent job anywhere and had ended up getting a post in a prison.

“You see? VI, I told you so.” Paquito's self-image was immediately boosted. “The prize woz wine. You're Catalan, ain't you? You should know what ‘VI' means!”

“My God, how idiotic!…” muttered the director. “But what about Cabestany eating brains? Don't tell me you read that in the newspaper too?”

“Oh, I don't know nowt about that,” Paquito retorted. “I reckon that's Cigala. He read the paper as well.”

“You mean Raimundo Pérez, in the fourth gallery,” clarified the minion.

“I know who you mean…” The director was starting to lose his patience and noticed how his blood pressure was momentarily going crazy. “But Paquito, that's impossible because Cigala is illiterate.”

“And so what? That ain't no reason to be ashamed. The psychologist told us that,” responded Paquito, proud that his therapy had come in useful at last.

“I mean, Paquito, that he's illiterate, he can't read the papers,” answered the director, appealing to his common sense.

“Oh, yes, he can! Everybody can read the papers, Mr Director. It's a duty. Or a right. Or the duty of a right…” Paquito responded, getting into a tangle. “A constitutional right. And what about Knocksie, Mr Director, he did him in. You know he did.”

“Knocksie died of a heart attack, Paquito.”

“Yeah, course he did, because he told him summat like in the film, and Knocksie copped it. That caused the attack. I saw that 'appen.”

“The doctor said Knocksie's heart was in a bad state and he could have had a heart attack at any time. It was a coincidence,” retorted the director, trying to get Paquito to follow the logic of his argument.

“Right, it woz also a coincidence they nobbled me in the airport with that suitcase and that pistol that supposedly didn't belong to yours truly and I ended up in jug, right? Well, coincidences don't exist, the lady psychologist told us that as well. I mean to say Hannibal is like the guy in the film. The two is queer sods,” he declared. “Besides, they've got the same name.”

“Paquito, films are one thing and life…”

“But it's all in the papers today, Mr Director!” protested Paquito, who was going from strength to strength.

“The papers” – the vein in the director's neck had swollen and was about to burst – “are full of it, you invented it and the story got out!”

“But if the papers say it's true, Mr Director…” insisted Paquito, now in a shrill voice.

He'd definitively blown it. A man with progressive ideas whose bedside reading was
Crimes and Punishment
by Cesare Beccaria, had given in to temptation and accused Amadeu Cabestany before the judge on the basis of a rumour, thus denying him his presumed innocence. All he could do was to try to turn the situation round.

“That's enough of this nonsense, Paquito. Amadeu Cabestany is no cannibal. He is suspected, I repeat, suspected for the moment of killing a woman and no more than that. So this had better be the story circulating around here. Got it, Paquito? Because I understand you've only got one year to go before you're out on conditional release, right? I wouldn't want that lengthened for any reason.” The director had decided to change his strategy and have recourse to the tried and tested methods of old. “And I don't think you'd be very happy if in the year you've theoretically still got to spend with us your ‘intimate time' was eight on a Monday morning, would you?”

“Fuck, no! That would be a bastard, Mr Director! My girlfriend can't do it at that time of day.”

“Right, so you'll go straight from here and tell your colleagues it was all a joke, or a misunderstanding or whatever you want. But this rumour must stop. You got that, Paquito? The judge is very annoyed and quite right too.”

“Whatever you say, Mr Director. I expect I can fix that. Course if you could give me extra ‘intimate time', I'd go for it even better…” Paquito tried to negotiate.

“You do what I told you to and then we'll talk.”

Paquito wrinkled his eyebrows – something he knew you were supposed to do when you were thinking. He was at a loss.

“All the same, is or ain't Hannibal a cannibal?” he asked, wanting to be clear.

“Look, Paquito, that's enough of that rubbish. Don't make me angry, because I'm at the end of my tether. Clear off and remember what you've got to do.”

Paquito returned to the fifth gallery awash in a sea of doubt. He didn't know what to think. Nevertheless, he only had a year until his conditional release and wasn't going to risk losing that, so he decided to do what the director had ordered him to do: namely, to persuade his colleagues that their Hannibal, however much his name was the same, was no cannibal. However, Paquito continued to keep his distance from Amadeu Cabestany. As the psychologist giving him therapy used to say, better not tempt fate.

After Paquito left his office, the director picked his phone up to try to tell the judge it had all been one big misunderstanding, an unfortunate joke played by the inmates. He felt unable to reproduce his surreal conversation with Paquito Expósito and mumbled all kind of apologies. He then wrote a short press release saying it was all a rather dud joke that had unhappily prospered and that, consequently, the rumour concerning Amadeu Cabestany's peculiar culinary habits had no basis in fact. A few hours earlier, the papers had received another release from the
Mossos d'Esquadra
's press unit. They regretted that a group of citizens of Vic had misinterpreted a comment made by an aspiring
mosso
as he left a restaurant. The following day, some papers – but only some – published a retraction, but lamentably by that stage, Vic was already a city besieged by vultures. Luckily for Amadeu and his family, the butchers and shopkeepers of Vic, gathered at an emergency meeting, agreed that publicity about the alleged cannibalistic tastes of one of their townsfolk might damage their sausage industry, so they organised an on-the-spot demonstration to scare off the press with a show of carving knives while a unit of
Mossos d'Esquadra
looked the other way. The journalists, mostly trainees on temporary contracts, decided not to wound local sensibilities and turned tail, mostly because someone had told them that pig farms and slaughterhouses are, as everybody knows, a perfect place to get rid of snoopers. The news item gradually cooled off and the papers ceased to mention it.

There was a degree of unease among the
mossos
. The Deputy-Inspector had to put up with being bawled at for an hour and a warning on her file, and the aspiring
mosso
Marc Serra received a kick in the balls delivered by a Deputy-Inspector who allowed him to enjoy the virtues of chastity for a while. It turned out the judge was bilingual, and that, if necessary, she could swear like a trooper in more than one language, while the director of the Model decided to take flight and take a few days' leave for private business and thus avoid having to give further explanations. Paquito Expósito came out of it rather well; he finally succeeded in getting an extra “intimate time” with the prostitute who'd recently been doubling as his girlfriend.

Unluckily, the rot had set in, as far as it impacted on the dusty carpets of the literary Parnassus where Amadeu Cabestany aspired to tread.

16

Ernest Fabià had been in Tarazona a little over a week and his morale had lifted noticeably. It wasn't geographical distance by itself which had helped put things into perspective, and not balloon recent events out of proportion. It was the fact that he was now living in the micro-cosmos of the Translators' House and its peculiar micro-universe of the picturesque city of Tarazona that made him feel as if he were infinitely more distant from the hustle and bustle of Barcelona than the four hundred kilometres actually separating him from his problems. Tarazona was a frontier city, close to the provinces of Soria, Navarre and La Rioja, and it was a challenge to get there by public transport. To begin with, as he felt no desire to sit behind the driving wheel again, Ernest was obliged to take the Talgo to Saragossa from Sants station. Then he had to get a much more rickety train that left him in the small station of Tudela in Navarre, and from there a local bus that finally dropped him in Tarazona. Because of the delays, which he was told were quite normal, whether a result of snow, rain, accidents or striking workers, he'd failed to make his connections and spent hours and hours waiting in each station. He'd left home at eight a.m. and had reached the Translators' House just before eight p.m., as the sun was setting in a riot of blazing colour that took Ernest's breath away. The imbalance between geographical distance and his twelve-hour journey to Tarazona had plunged him into a state of mental confusion akin to jet lag. When he finally did arrive, he was floating in a dream, as if the strange but familiar world surrounding him wasn't entirely real. Nevertheless, Ernest didn't find the sensation entirely unpleasant. Remorse effectively began to fade into the background four hundred kilometres away from Barcelona, and the anguish consuming him also began to ebb, swept away by the warm wind blowing from the peaks of Moncayo.

If he'd caught a plane to New York, Moscow or Casablanca, it would have been a quicker journey. But now he was in Tarazona, a small city with historical buildings undermined by property speculation, that he'd only heard of because it was the seat of an offbeat institution created and led by translators. The House was full in June, mostly with foreigners, and English was the language most commonly heard. Outside in the street Spanish was the language used, a Spanish heavily impregnated with the local Aragonese accent,
mañico
, that lengthened the last syllable of every phrase as if in a
jota
lilt, and was characterized by the constant use of diminutives. Ernest was no longer plain Ernest but
Ernestico
, a
café
was now a
cafetico
and he was now a
mozico
rather than a
home
. On the other hand, Tarazonans were open, gutsy, fun-loving people, fond of Holy Week processions, red wine and honey cakes. They also loved sport, which they practised in two ways: running in front of small cows along the city's steep, narrow streets, and throwing tons of tomatoes at each other in the
Town Hall square the day of the local fiesta. Past local celebrities included such diverse figures as the variety singer Raquel Meyer, the comedy actor Paco Martínez Soria and the philosopher Gracián, who wasn't born in Tarazona, but who, luckily for the city, had died there. At the time he was buried in a common grave since nobody anticipated he'd become famous centuries later, and local archaeologists had for years been trying to find his bones, though their macabre objective remained unclear. Worthy descendants of their forbears, the present-day inhabitants of ancient Celt – Iberian Turiasso were stubborn, proud and suspicious, particularly of weekend tourists from the metropolis who came to peer at old stones and, naturally, the eccentric characters continually parading through the Translators' House.

Ernest was welcomed by the centre's director, a woman in her forties who was a crazy chain-smoker. She was also from Barcelona and spent days on the phone managing crises. She apologized for not meeting him with a car in Tudela, which was only twenty minutes away, but she didn't drive and her secretary was off sick with depression. Ernest had come to that back of beyond in flight from incipient depression brought on by a bad conscience, so this news floored him somewhat. Did the inhabitants of Tarazona have depressive tendencies? He said nothing, but something stirred inside him and he began to regret the journey he'd just endured.