Southern Seas (18 page)

‘When the news broke about Stuart Pedrell, didn’t it occur to you to inquire about Señor Porqueres?’

‘Why? I don’t see the connection. Anyway, I’d forgotten about the whole thing. My head is chock-full of a thousand housing problems every day. Do you know how many drains get blocked every day? How many toilets have to be cleared? It’s as though these houses were made of paper.’

‘But wasn’t it you who built them?’

‘I put up what they told me to.’

‘I’ve been sent by Señora Stuart and the lawyer Viladecans. It’s vital that I get to see the flat where Porqueres lived.’

‘I’ll give you a note to give to the caretaker. Or if you prefer, I’ll get dressed and I can take you round myself.’

‘Don’t bother. There’s no need.’

‘I’ll write you a note then.’

He tried three or four drafts, but wasn’t happy with them and tore them up. Finally he wrote:
Señor García, do what this gentleman asks. Treat him as if he were me
.

‘If you need anything else, you know where to find me. How is Señor Viladecans? Still busy in the courts? I don’t know how he can stand it. Whenever I have to go there about some trouble on the estate, it always depresses me. It’s so inhuman, don’t you think? And how about Señora Stuart? What a tragedy! What a terrible tragedy! Señor Planas is the one I had most dealings with, because he’s the one who came to the site most often. He’s certainly got brains. He has this look, like he’s not taking anything in … But it’s all there in his head, from the first bit of string to the last bag of cement. This has been a very important project. I don’t care how much stick we get: these people used to live in slums and overcrowded sub-lets. Now at least they’ve got a roof of their own. The reason the flats have started crumbling before their time is because these people don’t know how to live in them. They think they’re like the slum tenements they used to have. All the lifts are falling apart, because they kick them about. You can’t find anything that’s in proper shape. It all has to be patched up. In the end, these people will get more civilized. But it’s very hard for them—a different kind of life.’

‘You’re lucky Zulus didn’t move in.’

‘You can laugh. But there are some blacks here. From Guinea and other places. It’s quite impossible to keep the sub-letting under control. Homes that were just right for four have now got ten
living in them. They say it’s to pay the bills. But once you start, it’s a slippery slope. If there’s room for five, why not twenty? I’ve got a file full of anonymous complaints about Chilean and Argentinian sub-tenants whose papers aren’t in order. Where have they all come from? I put it in the hands of Señor Viladecans. They run away from their own country, and they end up here. Well, if they run away, they must have done something, surely? The police don’t go round chasing people just for the hell of it. Believe me, it’s a constant source of problems. And then they’re always complaining. Nothing’s ever good enough for them. I tell them: Barcelona wasn’t built in eight years, or even in a century. Give it a few years, and you won’t recognize the place. But we need patience. They don’t seem to have heard of the word.’

García the caretaker apparently had all the patience lacking in other people. He emerged from the depths of his lodge, struggling to adjust to the air and light of the outside world. He slowly took and read the note, as if it were a dissertation on gastroenteritis.

‘In other words …’

‘In other words, I’d like to see the flat where Señor Antonio Porqueres used to live. Is anyone there now?’

‘It’s just as he left it. No one told me to do anything. And unless I get orders from above, I’m deaf, dumb and blind. Come in.’

On the glass-covered dining table, a young boy was doing his homework with one eye on the television. The janitor bent over the drawer of his desk, as if he had to ask his kidneys for permission. His kidneys were slow in answering. His arms matched the slow-motion gymnastic style with which the rest of his body moved through the world.

‘Here’s the key to the flat.’

‘I’d like a key for the downstairs door too.’

‘Are you staying the night?’

‘I don’t know.’

It took him a long time to realize that Carvalho’s reply left
him no option but to hand over the key. Yet he still held on to it until Carvalho snatched it away.

‘It’s bound to be pretty dirty. My daughter cleaned it a month ago, but since no one ever said anything to me … Don Antonio’s things are in the bedroom and the bathroom. The other stuff was already there when he rented it. I won’t come up with you. It’s an effort for me to move at all.’

‘So I see.’

‘A draught. There’s so many draughts in this lodge!’

It seemed impossible that any air could enter his crypt. The child suddenly shouted, ‘eight fours are thirty-two,’ and scribbled it down as if his life depended on it. Señor García shook his head and mumbled. ‘Always making a noise. I can’t stand noise.’

The lift had been patched up with sheets of plywood. The flooring bounced like a trampoline, and seemed likely either to catapault him through the roof or plunge him down the liftshaft. Carvalho hugged the walls. He got out into a cream-painted corridor thick with dust and brooding in the perpetual twilight of a row of twenty-watt bulbs encased in wire-mesh cages. Eight grey wooden doors marked the exits from eight flats. He stopped in front of 7-H. Someone had used a key to scratch the name Lola on the paintwork. The door opened with no more effort than turning the page of a book. He lit a match to help him find the fuse-box, but it was staring him in the face like some computer switchboard. Light shone down the hallway as he switched on, down the blankness of bare, smudgy walls. Then it revealed a dining room complete with a three-piece suite with faded tartan
upholstery. A turned-wood lampstand with a waxed paper shade. A horseshoe on one wall; on another, a Valencian woman covering her breast with a fan. A regional flag from Bultace. A half-empty box of matches. An ashtray lying on a little table in the middle of the room, with ash still stuck to the bottom. A glass case holding sherry glasses and two books—
The Meaning of Ecstasy
by Alan Watts, and
The Happy Forties
by Barbara Probst Salomon. More books in a wooden crate next to a folding bed:
Citizens and Madmen: A Social History of Psychiatry
by Klaus Dörner;
Francis Scott Fitzgerald
by Robert Sklar;
Les Paradis Artificiels
by Baudelaire;
Man of Plaster
by Joseph Kessel;
Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu
by Maurice Joly; a dozen or so little textbooks with titles like
What is Socialism …, What is Communism …, What is Imperialism
 … and so on; a book by Father Xirinacs in Catalan; Cernuda’s
Collected Verse
; Friedrich’s
Structure of Modern Lyric Poetry
.

Pulling back the bedspread revealed folded sheets and blankets that smelt of dampness and months gone by. On the bedroom wall was pinned a map of the Pacific and the coasts of Asia and America. As ever, the mouth of Asia seemed about to take a bite out of America’s backside. Yellowing and near-illegible newspaper cuttings were stuck here and there on the wall with drawing pins. Political articles on the Moncloa Accords. News items that were dated no later than early 1978, as if by then Stuart Pedrell had managed to overcome his initial urge to provide himself with points of reference on these alien walls. In a wardrobe, a dark-grey suit bought from a Hospitalet tailor; a jacket with matching trousers from the same shop; underwear; a tie and a pair of straw and canvas summer shoes.

The kitchen was a desert, inhabited only by half a dozen plates on the drying rack, a coffee pot, two coffee cups, a jar filled with a compacted mass of sugar, and another half full of curiously discoloured ground coffee. The fridge was switched off, and in it a slice of honey-roast ham had been miraculously preserved in a
mummified state. A jar of French gherkins pickled in peppercorns and white-wine vinegar added an exotic touch at the far end of the refrigerator shelf, next to a half-slab of butter wrapped in tin foil. In the glass-doored kitchen cupboard, a pack of Uncle Ben rice sat next to a packet of dried soup, an unopened jar of coffee, two beers, two bottles of sparkling mineral water, half a bottle of cheap white sherry and a bottle each of Fundador brandy and Marie Brizard anis.

In the other tiny room, he found a shoe-cleaning kit and a cardboard medicine-chest full of basic medicaments: aspirin, antiseptic cream, sticking plasters, hydrogen peroxide, a bottle of neat alcohol and a blade for treating corns. In the bathroom he found a full set of towels; a bottle of
Moussel Moussel Moussel
bath gel produced by the Paris firm of Legrain; a pumice stone; a white bathrobe; a pair of Arab-style slippers; and a much-used floorcloth. He went through the flat three more times, making a mental inventory of everything.

Then he left, without switching off at the mains. He looked for a phone box in the street, but the only two in sight were out of order. He ventured into the Jumilla wine shop. The owner was sitting alone in front of a large glass of fruit brandy. He didn’t bother looking up, but said that he could use the phone. Carvalho called Biscuter and asked him to go up to Vallvidrera and feed Bleda.

‘I don’t have anything for a dog.’

‘There are things up in Vallvidrera. What did you make for me?’

‘Hake in cider.’

‘Where did you get the cider?’

‘The man who runs the grocer’s on the corner is from Asturias.’

‘Give Bleda hake in cider. Make sure you take the bones out, though.’

‘Hake in cider? For a dog?’

‘We’ve got to train her palate. Did anyone ask for me?’

‘The usual.’

‘The girl?’

‘The girl.’

‘I’ll call in at the office early in the morning.’

‘Shall I tell her if she rings again?’

‘No. Take care with the bones. Don’t get one stuck in her throat.’

‘You really mean that, about the hake in cider?’

‘Do what you like.’

‘Can’t you give me any idea where you are?’

‘I’m afraid I forgot my compass, so I couldn’t tell you …’

Bon appetit
, Bleda. Try some good cooking, and see what the civilized human world is all about. When I’m dead and gone, remember that I once gave you the dinner that Biscuter had lovingly prepared for me.

‘How much do I owe you?’

‘No one owes me anything. I’m the one who owes things … to everybody …’ replied the man, from the depths of his self-absorption.

Carvalho scoured the area for a bar that was still open. They made him up a sandwich of tuna in oil, and to go with it, a portion of potato tortilla. He bought a bottle of chilled white wine of indeterminate pedigree, and then went back to Stuart Pedrell’s flat and switched on the water heater. He took a shower, soaping himself with
Moussel Moussel Moussel
and wrapping himself in the musty bathrobe. He paced the flat until the empty tomblike smell got too much for him. He checked that the sheets and blankets were clean, made the bed, and finished the wine, while leafing through every page of the books that Stuart Pedrell had rescued from his shipwreck. They were not so much carefully chosen as indicative of an intellectual thirst that Carvalho considered morbid. All he found was a scrap of paper among the pages of Cernuda’s
Collected Verse:

The poem was called
Islands
, and it related the adventure of a man who went to an island, had it off with a woman, and later reflected on the nature of memory and desire. ‘Isn’t memory the impotence of desire?’ Carvalho closed the book, turned off the light and lay down on the bed. The darkness transmitted the smells of stale air, the far-off sounds of cars, a voice, a trickling of water in next-door’s bathroom. Stuart Pedrell had spent the nights of a long year in that room. He had only to travel a few kilometres to get back to all that he had been for the past fifty years. But he stayed in that darkness, night after night. Playing out the role of a Gauguin distorted by a fanatical socialist-realist writer intent on punishing him for all the ruling-class sins he had committed. And the writer was none other than himself. Incapable of extracting language from himself, he had decided to convert himself into language. He lived out the novel he couldn’t write, the film he would never be able to direct. But who was the audience? Who was there to clap or whistle at the end of the performance? Only he himself. ‘He’s an incurable narcissist,’ the Marquess of Munt had said. He must have had a supreme capacity for self-contempt to have tolerated living night after night in that anonymous, amnesiac solitude.

Did you at least look in the mirror, Stuart Pedrell? He jumped out of bed, went into the bathroom, switched on the light and looked at himself in a mirror dirtied by spatters of water and toothpaste. ‘You’ve aged, Carvalho.’ He took a piece of toilet paper and went back to bed. Thinking of the Stuart widow, he masturbated as furtively as if he had been in a school toilet or behind a tree. He cleaned himself with the paper and dropped it on the
floor. He was surprised at the similarity of smells between sperm and empty tombs. Then he fell asleep.