The Angst-Ridden Executive (14 page)

‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you a lot. My relationship with Jauma was very one-sided. He talked and I listened. I wrote, and he read what I wrote. He was a pleasant sort of chap—intelligent, wealthy, and a bit of an extrovert. But he was dangerous. He was like a character in a book who ends up endearing himself to the reader without the writer intending it.’

‘Is that bad?’

‘Bad in every sense. If his appeal derives from the author, it means that the author has been unacceptably partisan in expressing his personal preferences. On the other hand, if he is sympathetic despite his author, it means that the writer has lost control of the book’s internal equilibrium.’

‘So for you Jauma was just a character?’

‘Recently, yes. I have reduced my level of receptivity to real flesh and blood people. My close friends I can handle. The rest are just characters. In the past Jauma meant something quite different to me. Now he’s just a character.’

‘What about the way he died?’

‘Lacking in verisimilitude. It reads like a Spanish erotic novel of the 1920s—Pedro de Repide, Alvaro de Retana, or Lopez de Hoyos. The decadent aristocrat is stabbed to death, and expires on a rubbish tip, having fornicated his way through every sexual aberration known to man.’

‘How would you have scripted his last days, if it had been up to you?’

‘Jauma at the age of seventy. He goes to the pictures every afternoon with a view to groping girls. His name comes up in the gossip columns. His eldest son starts knocking him about, and the old man takes off to the zoo to watch the monkeys masturbate.’

‘And the real facts of his death?’

‘That his death was real.’

‘I mean the real causes of his death.’

‘He died of real causes. A bullet, I believe.’

‘But someone must have fired that bullet.’

‘This is a detective novel, and generally speaking I prefer to steer clear of naturalistic literature. But if you insist on playing at detectives, at least let’s divide the parts fairly. You want to be Philip Marlowe? Well, I want to be Sherlock Holmes. I’m serious. I really can’t help you. It’s possible that my friends will be able to help you in imagining the real causes of Jauma’s death. I, however, spend my time imagining other things. Many other things. My whole job is precisely that—to create things in my imagination but within a proper logical framework, within my narrative discourse. What happened to Jauma was terribly sad, and, believe me, I was very upset about it at the time. But I feel that to carry on raking it over now would be like arguing about the sex of angels, or whether Muhammad Ali would have beaten Rocky Marciano.’

The audience had ended, Dorronsoro uncrossed his legs and prepared to get up and show Carvalho to the door as good manners required. The detective didn’t take the hint. The novelist hesitated for a moment, and then settled into a waiting mode. He stared into nothingness, to avoid letting Carvalho see the impatience in his eyes, and half absentmindedly he opened a book that was lying on the table, and began flicking through it. In a space between two of the shelves hung a hunting rifle, which was evidently well looked after.

‘Do you hunt?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you any good?’

‘It depends what it is. I’m good with partridge, but not so good with rabbits.’

‘Ever tried big game?’

‘I learned my shooting in Maresme, in the hills around San Vicente de Montalt and Arenys de Munt. They have no big game there.’

‘Intellectuals aren’t supposed to like violence, though. . .’

‘Aggression is another matter. We writers are as aggressive as anyone else, and I find that hunting releases my aggression. It enables me to contemplate other people’s aggressiveness as a spectacle and then describe it.’

‘But you still kill.’

‘I hunt.’

‘You kill.’

‘Killing is something different. It’s cutting a chicken’s throat in a farmyard, or shooting someone, or taking an axe to your neighbour. In hunting there are rules. . .’

‘Which the hunter imposes on an animal that has no weapons to defend itself with.’

‘I suppose you’d prefer it if pigeons went around armed with shotguns? Hunting has a certain aesthetic justice. It has its own morality too. If you ask me, you’re a puritan. For my part, I love animals. I’m passionate about dogs. I’ll introduce you to my dogs, if you like. You’ve stirred my guilty conscience, and now you’re making me feel like a criminal. If we carry on like this I’ll end up confessing that it was me that killed Jauma, with this rifle.’

‘What would have been your motive?’

‘That he didn’t like my latest novel.’

Now it was the novelist’s turn not to want to terminate their meeting, and he began to study Carvalho as a possible character for his next book.

‘Have you never killed?’

‘Yes. I’ve killed.’

‘Animals?’

‘People.’

‘You must have been a hit-man, or part of a firing squad, because you’re too young to have been in the war.’

‘I was in the CIA.’

‘This is getting interesting. A double agent?’

‘Treble.’

‘They’re the best sort. Did you kill them with your own bare hands?’

‘I’ve trained in hand-to-hand combat. The human body has twenty-five points where you can be killed by somebody with their bare hands. But I prefer to use weapons.’

‘Who did you kill? Russians? Chinese? Koreans? Vietnamese?’

‘Some of each.’

‘With those hands?’

Carvalho placed his hands in full view of the writer, who looked at them with mock panic.

‘Your hands don’t look particularly special.’

That’s because I haven’t killed anyone recently.’

‘If you don’t practise, you’ll lose the knack.’

Now the audience was over. Dorronsoro got up and stood back to enable Carvalho to leave. The detective didn’t take the hint. He got up, went over to the rifle, took it down, raised it to his shoulder and aimed it at the novelist, who by now was thoroughly annoyed.

‘That’s not funny. Put it down.’

‘Don’t worry, chief, I’ll put the camp bed next to the phone.’

Biscuter was prepared to stay awake all night in the event of Rhomberg’s call not arriving during what was left of the day. Concha Hijar had replied to say that she could only see Carvalho after nine, because she had to feed the children first. The papers were full of their usual contradictory news items. On the one hand the police were arresting the extreme Left, and on the other they were setting them free. In the afternoon they were persecuting the extreme Right, and at night the extreme Right was given a free hand. The political parties were preparing for the forthcoming elections. The fascist International had its headquarters in Spain. There was still no sign of the driver of the BMW that had crashed into the Tordera. The Peter Herzen Mystery: It appears that Mr. “Peter Herzen” had hired the BMW with false papers.’

‘I’m going out before the trouble starts on the Ramblas.’

‘I’ve got your dinner ready, chief. Kidneys in sherry and rice pilaf.’

‘What sort of rice?’

‘Uncle Ben’s.’

‘Keep it for me till tomorrow, and keep an ear out for Rhomberg’s phone call.’

‘God—anyone would think I’d ever let you down, boss.’

It seemed that the stage was being set for a scene similar to the night before. The police were waiting for the demonstrators, and the demonstrators seemed to be waiting for the police to take up positions. A drunk with a face blackened by his own grime began calling to imaginary chickens: ‘Here, chook. . . Chookie, chookie. . . !’ And then he began to sing:

The wine of my Asuncion

Is neither white nor red,

It has no colour at all.

Somewhere between his chest and his shoulders, Carvalho could feel a psychological chill. He tried to work out which of his recent experiences could be worrying him. Probably the drunk. But possibly not this drunk in particular.

The wine of my Asuncion

Is neither white nor red,

It has no colour at all.

A few five-and ten-cent coins clattered down into the street. They glittered on top of the cobblestones where they fell, or down the cracks in-between. The old singers gathered up their harvest, and didn’t turn up their noses at a small coin that had fallen into a pile of horse-dung.

‘Give him some—that one there.’

‘Why that one, and not the one before?’

‘Because this one’s old.’

The street singers were old, and were disabled. The people of District 5 leaned over their balconies and were selective in their charity.

‘He must have been wounded in the war,’ his mother would say. Wounded in the war. And grown old from what? Grown old from the war? Who hadn’t grown old from, the war? Who wasn’t war-wounded in one way or another?

‘Thank you, sir.’

The drunkard took the hundred-peseta note that Carvalho passed out of the car window. Between the black of his face and the yellow that bore no relation to what should have been the whites of his naked eyes, the drunk stared uncomprehendingly, trying to resurrect a semblance of dignity in gratitude. Despite the fact that his body and his ulcerous lips were aimed towards Carvalho, he wasn’t capable of looking straight ahead of him. He smelt of cheap sherry and death.

‘He’s asleep. He’s drunk.’

‘No, he’s dead.’

Somebody pulled him away from the circle of onlookers surrounding the fallen body.

‘It’s the Murcians’ son.’

When he had got out of the concentration camp, the Murcians’ son had survived on the few vegetables that his parents managed to sell clandestinely, when they weren’t being caught by the sergeant, who would give the old man a kick that sent him sprawling among his scattered vegetables. When the Murcians’ son was drunk, he would take up a position at the junction of calle Cera and Botella, and would give a military salute and shout: ‘Franco! I shit on you!’

While his mother tried to shut him up, his father would try to pull him away, and the gypsy lads at the Bar Moderno would freeze their seemingly inexhaustible hilarity, reduced to silence by the drama.

‘He was dead.’

‘Sssh! The boy will hear you.’

Why so much effort in concealing his death? Hours later, the silent moving line of people came up the street to the Murcians’ house.

‘Even with a hundred lives, they’ll never pay for the vile thing they’ve done.’

‘Who?’

‘The fascists.’

Sometimes he began to doubt the reality of his neighbourhood. Looking back, he remembered it as a city that was poor and sunk in a kind of bitter-sweet syrup. People who were defeated and humiliated, forever having to apologize for the fact of having been born. The first time that Carvalho had left those narrow streets, he actually had imagined that he had freed himself forever from his existence as an animal drowning in historical misery. But he found he was carrying it with him, like a snail carrying its shell, and years later, when he belatedly decided to accept himself for who he was and what he’d done, he returned to the scene of his childhood and adolescence.

His old neighbourhood had been transformed into a waiting-room for the grave, where the older generation had been sentenced to die in its damp surroundings, while the younger generation sought refuge in cheap flats out in the suburbs. Next to ageing survivors of the pre-war period were the middle-aged ones with a sense of personal failure at not having got out in time from the tight, satanic grip of this defeated city. And then a transient population of recent immigrants from Morocco and the odd bunch of Latin Americans forced into cheap rented apartments. Carvalho braked. He pulled up at the side of the road without thinking why.

‘You’ve hit rock-bottom,’ he thought to himself, and he pulled a box of Montecristos from the glove compartment and lit one of them with speed and the anticipation of great pleasure, with his lighter, as if he was drinking the gas flame through the Havana. When I die, the memory of those times will disappear with me. And also the memory of the people who, in bringing me into this world, gave me a first-class vantage point from which to view the spectacle of their own tragedy. Carvalho hadn’t just watched the spectacle. He’d made it his own, and had tried to transmit it to the younger generation. Up and down the Ramblas young and old people alike had expelled the fear that was left in them, on the day that the Dictator died. Happiness in their hearts—but silence on their lips. The shops ran out of bottles of cheap champagne that day; the streets and terraces were full of people enjoying the pleasure of being together without the great crushing shadow hanging over them. But still in silence, still with that cautiousness with words that they had learned in the years of the Terror as a guarantee of at least a mediocre survival. In some ways he understood that past. He knew its language. On the other hand the future opened by Franco’s death seemed foreign to him, like the water of a river that you shouldn’t drink, but that you wouldn’t want to drink either. Gausachs, Fontanillas. . . the crooks of the new situation.

‘And if there was another Civil War, the two of them would go to Burgos.’

‘And Argemi? To Tahiti, via Switzerland.’

And you, Pepe Carvalho, where the hell would you go? To Vallvidrera, to make myself roast leg of lamb ala Périgord, or a meat stew. Would you cook the cabbage together with the meat? Maybe, as long as you don’t put too much cabbage in. Otherwise the flavour of the cabbage drowns out everything else. And what if you didn’t have the wherewithals? Then I’d make salt cod with rice. And what if there wasn’t even any salt cod? Then I’d walk down the road into Barcelona, and I’d let myself be machine-gunned by a diving jet fighter. And what if they dropped a neutron bomb? It’d kill everyone on the Ramblas, and the only faces left would be the ones on the front pages of the newspapers hanging outside the kiosks. Then the conquerors would come marching in, bringing with them the seeds of their own destruction fifty years or a hundred years later.

‘No, I don’t have any news.’ Carvalho wasn’t inclined to share with the widow Jauma the news that Rhomberg was arriving, and he asked her if she had any news, in order to find out whether Rhomberg had been in touch with her too. Then she asked: