The Buenos Aires Quintet (18 page)

‘Ten minutes,’ Honrubia warns him, before leaving the room again.

Raúl remains standing, Carvalho stays in his chair. For a few seconds, neither of them speaks.

‘How is my father?’

‘He goes on living because he wants to see you.’

‘It’s all about his inheritance. He’s scared my aunt and cousins will suck his lifeblood from him. That’s what I’ve been doing all my life. I managed to become what I was thanks to him, and then lost it all no thanks to him. It’s too late now’

‘Everything would be so much easier if you returned to Spain with me.’

‘Everything is hard. I’ve discovered I’m Argentine. In Spain I felt like a dirty South American – that’s what they call us, isn’t it? Here, somewhere or other, is my daughter. I know there’s no chance now with Alma. But my past is here, my nostalgia for the past. In Spain I had no future, and I had lost my past.’

‘I’m not the only one looking for you. There’s the Captain. There’s Pascuali. I could do a deal with Pascuali for you to leave the country.’

‘I’d be happy with just one thing: to be allowed to live here, not to leave again. And you’re the one who worries me the most. You’re a rescuer. You want to rescue me from myself.’

‘I’m a professional. If I return you to Spain, I get paid.’

‘And I’m looking for my daughter. I’m on the right track.’ Raúl studies Carvalho, and eventually adds: ‘In a fortnight there’s going to be a big family
asado.
’

‘Another one?’

‘All
asados
are the same but different. This is at the house of a distant uncle of mine, in Villa Flores. He’s a cousin of my father’s. I won’t be there. But I will give you my final answer. And by the way, I won’t be here either – 1 can’t stay here any longer, so don’t even think of coming back.’ He hands Carvalho a scrap of paper. ‘This is where you’ll know for sure whether I’m going or staying.’

Carvalho leaves the Brucker mansion in the most luxurious Mercedes imaginable. The uniformed chauffeur presses a remote control, and the imposing wrought-iron gates glide open, revealing open country beyond. As they leave this garden of Eden, the chauffeur asks: ‘Did you like the
asado,
sir?’

‘It was excellent.’

‘Every
asado
is different. I make mine in the patio I share with neighbours in the old tenement buildings where I live – every free Sunday I have. It’s really soothing, and calms me down: you get back to the really important things in life – killing and eating.’

Carvalho studies the back of his neck with great interest. ‘Were you a guerrilla too?’

‘I was one of the foot soldiers, you might say. I studied in a shit-awful school in Barracas, and that’s where Señor Honrubia recruited me. He’s brought a lot of the old comrades to work for him here.’

‘Plotting the unfinished revolution,’ Carvalho mutters to himself. ‘The Bruckers have no idea what’s in store for them.’

Several motorbikes come zooming along the outside wall of the residence. They all gather outside one of the entrances. Their riders dismount without taking off their helmets or their masks. The two guards on the door do nothing to get rid of them. Instead, one of them opens it, after he’s pressed an alarm bell.

‘It’s disconnected in the sector around Señor Honrubia’s study’

The motorcyclists nod. They make for the lighted windows of Honrubia’s summerhouse. One of them looks inside. Honrubia appears to be reading in front of the wood fire. He’s also singing. The motorcyclists surround the building. One kicks in the door, another dives through the window. In less than a second, the six of them have their guns trained on Honrubia. He still has his bloodhound look, although there’s a glimmer of anxiety in his eyes. Two of the intruders barge their way into the other room, and give a thumbs-up sign. A third man follows them. They seem reluctant to go into the bathroom, but their attitude changes abruptly when they see the bidet has been turned to one side, showing a dark hideaway underneath. They turn it round completely, revealing a gaping hole. A powerful torch shows just how big it is. When they are all back in the study, a neutral voice orders Honrubia: ‘Stay where you are for fifteen minutes. Don’t move; don’t even go to the window’

The group withdraws to the gate they entered through, where the guards who had helped them are waiting. Two of the motorcyclists pull out bottles and handkerchiefs from the depths of their leather jackets; the guards lean forward meekly to receive their dose of chloroform. As they lie unconscious on the ground, the attackers beat them with their gun butts. Then they get back on their bikes and head off towards a car hidden in the woods. The fat man is at the wheel. One of the motorcyclists takes off his helmet and the goggles covering his face. It’s the Captain.

‘That bastard oligarchic guerrillero got rid of his little friend.’

‘Shall I put the screws on him?’ fat man suggests.

‘How stupid can you get?’ the Captain says, collapsing on to the back seat. ‘He may not be a real Brucker, but he’s a Brucker all the same.’

Carvalho has the notebook he took from the Latin teacher’s apartment open on the desk in front of him. The neat handwriting on the cover continues inside, where it establishes a Manichean list: the students who pay, and those who don’t. Carvalho sorts out the group: Juan Miñana, post office employee; Mudarra Aoíz, student retaking his exams; Carmen Lavalle, dancer and classical philology student; Enzo Pasticchio, teacher.

‘From what they paid, if he hadn’t been killed, he’d have died of hunger.’

‘These old-age pensioners have got amazing resistance,’ comments Don Vito, seated opposite Carvalho. ‘You only have to see them demonstrating outside Congress. Some of them look like skeletons because all they eat are bones. Others look tanned and fit from all the marches they’ve been on. Some of them are stripped to the waist, showing off muscles that the dignity of work has given them. But most of them are just surviving. Now my fifth wife’s left me, I have to buy meat sometimes in the local butcher’s, and I often see the old guys: “Can I have half a pound of scrag end please, it’s for the dog.” Get it, Don Pepe?’

‘Let’s split the list between us. Carmen Lavalle is dead. That leaves Mudarra Aoíz and Enzo Pasticchio for you, and Juan Miñana for me.’

‘That’s two to one.’

‘I’ve still got my cousin. Or perhaps he’s got me. Sometimes I think he’s the one watching me.’

At that moment, Alma comes into the office, so Don Vito quickly adds her to the list.

‘And you’ve got your other cousin here.’

Carvalho looks at Alma so scornfully she is taken aback, before she returns his stare defiantly. Don Vito notices the duel between them.

‘Well then, I’ll be off. We’re up to here with work.’

After excusing himself in this way, he nods to Alma, and she responds. Carvalho speaks to her sharply, and points to the visitors’ chair.

‘Take a seat, please.’

‘Are we going to play the game of detective and client?’

‘That’s right.’

Alma sits down and crosses her legs, staring at Carvalho as though she was hanging on his every word.

‘Have you come to employ me to find your husband – sorry, I mean your brother-in-law?’

‘That’s your problem.’

‘Perhaps it’s yours as well, after the fantastic night you spent making love in your apartment a few nights ago. The whole night.’

Alma gets up indignantly.

‘Were you spying on me?’

‘Not me. Pascuali was though, and Raúl only escaped by the skin of his teeth.’

‘What of it if Raúl was with me? Why should I tell you?’

‘He was in your apartment the night before that balls-breaking
asado
with your ex-revolutionary comrades, when you cynically asked them all to help find him: “We have to get to him before the Captain does.”’

‘Don’t try to imitate my voice. I don’t talk like a queer.’

‘You even managed to convince me when you said: “The best thing would be for his cousin to take him back to Spain.”’

‘Why is that so ridiculous? The best thing would be for him to go to Spain, and for you to go with him. The sooner the better.’

She picks up the nearest thing to hand – a file on the desk – and flings it at Carvalho. She storms out of the office, but when he runs after her and catches her on the stairs, she doesn’t try to escape.

‘It was all so sad. It was like the end of something that had lasted twenty years, but had never really existed. I told him the best for everyone would be that he went with you.’

‘So you’re trying to get rid of me as well.’

Alma smiles a little forlornly.

‘I’m not sure whether Raúl will go or not, but you, Don Pepe, are bound to leave some day or other, and get back to your Biscuter, your Charo, your Ramblas. You’ve got the face of a man frightened he’ll never find his way home.’

This hits the mark.

‘I’ve never found my way home. And the worst of it is, I can’t remember when I left, or what home I left when I did.’

Alma gives him a hug to make up for his loss.

‘Since when? Since you were a little boy? This high?’ She measures a few feet from the floor with her hand.

‘Why don’t we have something to eat in a badly lit bar I know near here?’ Carvalho says, recovering his composure.

‘Why not? I’m ravenous.’

Carvalho pushes his way through sacks, trolleys, postmen and foremen until he reaches the personnel manager’s office.

‘Juan Miñana? He doesn’t work here any more. He was a novelist in his spare time. He won an important literary prize and left for Europe. He had an uncle there. Before, Argentina was full of Europeans, and now everyone wants to escape to Europe.’

‘Did you know him well?’

‘He was like a son to me. I encouraged him to go on writing and studying. What’s better: to be a postman or a writer?’

‘Being a postman is more secure; and anyway, where would writers be without postmen?’

Carvalho does not give him time to be amazed. ‘Do you know he studied Latin? Doesn’t that seem odd to you?’

‘I can see you’re not a writer,’ the personnel manager says, doubly amazed now. ‘What else would he study? Quechua? The only word we get from Quechua is
chinchulines.
Why study Latin? Do you think you can write good Spanish without knowing Latin?’

‘Do you know Latin?’

‘If I did, do you think I’d be here?’

Carvalho cannot be bothered to consider the possible destinies of Miñsana’s bad-tempered intellectual mentor, so he leaves to meet up with Don Vito in the place where they first met.

‘It’s safer to speak here than at home. I think it’s full of microphones,’ says Carvalho.

‘They plant them just for the hell of it. Just to show they can break the rules. Whether they need the bugs or not.’

‘Where have we got to?’

‘Hang on a minute, why are you in such a hurry? Sometimes I think you’re more German than Spanish. You have to give these things time, my friend,’ Don Vito says, dancing a foxtrot with himself.

‘What do we know?’

Don Vito gives in. ‘The topless girl is dead. The novelist postman is in Europe. Enzo Pasticchio is a secondary school teacher trying to win a competition to get a university post. And the kid Mudarra is just that: a kid, a strange kid, the son of an invalid mother, who takes his dog for a walk every night: his dog’s called “Canelo”. The kid is a strange mixture of nobility and sordidness. He’s fair-haired, and moves around elegantly, but he picks his nose even when people he doesn’t know are around.’

He stops when he sees how disgusted Carvalho looks. ‘I can’t bear people who pick their noses in public.’

‘The secondary school teacher gets all over the place. He teaches at school, in a couple of hundred academies, and is obsessed with winning a university post. He’s gone bald from so much scratching his head over getting nowhere. Nothing remarkable there, except...’

‘Except?’

‘Except that Mudarra told me why he quit the Latin classes a few weeks ago. Carmen Lavalle and the professor were alone in his study. The professor leaning over the girl, hands on her shoulders as she concentrated on reading the book in front of her. I suspect that while the prof was giving her advice, he was staring as hard as he could down her neckline in search of the hidden valleys of her breasts. She reads more slowly, warming to Catullus’ emotions:
bebamus mea Lesbia atque amemus...
’

‘Where on earth did you learn that?’

But Don Vito won’t be interrupted. He goes on with his monologue: ‘As Carmen reads Catullus’ love poem, the professor’s hands start to caress her. She pauses, turns her head and glances at the professor with an amused look on her face. “What’s got into you, professor?” “We old men have feelings too!” he says with a sorrowful face. “You mean you have sexual feelings?”’

‘Don Vito, are you making this up?’

‘I’m offering you a scene in three dimensions and two voices. The old professor responds: “Why not? We have sexual needs too. They’re not often satisfied, but we do have them.” Carmen closes the book, stands up and puts her hands on the shoulders of the professor, who is looking away in embarrassment. Carmen lifts his skull-like face towards her. Kisses him on the forehead. Then gives him another passionate kiss full on the mouth. As they draw apart, the professor looks confused, almost stunned. Carmen is smiling, enjoying herself. All of a sudden, Pasticchio and Mudarra appear in the doorway. They’re astonished at what they have seen. Don’t know whether to be horrified or moved. You get the picture?’ Don Vito asks, but does not wait for a reply: ‘Pasticchio is a man of principle. He was in a seminary, he’s got six kids, he’s against the use of condoms. And it goes without saying that all the children are from the same mother.’

‘What about Mudarra?’

‘He’s got no balls. He’s a kid with no balls,’ Don Vito says dismissively, clutching at his own flies.

It has been years since anyone has trimmed the grass borders, cut back the trees, or interfered in the struggle between rats and feral cats, but the skyline of the house – more French than English in style – is still imposing, even though the way of life it once saw has long since gone. Marble stairs lead up to a heavy panelled front door with an unpolished bronze knocker, but Raúl has no need to use it because the door yields to his touch, revealing inside a large hall lined with doors and a pink marble staircase fronted by the statue of a welcoming angel. Hearing the sound of music from behind one of the doors, Raúl walks over and opens it: a llama comes rushing out, closely followed by the cries of a parrot hopping up and down on a perch.