Off Side (23 page)

‘Not thinking of what?’

‘You’re not thinking of doing a hold-up?’

‘You’re talking movie-language.’

‘I mean a robbery … or something like that.’

‘Something like that.’

‘Marta, I’d never have the nerve. If it was just mugging someone, OK. But I haven’t got the nerve for a robbery — I’d be too scared of ending up in prison. It would kill me. I’d be dead within three days. They’d separate us.’

‘You’ve mugged someone, haven’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, it’s something like that.’

‘Mugging someone isn’t going to give us enough money to travel abroad.’

‘It’s something like mugging, but there’s pots of money attached. Come over here.’

She got up from the mattress and hauled him across to the window. The street was cool and busy with the sounds of the late afternoon, and the sun was providing a golden halo for the last flats up calle de Robadors.

‘There it is. Thirty yards away. Right on our doorstep. The old lady’s absolutely loaded, and she let on to me that she keeps it all in the house because she doesn’t trust banks, and probably because she doesn’t want to pay tax on it.’

She left him standing at the window and went to get her bag. When she returned she handed him a key.

‘I made it the other day. It’s a copy of the spare key she keeps in the bread bin in the kitchen. We can go in any time we like and search until we find the money. In the afternoons she goes out for a walk, and none of her guests are in during the daytime, or at least only a useless old invalid who can hardly move out of
his bed. I’ll give him a coffee and a sandwich to keep him happy.’

‘Too easy.’

‘We deserve something to be easy for once. The woman enjoys handing out charity when she thinks people are down on their luck, and she’s decided I’m a poor cow who can’t live without her generosity. She doesn’t need the money. She’s done everything she ever needed to do in life, and now all she does is sit and watch the flashing sign of her dirty boarding house, and wander round the balcony to keep an eye on what’s going on down the street.’

‘Too easy.’

‘I’ve thought it all out. All we have to do is grab the money and run. You can go and steal a car from the other side of town and park it in the parking-lot behind the Boqueria. It’s an open car park, so there’s no one to check who comes and goes. It’s not even two hundred yards from here. We’ll break into her place, take the money, and we’ll just drive till the petrol runs out. Then, with the money we’ll have, everything will be easy.’

‘Too easy.’

‘So easy that even you couldn’t fuck it up.’

‘Supposing things go wrong, though?’

‘What could be worse than this?’

And she invited him to look at her, as bare and wretched as the four walls around them.

‘How about Morocco.’

‘Wherever you like. The desert. Billiards. Silk shirts. Give me your hand. Reach out of the window.’

And he did. A hand reaching out to the afternoon. Like a claw.

His last conversation with Charo had left him feeling uneasy. Once again his soul was making its presence felt, like a tumour which always seemed to reveal his darker side. The day’s business had driven the problem of Bromide clean out of his head, and
all of a sudden he had an image of Charo and Bromide united in a moment of solidarity which he didn’t recognize, and which in part repelled him. He was disturbed by a sense of something approaching a guilty conscience, and before going to see the shoeshine he tried to mend his bridges with Charo. Her voice was sad but affectionate at the other end of the line. When he suggested that they should go out together for a meal, her sadness gave way to cheerfulness, and they arranged to meet at Casa Isidro in calle de les Flors, a few yards from the Gothic surprise of the church of Sant Pau del Camp. Charo arrived dressed and made up for a night out, but with a touch too much Eau de Rochas about her, which threatened to ruin the delicate aroma of what they were about to eat. It was this that decided him to sit facing her, instead of next to her as Charo would have preferred. To make up for this he let her elaborate on the long voyage of analysis, tests, consultations and medical opinions on which she had embarked with Bromide.

‘You can’t imagine the terrible state of the health service these days, Pepe. When was the last time you went to the doctor’s?’

‘When that Siamese took a pot shot at me.’

‘Don’t remind me, Pepe — it gives me the creeps even thinking about it.’

Charo was a mature, goodlooking woman. She was ageing with dignity, and something in him approaching tenderness was interrupted by the timely arrival of the menu in the hands of Isidro and Montserrat, the couple who ran the restaurant which Carvalho frequented as a gourmet and a connoisseur. When Carvalho asked disingenuously, ‘What’s new today?’ they replied without batting an eyelid that they had foie gras with a green lentil dressing, a hors d’oeuvres of foie gras, sweetbreads with lime, salt codfish au gratin with garlic, farcellets of cabbage stuffed with lobster and saffron,
lubina à la ciboulette
, sole with mulberry, and
riz de veau
. They concluded their exposition of the day’s attractions, unaware of the profound disturbance which they had
occasioned in Carvalho’s spirit and his unease at being faced with so many choices and the necessity of having to decide.

‘I’ll have a bit of everything,’ he said, ironically.

Unfortunately Isidro took him literally and was about to go and place the order. Carvalho had to revert to linear language to disabuse him. Charo stayed on familiar territory: a hors d’oeuvre of foie gras, and sole with mulberry, and Carvalho opted for the foie gras with green lentils, followed by the
riz de veau
.

‘When Bromide was younger, he used to complain that God had left men very poorly equipped to deal with all the beautiful women in the world. I tend to feel the same nowadays about cooking. I’ll never live long enough to try everything I want to try.’

‘Your problem is that you’re greedy, Pepe.’

‘My problem is insatiable curiosity. I have the curiosity of the voyeur who has a sense that there are some things that he’s never going to see.’

‘Some people might say you’re getting old.’

‘People don’t know the meaning of the word nowadays. The only people who know what the word means are people who are old already, and I don’t feel that I’m old yet. Imagine it! They’ve even succeeded in disappearing the word out of the language. These days they talk about “senior citizens”. It reminds me of the years under Franco, when workers had to be called “producers”. To be a “worker” was politically obscene and dangerous. These days, to be “old” is biologically obscene and dangerous.’

‘Don’t depress me more than I am already, Pepe. Come on, cheer up and have a drink.’

Charo always made him nervous when she had a few drinks inside her.

‘This is a lovely wine, Pepe. Voluptuous.’

‘What’s the matter with Bromide?’

‘Don’t, Pepe, you’re going to start me crying. Leave it till the end of the meal. What’s for dessert, Pepe?’

‘Why not profiteroles, or orange terrine au Grand Marnier.’

‘In that case, no. Let’s talk about Bromide now, because I’m looking forward to this meal, and I want to be in a good mood to enjoy the sweet.’

‘If we’re going to talk about Bromide’s problems, maybe we’d best do it with the foie gras!’

‘That’s not funny, Pepe. Stop it — you’ll put me right off my food. You know, it was ever so sad at the hospital … Have you ever seen Bromide’s underwear?’

‘No.’

‘Well, it never even occurred to me to tell him … The first day, when I took him for his X-ray, or abdominal radiography, or whatever they call it, I’m telling you, Pepe, when the poor thing stood there in his underpants I didn’t know which way to turn. He had the kind of pants that my father used to wear. They were full of holes, with urine stains in the front. And his vest looked like a moth-eaten old floor-cloth. So I made sure that the nurse was in earshot, and I said: “For goodness sake — couldn’t you have put clean underwear on?” And he got all in a temper, Pepe, and said that all this stuff about clean underwear was nonsense, and that we come into this world naked, and we go out naked, and that during the Russian campaign they used to wear newspaper next to their skin instead of underwear, and that Franco set up the Health Service so that workers could go to the doctor’s looking how the hell they wanted. And he said the bit about Franco when the nurse was in the room, and the woman gave him a really dirty look. I thought to myself: “Charo, this woman’s going to kill him,” and I gave her a smile as if to say that Bromide was a bit crazy. I started telling him off for talking like that, and the nurse looked at me and asked if he was my father, and I felt ashamed to say that Bromide was my father, with his underwear looking so dirty, so I said that he wasn’t, but I said it a bit too quickly, and Bromide noticed, and he looked even more miserable, Pepe, and I felt a lump coming in my throat. I felt so annoyed with myself
that I added: “But it’s as if he was.” And when he heard that he started getting all emotional.’

Carvalho became aware that the delivery of foie gras and green lentils that he’d loaded carefully on to his fork had coagulated as it hung in mid-air. He imagined the scene in the fulness of its grisly detail and its terminal sadness, and he cleared his throat in order to make way for the food.

‘What about his health, though?’

‘Looks bad, Pepe.’

‘What sort of bad?’

‘You name it, he’s got it. Anaemia, cirrhosis, one kidney not working properly, and that’s not the end of it.’

‘In that case, maybe they’d best not carry on looking. They’ll probably end up discovering that he’s pregnant.’

Charo gave such a snort of laughter that part of what she had in her mouth ended up back on her plate, and this made her laugh even louder, so that by the end the whole restaurant was staring at her.

‘I’m sorry, Pepe. I can’t stop!’

Carvalho opted for total absorption in his meal, and Charo conducted a secret dialogue with herself until she finally subsided into a state of mild hiccups, and tears which initially were the aftermath of the laughter but then turned into tears for Bromide.

‘It’s unfair, the way people are left on their own when they get old.’

‘If we had to make a list of everything that’s unfair in this world, I’m sure we could find worse. Anyway, you went along to lend a hand; Biscuter has offered to help when we need him; and there’s me too.’

‘He’s going to die, Pepe.’

‘No.’

It was a dry, irrational ‘no’, as if the idea that Bromide might die was an act of violence on his very being. For a moment he tried to imagine his emotional world without Bromide in it, but
he couldn’t. It was inconceivable that one day he would go looking for Bromide in the bowels of the city and not find him. Bromide was like a little insect that lurked in the dirtiest cracks of the city of Barcelona, an insect that was fragile, soft-hearted and wise.

‘The hell he’s going to die.’

‘Don’t take it like that, Pepe. We all have to die one day, and Bromide is ever so ill. He says it’s because of all the muck that we’re forced to eat and drink. You know his mania about how the council’s putting bromides into everyone’s tap water so that people don’t screw so much. Now he’s saying that they’re poisoning everything so that people start popping off, and that will solve their unemployment problem. He says that this was all arranged when Reagan met Gorbachev. And what we need is another general like Muñoz Grandes, to stop people stepping out of line …’

‘In other words, the same old story. Listen. Let’s finish with Bromide for the moment, because I’m not going to enjoy my food otherwise. Leave it for the coffee. Instead of a glass of Calvados, I’ll ask for a glass of mineral water and we can talk about what we can do for him.’

‘I’d put him in a home.’

‘Bromide? In a home?’

‘Somewhere where they can look after him. He can’t be expected to end his days sitting on his shoeshine box, or dragged up an alley somewhere.’

‘He’s not a baby, and he’s not mad either. Let him decide. But I’m telling you, once they decide to put him in a home it’ll be the death of him. It’s only breathing the shit in the barrios that keeps him alive.’

‘And the poor man was so confused. He doesn’t seem to know what’s what any more. He says he doesn’t understand this city … it isn’t what it used to be … something’s happened and he doesn’t know what it is. He says once it was like a village, with its prostitutes and pimps and criminals, but now it’s full of all kinds of stainless-steel lowlife.’

Stainless-steel lowlife, and probably connected up with a centralized data bank on stainless-steel lowlife, via tiny cybernetic wires made of nothingness spiked with cruelty. He too had felt fear recently, on several occasions, as if he had been forced finally to accept that he was no longer the measure of his external world, or even of his internal world, but just a precarious survivor.

‘This food’s delicious, Pepe. Isidro, my compliments to the
maître d
‘.’

Carvalho was always intensely irritated by Charo’s inability to distinguish between the cook and the
maître d
‘, particularly when she started complimenting restaurateurs as if she was some Biscuter, talking man to man. Since Isidro was both the
maître
and the owner of the establishment, he bowed slightly and mentally complimented himself.

‘But he
is
the
maître
, Charo.’

‘I’ll never learn. I always think that the
maître
is the one with the big white hat. Isn’t the
maître
the one who counts?’

More than fifteen years spent absorbing gastronomic culture, and Charo still couldn’t tell the difference between a
maître
and a cook.

‘There’s a call for you, sir.’

Carvalho seized this opportunity to beat a retreat. It was Biscuter. He had an urgent message for him. Camps O’Shea had called, and he was to contact him immediately.

‘He was very insistent … 
immediately
…’