Tattoo (3 page)

Once the fire was burning brightly and warmly, Carvalho went to the kitchen and laid out everything he had bought in the order he would need it to cook his meal. The first thing was to go down to his wine cellar. He had had the partition between two walls knocked down, which left the soil and rock of the mountainside exposed. In it he had dug a small cave, where the dusty sides of wine bottles gleamed dully by the light of an almost infrared bulb. Carvalho looked along the row of whites, and eventually chose a Fefiñanes that was one of the few Spanish wines in his selection. Clutching the Fefiñanes in one hand, he was tempted by a Blanc de blancs from Bordeaux. But his dinner was not even worthy of this second-rank great wine from France. Each time he came down to his cellar, he carefully picked up and looked at one of the three bottles of Sauternes that he was storing for his Christmas seafood feast. Sauternes were his favourite white wine, apart from the incomparable Pouilly-Fuissé, which in his opinion ought to be reserved exclusively for the last wishes of intelligent gourmets down on their luck. He sighed, still clutching his Fefiñanes, and climbed back up to
the kitchen. He cleaned the fish and peeled the prawns, then boiled the fish bones and the pink shells together with an onion, a tomato, some cloves of garlic, a hot pepper and strips of celery and leek. This liquid was essential for Carvalho’s
caldeirada
. While he was gently bringing it to the boil, he fried some tomato, onion and more peppers. As soon as the mixture started to thicken, he poured it over some potatoes. Then in a pot he placed first the prawns, then the monkfish and finally the hake. The fish took on colour and added their juices to the mixture. Then Carvalho poured in a cup of the strong fish broth. Ten minutes later, the
caldeirada
was done.

Carvalho laid the table in front of the fire and ate straight from the pot. The chilled Fefiñanes, though, had to be drunk from a tall, elegant wineglass. Each wine had to have its own special glass. Carvalho did not usually follow style diktats, but this was one he strictly adhered to.

After his meal he drank a cup of the weak American coffee he had learned to prepare in San Francisco, and lit up a Montecristo No. 1. He sprawled across two sofas so that he could get completely horizontal, and lay with cigar in one hand and coffee in the other, gazing dreamily at the flames wavering as they disappeared up into the sooty heights of the chimney. He was imagining the body of a young, blond man, ‘bold and blond as beer’, according to the song. A man capable of having that motto tattooed on his back:
Born to raise hell in hell
. Among the stories about tattoos he could recall, one stood out: the poor crook who had put
Death to all cops
on his chest. He had paid dearly for this open declaration of principles, spending almost thirty years in jail alternately for petty crimes and for being a vagrant. Looking at El Madriles’ tattoo had become a favourite pastime in all the police stations of Spain.

‘Come on, Madriles, let’s have a look at it.’

‘I swear it was nothing more than a mistake, Inspector, sir. I was drunk when it occurred to me. The maestro who tattooed me warned me at the time: Madriles, it’ll only bring you trouble.’

‘So another spot of bother won’t matter much. Go on, Madriles, take your shirt off.’

The tattooist. Somebody must have given the young man ‘as bold and blond as beer’ that tattoo. There weren’t many experts left, but was this a professional tattoo, or one out of a Parisian drugstore, the sort young girls went in for when they wanted to leave a mark on their flesh and in their minds. This one must have been done by a professional. If not, the same water that had given the fishes the time they needed to gorge themselves on the dead man’s face would have washed away the motto by now, and the body would have emerged from the sea not only stripped bare by death, but rendered completely anonymous – unless his fingerprints were in police records somewhere. His ID card, thought Carvalho. Of course they would be in the police records. He pondered on a possible link between the dead man and his client. There must be some connection between them. Carvalho tried to brush aside this hypothesis. He knew from experience that the worst thing to do in any investigation was to start from a hypothesis. That can only restrict the approach to the truth, and sometimes even distort it.

By the time he had finished his first litre of coffee for the night, the fire was crackling loudly and had turned the entire room into the backdrop for its wild but fettered dancing. Carvalho was hot; he stripped to his underpants. This lasted only a moment, just long enough for him to identify his own white body with that of the corpse: he shuddered, and rushed to get the protection of a second skin, his pyjama jacket.

H
e woke when he was tired of sleeping. Through the shutters of the half-open window he could hear the birds chattering among themselves about how bright and hot the day was. He looked out of the window and saw that everything was where it ought to be: the sky was up, the earth down. The electric heater and the Italian coffee-making machine helped him recover a sense of self. The shower and the coffee he drank forced him to recognise the here and now, and the idea that he had work to do that would help him get through another day: not that he had any better notion of what to do with it.

His cleaning woman was due that afternoon, so Carvalho made a rapid check to make sure there was nothing visible that Máxima should not see. It was while he was doing this that he realised he had not even looked at his post. He peered at the envelopes and divided the letters into those that were worth reading and those that were not. Almost all of it was junk mail, except for two items: one was from the savings bank, the other from his uncle in Galicia. Carvalho began with the letter from the bank. It was a current account statement: a hundred and seventy-two thousand pesetas. He felt in his jacket pocket for the fifty thousand Don Ramón had given him, and briefly wondered whether it would be better to deposit it in his current account or in his savings book. He looked for the book in a small money box he
kept in the bottom drawer of a writing desk. Savings: three hundred and fifty thousand pesetas. Together with what he had in his current account, that made a total of almost half a million pesetas. After ten years’ work, that was neither good nor bad. It simply meant that after another ten he should have reached a million, and would not die of poverty in his old age.

Carvalho decided to put the money into his savings account. Somehow money in a current account is always more ephemeral, more at threat from sudden splurges courtesy of a handy chequebook. It would be safer in his savings account. He counted the fifty banknotes again, then spread them out on the table like a gangster showing off. He picked them up one by one, stacked them in a careful pile, and fanned the air with them. After that, he put the notes in an envelope and stashed it away with his savings book. Next came the letter from his native village. His father’s younger brother had written to him in his almost illegible handwriting, with strange gaps between syllables and sudden bursts of high-flown rhetoric which made the meaning even more obscure.

Following a lengthy introduction covering health matters and memories of his father, Carvalho’s uncle painted a not unskilful picture of arable despair: the harvests had failed. Then it was the turn of the unfortunate livestock: one of his cows had died after eating some grass it shouldn’t have, or perhaps, who could tell, owing to poison administered by one of his neighbours. As if all this weren’t bad enough, his wife was ill and he had sent her to Guitiriz to take the waters. A fortune! If Carvalho’s father had been alive, he would surely have responded to such a dramatic situation, and so he and his wife were wondering whether he could perhaps see his way to helping out a bit, only if he could, of course,
and without wishing to cause him problems of any kind. By the way, he was sending a dozen sausages, two cheeses and a bottle of brandy by a slow but sure delivery man.

Carvalho let out a string of curses in Galician against families and mothers who would have them. He thought about writing a tough reply in which he told his uncle straight out about how stupid his father had been to share the inheritance with them, to help them as much as he could throughout his life, and to die with scarcely anything to his name. And all because he had gone off first to Cuba and then to Madrid and Barcelona, which meant the rest of the family saw him as the black sheep.

But he did not do it. Instead, he scrawled a few lines telling them he was sending a money order for five thousand pesetas. He reckoned his father would have done the same, and that in so doing he was in some way reincarnating the poor old man. Carvalho’s eyes grew misty when he remembered seeing him laid out cold and shrunken on the slab in the mortuary at a Barcelona hospital after an exhausting journey back from San Francisco. This was the second five thousand pesetas his father had cost him, the second cow he helped his uncles pay for in posthumous honour of him.

Carvalho had a lot to do before he met Bromuro again, almost all of it connected to his Galician roots. He drove quickly down the highway from Vallvidrera, deposited the money at the branch on Carlos III, then sent the money order from the post office in Avenida Madrid. By the end of half an hour, he was at peace with himself and with his future.

H
e left his red Seat coupé in the car park in Villa de Madrid square. He liked to park his car near the top of the Rambla so that he could stroll down it to Charo’s neighbourhood. Carvalho walked in a leisurely way under the plane trees, stopping now and then to allow himself to be distracted by the most unlikely attractions. Patches of white and yellow sunlight filtered through the leaves of the trees on to the rare morning passers-by. Carvalho walked under the arcades of Plaza Real and the eighteenth-century atmosphere gave him an immediate sense of peace and harmony. He headed for a wide porch and walked up some marble steps surrounded by unpolished wood. A little old man in a chequered apron appeared at a door also made of heavy wood that was varnished a chocolate colour. When he saw it was Carvalho he opened the door and ushered him along a corridor lined with wallpaper featuring scenes from Pompeii. They soon reached a dining room done out in a vaguely English style, full of small plaster statues, ships in bottles and a display of faded brown family photographs in front of which two wavering candles floated in bowls. The room smelt of wax and boiled cabbage, and reminded Carvalho of childhood summer holidays spent in Souto in Galicia, with cows’ muzzles peering directly into the family dining room from their barn next door.

Don Evaristo Tourón motioned to him to sit down, and
immediately launched into gossipy memories about their native region. Carvalho was afraid he was in for another exhausting and impossibly complicated story about the wolves on Monte Negro which caused havoc throughout San Juan de Muro and sometimes even got as far as Pacios in their pursuit of Manolo the tailor’s sheep.

‘I came to talk to you about tattoos, Don Evaristo.’

‘Oh, I see. You want to get a tattoo. I don’t do them any more. You have to have a steady hand. A steady hand and the desire to do it. Nobody ever became a good tattooist if they did not enjoy doing them.’

Don Evaristo stood up to get a photo album out of a drawer in the sideboard. It showed his greatest professional triumphs.

‘Look. Here’s one I did for a man from El Ferrol. A fisherman on the cod trawlers. Look at this.’

The tattoo was a leafy tree that completely covered the man’s chest. Instead of fruit hanging from its branches there were women’s bodies. In another photo, an apeman was showing his flexed biceps with a tattoo of the statue to Columbus in Barcelona, and the motto:
Merche, I’ll find you wherever you hide
. A third was of a teenager proudly mooning at the camera. Don Evaristo had engraved on his buttocks:
Exit only; no way in
. Don Evaristo sighed as he regretted yet again not having photographed the tattooed penis of a famous pickpocket. On the foreskin he had tattooed a cat. When it was pulled back, a mouse appeared on the tip.

‘I’m telling you, Pepiño, I sweated as much blood as I spilt over that one. And you should have heard him howl. But he had balls all right.’

Carvalho asked him whether anyone was still in business.

‘I tried to create a school here. But I failed. Who was it that used to want a tattoo? Sailors and crooks. Sailors aren’t what they used to be, and the crooks don’t want tattoos any more because they can identify them. I had an apprentice by the name of del Clot who was good. But he was a queer, and in that line of business he was constantly being threatened. The only one left now is a guy from Murcia. He lives up near the park. But there aren’t many more in Barcelona. Tangiers: there are still a few there. And in Morocco in general. And some of the northern ports. Not Hamburg. Hamburg’s got a big reputation, but there’s nothing there. Rotterdam before the war. It had good tattooists then, very good ones.’

Carvalho asked him whether he had heard of the tattoo on the dead man’s back.

‘That sounds interesting. Before the war you used to get really educated people wanting tattoos. Once a kid from a good family who was in the Spanish Legion came to see me. He asked me to tattoo a motto in French for him.’

The old man went over to the sideboard again and came back with a notepad. In it he had written the best mottos he had come across.

‘What does it say there, Pepiño?’

‘
Ah Dieu! Que la guerre est jolie/avec ses chants, ses longs loisirs
.’

‘That’s right. He told me it was by a very good poet.’

Carvalho asked for the address of the tattooist who lived near Ciudadela Park. The old man could not remember the address, but drew him a map.

‘You can’t miss it. Besides, he’s unmistakable. He’s got a gammy leg and weighs more than a hundred kilos.’

Carvalho escaped as quickly as he could from the old man’s effusive farewells.