The Angst-Ridden Executive (6 page)

‘I was on the point of ringing you, but idleness got the better of me and I went to eat on my own.’

‘You’re too kind. And I suppose you fancy a siesta now. . .’

‘What else?’

‘Well I’ve just been to the hairdresser’s and I don’t want you messing up my hair.’

‘Don’t you work on hair-do days?’

‘With my clients I wear a wig. Dark brown on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Blonde on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. I’ll put one on, if you like.’

‘No.’

Charo’s annoyance turned to good humour. She took Carvalho’s head and kissed him on the lips.

‘Poor dear. . . wicked Charo was going to deny him his siesta. . . Come, my darling, come. . . !’

Charo went off down the corridor, stripping as she went, and Carvalho’s nerves were on edge as he watched the sun of her arse quivering with each step she took. The half-light of the bedroom could not hide the richness of her tanned skin—browned under sun and sunlamps—and her lazy nipples and a tongue which drove itself between Carvalho’s teeth like a karate blow. Charo removed his clothes as if they were the wrappings of some precious gift, and settled herself on his penis while at the same time rubbing his chest with a cheek that was surprising in its smoothness. They moved towards the bedroom, slipping down the corridor together, but slowly, to enjoy the moment of distance and delay. Once in bed, Carvalho sprawled on his back and contemplated the inner passions and virginal blushes that showed in Charo’s face. In the floating continuity of their efforts and their caresses, the four walls of the room receded into nothingness, the bond between their sexes became as of steel, and the entire expressive capacities of their bodies became concentrated in their lips and tongues. Lubricated by each other’s juices, they thrashed about and ended up scattered, like an open book, held together by hinges of arms and legs. The peace of the ceiling descended on Carvalho as his hand touched Charo’s breasts in a penultimate sign of solidarity, an ember of an intense communication that was now setting, like a late evening sun.

Charo respected Carvalho’s right to first use of the bathroom, and was not surprised that he felt a sudden urge to flee after making love. As if he had to escape from the scene of a crime.

‘I’ll ring you, ‘ Carvalho shouted as he pulled on his shoes, while from the other side of the door there came the drumming of the shower water. He appreciated the cooler air of the passageway that led him to the fridge, where a bottle of chilled champagne awaited him. He drank one glass greedily and felt the prickling round his gums as the cool, blond liquid reached deep into his psyche. Out in the hallway he rang Marcos Nuñez, and they made an arrangement to meet at El Sot at midnight.

‘When you see fifteen or twenty people listening to someone and looking simultaneously amused and bored, that’s where you’ll find me. You can be sure that I’ll be the one speaking.’

The street was shared between delivery vans and ageing prostitutes in angora wool sweaters. One hand clutching a handbag from which years of sweat had removed the gloss, and the other giving a come-hither gesture, or using a nail to dislodge a piece of stewing steak lodged between her incisor and first molar. This same finger served to touch up her lipstick, or to empty her ear of scurf, of things that itch, and of old ear wax. The van boys divide their time between a lazy coming and going to grocery stores and cavernous bars and the occasional question to the prostitutes:

‘How come you’ve got such big tits, granny?’

‘Because your dad used to suck them.’

A drunk is calculating the shortest distance between the roadway and the pavement. Schoolchildren are returning from some mezzanine school where the toilets perfume the whole environment and the children’s horizons begin and end with an internal patio divided between the section for the dustbins, a playground for rats and cats, and a number of inside passageways where the washing lines seem to be perennially full. Pots of geraniums on rickety balconies; the occasional carnation; cages containing thin, nervous budgerigars; and butane gas bottles. Notices advertising the services of midwives and chiropodists. An office of the leftwing PSUC. Maite’s hairdresser’s. A vile smell of frying oil: squid
á la romana
, fried seafood, spicy potatoes, roast lambs’ heads, sweetbreads, tripe, rabbit thighs, watery eyes and varicose veins. But Carvalho knew these people and their ways. They made him feel alive, and he wouldn’t have changed them for the world, even though at night he preferred to flee the defeated city and make for the pinewood heights. There was nothing to beat the backstreets and alleyways that give onto the Ramblas—tributaries feeding into a river which carries the biology and the history of a city, of the entire world.

Biscuter was making a potato tortilla.

‘I’m doing it the way you like it, boss. With a bit of onion and a touch of garlic and parsley.

Biscuter improvised an eating space on Carvalho’s office desk, and the detective applied his mind to the quarter of tortilla filling his plate. Biscuter sat in front of him, tucking into another quarter and waiting for some word of appreciation.

‘You can’t say that it hasn’t turned out well, eh, chief? If you’re still hungry I’ve made you a bit of brain paté with
ratatouille
. It’s good, isn’t it, boss?’

‘True.’

‘God, you’re stingy, boss. I think it’s brilliant. And wait till you taste the
ratatouille
. It’s a treat! Oh—I forgot. There was a phone call from Pedro Parra—the “colonel”, he called himself. He said: “Don’t forget, tell him that the ‘colonel’ rang. Tell him he’ll have what he was looking for tomorrow, if he calls in at the bank.” And there’s a telegram too. I didn’t open it.’

‘Am arriving Barcelona Wednesday. Rhomberg.’

‘Do me a bit of the paté.’

‘I suppose you won’t need any supper after this, eh, boss? You eat like a pig, and you still manage to stay trim. But it all goes into your blood, you know, and you end up with cholesterol…’

‘I’m surrounded by doctors! First Bromide, and now you! Stop worrying about the cholesterol and get on with your food.’

‘I was only saying it for your own good.’

‘And will you be eating again after this little snack?’

‘Of course. The left-overs will do fine for my supper. Don’t know what’s up with me, boss. I’m feeling depressed. I’m sleeping badly. I’ve been remembering my mother.’

Biscuter dried his eyes with his serviette, but they were still brimming with tears which threatened to spill into the green and red of the
ratatouille
.

‘Find yourself a girlfriend, Biscuter. Or a prostitute. Or have a wank every now and then. You’ll find it does wonders.’

‘You say find a prostitute, but that’s not so easy. They just treat me as a joke. When they say, “Come on, baldy, pull your willy out so that I can give it a wash,” I just want to laugh. And as for wanking, as you put it, I’m at it nonstop. First with one hand, then with the other. I even use the numb-hand system. I go to bed and lie down on top of my hand, so as to cut off the circulation, and it goes all numb. Then it feels not like my hand at all, but like something else . . .’

‘Have you ever tried it with a piece of raw meat?’

‘No.’

‘You’ve missed something.’

With one eye on Biscuter and the other on Rhomberg’s telegram, Carvalho reached for the phone. This was the signal for Biscuter to clear the table. An inexplicable sense of misgiving prevented Carvalho from informing Jauma’s widow of Dieter Rhomberg’s unexpected resurrection.

To arrive at a bar where the principal spectacle is the clientele, and to have to go down the stairs to centre-stage, tends to endow your shoulders with the stance of the lead actor in a New York movie, and your legs with the tension of a tightrope walker. Up until two in the morning the place is populated by two or three couples trying to escape bachelorhood or married life. From two onwards it’s taken over by mainstream actors from the fringe theatre and fringe actors from the mainstream, not to mention executives with a smattering of culture and sensibility, and people who would be film directors if the film industry wasn’t such an industry, and writers of protest songs and the ubiquitous political cartoonist, and so on.

‘To live in Barcelona is to live in Europe!’

A poet and ex-prisoner seeking in El Sot a double life that will give him back part of the twenty-five years spent in prison; an extremely young official of the workers’ commissions, with grey eyes; organizational and petitional ladies of the local Left; professional night-owls of more than thirty years’ standing, ever hoping for that one night in which everything will prove possible; a homosexual novelist; a concrete poet who has read Trotsky; a chairman of political round-table discussions, the owner of just the right magic gesture to make sure people take it in turns to speak, and who can conjure up a synthesis where there wasn’t even a thesis to start with; the occasional sensitive intellectual who turns up in the hopes of
l’amour fou
something even hardened regulars of the place have never achieved; ex-politicos still into things more or less ethical; young islanders from one or other of the islands; wild and soon-to-be-rich youth; Uruguayans fleeing the terror in Uruguay; Chileans fleeing the terror in Chile; Argentinians fleeing successive terrors in Argentina; one of Carillo’s ten right-hand men; an almost young ex-industrial engineer now publishing independent and radical-Marxist thinkers; a few leftovers of the 1940s, nourished on a diet of Stefan Zweig; puritan left-wing cadres intent on coming into contact with the decadent and definitely scandalous Barcelona Left for just one night. Cocktails somewhere between the low level of a mediocre bar in Manhattan and the abysmal level of Barcelona cocktail bars. A space that is divided into functional seating areas with differing degrees of intimacy, and a bar where people strike up conversations with the owner and the bartenders with a degree of camaraderie that reflects a nightly familiarity and the certainty that afterwards there will be a whole day to wash away its after-taste.

On this particular night the gathering around Marcos Nuñez was only ten strong, and the ageing youth was holding forth with his habitual sibylline style and a narrative rhythm acquired in his university days. A tone which is capable of imbuing even the story of a broken-down bus with sublime nostalgia, or firing wicked irony into the description of a Spanish sausage. Nuñez had been a pioneer in the reconstruction of the Left in Barcelona University during the nineteen fifties. After torture, and spells in prison, he had fled to France, where he had embarked on a life that would have made him ideal material for the bureaucracy of his own party, or a doctorate in social science and an assured place in a future democratic Spain. Too cynical to be a bureaucrat and too apathetic to be an academic, he plumped for the role of an onlooker, a role which he exercised with a dedication that was half-hearted only in appearance. Nuñez was one of the old guard, and he remained attached to the vision of moral renewal held by the Left when Franco was alive. His capacity for friendship was immense, in the giving and the taking alike, both of which he executed with a hint of sadism; he was given to verbal aggression when describing friends or enemies, and there was a certain personal angst in his frenetic adjectival acrobatics.

Carvalho went down the last of the stairs separating him from the gathering, and waited in the hope that during one of his leisurely eyebrow raisings Marcos Nuñez would raise at least one eye sufficiently to notice his presence. Some of the faces were familiar to him from his university days, and he even managed to put names to them with a fair degree of success. He was aware that people were trying to work out who he was. Carvalho came closer to the group and stopped when his eyes met those of Nuñez. He guessed that he was about to invite him to join the group, and pre-empted the invitation by indicating that they needed to speak in private. Nuñez did not break off his discourse immediately; he first cropped its wings and then killed it with a few well-turned phrases which caused a lady equipped with the large eyes of a nocturnal animal to laugh.

‘You’re a cynic, and you like people telling you so.’

‘Me? A cynic? I’m such a simple soul that you could twist me round your little finger.’

Nuñez got up and followed Carvalho to an adjoining room in which two married couples were drinking double scotch with ice but no water, a gin and tonic, and a vodka and orange.

‘You seem to keep yourself amused.’

‘If I keep myself amused I don’t get bored. I see it as preventive medicine.’

‘I was wondering whether you could help me with an inquiry. I’ve been trying to track down a man who was an inspector for Petnay—a friend of Antonio Jauma—Dieter Rhomberg. Do you know him?’

‘I know the name. Jauma used to say that he had the biggest penis in the world.’

‘The day before yesterday he was in San Francisco. But then, this morning, they told me that he’d disappeared two months ago, and that his whereabouts were unknown.’

‘Are you sure he was in San Francisco?’

‘A voice told me, “He’s gone for dinner at the Fairmont, and he’ll be back later.” Then, the day after, another voice told me that he’d gone on leave and disappeared. Anyway, you’ve hardly told me anything about Jauma’s life and habits. What sort of people did he mix with?’

‘In part old friends from the university, particularly the ones who had achieved a social status similar to his own. Not because this was what Jauma particularly wanted, but because circumstances dictated it. Of those of us who haven’t made it, only I and one other ex-comrade still have dealings with him.’

‘As friends? Or politically?’

‘Jauma’s only remaining link with politics was financial. He used to contribute to Party funds. Occasionally we would discuss things to do with the unions and the labour movement. He didn’t want problems with his workers, and he used to ask our advice. The last political talk we had together was when the embryo of new organizations began appearing in his firm, operating outside the Comisiones Obreras. Anarchists for the most part.