The Skating Rink (2 page)

Gaspar Heredia:

The campground was called Stella Maris

The campground was called Stella Maris (a name reminiscent of
rooming houses) and it was a place where there weren’t too many rules, or
too many fights and robberies. It was frequented by working-class families
from Barcelona and young people of modest means from France, Holland, Italy
and Germany. The combination was sometimes explosive and would have blown up
in my face for sure if I hadn’t immediately adopted El Carajillo’s golden
rule, which consisted basically of letting them kill each other. His harsh
way of putting it, which struck me as funny at first, then disturbing,
didn’t reflect a contemptuous attitude to the clients; on the contrary, it
sprang from a profound respect for their right of self-determination. El
Carajillo was popular, as I soon found out, especially with the Spaniards
and various foreign families who came back to Z year after year for their
summer holidays. In the course of his one, protracted round of the
campground, he was continually invited into campers and tents, where he was
always offered something to help him while away the night: a drink, a slice
of cake or a porn magazine. As if he needed any help! By three in the
morning the old man was drunk as a skunk and you could hear him snoring from
the street. Round about then, calm descended on the tents, and it was
pleasant to walk down the campground’s narrow graveled alleys, with my
flashlight switched off and nothing to do but listen to the sound of my own
footsteps. Before setting off on my round I’d sit on the wooden bench by the
main gate talking with El Carajillo while the sleepless and the revelers
went in and out bidding us good night. Sometimes we had to carry a drunk to
his tent. El Carajillo led the way because he always knew where each person
was camped, and I followed with the client on my back. Occasionally we got
tips for this and other services, but usually we weren’t even thanked. At
first I tried to stay awake all night. Then I followed El Carajillo’s
example. We retired to the office, switched off the lights and settled down,
each in a leather armchair. The office was a prefabricated box with two
glass walls, one facing the entrance, the other facing the swimming pool, so
it was easy to keep a more or less effective watch from inside. The power
for the whole campground often failed, and I was the one who had to go into
the Outer Darkness and solve the problem; not that it was really dangerous,
but in the little hut where the fuses were, you had to squeeze past a whole
lot of dangling wires. There were also spiders and all sorts of insects. The
buzz of electricity! The campers, whose television viewing had been
interrupted by the blackout, applauded when the lights came back on.
Occasionally, but not very often, the
guardia civil
came by. El
Carajillo dealt with them; he laughed at their jokes, and invited them in,
but they never got out of the car. Apparently, they could drink for free at
the Stella Maris bar, but I never saw them there. Occasionally the police
would put in an appearance. The national or the town police. Routine visits.
They didn’t even acknowledge my presence, which was just as well. And when
they turned up I often found a pretext to go and do a round of the
campground. I remember one night the
guardia civil
came looking for
two women from Zaragoza who had arrived that day. We said they weren’t
there. When they had gone, El Carajillo looked at me and said: Let the poor
girls sleep in peace. It was all the same to me. The next night El Carajillo
warned them and they cleared out as fast as they could. I didn’t ask for
explanations. Each morning, as day was breaking, I would go the beach. It’s
the best time: the sand is clean, as if freshly combed, and there are no
tourists, just fishing boats pulling in their nets. I’d take off my clothes,
go for a swim and return to the campground, picking my way through the
reeds. By the time I got back to reception, El Carajillo had usually woken
up and opened the windows to air the office. We’d sit down on the bench out
front, raise the entrance barrier, and talk, usually about the weather.
Cloudy, sultry, mild, breezy, overcast, rainy, sunny,
hot . . . For some reason that I never discovered, El
Carajillo was obsessed with the weather. Not at night, though. At night his
favorite topic was war, specifically the final years of the Spanish Civil
War. The story was always the same, with minor variations: a group of
Republican soldiers, armed with hand grenades, was advancing toward a tank
formation. The tanks opened fire; the soldiers flattened themselves on the
ground, and after a few moments began to advance again. Again the tanks
sprayed the squad with machine-gun fire, the soldiers dropped to the ground,
and then resumed their advance; after the fourth or fifth repetition there
was a new and terrifying development: the tanks, which had been standing
still until then, began to move toward the soldiers. Two out of three
times he told the story, El Carajillo’s face went red at this point, as if
he was suffocating, and he began to cry. What happened then? Some soldiers
turned and ran, others kept going toward the tanks, and most of them were
cut down screaming and cursing. Sometimes, if the story lasted a bit longer,
I got a glimpse of one or two tanks burning amidst the dead bodies and the
chaos. Shit-scared, on they went. Shit-scared, who needs legs? It was never
clear which side El Carajillo had fought on, and I never asked him. Maybe it
was all made up; there weren’t many tanks in the Spanish Civil War. In
Barcelona I met an old butcher in the Boquería market who swore he had been
in a trench less than two yards away from Marshall Tito. He wasn’t a liar,
but as far as I know Tito was never in Spain. So how the hell did he turn up
in the butcher’s memory? A mystery. After drying his tears, El Carajillo
went on drinking as if nothing had happened, or proposed a game of three
coin. With a bit of practice I became an expert. Three of yours, three with
what you’re holding, two and one of yours makes three, one and what you’re
holding makes three, my three, your three, and the one-eyed man has three as
well; three, all done! There were always some night owls among the campers
who’d come and join in, city folk from Barcelona who couldn’t sleep because
of the silence, or older guys who were spending the summer months with their
children’s families. El Carajillo’s friends. Sometimes, when I got tired of
the office, I’d hang out in the bar. That was a different scene altogether,
like a gathering of George Romero’s living dead. Between one and two in the
morning the barman would lock up and switch off the lights. Before driving
away, he’d ask that all the bottles and glasses be left on a designated
table on the terrace. No one ever paid any attention. The last to leave were
usually two women. Or rather, an old woman and a girl. One talked and
laughed as if her life depended on it, while the other listened absently.
Both of them seemed ill . . .

Enric Rosquelles:

I know that whatever I say will only make things worse

I know that whatever I say will only make things worse; but still,
let me tell it my way. I am not a monster, or the cynical unscrupulous character
that you have been portraying in such lurid colors. Perhaps you find my physical
appearance amusing. Go ahead and laugh. There was a time when people trembled
before me. I’m fat, five foot eight, and Catalan. Also, I’m a socialist and I
believe in the future. Or used to. Forgive me. I’m going through something of a
rough patch. I believed in hard work, justice and progress. I know that Pilar
used to boast about having me as her right-hand man when she met with the other
socialist mayors in the province. Well, I always supposed she did, although now,
in my new-found solitude, I keep wondering why I was never headhunted, why some
big shot never tried to snatch me away from Z and Pilar, and give me a job
somewhere closer to Barcelona. Maybe Pilar didn’t boast enough. Maybe they all
had their own indispensable helpers and didn’t need anyone else. Within the
bounds of Z, my power grew. And that sealed my fate. Z was where I did my good
works as well as the deeds for which I shall have to pay. Although the Z City
Council reviles me now, it still depends on all the projects and studies I
supervised. I was the head of the Social Services Department, as I said, but I
also looked after Urban Planning, and even the head of Parks and Recreation, a
child molester who has the nerve to insult me now, used to come into my office
each morning and ask for my advice. At festivities and official functions, I was
always at Pilar’s side. Don’t jump to conclusions: for some reason, I don’t know
why, our mayor’s husband hated gatherings of more than six people. Enric Gibert
is what you might call an intellectual. Perhaps I would have been better off
staying busy in my office like him, God only knows, but I didn’t and that was
how I met Nuria, at an official function in the Z Sporting Complex . . . Nuria
Martí . . . When I think of that afternoon, I can’t hold back the tears . . . We
were rather arbitrarily rewarding the merits of Z’s outstanding athletes. The
prizewinners included a junior basketball team, which had done very well that
season; a young soccer player who was in a second division A team; the trainer
of Z’s football club, which was in the fourth division (he was retiring that
year); the young water-polo players who had won the league championship; and
finally, the star, Nuria Martí, who had just come back from Copenhagen, where
she had defended the national colors, no less, in a figure-skating competition.
. . . The pavilion was full of primary school students (their teachers had
brought them for an outing) and when Nuria appeared in person the place went
crazy. They were all shouting and clapping! Little ten-year-old squirts
whistling and shouting
Hurray for Nuria!
I’ve never seen anything like
it. Not that there had been some sudden figure-skating craze; it’s a sport with
a small following, as everybody knows. Some of the kids, the girls especially,
had watched the event on television and of course they had seen Nuria skate. For
a few of them, she was an idol. But most of them were simply responding to the
magnetic force of her fame and beauty. There, in front of me, was the most
beautiful woman I had ever seen. The most beautiful woman I will ever see! They
say children are good judges of character. As a psychologist and civil servant,
I’ve never been convinced. But at least that time they were right. All the
world’s adjectives fell short of Nuria’s luminous form. How could I have worked
for so many years in Z without meeting her? The only explanation I can find is
that I didn’t actually live in Z, and up until then, Nuria had spent long
periods away, on a grant from the Spanish Olympic Committee. During the days
that followed this sublime apparition (I’m afraid I can’t describe it any other
way), I kept searching, almost unconsciously, for a pretext that would allow me,
if not to become friends with Nuria, at least to say hello to her when we met in
the street, and perhaps chat for a while. To that end, I invented a new title:
Queen of the Annual Fair of Dairy Products and Vegetables, to be awarded by the
Department of Fairs and Festivals, an idea which initially bewildered the
committee of exhibiting farmers, but was adopted enthusiastically after a little
explanation. I went on to suggest that no one was better suited to be Queen of
the Fair than our international skating star, Nuria. A purely ceremonial and
symbolic role. She would only have to say a few words at the opening. They were
all delighted, so I moved straight on to the hard part of the plan: using that
pretext to get her to see me, to recognize me. . . . Needless to say, the fair
itself didn’t matter to me in the least; for the first time ever my heart was
overruling my head, and I was more than happy to follow it. It was spring, I
think, and I was constantly aware that I was heading for a fall, a ruinous fall,
but I didn’t care. I only mention that now so as not to give the false
impression that I was blinded. The Coordinator of Fairs and Festivals officially
offered her the crown, which, as I had foreseen, she declined. One reason, the
Coordinator informed me, was that she would soon be resuming her place on the
Spanish skating team. There was clearly no time to lose. I had a valid reason
for getting in touch with her, so I called her the same day and we arranged to
meet at a place in the historic center of Z. I wasn’t able to convince her to
accept the title of queen, of course, nor was that my aim, but I did manage to
persuade her, in the end, to have dinner with me that week. That was how it all
began. I never found out if there was a queen that spring. Our first dinner was
followed by others, in rapid succession. I started getting to know the people
she mixed with, and gradually my social habits changed. Our chance encounters
became increasingly frequent. And increasingly pleasant. I must admit that I
would have been content to go on like that for the rest of my life, but nothing
lasts forever. As we got to know each other better, I began to get a clearer
sense of Nuria’s problems; viewed from a different point of view, they might not
have been problems at all, but her artistic temperament could quickly blow
things out of proportion. I won’t mention the hundreds of little obstacles that
life began to put in her way at that time. I’ll only recount the two that seemed
most significant to me. I learned of the first after a pleasant dinner one night
in the company of good friends, some of whom now seem to enjoy spitting in my
face. When we left, Nuria instructed me to drive out to the coves instead of
going straight back to her place. When we got to the farthest one, the cove of
San Belisario, she started talking in a hesitant, incoherent way about an affair
with some young man about town whom I had not met. I deduced that they had been
engaged, and that the engagement had been broken off. I could tell that she was
in pain and shock. Luckily it was dark in the car; otherwise she would have seen
the contorted expressions on my face, betraying profound disbelief and disgust:
how could there be a man capable of leaving her? I can say, however, that by
unburdening herself in this way, she took our friendship to a new level of
intimacy. How did I try to console her? What words did I find? Forget him. I
told her over and over again to forget him and devote herself body and soul to
her art, to skating. But, as it happened, the second problem was related to
skating. It arose about ten days after Nuria left Z. The Spanish team had
gathered in Jaca, in a special training center still under construction, from
which Nuria called me at midnight, in floods of tears. They had cut off her
grant! The bastards had all got together in Jaca and proceeded to hand out,
renew and cut off grants. Nuria was certainly not the only one ambushed like
that: in the space of a few hours, one Hungarian and two Scandinavian trainers
were fired, not to mention various Spanish trainers, and almost all the skaters
over nineteen lost their grants. The exceptions, according to Nuria, were highly
suspicious. The story appeared the following day, not splashed on the cover of
sports magazines, but tucked inside, in a single column of the winter sports
section, and never made it into the national newspapers. For Nuria, however, it
was a terrible blow. The Spanish Skating Federation had decided it had to
rejuvenate itself or die, not an uncommon policy in Spain and generally quite
futile. We all have to die a bit every now and then and usually it’s so gradual
that we end up more alive than ever. Infinitely old and infinitely alive. As for
Nuria, she was removed from the national team, but not from the Catalonian
Federation, whose facilities she could continue to use for training and
competitions. She was, understandably, demoralized and wounded in her sporting
pride. Although there was, of course, no place for her on the new figure-skating
team, she was better, as she said, than the two girls who now shared top
billing. From the newspapers and from phone conversations with some journalist
friends in Gerona, I was soon able to verify that most of the Catalan skaters
had received the same treatment. Was it a case of Castilian, centralist
favoritism? I don’t know, nor do I care—and at that point in my life all that
mattered to me was what made Nuria happy or unhappy. The new situation was in a
sense advantageous to me, because without a grant, Nuria would have to live a
settled life in Z. But love is not selfish, as I have recently come to realize,
and Nuria’s feeling of emptiness, the trouble she had adapting to a life without
travel, just two weekly train trips to the Barcelona skating rink, made my heart
bleed. When she came back to Z we had various conversations, sometimes in my
office during working hours (she was the only person who was allowed to
interrupt me whenever she liked, apart from Pilar, of course), sometimes down at
the fishing port, leaning against the old boats nobody used any more, which
smelt, oddly, of face cream, and we always came back to the same topics: the
nepotism of the Olympic bureaucrats, the injustice she had suffered, her talent,
which would wither away as the months went by. You might be wondering how we
could have gone on talking about what was, in the scheme of things, a minor
incident, when there were so many important and perhaps even pleasant things we
could have said to one another. But Nuria was obsessive like that; when she came
across something she didn’t understand, she beat her little blonde head against
it over and over until she started bleeding. I had already learned that it was
best to listen quietly, unless I had a practical solution to propose, but how
could I take on the imperious Figure Skating Federation? I couldn’t, obviously.
All I could do was let time go by. And meanwhile savor our moments together—I
could now look forward to some each day—contemplate Nuria, enjoy that perfect
weather in Z, and be happy. Did I try to make a move in all that time? Not once.
I don’t know if it was lack of nerve, fear of spoiling our friendship, laziness
or timidity, but I felt it would be prudent to let a little more time elapse. We
are the authors of our own misfortunes, I’ve heard it said, but that fact is I
was happy to play the role of the perfect
chevalier servant
. We went to
the movies or to bars. We went driving. Sometimes we had dinner at her house,
with her mother and her little ten-year-old sister Laia, who treated me, like
I’m not sure what, a fiancé, or a future fiancé, I guess, I never really
understood, but always in a friendly and relaxed way, in any case. After dinner
we’d watch a video, usually one I had brought, or they left us alone in the
little lounge, leafing through Nuria’s album of press cuttings and photos.
Pleasant evenings. I have often thought that I should have stopped there, I
should have said: This is enough, I’m happy, what more could I ask for? But love
has no time for reasoning or limits, and it pushed me on. And that was how the
Palacio Benvingut project began, ineluctably, to take shape . . .