Off Side (14 page)

‘Splendid, Carvalho, that was splendid …’

But by now the detective had had enough of him, and he went to search through what remained of his library for a suitable book with which to light the fire, to ward off the evening damp of Vallvidrera. Camps followed his movements with a look of easy-going somnolence, but as the ritual proceeded he began to sit up and show signs of perplexity. Carvalho went up to the bookshelves, chose a book and proceeded to tear it to pieces.

‘What on earth are you doing?’

‘I’m lighting a fire to enhance your sense of harmoniousness.’

‘So why are you tearing up a book?’

‘I’m going to burn it. All good fires need paper to start them.’

Each page that he tore from the book was like a stab at the heart of his ‘harmonious’ guest, who finally plucked up the courage to inquire feebly: ‘What’s the book you’re burning?’

‘A book on the Pre-Raphaelites.’

Camps’s eyes flickered, as if to say, ‘Pre-Raphaelites — what do you know about Pre-Raphaelites?’ But once again he erred on the side of polite inquiry: ‘Why are you burning it?’

‘It happened to be handy, it’s got a revolting cover, and it represents a bastardized hybrid of two cultural forms: painting and literature, in the worst of combinations, namely the painting of literature. No need to look surprised — I once had to do an end-of-term project on the Pre-Raphaelites. I’ve been to college, you know.’

‘So I see. And you have strong opinions on aesthetics.’

‘Tonight, yes. Tomorrow is another day.’

‘Supposing that tomorrow you decided that the book would have been worth saving?’

‘This book’s fate is already sealed. Only once did I save a book from burning. It was called
A Poet in New York
, and I reprieved it for sentimental reasons. Burning that particular book would have been like shooting García Lorca twice, so I decided to save it, despite the fact that the national and international phenomenon of García Lorcism makes me sick. To tell you the truth, the image of Ophelia drowning in the lake has always fascinated me.’

He returned to the Pre-Raphaelites, probably because the flames were now burning precisely the picture in which a drowning Ophelia emerged above the waves like some monstrous, delicate flower.

‘We’re two of a kind, Carvalho.’ The detective looked at the PR man suspiciously. ‘You too have a schizophrenic cultural past which you try to suppress. It shows in the way you seem to feel the need to run things down.’

‘Not at all. I have no cultural background, and I feel no need to run anything down.’

‘As regards this job, I suppose I have a choice. I could work at something else, or simply not work at all. I took the job on partly because it was such a contrast with my ambitions, and partly because Basté de Linyola, who is a good friend of my family, told me that he was intending to break with the boring traditionalist outlook that has dominated the club in recent years. In addition, I’ll admit that it was a fascinating prospect for me, to penetrate this den of heroes. Don’t you sometimes imagine the dressing rooms of a major football club as being like the mythical cave where the gods and heroes waited before joining their astral battle?’

Carvalho took a deep breath. Camps O’Shea was leaning forward with his glass clutched in both hands and his eyes fixed on some distant Olympian horizon that only he could see. ‘What film did you get the pose from, friend?’ Carvalho thought, but he resigned himself to the unavoidable explanation.

‘Do you know what astral battle I’m talking about?’

‘No idea.’

‘When the gods were sorting out the universe, and the heroes were defending it. I’ve always found the gods rather less interesting than the heroes. Basté de Linyola, for example, is a god, and Mortimer is a hero. The one is not a patch on the other.’

‘From what I’ve read in the papers, I find neither of them particularly interesting.’

‘One of them thinks he’s interesting, and the other one actually is.’

‘Why does Basté de Linyola think he’s interesting?’

‘He’s a more or less frustrated politician. He once had hopes of reordering Catalonia and its economy, and its political structures. Now he’s decided that he’s going to recreate the country’s epic sentiments, by restoring the club to its role as the symbolic unarmed army of Catalan identity.’

‘And that’s where the heroes come in?’

‘Exactly. You know, if we were to make a family tree of the world’s heroes, it would have a few surprises.’

‘Go ahead, surprise me.’

‘The real hero is the warrior. Societies have always felt the need to mythologize their warriors in order to mythologize the symbolic legitimacy of their aggression. Right from the earliest primitive societies, the hero has been imbued with a ritual, a costume, an aura of a chosen person who, by the victories he achieves, fleetingly comes close to being a god. But the gods carry on controlling the show from behind the scenes, and the lords of the earth, that is to say the gods, have adapted the hero over the course of time. Think of the symbol of Saint George killing the dragon — Saint Jordi, our patron saint. Well, Saint George actually derives from an ancient image found in Germanic legends, in which the hero is half man and half dragon — in other words, he contains within himself his own negation. The Saint George that we know no longer has the dragon within him; it is outside him, and he has to kill it. What was happening was that the logic of shopkeepers was beginning to establish itself in the world. Shopkeepers like things to be clear, and they like things spiritual to be one-dimensional. And Christianity took this vulgarity even further. When Saint Michael the Archangel is shown, he is no longer spearing a serpent, or a symbolic dragon, but Lucifer. In other words, evil.’

He took a mental breath and observed from the corner of his eye the effect that his erudition was having on Carvalho.

‘Am I boring you?’

‘No. Carry on. I don’t have to worry about burning spoken words. They burn out of their own accord.’

‘Heroic myths have always been built around a single powerful man, or on a god-man, who overcomes evil and frees his people from death and destruction. Are you with me? Good. I could quote you a bit of Jung, about man and his symbols, which would help you understand what I mean. The hero is surrounded by sacred texts, and ceremonies, and people sing about him, and dance for him, and sacrifice to him, and all this, and here I cite
from memory, “… overawes the bystanders with numinous emotions (as if these were magical incantations) and exhorts the individual to the point of identification with the hero.” When we give a person the possibility of identifying with the hero, and believing in him, we give him a means of freeing himself from his own personal insignificance and lack of importance, and he comes to believe that he himself shares his hero’s superhuman qualities.’

‘In other words, football.’

‘Or any other ritual of victory and defeat. Now, if you project forward into our present mediocre and so-called civilized world, in which wars are almost unthinkable between civilized countries, you find that the sporting hero has taken the place of the previous local Napoleons, and the club manager takes the place of those gods whose role was once to make order out of chaos. Then you transfer that schema to Spain, to Catalonia, and to our club. Our club represents Saint Jordi, and the dragon is the enemy without: in other words, Spain, for those who have high symbolic aspirations, and Real Madrid for those who are more down to earth.’

‘And you enjoy all this.’

‘It fascinates me. I find it entertaining.’

‘But you don’t actually enjoy it.’

‘I find very few things enjoyable, Carvalho. For me, it is sufficient that something fascinates me and that I find it entertaining.’

‘I envy you. It’s been years since I last found anything entertaining, let alone fascinating.’

‘One has to regain one’s sense of superiority. Heroes are strictly for the masses.’

‘Because you have usurped the function of the gods …’

‘I beg your pardon …?’

‘The first bit of the anonymous letter …’

‘Oh yes. “Because you have usurped the function of the gods who, in another age, guided the conduct of men, without bringing supernatural consolation, but simply the therapy of the most
irrational of cries: the centre forward will be killed at dusk.” I know it off by heart.’

‘Somebody else disillusioned with the degeneration of mythology.’

‘In fact I’ve given a lot of thought to what our author’s trying to say. I don’t at all share the police verdict that he’s a loony. Have you considered the possibility that this might be a paraphrased fragment of some book?’

‘Whatever way you look at it, he’s got to be a loony. Only a loony would actually read books like that, let alone start paraphrasing them with an obvious taste for parallelistic rhythms …’

‘Parallelistic rhythms! That’s the last thing I expected to hear from you.’

‘You’ve succeeded in stirring my cultural roots. In the same way that every once in a while a woman is capable of stirring my sexual roots. Over the years I’ve tended to store all that away at the bottom of the trunk.’

‘Might I ask how old you are?

‘You might.’

Carvalho poked the fire for a moment. Then he picked up his glass and offered a toast.

‘For Pepe Carvalho, who will be too old in the year 2000!’

‘At least we’ve got our freedom, Marçal.’

‘If only it wasn’t so cold.’

‘The summer’s not even over yet — this flat seems to trap the cold. Not one door shuts.’

From where they were lying on the mattress they had a view of the front door of the flat propped shut with a chair, and on the chair a bucket full of water, partly to increase its weight, and partly so that if anyone tried to enter, they would knock it over and warn of their arrival. The door was lockable only from the outside, not from the inside.

‘Give me a shot.’

‘Can’t you wait? I’ve only got two, and you know you’re going to want one later. I’m dying for one myself. I’m jangling all over.’

‘Give me a shot, please.’

He asked it as a favour, but she knew that shortly he would turn nervous and aggressive.

‘When the rain comes, this flat’s going to be leaking like a sieve.’

‘We’ll have to find another flat which isn’t stuck right under the roof.’

‘We’ll have to try another block. The flats downstairs are all occupied.’

‘Old people and cats.’

‘We’re just two junkies without a cat.’

‘Two junkie cats. Give me a hit.’

She noticed that he was no longer asking ‘please’, and she raised one hand to the cut on her forehead.

‘Look what you did the other day, when you started getting twitchy.’

‘That was your fault. You had a gramme, and you’d hidden it.’

‘I haven’t seen a gramme in years.’

‘But you had enough for four or five shots, and you didn’t want to give me any.’

‘Have you seen yourself in the mirror recently?’

‘What about you. Have
you
seen yourself?’

They raised themselves on their elbows on the mattress, and each provided a mirror for the other. He saw himself in her eyes, eyes that looked somehow bigger because of her thinness, and she saw herself in his. Looking as if her head had been shrunk.

‘Come on, you bitch, give me a shot.’

He dropped the yellowing sheet from round him, and stood naked against the light that was coming in through the closed shutters and the glass-less windows. Outside, the noise of the barrio was growing, and the afternoon advanced, ripened and finally
died in the last rays of the sun as it lit the peeling façades.

‘If you want your drugs, go out and earn them. I’ve had it up to here with me being out walking the streets all day, and you lying around here doing nothing.’

‘Listen, you’re the one who got me involved in all this, and I’m the one who protects you. If it hadn’t been for me, by now you’d have ended up in some back alley with a knife in your guts.’

‘You — you couldn’t even protect yourself.’

‘Do you want me to hit you?’

‘Hit me, then! Hit me, if you’ve got the balls.’

‘I’m warning you, eh!’

Was this a warning, or was he perhaps asking her permission? Every time he hit her she felt as if it increased her self-awareness, as well as increasing the sense of hatred and impotence that was growing within her. Several weeks previously he had started to vomit and had almost passed out. She was very relaxed about it all. This was her chance to get her own back for all the blows of the preceding months. She had taken off her shoe, and had begun beating his broken body as it lay there uttering groans of bewilderment, until the blood began to flow, and she was able to use it to trace red streaks across his dirty, naked skin. Streaks of blood, rivers, which she traced with an index finger, starting at the source and directing them as the fancy took her.

‘Give me the stuff, or I’ll hit you.’

‘There you are, take it! I hope you fucking die, you useless pig! We’re finished! When I go out, I’m going to ring your father to tell him to come and get you. He’ll put you on the farm, cleaning out pigsties.’

‘I’ll kill the pair of you. You and him.’

‘If he wants to waste his money on you, that’s his problem. If you ask me, you’re a basket case. But if he wants to blow his cash …’

‘And who’s going to save you? You started all this, and it’s all your fault that I’m where I am now.’

‘Don’t make me cry! Here, take it …’

He too had emerged from under the sheets, and their two naked bodies confronted each other, face to face, with their sexes like two dark brush strokes, and looking each other up and down, while their eyes avoided each other. She leaned over to get something out of her shoe, a small, weightless white packet. She threw it across to him, but it was so light that it travelled no more than a yard before dropping onto the mattress. Marçal dived to grab it, with a surprising degree of agility. As his hand closed around it he stood up and went to look for a cardboard box in the corner of the room. From it he took a hypodermic syringe with the needle already in place, a rubber strap, and a lighter. She turned her back on the scene and went over to the window, standing up on tiptoe to see out into the street. The neon signs outside were beginning to light up, and señora Concha was out on the balcony checking to make sure that hers was working. She fondled the ivy which hung from a pot on the balcony like a tress of hair.