Off Side (18 page)

‘Never buy anything that hasn’t got the sell-by date clearly marked, and if there’s any doubt, either don’t buy, or only buy English goods.’

One afternoon they had employed his services to go in search of various famous charcuteries, to find one which dealt in English products. ‘And if you can’t buy English, buy German.’ After England and the Scandinavian countries, Germany was the most serious country in the world. You could never really
like
Germans, but they had their good points, and seriousness was one of them.
One afternoon, a scruffy passer-by came across to Mortimer and asked for his autograph. As if by magic, the footballer found himself surrounded by four large men, all falling over each other, and the poor autograph-hunter was dashed against a Mortimer who was alarmed more by his protectors than by his presumed attacker. The aunt began a distribution of choice English invective to left and right, and Carvalho was tempted to intervene — except that he hadn’t been hired as an interpreter, and he lacked sufficient authority to bring order to this chaotic vocal octet, comprising the police guard, the English tourists and the much-trampled hunter of autographs. Finally the four vigilantes coordinated their efforts to the point of successfully tearing up the man’s autograph, and they would have done the same for his face had it not been for the intervention of some bystanders who took offence at the unfairness of the odds, and who had caught a whiff of police-state arrogance from the four large men. Mortimer stood back and let it all happen. He had an air of passivity about him, perhaps because he reserved all his intervention capacities for the football pitch — for those few square metres which were his world, where he was the centre forward, the precise point, the
nec plus ultra
of the life and histories of the spectators — the thousands of them present and the millions of them present only in spirit. Only heroes can act like that, thought Carvalho, borrowing a conceptual framework from Camps O’Shea, and he felt the envy that heroes rightly inspire, because the footballer knew the limits of his kingdom, and had the added pleasure of sharing it with Dorothy.

He followed the three English expatriates as they wandered abroad in this indeterminate part of the world’s southern quarter, and when they’d been delivered safely home he went to a phone box to ring Charo to inquire after Bromide. She wasn’t in, but he managed to find Biscuter at the office, and was duly given an up-date.

‘They had to rush him to the hospital, because he couldn’t even get up this morning. Charo called a cab and took him to
casualty, but there’s no need to worry, boss, she rang to say that he’s over the worst of the crisis.’

‘Over the worst of the crisis,’ Carvalho repeated to himself, and he wondered at Biscuter’s capacity for synthesis. Then, as he left the phone box, he found himself standing almost face to face with the Arab who had been so concerned for the world’s stupidity. He smiled slightly. They were in a street in a rich, upper-class area of Barcelona. Neither the Arab nor Carvalho were on their own patch, but perhaps the Arab felt slightly less at home than Carvalho.

‘Call me Mohammed. That’s what you Spaniards like to call us, isn’t it.’

Carvalho assumed the condition of ‘you Spaniards’ and invited the Arab for a glass of wine, always assuming that his religion didn’t bar him from drinking.

‘I’m not a very good Muslim. I don’t drink in Morocco, but I do in Spain. When I’m with my fellow countrymen, I don’t drink, and they don’t either. We don’t like to cause a scandal. Only stupid people cause scandals.’

Maybe this was the only pejorative term that he knew, and Carvalho began to feel a bit less stupid than he had on the previous occasion, and lost something of the respect that he’d had for the man, because there’s a great gap that divides a man who knows how to control his adjectives from one who does not. He decided to find a bar that was small but not so plush that the Arab would feel uncomfortable, and all of a sudden they came upon a diminutive wine shop which, by some miracle, had contrived to survive in this particular location on Paseo de la Bonanova. The bar announced itself as the Cerveceria Victor, and no sooner had Carvalho entered than he was bombarded with a host of visual data that informed him that something unrepeatable had just happened in his life: he had gone into a time warp. Outside the door lay the new, democratic, Olympic, yuppie Barcelona; inside there was a small homage to nostalgia for Franco’s Spain:
a wine-coloured den where even the beer barrels sported the colours of the Spanish flag, and where the posters around the walls were uniformly nostalgic: Onésimo Redondo, Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, General Muñoz Grandes with his Iron Cross and Colonel Tejero with his iron moustache, Adolfo Suárez in the uniform of a Falangist commander, pictured above a slogan: ‘Do You Swear, Judas?’ And El Nacional wine, and El Legionario cognac. And a certificate awarded to the Cerveceria Victor in recognition of its involvement in the
El Alcázar
defence campaign — not, in this case, the Alcázar de Toledo of the Francoite Crusade, but the extreme right-wing daily paper published out of Madrid. The only sign of anything progressive in the place was the Arab, and this for the simple fact that he came from the Third World. There was no aggressiveness in the gestures of the regulars as they leaned up against the bar, drinking glasses of wine taken from the wood, or glasses of beer, and eating olives. They were frugal, severe, somewhat embittered by history and were attended to by mine host, who was as slow and taciturn as the rest of them. The aggressiveness was to be found in the emblems and icons; they kept their historical resignation to themselves. Carvalho sat down, fascinated, and watched as the Arab studiously absorbed the visual detail of the environment.

‘Franco. A lot of things about Franco here. Is it a museum?’

‘Not exactly. But it will be soon.’

‘Franco, a great warrior. One of my father’s uncles fought with Franco in the war against the communists.’

And by so saying the Arab established his right to be in the place and there was nothing to fear. The ideology of the bar was so coherent that even the sports posters had a firmly Spanish stamp: either Espagñol, or Real Madrid. Seamless fundamentalism. Pure Francoite fundamentalism — so pure that time had rendered it innocent, as innocent as any cause that has outlived its time and has been converted to an archaeology of sentiment. Two of the locals were discussing the shortcomings of the Spanish national
squad and the probability of Real Madrid having a splendid season now that they’d signed Schuster. Signing Schuster for Real Madrid was on a par with the sister of José Antonio Primo de Rivera marrying Adolf Hitler. Europe would have seen something then! But the most delightful thing about the bar was this sense of nostalgia, a nostalgia which Carvalho found repellent but at the same time more or less harmless. The Arab on the other hand looked strangely as if he was feeling more and more at home as the wine began to take effect.

‘Another Franco, that’s what you need.’ This was the Arab speaking. The mafioso boss of old Barcelona. ‘Another Franco would sort out all the idiots and the criminals like a dose of salts. He’d put people back in line. No more stealing. No more killing. In my country things went well for a while because the king is strong. He doesn’t let people take liberties. But things are beginning to go downhill, badly, because there’s the socialists, and even communists, and Allah says we should not be friends with communists. With socialists, yes, maybe, but not with communists. Franco and Hassan would have done great things together.’

He apparently didn’t notice Carvalho’s increasing air of boredom, and continued expounding his views on history, philosophy, and life in general, with his vocabulary apparently expanding by the minute, although every now and then his discourse became a shade exotic as he used an Arab word, or quoted proverbs that had to do with dates and camels. The Arab was fast turning into a caricature of himself. And when Carvalho brought him back to the here and now, asking him what exactly he was doing so far off his patch, the alcoholic haze cleared from the Arab’s eyes and he once again became suspicious.

‘The other day you didn’t tell me everything you wanted to know, and it’s important that I know as much as you. You should always know just enough to get by. Only stupid people know too little, and only stupid people know too much.’

He was off again with his exasperating mono-adjectivality,
and Carvalho regretted having interrupted his ideological speculation. After ten glasses of wine and myriad coffees with brandy, the Moroccan was finding the world a wonderful place. Apparently forgetting that a lifetime of beatings had taught him the virtues of caution, he not only struck up conversation with the locals, but even proposed that they should all join in with the Hymn of the Legion, which he assured them he knew word for word. ‘One day I shall live in the high part of the city, of any city. Allah is great, and the sons of Allah have been chosen to bring back reason to the world. Up until twenty years ago nobody would give two cents for an Arab. And now we make the whole world tremble. Look at Khomeini. Look at the rich Arabs who are buying up everyone in sight. They’re buying everything you have. They’ve even bought this mountain you live on, Tibidabo. I guarantee the name comes from the Arabic. All the place-names in Spain come from the Arabic.’

‘You’ve got things divided up well. Khomeini preaches holy war, the sheikhs buy up everything in sight, and you spend your time thieving in the Barrio Chino.’

‘We just get the leftovers. But other Arabs richer and cleverer than me will bring the cause of Allah to these barrios. And they’ll sort out all your stupid people.’

By now Carvalho was bored with the Arab. He paid the bill and turned to leave. But the Arab felt unprotected in the bar without Carvalho to guarantee his safety, and he followed him out as if he hadn’t finished saying everything he wanted to say. Night was falling, and the street was almost deserted. Carvalho needed only to take one of the streets leading up Tibidabo and he’d be home. The Arab, on the other hand, had to go in exactly the opposite direction. However, whereas Carvalho’s nostalgia remained confined to the territory of his childhood, where poverty and the pneumatic drill were now throwing everything out of joint, the Arab’s big hope was to climb out of precisely those ruins in order to scale the heights towards the likes of Basté de Linyola, Camps
O’Shea and Golden Boy footballers. The Arab was as drunk as Carvalho, but it was less apparent, probably because he appeared to be speaking in Arabic. Not only appeared, but actually was, and, what’s more, right into Carvalho’s ear.

‘I can do without the readings from the Koran, Mohammed.’

But he continued his Koranic recital, and just at that point Carvalho saw a deserted slope leading down to a garage serving a block of flats. There was nobody else in sight, so Carvalho gave Mohammed a push which knocked him over and sent him rolling down to crash into the garage door. For a moment the body of the fallen man tensed, in the reflex manner of an animal accustomed to defending itself, but he was drunk to the tune of a bottle of Vino Nacional and ten coffees with El Legionario cognac, and no sooner had he tensed himself than he untensed again. He was set upon by a Carvalho who had suddenly flown into a fury for no apparent reason, and who began kicking him and punching him, until a woman standing at the top of the slope let out a scream and Carvalho pulled himself together and the Arab registered the fact that he was on enemy territory.

‘I know where you live, stupid.’

‘If you so much as set foot in my house again, I’ll slice you up like a salami.’

When the Arab disappeared with the fleetingness of a shadow in the night, Carvalho thought of his threat and started to laugh. Like a salami! He suddenly had an image of himself chasing after the Arab wielding a salami like a club, and he found it so funny that he couldn’t walk for laughing and had to sit down. The woman was still standing at the top of the slope, along with two youths who were sitting on motorbikes and toying with their throttles so that their bikes let out intermittent roars of impatience.

‘I saw it all. One of those dirty Arabs attacked this poor man and then he ran off.’

‘Shall we go after him?’ asked one of the motorized angels.

Carvalho gestured to dissuade them.

‘No. He wasn’t attacking me. The Arab is innocent. It was me who attacked him. He wouldn’t give me his jellaba, so I beat him up.’

‘What’s the man saying?’

‘Man bites dog, señora. Does happen, sometimes.’

‘He’s drunk.’

Once the word was out that Carvalho was drunk, all trace of solidarity evaporated. Carvalho cast an impertinent eye over the assembled company, and they felt threatened. The youths revved their bikes and as they drove off they called back that he was a bastard and an arsehole. Carvalho leapt out into the middle of the road, arms akimbo, and started yelling after them to come back if they were any kind of men. He was promptly assailed by cars sounding their horns because as he stood there he had become the final obstacle in the way of their return home. He hurled various shades of abuse at them, and then took to the shadows of the deserted upper-middle-class streets that lead up from paseo de la Bonanova in the direction of Tibidabo. His body was aching all over, not from the blows he had received but from those he had given, and he tried to explain his act of aggression as a gesture of vengeance for poor Bromide, or perhaps as a simple racist impulse. However neither of these explanations satisfied him, and as he walked he searched his brain for some kind of answer.

‘What made me hit him?’

He went back over everything that had happened, everything that had been said, by himself and by the gesticulating Mohammed, and suddenly something approaching a ray of light illuminated the inner recesses of his perplexity.

‘He deserved it, for being stupid.’

The woman grew on his sex like a phial of blue glass, like a giant soapy woman, like the best evening of his life, between leaves of bright-coloured trees painted in Caran d’Ache colours. The room
was like an April country scene in Santa Fe, in Holy Week, laurel and palm-leaf on his sex, moistness of thighs and the marble of a colonnade reaching towards a warm hand on his sex, a giant’s eyes and a flight up towards a cloud which blinked on his sex soft rains of fragmented light, and his sex was not his, but was he himself, as both the viewer and the centre of the kaleidoscope. His ears were somewhere else, searching for some call which had perhaps existed, but from the ceiling that had suddenly turned kingfisher blue, he saw his own eyes, laughing as they travelled in the best sea that he had ever seen. California Bay. Cape San Lucas. Pelicans and sea lions. Fans of eyelashes which closed in on his sex.