Off Side (33 page)

‘Jesus, Pepe.’

Charo got up and went to see what she could do for the shoeshine. She arranged his pillow, gave him a drop of water to drink, and mopped his face with a damp towel.

‘They didn’t even have any towels here, boss. I had to go and get one from the office. No toilet paper, either. Charo had to go down to the shops to buy some. And if you want mineral water, you have to bring it yourself. This place is disgusting.’

Bromide made an effort to focus on Carvalho, and when Charo left off straightening him up, he looked him in the eye and repeated: ‘Jesus, Pepe.’

Something was obviously hurting him, because he grimaced and pointed under the bedclothes.

‘I want to piss.’

So Charo passed a plastic bottle under the sheets, and put his penis into the opening, and held it up for him while Bromide made a great effort, with the few muscles he could still mobilize, to get a few drops out.

‘He’s up to his ears with uraemia, boss,’ Biscuter whispered in Carvalho’s ear.

Charo gestured to Carvalho to follow her out into the corridor, whereupon she burst into tears, crying to herself at first, and then flinging herself round his neck.

‘He’s not going to last out the night. That’s all they can say. And if he was their father, they’d let him die where he is, because there’s no point, Pepe, there’s no point. But this place is so disgusting, Pepe … it would be better to take him home.’

‘What do you mean, home? That revolting lodging house of his?’

‘You don’t have to tell me … When I went to get his things, I had a row with his landlady. He owes her months of back rent, and she said she wouldn’t let me take so much as a handkerchief away. As if Bromide had handkerchiefs! I had to pay his back rent. Let’s get him out of here. It’s like a morgue!’

‘At least they have doctors here.’

‘Doctors can’t do anything for him now. They can give us prescriptions for anything he needs. Why don’t I take him back to my place?’

Carvalho found the duty doctor. He was the only young person in the whole building, and he listened to Carvalho’s request for removing Bromide, with an air of scientific-biological perplexity.

‘He’s going to die. He might as well die here as anywhere else. I have to say, we can’t do anything for him, and the main thing is to keep giving him the painkillers. He could carry on in this condition for quite a while. Hours. Even a couple of days, although I doubt it, but then he does have a strong heart.’

‘I want to take him with me.’

‘I have to tell you that I won’t be held responsible for anything that happens. And the lady who brought him in is going to have to sign the form authorizing his removal. I hope you realize what a lot it takes to get a bed in a place like this.’

‘I’m sure.’

‘Anyway, how are you going to take him? We have no ambulances available at the moment.’

‘Would he be able to sit up in a car, or will he fall over?’

‘He can sit up, but you’re going to have to support him between two of you. He hasn’t eaten for several hours, and I’ve not tried to give him anything. It’s not worth it.’

‘Do you at least have a stretcher, so that we can get him down to the street?’

‘A stretcher, yes, but I’m not sure about someone to carry it.’

‘We can carry him down ourselves.’

When he got back to the room, Charo was trying to get a jumper over Bromide’s drooping head while Biscuter tried to hold him up.

‘We’re going home, Bromide.’

The shoeshine’s eyes asked ‘What home?’

‘My house. Vallvidrera.’

Bromide gave Charo and Biscuter a disconcerted look, as if to say that Pepe had gone crazy.

‘Jesus, Pepe.’

As they drove in the car, he alternated between dozing and suddenly waking up and trying to recognize the streets as they passed.

‘Avenida Virgen de Montserrat.… Plaza de Sanllehy.’

‘Right every time, Bromide,’ Biscuter said, encouragingly.

As they were halfway up Tibidabo he vomited, and a deep well-like smell engulfed the car. By the time they reached the house he had lost consciousness, but he was still breathing calmly. Carvalho picked him up in his arms and laid him on his bed. Charo arranged around him the requisite equipment — urinal
bottles, towels, hypodermics — and out of her handbag she produced a medallion of the Virgin of the Miracles, which she sewed onto Bromide’s underpants without Carvalho raising so much as an eyebrow in protest. Biscuter was the first to fall asleep, in an armchair in the living room. Then Charo followed suit, dozing off, having first given Carvalho a whispered account of some of the events of the previous two days, in which she had had to hump Bromide here and there, from one diagnosis to another, from one disaster to another, until, through someone she knew, she had managed to get a place in the clinic.

‘Apparently all the other clinics are just as bad. I was talking with some of the relations of the other old people there, and they said that they’re the same. No sooner do you put an old person in than they die.’

After Charo had fallen asleep on the sofa, Carvalho went to watch over the sleeping Bromide, and he had to put a hand on his chest in order to be sure that he was still breathing. Bromide began to snore gently, and gradually his sleeping bulk under the blankets began to be illuminated by the light of a new day, and birds began to sing, and Carvalho stretched a bit to restore the life to his muscles. Then he went out into the garden to watch the dawn rising over the city. He cast his eyes over the warren of Barcelona Vieja, that labyrinth to which Bromide would probably never return. No. Would definitely never return. By the time Carvalho returned to the room, Bromide’s tattooed chest had been transformed into something else, a pitiful box of cold bones and icy skin. He closed the shoeshine’s eyes, and with the same hand grazed the lips through which Bromide’s last breath had escaped. He felt an urge to murmur Bromide’s name, his real name, but he couldn’t, because he didn’t know it. He wanted to make some symbolic gesture that would have pleased the old man, so he went down into the garden with the idea of finding five roses, those five roses of which Bromide had sung so often in his Falangist youth. You fucking fascist, Bromide, you fucking
fascist … But there were no roses in the garden, and he suddenly felt an urge to get out of the house, head into town, and get the florist to open his shop. He passed the first cars of the morning as they struggled over the obstacle of Tibidabo on their way to a new day’s work, and a motor-cyclist who was tossing newspapers over people’s garden gates. Then he remembered that there was probably a letter waiting for him in his mailbox — Fuster’s report on Dosrius — and something approaching a smile revealed to himself the extent of his own scepticism. When he arrived at the main square of Vallvidrera, everything was shut save for a single bar and the newspaper shop which was in the process of sending out its delivery men. His eyes were aching, and he began to reflect on the scene that he’d just left, and the state that Biscuter and Charo would be in when they woke and discovered simultaneously his absence and Bromide’s death. And there were no flowers, nor would there be any till hours later. But there were newspapers, yes, and a headline in
El Periodico
caught his eye, with its gigantic letters and a shock of the unexpected: ‘New Development in the Palacín Case. Anonymous Death Threats to Centre Forward’. He bought the paper and returned home, going up the hill with all the tiredness of a night without sleep. The journalist had tried to be concise, and to convey the news in a manner that allowed the facts to speak for themselves. Just as the Palacín case seemed all sewn up, the main Barcelona newspapers had all received copies of an anonymous letter, a strange letter, which announced the forthcoming death of a centre forward. The note was not written in the normal style of death threats:

‘Because you constitute transparent pyramids for your ego-worship as failed gods, and because eunuch societies and plastic warriors are thronging at the gates, I warned you that the centre forward would be killed at dusk.

‘And he was killed at dusk.

‘Because you contented yourselves with placing crêpe on the pyramids, and you continue from within calling the attention of
the eunuchs, leaving the warriors to offer you the leisure of gods, while poets turn away from the evening and commit suicide with elixirs of perplexity.

‘I summon you.

‘Because you are the usurpers of liberty and hope, of poetry and victory, and for that reason the centre forward will be killed at dusk.’

Was this a polysemic message? Carvalho made a mental note to ask Inspector Lifante’s opinion, the next time they met.

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