Off Side (7 page)

‘And a bastard … Do I make myself clear?’

She made herself clear.

‘I’ll be round later this afternoon.’

‘You don’t have to treat me like a dog that has to be taken for walks. If I need a piss, I’m quite capable of going on my own.’

‘All right, so I won’t be round later this afternoon …’

Since she now had him on the hook, there followed another monologue which eventually resolved into a plaintive ‘Just who do you think you are?’ And then silence, as she waited for Carvalho to give an answer that she knew he was incapable of giving. And then, finally, acceptance of his ‘I’ll be round later this afternoon,’ delivered in the tones of a man admitting defeat.

Carvalho waited for Biscuter to return — a Biscuter still smarting from his dressing-down — and he explained the Mortimer case to him as if it was vital for Biscuter to be kept informed of its progress. It didn’t take long for him to take up his allotted role as a faithful Watson and to apply his analytical shrewdness to the situation in hand.

‘It must be the Arabs, boss.’

‘What Arabs?’

‘The Arab sheikhs, boss. They’re buying up all our best players and carting them off to their cities in the desert. They’ve got the money to build themselves teams that are unbeatable. First they put the wind up Mortimer, and then they sign him. I happened to hear what you were talking about with Bromide, and I’ve drawn my own conclusions. He wasn’t saying anything we don’t know already. I’ve been thinking more or less the same myself — you only have to walk round town to see what’s going on. You’ve been travelling too much lately, and either because of your travelling, or maybe because you’re stuck up in Vallvidrera, you haven’t noticed how things are changing round here. It’s the Wild West all over again, but this time it’s knives instead of guns. Are you in
for supper? I’ve got the necessaries to make a
brandada de urade
.’

‘And what might that be, Biscuter?’

‘It’s a recipe I got out of the encyclopaedia I was telling you about. It just so happens I’ve still got a piece of fish left over from the other day. It won’t take long to prepare — all it needs is taking out the bones and adding oil and garlic, whisk the cream and add salt, pepper and a drop of tabasco. Put it through the blender and it’s done. Five minutes.’

‘Why not!’

Biscuter was happier now, and as he disappeared into the kitchen he gave Carvalho an update on Charo’s state of mind.

‘She’s angry, boss, but it’ll pass. She told me she’s just about on the breadline these days, what with the Aids scare and all that, and the only clients she can still count on are her regulars, and they’re all getting old. One of them’s just died, in fact. A chemist from Tarasa. That’s why she was a bit depressed. You know what a softie she is.’

Carvalho shared the
brandada de urade
with Biscuter, and they washed it down with a bottle of Milmanda de Torres, a fact which Biscuter found amazing until he realized that the bottle’s presence was his boss’s attempt at a peace offering. Carvalho ate hurriedly, because he felt an urgent need to get out into the streets and see or talk with people who weren’t going to burden him with hard-luck stories or premonitions of hard-luck stories to come. He used the pretext of his appointment with Charo and left. He decided to go on foot, so as to observe at first-hand the changes that Biscuter had talked about.

‘Mind how you go, boss. Honestly, the way things are going … The other day I read in the papers that they’re planning to pull down half the Barrio Chino, from Perecamps on upwards, because knocking it down will let some fresh air in, they say. The place is beginning to feel like a graveyard.’

Carvalho was propelled out onto the street by a sense of irritation. Admittedly he had been travelling a lot, and admittedly
Vallvidrera was a fair way from the city centre, but it was unreasonable to suggest that he would no longer recognize the places where he’d spent his childhood. How could they just spirit away all the old places? Presumably the fashion of imagining that everything had changed had now reached the lower classes, and Biscuter was singing, out of time, a hackneyed requiem for what had once been and what was no more, or for what might have been but never was. He recognized his old haunts, as he walked the streets reviewing a geography that had been his whole life, or almost his whole life, and everything seemed to be where it ought to be. He visited a couple of second-hand bookshops, and the feel of their dusty, mummified culture reminded him of his breathless hunger for books in the days when he’d been a cultural junkie. He skimmed through a large, expensive book about Barcelona sporting a label on which the scandalous original price had been reduced by the bookseller’s sense of common decency: ‘Is the dream of free men living in a free city really realizable? At the moment, Barcelona is humanizing itself in each strip that it recovers or constructs for leisurely walking — that relation of space and time which gives us the freedom to do nothing, to fear nothing and to expect nothing. In other words, what we could call a beatific
desideratum
. Here we have a people that enjoys free things, and to whom one of their own philosophers promised that one day they would have everything paid for, wherever they went, for the simple fact of their being Catalan. These are people who get enthusiastic just collecting snails, or picking mushrooms, or drinking from public fountains and strolling round the city without a penny to pay. The average citizen relates to this city like a son to a mother: he knows that Barcelona is a woman, and he feels himself to be a child of the virgin Mother and the prostitute, of the Bronze Venus and of Pepita with the umbrella, of señora Josefina, of Reus, and many others. Over the years the city’s philosophers have tried to persuade us that Barcelona was a marble city, or a city state, or a city-region … But they failed.
People recognize this city as a motherland which each of them is able to possess through the hegemony of his own memory. Some were born here. Others came from elsewhere. But this possessive memory began on the day when, like the ancient Chaldeans, they understood that the basic elements of their world ended with the hills that constituted their encircling horizon.’ He either agreed or disagreed with this sentiment, but he couldn’t be bothered to decide which. He deflated the bookseller’s expectation of an impending sale and exited decisively en route to see Charo. When he arrived at her door, he called up on the entryphone. Two minutes later Charo came stampeding out and flung herself at him in a huge exhalation of rose water and warm flesh. It was a railway station embrace, a wife’s embrace for her returning husband, and Carvalho let himself be hugged and kissed, all the while giving her little pats on the back, because he was at a loss what to do with his hands and his guilty conscience. Charo made it easy for him, because she was in a happy, chatty mood, and Carvalho suggested that they celebrate in style. First a film, and then up to Vallvidrera, always assuming she didn’t have clients waiting for her.

‘Clients? What are you talking about? I’m in a worse crisis than those poor devils in the steel industry. I tell you, Pepe, this Aids business has really messed things up. I’ve got regular clients that I’ve had for years, but that’s not what you’d call a decent living. I don’t want you to think I’m complaining, but I’ve got some important decisions to make, and I wanted to talk to you.’

Carvalho knew that she’d get her say eventually, for all that he tried to delay the moment. He was willing to talk, but not until they first went to the cinema to see a film in which various people were getting drugged on gazpacho, and a girl was losing her virginity in her dreams, and a bunch of Shiite conspirators were somewhere in the background, making life complicated for a fashion model who had eyes like a doe and skin the colour of cream. Then, as they were on their way up to Vallvidrera, she repeated that she had things she wanted to talk about, decisions
that she had to make. But first they made dinner, and then they made love, to the fullest of Charo’s expertise and the fullest of Carvalho’s capacity to evoke another body whose face he couldn’t exactly place, until at last he realized that it was Charo’s own — Charo as a younger woman. And as they relaxed afterwards, she with a cigarette, and he with a Churchill Cerdan, flat on their backs and with a blanket to protect them from the October chill of Vallvidrera, Charo finally explained what was on her mind. An old client was suggesting setting her up in business. Something simple. A boarding house, in fact.

‘What would you think of that, Pepe? A boarding house would be a good idea, wouldn’t it … I don’t have a penny to my name. Just a bit of money in the bank, but that’s going very fast because I’m using it to live on.’

Whenever Charo was depressed, some client always seemed to pop up and suggest setting her up in business, and Carvalho had to be told all the details and was expected to offer advice. Carvalho shut his eyes in order not to catch Charo’s eye as he said: ‘That’s not a bad idea.’

Calle Perecamps was to be extended, and would cut through the meat of the Old City towards Ensanche, forging a way through the defeated fibre of the city and the calcified skeletons of its direst architectural horrors. A gigantic mechanical digger with a head like some nightmare insect would convert the archaeology of poverty into archaeology pure and simple, but even if they demolished the houses, and got rid of the old people, the drug addicts, the pushers, the penniless prostitutes, the blacks, and the Arabs, all of them would have to find somewhere to escape to as the bulldozers drove them out. They would have to find a new home for their poverty, probably somewhere in the outskirts, where the city loses its name and thereby sheds responsibility for its disaster victims. A city with no name is a city which effectively
doesn’t exist. It appears on no postcards, and only earns the sympathy of the front pages when its auto-destruction complex transcends the limits of tolerability in a permissive society, and it begins to kill, rape, and commit suicide with the lack of self-control which normally characterizes only the desperate and the insane. Streets of old people with almost empty shopping bags, eternally en route from one pitiful purchase to another, from one half-memory to another; what they’ve done with their lives, and what day it is today. A new generation of whores with varicose veins, who will be entered into the census statistics by a fifth-generation computer, and who will feed, as their mothers fed, on tuna sandwiches and squid tapas floating in a hybrid sauce and (as a concession to modernity) frankfurters doused in ketchup. Alongside the monumental prostitute, weathered by the passing years and the chill of the night, stands the skinny, wraith-like junkie prostitute, her shifty eyes flicking about like those of drunken sailors on a sea with no way out. Two classes of pimps, too: the old familiar type, a pachydermic stud with prominent buttocks and a barrel chest, and the post-modern pimp, wiped out by drug addiction, and with his eyes and fingers slipping like blades over the surface of a mad and hostile world. Dimly lit shopkeepers who are irretrievably up against the wall. Clean-living young men, unemployed through no fault of their own, who hurry through prohibited streets. Mothers, internal exiles in barrios where they have been growing geraniums on their balconies from five or six generations back. The contrast of honest poverty. Families of Moroccan moles and black gazelles from darkest Africa, inhabiting flats that have been abandoned by people fleeing a leprous city. Toilets with no running water. Dead bodies lying in flats barricaded from the inside. Old people, abandoned by memory and left by their own desires and those of others. Lost children kicking footballs around in the squares, up against the doors of Gothic churches that are so old that they’re half sunk into the ground, each with a recent history as street-corner tobacconists or the abodes of artisanal
cutlery makers. Dog shit, and shit dogs, as faded and fearful as their owners — the women and mature children who look as if they are obliged to take the dog for a walk in order to take themselves for a walk, down the narrowness of narrow streets and worn paving stones. And something approaching the beauty of poverty has etched itself onto the façades of houses that were built shortly before or after the publication of the
Communist Manifesto
, a fact to which they remain oblivious, because this city was already old and has built itself, or rebuilt itself, on both sides of the medieval walls that were demolished in the middle of the nineteenth century. What excited Carvalho’s visual memory as he left Charo at the hairdresser’s and drove towards the southern parking lot on the Ramblas was not his own erudition, but a radio discussion on the problem of ‘Violence in the City’, where the contributors were an ex-terribly-modern-novelist, and a communist Jesuit, the former using as his spiritual inspiration a collage of various and opposing spiritual sources, principally a certain Georges Simmel, and the latter invoking Jesus Christ and Karl Marx. According to Simmel, since cities provide no ways of discharging aggression which do not involve great danger to the well-being of society, it becomes absolutely necessary to find ways of channelling that violence. One of the most familiar ways is what experts in ethics have come to recognize as aggression against a substitutive object.

‘Let us imagine,’ said the novelist, ‘that a terrified rabbit decides to kill the fox which has been making its life a misery. Obviously, the fox is stronger than it is. So instead it relieves its aggression by taking it out on a mouse. There’s a long tradition of these kinds of urban scapegoats: the persecution of Jews, blacks, Arabs, gypsies, Asians and foreigners in general gives the frustrated and aggressive citizenry a chance to lash out against minorities who are weaker than them and have no way of hitting back. Sport is another effective variant of substitutive objects. The ritualized interplay of aggressive actions and self-control enables the public to participate in a simulacrum of struggle, in an aggressiveness
between players. The problem is that today’s generation of fans is no longer satisfied simply with simulated violence, but feels the need to materialize it on the terraces, or outside the ground, out of frustration at the feeling that their escape valve has become commercialized.’