A Shortcut to Paradise (11 page)

Our plan was to go and have a bite to eat and rest for a while. Montse wasn't around, Arnau was with his grandparents and the twins were on the rampage with friends. I'd promised Montse I would help her that evening to prepare for the party by taking chairs up to the terrace and going to buy the fireworks and cava. However, before complying with my domestic duties, I had to accompany Borja to buy a summer suit in the centre. My brother chose a beige item and bought me a couple of short-sleeved shirts – one dark, the other lightish – a belt, three pairs of black socks, one pair of brown shoes and a tie that went well with the suit and shirts. The sales were on, but even so, I had a shock when I saw the receipt I had to sign.

“Don't grumble!” remarked Borja, hearing me muttering as we left the shop. “If you'd gone for an Armani or Hermès, it would have been a good deal more expensive.”

“Then perhaps we'd both have had to stand like statues in the Ramblas, for what's left of the summer!” I retorted angrily. “Frankly, Borja, I am quite unable to see the difference. There's a little shop round the corner from home…”

“Maybe you can't,” he cut me off, “but I assure you other people can.” I suppose he was referring to our rich, sophisticated clients. “And that's the whole point.”

“What it is to be in the know…” I thought to myself while deciding not to contradict him. Borja's philosophy had worked wonders today and I wouldn't be the one to question it. The fact I personally believe it is scandalous that people take more notice of our appearance than of our CV makes not a jot of difference. On the other hand, we don't have much of a CV, appearance is the only card we can play, and Borja is right there. It's also true we're not the only ones to do these things, although we may do them more consciously. Montse's radical customers also like the fact that the woman helping them to give up smoking and enjoy the secrets of karma and the virtues of yoga wears that half-hippy half-ethnic look she's worn lately. If our rich customers are dazzled by the make of the clothes we wear, that's their problem, not ours, as my brother liked to say.

After giving him money for a taxi to the Passeig de Gràcia, I took a bus home, six hundred euros the poorer and loaded down with bags. Montse, who was
back, wrinkled her nose when she saw them, but said nothing. She must assume it was Borja's doing, because she knows I hate shopping and that I prefer old jeans and the feel of cotton shirts when it comes to clothes, and preferably on the worn side. Luckily, my brother has yet to insist I spray myself with one of those eaude-Cologne fragrances he likes so much. No guarantees though.

“The demands of work, love,” I commented resignedly, as I put my purchases in the wardrobe, rather shame-faced after telling her about the theft on the Ramblas.

“Well, get changed, because you've got to help me to take things up to the terrace for tonight's party,” she instructed me as she undid her plait and combed her hair. “We'll have a good crowd and as the neighbours have given us permission to hold it on the roof terrace, I've been forced to invite them too. But not to worry, they won't all come.”

“I hope the Rottweiler doesn't show up,” I said anxiously.

The Rottweiler is the chair of the flat-owners' association. No one can stand her, Montse in particular, who's had several rows with her.

“Don't worry, I don't think she'll stick her nose in,” Montse smiled. “In fact, she's dying to put in a complaint and says she'll ring the police if we play music or make too much noise. It seems she's bought one of those little gadgets that measure decibels.”

“She just has to be a witch!”

“I'm sure Carmen will come, the one on the first floor, with her two children. Her husband is away.”

“They seem like nice people,” I added as I changed my shirt. “He's a translator, isn't he?”

“Something of the sort. Hey, hurry up. And try not to knock the lift about when you're taking the chairs up.”

“
Yes, sir
!” I answered, acting as if I was giving a military salute, and resigned to carrying out her orders without protesting in the slightest.

Those who wear the trousers are in charge, and that's Montse
chez nous
. Luckily, no one talks about hen-pecked husbands any more.

11

Josefina Peña was sad and distraught. She couldn't rid herself of the image of her friend sprawled out on the floor in her room at the Ritz with her head smashed open, and since she'd found Marina's corpse, the police had questioned her several times, as if they were still none the wiser. She had held on to the pearl-and-diamond earring she'd found quite by chance under a chair at the hotel, and didn't know what to do with it. Give it to the police? Keep it as a souvenir? It wasn't the piece's value that led her not to declare it, but the feeling that, by preserving the earring as a kind of relic, she would be preserving her friend whom she'd never see again. Josefina was a widow, her only son lived in London and she'd found in Marina the friend she'd never had. With no Marina at the other end of the line, she'd be alone again and would relapse into depression.

Unlike Marina, Josefina was a wealthy woman who came from a good family. And, also unlike Marina, her life had followed the hackneyed, random pattern of many young people of her generation and economic and social status: a difficult, well-heeled adolescence, an initiatory trip to India at eighteen and, on her return, nine years in Ibiza living in a commune, practising free
love between one joint and the next. Josefina had spent ten years searching for her soul, bedding whomever, making and selling plastic necklaces she reckoned were arty and tripping on LSD. Unfortunately, the only thing she'd discovered in her hippy years were a number of sexually transmitted diseases and the growing feeling she was occasionally beginning to lose her memory. She was thirty when she returned to Barcelona, alone, pregnant and slightly unhinged. Her parents quickly found her a husband and opened a boutique for her in Sarrià. Josefina met Marina in that shop, which was called
The Oracle
, where she sold radical chic clothes from Ibiza. The novelist soon became one of her best customers and, in the process, her best and only friend.

However, Marina was a secret person. She never talked about her past. Josefina only knew that she was from Sant Feliu de Codines, where she owned a house, and had an ex she never saw and an Italian lover who never came to Barcelona. When Marina travelled down to the city, they'd both meet up for dinner or to go to the theatre or the Liceo. Josefina didn't really like opera but ever since her last boyfriend jilted her after helping himself to her current account, she found her eccentric friend's cheerful, disinterested company even more appealing. Marina was an optimist by nature, and her conversation worked better for Josefina than any anti-depressant.

That Friday her son and daughter-in-law were arriving from London and she'd bought cake and cava to celebrate St John's Eve at home with them. She wasn't at all keen on her daughter-in-law, a starchy Young Conservative who looked down on her ex-hippy mother-in-law. Her son was only twenty-five but he was a financial whizz-kid and earned a fortune in the City, where he'd met that young lawyer on the road to success whom he'd finally bedded and wedded. Josefina knew they'd both try yet again to persuade her to close her boutique and do something more respectable, like being a lady of leisure or looking after her grandchildren, if she could put her mind to it. Four years had gone by since her husband had died – her son didn't know he wasn't his biological father – and her child was intent on taking her to live with them to salve his conscience and, in the process, ensure his mother didn't fritter away the family inheritance. He knew nothing about her past or present boyfriends, and Josefina always played the role of the resigned widow to avoid disappointing him.

As her son and daughter-in-law were about to arrive, she decided to go to the laundry room to smoke the joint she'd just rolled so the house didn't smell of weed. They wouldn't understand, and if they got a sniff were sure to force her into a detox centre and might even find a judge to declare her incapacitated so they could close her shop. While she got high on the grass she'd bought from an acquaintance who cultivated a plantation of marijuana in her house, the tears welled up in Josefina's eyes. Deprived of her long, exhilarating conversations with Marina, she'd been driven back to dependence on anti-depressants, tranquillizers and joints, in that order.

 

 

On Saturday morning, after celebrating St John's Eve at home watching
Gertrud
and getting to bed relatively early, Oriol Sureda went out to buy some breakfast and returned home with a baguette, a butter croissant and a sheaf of papers under his arm, set up to spend the
rest of the morning reading cultural supplements and literary reviews. He made coffee, put on Beethoven's Sonata Number 5 for piano and violin, and sat down at his dining table with his breakfast and a pile of magazines and newspapers. By that stage in June, classes at the university had wound down and Oriol felt he could spend Saturday afternoon, even the whole of Sunday if necessary, revising the paper on the death of the novel he'd agreed to read in the middle of July at a Congress in the Canary Islands. In fact, he'd be giving that lecture he'd written some ten years before for the fifth time. He would have to touch it up slightly, in case someone in the audience remembered it, or in case the organizers had garnered financial support and insisted on publication: he needed to change the order of the paragraphs, the title too, perhaps a couple of the quotations, incorporate different examples… An afternoon's labour or an afternoon and morning at most. He'd already published the same paper in three university journals under three different titles – ‘The Slow Death of the Novel' (1998), ‘European Narrative from Flaubert to Agustí Capdevánol' (2001) and ‘
Easyreads
and the Degeneration of the Novel as a Genre' (2004) – although Oriol doubted any of his colleagues had bothered to read it, or if they had, that they'd paid sufficient attention to notice that it was the same text. In any case, it was common knowledge that it was what everybody did at the university and he had no need to feel embarrassed. In terms of lecturers' cloned publications in the area of philosophy and literature, there was a kind of tacit agreement, of academic
omertà
, that was scrupulously respected at every institutional level, from rectors and deans to the lowliest porter and teaching assistant hoping for a promotion. Oriol Sureda felt enormously proud to be a cornerstone of this mediocre, self-perpetuating system.

It was hot, and after skimming a few literary critical articles that revealed nothing to anyone but did some good for their authors' CVs, Oriol went into his kitchen in search of a Coke. He decided to put his cultural supplements to one side for a while and watch the news. The world continued to be in a mess, and he saw that the papers were still raking over the murder of Marina Dolç. He'd been one of the guests at the literary party at the Ritz the night she won the prize, even though he was one of her detractors. Apart from teaching literature classes at the university, Oriol doubled as a literary critic. Writers, especially young ones, feared him like some raging oracle and tried to ingratiate themselves with him. From the Olympus of his erudition, Oriol could consecrate or sink a writer, and childishly enjoyed wielding the burning tip of his pen in the weekly column he wrote for one of the nation's most prestigious dailies.

He was now nearing sixty, but was forty-four when he was asked to review the first novel by the then unknown author, Marina Dolç. At the time, Oriol was bottom of the pile in a university department where he languished attempting to build a reputation by dint of his secondhand theories on the dismal future of literature. Unfortunately he wasn't related to any of the pillars of the patriotic bourgeoisie that ruled that particular roost, and was no brain-box either, so he had to earn it by graft alone. He'd been warned it was a rubbish novel, though an impartial review was expected of him, if possible with a little blood and gore in bilious mode. Oriol Sureda, fretting for fame, didn't disappoint.

The Rage of the Goddesses
was cliché-ridden, written in a rather puerile lyrical style that its author had tried to offset with a series of steamy sex scenes. The characters were limp, the plot contrived and the prose facile and transparent. Even so, Oriol Sureda was hooked on that ramshackle fictional world of intrigue and couldn't put it down. Oriol only read stodgy tomes that were unfathomable, which once you'd fathomed them, made you feel like committing suicide, so he felt quite bewildered when he enjoyed reading a novel for the first time in years. It took him three days to read it and thirty to write the review: nonetheless he trashed it.

He wrote a perceptive, cruelly sardonic review that was praised to the skies by the great patricians of culture in their respective eyries. Doors began to open to Oriol Sureda, including ones to a chair within ten years and others to a couple of lavatories he preferred not to step inside. Rather reluctantly he continued reviewing the novels Marina published, but from now on there were two Oriol Suredas sharing one body, one bald patch, one bank account and one brain.

He'd been suffering from terrible migraines recently and sometimes felt he was going to have a complete blackout. Perhaps he was ageing. When he finished reading the supplements, it was time for lunch. As happened every week, his housekeeping lady had left a supply of precooked dishes in the freezer. He took out the Tupperware container full of meatballs, which he heated in the microwave. He poured out a glass of red wine and ate the meatballs and a peach while he flicked on the TV. Then he made coffee, zapped through the different channels some more and decided he didn't really need to introduce big changes in the lecture he'd already written. In any case, he would dedicate Sunday afternoon to that. He switched off the television, went to his library and gingerly, as if it was a bibliophile's dream, took down the unbound copy of
A Shortcut to Paradise
that he'd received clandestinely from a member of the jury a day before the prize was announced. He drew his curtains slightly, sat in the armchair by the window and, with a
frisson
of ineffable pleasure, plunged for a third time into that novel which fascinated him, like all the fiction written by Marina Dolç.