Off Side (3 page)

‘Señor Mortimer may well decide to choose a Catalan name, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be Núria or Jordi. There are other names.’

‘Such as …?’

‘Montserrat and Dídac, for example.’

‘All right, then. Will you call the child Dídac or Montserrat?’

‘I said that they
could
be called Montserrat or Dídac, but they could equally well be called Núria and Jordi, or Pepet and Maria Salud, or Xifré, or Mercè …’

Some of the journalists were beginning to show impatience with this process of onomastic accretion, and Mortimer sat by, puzzled but none the less smiling, as they proceeded to choose names for children that he didn’t even have yet.

‘Señor Mortimer, have you tried
pan con tomate
?’

Camps O’Shea patiently described to Mortimer the composition of
pan con tomate alla catalana
: bread, oil, tomato and salt.

‘Is that all?’

‘Yes, that’s all.’

Mortimer gave the matter some thought, and announced
without great enthusiasm that he would make sure to incorporate
pan con tomate
into his diet at the earliest opportunity. Then he added, with the ponderous determination of a novice linguist: ‘Me gusta mucho la paella.’

‘Do you prefer Catalan paella, or Valencian paella?’

Camps O’Shea asked the journalist to explain the difference between Catalan paella and Valencian paella, and the journalist said that it had been a joke. Camps gave him a poker-faced look and continued: ‘Are there any more questions?’

‘Mortimer, are you one of those centre forwards who go out looking for the ball, or do you prefer to stay in your area?’

When this had been translated, Mortimer pondered for a moment and replied: ‘A good centre forward should almost never come out of his area.’

Camps O’Shea got up, to indicate that the press conference was at an end. The press photographers flashed away as if their lives depended on it. Camps ushered Mortimer into another room, followed by the club’s directors, with the club chairman, Basté de Linyola, at their head. Once the photographers and the journalists were gone, Mortimer lost his aura as the god of the stadium. Now he looked like a young lad who had ended up in the wrong room by mistake. Especially when you put him next to Basté de Linyola, a businessman and ex-politician who had transformed the club’s presidency into a position of ultimate social significance. He had been on the point of becoming, variously, a minister in the Spanish government, a councillor in the autonomous government of Catalonia, and mayor of Barcelona. At sixty years of age he had suddenly discovered tiredness, and a fear that this tiredness would cause him to disappear from the public stage that he had occupied continuously ever since he had become the great white hope of the progressive business community under Franco. The chairmanship of this football club was his last position before retiring, but he had converted it into a hot seat, and he was a man who loved power as the only antidote to his own
self-destruction. By the age of sixty, either you have power or you commit suicide — this was what he told himself every morning as he stood in front of the mirror which reflected back unpityingly the tired face of that other being who was growing inside him, and who would eventually turn into his worst enemy. The idea of taking up this presidency after a long period in which the club had been run by uncouth and uncultivated businessmen had struck him as a worthwhile task, to which he brought his qualifications as an engineer and a master in fine arts at the University of Boston, a cultural schizophrenia which had provided him with a few entries for his CV.

‘Now that we’re here, this club is coming home,’ he had said in his first address as club chairman. And the sentiment was well received, as was his observation that the club was not just a club but was the symbolic army of Catalonia.

Now he permitted himself a closer look at Mortimer. He felt both curiosity and a certain populist tenderness towards him. The lad could have been one of his factory workers in Valles, one of those young workers who excited his poetic sense of himself as an enlightened businessman, and who stirred in him the envy that every cultured rich man feels in the face of young men with promise. His English was better than Mortimer’s, a provocation that would have enraged the learned professor of Shaw’s
Pygmalion
, and as the golden boy of European football became aware of this fact, he suddenly became reticent, as if he was speaking with some superior being who stood for the bosses and all they represented. Basté de Linyola passed him a box and told him to open it. In the box were the keys of three-hundred square metres of apartment located in a residential area of the city close to the club’s ground, where Mortimer would be able to house and raise his family during the four years of his contract with the club. Thereupon the club’s vice-chairman, the young banker Riutort who had connections with Arab investors and Japanese microchip manufacturers, handed him another box, in which there shone
with almost indecent brightness the keys of the Porsche that Mortimer had requested as one of the terms of his contract. The entire board broke into applause, and Basté de Linyola decided that it was the responsibility of his PR man to utter the banalities which the act required. Camps O’Shea spoke up accordingly: ‘Mortimer, may we welcome you as one more citizen of our city of Barcelona.’

The young footballer was happy, and caressed the car keys as if somehow expecting the vehicle to appear miraculously in the room. Somebody opened a bottle of
cava
, and a waiter dutifully poured it. This gave Basté de Linyola his cue for a toast. He had a complete mental collection of toasts which he had tried for size that morning before leaving home. He was particularly proud of the one which he had pronounced on the occasion of the homage which Barcelona’s up-and-coming entrepreneurs had offered to Juan Carlos when he was still a princeling in the shadow of General Franco.

‘Your Highness, in these bubbles you see the impatience of a people waiting to make the leap to modernity.’

The toast that he’d made to the president of the reconstituted Generalitat wasn’t bad either, on the occasion of his elevation to the post of president of the Chamber of Industry and Commerce.

‘Sir,
cava
is our symbol. It has been necessary to give it a new name, but for us it is still what it always was.’

Basté de Linyola’s toasts were much appreciated among the so-called political classes, and there were some who suggested that they might reflect the presence of a certain well-known writer as a regular guest on his yacht. Basté de Linyola was aware of this calumny, and cultivated it, in the same way that he secretly wrote pieces for the theatre and composed small items of classical music which he would play in the loneliness of his study, with the voluptuousness of a person buried alive, who knows the hour and the day of his resurrection. But this time he sensed that a simpler toast was required — not least when he looked at Mortimer’s smiling, freckled face, poised and eager to absorb the strange
sounds that were about to fall from the lips of his club’s chairman.

‘Mortimer, we hope you’re going to score many goals. Behind every goal you score stands a whole city’s desire for victory.’

Camps O’Shea took advantage of the ensuing applause to lean in Mortimer’s direction and translate what the chairman had said. The footballer nodded with a determined affirmation that some might have found excessive, and his enthusiasm was slightly at odds with the rest of the hall, because by now people were inventing excuses for having to leave. Basté de Linyola himself was the first to move, having first instructed his PR man to be sure not to abandon their new purchase.

‘The first few days are important, Camps. Until his wife arrives, you’re even going to have to make his bed for him.’

The chairman glanced momentarily at a silent man with a drink in one hand, leaning against a wall poster depicting some important moment in the club’s history, and then redirected his gaze to Camps O’Shea.

‘Is that him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t you think it’s a bit risky having him here?’

‘Nobody seems bothered by him. He’s our psychologist.’

‘Well, let’s hope we never need a psychiatrist!’

Camps watched as the chairman left, accompanied by the two remaining directors; then he took Mortimer by the arm.

‘I know a place where they do an excellent paella. I’ve reserved a table.’

‘Can we go in the Porsche?’

‘Of course. And a friend of mine will be coming too.’

Carvalho abandoned his stance of drooping weariness and fell in behind the footballer and the PR man. He mentally cursed himself for having accepted the job. The prospect of having to share a paella with a spoilt kid and a naive freckled Englishman filled him with foreboding.

No. She hadn’t left a forwarding address.

A fleeting narrowing of the eyes betrayed the man’s irritation, and disarmed the porter’s reluctance to continue a conversation which he had accepted unwillingly in the first place. At first he had decided that he was a sales rep, but when he registered that he wasn’t carrying anything with him he had listened more or less inattentively to his questions regarding Inma Sánchez, the tenant on the second floor, and her son. The man had to drag the negatives out of him one by one. She wasn’t living there any more. No, she hadn’t left on her own. She could hardly have gone off on her own, seeing that she didn’t live alone. The boy had gone with them too.

‘No. She didn’t leave a forwarding address.’

The conversation was at an end, but since he sensed a great sadness weighing on the shoulders of the man before him, he lowered his guard and momentarily abandoned his role as porter in a semi-de-luxe house in a semi-high-class part of town, halfway between Ensanche and the slopes of Tibidabo, with a service lift for flats that had no servants, and parking places for tenants who couldn’t necessarily afford cars.

‘Was the kid OK?’

‘He seemed to be, seeing the way he was going down the stairs four at a time.’

‘Four at a time?’

Something told the porter that he needed to give a better impression of the boy.

‘He’s a good lad. Well brought-up, too.’

‘Well brought-up …’

The moistness which seemed to appear in the man’s eyes was countered immediately by a straightening of his back in an attempt to recover a vertebral condition which sentiment had eroded. He adopted a pose that was almost athletic. He took his wallet out of his back trouser pocket, and from it produced a photograph which he showed to the porter.

‘Has he changed much?’

The porter took his glasses out of the top pocket of his uniform jacket and examined the photograph carefully. It showed the good-looking woman from the second floor, her son, and the man with whom he was now talking. As he looked at the photograph, a flash of a half-remembered image passed before his eyes.

‘I’ve seen you somewhere before. On TV, maybe …?’

‘Not these days.’

‘But you used to be. I’m sure I’ve seen you on television.’

‘I used to be, years ago, once in a while. Has the lad changed much?’

‘A lot. He’s a teenager now. In this photo he must be seven or eight years old, but he must be thirteen or fourteen by now. Is he your son?’

‘Yes.’

‘And why would I have seen you on TV?’

‘I used to play football.’

‘Ballarín!’ the porter shouted, as if he’d suddenly hit the jackpot. ‘You’re Ballarín!’

‘Palacín.’

‘That’s it. Palacín. Well, I was close. Amazing — who’d have thought that I’d run into Palacín today! Now, I tell you what … I remember your surname, but not your first name.’

‘Alberto. Alberto Palacín.’

‘Jesus! Palacín! They don’t make centre forwards like you nowadays! Centre forwards these days are rubbish. You don’t get players like you, going right up to the goal area and driving it in, straight past the goalkeeper … What are you doing nowadays? I suppose you’re retired and living off rent. Or is it business?’

‘Business, really. Not rent.’

‘Well, that’s good. You deserved a break after what happened … What was it, now …? You were injured, that’s it. That animal, what was his name …?’

‘What does it matter?’

‘What do you mean, what does it matter? The bastard had it in for you. I remember it like it was yesterday. They showed it on TV. In those days I only had a black-and-white set, but when I remember it I see it in techni-colour. By the time he’d finished with you, your knee looked like raw meat. What was it the doctors said …?’

Reaching into the recesses of his memory he produced the answer to his own question: ‘Fracture of the meniscus, and a tearing of the internal ligament and the front right ligament.’

‘A bastard, that. Like having to buy yourself another leg.’

‘That’s right. Like having to buy yourself another leg.’

The porter cast a critical eye over his leg.

‘You don’t seem to have a limp, though.’

‘I don’t limp.’

‘That was bad luck, that was. You’d be making a packet by now. You were making good money, but not like they make nowadays. They’re all millionaires, but half of them are nothing to write home about. They only play when they feel like it, and if they don’t feel like it they run off and hide behind the ref or behind the goalposts. Have you seen that Butragueño play? He looks like an orphan … And what about Lineker … A joke …! And this one they’ve signed now — it’s like taking lambs to the slaughter. The kind of thugs you get in Spanish football these days will teach him a thing or two. In no time at all he’ll be wanting to hang up his boots.’

‘They’re good players. They’re all very good.’

‘But there’s no one like you.’

‘No, that’s not true.’

‘No one, Ballarín, no one!’

The porter took him by one arm to emphasize the point. He took another look at the photograph, and was clearly full of sympathy and willing to help.

‘A hell of a girl, you had there. She didn’t leave a forwarding address, but you could try asking at the beauty parlour on the
corner. The lady spent a lot of time there. It’s very well equipped — they’ve got everything, a gymnasium, a sauna, a hairdresser’s … I’m sure they’ll be able to help you.’