Southern Seas (23 page)

‘Did they get on well?’

‘No.’

‘He seemed a sad man.’

‘And you gave him happiness.’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Just one last question for today. Don’t you remember anything, any event or any person, that might set us on the trail of the murderer?’

‘The last question for today and any day. And this is my last answer. No.’

‘We’ll be seeing each other again,’ said Carvalho, as he rose sharply to his feet.

‘I hope not.’

‘Tell your friend and her chum to disguise themselves better next time.’

‘They’ve nothing to disguise. They came because we agreed that it would be a good idea.’

Carvalho got into his car and drove off to meet Señor Vilas. He was sitting in front of the television with his grandchildren, watching a programme about horses. He took Carvalho up to the office.

‘Do you keep information about people living in San Magín?’

‘Not everyone, but just about everyone.’

‘Do you have files?’

‘Señor Viladecans asked me to keep them. There’s an administrative file, which is pretty complete, and a much patchier one for specific incidents.’

‘What kind of incidents?’

‘If someone gets into trouble. After all, you have to know your enemy. It’s a jungle out there.’

‘I want everything you have on Ana Briongos.’

‘I can tell you that without a file. She’s a red, but she hasn’t been causing much trouble. Not for some months, anyway. She seems to have been lying low for the past year. I hear she has a sweetheart.’

‘Where she lives, who she goes around with, what her family does, everything you know.’

‘I’ll see what I can do.’

A small cupboard that appeared to promise little of interest opened, to reveal Señor Vila’s cardboard files. He searched around, pulled out three or four folders, and held them at a distance from his longsighted eyes.

‘I can’t see a thing without my glasses.’

The file contained Ana Briongos’s address and that of her
family—her parents and six brothers and sisters. The parents and the oldest brother had come from Granada. The others were born in the immigrant areas of Barcelona; the youngest in San Magín. The father: a cinema usher in La Bordeta. The mother: a cleaner at the same cinema. The eldest brother was married and working at a pipe factory in Vic. Ana was the next in line. Next came Pedro Larios …

‘How come one of the Briongos kids is called Larios?’

‘He’s a half-brother. That’s all I can tell you.’

One of the girls worked at a hairdresser’s in San Magín. The youngest two were still at school. Ana’s file had a long list of political activities. Next to the name of Pedro Larios ‘Briongos’ was a note about a motorcycle theft at the age of fourteen.

‘What else is known about the guy?’

‘This isn’t a police file. I only record what people tell me.’

Carvalho jotted down a few notes.

‘I’ll be absolutely discreet.’

‘Don’t worry. Are they in some sort of trouble?’

‘I don’t think so. It’s just routine.’

‘It’s not very pleasant to have to keep an eye on people. But these days, it’s more necessary than ever. All this freedom is all very fine, but it has to be freedom with responsibility, and therefore with vigilance. Does this have anything to do with the tenant you were asking me about the other day?’

‘Probably.’

‘I repeat, it wasn’t my responsibility. It was a direct order from Señor Stuart Pedrell, may he rest in peace. I’ll make that clear to Señor Viladecans.’

‘Don’t mention anything for the moment. I’ll have to give him a report myself.’

‘Whatever you say. Would you like a drop of something?’

‘Of what?’

‘Whatever you fancy. Calisay, a liqueur, cognac, anis, Aromas de Montserrat …’

He drank a glass of Aromas de Montserrat while they sat and watched the sad story of a Mexican rancher who deserted his beautiful wife because of his obsession with horses.

‘Iaio, what’s a
xarro
?’

‘A
xarro
is a gunman, a cowboy.’

‘A western cowboy?’

‘Yes. But from the west of Mexico … These kids are at the age when they want to know everything, and you don’t necessarily always know the answers.’

‘Almost never, in my experience.’

‘It’s true, what you say. Very true.’

‘I heard that the Briongos family didn’t much care for Ana’s political activities.’

‘No. She used to just take off, and no one ever knew where to find her. She’s been in trouble of one sort or another ever since she was a kid. Even under Franco. I’m telling you. They’d give her a thrashing because the police were after her. I had words with her once, when there was that fuss about the clinic. She said that I’d been a Franco supporter. But I’ve never been anything. I fired a few shots in the civil war, on the side of the reds, but that was only because I was in Barcelona at the time. Anyway, I told her she was a troublemaker—and that you convince people by talking to them, not by shouting at them. So, she goes and says I supported Franco. I don’t owe anything to Franco—well, nothing except peace and work. People have a lot of bad things to say about Franco, but in those days, things weren’t like they are today. No one wants to work any more. They turn up from Almería and they think someone’s going to pay them a thousand pesetas for bending down and picking up a bit of paper.

‘Look, I’m no dictator, but I say we’re in a complete mess now. We’re heading for disaster. I’ve worked like a dog to give myself a peaceful old age. No one’s given me anything. My children are married and well set up. I’ve got my health and a bit of cash for when I can’t work any longer. What more could a man want? Am
I going to let a few crackpots spoil everything because they decide they want the moon? No, sir. The parents are a different matter. Good, hard-working people. I went to see Señor Briongos, to ask him to get a grip on his daughter. One day she was demanding a health centre; the next she was making a fuss about the drains; and the next day it was about schools. Well, hold your horses, girl! We’re not made of money, you know. And anyway, I just take orders. Thank God she’s not been making much trouble lately. You can tell the difference. Her new boyfriend must have calmed her down. That’s what I say: God save us from women who don’t get a proper fuck.’

Winking as if to excuse the strong language, he raised his elbows as if preparing for take-off, and let out a laugh that sounded more like a sneeze, thereby annoying his grandchildren, who could not hear the sad story of the beautiful Mexican woman abandoned for half a dozen horses.

Señor Briongos smelt of omelette, and the trace of oil that he wiped from his chin had obviously been used in frying the omelette in question. He looked like a croupier from a Mississippi steamboat who had been brought down in the world by the effects of a stomach ulcer. A bald, emaciated man with long sideburns and eyes as large as his daughter’s. Incisive arm movements dealt people and spaces into their allotted portion, and it was as if he were inviting Carvalho into some huge castle and instructing his family and servants to retire to their quarters. The main room was an exact copy of the one occupied by Porqueres’s three-piece, tartan suite. There was hardly any space to move between the
aerial-topped television, the outsize neo-classical dining table, the chairs, the glass cocktail cabinet, and two green imitation leather armchairs occupied by two boys and a girl who had her fingers in a jar.

‘Switch the telly off, and go to your room. I have to talk to this gentleman.’

The father’s withering look cut short their gestures of protest. By now the Mexican lady had decided to learn horse-riding, so that she could follow in the footsteps of her cowboy husband. Back in the room, a bell-shaped woman whose hair had been badly dyed in platinum-chestnut tufts was beginning to clear the dirty plates from the table.

‘Is the girl in trouble again? I must explain that I no longer have anything to do with her. She has her own life, and I have mine.’

‘God help us!’ the woman muttered, without pausing in her task.

‘That girl has given us a lot of worry, and no pleasure. Not that we haven’t tried to set her on the right road. But what can parents do, when they’ve got a lot of children, and they both work.’

‘Too much reading, and bad company,’ the wife shouted from the kitchen.

‘Reading’s not a bad thing. It depends on what you read. But I won’t argue about the bad company. So, tell me what she’s done now. I’m prepared for the worst.’

‘I don’t think she’s done anything. It’s not really about her that I wanted to see you, but about a fellow she was going round with last year.’

‘She’s had so many—I’m ashamed to talk about it. I don’t know what makes me more ashamed: that she’s messed about with politics; or that she goes to bed with anyone who wants it, ever since she learned that it wasn’t just for pissing with. Excuse me, but that daughter of mine brings out the worst in me.’

‘This was quite an older man. His name was Antonio Porqueres.’

‘Ah, yes. The musician. Amparo, he’s come to ask us about the musician.’

‘The musician!’ shouted Amparo from the kitchen.

‘Was he a musician?’

‘We call him that because he came here one day and spent the whole time talking about music. I’d just bought a record by Marcos Redondo, and when he saw it, he suddenly began talking on and on about music. When he left, we all cracked up. Sole, the girl you saw just now, is a born comedian, and she began imitating him. You’d have died laughing. A very stuck-up sort of bloke, he was. She brought him here because her mother was dying of shame. The whole neighbourhood was asking who her daughter was engaged to. So I went looking for her at the bus stop, and told her straight that she had to introduce us to the man, if only for her mother’s sake. And one day she brought him round. Then he went off, and left her with what she’s got now.’

‘So you know what she’s been left with.’

‘And how can I look people in the eye, now …?’

‘May the Lord help us!’ added Amparo from the kitchen.

‘I went back to the bus stop and told her, again quite plainly, that she’d have to fend for herself. I don’t want to have anything to do with it. Pedrito has already been enough of a cross to bear.’

‘Who’s Pedrito?’

‘My son. It’s a very long story. When I already had Ana, I was given the chance of working on a dam near Valencia. I went there without my family, and I’m sure you can guess what happened.’

‘How can this gentleman know what happened? Men aren’t all the same. There are still some who have a sense of decency.’

‘Shut up. Mind your own business, will you? Well, I had an affair with this girl there, and she went and died on me in childbirth. The whole village was against me, and there was nothing I could do. She’d been through every man in the village, but they
pinned the kid on me. So I came back with the little boy, and my wife, who’s a real saint, accepted him into the family. It’s a pity he turned out so bad—it must have been a bad seed to start with. How can you tell where he came from? He can’t be my son—that’s getting clearer all the time. But it’s a funny business, all this stuff about seeds. Ana is mine, and look how she’s turned out. There was no way of taming either her or Pedrito. And it wasn’t that I spared the rod, either. In the end, on Amparo’s advice, we put Pedrito into care. There was nothing we could do with him. But he managed to run away, and we were landed with him again. And it’s still going on.’

‘Does he live with you?’

‘No,’ the woman shouted emphatically from the kitchen. ‘And he won’t, as long as I have anything to do with it.’

‘Funnily enough, though, the boy doesn’t have bad feelings towards us.’

‘He has no feelings, full stop. Neither good nor bad.’

‘Don’t exaggerate.’

‘Don’t let’s talk about the monster. It only upsets me, and you know what I’m like.’

She was occupying the whole kitchen doorway, as if ready to fall upon them and hammer them into the ground.

‘Was that the only time you saw Antonio Porqueres? When he was here talking about music?’

‘Yes. Except for the time when I got him and my daughter tickets for the cinema where I work. I asked him if he wanted to join me for a drink, but he wouldn’t. Just hello and goodbye. That was all. I never saw him again. Never.’

He tried to open his eyes and his face to the utmost, so that Carvalho would see that he was telling the truth.

‘Could I talk to your son?’

‘What for?’

‘What for?’ the woman repeated, now firmly esconced in the dining room.

‘Maybe he had more contact with Porqueres.’

‘He had no contact with him at all. He didn’t even see him when he came here.’

‘Ask Ana. She’ll tell you.’

‘Yes, ask Ana.’

I can see that you’re both afraid. I don’t know if it’s the kind of fear that we all feel when we don’t know what’s round the next corner. But you’re definitely afraid.

‘Pedro didn’t relate to anyone in the family.’

‘Not to any of us.’

‘We haven’t seen him for months. I couldn’t even tell you where to look.’

‘He’s living his own life. In our family, everyone’s lives their own lives, except for us. We’re always stuck with other people, aren’t we, Amparo?’