The Angst-Ridden Executive (13 page)

He put the top on his pen and arched his eyebrows with sufficient force to be able to keep them up for a while.

‘OK, fire away. I imagine that you haven’t come here just to tell me things about the lovely but crazy Vilaseca. Crazy, he is, quite crazy. . .’

Another personal and infectious laugh.

‘I’d like to be able to live like that madman. . . He lives a hell of a life, a hell of a life!’

He clasped his left hand with his right, sank his head into his chest as if to concentrate better on the person before him, and encouraged him:

‘Go ahead—fire away.’

‘It appears that out of all the friends of his younger days you’re the one who has kept the closest links with Jauma.

‘Am I to conclude from the way you phrased that that you consider me no longer young?’

‘Not
as
young. . ..

‘Ah, that’s better.’

Once again, an invitation to laugh.

‘I’m involved in re-opening this case, and I want you to tell me anything that might encourage me to keep it open. In other words, anything that might verify my suspicion that Jauma was not murdered for the reasons stated in the official version.’

A long sigh. A slow reflection. Slow movements in search of the back of the chair. A slow resting of his head against one of its wings. A slow return to his initial position.

‘I’m afraid I can’t really help you. I’ve already told the police everything I know about Jauma, and everything that I know fits perfectly logically with the facts of his unfortunate death. I knew him well, very well . . .

He took a Davidoff Special from a Dunhill humidor. With a wooden spill he meticulously applied a flame to the end of the Cigar, and when the sides began to catch he moved it continuously between his fingers until the whole thing was alight. Then he trimmed the other end with a silver Cigar-cutter and inhaled a compact mass of smoke.

‘Oh—I
am
sorry.’ he said, as if suddenly annoyed with himself for an unpardonable oversight, and he passed the box of Davidoffs to Carvalho. The detective sensed that this was a deliberate manoeuvre, a test to find out whether he appreciated quality tobacco. In fact Carvalho had not taken his eyes off the Davidoff ever since it had appeared in Argemi’s hand like the apple appearing in the hand of Eve. Argemi watched with evident gratification as Carvalho went through the lighting-up ritual, and when both Davidoffs were alight and their perfectly-formed tips were glowing at each other, a mutual bond of connoisseurship had been established between the detective and the entrepreneur. Argemi fondled the beginnings of a waistline as if it was an expensive pet and observed:

‘Jauma didn’t smoke.’

‘But he certainly liked to eat and drink.’

‘And screw! And screw! Don’t forget—he did like a good screw!’

Laughter and smoke arose from Argemi’s half-closed lips as he leaned towards Carvalho to underline this statement, waving his cigar assertively under his nose.

‘We used to go on trips a lot. Sometimes just the two of us, and sometimes with our wives. When you travel together you get to know a person. I could say a lot about Jauma’s erotic obsessions. Not least, I suppose, because I share them myself.’

‘Why did you travel together so often?’

‘Sometimes for business and sometimes just because we enjoyed each other’s company. Jauma’s business and mine had aspects in common, in the sense that Petnay supplied me with particular products via one of its many subsidiaries.’

‘Can you confirm my impression that Jauma had been getting particularly depressed recently?’

‘Absolutely not. Not at all. He was certainly capable of swinging between euphoria and depression, but I’d not noticed any particular change in him recently. Who’s been telling you that Jauma was depressed?’

‘Nuñez, Vilaseca, and Biedma.’

‘Oh, the left wing! They seem to take a particular delight in trying to show that Jauma, Fontanillas and myself have made a mistake in the kind of life we’ve chosen.’

‘Have you?’

He raised the Davidoff as if it were a chalice about to be consecrated, and nodded towards the cigar in Carvalho’s hand.

‘Do
you
think we’ve made the wrong choice? The day that you reach maturity is the day when you realize that you only live once. Then you have two choices. Either you decide to live the best life you can, or you go transcendental, go for the hereafter, and turn religious like Nuñez, Vilaseca, Biedma and Santa Teresa de Jesus. Every time I get intimations of mortality, I take a plane and I head for the Princess Hotel in Acapulco. You’ve heard of it, I’m sure. It’s the most luxurious hotel in the world. When I was young and had no money, I used to write poetry and buy myself ties. That used to get me through the depressions. Nuñez,Vilaseca and Biedma believe in the immortality of the soul—not the individual soul, but the soul of the ascendant classes. Note that—“ascendant”! According to them, the class that I belong to is on the way down. Fair enough, I say. But the soul of the bourgeoisie deserves a decent death—with its stomach awash with champagne—Dom Perignon for preference—and its eyes veiled by the smoke of Davidoff cigars. Every morning I breakfast on three decent-sized Iranian caviar sandwiches and a glass of French champagne with orange juice. Then I go for a swim in my indoor swimming pool, or play tennis on my tennis court, or go for a game of golf. When the good weather comes, I race my yacht during the week, and at weekends I lend it to my friends, so as to enjoy the pleasure of being hopelessly envied. I never eat run-of-the-mill food, Carvalho, never! Our senses deserve better than to be subjected to a routine, because it is through our senses that we are living, sentient beings. In my house we eat a la carte. A choice of at least five courses every day, and at every meal. My wife and I are both on a diet, to keep in trim. Nothing miserable, though. Grilled lobster with a caper salad, or a sirloin steak, or maybe a low-fat beef stew. I’ve been sending my cook to special courses on dietetic cooking. You have no idea what my cook costs me! First I have to pay him enough so that he doesn’t just pack his bags and leave. Then I have to shell out even more, to make sure nobody makes him an offer he can’t refuse. I keep his whole family employed in my firm. But there you go . . . a cook is a man’s best friend, Carvalho, and if my cook were ever to die I would be heartbroken. I have five thousand bottles in my cellars at Ampurdan, and about two thousand in Barcelona. Top quality, all of them. The best French vintages you can get. And a few Spanish ones—a few good white wines, because sometimes I have a hankering for a well-chilled Galician vino verde—in spring, maybe, or when I have a real thirst. Tomorrow I’m off to Paris, to dine at the Tour d’Argent, and the following day I’ll be driving to Lyon, to eat chez Paul Bocuse. A voyage of gastronomic moral rearmament. So what do you think? Do you think I’ve chosen the wrong kind of life? Not a bit of it! I live a hell of a life, and I love it! I don’t have a lot to worry about on the business front. I don’t even have to worry about domestic competition, because I’m an exporter. D’you hear that? An exporter. Of yoghurt! The production process, incidentally, is child’s play, and so is the distribution. As for my love life, I could insure it at Lloyds for a billion dollars. I have a sensible wife who knows when to be intimate and when to leave me alone, and who looks as good in a nightdress as she does in evening dress. My children are perhaps not as intelligent as I would have wished, but they’re adequate, and they’re healthy too. I have friendships for every occasion—from the nostalgic pleasure that I get from my university friends, to the occasional high-class wedding reception. I have girlfriends for every occasion too. An old girlfriend from my student days, with the body of a forty-year-old woman, who frees me from my adolescent hang-ups; other girls who may be a bit past their prime, but who have a convertible and a cheque book and a slight resemblance to Jacqueline Onassis that I find increasingly attractive as I get older; the wife of one of my subordinates, which provides me with that particular shot of humiliation and abuse that the sex act sometimes requires; and the wife—or the daughter of one of my friends from the wedding receptions. You could say that I’m a collector. I’m only telling you all this because one should always tell policemen and detectives everything, and also because you know how to smoke a Davidoff. Last week I blew two hundred thousand pesetas buying shirts in London. I shall go back in September in order to replenish my supply of sweaters. I have as much as I need in life, and, thank God, I am not attracted by the sensuality of political power. For some weeks now I have noticed how increasing numbers of business people seem to be getting hooked on politics. They want to be MPs, or senators. Partly because they’re worried that the politicians aren’t looking after their interests. And partly because political power has a sensuality all its own. They know that history books tend to print the names of politicians and cabinet ministers, and that nobody will ever record the fact that I happened to be the owner of Aracata Ltd. This is another aspect of transcendentalism, against which, fortunately, I have been vaccinated. I have written some excellent books of poetry in Catalan, and I’m thinking of publishing them when I reach the age of sixty, for the simple pleasure of forcing the Encyclopaedia Catalaña to dedicate ten lines to me now and probably thirty lines fifty years from now. Take a look at this. I’ve written a likely version of what they’ll write about me fifty years from now. I’ll do you a photocopy so that you can keep it—assuming you want to—and if you live that long you can have a look in fifty years time and see if I was far wrong.’

‘Argemi Blanc, Jordi. Born Barcelona 1932, died Palausator (Gerona). 2002. A late-developing Catalan poet. His first book,
Keep the Wood on
the Quay
, published in 1980, revealed a previously unknown link between the poetry of Salvat-Papasseit and Gabriel Ferrater, a poetry of personal experience which sometimes tends towards social comment (Salvat-Papasseit), and sometimes adopts a hermetic style of intimate love poetry (Ferrater).
Fruit Skin
(1985) returns to more traditional themes of love poetry, drawing on the Catullan tradition of lyric poetry to create a libretto for a rock-opera. A poet without a poetic history, and with no links with the literary movements of his time, Argemi maintained a constant development in his thematic material and his poetic forms, which culminated in his masterpiece
Yoghurt
, a Laocontian attempt to convert poetry into a synthesis of different literary genres. Some writers on Argemi have seen in
Yoghurt
(1990) symbolic elements which go beyond the formal and expressional challenge contained in it. In the words of Pedro Gimferrer,
Yoghurt
is “an attempt at poetic apprehension of the essence of a country —Catalonia —at the historic moment when, for the fourth time, its desire for independence is frustrated. In this sense,
Yoghurt
forms one part of the great triptych of Catalonia’s national poetry, alongside Verdaguer’s
Atlantis
and Josep Carner’s
Nabi
.” Between 1990 and 2002, the year of his death, Argemi’s only published work was a curious book of “sensual memoirs” entitled
Capital Pleasures
. A year after his death, in 2003, a minor work was published which revealed the creative decline of the seventy-year-old poet, although it still had the characteristic linguistic inventiveness which was so typical of his writing:
The Smoke of a Davidoff
(2003). Essential bibliographic reading:
Argemi Through the Looking Glass
, ed. P. Gimferrer. La Coqueluche. 1995;
Final Poems
, Josep M. Castellet. Edicions 62. 1983;
Argemi Alone
, Franyoise Wagener. Editions Gallimard. 1990.’

‘All these books, of course, will have been written by myself.’ Argemi concluded as he sat half-hidden behind a final puff of smoke from the Davidoff.

In a solidly modern flat located in a part of Barcelona that was high enough up a hillside to escape the hurly-burly of the urban masses and central enough to enable its owner to go on foot to any of the city’s art movie houses or one of the restaurants catering for reasonably well-off cultural minorities, lived Juan Dorronsoro, the youngest son of a family whose eldest son was a poet featured in seventy-three per cent of international anthologies of Spanish poetry and whose second eldest was Pedro Dorronsoro, the best known of all Spanish novelists, who had even been mentioned in an American TV mini-series.

‘Who are your favourite writers?’

‘I’ve just finished a Hemingway, and now I’m starting something by Pedro Dorronsoro, whom I find a very interesting writer. . .’

While it lacked the socio-cultural representativeness of the one brother, and did not enjoy the intellectual repute of the other, the work of Juan Dorronsoro had advanced slowly but steadily in the form of just three novels, which had met with more critical than popular acclaim. He was a man who wrote ten lines a day, and he lived life as a function of his writing, in a time-scale all his own, and in a physical space limited solely to the present. He lived in the antechamber of a photographic memory that was sufficiently falsificatory to provide material for his novels and at the same time not transgress the bounds of a decent and socially desirable forgetfulness. He had the features of a young duke, the gangling walk of an adolescent, and was the living image of his mother —the classic description of young dukes in novels wherein they contract tropical diseases and impossible passions. And beneath the delicacy of features that had probably remained unchanged since puberty lay the passion of a rationalist writer whose self-imposed brief was to leave some testimony to the collective mediocrity of this city. A silk dressing gown, worn over a mohair jumper; leather slippers; culture piled high on tables and stacked up the walls in the shape of books, files, and pieces of paper; the look of a writer who has just finished one line and is thinking about the next; and a study with the restrained lighting characteristic of the serious writer—a room where only the sun is allowed to enter without knocking, and even sunlight is only permitted in small quantities, for fear that it might impede the writer’s capacities for re-inventing reality.