The Angst-Ridden Executive (21 page)

‘Why are you leaving?’

‘Because there’s too much scum around here. From first thing in the morning it never stops—journalists. Sightseers and nosey-parkers. It’s like living in a zoo.’

‘My sister has sold the bar, and she’s leaving. I say she’s doing the right thing.’

The woman glanced at her brother with a look that could kill.

‘Sold the bar, have you? Well fancy that! Your son-in-law gave himself up yesterday. The news wasn’t in the papers till today. They must have come pestering you all morning, and by midday, lo and behold, the bar’s sold! Who bought it?’

‘Well . . . it was only a verbal agreement.’

‘With whom?’

‘I don’t know. He said he’d be in touch. I gave him the address of a cousin of mine who lives in Barcelona. We’re going to stay there for the time being so that we can be closer to Paco, and then, depending on how things go, well probably come back to the village.’

‘Do the police have the address of this cousin of yours?’

‘Why should they? The lawyer has it, and that’s good enough for when they need me as a witness.’

‘Well I want the address too.’

The man pulled a ballpoint out of his jean jacket and wrote the address on a page of
Interviu
.

‘How many punters do you reckon to get in a day? One? Two?’

‘That’s none of your business.’

‘What do they pay for a screw?’

The girl broke into hysterical crying. The woman slapped her and pushed her into a corner of the room. Then she turned on Carvalho in a blaze of fury:

‘Why didn’t they come asking questions when my son-of a-bitch husband left us in the shit in the first place? Why didn’t they ask me then how much money I had tucked away? No chance! Anyway, here, nobody’s been sleeping with anyone. The girl sleeps with her husband and I sleep with myself. That’s my story, and if you don’t like it. . .’

‘But did she go to bed with Jauma? Because if she did, that’s prostitution.’

‘Go to bed? What on earth are you talking about? He told her: “Come in here, I’ve got something to show you.” And this poor innocent followed him, and that’s when the trouble started. Is that good enough for you? Because it’s the best explanation I’ve got. And now you can hit me and kick me as much as you like, because that’s all you’re getting out of me.’

‘Sir. . .’

The man cleared his throat. He was slow, thin, and his huge hands were covered with traces of cement and plaster.

‘Let’s be civilized about it, sir. You have to understand, sir, that we’ve been through bitter times here, very bitter, and my sister has her ways, but that’s because she’s had to make her own way in life from a very early age.’

‘Don’t waste your breath on him, Andres, they’re all the same.’

‘No, Fuensanta, no. When people talk, it helps them understand each other. Isn’t that right, sir? You understand what these two women have been through, don’t you?’

Carvalho walked between the obvious fear of the brother and the raging fury of the sister. He was furious with them, and furious with himself. The fear and anger of poor people, he thought to himself.

‘I’m going. But I haven’t finished with you yet. You’re not making a single move unless I know about it. Tomorrow I want the name, nationality and date of birth of the man who bought this Ritz, together with his address and the size of his trousers. So watch out!’

In the nearby furniture showroom they told him that La Chunga had been open for five years. The girl had still been in plaits and the woman had been living with a Catalonian gypsy who earned his living gathering mushrooms. He’d pick them and dry them, and during the season he’d sell them to packers in Granollers. One day the gypsy disappeared, and within a week or two he’d been replaced by a self-employed truck driver who worked for an artificial stone factory in Aiguafreda. The truck driver was the last of the regular men about the place. The bar didn’t earn a lot. The regular clientele were mainly immigrants, and the bar served the occasional wayfarer with alcohol, coffee, cold drinks, or a snack. The woman began waving her breasts around, and the place began to liven up, One day the girl went on the game too. Always trouble in the place, one of his informants observed. Punch-ups galore. No-hope whores. Then the girl took up with this pimp, an evil little bastard, but at least he knew how to keep the clients in line.

‘They were up to their necks in debts. I think one of her boyfriends got involved in some shady deals, and she got landed with the bill and didn’t have the money to pay. He’d used her signature in some fraud or other.’

At the petrol station they filled in the rest of the details for him. Fuensanta’s brother worked as a bricklayer for one of the big building contractors in Centelles.

‘He was the first of them to leave the village. Then it was the usual pattern—the rest of the kids followed, and then the parents. The parents are dead now. With the exception of the bricklayer, none of the kids will have anything to do with the woman at La Chunga. If you ask about her, they say, “She’s not one of us.” They’re ashamed of her. The bricklayer still shows up every now and then. One day he told me, “What do you expect—she is my sister, after all, and I’m the eldest brother. I’ve got certain responsibilities, wouldn’t you say?’

He waited at the petrol station for the pick-up to pass. The old man was driving, his hands still covered with plaster and cement. At his side, bolt upright, in the full consciousness of her volume, sat Fuensanta. From between them peered the contrite face of the adolescent prostitute. The bricklayer acknowledged Carvalho with a slight nod of his head, but Fuensanta dispatched a visual thunderbolt that cracked against his windscreen.

He bought his
butifarras
in La Garriga. They were freshly cooked, and made with blood and eggs. Catalonia is next in line after the Germans when it comes to extracting the best gastronomic advantage from pigs. Leaving aside the hams, which are always too soft and lacking in flavour, the local pigs had the honour of contributing a range of really splendid sausages. An excellent display—the proof of Carvalho’s observations on the matter—appeared on the serving-counter of the Fonda Europa, a restaurant in Granollers that Carvalho would escape to every once in a while, to confirm, with surprise and admiration, that it still maintained its high culinary standards. On the food counter there was a pile of sausages on a dish which featured in the menu under the heading plat du jour. Looked promising. Next to excellent local sausages, which probably came from Llerona, were factory-produced sausages and specimens of the damp-looking local ham, which seemed to have been cured by immersion in the sea rather than hanging in the air. The local ham had some distant family relation to Parma, but without achieving the latter’s savoury tenderness. To have ordered the chefs special for a starter was an act of Pantagruelian caprice that closed down subsequent options. He thought it advisable to pass over the hams and chorizos and settle on the pork sausages which ranged from everyday salamis to the ethereal lightness of egg sausages or
fuet
. The waiter left at the side of his table the trolley which came with a range of serrated knives and a large basket for rind, skin, and other detritus. When Carvalho came to the Fonda Europa, he always ordered a special tripe dish consisting of tripe and pigs’ trotters, which had a honey sweetness similar to what the Andalusians achieve by adding pig’s jowl to the austere tripe dishes of Castille. He found himself comforted by the fact that he was not alone in his desire to eat everything the Fonda Europa had to offer, a tendency also observable in his fellow diners, especially on market days, when the dining room was packed with dealers and reps, concentrating their energies in the search for the deepest and broadest dishes. It was also a restaurant with space, so that each table could create its own environment and lose itself in the operation of eating, without being watched by the people at an adjoining table with that look of superficial curiosity characteristic of people who like to spy enviously on what other people are eating. The simplicity of the late modernism of the decor was also appealing—walls that were painted in colours that were also gastronomic. Themes and colours that were digestive, either because metaphysically both can exist or because a satisfied diner will accept any murals, even those cooked in the sauce of late modernism. The wine was not up to the standard of the food, and if the choice of a Rioja was a choice of the lesser evil, Carvalho once again mused on the disparity that exists in Catalonia between an excellent popular style of cooking and the lack of finesse of its more popular wines. The
mel i mato
dessert offered by the Fonda Europa was up to the standard of the rest of the meal, yet Carvalho ordered it more out of respect than because he really wanted it. As one who appreciated the tragic side of eating, it seemed to him that anything other than fruit for dessert implied a reprehensible frivolity, and cakes in particular ended up annihilating the flavour of quiet sadness that must be allowed to linger at the end of a great culinary performance.

With his hunger completely vanquished, Carvalho chewed on his Montecristo. As the smoke began to rise, he found himself musing on how things were going—or, rather, not going. Somebody was trying to establish a rationale for the killing of Jauma, and it was obvious that it was a fabrication. Why? Jauma’s discovery of the shortfalls in Petnay’s accounts could have been the reason, but then Petnay had been informed about them. In fact they had seemed to respond to his revelations by hushing the whole business up. Who had handled that money? Why? On the one hand there was the political pressure to get the case shut, and all the expense involved in buying a killer who could claim that he had been defending his honour, and who would be freed in another couple of years, several million pesetas the richer; then there was the ruthlessness with which the people behind all this had acted in the case of poor Rhomberg. In the face of this great wall that was moving to block him, Carvalho only had the fragile pretext of his commission from the widow, a commission that was looking increasingly tenuous in the light of the pressure that was undoubtedly being put on Concha Hijar at that very minute. If the widow pulled out, his only remaining option would be to stoke up a political scandal with the aid of Alemany the accountant and the left-wingers among Jauma’s circle of friends. And who would pay him for that? He wasn’t after the satisfaction of a job well done, but at least he liked to see a job finished, and it worried him to leave a problem unresolved, in the same way that he didn’t like to see a job around the house left undone for want of a suitable screwdriver or because he’d forgotten to buy a roll of insulating tape. The only emotional factor in it for him was the question of Rhomberg’s son. With Jauma he felt a professional solidarity, but the solidarity that he felt for the German kid came from somewhere in his blood. It came from the depths of a childhood terror of being orphaned. It came from having seen the wretchedness of kids in the barrio who had been left fatherless by the war, or by prison, or by shootings or the post-war tuberculosis. The fragility of those orphans who poked their shaved heads through the geraniums on balconies that were as rusty as the collective spirit of the barrio aroused in his stomach the anxiety of the young animal that discovers in others’ misfortunes the possibility of its own.

‘For the working class, everything is tragic,’ his father used to say, ‘whether it’s a sickness, a divorce, or a death in the family. The rich always have a mattress ready so that when they fall they don’t get hurt.’

The German kid probably had a mattress soft enough to protect his little bones, but not to protect against the damage to the esteem he felt for the father he idolized. Once again Carvalho regretted the poverty of his emotional upbringing, with its basis in absolutes. In Japan a dog had apparently died of a broken heart because its master had not come home: he’d read this on a caption to one of the agency news photos displayed in the windows of the offices of La Vanguardia on calle Pelayo. A man had stabbed another man because he was trying to steal the woman he loved: he’d heard this recited by a balladeer on Radio Barcelona. A little girl died of grief because her parents had had a baby boy and he was going to inherit the family’s wealth: he’d heard it, and seen it, acted by a lousy tragic actress at the Sala Mozart. Probably the German boy would grow up strong and confident, freed of the authoritarian presence of a castrating father. But then again, maybe not. He could end up suffering the same fate as Tyrone Power in
Son of Fury
—sadistically enslaved by his uncle and tutor as played by George Sanders. He’d taken an instant dislike to the voice of Dieter’s brother-in-law. Prussian, he’d thought to himself. Or rather, a Prussian-sounding voice according to what conventional wisdom thinks Prussian sounding voices sound like. But the kid would grow up. He’d emigrate to the South Seas. He’d go pearl-fishing. Then he’d hire other people to do the pearl-fishing for him. He’d get rich on the proceeds, and come back to Berlin and humiliate his uncle. Or he’d grow up living in the past, a failure, who would fall in love with strong women who’d ignore him totally, and he’d end up committing suicide by swallowing all the records of his favourite singer, dissolved in acid.

‘We shouldn’t bring children into this world. No matter how much we do for them, we can never compensate them for the dirty trick of having brought them into the world in the first place.’

So said his father, particularly when he became obsessed with the prospect of the impending nuclear destruction of the world. Every time a nuclear mushroom cloud appeared in the pages of La Vanguardia or the Diario de Barcelona, Don Evaristo Carvalho would point an accusing finger at it and embark on a Malthusian tirade for which the young Pepiño was the sole audience. The boy soon became aware that his very existence was a lamentable error which (for his own good) his father now deeply regretted.

‘If humanity just made up its mind not to have any more children, in fifty years the human race would die out, and the earth would revert to the forces of innocence—water, sun and minerals.’