The Savage Detectives (60 page)

Little by little, various questions began to come to mind, but I decided that it wasn't the moment to be sensible. There's a time for everything. The first thing we discussed was the choice of weapon. I suggested balloons filled with red dye. Or a battle of exaggerated sombrero doffing. Arturo insisted that it had to be with sabers. To first blood? I proposed. Grudgingly, although deep down probably in relief, Arturo accepted my suggestion. Then we went looking for the sabers.

My original plan was to buy them in one of those tourist stores that sell everything from blades made in Toledo to samurai swords, but informed of our intentions, my friend said that her late father had left a pair of swords, so we went to look at them and they turned out to be real ones. After giving them a good polish, we decided to use them. Then we looked for the perfect place. I suggested the Parque de la Ciudadela, at midnight, but Arturo preferred a nudist beach halfway between Barcelona and the town where he lived. Then we got Iñaki Echevarne's telephone number and called him. It took us a long time to convince him that it wasn't a joke. Arturo spoke to him three times all together. Finally Iñaki Echevarne said that he agreed and that we should let him know the date and time. The afternoon of the duel we ate at a snack bar in Sant Pol de Mar. Fried cuttlefish and shrimp. My friend (who had come this far with us but wasn't planning to attend the duel), Arturo, and me. The meal, I have to say, was a little gloomy, and while we were eating Arturo pulled out a plane ticket and showed it to us. I thought it would be to Chile or Mexico and that Arturo was, in some sense, bidding farewell to Catalonia and Europe. But the ticket was for a flight to Dar es Salaam with stopovers in Rome and Cairo. Then I realized that my friend had gone completely insane and that if the critic Echevarne didn't kill him with a whack on the head he would be eaten by the black or red ants of Africa.

Jaume Planells, Bar Salambó, Calle Torrijos, Barcelona, June 1994
. One morning my friend and colleague Iñaki Echevarne called me and said he needed a second for a duel. I was a little hungover, so at first I didn't understand what Iñaki was saying, and anyway he hardly ever calls me, especially at that time of day. Then, when he explained, I thought he was kidding and I went along with him, people are always kidding me, but I don't mind, and anyway Iñaki is a little strange, strange but attractive, the kind of guy women think is really handsome and men think is nice, if slightly intimidating, and whom they secretly admire. Not long ago he'd had a feud with the great Madrid novelist Aurelio Baca, and even though Baca thundered and stormed, hurling abuse at him, Iñaki managed to emerge unscathed from the exchange of hostilities, coming out even with Baca, you might say.

The funny thing is that Iñaki hadn't criticized Baca but a friend of Baca's, so you can only imagine what would've happened if he'd gone after the great man himself. As far as I could tell, the problem was that Baca was a writer on the model of Unamuno, there being no lack of them nowadays, who would launch into some lecture full of cheap moralizing whenever he got the chance, the typical preachy, irate Spanish lecture, and Iñaki was the typical provocative, kamikaze critic who liked making enemies and who had a habit of leaping in with both feet. It was a matter of time before they clashed. Or at least Baca had to clash with Echevarne, call him to order, give him a slap on the wrist, something like that. Underneath, they both fell somewhere along the increasingly vague spectrum we call the left.

So when Iñaki explained to me about the duel, I thought he must be joking. The passions Baca had unleashed couldn't be so powerful that authors were taking justice into their own hands now, and in such a melodramatic way. But Iñaki said it had nothing to do with that. He sounded a little bit confused but he said this was something different and he had to accept the challenge (could he have mentioned the
Nude Descending a Staircase
? but what did Picasso have to do with it?) and I should tell him once and for all whether I was prepared to be his second or not, and he had no time to waste because the duel was taking place that very afternoon.

What could I say but yes, of course I'll do it, tell me where and when, although afterward, when Iñaki hung up, I started to think that maybe I'd just gotten myself mixed up in some serious shit, and that I, who have a pretty nice life and enjoy a good joke every once in a while like any normal guy so long as it doesn't go too far, might be landing myself in one of those messes that never end well. And then, on top of that, I got to thinking (something a person should never, ever do in cases like this), and I came to the conclusion that it was strange to begin with that Iñaki would call me to be his second in a duel, since I'm not exactly one of his best friends. We work for the same newspaper, we run into each other sometimes at the Giardinetto or the Salambó or the bar at Laie, but we're not really what you'd call friends.

And since there were only a few hours left before the duel, I called Iñaki to see whether I could catch him, but no, clearly he'd called me and then gone right out to, I don't know, write his last article or head for the nearest church, so once that had been established, I called Quima Monistrol on her cell phone, it was like a light going off in my head, if I'm with a woman things can't get too ugly, although of course I didn't tell Quima the truth, I said Quima, baby, I need you, Iñaki Echevarne and I are meeting someone and we want you to come with us, and Quima asked when, and I said right now, sweetheart, and Quima said all right, come pick me up at the Corte Inglés, something like that. When I hung up I tried to get in touch with two or three other friends, because all of a sudden I realized that I was much more nervous than I should've been, but no one answered.

At five-thirty I spotted Quima smoking a cigarette on the corner of Plaza Urquinaona and Pau Claris, and after a pretty bold U-turn I had the intrepid reporter in the passenger seat. As hundreds of drivers honked their horns at us and I could see the menacing outline of a cop in the rearview mirror, I stepped on the gas and we headed for the A-19, toward the Maresme. Of course, Quima asked me where I was hiding Iñaki (the man has an amazing effect on women, it must be said), so I had to tell her that he was waiting for us at the bar Los Calamares Felices, outside of Sant Pol de Mar, near a cove that becomes a nudist beach in spring and summer. For the rest of the trip, which took less than twenty minutes (my Peugeot goes like lightning), I was on edge, listening to Quima's stories and unable to find the right moment to tell her the real reason we were going to the Maresme.

To make matters worse, we got lost in Sant Pol. According to some locals, we had to take the road to Calella, but turn left at a gas station after a quarter of a mile, as if we were heading for the mountains, then turn right again and go through a tunnel-but what tunnel?-and come back out onto a beach road, where the place called Los Calamares Felices stood, solitary and desolate. For half an hour Quima and I argued and fought. Finally we found the damn bar. We got there late and for an instant I thought Iñaki wouldn't be there, but the first thing I saw was his red Saab, actually
all
I saw was his red Saab, parked on a strip of sand and scrub, and then the desolate building, the dirty windows of Los Calamares Felices. I parked next to Iñaki's car and honked the horn. Without a word, Quima and I decided to stay in the Peugeot. Soon afterward we saw Iñaki appear from around the other side of the restaurant. He didn't scold us for being late, as I thought he might, and he didn't seem to be angry when he saw Quima. I asked him where his adversary was, and Iñaki smiled and shrugged his shoulders. Then the three of us went walking toward the beach. When Quima heard why we were there (it was Iñaki who explained it to her, clearly and objectively and in just a few words, something I could never have done), she seemed more excited than ever and for a second I was sure everything would turn out all right. The three of us were laughing for a while. There wasn't a soul on the beach. He hasn't come, I heard Quima say, and I thought she sounded a tiny bit disappointed.

From the north end of the beach, two figures emerged from among the rocks. My heart skipped a beat. The last time I was in a fight I was eleven or twelve. Since then I've always avoided acts of violence. There they are, said Quima. Iñaki looked at me and then he looked at the sea and only then did I realize that there was something hopelessly ridiculous about the scene and that its ridiculousness was not unrelated to my presence there. The two figures that had appeared from among the rocks kept walking toward us, along the water's edge, and finally they stopped about three hundred feet away, close enough for us to see that one of them was carrying a package with the points of two swords poking out. Quima had better stay here, said Iñaki. After our companion had finished protesting, the two of us headed slowly toward the pair of madmen. So you're going to go ahead with this farce? I remember I asked as we walked along the sand, so this duel is going to happen for real, not pretend? so you've chosen me to be the witness to this madness? because it was just then that I sensed or had the revelation that Iñaki had chosen me because his real friends (if he had any, maybe Jordi Llovet or some intellectual like that) would have refused point-blank to take part in something so absurd and he knew it and everyone knew it, except for me, the dumb hack, and I also thought: my God, this is all that bastard Baca's fault, if he hadn't attacked Iñaki this wouldn't be happening, and then I couldn't think anymore because we had come up to the other two and one of them said: which of you is Iñaki Echevarne? and then I looked Iñaki in the face, suddenly afraid that he would say it was me (with my nerves in the state they were in, I thought Iñaki might be capable of anything), but Iñaki smiled as if he were delighted and said that he was who he was, and then the other one looked at me and introduced himself: hello, I'm Guillem Piña, the second, and I heard myself saying: hello, I'm Jaume Planells, the other second, and frankly now that I remember it I could puke or laugh my ass off, but what I felt then more than anything else was a sharp pain in my stomach, and cold, because it had suddenly gotten cold and only a few rays of the setting sun lit the beach where in the spring people stripped naked, little coves, rocky inlets, seen only by the passengers on the train along the coast, passengers unmoved by the spectacle, that's democracy and civic spirit for you, in Galicia those same passengers would have stopped the train and climbed down to hack the balls off the nudists, anyway, I was thinking all of this when I said hello, I'm Jaume Planells, the other second.

And then this Guillem Piña unwrapped the package he was carrying and the swords were bared, and I thought the blades even seemed to glow a little bit, steel? bronze? iron? I don't know anything about swords, but I did know enough to realize that they weren't plastic, and then I reached out my hand and touched the blades with my fingertips, metal, of course, and when I pulled back my hand I saw the shine again, a very faint shine, as if they were coming to life, or at least that's what Iñaki's friends would have said if he'd had the guts or the decency to ask them to come with him, and if they'd come, which I thought was unlikely, and it struck me as too much of a coincidence, or in any case too intense a coincidence: the sun going down behind the mountains and the glow of the swords, and only then, at last, was I able to ask (who? I don't know, Piña, maybe Iñaki himself) whether they were really serious, whether the duel was in earnest, and warn them in a loud though not very steady voice that the last thing I wanted was trouble with the police. The rest is a blur. Piña said something in Mallorcan. Then he let Iñaki choose one of the swords. Iñaki took his time, hefting each of them, first one, then the other, then both at the same time, as if he'd done nothing all his life but play musketeers. The swords weren't gleaming anymore. The other guy, the writer with a grievance (but a grievance against whom, and why, if the goddamn offending review hadn't even been published yet?) waited until Iñaki had chosen. The sky was a milky gray and a dense fog was drifting out to sea from the hills and fields. My memories are confused. I think I heard Quima shout: go, Iñaki, or something like that. Then, by common accord, Piña and I retreated, backing away. A little wave wet my pant legs. I remember looking down at my moccasins and cursing. I also remember the feeling I had of indecency, illicitness, because of my wet socks, and the noise they made as I moved. Piña retreated toward the rocks. Quima had gotten up and come a little closer to the duelers. They clashed swords. I remember that I sat on a mound and took off my shoes and was careful to wipe off the wet sand with a handkerchief. Then I tossed the handkerchief away and watched the line of the horizon as it grew darker, until Quima put her hand on my shoulder and with her other hand put into my hand a live, wet, prickly object that it took me a while to identify as my own handkerchief coming back to me, returned to me like a curse.

I remember that I put the handkerchief in a pocket of my blazer. Later Quima would say that Iñaki handled the sword like an expert and the fight went his way from the start. But that's not what I would've said. They were evenly matched at first. Iñaki's swings were on the timid side. All he did was clash swords with his adversary, and he kept backing farther away, out of fear or because he was sizing up the other guy. In contrast, his opponent's blows were increasingly confident. At some point he took a thrust at Iñaki, the first of the fight, gripping the sword and lunging with his right foot and right arm, and the tip of his sword almost touched the seam of Iñaki's pants. It was then that Iñaki seemed to wake from the foolish dream he was in and plunge into another dream where the danger was real. From that moment on, his steps became much more nimble and he moved more quickly, always backing away, although not in a straight line but in circles, so that sometimes I'd see him from the front, other times from the side, and other times from behind. What were the rest of the spectators doing all this time? Quima was sitting on the sand behind me, and every once in a while she would cheer Iñaki on. Piña, meantime, was standing, quite far from where the swordsmen were circling, and his face looked like the face of someone who was used to this kind of thing and also the face of someone who was sleeping.