The Skating Rink (8 page)

Enric Rosquelles:

How do you think I felt when I found out

How do you think I felt when I found out that there was something
more than friendship between Nuria and Remo Morán? Terrible, I felt terrible. My
world was falling apart and my spirit revolted against such a cruel injustice. I
should say: the repetition of such an injustice, because some years before, in
similar circumstances, I had seen Lola, my best social worker, an extremely
efficient girl, enviably balanced and positive too, fall into the clutches of
that South American dealer, who soon destroyed her life. Morán degraded,
despoiled and defiled everything he touched. Lola is divorced now, and seems to
be leading a normal life, but I know she’s hurting inside, and maybe it will
take her years to recover the glow of freshness and joy she had before that
unfortunate encounter. No, I never liked Morán; I could never stomach him, as
they say. I have a natural talent for judging people and right from the start I
knew he was a fraud, a charlatan. Some have said I hated him because he was an
artist. A con artist more like it! I adore art! Why would I have risked my
position and my future to build the skating rink if I didn’t? It was simply that
he didn’t fool me with that world-weary, seen-it-all manner of his. So he’d been
through a war. So he’d been on TV a couple times. So his dick was a foot long.
God almighty! I’m surrounded by a pack of rabid dogs! My former subordinates,
despicable busybodies from Fairs and Festivals, Child Welfare, the volunteers
from Civil Defense, all the people affected by my budget cutbacks, who were
shifted to smaller offices, or simply sacked because I didn’t want dead wood in
my departments, now they’re trying to get their own back by making up stories,
casting the Latino as the hero and me as the villain. Morán’s a clown, he’s
never been near a war; he might have been on television, on some local show, but
who hasn’t these days; and let me tell you a secret I discovered a long time
ago: size is not everything. What women really want from a man is affection and
tenderness. Unless you think you need a foot-long tool to reach the clitoris? Or
stimulate the G-spot? When I think of Lola walking along the beach, hand in hand
with her little boy, to whom they gave some unfortunate Indian name I can never
remember, I feel I have every reason to hate Morán. Yes, I tried to get rid of
him, but always within the strict bounds of the law. I had seen him only three
times in my life before the regrettable incidents at the Palacio Benvingut, and
each time, if I’m not mistaken, he boasted about flouting the current
regulations forbidding the employment of foreigners without work permits. As far
as I know, Morán and the small-time farmers around Z were the only ones
consciously breaking the law. With the market gardeners, or some of them at
least, it was understandable if not excusable; the lettuces, for example, had to
be harvested, and the pool of laborers available was basically made up of
Africans, most of whom didn’t have their papers in order. I don’t like Africans.
Especially if they’re Muslims. Once, in passing, I suggested to my team in
Social Services that we could gather up all the street kids in Z and give them
jobs on the farms: sowing, harvesting, driving tractors, even working on the
market stalls each morning. It would have been marvelous to see that generation
of future delinquents and junkies working the land. Of course the idea was
rejected, almost as if it had been a joke. I wasn’t entirely convinced myself. A
bit too much like slave labor, they said, bad for our image. We’ll never know
now. As I was saying, the farmers had their reasons. But Morán used to employ
foreigners just to bug us! I once mentioned this in passing to Lola, when she
was still his wife, and I still remember what she said. According to Lola, Morán
used to hire old friends, friends he had made when he was eighteen, a bunch of
poets who had eventually washed up in the Mother Country one way or another. He
found them, or came across them, through a combination of luck and concern; he
gave them work, helped (or forced) them to save, and at the end of the season
they invariably went back to their respective places of origin in Latin America.
Or that’s what Morán told Lola, at least. She never made friends with any of
them, although she judged them all to be worthy of her professional attention.
Scruffy, damaged individuals; resentful, taciturn, sickly misfits, the sort
you’d rather not encounter on a deserted street. I should say that in spite of
the gulf between me and her husband, my professional relationship with Lola was,
and I trust still is, founded on a sense of friendship and team spirit—after the
mayor, she was my closest collaborator—and there was no reason to doubt what she
confided in me. The aforesaid poets, completely unknown in Spain as indeed in
Latin America, were never very numerous, and must have blended in with the rest
of the motley staff, which comprised a range of characters to satisfy all
tastes. I never saw any of them, and I only remember the story now because of
the aftereffect it had on me, like a horror film. Anyway, as I put it to Lola,
was he helping out his old friends and colleagues, or just trying to get rid of
them? Lola pointed out that they might not all have gone back to Latin America,
maybe they just didn’t come back to Z, but the way their departures coincided
with the end of the season struck me as too neat. Which raises another question:
did they go back empty-handed, apart from the few pesetas they would have been
able to save, or was the trip a way of continuing to work for Morán as couriers
or messengers? It’s well known that the drug trade is comfortably established in
Z, and more than once I heard it said that Morán was involved, although to be
honest I should add that the claims were unconfirmed. Of course I never
mentioned any of this to Lola, out of respect more than anything; after all,
Morán was the father of her child. Twice I called some acquaintances in Gerona
to see if they had anything on him. But I drew a blank. People drop off the twig
when they’re ripe. Needless to say, the labor inspectors never got anywhere when
they went to visit. I didn’t have any illusions about that. I know exactly how
those bureaucrats operate; they wouldn’t have tried to take him by surprise by
calling at an unexpected time, questioning all the staff, checking with the
neighbors and so on. As long as they kept using their traditional methods, Morán
was always going to slip through the net, without even a token fine. Another
solution would have been to report him to the Trade Union Councils, but I don’t
have very good relations with the union officials in Z. Only once in my life
have I been in a fight, about five or six years ago, when I encountered a group
of maniacs at the entrance to the UGT headquarters. It was me and a municipal
policeman, who has since retired, against eight or nine heavies from the strike
committee. To be honest, there were so many of them I don’t remember the exact
number. Luckily the fight was brief, and there were more slaps and pushes than
punches. All the same I came away with a bleeding nose and an eyebrow gashed
open, and Pilar dropped whatever urgent task she was engaged in to come and see
me straight away. It’s strange: as a child, I never bullied anyone and no one
bullied me; I had to come to Z and work like a slave and fall in love to get
beaten up. I want to make it clear that I said nothing to Nuria; not a word of
reproach or anything that could be taken as such. I stifled my rage and (why not
admit it?) my jealousy and the utter shock of it all. Her body language and the
way she brought up the subject made it clear to me that Nuria herself didn’t
entirely understand what was happening with Morán, and that my interference
could only make things worse. The pain I felt did not reduce the intensity of my
love, but transformed it continually, producing new mental pleasures. And I had
plenty to keep me busy; my antagonism toward Remo Morán has never, thank God,
represented more than three per cent of my emotional investment. Around that
time I dreamed of the ice rink again. It was like the extension of an earlier
dream: outside, the world was subjected to a temperature of 105 degrees in the
shade, while inside the Palacio Benvingut, the glacial chill of the air was
cracking the old mirrors. The dream began precisely when I put on the skates and
went gliding, without the slightest effort, over the smooth white surface, whose
purity, it seemed to me, was peerless. A deep and final silence enveloped
everything. Suddenly, impelled by the force of my own skating, I left the rink,
or what I thought was the rink, and began to skate through the corridors and
rooms of the Palacio Benvingut. The machinery must have gone crazy, I thought,
and coated the whole house in ice. Flying along at a dizzying speed, I reached
the rooftop terrace, from which I could see a corner of the town and the
electric pylons. They seemed to be overcharged, about to explode or stride away
toward the coves. Further away I could see a small, almost black pine wood on a
slope, and above it some red clouds like slightly open duck bills. Duck bills
with shark’s teeth! Nuria’s bike appeared, moving very slowly along the dirt
road, just as huge flames erupted from Z. The glow lasted only a few seconds,
then the whole horizon was plunged in darkness. I’m done for, I thought, it’s a
blackout. I woke as the ice beneath my feet was beginning to melt at an alarming
rate. This dream reminded me of a book I had read as a teenager. The author of
the book (whose name I have forgotten) claims to be recounting some kind of
legend about the struggle between good and evil. Evil and its agents establish
the empire of fire on earth. They spread, make war and are invincible. In the
final, crucial battle, good unleashes ice upon the armies of evil and brings
them to a halt. Gradually the fire is extinguished and vanishes from the face of
the earth. It ceases to be a danger. The agents of good are victorious at last.
Nevertheless, the legend warns that the struggle will soon begin again since
hell is inexhaustible. When the ice began to melt, that was exactly the feeling
I had: along with the Palacio Benvingut, I was plummeting into
hell . . .

Remo Morán:

I decided to go and look for Nuria at her place

I decided to go and look for Nuria at her place, something I had
never done, and that was how I met her mother and her sister, a very clever
little girl called Laia. The sun was beating down that afternoon, but there were
plenty of people out walking in the streets, which were full of food vendors and
ice cream stands, and all kinds of merchandise, which the storekeepers had
spread out almost to the edge of the sidewalk. A slim woman, slightly shorter
than Nuria, opened the door and invited me in, just like that, as if she had
been expecting me for a long time. Nuria wasn’t home. I tried to leave, but it
was too late; politely but firmly, the woman blocked the exit. I soon realized
that she wanted to pump me for information about her daughter. I was corralled
into the living room, where there were trophies on little fake-marble pedestals.
Photos and press cuttings in aluminum frames hung on both sides of the chimney,
proclaiming former triumphs. They showed Nuria skating on her own or with
others; some of the cuttings were in English, French and something that might
have been Danish or Swedish. My daughter has been skating since she was six
years old, announced the woman, standing in a doorway that led through to a
spacious kitchen with the blinds down, which gave it the look of a dim wood, a
clearing in a wood at midnight. In the living room, a pleasant yellow light was
filtering through the curtains. Have you seen my girl skate? she asked in
Catalan, but before I could answer she repeated the question in Spanish. I said
no, I had never seen her skate. She stared at me in disbelief. Her eyes were as
blue as Nuria’s, but without the glint of iron will. I accepted a cup of coffee.
A monotonous, repetitive sound was coming from the back of the house; my first
thought, absurdly, was that someone must have been splitting firewood. Are you
South American? asked Nuria’s mother, sitting down in an armchair patterned with
sepia flowers against a grey background. I replied in the affirmative. Would
Nuria be long? You never know with Nuria, she said, looking at a bag from which
knitting needles and balls of wool were protruding. I lied about another
engagement, although I knew it wouldn’t be so easy to get away. What country are
you from? Argentina? Although her smile was fairly neutral, it seemed to be
giving me little taps on the back, inviting me to bare my soul. I told her I was
Chilean. Ah, I see, from Chile, she said. And what do you do? I have a jewelry
store, I mumbled. Here, in Z? I nodded, going along with everything. How odd,
she said, Nuria has never mentioned you. The coffee was scalding but I drank it
quickly; someone squealed behind me, and from the corner of my eye I saw a
shadow slip into the kitchen. Nuria’s mother said, Come here, I want to
introduce you to one of Nuria’s friends. The little Martí girl appeared before
me, holding a can of Coca-Cola. We shook hands and smiled. Laia sat down beside
her mother, separated from her only by the bag of wool, and waited; I remember
she was wearing shorts and sporting large purple scabs on both knees. My husband
saw her skate only once, but he died happy, said Nuria’s mother. I looked at her
in utter bewilderment. For a moment I thought she was telling me that her
husband had died
while
watching Nuria skate, but to ask for an
explanation would have been even more absurd than my initial supposition, so all
I did was nod. He died in the hospital, said Laia, and went on staring at me as
she sipped her Coca-Cola with chilling parsimony. In room 304 of the Z hospital,
she specified. Mrs Martí looked at her with an admiring smile. Another coffee,
Mr Morán? I said no, it was delicious, but no thanks. Strangely, I had the
impression that the decision to go or stay was no longer mine to make. Do you
know what Nuria is doing here? I thought Laia was referring to the real
flesh-and-blood Nuria, and spun around, startled, only to find an empty corridor
behind me. Laia’s index finger was pointing at one of the framed photographs. I
confessed my ignorance and laughed. Nuria’s mother laughed with me,
understandingly. What an idiot I am, I said, I thought Nuria was behind me. This
is a “loop,” said Laia, a “loop.” And do you know what she’s doing here? The
photo had been taken from a distance, to show the size of the rink and the
stands; in the middle, leaning slightly to the right, a shorter-haired Nuria had
been frozen on the point of taking illusory flight. This is a “bracket,” said
Laia. And this is the end of a series of “threes.” And that’s the “Catalan”
figure, invented by a Catalan skater. Having expressed my admiration, I examined
the photographs one by one. In some of them, Nuria was no more than ten or
twelve years old; her legs were like matchsticks and she looked very thin. In
others she was skating arm in arm with a muscular, long-haired boy, and they
were smiling demonstratively: gleaming teeth, a focused look, but all the same
they did seem genuinely happy. Overwhelmed by the whirl of photos, I suddenly
felt tired and sad. When will Nuria be back? I asked. There was a plaintive
sound to my voice. Later on, after training, said Laia. I hadn’t noticed her
mother reach for the needles, but now she was knitting with a contented look on
her face, as if she had found out all she needed to know. Training? In
Barcelona? Laia smiled confidentially: No, in Z, skating or jogging or playing
tennis. Skating? Like I said,
skating
, Laia replied. She always comes
home late. And then, after checking that her mother wasn’t paying attention, she
whispered in my ear: With Enric. Ah, I sighed. Do you know Enric? asked Laia. I
said yes, I knew him. So she trains with Enric every day? Every day! shouted
Laia, Even Sunday . . .