by Richard Gwyn
From Eugenia’s third-floor veranda we enjoyed a superb panorama of street-life through the main thoroughfare of Gràcia. As we stood there staring down, two traffic police were in the process of guiding the driver of a breakdown truck in his effort to remove an illegally parked car from the street. The breakdown truck was equipped with a crane. One of the traffic cops was attaching the crane’s iron hook under the front bumper of the car; a new, silver BMW. The cops were joking with the driver of the breakdown truck, who leaned out of the window of his cab, reversing carefully towards the BMW. At this point an agitated man appeared from a neighbouring building, and, waving his arms and shouting, walked rapidly towards the three officials. He was balding, red-faced, expensively suited, and extremely indignant. The cops acknowledged him warily as he approached. He started shouting at them when still twenty paces away. The police, their body language informed us, had been through this a thousand times before, having to confront an angry car-owner at the precise moment that they wished to tow the car away. It was, for them, part of the routine. Once the wheels of a top-heavy civic bureaucracy had begun to roll, the police having summoned the breakdown truck, it was (we could discern) too late, just too late. The owner of the BMW would have to accompany the police and breakdown car, or take a taxi if he so wished, follow them to the pound, pay his fine, collect his receipt, and only then might he retrieve his car. The car-owner’s response was audible, scatalogical and explicit. He remonstrated violently, even producing a wad of money from his wallet and waving it in the face of the officers. But no: it seemed that the paperwork would have to be done in the correct place. The notice of denúncia had already been written out. The car’s removal was an implacable fact in the merciless rationale of the law. The procedure would have to be followed.
One of the cops signalled to the driver of the breakdown truck, and it pulled away, towing the silver car at a 30-degree angle. The car looked humiliated by its denunciation, tilted at that angle, rolling along on its back wheels. Its owner stared after it in a state of helpless wrath, delivered a final volley of imprecation skyward, and then stepped resignedly into the vacant back seat of the police car. They drove off.
The cackling of a group of gulls in dispute on the facing rooftop brought the vignette to a close. I followed Eugenia back inside, where she stood cleaning her spectacles with a handkerchief. I knew I had something to say, but did not know where to start. It concerned making a new beginning, the sensation that something remarkably good was being allowed to unfold in my life, and that I had a chance to ride with it, to follow a new path with Nuria, a path free of repetition from the dead-ends and fruitless affairs of my life to date.
But I never brought myself to say it.
7. THE MAN IN THE GREEN SUIT
I decided to walk home from Eugenia’s apartment rather than take the metro. It was early evening and the shops were beginning to open in the broad streets of the Eixample after the siesta break. I skirted the Plaça de Catalunya and headed down Laietana. As I crossed the road I noticed a distinguished-looking man in a pale green suit who was staring at me from across the way. He had close-cropped white hair, and an eager, tanned face. I recognised him as the feeder of gulls from the first evening I had spent with Nuria in Barceloneta. His eyes were fixed on me. Unsettled, I walked on. Halfway down the next block I could still feel his eyes burning into my back, and I paused deliberately to look in a bookshop window. Then, turning into an adjacent tobacconist’s, I scanned the street, but could not see the man in the green suit.
When I came out of the shop, I was confronted by an incongruous sight. A herd of around thirty cows was being ushered down Laietana, a wide and usually congested street. The cows ambled by, swishing their tails against the noise of traffic and the fly-like distraction of blaring horns, their heavy bells clunking in bizarre counterpoint. A pair of rugged, confident farmers guided them with long crooks, steering them down the street in the direction of the sea, presumably in some kind of demonstration against, who knows, the price of milk? I needed to cross again, just as they were passing. As I waited there, I realised the green-suited gentleman was standing at my left shoulder. He spoke to me, without hesitation, in precise Castilian.
“How extraordinary, that we should be here, in the city, with these cows.” He spoke as though he knew me well.
“Isn’t it,” I replied, surprised, but also amused, by his forthright manner. “Remarkable. Do you know why they are here?”
“They are demonstrating. Against their income. The European subsidies that their farmer receives.” And he added, with a smile, “They hope to meet the president. Mr. Pujol.”
“I see.”
“But that is not what I find so extraordinary,” the man continued. I noticed the almost painful intensity of his eyes, a bright blue-green, all the more startling alongside his green suit, which was cut from fine silk. “What is incredible to me is that we should stand here, you and I, two individuals, to all intents and purposes with nothing in common: stand here, side by side, at this zebra crossing.”
I was nonplussed.
“Why so extraordinary?”
“You will see. You will see. Allow me. Do you speak English, by any chance?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Of course you do. Excellent, excellent.” And he opened a soft leather attaché case that he had been carrying under his arm, and produced a typed manuscript, neatly stapled. He handed it to me. On the title page was written, in bold type, the heading: ANIMAL HUSBANDRY AND THE URBAN MYSTIC: A TREATISE. There was no name, no acknowledged authorship, no address. In the bottom right-hand corner was some kind of insignia, stamped in red, depicting a boar.
“Thank you,” I said, switching to English. “I like a good read. Is this your own work?”
“Indeed it is. Study it if you wish. We’ll meet again, I’m sure. And a good evening to you.”
And he had left before I really had time to register that he had made a little bow to me, there in the street, a bow utterly in keeping with his dress and manner—the bow of a Japanese businessman addressing a colleague of marginally elevated status—but entirely strange in the crowded and stolidly democratic environment of Laietana under the mournful gaze of passing cattle.
When the road was clear I crossed into Avenida Francesc Cambó and began to make my way across Santa Caterina towards my house, but then decided to visit Enrique’s bar and have a beer. The manuscript that the green man had given me was like a living entity in my hands: it demanded to be looked at. There were no customers in the bar. Enrique’s Basque girlfriend, Ixía, served me. Ixía had a two-year-old daughter, who sat contentedly on the floor behind the bar, attempting to knock the top off a bottle of beer with a plastic hammer. I took a table by the window and opened the manuscript at random:
The care of animals for purposes of food is not intrinsically evil, although it is well-established that carnivorous beings occupy a lower level on the ladder of spiritual evolution. While cattle, sheep, goats, rabbits and chickens might be kept for the sale of their produce, it must be questioned whether it is ethically sound to do so. Persons seeking to attain a higher level of consciousness would refrain from eating any manner of meat, and, by extension, from encouraging others to do so. Therefore the rearing of these creatures, even for sale to others, must be considered detrimental to the life of the spirit. The urban mystic, of whom we speak, must treat all animal life with great respect, above all those animals which are eaten by our less enlightened brothers and sisters. Therefore, do not kill any animal, however lowly: your future life may depend on it.
Cats are an interesting case, because, like dogs, they are not reared for food, but unlike dogs, they serve little useful purpose as guards or as walking companions. Their function in the household in these days of efficient rodent control is open to question. It would seem that they provide something for their owners to stroke, to be comforted by, and to speak to. However, it is untrue that cats are diabolical. They simply unsettle people b
y the ease with which they snub affectionate advances, and inspire jealousy in the relaxed and libidinous lifestyles that they pursue amid the toiling masses of humanity. They should, if anything, be venerated for their independence of spirit and their spurning of human control. However, their insouciant carnivorousness must condemn them to rebirth at a consistently lower level of incarnation.
I flicked through the pages of the document. It rambled on in the same discursive vein, touching on topics such as veganism, respect for the body, care of the dead and the nurturing of what it referred to as a “mystic sensibility”:
Urban dwellers might consider themselves at a remove from the numinous, depleted of any mystic sensibility, which has always been associated in the collective consciousness with the countryside, especially with mountains and with waterways such as streams and pools. It is not surprising that we consider ourselves disinherited in some way, cheated of a long-lost birthright to commune with nature and thus to replenish the spirit. But the urban dweller can replicate the life lived in nature by imagining the tall buildings that surround him to be mountains, the busy streets to be raging torrents, and the people walking by with their fixed somnambulant stares to be mere ghosts or sprites, the relics of human memory, deprived as they are of any nourishment that stems from a deep and daily communion with the grace of God.
Insouciant carnivorousness? Somnambulant stares? Sprites? The treatise might have been aimed at a certain kind of fashionably “alternative” contemporary audience, but it was composed in the tone of an evangelical pamphlet from the nineteenth century. How could anyone be expected to take such stuff seriously at the turn of the twenty-first? And yet I was intrigued by the figure of the man in the green suit, if this was his work. He had singled me out in advance. If this had happened in isolation from the other events of the past few days, I would have been less interested. But our meeting had come about in a sequence of apparent coincidences, not least of which was the fact that I had seen him before, only two weeks earlier, and had remembered him, notably, I supposed, because of the colour of his suit. People impose significance on events when they happen in clusters that, occurring in isolation, they would not; but I was tempted to regard the man in the green suit as a participant in some conspiracy, and I was the target.
I put the manuscript down and asked for another beer. Outside, the street was getting busy. A pair of kids sat on the pavement opposite, sharing a joint. One of them looked about thirteen years old, small and elfin, and the other was a little older. They both wore trainers, blue jeans, tee shirts and lightweight bomber jackets. They acted as though this was all they ever did, hang out in the street, smoking dope. I tried to imagine the smaller one in school, sitting at a desk, being told about electrical power circuits or the history of Spain’s serial civil wars. I drew a blank, unable to hold him in the frame. He must have noticed me staring, made a mock-astonished face, and then enacted a curt gesture of masturbation, followed by an obscene flicking of the tongue, and raised his eyebrows in question. I’d not been solicited by a rent boy in the barrio before. I looked away and shifted in my seat, turning towards Ixía, as if somehow to confirm (to the boy? to her?) my heterosexual credentials. Ixía was clearing the froth from my beer with a knife.
“Those two outside,” I asked, “are they on the game?”
She didn’t raise her eyes from the task in hand.
“The small one, yes. The other keeps an eye out for him, as they say.”
“Christ.”
“I know. But it’s the nature of things in this barrio. What do you expect?”
“Do you still want to be here when your little girl is older?”
She rolled her eyes at the stupidity of my question. “Shit, no. If we can save enough money we’re moving back to the Basque country. Buy our own bar in a nice part of Bilbao. A nice area. Not like this.”
I nodded, and wondered what her notion of a nice area was.
“You rent this place then?”
“Claro, sure. So it’s a job to save anything with the rent and so on. And you can’t turn your back for a second.”
“Have one for yourself.”
“Thanks. I’ll have a small one.”
She brought the beers over and sat down at my table. The toddler appeared from behind the bar, no longer holding the bottle, but wielding the plastic hammer like a tomahawk. She started across the room, arm raised, and then paused to give me a thorough perusal, dropping the hammer onto the floor.
Ixía took a sip of beer, leaving a thin line of froth on her upper lip. She crossed her legs, and settled back in her seat. She had attractive legs, and was dressed entirely in black: tight black sweater, short black skirt, fishnet tights. She wore purple nail varnish and her hair grew straight and thick to the shoulders. She had the sullen, bruised good looks of a city night-owl, and there was a hardness to her face, but there was also kindness in her mouth and her eyes. I offered her a cigarette.
“You live nearby, don’t you?” She accepted a light.
“Yeah. Santa Caterina.”
“Why do you live there?”
“Caterina was the name of my first girlfriend.”
“Seriously.”
“I am being serious.”
“I’ve seen you about. Sometimes you wear pretty smart clothes. I bet you’ve got a good job, make a packet. Why live here?”
“I like living here. I like living on the top floor. Looking down on the world.”
“Had any trouble from the roof people?”
The roof people. This was an expression I had heard before, never knowing for sure whether such a group really existed. They were said to be a diverse gang of nocturnal vagrants who lived among the precipitous rooftop masonry of the Gothic quarter. I had not met anyone who had actually seen them, and I suspected they represented some kind of collective paranoia, a category of grotesque outsiders said to dress in capes and hoods. Phantoms of the night.
“No. What do you know of them?”
“Only what I’ve heard, that they live like birds on the rooftops, that they slink into people’s apartments at night and rob them, that they have been known to steal children too, on occasion.”
“They steal children?”
“So I’ve heard. And though they always bring the children back before sunrise, the child fails to recognise its parents for a week.”
“You believe that?”
“No. Of course not. But that’s what they say.”
This facility of the Spanish language to obfuscate what was said, and by whom, sometimes demanded further enquiry.
“That’s what who say?”
“I don’t know. The old women, as always.”
She quickly changed the subject, as though she had been put on the spot.
“What do you do, by the way?”
“I work for a publisher’s office. Dictionaries, encyclopaedias. Fat books. Long words. Small print.”
“I see, a posh job. You’re a yuppy.” Yoopy. She giggled, and flicked hair that didn’t need flicking out of her eyes. The child too laughed briefly, a little machine-gun rattle, in imitation of her mother. She had edged nearer during our conversation, and was standing by Ixía’s chair, hovering unsteadily between us.
“And it’s hard to tell, but you’re a foreigner, yuh?”
“Aren’t we all?”
She smiled, but didn’t rise to the bait.
“I’ve heard you speaking English here once before, with a friend. A man who wore many coats. A small man, but many coats, and a gran borracho.”
I guessed she was referring to the highly conspicuous Igbar Zoff.
“Yeah, I speak English.”
“You know what he said to me, your friend, in Spanish?”
I dreaded to think.
“En la boca de un caballo cabe una persona. What do you make of that? You know, we get plenty of drunks here. Big mouths, dirty tongues. Your friend though, he’s just plain nuts. This means something in English?”
I
shook my head. It was not an aphorism I knew, in either language. A person will fit in a horse’s mouth. Pure Igbar. Maybe some hallucinatory association with Chagall, though I was more than willing to concur with Ixía’s diagnosis.
“You know what I learned? In school, that is.” Ixía grinned and pulled her chair a little closer, resting her elbows on the table. “In English, wardrobes, tables and pianos have legs, just like people. The same word. You know, in Spanish we have different words for the legs of people, animals, things. In English they’re all the same. That’s very strange. Can you imagine a piano with legs, I mean a man’s or a woman’s legs? I just kept thinking of all this furniture walking around the place. I’m crazy too, huh?”
Outside, the two boys got up from the pavement and set off down the street, both walking with the studied idleness of the streetwise. I finished my beer and looked at my watch. I had arranged to meet Nuria at my place after she finished work. The toddler stared up at me as though expecting me to do something spectacular.
“She likes you,” said Ixía.
I smiled at the little girl, ruffled her curly brown hair. She laughed.
“I have to go. Nice talking to you.”
“Until later.” Ixía picked up the empty glasses and set them down on the counter, then turned to lift up her daughter, and disappeared through a bead curtain at the end of the bar.
8. WE MOVE ABOUT THE ROOFTOPS
Back home, on the large communal roof terrace, Manu was in a state of sweaty agitation.
“Funcionarios!” He spat out the word contemptuously. No expletives were necessary, since for Manu, no other word in the Spanish language could rival it as an expression of useless privilege and narrow-minded obtuseness. He jerked himself from the canvas chair and walked over to the rabbit shed, peering from hutch to hutch and muttering endearments to each twitching nozzle. He turned back to me, cradling a huge grey beast in the crook of his arm and flattening the rabbit’s ears against the shiny fur of its back with a hairy hand.
