The Spanish Game am-3

by Charles Cumming

  ‘I thought you gave up?’ he asks.

  ‘I did. I just like having one every now and again. Late nights and weekends. What were you two talking about? My ears were burning.’

  ‘Your past,’ Sofia says, fanning smoke away from her face. ‘Saul says you’re a man of mystery, Alex. Did you know that, darling?’

  Julian, checking messages on his mobile phone, says, ‘ Si, yup,’ and heads outside in search of better reception.

  ‘He also said you worked in the oil business?’

  ‘Briefly. Very briefly. Then I got a job at Reuters and they shipped me out to Russia. What do you do, Sofia?’

  She grins and looks up at the ceiling.

  ‘I’m a clothes designer, Alex. For women. Didn’t you ask me that at the Christmas party?’

  The tone of the question is unambiguously flirtatious. She needs to cool it or Saul will cotton on. In an attempt to change the subject, I say that I once saw Pedro Almodovar drinking in the bar, sitting at a table not too far from where we are standing. It’s a lie – a friend saw him – but enough to interest Saul.

  ‘Really? That’s like going to London and seeing the Queen.’

  ‘Que’ Sofia says, her English momentarily confused. ‘You saw the Queen here?’

  And, thankfully, the misunderstanding engenders the conversation I had hoped for: Saul’s lifelong distaste for Almodovar’s movies perfectly at odds with Sofia’s loyal, madrilenian obsession.

  ‘My favourite I think is Todo Sobre Mi Madre,’ she says, summoning a wistful look more appropriate to a lovestruck teenager. ‘How would you translate in English? Everything About My Mother. It’s so generous, so…’ she looks at me and produces the word ‘inventive’.

  ‘Total bullshit,’ Saul says, and Sofia looks startled. He’s more drunk than I had realized and may have misjudged the wonders of the Ricken charm. ‘Worst movie I’ve seen in the last five years. Facile, adolescent, piss poor.’

  Silence. Sofia slides me a look.

  ‘You get – what? – transvestites and pregnant nuns and benign hookers and what does it all add up to? Nothing. AIDS is just co-opted for cheap emotional impact. Or the new one, Talk to Her. I’m supposed to feel sympathetic towards a retarded necrophiliac? None of it makes any sense. There’s no recognizable human emotion in Almodovar’s movies, and I’ll tell you why – because he’s too juvenile to cope with real suffering. The whole thing’s a camp pantomime. But his films are shot so beautifully you’re tricked into thinking you’re in the presence of an artist.’

  The outburst allows me to speak to Sofia in Spanish, as if to apologize for Saul getting out of hand.

  ‘I’m going to make an excuse and get us out of here,’ I tell her, speaking quickly and employing as much slang as I can. Then, looking at Saul as if to laugh him off, ‘Don’t believe everything my friend has told you. He’s drunk. And he’s in a difficult mood.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Alex was just telling me that you love the cinema,’ Sofia tells him quickly. ‘But I don’t think this can be true. How can you love cinema if you don’t love Pedro Almodovar?’

  ‘It’s a Madrid thing,’ I explain. Saul makes a sucking noise with his teeth. ‘Almodovar came onto the scene after Franco, made a lot of risque comedies; they associate him with freedom and excess. He’s a cultural icon.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Sofia nods. ‘It is very English of you not to embrace him. The films are crazy, of course they are, but you mustn’t be so literal about it.’

  Saul looks contrite. ‘Well, we don’t have anyone comparable in England,’ he says, which may be his way of apologizing. ‘Maybe Hitchcock, maybe Chaplin, that’s about it.’

  ‘Judi Dench?’ I suggest, trying to make a joke of it, but neither of them laughs. Julian has come back in from the street and he seems flustered.

  ‘Look, I’m afraid we’ve got to bugger off.’ He pinches Sofia’s neck in a way that annoys me. ‘Just had a message from our friends. We were supposed to meet them in Santa Ana.’

  Is this an excuse? When Julian arrived he said nothing about meeting anyone for a drink.

  ‘Santa Ana?’ Sofia drains her Diet Coke. ‘ Joder. Are you sure?’

  ‘Quite sure.’ Julian brandishes his mobile phone as if producing evidence in a court of law. ‘And we’re late. So we’d better hit the road.’

  There are rapid apologies and farewells – Sofia and I very pointedly do not kiss – and then they are gone. Saul drains his cana and places the glass on a nearby table.

  ‘That was a bit sudden.’ He is as suspicious as I am. ‘You think they just wanted to be alone?’

  ‘Probably. Not much fun bumping into an employee on your night off.’

  ‘They seemed nice, though.’

  ‘Yeah, Julian’s OK. Comes on a bit strong. Gale force Sloane Ranger, but he pays my wages.’

  ‘How do you know he’s not SIS?’

  I look around to ensure that nobody has overheard the question.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard.’

  ‘Because I just do.’

  ‘How?’

  Saul is smiling. There’s no chance that he will drop the subject. I try to look irritated and say, ‘Let’s just chat about something else, OK?’ but he keeps going.

  ‘I mean, surely you must have had your doubts? Or was the job at Endiom too important to sacrifice for the sake of a paranoid hunch?’ My expression must give something away here because he looks at me, knowing that he has struck a nerve. ‘After all, you didn’t seek him out. He approached you. So, according to the Laws of Alec Milius, he’s a threat.’ A big grin with this. ‘You said he heard you speaking Russian in a restaurant and offered you a job.’

  ‘That’s right. And then I ran basic background checks on Endiom, on Julian and his wife, and everything came up clean. So it’s cool. He’s fine.’

  Saul laughs, rapping his knuckles against the wall. In an attempt to move off the subject, I say that it’s his round and he goes to the bar, buys two more canas, coming back with his mood completely unchanged.

  ‘So you ran background checks?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And what came up about Sofia?’

  ‘Sofia?’

  ‘Yes, the woman he was with. Julian’s wife. Didn’t you catch her name?’

  The sarcasm has deepened. There is mischief in his eyes.

  ‘I hardly know her.’

  ‘She’s good looking,’ he says.

  ‘Do you think?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘It’s not that. I’ve just never thought of her that way. She’s not my type.’

  ‘Not your type.’ A small silence, then Saul says, ‘What age would you say she was? Early thirties?’

  ‘Probably. Yes.’

  ‘Very smart? Very sexy?’ It takes me a moment to realize that he is quoting from our earlier conversation. He stares directly into my eyes. ‘You’re fucking her, aren’t you?’

  Yet again he has seen right through me. I use the noise of the bar and the low light to try to disguise my reaction.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  He ignores this.

  ‘Does Julian know?’

  ‘What are you talking about? I met her for the second time tonight.’

  ‘Oh come on, mate. It’s me.’ Why am I bothering to lie, and to Saul of all people? What possible harm could come from him knowing? ‘Your little exchange in Spanish? That was about Pedro Almodovar? It wasn’t about both of you saying how much you missed each other and how awkward things were getting with me and Julian hanging around?’

  ‘Of course not. Where’s this coming from?’

  I seem to possess a default personality set to perfidy and misinformation. Not for one moment has it occurred to me to tell Saul the truth, but my relationship with Sofia is one of the few things out here that gives me any pleasure, and I don’t want him trampling on it with his decency and his common sense.

  ‘Yo
u remember Mr Wayne,’ he says, ‘Our Spanish teacher at school – the one with the BO problem?’

  ‘I think so…’

  ‘Well, it turns out he was pretty good. I understood what you were saying…’

  ‘And what was that?’ I raise my voice above the music. ‘Seriously, Saul, you can’t have understood. I was apologizing to Julian’s wife because you’d turned into Barry Norman. It was getting embarrassing. Just because you thought she was fit doesn’t mean I’m fucking her. Christ, the way your mind works…’

  ‘Fine,’ he says, ‘fine,’ waving his hand through the air, and for a moment it appears that he might have believed me. I would actually relish the opportunity to talk to Saul about Sofia, but I do not want him to judge me. The adultery is my sole concession to the darker side of my nature and I want to show him that I have changed.

  ‘Look, what about a different bar?’ I suggest.

  ‘No, I’m tired.’

  ‘But it’s only one o’clock.’

  ‘One o’clock is late in London.’ He looks deflated. ‘I was up early. Let’s call it a night.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘I’m sure.’ He has withdrawn into disappointment. ‘There’s always tomorrow.’

  We finish our drinks, with scarcely another word spoken, and head out onto the street. I feel as if I am in the company of a favourite schoolmaster who has discovered that I have deceived him. We are waiting in his study, the clock ticking by, just killing time until Milius can find it in himself to come clean. But it is too late. The lie has been told. I have to stick to my tale or risk humiliation. So nothing has really changed in six years. It’s pitiful.

  8. Another Country

  Perhaps as a consequence of this argument – and several others that occur over the course of the weekend – I allow Saul to stay in the flat while I am working in San Sebastian. He was clearly not ready to go to Cadiz, and I did not have the heart, or the nerve, to ask him to move into a hotel. He played so cleverly on my sense of guilt on Friday night, and ridiculed my paranoid behaviour to such an extent, that forcing him to leave was out of the question. He would, in all probability, have simply hopped on the next plane back to London, never to be seen again. Besides, I told myself – unable to sleep on Sunday night – what harm could come from allowing my best friend to stay in my house? What was Saul going to do? Bug the place?

  Nevertheless, before leaving for the coast I take several precautions. Details of the safe house in Alcala de los Gazules are removed and placed in my PO Box at the post office in Moncloa, ditto coded reminders of email addresses, computer passwords and bank accounts. I have €14,500 in cash concealed behind the fridge in a plastic container, which I place in a black bin liner to stow beneath the spare wheel of the Audi. Safes are pointless; most can be cracked in the time it takes to boil a kettle. It is also necessary to disable my desktop computer by removing the hard drive and telling Saul that the system is clogged by a virus. Everything is password protected, but an expert could hoover up most of the information on the system using a modified PDA. If Saul wants to check his email, he can dial up from his own laptop using a mobile phone or, better still, go to an internet cafe down the road.

  I wake at seven on the Tuesday morning and open the windows of the sitting room, letting the flat air for five minutes as coffee bubbles on the stove. Saul’s bedroom door is closed and I leave a note, with keys, saying that I will be back on Friday evening ‘in time for chess and dinner’. He already knows the neighbourhood fairly well and will be able to buy milk and booze and British newspapers at the various shops I have pointed out over the last three days. Nevertheless, closing the door behind me feels like an act of the grossest negligence, every instinct I possess for privacy recklessly ignored. But for the impact on my Endiom career, I would immediately telephone Julian at home, explain that there has been a problem, and cancel the trip.

  At my regular breakfast cafe on Calle de Ventura Rodriguez I eat a croissant, with a copy of The Times for company. The Kuwaiti desert is gradually filling with troops and tanks and the prospects for war look bleak: a long drawn-out campaign, and months to take Baghdad. Beside me at the bar a construction worker has ordered a balloon of Pacharan, iced Navarran liqueur, at 8 a.m. I content myself with an orange juice with just a splash of vodka and head outside to the car.

  For €250 per month I keep the Audi on the second floor of an underground car park beneath Plaza de Espana, the vast square at the western end of Gran Via dominated by a monument to Cervantes. It has been some time since I was last down here and a thin film of dust has formed on the bonnet and across the roof. I lift the spare wheel out of the boot, conceal the bag of money in the moulded recess, remove several CDs from my suitcase for the journey ahead and lay two suits flat along the back seat. A woman passes within ten feet of the car but walks by without so much as a glance. Then it’s just a question of finding the ticket and driving out into rush-hour Madrid. Cars have double-parked along the length of Calle de Ferraz, reducing a three-lane street to traffic that can only bump along in single file. The aggression of horns at this hour of the morning is jarring and I regret not having left an hour earlier. It takes twenty minutes to reach Moncloa and a further ten until we are at last loose on the motorway, bunched traffic moving clockwise on the inner orbital, heading north for Burgos and the N1. Low clouds have settled on the flat outer plains of Madrid, industrial plants and office blocks broken up by thin, dew-rich mists, but otherwise there is little to look at but endless furniture superstores, German technology companies and blinking roadside brothels. Living in the centre of Madrid, I forget the extent to which the city sprawls out this far, blocks of flats deposited on the featureless plain, built with no greater purpose than proximity to the capital. These could be the outskirts of any major city in the American Midwest. It does not feel like Spain.

  The driving, on the other hand, is as Spanish as flamenco and jamon. Cars whipping past at over 160 kph, sliding lane to lane oblivious of sense or reason. It is my habit to copy them, if only because the alternative is a snail-slow crawl in the slipstream of an ageing lorry. Thus I take the Audi well beyond the speed limit, sit on the bumper of the car in front, wait for it to pull to one side, and then surge off into the distance. Traffic police are not a problem. The Guardia Civil tend not to patrol in the long stretches between major towns and one glimpse of my (counterfeit) German driving licence, accompanied by an inability to communicate in Spanish, is usually enough to encourage them to wave me on.

  As the weather closes in, however, I am forced to slow down. What had seemed at first like the beginning of a decent, sunny day becomes fogbound and wet, hard rain falling in patches and glistening the road. At this rate it will be four or five hours before I cross the border into the Basque country. A preliminary meeting scheduled in the capital, Vitoria, for one o’clock may have to be postponed or even cancelled. Climbing into the Sierras, I get stuck behind two articulated lorries driving parallel in a macho overtake, and decide to pull over for a coffee rather than sit in the funk of their exhaust. Thankfully, the rain has stopped and the traffic thinned out by the time I rejoin the road, and just after eleven I am passing Burgos. This is where the landscape really comes into its own: rolling, patched fields of green and brown and the distant Cantabrian mountains smashed by a biblical sunlight. At the side of the road, little patches of undecided snow are gradually melting as winter draws to an end. To be away from Madrid, from the pressure and anxiety of Saul, is suddenly liberating.

  When the road signs begin to change I know that we have crossed the border. Every town is announced in translation: Vitoria/Gasteiz; San Sebastian/Donostia; Arrasete/Mondragon: government concessions to the demands of Basque nationalism. This is not Pais Vasco; this is Euskal Herria. Spain is divided into a number of regions with far greater political and social autonomy than, say, devolved Scotland. Under the terms of the constitution hammered out in the aftermath of Franco’s death, the Basques – and the Catalans – wer
e granted the right to form their own regional governments with a president, legislature and supreme court. Everything from housing to agriculture, from education to social security, is organized at a local level. The Basques levy their own taxes, run their own health service – the best in Spain – and even operate an independent police force. As Julian exclaimed over lunch, What more do they fucking want? Explain that in your magnum opus.’

  The ‘magnum opus’, as he put it, will probably run to several thousand words, a blend of conjecture, facts and business jargon designed to impress Endiom’s investors and provide a broad overview of the political-financial consequences of investing in the Basque region. ‘Still,’ Julian disclosed, polishing off his second glass of cognac, ‘the idea is to encourage our clients into parting with the readies, yes? No sense in putting them off. No sense at all.’

  So, what more do they want? I stop in Vitoria, late for the first of many meetings, and come no closer to an answer. Two hours of employment law and social security benefits with a bespectacled union representative struggling to rein in a bad case of dandruff. It takes twenty-five minutes to find his office and another fifteen for the two of us to walk the damp city streets in search of an eventually mediocre restaurant serving thin soup and stodgy beans. I begin to regret coming. But this is only my second visit to the Basque country and I had forgotten the striking transformation in the landscape as you drive northwest towards the sea, the flat plains of Castilla suddenly soaring into magnificent, bulbous mountains dense with trees and lush grass, the motorway winding frantically along narrow valley floors. This is another country. At half past four I have reached the outskirts of San Sebastian, rain starting to fall and obscuring the hillsides in mist. Every now and again the silhouette of a typical caseria, low alpine houses with obtuse angular roofs, will punch through the fog, but otherwise little is visible from the road. So nothing prepares me for the beauty of the city itself, for the long graceful stretch of the Concha, the grandeur of the bridges spanning the Urumea river and the elegance of the broad city streets. Julian’s secretary, Natalia, has booked me into the Londres y de Inglaterra, perhaps the best hotel in town, situated on the seafront looking out over a wide promenade dotted with benches and old men wearing black Basque berets. The promenade is lined by a white iron balustrade and there is no traffic in sight. It would not seem strange for a woman carrying a parasol to pass on the arm of a Spanish gentleman, nor for a child bowling a hoop along the seafront to scurry past in a pair of salmon-pink culottes. I seem to have emerged into a time warp of the fin-de-siecle bourgeoisie, as if the heart of San Sebastian has not changed in over a hundred years, and all of the grim political sparring of the Franco years and beyond has been a myth now happily exploded.