Murder in the Central Committee

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  ‘I don’t think it’s hard to guess why we’re here. First of all, I’d ask you to be as discreet as possible about our conversation, however it may go. If necessary, I’ll claim professional secrecy.’

  ‘It’s an almost forced secrecy. I never talk to anyone.’

  ‘As a preventive measure?’

  ‘No. I just think it’s obvious that if what other people say does not interest me, then nothing I can say will interest them.’

  ‘You’d go a long way in politics. Those who talk least usually have the most successful careers.’

  ‘In politics, as in bed and everywhere else, you must never allow any doubt to creep in.’

  ‘I’ve come on more or less official business. We would like you to help us investigate the murder of our general secretary. The government has appointed an unsatisfactory investigator against our express wishes, and it has been accepted that we should have one of our own, whose complete freedom of movement is guaranteed by both the Party and the government. If Superintendent Fonseca had not been given the case, we might not have taken this step. But that alone is enough to show that the government will try to use the investigation to get at us. I don’t know if you are familiar with Fonseca’s background.’

  ‘I am. And you know it.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true. You are one of Fonseca’s thousands of past victims.’

  ‘A mere trifle. I was hardly even an insect in Fonseca’s zoo.’

  ‘Any effort to bring down the dictatorship was worthy of praise. Anyway, you know who Fonseca is. You know he started his career as a Franquist infiltrator in our party; he cost us a very great deal in the forties, including four shootings. I won’t beat about the bush anymore. We’re here on business and you have only to name your price.’

  Salvatella seemed to be busy digesting what Santos had said, while Santos himself looked at Carvalho with an encouraging smile on his lips, as if he had already received a positive answer.

  ‘What do you want me to do? To find the murderer or to help you cover up the murder?’

  ‘Maybe we were given the wrong information. But they told us you uncovered murders, not covered them up.’

  ‘This case is beyond my powers. I’m used to starring in black-and-white films, and now you’re offering me a 70mm super-production with governments and police departments at the centre. In Madrid, too. I’m tired of travelling. I know Barcelona like the back of my hand, but sometimes I find even this city unbearable. Imagine me in Madrid, among the skyscrapers, functionaries of the old regime, ex-functionaries of the regime. I’m apolitical—let’s get that straight. But I can’t stand the little moustaches worn by functionaries of the old regime, ex-functionaries of the regime.’

  Santos looked to see what was in Salvatella’s eyes. His smile told Carvalho that he knew Santos was lacking in humour. Strengthened and forewarned by his comrade, Santos returned Carvalho’s look in the form of a complicit smile.

  ‘Madrid is no abstraction, and you can’t generalise about functionaries. I can see that you swallow all the clichés current in the provinces.’

  ‘I neither swallow them nor refrain from swallowing them. But Madrid is not what it used to be.’

  ‘In 1936?’

  ‘No. In 1959, when I lived there. Take the prawns at the Casa del Abuelo. Excellent and ridiculously cheap. Just try finding them now.’

  ‘Ah, so it’s a question of prawns.’

  Santos’s eyes shifted left and right, as if he were trying to work out exactly how the disappearance of prawns from the Casa del Abuelo fitted into a conversation about the murdered general secretary of the Communist Party.

  ‘There are some first-class shellfish restaurants,’ he burst out with a certain relief.

  ‘But what do they charge?’

  ‘Obviously shellfish are expensive.’

  ‘There’s some of everything,’ Salvatella chipped in. ‘When I go to a central committee meeting, I sleep at Togores’s place—you know, the Perkins one. He lives near the Sports Palace, in Calle Duque de Sesto. There’s an excellent and fairly cheap shellfish restaurant in the area. It’s always full. And if you walk around a bit, you can find some very nice pubs. The local near Togores’s place is really quite impressive: María de Ceberos, it’s called. Have you ever tried the lamb kidneys that woman makes? Absolutely delicious. The simplest thing in the world: salt, pepper, under the grill, a squirt of oil and lemon. Of course, they have to be very fresh lamb kidneys.’

  Either you’re play-acting or you’re a man after my own heart, Carvalho thought. He noticed the clear disorientation of Santos, who was trying with a smile to enter into the gastronomic complicity.

  ‘I can’t really answer you. It’s a long time since I’ve been in Madrid, but on my last visit I wandered through the Asturias district. There’s now a cafeteria where there used to be a pub, and they serve you Madrid-style tripe made with stock-cubes and some horse-meat chorizo.’

  ‘Well, tripe’s another story. It has to be admitted, and it’s not just a provincial cliché . . .’ Santos shrugged at Salvatella’s allusion.

  ‘. . .that much has been lost. The same is happening to Madrid-style tripe as to Asturian fabada. It’s tinned. Tinned.’

  Salvatella harshly pointed out this objective truth to Santos Pacheco, as if he were showing him the very wound made by Mercader’s ice-pick in Trotsky’s skull.

  ‘I don’t like tripe,’ Santos said defensively.

  As I thought, Carvalho said to himself.

  Santos shifted awkwardly. But for fear of displeasing Carvalho, he did not dare to bring the conversation back to the original theme. His mounting irritation focused instead on Salvatella; on that traitor who, before Garrido’s corpse had even grown cold, could launch into a trivial conversation about prawns, tripe and grilled lamb-kidneys. So he lay in wait, with a cold, admonitory stare that Salvatella met just as he was beginning to speak.

  ‘There’s no tripe like in. . .Anyway. If you come to Madrid, we’ll have plenty of time to discuss and eat tripe. Don’t let’s get away from the purpose of our visit. Besides, we’re disturbing you. You have to work as well. We’ll agree to the price you set. We’ll find you the best hotel in Madrid, whichever one you like.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Because you’re an ex-communist. Because you know who we are, what we’re like, where we come from, and where we’re going.’

  Santos spoke with passion; even, one might have said, with a moist warmth in those eyes which harboured the immortal remains of his friend and comrade Fernando Garrido.

  ‘An ex-communist is either an apostate or a renegade.’

  ‘It’s enough for us that he’s an apostate.’

  Your conduct has been judged improper. The leadership has asked us to set up a cell court and to decide in the first instance whether you should continue to be a member. Carvalho saw himself interrupting the rhythmic movement of his brush across the yellow canvas-sheet. He left the word ‘amnesty’ half-written and turned to that callow, larva-like economist:

  ‘You’ve improved a lot if you’re willing to accept help from an apostate. But I’m not even that. I’d almost forgotten that I was once a communist. Just like I’d forgotten that I worked for the CIA for four years. Did you know that?’

  ‘We did,’ they said almost in unison.

  Carvalho leant against the back-rest of his revolving armchair:

  ‘I warn you. I make no reductions on grounds of nostalgia.’

  ‘We’ll pay whatever is necessary.’

  It struck Carvalho that Salvatella had to arrest the spontaneous movement of his hand towards his wallet.

  ‘Will you be long in Madrid, boss?’

  ‘As long as necessary.’

  ‘What shall I do with all that food?’

  The office seemed half-full of tins, sausages and salted codfish.

  ‘Keep yours here, and take the rest up to my place in Vallvidrera.’

  ‘What if there’s trouble? One of
my mother’s brothers was a travelling salesman. The civil war caught him in Aranjuez, and nothing more was heard of him.’

  ‘Times have changed—people too.’

  ‘When I was a kid and my mother was still alive, she often used to cry thinking about her brother.’

  ‘People used to cry much more than they do now.’

  ‘True enough, boss.’

  All he had left now was to say goodbye to Charo.

  ‘I’m off.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘I’m leaving Barcelona for about a fortnight, I guess.’

  ‘Just like that, over the phone?’

  ‘It all happened very quickly.’

  ‘Right, dear, don’t waste any more time.’

  And she hung up.

  ‘If civil war starts and I don’t come back, share all the food with Charo.’

  ‘I’d already thought of that, boss. Call me if you need me.’

  ‘I’ll miss your cooking, Biscuter. I’m going to a town which has given no more than a stew, an omelette and a dish of tripe to the gastronomic culture of our country.’

  ‘What omelette?’

  ‘Uncle Lucas’s. If the Lorenzo brothers call about the revolving-door patent, tell them to try again in a fortnight.’

  The Ramblas were about to start channelling people in search of restaurants and snack-bars. Casual strollers and groups of pensioners were making way for the newspaper kiosks. A slow-moving, garrulous and more cheerful mass of people were shaping up for the gastronomic mysteries concealed in the dark side-streets where new restaurants appeared every day—one more proof of the democratic pluralism made available by the liberation from domestic gastronomic paternalism. At the height of the crisis of patriarchal society, heads of families were out in search of new restaurants, their hearts thumping at the forbidden adventure of a cream sauce with Olot truffles, dishes with tights and black, transparent underwear, four-course oral-genital meals in which the tongue is ready for the polyvalency of aromatic herbs and quick-fried dishes enlivened by bites of pine-kernel.

  ‘Have you got a surprise that will help me leave the city for a while in a really memorable way?’

  The pork-butcher on Calle Fernando pointed to a rosé wine:

  ‘It’s just come in from Valladolid: a natural rosé.’

  ‘I’ll have it with a shellfish risotto.’

  Carvalho was drawn to Les Quatre Barres by the ‘burnt-garlic angler-fish’, but the street was full of idle young whores and the four restaurant tables were about to be taken by Generalitat civil servants, whose reconstruction of Catalonia began with the reconstruction of their own palates. Nor was there any point in going to the Agut d’Avignon, where tables were reserved with as much notice as Jane Fonda gave in booking her civilian flight to the moon. Besides, Carvalho did not want to give the owner the satisfaction of turning away customers, in the manner of an Iranian who gives, withholds or raises the price of oil. And so he preferred to walk to the Boquería, with the aim of making a soup from two kilos of fish and molluscs. Afterwards he picked his car up from the Garduña parking lot and went to have a bacalao at the Pa i Trago eating-house near San Antonio market. There, at least, civilised human beings could breakfast on a capipota with mixed vegetable sauce at nine o’clock in the morning.

  Between a fine relic of those legendary pre-war bacalaos from Terranova and a dish of Catalan-style tripe with beans, Carvalho rang Salvatella at the PSUC central committee offices.

  ‘I’m going to Madrid early tomorrow, but I’d like to have a leisurely chat with you. Why don’t you come to dinner at my house?’

  The man at the other end was very busy that evening. He had to explain the decisions of the last central committee to a suburban branch meeting and then prepare a speech on the new electoral bill that was to be debated in the Catalan Parlament in two days’ time.

  ‘You can imagine what the branch meeting will be like after Garrido’s assassination.’

  ‘I think there’s an order of priorities, and a discussion of my activity is now at the top.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I was thinking of making a shellfish risotto, very much like arroz de Arzac.’

  ‘Arzac’s made with kokochas.’

  ‘Also with clams.’

  ‘It could be a very interesting risotto. I’ll go to the branch meeting and then accept your invitation.’

  ‘We’re fated to understand each other.’

  He gave Salvatella the directions to his house in Vallvidrera. Without giving time to the woman whose nipples and mascara-hardened eyes urged him to hurry, Carvalho rang his agent and neighbour Enric Fuster.

  ‘Are you interested in supper with a communist?’

  ‘Depends on what it is. Anyway, you know I don’t vote communist.’

  ‘Shellfish risotto.’

  ‘Wine?’

  ‘Viña Esmeralda or Watrau, depending on whether you feel young or mature.’

  ‘Young till death.’

  ‘Viña Esmeralda, then.’

  ‘Is the communist from the tedious or the nostalgic faction?’

  ‘The gastronomic faction.’

  ‘They don’t know what to do to win votes. I’ll come. Dinner-jacket?’

  ‘Dark suit.’

  Against all the rules of taste, Carvalho wanted to take leave of the district by consuming a horchata at the best ice-cream parlour in Barcelona, the one in Calle Parlamento. But the metal containers were dry, and the place was as forsaken as a public urinal; the glazed-tile parlour illuminated by the neon light of a dark evening. He started on the Calle de la Cera Ancha, walking between gypsies who had brought their stools and brandy-laced coffee to the bars of the Ronda and the corner of Calle Salvadors. In the 1940s he had watched the same gypsies, or their parents, dancing and generally surviving around the doors of the Bar Moderno or the Alujas—watched them from the balcony of a house constructed in 1846, two years before the Communist Manifesto, in a clear gesture of historic optimism on the builder’s part. The street divided into the Calle de la Botella and the Calle de la Cera Estrecha, where the Padró cinema had ceased to cater for old people, gypsies and boisterous children and become a kind of film club. How you have changed, Padró of Barcelona! Repopulated with cosmopolitan immigrants, Guineans, Chileans, Uruguayans; boys and girls in flower and marijuana, trying out post-marital, pre-marital and anti-marital relations; counter-cultural bookshops where the nazi Hermann Hesse lies next to a manual of some yogi from Freguenal de la Sierra. Denuded ever since the disappearance of the shady street-traders and Pepa the lottery queen, the district has no heroic remnants other then the Padró fountain; the Romanesque chapel half-hidden between a local school and a tailor’s shop, its apse formerly shared by an alcohol merchant and a blacksmith; and the condom shop—La Pajarita—which may be declared a historical monument or building of national interest if Jordi Pujol, president of the Generalitat of Catalonia, grants the request that Carvalho has been thinking of sending one day.

  The approach of winter was apparent in the rapid nightfall over the Vallés, while on the other side of Carvalho’s house, Barcelona received night on a sea displaying various forms of pollution and an uneven division of the first city lights. Carvalho envisaged a cold journey, a stranger’s sojourn in a town where he had never been happy or unhappy and which suddenly appeared in the desolate landscape as a papier-mâché miracle worthy of Las Vegas or Brasilia. While the fish were cooking on the stove and imparting their aromas to the broth, Carvalho furiously washed the clams in a resolute struggle against the sand lurking in their grooves. They seemed more like fruits of the earth than of the sea, especially when they opened in the steam to show the toughness of poor clams, so different from the unwholesome purity of the richer species delicate in both colour and health. By contrast, these clams required teeth, serious chewing, before they divulged the deep flavours hidden in their coarse textures. He heated the rice in a pan of already sautéd onions, strained the fish broth and thr
ew away the residue. Then he filtered the milky bouillon left by the clams and waited for the valves to cool before pulling out their cooked and humanly reduced flesh. Raw molluscs are boundless creatures: only the warmth of death gives them a determinate limit and volume. He prepared a good amount of garlic and parsley. After all these preparations, the meal could be finished as soon as the guests arrived.

  He went to his room, took a suitcase from his dream-deep wardrobe and filled it with five changes of clothes, a toilet bag and a bundle of Canary cigars given him by the client before last. Next he examined his pistol and tested the spring on the clasp-knife four or five times. He sprawled on the bed, one eye on the ashes in the fireplace, the other on the ever brighter city lights. He tested his muscular reflexes by seeing if he could jump straight to his feet. Two movements were needed, and so he lay down to try again. He finally succeeded and went up to the bookcase full of empty spaces, collapsed sections and books deformed by lack of support or the asphyxiating pressure of larger volumes. He took down Engels’s The Housing Question, and one look at ‘Part Three: Supplementary Remarks on Proudhon and the Housing Question’ convinced him that it deserved the fire. He tore the book in three, fanned the pages out so that they would catch fire more easily, and began to construct a building of twigs and branches on the ruins of one of Engels’s most inadequate works. The fire rose like a persuasive tongue, and it suddenly occurred to Carvalho that quite a few days would pass before the ceremony could be repeated. Time would thus work in favour of the passive resistance of his library to being burnt at a punishment velocity proportional to the number of useless and inadequate truths it contained. He decided to allow himself the gratuitous act of burning a book in the fire of no appeal. He did not choose at random, but looked on the shelves of literary pedagogy and criticism in order to surprise an anthology of Castilian so-called erotic poetry by two citizens, Bernatán and García. He convicted them of an excrutiating selection that managed to desex even the last piece of skin lending itself to the most unimaginative eroticism. The flames swallowed the book with relish, and Carvalho lay down again, satisfied that men of the future could now avoid disorientating information about the erotic customs and abuses of twentieth-century Spain. The telephone rang.