Murder in the Central Committee

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  ‘An expert’s knife, with a wide, serrated blade. One that will open a way into the chest.’

  Santos’s eyes quivered, as if the knife were hurting him. Carvalho turned and waved goodbye.

  ‘If you want to see Cerdán,’ Santos said, already behind him, ‘he’ll be at the Antonio Machado bookshop at eight this evening. He’s bringing out a book.’

  ‘Are you watching his movements?’

  ‘I just read El País.’

  ‘Am I invited to the funeral? Or aren’t there any personal invitations?’

  ‘It’ll be at ten tomorrow morning.’

  Carvalho found Carmela nervously pacing the pavement and looking again at her watch almost before it had recorded any passing of time.

  ‘At last. I’m in a real jam. I just rang my bloody husband, and he can’t fetch the kid from the nursery. I’ve got to go myself. Do you mind if we stop by the nursery? I’ll drop him off at my sister’s and then stay with you.’

  ‘I’ve decided to free myself from you. Santos gave his permission.’

  ‘And what will they say?’

  ‘Are they higher up than Santos?’

  ‘It’s a different question. I’ll let them know. But you’ll be followed.’

  ‘Where is the Antonio Machado bookshop?’

  ‘You want a book? Or is it for the Cerdán thing?’

  ‘I can see everyone in the Party is glued to Cerdán.’

  ‘He’s in fashion. He’s been arrested, questioned. . .’

  ‘What do you think of him?’

  ‘I think he’s a pain in the arse. But I’ll go to Machado’s. There’s going to be a demonstration. Here.’ She gave him a telephone number. ‘In case I don’t make it. I’ll be looking after my kid this evening. If you need anything. Do you know where Machado’s is? Okay, I’ll write down the address. It’s very near the Santa Barbara Pub. You don’t know that either? Where on earth are you from? They don’t teach you anything in Barcelona.’

  Carvalho was alone in Madrid, on the flower-lined precinct that runs around the Hotel Continental block. He caught sight of the new ministry buildings in the middle distance and went to look for La Castellana avenue. He hoped to escape as soon as possible from a district exactly like any modern hotel and office district in any city in the world. He struck out down La Castellana with no other purpose than to assert his freedom and to check whether he was being followed. One of the young men from the airport reception committee tried to adjust his pace to that of Carvalho.

  Carvalho stopped. ‘Look, kid, I’m going to have some prawns and then visit the Antonio Machado bookshop. If you like, you can come and protect me at the bookshop. I don’t think anything will happen while I’m eating prawns. You can take a couple of hours off to have a drink or buy yourself a lemonade.’

  ‘I’m not a kid. My name is Julio and I prefer to collect stamps. I’m a philatelist. Mir will shit all over us if we lose you.’

  ‘If I want to, I can shake you off anyway. Much better to come to an agreement.’

  ‘You do what you like. We were told to follow you and that’s what we’ll do. If you give us the slip, we’ll let them know.’

  Carvalho walked forward two steps and resolutely stopped a taxi. Through the rear window he could see the young man gesticulating as he ran along the street and asked his driver companion for help.

  ‘Go into this ministry. Through the side-gate. Stop. Here’s the fare.’

  He placed two hundred pesetas in the hands of the astonished taxi-driver. He jumped down, greeted an attendant and prepared to climb the stairs.

  ‘Where are you off to?’

  ‘Don Ricardo de la Cierva is expecting me.’

  ‘Don Ricardo is not at this ministry. Didn’t you see at the gate that this is the Ministry of Trade?’

  Not a trace of his pursuers outside. The Madrid air smelt of grilled prawns.

  ‘It’s no accident that just as the end-of-the-millennium psychosis was getting underway, a book like Orwell’s 1984 came into fashion and people again grew interested in the other two coherent projects of twentieth-century utopian literature: Huxley’s Brave New World and Zamyatin’s We. It is not that the end of the century confirms the utopian premonitions of those three writers. But in an age of crisis, the most critical sectors of a culture experience as a nightmare the collapse of all existing models. And when no model is or can be endorsed, the only solutions are utopianism or cynicism, sometimes masked by pragmatism masked by a cult of historical efficacy masked by the virtue of prudence.

  ‘I would not wish to be sarcastic in the presence of the lifeless body of a man who deserved all my respect and now deserves it only because others believe in him as the spokesman of the revolutionary project. In the presence of Fernando Garrido’s lifeless body, however, I wonder what has become of the revolutionary prudence he so much invoked in recent times to conceal that he had lost all possibility of imprudence. I was not sure whether to go ahead with this gathering, which was planned before the murder, or to cancel it and add my voice to the grief that every revolutionary must feel, even if he does not consider Fernando Garrido to have been a revolutionary. I, too, do not think he was a revolutionary, and yet I hope you will believe me when I say that I am sad, as a person can be sad only when he has lost something that affects his own identity. If I finally agreed to come, it’s because the murder itself is an apparent endorsement of the negative utopia.

  ‘Under the weight of a nightmare, the critics of reality can react by wagering on either a positive or a negative utopia. A wager on positive utopia would mean to obey Lenin’s behest, formulated at a time when crisis was looming over the Russian and European socialist movement and when, for want of a model that was not a failure, Lenin adopted Liebknecht’s proposal: study, agitate, organise in order to grasp a reality that cannot be apprehended by a mechanistic politics progressively devalued through the dead-end of its own logic and its refusal to join a dialectical struggle with reality. A wager on negative utopia, on the other hand, would precisely mean to see Garrido’s murder as proof that Huxley’s brave new world is nigh, or that Orwell’s Oceania or Zamyatin’s dehumanised cosmos is in sight. Such worlds are nothing other than the world system of domination, which devours its own children and integrates them into the fatalistic rules of the game of survival and equilibrium. From this perspective, the hot line does not even unify the world. It ties it up.

  ‘Garrido’s murder is an unforeseen event that will not unearth the trail of the sans-culottes nor bring the tanks onto the street. It is a pound of flesh offered to the logic of the system; and to question this fact is to question the system, to endanger functions like the one we are holding now, to jeopardise the situation in which the central committee can meet legally, or people over twenty-five can attend university courses, or Vázquez Montalbán can win the Planeta Prize.[7]* Neither Orwell, Huxley nor Zamyatin could have foreseen that the structure necessary for the terrible world of their prophecies might be created through implicit and explicit agreement between the two antagonistic systems. Zamyatin was a narodnik, a Russian populist who believed in a peasant revolution and the implantation of an asiatic mode of production, as against the NEP system of state-capitalist accumulation started by Lenin and forged into shape by Stalin. Huxley used to poke fun at the excesses that Russian communism could produce when it was experienced not on the spot, but through the heated palaver of young inter-war English communists at a loose end between two boat-races. In fact, Huxley’s work is a kind of joke designed to alert the supposedly liberal British conscience at a minimal, liberal level.

  ‘As for Orwell, Deutscher put it well in Heretics and Renegades:

  Although his satire is more recognisably aimed at Soviet Russia than Zamyatin’s, Orwell saw elements of Oceania in the England of his own days as well, not to speak of the United States. Indeed, the society of 1984 embodies all that he hated and disliked in his own surroundings: the drabness and monotony of the English industrial suburb,
the “filthy and grimy and smelly” ugliness of which he tried to match in his naturalistic, repetitive, and oppressive style; the food-rationing and the government controls which he knew in wartime Britain. . .’

  He looked up from the written notes, which he had consulted only for the quotation, and met Carvalho’s gaze. Behind larger and sadder glasses than he had worn twenty-five years earlier, his eyes tried to remember and did remember. A yellow mask now covered his features, drooping like deflated tyre-tubes beneath the sharp-pointed dictatorship of a capillary bed of nails. He turned his eyes back to the collective, which approached from the horizon to form a border of faces raised on its preacher’s feet.

  ‘Naive utopians. They thought it was possible to build utopias to escape from their nightmares; and then they merely cast into the bondage of their fears all those who followed the logical sequence of the next twenty, forty or a hundred years. They did not realise that fears and nightmares change, that no imagination can forget about what happens to us. What utopia could we build today over this lifeless body of Fernando Garrido, whose name I do not take in vain, whose name I do not invoke without pain? The landscape is dark and indistinct. But precisely because the night is so black, it may prove a little easier to find one’s bearings with the modest help of a pocket astronomy.

  ‘In presenting the first issue of the review Hasta Luego, I expressed a certain perplexity at the new contradictions of recent reality. The contradictions have sharpened, but I am less perplexed about the task which has to be set, if the dark night of a civilisation in crisis is to issue in a juster humanity on a habitable planet, rather than a massive herd of half-wits on a noisy dunghill of chemical, pharmaceutical and radioactive waste. In my view, the nineteenth-century fusion of science and the workers’ movement cannot be achieved through agitated, irrational flights of fancy, but only in a house of the left where the calm of reason prevails.

  ‘So much time has passed that the two old allies, science and the workers’ movement, may have difficulty in recognising each other. A number of different movements may in fact be involved: ecology, for instance, which is the bearer of the self-critical science of the late twentieth century; or feminism, so long as it merges its emancipatory potential with that of other forces of freedom; or why not the classical revolutionary organisations? So long as they understand that their capacity to work for a free and just humanity has to be purified and confirmed through self-criticism of the old knowledge of society that informed them at their birth. At the same time, however, they must not renounce their revolutionary inspiration or lose themselves in the pitiful social-democratic army which, having completed its services in restoring capitalism after the war, is now on the eve of collapse. The revolutionary organisations must recognise that it is they themselves—those who live by their hands—which have been exceedingly confused by the rich, the “uncreators” of the Earth. It is a pity that Fernando Garrido is not among us to take up this call, this programme of hope or positive utopia. I am sorry to say it, but he died in the ranks of the pitiful social-democratic army, in the ranks of the “uncreators” of the Earth, although he is saved for History by the memory that is left of him.’

  Someone next to Carvalho said ‘amen’. It was the jumping-jack from the central committee meeting. But his ‘amen’ was buried by the earnest yet muffled applause that one expects at a first-rate funeral or the last speech of a besieged city. Cerdán was encircled by young people ready to leave everything and follow him. They were not congratulating him. They were asking for a bibliography and some illumination of reality. Carvalho thought he recognised one of the faces from the Hotel Continental. He surprised Carmela as she was putting a book in her bag, and Julio as he was slapping Cerdán on the back. The master was tired, or at least his eyes were. For he stroked them with his hands, as if to stimulate them into further contemplating the reality of the noisy dunghill of chemical, pharmaceutical and radioactive waste.

  ‘He called us half-wits,’ the jumping-jack laughed. ‘We haven’t been introduced. I’m Paco Leveder, and you must be Sherlock Holmes.’

  ‘In person.’

  ‘Did you notice? He called us half-wits. Cerdań has always been like that. All his life he’s been giving people marks according to how well they understand his own lesson. Some years ago he gave me nine out of ten. But now I’m suspended. You want to meet him? Follow me.’

  Cerdán saw Paco Leveder approaching with Carvalho and put on his glasses so as not to be at a disadvantage.

  ‘Sixto, how delightful you are, still preaching the end of the world! Keep at it; one day you’re bound to be right.’

  Cerdán did not reply but offered his hand to Carvalho.

  ‘After twenty years and more!’

  ‘Ah! you two know each other? I feel cheated.’

  ‘You have the heart of a professor of political law, Paco.’

  ‘I’ve read the insults you aim at us in that libel of yours. You accuse us of being the organic intellectuals of a capitulatory leadership. That’s going too far, Sixto. We’ve known each other for years, and no one’s a patch on you as a political commissar. You even had to be asked about the political adjectives in our leaflets.’

  Cerdán seemed more glued to the mute discourse in Carvalho’s eyes than to Leveder’s provocative talk.

  ‘How’s your life been?’

  ‘I’m one of the half-wits who live on the noisy dunghill of chemical, pharmaceutical and radioactive waste.’

  ‘There are two kinds of half-wit: those who are moved by the spectacle, and those who never give it a thought.’

  ‘I never do.’

  ‘Come on, Sixto, stop picking a row. The señor is not part of this war. We’ve come to ask for your blessing and then we’ll be off.’

  Cerdán began to get irritated. Nearby some pallid young people, their arms bent forever by the premature carrying of books, were pecking away at the crumbs of his knowledge.

  ‘We’ll meet later.’

  ‘Yes, let’s meet.’

  ‘Me too?’

  ‘If there’s no other way.’

  Leveder steered Carvalho to what remained of the austere cocktail, in true harmony with the time of crisis. The cubes of potato tortilla disappeared to the insistent rhythm of chopsticks that seemed driven by half the population of China.

  ‘It’s the same old Cerdán,’ someone said.

  ‘Even more pessimistic, though,’ another added.

  ‘But he’s obviously distressed by the Garrido business.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t he be?’

  ‘I sometimes say to myself: let that guy do the thinking and the rest of us can plant cabbages.’

  ‘Did you hear?’ Carvalho asked.

  Leveder was mockingly concerned.

  ‘It’s not the first time I’ve heard that. Cerdán produces that kind of impression. He’s a verbal seducer. He has mastered the magic of words and summons them from a realm whose keys are and always will be in his pocket. He’s a great shaman, a medicine-man of the real and spiritual worlds. At first I adored him: I was one of Fu-Manchu’s thugs. Then I hated him. Now I find him amusing. Every culture deserves a Savonarola, and Cerdán is the Savonarola of Spanish communism. Still, he does go too far, damn it. He spends the day in tears at the wailing wall, and now he’s taken it into his head to work for the salvation of cabbages. You can’t breathe in Madrid, I agree, but this dunghill business is much too strong. And then he starts calling us half-wits—not as a figure of speech, but as a real description. He has the gift of keeping people guessing for their mark. I remember we all used to hover around so that he would look at us and assess our worth. If Cerdán didn’t look at you—crash! something had to be wrong with your IQ. Sitting on his right one day, I was filled with illusions when I heard him say: “This young man has a great analytic talent.” In his view, there were people with analytic talent and people with synthetic talent. Years later he remarked to me: “So-and-so has a great analytic talent, while what’s-his-n
ame has a great synthetic talent.” As far as I was concerned, both of them were complete idiots.’

  The little hair remaining on Leveder’s tall frame was almost red in colour, and his short beard was like a garland that highlighted the length of his face. He swallowed three chinchones in two minutes.

  ‘The ulcer’s got to be hit. Let’s see if we’re going to dine with Cerdán. He has an interest, after all. He’d like to worm something out of me about the Garrido affair. I’ll give him a rough time, though. He must also have an interest in talking with you. Do you know each other well?’

  ‘Too well.’

  ‘That’s bad. When you know Cerdán too well, you become immune to any religious argument. I’m working on an unpublishable essay in which I compare Cerdán’s positions with those of Bernard-Henri Lévy in God’s Testament. You know who I’m talking about.’

  ‘I’ve never had the pleasure.’

  ‘A French philosopher, the most chic at the present moment. Cerdán is very small fry in comparison.’

  ‘I’m just a humble, uncultured private detective, but don’t say so to Cerdán. I’d like to hear him talk.’

  ‘You could always arrest him. Do you have the power to arrest people? Look, here comes the prettiest girl in the western communist bureaucracy.’

  Carmela approached and pretended not to know Carvalho. Leveder introduced them, while Carmela presented Julio. Leveder lent an ear to the wage demands being formulated by Julio and Carmela. At the meeting of Party full-timers, no one had paid any attention to what any business takes into account.

  ‘On the pretext of militant activity, we’re actually being exploited.’

  ‘You people from the leadership ought to take our side, because the old ones still think like in the forties, when you had to pay to be shot, damn it.’

  ‘For example, we get a fortnight’s marriage leave. But what if you just have a lover all your life or part of your life? No holiday? Is there a bonus for legal matrimony? What kind of communist morality is that?’