Off Side

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  ‘Was the kid OK?’

  ‘He seemed to be, seeing the way he was going down the stairs four at a time.’

  ‘Four at a time?’

  Something told the porter that he needed to give a better impression of the boy.

  ‘He’s a good lad. Well brought-up, too.’

  ‘Well brought-up …’

  The moistness which seemed to appear in the man’s eyes was countered immediately by a straightening of his back in an attempt to recover a vertebral condition which sentiment had eroded. He adopted a pose that was almost athletic. He took his wallet out of his back trouser pocket, and from it produced a photograph which he showed to the porter.

  ‘Has he changed much?’

  The porter took his glasses out of the top pocket of his uniform jacket and examined the photograph carefully. It showed the good-looking woman from the second floor, her son, and the man with whom he was now talking. As he looked at the photograph, a flash of a half-remembered image passed before his eyes.

  ‘I’ve seen you somewhere before. On TV, maybe …?’

  ‘Not these days.’

  ‘But you used to be. I’m sure I’ve seen you on television.’

  ‘I used to be, years ago, once in a while. Has the lad changed much?’

  ‘A lot. He’s a teenager now. In this photo he must be seven or eight years old, but he must be thirteen or fourteen by now. Is he your son?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And why would I have seen you on TV?’

  ‘I used to play football.’

  ‘Ballarín!’ the porter shouted, as if he’d suddenly hit the jackpot. ‘You’re Ballarín!’

  ‘Palacín.’

  ‘That’s it. Palacín. Well, I was close. Amazing — who’d have thought that I’d run into Palacín today! Now, I tell you what … I remember your surname, but not your first name.’

  ‘Alberto. Alberto Palacín.’

  ‘Jesus! Palacín! They don’t make centre forwards like you nowadays! Centre forwards these days are rubbish. You don’t get players like you, going right up to the goal area and driving it in, straight past the goalkeeper … What are you doing nowadays? I suppose you’re retired and living off rent. Or is it business?’

  ‘Business, really. Not rent.’

  ‘Well, that’s good. You deserved a break after what happened … What was it, now …? You were injured, that’s it. That animal, what was his name …?’

  ‘What does it matter?’

  ‘What do you mean, what does it matter? The bastard had it in for you. I remember it like it was yesterday. They showed it on TV. In those days I only had a black-and-white set, but when I remember it I see it in techni-colour. By the time he’d finished with you, your knee looked like raw meat. What was it the doctors said …?’

  Reaching into the recesses of his memory he produced the answer to his own question: ‘Fracture of the meniscus, and a tearing of the internal ligament and the front right ligament.’

  ‘A bastard, that. Like having to buy yourself another leg.’

  ‘That’s right. Like having to buy yourself another leg.’

  The porter cast a critical eye over his leg.

  ‘You don’t seem to have a limp, though.’

  ‘I don’t limp.’

  ‘That was bad luck, that was. You’d be making a packet by now. You were making good money, but not like they make nowadays. They’re all millionaires, but half of them are nothing to write home about. They only play when they feel like it, and if they don’t feel like it they run off and hide behind the ref or behind the goalposts. Have you seen that Butragueño play? He looks like an orphan … And what about Lineker … A joke …! And this one they’ve signed now — it’s like taking lambs to the slaughter. The kind of thugs you get in Spanish football these days will teach him a thing or two. In no time at all he’ll be wanting to hang up his boots.’

  ‘They’re good players. They’re all very good.’

  ‘But there’s no one like you.’

  ‘No, that’s not true.’

  ‘No one, Ballarín, no one!’

  The porter took him by one arm to emphasize the point. He took another look at the photograph, and was clearly full of sympathy and willing to help.

  ‘A hell of a girl, you had there. She didn’t leave a forwarding address, but you could try asking at the beauty parlour on the corner. The lady spent a lot of time there. It’s very well equipped — they’ve got everything, a gymnasium, a sauna, a hairdresser’s … I’m sure they’ll be able to help you.’

  As Palacín left, the porter called him back.

  ‘You wouldn’t happen to have a photo you could sign for me …?’

  Palacín smiled, and then shrugged to indicate that he couldn’t oblige.

  ‘I haven’t carried photos of myself for years. I used to, in Mexico, but here …’

  ‘That’s a shame. My grandson would love one. He’s got a signed photo of Carrasco.’

  Now that Palacín was alone again, he walked down a pavement that was almost deserted, in the shade of trees that had too much September about them. The trees were young, in the same way that the area was young, and the plants hanging off people’s balconies, too. Fifty yards down the road was a sign for the ‘Beautiful People’ beauty parlour, but the watch on his wrist was signalling an urgency of which only he was aware. At any rate, he knew what he’d be doing with his free time the following day, in this city where he now felt such a stranger.

  The worst of it had been the taste of reused frying oil which had provided the base for a paella apparently cooked by a gastronomical natural scientist with a mania for combining every botanical and zoological possibility imaginable together into one single dish. Apart from foie gras, the paella contained just about everything you could think of, and each species left in his mouth the aftertaste of its death-throes before sinking down to let itself be drowned in his gastric juices. Mortimer was still absorbed in anthropological research, and he ate the paella as if he was consuming the soul of his new country of adoption. Camps barely touched his, maintaining an air of distant reserve, like an English major in the Falklands. Carvalho took advantage of Mortimer’s ecstasy to ask him a few questions appropriate to his new-found status as a sports psychologist.

  ‘Do people see you as a superstar in England?’

  ‘Yes, more or less.’

  ‘Were there protests from the public when you decided to sign for a foreign club?’

  ‘No. No. We have a lot of centre forwards in England, and my club did a good deal. The club is a limited company, and the proceeds from my signing will keep them out of the red for a while.’

  ‘Has anyone ever tried blackmailing you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you ever had threatening letters? Or phone calls?’

  ‘Only one time, when we reached the cup final, against Manchester. Sometimes you get threats from lunatics. But then nothing happens. The fans tend to fight it out on the terraces, and they leave the players in peace.’

  ‘Have you encountered any particular hostility from members of other teams?’

  ‘Off the pitch, not at all. One season I had a bit of a feud with a Liverpool midfield player … But these days, every time we have a run-in, it’s a kind of a nod and a wink situation. We’re professionals. Football’s our bread and butter. The dangerous players are the younger ones, because they’re in a hurry to make their mark, and the older ones, because they want to show that they’re still up to it. There’s nothing more dangerous than an ageing midfield player. I got an elbow in the face once, and ended up with a broken cheekbone.’ At this point Mortimer got up, in the middle of what was a rather expensive Barceloneta restaurant, and invited Carvalho to participate in an action replay. ‘You jump. Jump as if you’re about to head a ball.’

  Camps half closed his eyes as if urging him to play along, but Carvalho limited himself to getting up and resting his hands on the tablecloth. Mortimer closed in on him, leapt up as if t
o head off an imaginary football, and lashed out with his left elbow in the direction of Carvalho’s head.

  ‘You see? You could end up knocked unconscious and the ref wouldn’t even notice. Elbows are the worst, because a kick usually leaves a mark, but refs don’t tend to notice elbows. Or when somebody nuts you. There was a Spurs centre back who had a head like iron, and if he nutted you you’d end up out for the count.’

  He was obviously intending to do a demonstration head-butt on either Carvalho or Camps, but they both sank back into their seats to deny him the opportunity.

  ‘I’ll eat paella every day,’ Mortimer promised himself, and he inquired of Camps O’Shea whether it was possible to buy frozen paellas, because Dorothy wasn’t too hot on cooking.

  ‘She likes cakes — people in England like cakes — but she doesn’t like cooking.’

  ‘Have you been married for long?’

  ‘A year.’

  ‘Isn’t your wife going to get very bored in a city that she doesn’t know?’

  ‘Dorothy never gets bored. She’s been working as a buyer for Marks and Spencer’s, but she’s into birdwatching in her spare time. She wants to make a list of all the birds in Barcelona. I told her that there are a lot of birds in Barcelona. I saw a lot of birds on the Ramblas.’

  ‘It’s a market. They’re in cages. They’re not native birds.’

  Camps moved to temper this discouraging piece of information: ‘Don’t worry. We have uncaged birds too. If that’s what Dorothy likes, she’ll find no shortage of birds.’

  ‘I hope so. She does my accounts, too. She’s got a good head for figures. Not like me. My business is football. I know where a ball’s going to land simply by the shape that the kick takes. It’s instinctive. The English papers used to say that I could always tell where a ball’s going to end up.’

  ‘Remarkable,’ said Carvalho and Camps simultaneously, but each with a difference of nuance which Mortimer was not in a position to identify.

  The PR man took advantage of the footballer’s need to go to the toilet, to ask Carvalho’s impression.

  ‘Not a lot to him. A bit simple, I would say.’

  ‘He has the ingenuousness of all young animals. He hasn’t taken too many knocks, yet.’

  ‘As regards our particular field of interest, it seems he hasn’t brought any enemies with him. These anonymous letters are obviously locally produced, designed to produce a local effect.’

  ‘I’m not saying that we should pay them too much attention, but we should still be careful. It could be some lunatic who will give up after a week or two. On the other hand, if he’s looking for publicity he might carry on until he gets found out.’

  ‘There are crazy people around who kill their idols.’

  ‘In the United States, maybe. When Europeans get mythomania, they’re usually more civilized about it. But you should take a good sniff around, just in case.’

  ‘I’m not going to get much more out of this young man. And one paella’s more than enough for me.’

  ‘Didn’t you enjoy the paella?’

  ‘No. Rice is a very delicate creature, señor Camps. It looks as if you can do anything you like with it, but it has a very sensitive soul. It’s not like the potato, or Italian pasta, although these too are simple vehicles with a volume and texture that carry all kinds of flavours. Rice either has to have an underlying flavour of its own, or its flavour has to be unobtrusive so that it can take in other flavours. For this reason it can only be cooked together with things that have a common paternity. When you combine it with meat and fish, you have to use white rice, and boil it on its own. Then you strain it, and then you can put it with other things that have been cooked on their own. It was the Valencians, the real Valencians, who invented the idea of cooking rice together with other things, but they never invented the gruesome concoction that people serve nowadays — chicken and seafood paella. The Chinese, and Asians in general, are masters of the art of rice on its own, which they combine with whatever takes their fancy, anything from five to five thousand different things. What I find intolerable is that people can serve up a paella like the one we’ve just had, where the rice has been fried in half a litre of oil that was previously used for frying fish. That wasn’t a paella. It was a by-product of a serious burns hospital.’

  By now Camps was open-mouthed. At the start he had listened to Carvalho’s monologue with his customary air of condescension for the inconsequentiality of other people’s opinions, but Carvalho’s irritation, and his obvious knowledge of the subject, had triggered his interest.

  ‘Amazing. So you know about cooking.’

  ‘That’s all I know about. And even then, I don’t know much.’

  ‘Is knowing about cooking an occupational requirement for a private detective?’

  ‘No. But it is for being a social psychologist.’

  ‘Fascinating. Could you explain that?’

  ‘I’m not a great talker.’

  ‘That’s not the impression I had just now.’

  ‘After-dinner chit-chat has never been my forte.’

  ‘I want to know the connection between cooking and social psychology.’

  ‘Man is a cannibal.’

  ‘That’s a good start.’

  ‘He kills in order to feed himself, and then he calls in culture to provide himself with ethical and aesthetic alibis. Primitive man ate his meat raw, and his plants too. He killed and he ate. He was sincere. Then they invented roux and bechamel. At that point culture came onto the scene. Covering up what are basically dead corpses in order to be able to eat them with your ethics and your aesthetics intact.’

  ‘Do you eat your meat raw?’

  ‘No. I have a great contempt for the way in which culture in general tries to mask reality, but I lay it aside when it comes to food. The only masking effect that I accept with good grace is cooking.’

  ‘And sex?’

  ‘Adulterated sex is bad for your health.’

  When Carvalho fell silent in order to light a Rey del Mundo Special which he had ordered from the waiter, Camps waited for him to finish his lighting-up ritual in the hope that he would continue his explanation. But Carvalho limited himself to the quiet contentment of simply smoking.

  ‘Carry on. I’m very interested in what you’re saying. You’re a philosopher.’

  ‘That’s all I know. I’ve already told you everything I know, and it surprises me that I’ve said so much. I’m getting old. I like to know the reasons for the things that I do.’ And all of a sudden, as if he’d received some sort of internal message, he rose to his feet.

  ‘I’m going to have to leave you to look after your Englishman. I have to get a move on. I have people I need to catch after lunch.’

  Coffee-time is the best time to catch shoeshines around town, Carvalho thought as he left the Barceloneta restaurant, a little wobbly from the effects of two bottles of Brut Barocco which he’d had to drink virtually on his own because Camps was more or less teetotal, and Mortimer barely touched the stuff, not even the cava which Camps had promoted as part of the framework of what was quintessentially Catalonian. Pan con tomate, cava, the seques amb butifarra, the escudella i carn d’olla … Camps had run through the list as if he was declaiming a patriotic poem. On the crowded beaches of Barceloneta, scores of tanned bodies, bronzed with the assistance of atmospheric pollution, were taking the afternoon sun. Two images came to his mind’s eye, faded images of days that he had spent on that beach during his childhood, and he was just on the point of turning sentimental when a sudden whiff of oil that had been reused after frying frozen scampi erected an insuperable obstacle to nostalgia. So instead he went looking for a taxi in paseo Maritimo, a street seemingly frozen in time and place as it waited for the extension which would link it to the Olympic Village. In the distance, the houses that had been demolished for the construction of the Olympic sports facilities looked more like a set for a film about the bombing of Dresden. The new city would no longer feel like
the city he knew, the city which had lived within the confines of Tibidabo to the north and Barceloneta and the sea to the south. The taxi dropped him in the Ramblas, at the foot of the Pitarra monument in plaza del Arco del Teatro. The young prostitutes, made up to look like even younger prostitutes, were still there, lined up along the pavement outside the Amaya and the Palacio Marc, which was now the seat of the Cultural Council of the Generalitat of Catalonia. The frontage of the church of Santa Monica was showing signs of the plastic surgery which was about to turn it into a Museum of Contemporary Catalan Art, and at his shoulder the bulldozers were poised over the Raval barrio, intent on opening an exit route for those who were trying to escape from the unpleasant realities of drugs and Aids and black and Arab immigrants. As long as there are young prostitutes, there will also be contemporary art, he thought, and this thought proved to him that he had reached the desired level of alcoholic surrealism. Bromide was not cleaning shoes outside the Cosmos, so Carvalho set off down calle de Escudillers, expecting to find his old and balding friend kneeling at the feet of some somnolent citizen. Why, he wondered, don’t women use shoeshines? Outside yet another restaurant advertising the delights of paellas and calamares alla Romana he found Bromide labouring over the shoes of a self-satisfied man who was either Swiss or a rich Catalan from Vic.

  ‘You’ll have to wait a moment, Pepiño. I’ve another customer after this gentleman.’

  ‘Glad to see you’ve got plenty of work, Bromide.’

  ‘Touch wood.’

  Carvalho leaned up against the counter and treated himself to a malt whisky with no ice or water. He was feeling the need to disconnect his capacity for self-control, but he wasn’t sure why. Bromide finished with his clients and then applied himself to Carvalho’s shoes, apologizing all the while for having kept him waiting.

  ‘People are beginning to want their shoes polished again, Pepe. Shoeshines are doing good business. The young ones, mainly, because I just do my usual customers, and three or four others a day. Why are people wanting their shoes shined, again, Pepiño? Have you asked yourself that? You should think about it, because you’ve got a good brain, and it’s worth some thought. If you ask me, things are changing. Everything. And I’m not talking about a change like in the 1940s or the 1950s, or the years when everyone was flush, the sixties and the seventies, up until Franco died. It’s another sort of change. I see it from people’s attitude to their shoes. For ten years people have been too ashamed to stick their feet under the nose of a shoeshine and say, “There you go, clean them.” They didn’t mind going to the dentist to get their teeth cleaned. But when it came to cleaning their shoes, they preferred to do it in the privacy of their own homes, with those shoeshine machines that put the likes of me out of a job. For years they all wanted to be so egalitarian, and it wasn’t the done thing to have someone else shine your shoes for you. So what’s it all about? What’s happened is that they’re not embarrassed any more, Pepe. So shoeshines are making money again. But I wouldn’t say other things were so great. In fact things seem to be going from bad to worse. What do you think?’