Off Side

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  Carvalho emerged from the stadium in the wake of the departing fans, who were moving slowly like ants in an ant colony, following in the footsteps of the people in front of them, slowly divesting themselves of their condition as a collective subject and recovering the memory of their own realities as each step took them nearer home and back to everyday reality. Night had fallen suddenly, as if to assist in the expulsion of the multitude from the stadium and its surrounds, and everywhere you looked there were streams of people and cars attempting to flee this scene which had now given all that had been expected of it.

  Several groups of young fans were giving loud cheers for their club, although what they were actually cheering was themselves, and the sole topic of conversation was an open-ended post-mortem on Mortimer’s style of play and the goals he had scored. Next to the big stadium rose the other sporting facilities of the powerful football club, but nobody had so far succeeded in dislodging from the locality the cemetery of what had once been a town in its own right, but which had now been swallowed up into Greater Barcelona. Carvalho had a half-memory that one of the former glories of this selfsame club was buried in that cemetery — one of those players whose exploits were as invented as they were real. The player had asked to be buried there, because that way, even though he would no longer be able to see the goals scored in the stadium, at least he would be able to sense them from the shouting of the fans. Maybe you’ll be able to hear the goals, but will you ever know who scored them? Carvalho stood next to the cemetery railings in silent communication with this former glory, a part of the scrapbook of his childhood days when that player used to be billed as the main attraction on the posters announcing the next game. The posters used to hang in the windows of the most frequented shops on the street — like the bakery where the inevitable black bread of the post-War period was baked; or the laundry which boasted the four daughters of señora Remei, four plump girls who courted a chorus of lascivious wolf-whistles every time they crossed the street — the co-owners of a collective carnality inappropriate in a post-War period characterized by austerity and rationing.

  ‘Today’s goals were scored by Mortimer,’ Carvalho said, out loud, as he stood next to the railings. He waited for a moment, half expecting a reply.

  There was none. He shook his head, began to doubt for his own sanity and went to retrieve his car, which had been beached high on the pavement by the departing fans. He pointed it in the general direction of Vallvidrera and switched on the radio, which was devoting itself to an endless chewing-over of the afternoon’s footballing highlights, and an equally endless listing of the results, the pools draws, the league tables, as well as the opinions and pontifications of managers and players alike. The droning noise of the sports news became a kind of aural wallpaper as he engaged his brain in demolishing the notion that the Mortimer case had even the slightest degree of plausibility. Who on earth would want to kill the kid? Why? What motive could there possibly be? Every day that passed meant more money in the bank for Carvalho, but he was a man who found pointless work even more repellent than useful work. Either way, work makes you tired, whether you’re working usefully or pointlessly. All at once something caught his attention on the radio. The commentator was busy clearing out the rest of the day’s junk, and he was in the process of giving the results for the third division games, and other results. All of a sudden a name illuminated a corner, a half-forgotten memory in the storehouse of Carvalho’s memory:

  ‘Centellas 1 — Gramenet 0.’

  Centellas. Did Centellas really still exist? His recollection was of going down a road with his mother in the 1940s. They used to leave the city, sometimes going to the south, other times to the north, seeking out particular houses in the countryside where the black-market was able to supplement the routine and scanty foodstuffs provided by your ration card. To the north, in between orchards and allotments run by full-time or Sunday market-gardeners, he remembered the perimeter wall of the Centellas Football Club, faced with cement, and topped with broken glass. For Carvalho, the club’s name and the memories that it brought flooding back were an inextricable part of his childhood, and to discover that it still existed, and that Centellas could still win one-nil (and beat Gramenet, what’s more) was like suddenly finding in his trouser pocket a crust of the black bread that they used to eat after the War.

  Dosrius agreed: ‘Yes. One-nil.’

  ‘Things aren’t going too well.’

  ‘We shouldn’t be in too much of a hurry.’

  ‘It’s starting to get urgent now. If we’re going to make anything out of the rescheduling of the Centellas ground as a residential area, it’s vital that we keep a firm grip on the agreement — while of course making sure that nobody knows that any such agreement exists. I think we were all clear on this.’

  ‘You need patience, Basté.’

  ‘I’m a very patient man, as well you know. Patience is almost always a good thing, except when it’s stupid, and in this case it’s beginning to be stupid. I don’t trust Sánchez Zapico.’

  ‘He’s the one who’s got most to lose. We’ve set him up as chairman of Centellas, and he knows that he’s there for a reason. But he’s right when he says we should let him go at his own pace.’

  ‘Dosrius, the team won. And that creates fans. Imagine what might happen if they win their next away match. It’s going to mean more people coming to the ground, and every bar in the barrio is going to start hanging up photographs of the team, and the kids will be … In a situation like that, nobody’s going to want to shut the club and sell the ground.’

  Dosrius opened his wallet and toyed with some banknotes, without venturing so far as to give business overtones to his conversation with Basté de Linyola. He knew that Basté liked rituals, as long as they were brief, and he had learned the art of combining ritual with brevity. Basté regained his humour, and returning behind his rosewood desk he indicated that he could begin.

  ‘Sánchez Zapico’s problem is that he always tries to be all things to all people. At the end of last season, the Centellas board were putting pressure on him to beef up the team. They escaped relegation and instant death by the skin of their teeth. If you like I’ll show you the gate receipts. Right. Sánchez, who is far from stupid, sells them the idea of putting out feelers to Alberto Palacín, a centre forward who, by the way, once played for your team, about ten years ago, and who also played in the national squad once or twice. I don’t know if you remember, but Pontón, who had a reputation as a bit of an animal, gave him a particularly nasty foul which left him just about fit for the knacker’s yard. And that’s more or less where he ended up. He went to play in the American League, then signed for Oaxaca, and he was working out his last contract when he got the call from Sánchez Zapico. Sánchez consulted me about it, and I gave him the go-ahead. Palacín had a pretty good name as a player, and people remember him, but actually he’s all washed-up. His personal life is a disaster. He’s separated from his wife, and he’s got himself hooked on cocaine.’

  Dosrius paused for a long moment to watch the effect of this last piece of information on Basté. There was a flicker of interest — brief, but sufficient to show that it had been registered.

  ‘As soon as he arrived in Barcelona, I had him followed. He booked himself into a cheap boarding house in one of the streets of the Barrio Chino, if that’s still what it’s called. I can’t keep up with the changes these days. Anyway, I had to wait for a few weeks, while he settled in with his team, and while he spent some time trying to locate his wife and son. He only ever left the boarding house to go to the stadium, or to try and trace the whereabouts of his family. His wife has shacked up with Simago — I don’t know if the name means anything to you. He specializes in buying and selling footballers, and signed up a number of good players in the early 1970s. That was before things started going badly for him — so badly in fact that he had to make a hasty exit to America, because he was being pursued by creditors on all fronts.

  ‘Anyway
, Palacín discovers that his wife has disappeared, and starts getting depressed. One day he runs into a young prostitute from the street where he lives. He uses her as his dealer, and they go off and have fun in her apartment — if you can call it an apartment … From what I gather from my informant, the girl lives in a derelict building. And this may interest you … She’s living with Marçal Lloberola, the youngest son of a man whose name will be familiar to you. Lloberola, the king of the scrapyards, as he is known all over the port. A mint of money behind him, and a hundred-year family history of calling the tune in the Port of Barcelona. The woman is Marta Becera, an ex-student friend of Marçal from his college days. They’ve been together for about ten years now, and they’re both heavily into drugs. They’re pretty much made for each other. So, Palacín takes up with the girl, and six days ago they went off on their first cocaine trip.’

  ‘And has there been a second time?’

  ‘Indeed there has. Last night, in fact. When the game was over, Palacín went for a stroll on his own in the area round the stadium. Then he took a taxi, which dropped him at the corner of calle del Hospital and pasaje de Martorell. He went to considerable lengths to find the girl, and they went off to score cocaine in Plaza Real again. Then they went back to the flat for sex. He’s well hooked, and one of these days he’s going to crack. Without his help, Centellas is as good as dead, and I would say it was a miracle that he managed to score that goal yesterday. But he does have style. I was there for the match, and it’s obvious that he might make himself a following. I said as much to Sánchez when we contrived to bump into each other, and he was worried. He thinks it might complicate things.’

  ‘Hooked on cocaine, eh?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Basté wrinkled his nose.

  ‘I don’t like the sound of this. It could get very mucky, Dosrius, and I can’t afford to get involved in that sort of thing.’

  ‘That’s what I’m here for, Basté.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant to say.’

  ‘You don’t need to say it. I said it.’

  Basté habitually used Dosrius as his lawyer every time he found himself involved in some particularly delicate set of negotiations — the sort of business deals that his ex-wife had criticized him for, calling him a speculator and a cynic; the kind of deals that sat uneasily with his image as a man who, for the last thirty years, had created for himself a public image as a political progressive, and as an enterprising businessman able to preach the philosophy of the creativeness of neo-liberalism by his own example. Dosrius had understood from the start that his role was to take the facts with which Basté supplied him, and then supply him with solutions without explaining too much about the procedures, while all the time taking sole responsibility for the ways in which these ends were to be achieved. The Centellas land-grab operation was going to involve more than a dozen building firms and industrialists, all of whom were willing to place their trust in Basté because he had a good business sense and enjoyed considerable social standing. To such an extent that they didn’t even demur when, during their few discreet meetings together, Basté placed them all in seats that were lower and less comfortable than his own, while he shifted his well-preserved skeleton and his concert-conductor arms into a Charles Eames rotating chair which his father had imported in the 1930s, and which Carlos Basté de Linyola had carried with him from one office to another as a sort of good-luck mascot. To those occasional meetings, Sánchez Zapico had contributed his brutal ordinariness, and the rat-like acuteness of his business sense, while Dosrius brought technical clarity and Basté the apostolic blessing. Even though in the past his name had figured among the princes-elect of the new democracy, he had won the definitive respect of his colleagues from the moment that he had decided to take over as managing director of the richest and most powerful football club in Barcelona. This was a position that they understood.

  ‘You know better than anyone that time is at a premium. Everything is in place and ready to move. The offer that we shall be putting before the board will include housing, a public park, a service area with a day nursery, a civic centre, and, just for good measure, a community centre for senior citizens. The council will give us medals, and there’s a very large amount of money waiting to be made. But these kinds of deals can go off the boil very fast; if we lose the initiative the vultures will be on us, and there’s absolutely no guarantee that we’re going to end up first in line.’

  ‘Sánchez Zapico is the key to all this.’

  ‘Sánchez Zapico can only be counted on for as long as he has no other option. He’s not much more than a rag and bone dealer who’s become rich, and a manufacturer of no account. What can you expect from a manufacturer of sugared almonds?’

  ‘A free hand.’

  ‘You have a free hand.’

  ‘And you can be sure that your hands will stay clean.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have said that.’

  He felt uncomfortable. He was not a man capable of accepting the slightest hint of doubt about himself. He was a man who liked to look into the mirror each morning and see an image that corresponded to the image that the city had of him. Everyone has his role, and his role was that of a respectable citizen.

  ‘I was thinking …’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

  ‘No, no need to get alarmed. I wasn’t intending to explain the solution that has occurred to me, but I should warn you that it’s probably not going to be easy. You’re going to have to accept this, and Sánchez Zapico is definitely going to get jumpy. We’re moving to completion now, and the other day I fired a warning shot over his bows and he didn’t like it. He turned up at my house at eight in the morning and started ranting. But he’s nobody’s fool. You shouldn’t underestimate him just because he’s in the confectionery business.’

  ‘I don’t underestimate him at all. I just try to avoid playing golf with him. He’s managed to make himself the laughing-stock of the golf club at Sant Cugat. Even the caddies laugh at him behind his back. And what about that wife of his. She looks like a hairdresser out of some bedroom farce. Very uncouth.’

  ‘According to my scheme of things, Sánchez Zapico will call a meeting of the group, and you’re going to have to be ready. He’s a man with a short neck, and he charges with his head. I might remind you of the dossier which I prepared on his activities, and particularly on the period when he was smuggling photographic material in the 1960s, and the prostitutes that he was running during the period before he discovered massage parlours.’

  ‘I never even looked at it.’

  ‘Well, keep it safely under lock and key. I don’t think it’s going to be necessary to bring it out — I’ll only do that if it’s needed. But he’s likely to turn nasty, and he knows a few things about me. About you, he knows nothing. Nobody knows anything about you.’

  Dosrius took the opportunity of the silence that followed to ponder the fact that the sum total of what he knew about Basté de Linyola would not be capable of staining even the white cuff of the man’s shirt, because in effect Dosrius was the instigator and the man behind the scenes. Ten years as a labour lawyer, paid for by money leached out of the clandestine labour unions. Another ten years as a business lawyer, most of them spent in the fastidious shadow of Basté de Linyola, acting as a pageboy to the immaculate patrician. He had progressed from shoes bought in Can Segarra, which had destroyed his feet, to Italian shoes or made-to-measure shoes, and had developed a habit of travelling abroad without luggage and buying new clothes in each city where he stopped, as if in search of a new skin every time.

  ‘If you’ll pardon the biblical quotation, Dosrius: “What you have to do, it were well that you do it quickly”.’

  ‘I’ll reply in equally biblical mode, Basté. “May the Lord be with you, and with thy spirit.” ’

  ‘Would you like to go away somewhere, Marçal? Why don’t we go? Get out of this place. Green fields and pastures new.’

  ‘What with? Shirt buttons?
’

  ‘My trade travels with me.’

  ‘With your trade we’re better off staying here.’

  ‘You’re right, I suppose.’

  They clung to each other like two shipwrecked souls on their mattress island.

  ‘I like the idea, though.’

  ‘Would you like to leave?’

  ‘Leave Spain?’

  ‘Sure. Just get on the road and go.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Who cares.’

  He raised half of his naked body on to one elbow and examined her, lost in thought; then he gazed upwards as if searching somewhere up among the rafters for an escape hatch through which they could empty their lives, as if down some liberatory drain.

  ‘Let’s make the most of this sweet moment, Marta.’

  ‘This sweet moment …! Ha!’

  ‘Don’t laugh at me. I’m almost happy.’

  ‘You’re right. Let’s make the most of this sweet moment. What kind of life are we going to have if we carry on here? The same old shit, day after day.’