Off Side

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Right. On your way, now. If you’re not feeling well, go home. We’re going to carry on for another half hour. It’ll be dark soon.’

  But he didn’t go straight away. He waited for a few more minutes, enjoying the illusion that he was a free man, communing with nature. As he lay back on the cool earth, he thought back to an old and favourite project of his, to buy a farm in Granada and to watch the plants and the hams grow. ‘Hams don’t grow,’ had been Inma’s only comment when he had invited her into his dream one day. This was at the time when she was carrying in her belly the other portion of his dreams, the son whom he already imagined wearing the club colours, taking the kick-off at the testimonial match when his father retired, with all the TV cameras there, and the boy suitably impressed by the sound of a whole stadium chanting his father’s name. What was he going to do with himself when the season was over? Sánchez Zapico had promised him a well-paid job as a sales rep, but he couldn’t really see himself representing anything other than his own deep-seated sense of fear and the memory of what he had once been. He felt a sudden pain in his kidneys and as he stood up he felt slightly dizzy, but after a few steps and a couple of deep breaths he felt better. He made his way over to the centre of the pitch where Mariscal, ‘Confucius’, was doing fancy tricks with the ball, apparently oblivious to the sarcastic comments coming from his manager on the other side of the pitch:

  ‘Confucius, you should join a circus!’

  ‘Did you hear that old creep? He doesn’t like it, because I know how to control a ball. He prefers gorillas and boneheads like Toté.’

  ‘Ignore him. Just carry on with what you’re doing. You’re getting better.’

  ‘Thanks, maestro. Remind me to send you a box of cigars for Christmas.’

  He continued on his way to the dressing rooms, pleased at the prospect of being able to change in his own time and get a decent shower before the others. He stopped on his way for a few words with the young centre half, who had been sentenced by the manager to a session of kicking a medicine ball.

  ‘He says I’ve got skinny legs.’

  ‘Go easy with that, because you might very easily end up tearing a muscle. You’re doing well, but take it easy. Try and kick with your instep and not with your toe.’

  ‘My dad’s always talking about you. The things he tells me, I sometimes think he must be making them up.’

  ‘How old’s your dad?’

  ‘Um, I don’t remember. About the same as you … getting on a bit. About forty-something.’

  ‘I’m not that far gone, son.’

  ‘Well, you’re fit, and he’s not. He couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag.’

  Palacín walked on to the open dressing-room door. He pushed the door. The sick hinges squeaked and the door opened to reveal a view of the corridor. The transition from light to shade meant that at first he wasn’t aware of the sudden surprise on the faces of three men who were moving in the corridor. They froze. By the time he saw them he was already in the dressing room, and it took him several seconds before his senses associated their presence with danger. All the locker doors were hanging open, and the three reacted to his arrival by adopting automatic but differing bodily stances. One of them stepped back a few paces, as if to protect a sports bag which was sitting on the ground, and the other two came forward rapidly to within a few inches of him. He read in their eyes a fear at having been surprised, and they gave him no chance of backing off towards the door; one of them leapt round and put himself behind him. He heard the sound of a flick-knife clicking open. Seconds passed in concentrated panic and silence before he managed to stutter: ‘Anything you’ll find in here will hardly be worth the risk. Nobody’s got any money here.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  The sound came from behind him.

  ‘Shut up, or we’ll break your legs.’

  This time it was the one in front of him speaking, and in a flash he too pulled a flick-knife from his pocket, and opened it. Palacín’s skin registered the sensation of the cold air moved by the knife by the simple fact of its flicking open.

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘Can’t you see? Maradona! It’s Maradona, and he’s very stupid, because he decided to go home early without anyone asking him to. Who asked you to come sticking your nose in where it’s none of your business?’

  Palacín sighed, tried to relax, and moved his arms as if in an attempt to distance himself from this nightmare. He was about to say: ‘Go, just go, take what you’ve taken, and I won’t say a word.’ He wanted to tell them that he hadn’t seen anything, and that even if he had, he wouldn’t say anything because he recognized they were just poor bastards like himself. He needed them to go, to remove the weight of fear, both his and theirs, but most particularly theirs, which he could feel pressing against his back and his chest, extending in a direct line from the tips of their knives. However the sound that filled the room was not the sound of his voice, but the words of the man who had stayed in the background guarding the sports bag on the floor.

  ‘He’s seen us. The bastard’s got a complete description of us.’

  He felt the first knife-stab in his back, just below his shoulder blade and aiming for his heart. As he went to run forward, as if running from death, he ran right onto the knife that the other man was holding at just the right level. It was as if the knife was there to save him from falling, as if it was trying to hold him up. When the man pulled the knife out again, Palacín fell to the ground, his hands weak and trembling, uselessly trying to staunch the flow of blood. His eyes, at ground level, watched the movements of feet and he listened to the sound of voices which were showing no further interest in him.

  ‘Have you done all the lockers?’

  ‘Sure. You saw I did. Come on. Let’s move. They’ll be back in a minute.’

  He felt as if he was floating in his own blood. He felt as if he had a fever. He didn’t want to fall asleep, so he opened his eyes, looking to see as far as he could, and when a grey and increasingly opaque glass screen seemed to place itself between him and the damp-stained cobwebby ceiling, he engaged his brain in an effort to work out who was the owner of the woman’s face which was leaning over and talking to him. No. It wasn’t Inma. Nor was the voice that of his son. He tried to think what his son’s voice would sound like. Anyway, it was a woman. Who was it?

  ‘She’s gone out.’

  This was a statement of fact, but also an order and a justification addressed as much to herself as to her partner in crime.

  ‘Now, we’d better think for a moment. Just think. We’re going to be depending on that car. Memorize the exact spot where it’s parked. Don’t forget the keys. We won’t have a moment to lose. Everything’s ready for the getaway, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Her voice was filled with urgency, and she gave him a push to get him moving. She closed the window and went out onto the landing. He followed. She ran down the stairs and emerged hurriedly onto calle de San Rafael, where she started her reluctant streetwalker routine. He followed several paces behind her, allowing her to take up her position in the boarding-house doorway. Then he turned and looked from left to right. The street was deserted, as it usually was in the late afternoon, and the lottery ticket seller in pasaje de Martorell was just a distant shadow. Marta was ahead of him, up on the landing, and he called to her to slow down a bit. His legs were willing but he was panting a bit, and when they reached the front door of the boarding house she glared at him fiercely. The key trembled slightly in her hand, and it took two goes to get it into the lock, whereupon it gave out a pained metallic screech.

  ‘Are you in, Doña Concha?’

  The only sound of life in the building was a fridge loudly protesting its misfortunes, and its motor drowned the words of the old invalid at the end of the corridor, who had heard her, and had sought to make his presence known.

  ‘There’s somebody in.’

  ‘It’s the old man.
Don’t worry about him.’

  Marta burst into the kitchen and started turning all the jars upside down, regardless of what they had in them. She pulled up the greasepaper linings in the cupboards, tipped out the drawers, and within minutes the kitchen read like a randomized inventory of its contents.

  ‘Come on, the mattresses.’

  She led the way by taking the largest knife she could find, ripping the mattress covers and probing their foam-rubber hearts. She searched under the carpets, emptied all the cupboards and left him the task of examining what she had tipped out. Room by room, there wasn’t a single book that wasn’t looked into, nor a window shutter, nor a piece of suspect wallpaper that wasn’t ripped apart. But they found nothing. Her hands and face were sweating, as was his whole body, and he began to try to say that there was no point, because there was nothing there.

  ‘The oven! We haven’t looked in the oven!’

  They ran to the kitchen and opened the oven door; he used the knife as a lever and lifted up the rusty bottom, only to reveal an empty space beneath.

  Not a thing.

  ‘Shit! Where’s the old witch put it, then?’

  All of a sudden the fridge found peace with itself, and in the silence they clearly heard the sound of the invalid trying to say something.

  ‘The old man.’

  ‘I heard it.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant. The old bitch has probably put her money in the old man’s room.’

  ‘But if we go into his room, he’ll see us.’

  ‘So? Who cares?’

  ‘But supposing we don’t find anything? What use will the car be then? We can’t go anywhere without money.’

  ‘We’ll go anyway. I’m not turning back now. Let’s go for the old man.’

  They were momentarily stopped in their tracks by the look of terror that came from the sunken eye-sockets of that living skull, but they side-stepped it. The room was full of objects abjectly ashamed of their own wretchedness, and its windowless walls were illuminated by one bare lightbulb.

  ‘The pot. Look in the pot.’

  ‘What pot?’

  ‘Where he pisses, idiot. It’s under the bed.’

  He pulled out the pot with a trembling hand, and part of the urine that was in it splashed onto his hand and spilled onto the floor. He managed to contain his desire to throw up, but not his desire to drop the vessel and its contents.

  ‘Search his bedclothes!’

  He pushed the invalid over to the other side of the mattress, and raised the sheet with one hand as he struggled with the old man’s warm, stiff body. Then he reached under the mattress, searching around in the hopes of finding a promising lump.

  ‘There’s nothing here, Marta.’

  ‘Shut up and keep looking. Search him.’

  But his hands fluttered like paralysed crows over the frail little body that he couldn’t bring himself to touch.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’

  ‘He’s looking at me.’

  ‘You’re useless.’

  And in the end she was the one who ripped open the buttons of the dirty flannel pyjamas covering his aged skeleton, and even reached down to his crutch in the hopes of finding what she was looking for.

  ‘Shit! It must be here somewhere.’

  She stared at the walls and the floor, looking for inspiration.

  ‘But where? Let’s check to see if we can find anywhere hollow. I’ll try the floor, and you try along the walls.’

  She went down the corridor, stamping up and down on the floor as she went. But her obsessive searching did not stop her hearing the clear sound of a key turning in the front-door lock, and in virtually a single movement the simultaneous apparition of Doña Concha, who was muttering to herself until the point where she registered Marta’s presence and stared at her, dumbstruck and uncomprehending.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  Her second question was answered even before she asked it. All it took was one look at the mess in the corridor, and down into the kitchen, where she could see the results of Marta’s handiwork. But the ‘how did you get in’ continued as a silent logical link between the two women, the portly Doña Concha weighing up the evidence of her eyes as she tried to decide whether to hurl herself on to Marta or to retreat to the door and scream for help. But the sight of her there, at the end of the corridor, so thin and fragile and looking as guilty as a rat, gave her courage, and she advanced on her with an evil tongue at the ready.

  ‘You’ve come to rob me! I’ll scratch your eyes out!’

  Marta backed off up the corridor, and tried to remember where she had left the knife. However the speed of her retreat was less than that of her advancing adversary. Doña Concha dived on her without giving her time to think, but in the blindness of her anger she didn’t notice an apparition reaching up from behind her — the shadow of a young man with a bottle in his hand. Doña Concha had just succeeded in grabbing a handful of Marta’s hair and digging the nails of her other hand into her face when the bottle smashed over her head, and water, glass and blood erupted into a kind of halo around her head. Her body leaned further and further forward until it finally collapsed and fell to the floor. Once there, she tried to protect her face with one hand while the other grabbed at the girl’s frail legs. The man began mercilessly kicking at the mass of flesh, anger and fear, until Marta all of a sudden realized that she was out of her clutches, and leapt over her body. The pair of them ran to the door, and there they turned to see whether the woman was trying to follow.

  ‘She’s not moving. I must have killed her.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. Come on, get the car.’

  As they leapt down the stairs, he tried to get sufficient air into his lungs to be able to tell her that they had no money, and that there was hardly enough petrol in the car even to get them out of town. But as they arrived on the pavement down below she forced him to a walking pace, and told him that they should separate and go in the direction of pasaje de Martorell and the La Garduña parking lot. There was no sign of Doña Concha’s feared presence on the balcony behind the pot of ivy which she tended with such loving care, and they reached calle de Hospital with a sense of having arrived at the frontiers of a country where, fortunately, nobody knew them. At this point they could no longer contain the urge to run, and they raced to the car park. He sat himself at the wheel of the car that he had stolen an hour previously in the upper part of the city — in paseo de la Bonanova, curiously close to the house where his parents lived. For a moment he had almost decided to call the whole thing off. He’d wanted to go and knock at their door, and let himself be treated once more as the returning prodigal son. But in the end he decided that their decision to leave made more sense, because Marta was the only thing in his life that had any meaning.

  ‘Let’s head for the South.’

  ‘No. Take the coast road and turn off towards Pueblo Nuevo. Then we’ll think what to do next.’

  ‘What are we going to do there?’

  ‘We’re going to be leaving with money. I made you a promise, and I’m sticking to it.’

  Then, as they drove along, he finally summoned up the courage to repeat that he was sure he’d killed the woman. He needed Marta to say that he hadn’t, but she didn’t oblige, either because she had her mind on something else, or because she was enjoying his suffering.

  ‘Head towards the sea and pull up somewhere. I’ll ask someone the way.’

  Marta stuck her head out of the window to ask a couple of garage mechanics where the Centellas ground was. He tried to hide behind the wheel, because he was convinced that the fact of what he had done was written all over his face. They had to ask the way three times before they finally found themselves down backstreets that were as ruined as the abandoned factories that had been their raison d’être, and emerged into a wide panorama of newly constructed apartment blocks. There stood the perimeter wall that surrounded the Centellas ground. A huge ochre monstrosity of a wall, which had
borne the indignities inflicted by the elements over many years.

  ‘I killed her. They’re going to be searching for us.’

  ‘If you really did kill her, they won’t be after us for a while. The real danger is if you didn’t kill her. Leave the car parked so’s we can make a quick getaway.’

  It was as if somebody was trying to make things easy for them, because as they walked in they saw the faded lettering of a sign over one of the doors, which said: ‘Dressing Rooms Only — No Entry’. Marta pushed the door, and it opened onto a small courtyard paved with weeds and broken bricks. On the other side was the door which led into the dressing rooms. From outside they heard the sound of somebody kicking a football, and voices, and a whistle, and people shouting to each other. The woman steeled herself and penetrated into the half light of the dressing room, where she was suddenly confronted with the sight of all the lockers hanging wide open. As her eyes got used to the dark, her gaze wandered downwards, and she saw a body lying on the floor, in a pool of dark blood. It was the body of a man. He was staring at the ceiling, and Marta leaned over him, and thought that she saw a glimmer of light in his eyes and his lips attempting to say something. Her companion just stood there, petrified, but she stretched out a hand to see whether Palacín was dead or alive. Then his lips stopped moving, and his eyes glazed over. It was at this point that they heard a screeching of car brakes outside and the opening and shutting of car doors. Before the pair of them had time to gather their wits, the dressing room door smashed back against the wall, threatening to demolish it on the spot, and a squad of policemen leapt at them, shouting, and with their guns raised and ready to strike. All the pair were aware of was a hail of blows raining down and a total internal silence.

  The dressing gown was made of silk, and the tube of sleeping pills was innocent sky-blue in colour. This much registered on Carvalho as he toyed with the pills, while from the bathroom came the sound of Camps O’Shea spewing his guts up the sink. Basté de Linyola wrinkled his nose, as if his impatient pacing up and down the living room of his PR man’s flat was not already a sufficient display of his disgust. The dressing gown looked like the best that money can buy, and it was awaiting the arrival of its owner once he had finished vomiting up the tube of pills that he had consumed shortly after having written notes to both Carvalho and Basté. Carvalho had not opened his. Since the attempted suicide had been a failure, he was waiting for Camps to give him permission before he read it. From the bathroom he heard the sound of a voice — that of the doctor who was directing the intestinal evacuation of the would-be suicide. The doctor was the first to appear, in shirtsleeves and looking as if he’d just supervised a particularly difficult birth. He was very young, too young in fact, and evidently felt it necessary to conceal his age: ‘Everything’s under control,’ he said, with excessive rotundity, as if World War Two had just come to an end. Only when he had put his jacket on did he write out a prescription, which he left on top of the silk dressing gown.