by Pablo Tusset
She laughed with that big old face of hers, but quickly recovered upon hearing the voice of my Mother’s Highness, approaching through the door to the dining room.
‘Eusebia, I do hope you haven’t forgotten to place the order for the venison liver paté … Pablo José! How on earth did you get up here?’
‘Hello, Mom. Through the back entrance. You can’t hear it from the other end of the flat.’
‘Good heavens, you look like a truck driver. Let me get a look at you.’
She took my face in her hands, kissed my cheeks and stood there observing me.
‘You are fatter than ever, my dear. And that shirt you’re wearing? Don’t you have anything else to put on?’
‘I forgot to do the wash …’
‘Well, call the dry cleaners. Most of them do deliver, you know … Well, now. Let’s go outside. Eusebia: would you please tell Loli that she can serve us our aperitifs out on the terrace? And take out the white wine at the very last minute – otherwise it will get warm, and that would be terribly boring.’
The general colour scheme of the living room had changed since the last time I’d been there: what had been orange at Christmas was now pale yellow, including the recliners and the rug beneath the piano. Grand piano, of course.
‘Well now, what’s new with you?’ my mother asked, to stir up the conversation. The journey to the terrace is a long one, requiring slight navigation through the antiques.
‘I’m all right. Same as usual. And you?’
‘Awful, darling, perfectly awful. Everything’s simply upside down, what with your father. You can’t imagine what he’s been like. You can’t even imagine.’
She stopped for a moment before walking through the glass door and onto the terrace. She turned toward me and asked me the usual question, in the usual tone of voice.
‘I don’t suppose you have a new girlfriend that we might like to meet?’
‘You’ll be the first to know …’
‘You need a proper girlfriend, dear. A woman always helps a man get focused, you know. Just the other day, as a matter of fact, we met Jesús Blasco’s daughter. A lovely girl. Love-ly. Twenty-seven years old. And I thought to myself: this girl would be so perfect for Pablo José. She’s a bit hippy, you know? I think you’d get on so well.’
‘But I’m not a hippy, Mom. Not in the least.’
‘Well, what I meant to say was bohemian … I think she left the Conservatory to play jazz music. She has … artistic inclinations, just like you.’
‘I don’t remember ever having had artistic inclinations.’
‘Pablo José, darling, you are so difficult. You remind me so much of your father whenever you get like that, when you decide not to understand what I’m trying to say.’
Ah. My Father’s Highness. The main course, so to speak, of my visit. And there he was, stretched out on a chaise longue under the awning, scanning the newspaper through his reading glasses, with a non-alcoholic bitters at his side.
‘Pablo! I thought you were coming by before one.’
I shrugged my shoulders as I leaned down to give him the customary double-kiss.
‘Well, you know my time zone is a little bit behind that of the Peninsula.’
‘What Peninsula?’
FH never gets my jokes. He’s the only person in the world with whom I have no choice but to talk seriously.
‘Sorry. I got distracted on the way over.’
He didn’t stop his charade of reading the newspaper – FH doesn’t really read the newspaper, he skims – as I sat down next to him.
‘I don’t understand it, you’re always getting distracted. I can’t imagine what you find so distracting out there. I walk down the street and I don’t get distracted by anything.’
‘Well, I’m a little absentminded, you know.’
‘Absentminded? Absentminded people don’t get distracted, they may occasionally get lost …’
That’s another thing. With FH, you have to search and search until you hit on the exact word that, according to him, is appropriate to the situation at hand.
‘Maybe I’m a little scattered, too.’
‘Well, scattered is not a good thing to be, son. You have to concentrate on what you’re doing.’
My Mother’s Highness, sensing an imminent Ode to Proper Conduct, decided to make herself scarce. Murmuring something about having to help Beba and the maid, she summarily vanished from the terrace. At that precise moment I knew I was in for an attack, full force, because FH had set the paper down, sat up in the chaise, and lit one of those cigars that often imply the imminent delivery of a momentous speech.
‘If I had been “scattered” when I was your age, I would never have gotten where I am today.’
‘You mean in that chair, with your leg in a cast?’
‘Don’t be funny, damn it. I’m serious.’
‘I’m being serious, too. I just don’t know what you mean with that “I would never have gotten where I am today.” It’s an ambiguous statement, frankly.’
‘Well, I think it’s perfectly clear: you’re going to be forty and you live like a seventeen-year-old.’
‘I’m going to be thirty-five.’
‘Well, you’re going to be forty some day too, aren’t you? In any event, that’s irrelevant. You’re at an age in which you should be living another kind of life. By the time I reached your age, I had two degrees under my belt, I had passed my Notary examination, I had founded my own business, and borne two children. And I had a proper wife and a decent home to live in.’
No fewer than three possible responses occurred to me. For example: yes, but you were a failure when it came to your younger son’s education, who will soon turn thirty-five but lives like a seventeen-year-old. But instead I just said, rather grudgingly, ‘And that’s admirable, Dad. You are a great man.’ He took this literally, in keeping with the obstinate fart that he is.
‘I don’t know if I am a great man, but I am a man. A solid, upstanding, self-made man.’
‘Oh, really? And what am I supposed to do? Try to be just like you and truly search for my own destiny, or try to be unlike you and end up a sad copy of a self-made businessman?’
‘What you need to do is live a life that is worthy of your name. Look at yourself: you look like a … I don’t know what you look like, in point of fact. You’re fat, you’re a perfect disaster, you don’t have a profession to speak of, nor do you have a job, a house, a wife or a family. Pray tell: if it weren’t for your brother how on earth would you survive?’
‘My brother?’
‘Yes, your brother.’
That was a low blow.
‘Look, Dad. I came to see you today because they told me you had an accident. This means that I am willing to chat with you for a while, in an amicable tone, but that does not mean, under any circumstances, that I am willing to offer some kind of defence of my way of life. I live off the income that comes in from the business that you founded. That is true. And I use my earnings in the manner which I find most opportune, just as Sebastian does with his. He does it his way and I do it mine. But if you regret having given me a piece of your cake, I will gladly give it all back to you, down to the very last cent of my inheritance. I’d be perfectly willing to pay the rent that you would charge someone else for the flat that I live in. And if I can’t pay you I will move to another, less expensive one.’
‘I’m not asking you to give me anything back, that’s not what I mean.’
In the bottom of his heart he’s a softie. A sentimental softie. There was a time when he drove me insane, but I’ve got his number. I took advantage of the lighter moment and the subsequent lull to redirect the conversation.
‘So what was it like?’
‘What?’
‘The accident.’
‘That was no accident.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Really. Those people hit me on purpose. Now I don’t want you mentioning this in front of your mother. We got into
an argument over this point.’
‘That they hit you on purpose?’
Silence. A sip of bitters. That meant he didn’t want to discuss it, at least not right then.
My Mother’s Highness then arrived bearing plates some godforsaken shade of yellow, and the maid trailed her with what very well might have been venison liver paté, despite the suspicious absence of any antlers. MH approached me and inquired as to whether I would like a drink. I asked for a beer. She, on the other hand, offered me bitters, vermouth, white wine, champagne, Coca-Cola, anything that would be more appropriate as an appetite opener to be sipped on a garden terrace on the fourteenth floor of a building high above the Diagonal, where Her Royal Highness the Princess Cristina and her husband, Iñaki Urdangarín, take their daily stroll. She finally conceded to my request for a beer when I suggested a vodka with Vichy water, which she regarded as even less acceptable. FH hid behind the newspaper and I took advantage of his evasion tactic to look down onto the street between a crack in the trees. From there you can see a substantial stretch of the Diagonal, from the Hotel Juan Carlos down to Calvo Sotelo, the La Caixa towers and a fair-sized chunk of the city all the way down to the sea. It was slightly overcast, but visibility was good, and in the distance you could clearly spot the two skyscrapers in the Olympic Port that look remarkably like a twin set of lipsticks. My eyes worked their way back to our neighbourhood. From there, you could almost read the label on the satellite dish at the top of my building, which is entirely owned by my Father’s Highness: right there, on the left. And just a bit further up you could make out Jaume Guillamet street where, caught in some kind of idea-association vortex I couldn’t help trying to locate the house at number fifteen.
‘You can come to the table now.’
Those were MH’s orders. FH tried to stand up with the aid of crutches and I offered my assistance.
‘I’m going to get dressed now,’ he announced.
My father’s very idiosyncratic sense of etiquette prohibits him from sitting down at the table in shorts, and so my mother begged my pardon (‘You’ll excuse us for a moment, won’t you, Pablo?’) and they went off together, I assume, to get him into a pair of long pants, something that can’t be terrifically easy if you are pushing seventy, your leg’s in a plaster cast and you weigh about a hundred kilos. I sat by the table, just off to the side. Total apathy. My beer was there, but it wasn’t normal beer, it was some faggy imported thing, with a hermetic seal on the top, like the kind on those old-fashioned soda bottles. I sipped. Eh: kinda warm. I had no appetite, but I told myself that I couldn’t pass up the chance to eat well and attacked a prawn in the hope of whetting my appetite. Not too tough. The beer cut the sweet taste of the coffee I had swigged at Luigi’s bar and the prawn stimulated my dormant taste buds. I followed up with some steamed cockles and some delicious canapés of artichoke hearts, and then a couple of anchovies in brine. This was home sweet home, at the end of the day.
Beba appeared carrying a bottle of white wine coated in a fine layer of frost.
‘So how are you doing?’
‘It’s tough going. But I’ll make it through.’
‘Patience. And try the venison liver paté, it’s good. It’s the dark one.’
‘Listen, Beba. What do you know about my father’s accident?’
‘Well … they say he was coming out of the park and a car jumped the curb and rammed into him.’
‘And the driver?’
‘He got away, they say. A couple of tramps who saw the whole thing from a bar got out and helped your father into a cab. Your brother picked him up at the hospital afterwards.’
‘And you haven’t heard anything else?’
‘Anything else like what?’
‘I don’t know … didn’t Sebastian tell you anything?’
‘Sebastian was acting strange yesterday. I mean, I know he’s strange in general but yesterday he was weirder than usual. He came into the kitchen to say hello but that was it between us.’
Beba has an excellent radar, but you always have to wait a while before she verbalises anything concrete. In any event, my snooping mission had to be aborted because my hosts returned to the terrace just then. FH had changed out of his Burberry shorts and into a pair of grey wool Dacron pants with a slit near the bottom that allowed him to slip his cast through. He was still wearing one tennis shoe on his good foot, and the same scotch plaid shirt that had matched the shorts, so the resulting look was slightly eccentric – he looked remarkably like a tramp who’d been clothed by the charitable donations of this wealthy neighbourhood. MH maintained her appearance as per her official bylaws governing informal events: white jeans and an ample blue tunic bordered with golden birds, Bengal tigers and peonies, all of them set around in a mandala motif. Ever since she discovered Lobsang Rampa she’s had this yen for all things oriental. Some couple I had sitting before me. I tried not to draw too much attention to myself by consciously reducing my brain waves to the very barest minimum, but it was useless. MH opened fire, though pretending to speak exclusively to FH.
‘I was just telling Pablo José that we met the Blascos’ daughter the other day.’
‘Mmmm.’
FH was focused on peeling a prawn without touching it too much, as if it were a repugnant thing, and so he didn’t pay much attention to what my mother was saying. But it takes a lot more than a sluggish mumble to discourage my Mother’s Highness.
‘Carmela, that’s her name. An exceptional young lady. Ex-cep-tional. An only child. Did I mention that she studied jazz, just like you?’
‘Mom: I’ve never studied jazz in my life.’
‘Oh, no …? Well, you did play guitar, didn’t you? Anyway, the point is, Carmela made quite a magnificent impression. Mag-nificent. A real modern girl. You’ll love her, I know it.’
I was about to mention that every day I walk past hundreds of people I’m sure I’d love if I met them. The problem is, they’re never the people I actually end up meeting. But in the interest of restraint, I simply assumed an expression that indicated I was deeply engrossed in my chewing. Not worth getting involved.
‘Well, for the San Juan holiday I believe the Blascos are organising a garden party in Llavaneras. I’m sure Carmela will be there, and I should warn you, I showed her a picture of you. She seemed quite interested.’
For once in his life, my father saved me from having to try and get out of that one.
‘Don’t get too worked up. We’re not going to be in Llavaneras for San Juan.’
‘Oh, but why not? It’s not for another week yet, and Dr Caudet himself said …’
‘We’ve already had this discussion, Mercedes.’
My mother now turned to me for support.
‘Would you believe how ridiculous he is being? Your father doesn’t want to leave the house because he thinks those people meant to hit him.’
‘Mercedes, we’ve already had this discussion.’
‘We haven’t had any such discussion, and you know something else? I’m beginning to think that you’re paranoid. That’s right. Paranoid. For the record.’
‘Mercedes, please. Enough.’
My father said it: enough. He left the prawn half-peeled, and for effect, ran his napkin over his lips – which were still immaculate – and then threw the napkin onto the tablecloth and began the complicated manoeuvre of standing up, fumbling with his crutches. The aperitif was over. A shame, because the venison liver paté wasn’t so bad. Fortunately, after his temper tantrum we ate more or less in silence, at least for the beginning, which allowed me to fully concentrate on the food at hand. Beba still hadn’t lost her touch in the kitchen, and in my honour she had prepared one of her specialities: steak in wine-and-mushroom sauce. My Mother’s Highness, of course, barely even picked at the dish, opting instead for a lettuce salad, chewing no less than twenty times per mouthful. According to her, her personal trainer had recommended this as a saliva-whetting exercise, according to some kind of proper nutritional-assimi
lation theory. This was preceded by the ingestion of an endless sequence of microscopic homeopathic pellets especially prescribed for the reinforcement of sulphuric – or sulphurous, or hydrosulphuric – tendencies. I don’t remember that last bit very clearly.
We had to wait until dessert before my mother retired to the kitchen, where she busied herself with the coffee, the one thing she insists on making and serving herself. This, of course, left me alone with my father.
Start:
‘All right. Explain.’
‘What do you want me to explain?’
‘The thing about them trying to hit you.’
‘They didn’t try. They succeeded.’
Pause. Me, with a vaguely sceptical look on my face. My father, with a Father’s Highness look on his face.
‘Now why would anyone want to try and hit you?’
‘I don’t know. All I know is that they could have killed me if they had wanted to. But they didn’t.’
Time out for an information-gathering digression.
‘How many of them were there in the car?’
‘Two.’
‘Did you recognise either of them?’
‘Pablo, dear, are you stupid? If I knew who they were I would have done something by now.’
‘And the car?’
‘I don’t know. It was red. Small.’
‘Number plate?’
‘I didn’t have time to look.’
‘Did you report it to the police?’
‘What do you want me to report? That a small red car hit me on purpose? The people at the hospital filed a report with the police. That was it.’
By now I was starting to feel like Colombo.
‘Witnesses?’
‘A couple of construction workers. They were having lunch at the bar on Numancia and they came running out when they heard me scream and hit the hood of the car, but by the time they reached me the car had already taken off. In any event, I doubt they would want to get mixed up in declarations and such. They helped me right away, they even hailed a cab and offered to take me to the hospital, but I told them not to worry.’
