by Pablo Tusset
The telephone, however, was modern.
‘No rush, Santiago, I understand … no, no, it’s all the same … In any event, tell them to look out for the complaint, I’m going to have them put it through right now … Yes … Listen, I’m going to have to go, I have a visitor.’
The visitor was me, obviously. He gestured for me to sit down, and I did, in one of the two chairs that faced his leather swivel chair. There I was, face to face with the Shirtless General.
‘For the past two hours I have been trying to get these people to place the roads in and out of the country under surveillance, and now little Santiago comes and tells me that he can’t involve “uniformed agents” if there isn’t a complaint report filed. I don’t know why but I think this guy is a few cards short of a full deck. All right, then … Now, I’d like you to move in here for a few days, Gloria and the children as well. It’s easier to protect one house instead of three. And this house is going to become a bunker.’
I didn’t bother disagreeing verbally. If you don’t happen to like whatever my father has decided for you, there is no use arguing, because it’ll be war. And that day, he looked perfectly capable of having four goons immobilise me and hold me captive in his house if he felt like it. Once his Churchill-esque diplomatic efforts fail, my father is incredibly deft at assuming the Jesús Gil alter-ego, and from there, it’s straight on into Corleone mode.
‘Did you find out anything about the Robellades accident?’ I asked, not only to distract his attention but because I was genuinely interested in knowing the answer.
‘Well, it was no normal accident. To start with, the driver hadn’t had a sip of alcohol, nor had he taken any kind of drug detectable by an autopsy. He was alone, which meant that he could not have been provoked by an argument, nor would he have been trying to show off for a friend … or girlfriend. He has not been involved in any kind of accident in the last five years, and his profile doesn’t jibe in the least with the kind of guy who goes around drag-racing with other cars at midnight.’
‘Maybe yes, maybe no … after all, he was a private detective …’
‘Private detectives don’t drive at one hundred kilometres an hour with cars on their tail in the middle of a neighbourhood like Les Corts.’
‘Unless the roles were reversed, and he was on the other guy’s tail.’
‘That’s exactly it. I think we can assume that he ended up running from someone whom he initially had been following. And in the course of the chase, he fell into the car park pit.’
‘But the other car crashed into him nose-first, didn’t it?’
‘How would you know?’
‘I have my methods.’
‘It was a red car that hit him, a 1997 Renault, we know this from the paint chips found on the ground. They were driving at more or less the same speed. The most likely story is that the two cars turned too wide for the curve, and that was what caused the crash. An accident. Maybe the men in the Renault were trying to cut him off, or make him stop, but I don’t think they would have ever planned to crash into him and then send him down into that pit. That doesn’t make sense. So it wouldn’t be murder, but it could be homicide. Reason enough to be extremely careful.’
‘Could that Renault be the same one that hit you?’
He nodded, though without much conviction, and sat there looking up at the ceiling, pensive. In a wave of weakness, I thought of just telling him everything about the house at Guillamet to see what he thought. But I wasn’t ready to go and throw out my thirty-three-year struggle for independence – not then – just because a knot of fear had lodged itself in my throat. “The only one who’s going inside Guillamet number 15 is me,” I told myself. “And whatever balls I’ve got.” Maybe MH was right after all, when she said she had spent her life surrounded by a bunch of stubborn mules. But the truth is, if a willow may be able stand up to the winds that blow, like the Zen Buddhists would say, then a mule like me can do it just as well, if not better.
‘I told Eusebia that Sebastian is in jail. I had to invent something, I had no other choice,’ I said so that I wouldn’t succumb to the temptation of telling him the Guillamet bit. That was more than enough for the Shirtless General to look down from the ceiling and glare at me with all his might.
‘But didn’t you tell your mother something else?’
‘Yes, but if they end up talking about it, the two versions are entirely compatible. And I had to tell Beba something more dramatic, I don’t know …’
‘Pablo, you know very well that in the end the truth always comes out …’
‘Shit, Dad. You’re lying to them, too …’
‘I’m not lying. I’m simply not informing them. And I’ll thank you to watch your language with me.’
‘All right. Let’s not argue. I just told you so that you’d know.’
Pause.
‘Right. Do you need anything from your flat?’ he asked me.
‘Anything for what?’
‘I want you to move in here tonight. Aren’t you going to need a change of clothes, a toothbrush, something? I can send someone over to fetch your things. I suppose you can manage to abstain from getting drunk for one night in your life, but if not, there’s plenty of alcohol in the living room bar. Forgive me if I can’t offer you any narcotics.’
I ignored the dig and followed his lead:
‘I have to go by my flat myself. And I’m going to need at least a couple of hours.’
‘A couple of hours to pick up a change of clothes? I can place a call and you’ll have everything you need in ten minutes.’
‘No. I have to go there myself.’
‘Oh, really? And why is that?’
Shit. I always have to go around making up excuses.
‘Dad. There are some things a man has to do himself …’
‘Like looking for a pair of underwear in your top left dresser drawer?’
‘Like explaining to the woman who’s waiting for you that you can’t see her for a few days because you have to hole up in a bunker.’
Pause. Doubt. Did he suspect I was lying to him?
‘Well, try not to tell her too much. The less she knows, the better off she’ll be.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll take care of most of it with body language.’
‘Listen, Pablo, I don’t like to hear that kind of talk, especially if it concerns a woman with whom you are involved. Not in a bar, and most certainly not in my house. Or have you completely abandoned the few manners I tried to instil in you?’
‘I think I’ve still got some left.’
‘If you did, you wouldn’t be running about with a married woman who happens to live with her husband. Nor would you be parading through the neighbourhood with her. You are exhibiting an incredible disrespect for that man, and for yourself as well. Try, if you might, to avoid doing the same to her, and watch your tongue when you talk about her, at least in my presence.’
I am a brilliant liar, I shouldn’t say so but I must. A date, a gentlemanly appointment, is one of the few things that the Grand Master feels is worthy of risking one’s life for. A question of honour. Luck was on my side, because he interpreted the simple mention of a woman to be a lover’s tryst with Fina. No doubt Lopez had informed him about the two of us gallivanting about the neighbourhood together and his imagination had taken care of the rest, resulting in the perfect excuse to escape for a fair amount of time. In fact, if push came to shove, the excuse could hold up for the entire night.
I got out of there on the double, without even saying goodbye to my mother or Beba, given that I would supposedly be back in a couple of hours.
I took another taxi back to my flat. At the last moment I asked the driver to leave me on the Travessera, not far from where the private gardens are. Neither Lopez nor Antoñito were expecting this detour – I realised this when I saw the Kadett cruise by and stop a block further up the road as they saw me exit the taxi. I walked away from them, toward the tunnel that cuts through one of the b
uildings and leads into the private gardens. It took me a few seconds to identify Nico among the little group clustered around a bench that was a bit more tucked away than the others.
Everyone’s hands went straight into their pockets and all the faces rapidly assumed nice, innocent-boy expressions until Nico signalled that he knew me, at which point they all resumed consuming their respective drugs of choice.
‘What do you want, dude?’
‘Some coke, if you have any.’
‘How much do you want?’
‘How much have you got?’
‘Dude … I don’t know … come with me down that-away and I’ll give you however much you want. I got four grams.’
‘Okay. I’ll take four.’
Easy sale. Too easy for Nico, probably, because he then felt obliged to specify the price.
‘Two hundred fifty, my friend, special price …’
‘No problemo. And set me up with some hash, too, round it up.’
‘Shit, man, you’re loaded. You robbed a bank or something?’
‘I won a beauty contest.’
‘Look at that, you never know what kind of luck’ll come your way … Come on, I got the goods in the car park.’
We walked down the little path toward the stairs that seemed to sink into the basement beneath the park. When we reached the metal door at the bottom, he pulled out a piece of folded-up cardboard that kept the door from locking, and we walked down another set of stairs. Then we went down half a flight more, through another doorway until we finally reached the massive underground car park. From there we went over to a yellowish early-model Opel Corsa, and in the dark Nico stuck his hand into a little nook in the wall, patted about a bit and then removed four white packets. He gave them to me in one deft, sly movement that didn’t really make much sense down there.
‘This shit rocks. Uncut.’
‘Don’t worry, as long as its not lethal, I’m happy. What about the hash?’
He stuck his arm back a few metres further into the nook and came up with a piece about the size of a woman’s high heel.
‘This is all I’ve got.’
I pulled out my wad of bills and gave him a few. He was about to give me the change I had coming, but I stopped him.
‘Forget it. So you treat me right when I’m not so flush.’
If I had known that that would be the last time I’d ever see Nico, I’d have given him the whole wad. But I didn’t.
I walked out of the car park through the exit that went under the gardens, so that I could return without going outside and through the entire park again.
I had scarcely finished the first line when the telephone rang. It was John. He didn’t even bother saying hello, he went straight into the insult routine.
‘May I ask where the fuck you’ve been sticking your nose in, arsehole? I just spoke with Günter on the phone and he told me they’re reformatting all their hard drives.
‘And …?’
‘What do you mean, “and …”? The guys at that address you gave him attacked them with a killer virus.’
‘What?’
‘A virus, goddamnit. You know what a virus is, idiot? They tried to connect via FTP to plant a sniffer on their server and the system went ballistic on them – bounced it back to them in God only knows what kind of aggressive format that’s eating the shit out of them. A scheusal, says Günter. That is, an ogre, that’s what they named it. It spread to all the computers in their place, because they’re all hooked up to a local network. They’ve had to reformat absolutely everything.’
‘But aren’t they to be the virus experts?’
‘Well, they’re fucking flipping out, man. Apparently all their printers started spewing shit all at once, you know? Bing-bing-ffffff. Page after page of some kind of curse written in giant letters. And some kind of insane voice came booming out of their speakers … Günter says they got so scared they cut the electricity. Luckily, when the machines rebooted they seemed to work fine … no trace of anything in the hard drives and no alterations in their desktops or files. Nothing. But they don’t believe it, they’re afraid maybe the thing will resuscitate and fuck them up all over again.’
John seemed completely blown away by the whole thing, and he hadn’t even been there to see it.
‘Did Günter tell you what the printout said, the curse thing?’
‘He emailed it to me. Let me read it to you: “Impoverished is he who approaches with impure intentions. He will never reach the heart of the worm, but he will nonetheless be pursued.”’
‘Yeah. I know it.’
‘You know it? Well, you might have told us …’
‘Listen, tell Günter I’m really sorry, I didn’t think anything bad could happen to them.’
‘No, no, he’s thrilled. They’re going to save the ogre on one of their computers so they can study it. They feel like they’ve caught the genie in his lamp, you know. He says it’s got some weird thing that’s different from any other virus they’ve ever seen.’
Every cloud has a silver lining, I thought to myself. But the news made me feel even less inclined to keep making up stories for John. I actually had to pretend someone was at the door so that I could hold him off for a second. When I got back on, I told him that I had to hang up because my upstairs neighbour had called me to tell me about a major water leak that was going to hit my apartment.
‘Right. Maybe that was the ogre, too,’ John said.
The only reasonable course of action was to do a couple more lines and light a joint. A scheusal, goddamnit. I could just picture my Magnificent Brother trapped in a cage, hanging from some ceiling somewhere, dangling above some lunatic in a pair of massive military boots propped up on a table. I think that was the moment, right there underneath the water in the shower, when I decided what I was going to do. Monday, June 22, midnight: that was the date next to the Jaume Guillamet address in the pencilled-in circle. Sooner or later you have to get on the Death Star.
The next fifteen minutes raced by. Very possibly the combination of cocaine, hash, the remains of Fina’s bottle of Cardhu – which I finished off in one gulp – and the several sleepless nights had something to do with that. I was completely awake, focused, but life had become a dream. I arrived at Jaume Guillamet and I staked out behind a lorry that was parked on the side of the street in front of the little garden. At midnight (I imagine it was midnight) the procession began. Someone would arrive (men and women – people of varying ages and appearances kept turning up, always alone), take the red rag from the telephone pole, and ring the doorbell. The front door would swing open, the person would go inside, and after ten seconds the bald dude with the brown robe would emerge, very briefly, to re-tie the red rag to the pole. This happened four or five times, at five-minute intervals.
I was so freaked out that I didn’t even notice the two guys that had gotten out of a parked car that had effectively cut off my path to the street, in between the lorry that served as a makeshift parapet and a van closer by. The car was a navy-blue Peugeot, not a red Renault, but the look on their faces was crystal clear: guaranteed trouble. The guy on the right closed off my most direct escape route via the sidewalk that led toward Travessera, a paradise of traffic and lights, and so I stood as straight up as I could and approached him, sticking a hand in my pocket.
‘You, big guy. Are you gonna be nice and let me get by or am I gonna have to beat the shit out of you?’
At first, as I watched him move, I thought he was going to step aside, and in the space of a millisecond I thought of the disadvantage I would face as I walked by him, because I would end up with my back to him. But as things turned out, that wouldn’t be an issue, because he had no intention of stepping aside: instead he retreated a pace or two, just enough to transform his leg into a seven-spring catapult and shoot a size forty-five moccasin into my face. The corresponding foot brought the moccasin to life in a very vivid fashion.
The next thing I remember is noticing how the tiled side
walk of Jaume Guillamet has a sewer drain in the shape of a daisy with four petals. And it’s full of powder, brilliant powder, like the twinkling motes of microscopic glitter.
THE PORCELAIN POODLE
When I was a teenager I read a story by Julio Cortázar that was (and I suppose still is) called “The Night Face Up.” Basically it’s about a guy who supposedly is in some hospital bed, delirious with fever, wavering between consciousness and a dream state in which he is captured by a very dodgy tribe that intends to offer him as a sacrifice to their god. To make a long story short, after several literary stunts that throw off the reader (the usual Cortázar tricks), it turns out that the hospital bit is the dream and the reality to which he awakens is the ritual sacrifice and the dodgy tribe. Well, something like that happened to me that night. By the time I had recovered some modicum of consciousness, I felt as though I were suspended by my feet and hands, and then I was being moved, deposited, moved somewhere else, and when I lost consciousness again, I dreamt that I had arrived at my bed drunk, and that the mattress was moving slightly, as usual. The two things were equally unpleasant, as I associated both with an intense discomfort – dizziness, nausea, but naturally the dream was much more plausible than the reality. When I finally felt that I was being released and allowed to drop onto something soft (in the reality that I thought was a dream), I felt a prick in my arm and shortly thereafter a state of total and complete restfulness put an end to all my pains. That is, until I awoke with this terrible pounding feeling, as if my head had been rammed full of spikes.
When I opened my eyes and tried to sit up, the spike soup suddenly materialised as a sharp blow to the left side of my head. Slowly, my eyes were blinded by a flash and my facial muscles contracted in an attempt to absorb the shock of the hammering inside my brain, and I fell back down on the bed. Much worse than any hangover I have ever experienced. But little by little the flash died down until it was a simple, yellowish fluorescent light shining onto a mirror that hung on the wall facing me. That was when I began to comprehend that my headache most definitely had to do with a certain swelling on my left temple. After another few minutes I was finally able to see things, relatively speaking, and I rose up in bed. I was in my clothes, but someone had removed my shoes, unbuckled my belt, loosened my pants, and unbuttoned my shirt to mid-chest. Aside from the blow to my head, I had no other external pain. I carefully patted my body, but all I found were minor aches and a couple of scratch marks on my wrists.
