by Don Boyd
Margot had a charming, childlike enthusiasm which Archie so clearly adored.
Eusebio, Tilly and Paolo finally emerged from the aluminium and glass-housed atrium which housed the hotel’s first floor reception area. The elite throng broke out into rapturous applause. The manager of the Arts was awkwardly trying to shepherd his distinguished guest through the hordes of welcoming friends towards a makeshift dais with a microphone, but Eusebio was stopped, kissed and given a book by every woman en route. Each of them had a rose in her hand. Paolo couldn’t resist a jibe at his stepfather’s expense.
“You old goat! How do you do it?”
Eusebio laughed and winked at Tilly as he collected at least half a dozen books on his way to the platform. He paused only once, for Margot. Scurrilously disregarding the rules of their professional relationship, he kissed her on the mouth and then hugged Archie.
“My favourite tee-shirt on my favourite wife! So typically American. I love you for it… Stay close, I need you to calm my nerves and taunt your husband.”
“Bless you for the St. George’s rose, Eusebio. Archie was so jealous.”
Archie was chuckling again. He was used to his beautiful wife’s flirtatiousness.
“He’s Scottish! Their patron saint is St Andrew!” quipped Tilly, who was playfully air-kissing Margot, who then in turn hugged Paolo. Tilly’s natural exuberance was infectious.
“Where’s your brother, Tilly?”
“Hugo’s changing into his state of the art Speedo. He has challenged Eusebio to a swimming race and wanted a warm-up swim in the pool over there. He’s been training for weeks.”
They all laughed. These unscheduled interruptions in their regal procession were beginning to irritate the hotel manager who was keen to start the official ceremony. Eusebio was finally strong-armed towards the stand.
After a brief welcome from the British consul, which was greeted with braying whelps and shouts, Eusebio came to the microphone. He was in his element, among this community, his cultural stamping ground.
“Thank you so much, everyone, gracias. I am so moved. Gracias… I want to tell you about the Sant Jordi tradition in Barcelona. Sant Jordi, your St George… When Sant Jordi killed his dragon, the blood from his enemy spilled into a beautiful rosebush. He gave a red rose to the beautiful princess he had saved and rescued. April 23rd. Did you know that this is also the day in 1616 that both William Shakespeare and Cervantes died? England and Spain. Books… Love… Spring… Fertility…”
The guests cheered. When the noise died down, Eusebio’s voice went quiet. “I have an important contest to announce. Tilly’s brother, Hugo, has challenged me to a swimming race. After lunch I will be Hugo’s dragon, maybe? And my blood can be a thousand rose bushes.”
More raucous braying and applause. He raised his arms. “But now, so that you can also think of your lovers and mistresses, and beautiful roses, and Don Quixote… Falstaff, and dancing the sardana tonight in the Plaça St. Jaume… and making love all night… I want to sing a song for you to say to all of you, ‘T’estimo’, ‘I love you!’ All of you!”
And then, putting his finger to his lips to silence their euphoria, this debonair man in his seventies broke into a beautiful rendition of a haunting Catalan love song, which brought the house down. Archie put his arm around Margot, whose eyes were brimming with tears. They walked over to the buffet brunch. Archie had regained his sense of humour.
“He’s such an old goat, but I can’t help loving him. Can you see Tilly and Paolo anywhere? They have vanished.”
“No, but they are probably at the pool watching Hugo warm up for his race. I’m starving. Let’s have brunch with Robert. Where is that mad hack?”
Archie muttered, “He’ll be charming some pretty young girl, probably a client of yours. Not that I would know one, of course…”
Archie’s best friend, Robert, in his dishevelled, grey-speckled, tweed jacket, light grey trousers and worn-down old sneakers, was already tucking into a plate of waffles and scrambled eggs at a wooden table under one of the white-brimmed umbrellas which surrounded the terrace. He was alone and as if he had heard them, he bellowed out, “Eusebio will win. He’s a brilliant swimmer.”
Margot remembered that she had a date with Robert at the opera the following evening, who was bringing along a mysterious friend he had wanted her to meet.
A new lover, perhaps?
Chapter Two
Ciutat Cooperative is an industrial zone to the West of Barcelona’s international airport. It is a bleak wasteland in sharp contrast to the seductive beauty of the city it serves. Portacabins are strewn around irrigation channels and temporary construction ducts which crisscross clusters of brown-painted, corrugated iron sheds, sleek, single-storey warehouses and a myriad of yellow and lime green containers. Even bald young palm tress planted to add some decoration fail to give any charm to this unfriendly landscape sprawling from the Mediterranean to the mountains which straddle the Costa Brava coastline.
Occasionally, at dusk in the spring, the winds coming from the sea are strong enough to create a light dust storm. A portly, middle-aged man dressed in the khaki uniform of a night watchman, was cycling through this dusty mist along one of the many makeshift construction site paths. He parked his bike in front of a large brown hut next to the security gates of a parking lot littered with modern engineering equipment, some of it covered with tarpaulin sheets. The hut housed a sophisticated security system within a neatly arranged bed-sitting room and kitchenette. He flicked some switches to activate the eight television monitors, which then swept his patch with a series of surveillance cameras. Satisfied that all was in order on his site, he flicked another switch, which closed the system down. He then walked across from his hut to an old black sedan car, parked in front of a sleekly designed, aquamarine-coloured modern warehouse across the parking lot. He looked around furtively and then bent down at the front of the car and took an envelope from the top of the left tyre. He opened it and while counting the bank notes inside, he walked hurriedly towards the sliding doors of the silver warehouse. He stuffed the money into the back of his tatty uniform, tapped a code into a security locking pad, and went inside. Negotiating a labyrinth of palettes and makeshift storage areas with a flashlight, he arrived at a larger open space and fumbled for a switch. Several fluorescent tubes clamped to what looked like photographic lighting stands flickered on to reveal what he had come to inspect. He took it in with more than a passing sense of curiosity. Painted on three large screens, which were laid out like the set of a stage play, was a three-dimensional reproduction of the walls and piazza of a mediaeval city flanked by its Gothic cathedral. In the centre of the stage area was a large, old wooden barrel, a mound of broken glass on what looked like a funeral bier, and two planks of wood arranged in the shape of a crucifix. The floor had been covered with several canvas tarpaulins.
To one corner there was a lengthy, rectangular, glass-topped table strewn with digital paraphernalia: a wireless mouse – shiny white, comfortable. A sleek black laptop, its seventeen-inch screensaver radiating a crisp, well-defined digital reproduction of the famous Victorian painting of Shakespeare’s suicidal Ophelia – an exquisite, red-haired teenager drowning amongst the water lilies. Near to this laptop were two expensive mobile phones with liquid crystal display screens glowing in the shadows. One of them was attached to the computer by a sleek grey cable. The other was vibrating almost noiselessly. A few feet away from the table was an old Sony High Definition Z1 video camcorder perched on an aluminium tripod. Its screen flap was open but blank. The tape loading mechanism of the camera had been ejected and was empty. The baffled night watchman finally decided to pick up the vibrating mobile ‘phone and clumsily managed to answer it.
“Si?… Si, Paolo!… Si, vale, vale… Adios!”
He turned off the phone with awkward unfamiliarity, placed it back where he had found it and hurried out of the warehouse, back across to the brown shed where he began to settle in for the night.
After stripping down his bed, he took a plate from the tiny fridge and placed it just outside the door of his hut, and stood there looking out towards the dark warehouse. The black sedan car had disappeared. He listened to the soft hum of the Mistral and the intermittent screeching of a pack of hungry wolves. There was no moon. He chuckled as he went back to his bed and a dog-eared copy of La Vanguardia.
Chapter Three
To whom can we entrust our darkest, deepest secrets? A priest? Hardly, even if you’re a Catholic… A drunk in a bar? Our immediate family? Maybe a sister or brother at a pinch. Certainly not my mother; she would tell my Dad, for sure! And then there are our husbands and lovers. Lovers are about as discreet as second-rate gossip columnists. Husbands? We need secrets to keep our marriages alive and Archie and I have our past to hide from each other. Therapists, like me? We thrive on discretion in the way that Swiss bankers and doctors are supposed to. In my book, once you have told somebody a secret, it stops being a secret. Your confidante knows and even the pretentiously discreet live on in the knowledge of their new information. Tell a best friend about the withering terminal disease persistent in your family medical history, and you can be sure that there will be a pregnant pause in the conversation when you let slip that you are about to have the obligatory medical examination to qualify for a life insurance policy. Those desperate precarious moments when we feel the need to expel the burdens of childhood anxiety or the need to confess some hideous crime of passion are the catalysts for tragedies of Shakespearean proportions. But these secrets are my stock in trade and I revel in them on so many different levels. And they allow me to help my patients to live their lives more comfortably. Something I love doing.
Margot’s conventional childhood in La Jolla had been very happy and so the stories she was told by her eclectic collection of patients fascinated her just as much as they inspired her to help them cope with their strange, uncomfortable lives. That Freudian, ‘evenly suspended attention’ she diligently indulged in these damaged people as part of her job, she combined with a familiar and overwhelming private excitement which comes half-way through watching a great film when the characters and story are so enjoyable, we don’t want it to end. The lives of Margot’s patients, or clients as they would have preferred, always seemed to her like never-ending movies and ever-persisting nightmares. But like great dreams, when great movies end, we have to make our way reluctantly back into the baffling vicissitudes of our humdrum lives. In that sense the exotic and outrageous sagas about abusive parents and incestuous siblings which are standard psychiatric milestones for the damaged children of the rich, Margot had to put into the context of her professional responsibility. She took her job very seriously. She possessed a rare ability to put everyone at ease and along with an infectious laugh, she managed to blend her natural charm into her rigorous ‘no nonsense’ manner when her work demanded a tough approach.
Early every Monday morning, Margot relished her walk down from her apartment on the Montjuic, Barcelona’s highest vantage point. After winding her way past the modernism of the Olympic stadium and away from the pseudo Classicism of the great museums surrounding it, she would alternate her route to the harbour according to her mood and according to her first client of the day. That morning, she chose to amble through Raval, the ramshackle, impoverished old brothel district still inhabited by the same families which had been the engine room of Barcelona’s great mercantile empire. Nowadays, these families are joined by the North Africans, Pakistanis and Indians who have colonised it with Internet emporiums, mobile phone shops, cheap cafes and shabby hairdressing salons. Some of the late night bars, still haunted by the ghosts of Cocteau and Dali, who had immortalised their seductive seediness, stay open to serve breakfast to the human remnants of desperate alcoholic nights and sordid encounters.
Her first session that day was with, of all people, Robert, who was strictly speaking not really a client. After a psychological campaign of gargantuan proportions which had included abortive referrals to other eminent therapists in Barcelona, and at first on the mutual understanding that their time together could never be defined as a professional relationship, (she was jeopardising her licence to practise by seeing him), Margot had very reluctantly agreed to allow him one hour every Monday, as a friend. This should have been a taboo for any self-respecting clinical psychologist and therapist like Margot. But he had pleaded so desperately.
“You are the only person I can trust, Margot, and you don’t have to talk about me to Archie, do you?”
She had succumbed to his emotional blackmail and this tenuous arrangement had worked out, certainly to Robert’s satisfaction.
As part of the raison d’être for adopting a lifestyle in sharp contrast to the more familiar English shires of his childhood, Robert regularly indulged in the faux romanticism of the Raval in all its seedy glory. Margot used her dawn journey through its narrow, moody streets to orientate her mind into his bizarre psyche and environmentally prepare herself for her weekly exposure to its perverse intricacies. On one occasion, she had bumped into him sitting outside a seedy bar, much the worse for wear after a night of drunken debauchery and entwined with a girl less than half his age. As was Margot’s custom on such occasions, she pretended not to recognise them – the girl looked horrifyingly like Tilly. Later that morning during their session, when she confronted him with his behaviour, he had told her that he had wanted to die. Perhaps the melancholy sky and the multiple copas de Cava which had fired his fertile fantasy, had been factors in his gloomy mood? Perhaps his doomed affair with this teenage nymph had finally alerted him to inevitable mortality? Margot patiently harboured this secret and reminded him gently about the other women he was also sleeping with. Robert had a very dark alter ego.
When she finally emerged on Las Ramblas, her favourite newsvendor was busy arguing with a couple of hung-over English tourists. The avenue was littered with red roses, and the bookstalls from Sunday’s La Diada di Sant Jordi were being dismantled. The vendor handed her The International Herald Tribune with his customary smile and a wink. She then walked down towards the sea and crossed the square southwards, over to the Colm, Philip II and his Queen Isabella’s famous homage to Christopher Columbus. The azure Mediterranean sparkled behind the gleaming stone statues heralding Spain’s vainglorious maritime past.
She loved walking around this tall, rather vulgar statue which proudly celebrates Barcelona’s connection with the New World. Christopher Columbus had sailed five hundred years ago into this harbour to be greeted by his reluctant but now jubilant benefactors, the King and Queen of Spain. Like so many proud Americans, Margot had a powerful and sentimental attachment to the Europe of her forefathers. She had been thrilled when Archie had mooted his stint as a visiting professor at Barcelona University.
“It’s about time I went back to my European roots. After all, I spent the first ten years of my career teaching there. I have been hiding away in the Windy City now for far too long. And one of my friends from my teaching days in Scotland says it’s now the best city in the world.”
When she asked him what she was going to do while he was at work, her Spanish being poor at best, he laughed: “You can learn Catalan, and you can set up as a shrink for the ex-pats! I’m sure that they are all as fucked up as the rest of us, and will welcome someone with your special qualifications!”
His jocular, half-serious suggestion had made so much sense. She could continue her work as a psychotherapist, combine that with fantasies of Catalan citizenship and luxuriate in the bourgeois indulgences of urban tourism. She had never imagined that the therapeutic territory would be so fertile, especially in the treatment of sexual problems, which was her speciality. Much to her amazement, even her research work into recondite sexual practices proved useful and helped increase her professional reputation. Within weeks she had established a dozen regular clients – and the extra money came in handy. The academic network of American psychology had led her to Marie-Christine who, as her supervisor and
personal therapist, became a vital building block for the serious analytical work she was keen to pursue within this hybrid, rather effete community. They had become such firm friends. She was now missing her more than ever, and at least as much as she missed her parents in La Jolla.
Her final destination before going to work this April Monday, like every weekday morning, was a small, dark bar hidden in the shadowy cobbled streets of the Barri Gotic – the city’s crammed and haunted mediaeval quarter. Heaven and a haven. Margot used to be embarrassed to ask for her café solo in the poor American Spanish she had learned at high school in California. But Elvira, the wise beauty who owned the bar, put her straight. She explained, in the simple unpretentious English she spoke with the lilt of a Catalan accent, that Barcelona prospered in the eighteenth century as Spain’s pre-eminent imperial city because the people of Barcelona had explored, plundered and exploited the Americas. She was proud to have her American friend there every morning.
Elvira’s family had lived in the same terrace of loosely connected, timber-framed buildings since the Wars of the Spanish Succession. Fiercely proud of her Catalan roots, she would tell Margot a new story every day – often about the myriad of her descendants and relatives over the centuries who had been hemp importers, cardinals, revolutionaries and executioners – the garrotte had still been in use late into Franco’s regime. On occasion she would let her into lurid contemporary stories about the darker criminal side of her beloved city. Her husband Carlos’s role as Barcelona’s most celebrated police inspector gave her a special insider’s track. By way of reciprocation, Margot matched these yarns with her own graphic tales of psychopathic criminality stockpiled during her time at Chicago University’s legendary Department of Psychology.
Elvira was no substitute for Marie-Christine but she had become a vital part of Margot’s life. They kept their husbands and families away from their friendship and Margot trusted Elvira in the way that she might have done a favourite aunt. They had carefully delineated and respected boundaries. And so, as she entered the bar that morning and was not greeted with the customary hug with quite as much of the usual amount of enthusiasm, Margot knew that something was ruffling Elvira’s feathers.
