The countryside. Woods. An ancient farmhouse. A garden.
Within a month I had packed my bags and gone to live in the village of Campfredor.
I had a good job in Barcelona and earned a decent amount. I’d spent the last fifteen years interpreting – the advantages brought by a Russian mother and foreign-language study – though the bulk of my income didn’t come from interpreting in congresses or for executives who didn’t have a sufficient grasp of English to use it as a lingua franca but from small jobs Isa contracted me for in the city. Isa had set up a translation and interpreting agency, but globalization, the translation software now available to everyone and the collapse in rates had forced her into an imaginative rethink. She had finally cornered the market for supplying interpreters to the only group that had really taken up the slogans of Marx and his International – organized crime, consisting of crooks of every ethnic background and nationality – and I had benefited as well. With what they paid me, I’d been able to put down a deposit for a flat and paying the mortgage was no hassle.
I calculated that what I’d have left after selling my flat would be enough to allow me to buy a farmhouse in Campfredor and live comfortably for at least five years. It would be my opportunity to write the novel I’d always wanted to write, and, simultaneously, after a string of emotional disappointments that had rocked my faith in the male of the species, I needed to distance myself from them before embarking on another relationship. “No men,” I told myself. Easier said than done.
My Campfredor metamorphosis from promiscuous urbanite to celibate country girl was only half complete. Eighteen months after establishing myself there, my life turned out to be very different from what I’d imagined when still living in Barcelona: I was beginning to feel sorry for myself. Rather than spending time on my novel, strolling through the fields or weeding my garden, activities I had so looked forward to when I arrived in Campfredor, I was eating biscuits all day while watching American soaps. It was no surprise that Isa’s phone call caught me on the sofa, with my T-shirt covered in crumbs, glued to episode after episode of the third season of Scandal, which I had downloaded from a pirate website.
When I saw it was her phoning, I almost ignored the call. Not for any good reason, but I’d been at a loss for words when she’d phoned recently. Unlike Isa, I never had anything interesting to say, and I’d done to death the line about how wonderful it was to live in the countryside surrounded by cows and birds. There was nothing in my life of rustic exile that was worth sharing, and it rather bugged me to think that. I had no friends in the village (you try making friends in a village when you’re forty-two!), no affairs, and, worst of all, I was starting to become resigned to the futile fate I’d mapped out for myself. The world and its disasters had ceased to interest me – I didn’t even leaf through the online pages of the dailies – and, almost unawares, the solitude and picture-postcard scenery had turned me into a couldn’t-care-less misanthrope, into a couch potato, as the English say.
A contented patata de sofà.
The fourth time the bars of “A Hard Day’s Night” struck up, I answered. Isa was in her car and in hands-free mode. She told me that a business lunch with a client had brought her to a village forty kilometres from Campfredor and she hinted that I should invite her to dinner.
“What do you reckon? I’m only just up the road.” But she must have detected my reluctance, because she added: “But if it’s in any way inconvenient —”
“No, I’m not doing anything special. I was reading,” I lied.
“You’re sure you’ll be happy to see me? I didn’t know what time I’d be finished, that’s why I didn’t ring earlier —”
“No, it’s fine. Come whenever you want.”
“I reckon I’ll take three quarters of an hour. I don’t know the roads and I’m no speed freak.”
The moment Isa rang off, I looked at the clock. When I saw what the time was – 7.30 – I jumped up from the sofa. Although the sun wouldn’t be enacting its nightly stellar fireworks and plunging poetically during another multicoloured twilight for some time, the shops would soon be shut and I didn’t have enough food in the fridge to offer my friend a decent meal. What’s more, it was Monday, and that meant Campfredor’s only restaurant would be closed and I’d need a stint in the kitchen. If I was lucky, I’d still find the butcher’s open, but I also needed to visit the supermarket, because there were no lettuce or tomatoes left in the pantry for a salad. And as I had to go into the village, I thought I might as well visit the bakery and buy a cottage loaf; that’s the kind of bread city slickers expect to find in the kitchen of an exiled urbanite who’s a convert to faith in rural life.
I rapidly put on my trainers and picked up my purse. The house where I lived was on the outskirts of Campfredor, though close enough to the centre of that municipality with 333 miserable souls on its census. However, I was in a hurry and leapt into my car. Luckily the bakery still had a kilo loaf left and a couple of packets of those delicious home-made madeleines I devoured by the dozen. There was no queue in the butcher’s, unlike most weekdays, and in ten minutes I had purchased Iberian ham, fuet and llonganissa sausages, brawn and three varieties of cheese. At the supermarket I also stuck a cucumber, a pepper and a couple of heads of garlic into my bag – you simply must have garlic when you live in the country. On the other hand, there was no need to buy wine. Coffee, wine and cigarettes were the three basic elements never in short supply in my pantry.
Back in my farmhouse, I dumped the bags in the kitchen and went to my bedroom to change. Even though I never stood on ceremony with Isa, I didn’t want her to see me in that old yellow jersey I wore to lounge around the house or those tracksuit bottoms that, despite being a size forty-six and black, didn’t hide the bagginess the washing machine never managed to eliminate. I remembered I’d not had a shower, and before slipping on a purple T-shirt – it was too tight and a colour I wasn’t keen on, but the only one new enough – I splashed some water over my face and gave my smelly armpits a squirt of deodorant. I pulled over my T-shirt a black, loose-fitting, knee-length knitted jacket, which I’d bought months ago hoping to conceal my burgeoning belly and the grotesque proportions my backside had recently assumed. Trousers, however, were a problem, because all the jeans in my wardrobe were too small and the only ones that really fitted were tracksuit bottoms, and all three pairs of those were in the dirty linen basket. As for the elegant trousers that I’d worn when I worked in Barcelona – I can’t think why I’d kept them, as they had surely gone out of fashion – they weren’t worth contemplating. It was not just the fact that they were too small; I couldn’t imagine how my bum and Buddha belly could ever have squeezed into such tiny size thirty-six items.
By default, I selected a black, bell-like dress that hung beneath the knee. As the boots matching the skirt had cracked, I had to wear flats and thick black stockings to hide the hairy legs I’d not shaved for months – like my armpits. I gargled with Listerine in the bathroom to remove the stink of tobacco from my breath and, when I looked at myself in the mirror, I was devastated to find my eyebrows were a wild hedgerow. When had they started to grow like that? I tried to comb the dishevelled hair I’d dyed a dark chestnut – after moving to the village, I did that myself at home; I can’t remember when I last went to a hairdresser – and noticed that those implacably grey roots had grown a good inch: where my parting was normally on the right, a gleeful stream – straight from a nativity scene – now rippled from my crown, ran along my forehead and in a delta of hundreds of silvery filaments brimmed over to form a thick, chaotic fringe that at least had the virtue of hiding the Amazonian jungle I had discovered above my eyes.
I rummaged in my make-up bag, and put on lip gloss and eyeliner. To jazz up the Holy Week penitent’s air my grim, unseasonable clothes gave me (thick stockings in the month of May, for Christ’s sake!), I picked out a brightly coloured silk scarf that was a present from one of my exes (I don’t remember which), silver hoop earrings
, a clunky glass bracelet and a coloured bead necklace that belonged to my previous life when I bought my clothes and accessories in shops in Boulevard Rosa and not at Decathlon. Before leaving my bedroom and heading to the kitchen to prepare the salad and put the cold sausage and meats on a plate, I stopped in front of the full-length wardrobe mirror and was totally devastated by what I saw. With my messy, poorly dyed hair and those vast funereal garments I hoped would conceal my nigh on seventy-seven kilos, that rapidly concocted new look was midway between an amateur provincial witch, an expert in reading tea leaves and making spells, and a fat forty-two-year-old who was the local laughing stock.
While I was trying to recognize myself in the miserable image in that mirror, the doorbell rang. I immediately took off the scarf, necklace, bracelet and earrings and stuffed them into a drawer.
If I was in post-glam mode, I decided it was better to err on the side of louche rather than loony.
Isa was the same as ever, perhaps even slimmer. As usual, she sported that beach tan she retained almost throughout the year thanks to the flat she owns in Llavaneres. The moment she saw me, I realized she was attempting to hide how shocked she was to be confronting twenty kilos extra of friend.
“Darling, if I don’t come to see you …” she recriminated. “How come you never come back to Barcelona these days?”
“It’s not been that long …”
“It was last November. Now we’re in May … You just work it out!”
Isa was right. I’d not been down to Barcelona for at least six months. It was a good three-hour drive, and with that and the inevitable overnight stay, sloth had got the better of me. Nevertheless, as I didn’t want her to think I’d become a hermit, I assured her I was planning to go for the St John’s Eve festivities (a lie), and used the pretext that it was turning cool and I needed to light a fire to change the subject.
“Are you hungry?” I asked, as I put the logs in place and lit the fire. “We’ve got a cold supper.”
“By the way, I wasn’t being totally honest,” said Isa. “I’ve not come on the off-chance. I’ve paid you a visit because I need you to interpret for me at a meeting.”
“Oh no!” I snapped. “You know that I’ve retired. I’m too busy with my novel and —”
“Please, Vicky. Just the once …” insisted Isa. “As a favour, in memory of the good old times.”
“No way.”
“It’s a really important meeting. I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t.” Then she hesitated, before adding: “You owe me one.”
Isa was right. I owed her a really big one. Shit.
“What became of your other interpreter? Has she retired as well?” I asked.
“Oh, you know what some of them are like …” She shook her head. “She tried to be too clever by half. That’s what happened.”
“What do you mean?”
“She tried to defraud some Chechens and it went badly wrong.”
“You mean …?”
“Yes.”
“Christ …”
“Right.”
Isa told me she needed me back to interpret at a meeting that would bring together Russian mafia, French gangsters and a patriarch from La Mina. It was one of those dicey get-togethers where, as usual, lots of money would be at stake.
“You’re so good,” said Isa, soft-soaping me. “Because you never try to take advantage of my clients. That’s a temptation some of my translators often surrender to. They think that just because they’re in control of the language, they’re cleverer than the guys they’re translating for.”
I cracked open a bottle of red wine and filled two glasses.
“Do you mind if I go to the bathroom for a moment?” asked Isa.
“It’s upstairs. Second door on the left.”
The farmhouse I had bought had a lovely bathroom, with wooden beams, rustic furniture and indigo-painted walls. However, when she opened the door, Isa would find a chaotic array of bottles, dirty clothes all over the floor, a sink full of hair and bits of toothpaste, a mirror covered in soap and water stains and a bath lined with gunge.
“I do apologize, I know the house is in a state,” I muttered shamefacedly when Isa came back. “I’ve been so busy …”
“Yes, I know, working on that novel of yours.” Isa didn’t believe a word of it. “Campfredor is very pretty, but isn’t it quite a bore living here all by yourself? Don’t you ever miss Barcelona?”
“I’m not sure. Sometimes …”
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Isa went on, “but country life doesn’t really seem to suit you.”
“I suppose I’m still adapting.”
I didn’t want to face up to it, but Isa was quite right. I was getting tired of all those little birds and all that nature, and at the same time I wasn’t finding it so easy to do without male company as I’d imagined. Or perhaps I was, because since I’d changed into a frump who dressed in any old thing, I had become invisible as far as men were concerned.
“The meeting is in Barcelona in two weeks’ time,” Isa continued. “They pay really well, as you know. I can get you a suite in whichever hotel you want. And you can make the most of it, go to the hairdressers, go shopping …”
I sighed. I couldn’t refuse. And I reckoned that perhaps it might do me good to take a holiday from all that pastoral peace and quiet.
“Just this once, right?”
“I promise.”
In the end, Isa stayed the night. The next morning, while we ate breakfast and waited for the ibuprofen to deal with the fallout from the two bottles of wine and half-bottle of grappa we had knocked back, I told her I would do her interpreting job on one condition: that when I was finished, she’d arrange dinner for me with some of her bachelor or divorced friends.
“I think I need a weekend fling,” I acknowledged, with a sigh.
I started my diet right away. In two weeks I wouldn’t get rid of the twenty or so kilos I’d put on since moving to Campfredor, but, if I starved myself, did lots of exercise and applied all my willpower, I might possibly shed nine or ten. To steel myself, I went to the only hairdresser in the village for a cut and dye, and, as soon as I was back home, I threw all the sweet and biscuit packets in the pantry into the dustbin.
After eighteen months of excess, a fortnight of severe fasting lay ahead, based on potatoes, cabbage and steamed fish.
A couple of weeks later I clambered into my car nine kilos lighter and drove non-stop to Barcelona. Isa had booked me into a suite in a luxury hotel on Passeig de Gràcia and the first thing I did, after leaving my case in my room, was to visit the spa and spend hours enjoying all manner of massages and treatments. The next morning I went shopping – I needed elegant clothes in my new size – and that afternoon I went for a coffee with my friend, Vero, who lives in Sarrià. That evening I decided to go to the Verdi to see a French film, so nobody could say I was out of touch, and, after the film, as I didn’t feel sleepy, I went for a drink in the Plaça del Sol. I was still in the bar, enjoying a fantastic gin and tonic, when Isa rang to give me the address of the place where the meeting would take place in the morning.
“They’re not what you call early risers. They’ll be expecting you at eleven. Don’t be late.”
I was rather surprised at the address she gave me.
“Christ, you’ve never sent me to a flat before. And what’s more, one in the Eixample,” I replied, recalling the usual scenarios for this kind of encounter: clip joints, abandoned warehouses and, if your luck was in, rooms in three-star hotels, all so as not to draw attention.
“It’s one of those tourist flats people now rent on the side,” Isa explained. “They’re discreet and more comfortable. And as so many foreigners are always coming and going, the neighbours don’t even notice.”
Next morning I got up early. I ordered breakfast in my room, showered and slipped on the black trouser suit I’d purchased the day before. I decided to combine it with a low-key flowery silk blouse and black, relatively h
igh-heeled shoes. To complete the professional look I was after, I put on hipster glasses I didn’t need but used to wear when working for Isa. With the kind of individuals I was going to interact with, I preferred to assume a slightly rebarbative appearance rather than provoke lascivious thoughts.
I arrived punctually. The flat, one of those grand first-floor efforts on Carrer Ausiàs Marc on the corner of Bruc, reminded me of the place in the Eixample where I once lived on Carrer Mallorca, though this one was twice the size. A two-metre-tall Russian opened the door, checked my handbag and, after asking permission (in Russian), frisked me and said he’d keep my mobile until the meeting was over. “OK,” I said (also in Russian). As I’d worked for years as an interpreter with this type of person, I knew the routines and wasn’t shocked.
The big hulk accompanied me down a long passageway to a large dining room that in turn led into a gallery looking over a patio full of garden furniture and pots with all kinds of green-leaved plants. The flat had been restored but not gutted – the radiators were new but they’d kept the hydraulic floor tiling and ceiling cornices – and adapted for tourist use, with an elegant blend of modern and antique furniture.
Seven men were waiting for me, split into three small groups; silence descended when they saw me walk in. Sitting and smoking at what was perhaps an Ikea table were two fat, bejewelled Russians who had turned a glass potpourri bowl into an ashtray. In the gallery, next to the big windows, three men were chatting in Catalan: an old man with gypsy features and an oxygen bottle, and two younger fellows looking so villainous the sight of them made me regret accepting Isa’s offer. Finally, from the other end of the dining room, two moustachioed Frenchmen in their fifties who spoke with a Marseille accent looked me up and down and gave me a dirty smile I preferred to pretend I’d not seen.
The First Prehistoric Serial Killer and Other Stories Page 14
