One morning towards the end of June, neither of them appeared at the café, not that there was anything unusual about that, for it did occasionally happen, and I assumed that they must have gone away somewhere or were too busy to share that brief pause in the day which they both clearly enjoyed so much. Then I was away for most of a week, dispatched by my boss to some stupid book fair abroad, mainly to press the flesh on his behalf and generally play the fool. When I returned, they still did not appear, not once, and that worried me, more for my own sake than for theirs, because I was suddenly deprived of my morning fillip. ‘How easy it is for a person simply to vanish into thin air,’ I thought. ‘Someone only has to move jobs or house and you’ll never know anything more about them, never see them again. All it takes is a change in work schedule. How fragile they are, these connections with people one knows only by sight.’ This made me wonder if, after spending so long endowing them with such joyful significance, I shouldn’t perhaps have tried to exchange a few words with them, not with the intention of bothering them or spoiling their moment of togetherness nor, of course, with the idea of establishing some kind of social relationship outside of the café, that wasn’t what I wanted at all; but merely to show them how much I liked and appreciated them, so as to be able to say hello to them from that point on, and to feel obliged to say goodbye to them if, one day, I were to leave the publishing house and thus cease to frequent that particular area, and to make them feel slightly obliged to do the same if they were the ones to move on or to change their habits, just as a local shopkeeper would forewarn us if he were going to close or sell his business, just as we would warn everyone if we were about to move house. To, at least, be aware that we are about to cease to see people we’ve grown accustomed to seeing every day, even if only at a distance or in some purely utilitarian way, barely noticing their face. Yes, that’s what one usually does.
So, in the end, I asked the waiters. They told me that, as far as they knew, the couple had already gone on holiday. This sounded to me more like supposition than fact. It was still a little early to go away, but there are people who prefer not to spend July in Madrid, when the heat is at its worst, or perhaps Luisa and Deverne could allow themselves the luxury of spending the whole two months on vacation, they certainly looked wealthy enough and free enough too (perhaps they were self-employed). While I regretted having to wait until September for my little morning stimulant, I was reassured to know that they would be back and hadn’t disappeared from the face of my earth for ever.
During that time, I remember happening upon a newspaper headline about a Madrid businessman who had been stabbed to death, and recall that I rapidly turned the page without reading the whole item, precisely because of the accompanying photo, which showed a man lying on the ground in the middle of the street, in the street itself, without a jacket or tie or shirt, or with his shirt unbuttoned and the tails hanging out, while the ambulance men were trying to revive or save him, and with a pool of blood all around, his white shirt drenched and stained, or so I thought from that one quick glance. Given the angle from which the photo had been taken, you couldn’t see the man’s face clearly and, besides, I didn’t stop to look properly, I hate the current mania in the press for not sparing the reader or viewer even the most gruesome of images, as if the verbal description were not enough – or perhaps the ones who want those images are the readers and viewers, who must, by and large, be disturbed individuals; why else insist on being shown something you already know or have been told about – and with not the slightest consideration for the person who has been so cruelly mistreated and who can no longer defend or protect himself from the kind of prying gaze to which he would never willingly have submitted when fully conscious, just as he would not have appeared before perfect strangers or indeed acquaintances in dressing gown and pyjamas, considering himself, quite rightly, to be unpresentable. Photographing a dead or dying man, especially one who has died a violent death, seems to me an abuse showing a gross lack of respect for someone who has just become a victim or a corpse – if he can still be seen, that means he’s not quite dead or does not belong entirely in the past, in which case, he should be left to die properly and to make his exit from time with no unwanted witnesses and no audience – and I’m not prepared to be a part of this new custom being imposed on us, I don’t want to look at what they urge or almost oblige us to look at, and to add my curious, horrified eyes to the hundreds of thousands of others whose minds will be thinking as they watch, with a kind of repressed fascination and, no doubt, relief: ‘The person I can see before me isn’t me, it’s someone else. It’s not me because I can see his face and it’s not mine. I can read his name in the papers and it’s not mine either, it’s not the same, not my name. It happened to someone else, but whatever could he have done, what kind of trouble must he have been in, what debts must he have incurred, what terrible damage must he have caused for someone to want to stab him to death like that? I never get involved in anything and I don’t make enemies either, I keep myself to myself. Or rather I do get involved and I do cause my own kind of damage, but no one has yet caught me. Fortunately, the dead man they’re showing us here is someone else and not me, so I’m safer than I was yesterday, yesterday I escaped. This poor devil, on the other hand, didn’t.’ At no point did it occur to me to associate the item of news, which I merely skim-read, with the pleasant, cheerful man whom I watched every day having his breakfast, and who, quite unawares, along with his wife, had the infinite kindness to raise my spirits.
For a few days after I got back from my trip, I still somehow expected to see the couple, even though I knew they wouldn’t come. I now arrived punctually at the office (I ate my breakfast at the café and left immediately, with no reason to linger), but I did so reluctantly, half-heartedly, it’s surprising how much our routines resent change, even when those changes are for the best, which this was not. I found it harder to face my various jobs, to have to watch my boss preening himself and to be on the receiving end of the unbelievably tedious calls or visits from writers, which, for some reason, had become one of my designated tasks, perhaps because I tended to take more interest in them than did my colleagues, who openly avoided them, especially, on the one hand, the more conceited and demanding among them and, on the other, the more tedious and disoriented variety, those who lived alone, the complete disaster areas, the inappropriately flirtatious, the ones who used any excuse to phone us up as a way of starting their day and letting someone know that they still existed. Writers are, for the most part, strange individuals. They get up in exactly the same state of mind as when they went to bed, thinking about their imaginary things, which, despite being purely imaginary, take up most of their time. Those who earn their living from literature and related activities and who, therefore, have no proper job – and there are quite a few of them, because, contrary to what most people say, there’s money to be made in this business, although mainly by the publishers and the distributors – rarely leave their houses and so all they have to do is go back to their computer or their typewriter – a few madmen still continue to use these, which means that their typewritten texts, once delivered, have to be scanned – with an incomprehensible degree of self-discipline: you have to be slightly abnormal to sit down and work on something without being told to. And so I was neither in the mood nor feeling sufficiently patient to give my almost daily advice on what to wear to a novelist called Cortezo, who would call me up on the flimsiest excuse and then say: ‘While I’ve got you on the phone,’ and ask my advice on the collection of hideous old tat he was wearing or thinking of wearing, and which he would then describe to me:
‘Do you think a pair of argyle socks would go with these fine-pinstripe trouse
rs and a pair of brown tasselled moccasins?’
I refrained from saying that I had a horror of argyle socks, fine-pinstripe trousers and brown tasselled moccasins, because that would have worried him no end and the conversation would have gone on and on.
‘What colour are the argyle socks?’ I asked.
‘Brown and orange, but I’ve got them in red and blue and in green and beige too. What do you reckon?’
‘Brown and blue would be best, isn’t that what you said you’ve got on?’ I replied.
‘No, I haven’t got that particular combination. Do you think I should go out and buy a pair?
I felt the tiniest bit sorry for him, although it irritated me intensely that he should ask me these things as if I were his widow-to-be or his mother, and the guy was so vain about his writing, which the critics loved, but which I found just plain silly. Anyway, I didn’t want to send him off into the city in search of yet more ignominious socks, which, besides, would not solve his problem.
‘No, it’s not worth it, Cortezo. Why don’t you cut the blue diamonds from one pair of socks and the brown ones from another and stitch them together? You can make a “patchwork”, as we say in Spanish now. A patchwork work of art.’
He took a while to realize that I was joking.
‘But I wouldn’t know how to do that, María, I can’t even sew on a button, and I have to be at my appointment in an hour and a half. Ah, I get it, you’re pulling my leg.’
‘Me?! Not at all. But you’d be better off with some plain socks, navy blue if you’ve got any, and in that case, black shoes would go best.’ I did usually help him out in the end, insofar as I could.
Now that I was in a far less sanguine mood, however, I would rather irritably fob him off with some vaguely ill-intentioned ‘advice’. If he told me that he was going to a cocktail party at the French Embassy wearing a dark grey suit, I would unhesitatingly recommend a pair of Nile-green socks, assuring him that these were all the rage and that everyone there would be amazed, which wasn’t so very far from the truth.
I found it equally hard to be nice to another novelist, who signed himself Garay Fontina – just that, two surnames and no first name, which he may have thought was original and enigmatic, but in fact made him sound like a football referee – and who considered that the publishing house had a duty to solve every and any possible problem or difficulty, even if it had nothing to do with his books. He would ask us to go to his house to pick up an overcoat and take it to the dry-cleaner’s, or else send him an IT person or some painters or find him accommodation in Trincomalee or in Batticaloa and make all the arrangements for what was a purely private trip, a holiday with his tyrannical wife, who occasionally phoned or turned up in person at the office and who didn’t ask, but ordered. My boss held Garay Fontina in high esteem and did his best to please him – through us – not so much because Garay Fontina sold lots of books as because he had led my boss to believe that he was frequently invited to Stockholm – I happened to know that he always went there at his own expense in order to plot alone in the void and breathe the air – and that he was in line for the Nobel Prize, even though no one had publicly put his name forward, in Spain or anywhere else. Not even in his home town, as so often happens. In front of my boss and his subordinates, however, he would present it as a fait accompli, and we would blush to hear him say such things as: ‘My Nordic spies tell me that I’m a dead cert for this year or the next’ or ‘I’ve memorized the speech I’m going to give to Carl Gustaf at the ceremony – in Swedish! He’ll be flabbergasted, it will be the most extraordinary thing he’s ever heard, and in his own language too, a language no one ever learns.’ ‘And what’s in the speech?’ my boss would ask with anticipatory glee. ‘You’ll read it in the world’s press the next day,’ Garay Fontina would tell him proudly. ‘Every newspaper will carry it, and they’ll all have to translate it from Swedish, even the Spanish newspapers, isn’t that funny?’ (I thought it enviable to have such confidence in a goal, even though both goal and confidence were fictitious.) I tried to be as diplomatic as possible with him, I didn’t want to risk losing my job, but I found this increasingly hard now, when, for example, he would ring me up early in the morning with his overblown desires.
‘María,’ he said to me one morning over the phone, ‘I need you to get me a couple of grams of cocaine for a scene in my new book. Have someone come over to my house as soon as possible, or, at any rate, before it gets dark. I want to see what colour cocaine is in daylight, so that I don’t get it wrong.’
‘But, Señor Garay …’
‘I’ve told you before, my dear, it’s Garay Fontina. Just plain Garay could be anyone, be it in the Basque Country, in Mexico or in Argentina. It could even be the name of a footballer.’ He insisted on this so much that I became convinced he had made up that second surname (I looked in the Madrid telephone directory one day and there was no Fontina, only a certain Laurence Fontinoy, an even more improbable name, like a character out of Wuthering Heights), or perhaps he had made up both surnames and was really called Gómez Gómez or García García or some other such repetitive name that would have offended his sensibilities. If it was a pseudonym, he was doubtless unaware when he chose it that Fontina is a type of Italian cheese, made either from goat’s or cow’s milk, I’m not sure, and which is produced, I believe, in Val d’Aosta, and which apparently melts easily. But then again there are some peanuts called Borges, and I doubt Borges would have been greatly bothered by that.
‘Sorry, Señor Garay Fontina, I was merely trying to keep things short. But listen,’ I had to say this, even though it was far from being the most important thing I had to say, ‘don’t worry about the colour. I can assure you that cocaine is white, both in daylight and under artificial lighting, almost everyone knows that. It’s always coming up in films, didn’t you ever go to any Tarantino films? Or that other one starring Al Pacino where there’s a shot of the stuff in little piles?’
‘That much I know, dear María,’ he retorted, rather stung. ‘I do live on this grubby planet of ours, you know, even though it may not seem so when I’m in full creative flow. But please don’t undersell yourself, you who not only make books, like your colleague Beatriz and so many others, but read them too, and show excellent judgement if I may say so.’ He used to come out with such comments occasionally, I imagine so as to win me over; I had never actually given my opinion on any of his books, that wasn’t what I was paid to do. ‘I’m just worried about not choosing the right adjectives. Can you tell me, for example, is it milky white or more calcareous? And what about the texture? Is it like chalk dust or sugar? Like salt or flour or talcum powder? Come on, tell me.’
Given the susceptibility of the Nobel Laureate-to-be, I found myself embroiled in an absurd and dangerous conversation. And it was entirely my fault.
‘It’s like cocaine, Señor Garay Fontina. There’s no point in describing it these days, because even if someone hasn’t tried it, they will have seen it. Apart from old people, of course, but they’re sure to have seen it on television thousands of times.’
‘Are you telling me how I should write, María? Whether I should or should not use adjectives? What I should describe and what is superfluous? Are you trying to give lessons to Garay Fontina?’
‘No, Señor Fontina …’ I was incapable of calling him by his two surnames every time, it took too long, was hardly a sonorous combination of words and, more to the point, I simply didn’t like it. Oddly, he seemed less put out if I omitted the Garay.
‘I have my reasons for asking you for those two grams of cocaine today. Probably because tonight the book is going to need them, and you want there to be a new book and you w
ant it mistake-free, don’t you? All you have to do is get me the cocaine and send it to me, not argue with me. Or must I speak personally to Eugeni?’
Here I took a risk by digging my heels in, and came out with a Catalan turn of phrase. I picked them up from my boss, who was Catalan by birth and full of Catalanisms, despite having lived in Madrid all his life. If Garay’s request reached his ears, he was capable of sending us all out into the street to pick up drugs (in dodgy areas and places where taxi drivers refuse to go) just to please the author. He took his most conceited author far too seriously; it never ceases to amaze me how these vain people manage to persuade so many others of their worth; it’s one of the world’s great enigmas.
‘¿Que nos toma por camellos?’ I said. ‘What do you take us for, Señor Fontina? Drug-pushers? I don’t know if you realize it, but you’re asking us to break the law. As I’m sure you’re aware, you can’t buy cocaine at the local tobacconist’s nor in your local bar. And what are you going to do with two whole grams? Do you have any idea how much two grams of cocaine is, how many lines of coke you could get out of that? You might overdose, and imagine what a loss that would be! To your wife and to literature. You might have a stroke. You could become an addict and be unable to think of anything else, not even writing, a mere piece of human flotsam unable to travel, because you can’t cross frontiers if you have drugs on you. You could kiss goodbye to the ceremony in Sweden and to that impertinent speech of yours to Carl Gustaf.’
The Infatuations Page 2
