The Infatuations

by Javier Marías

  Garay Fontina remained silent for a moment, as if weighing up whether or not he had overstepped the mark with his request. But I think he was more concerned by the dreadful prospect of never treading the red carpets of Stockholm.

  ‘No, not drug-pushers,’ he said at last. ‘You would just have to buy it, not sell it.’

  I took advantage of his hesitation to clarify in passing an important detail of the operation he was proposing:

  ‘Ah, but what about us handing it over to you? We would give you the two grams and you, presumably, would give us money. What’s that if not drug-pushing? A policeman would certainly think so.’ This was a somewhat sore point, because Garay Fontina did not always reimburse us for the cost of the dry-cleaning or the painters’ wages or the hotel reservations in Batticaloa, or, at best, took a long while to cough up, and my boss would get embarrassed and nervous whenever the time came to demand payment. The last thing we needed was to start financing the vices he was writing about in his new and unfinished novel for which he had not even been given a contract yet.

  This, I saw, gave him further pause for thought. Perhaps, unaccustomed as he was, he hadn’t stopped to think of the expense. Like so many writers, he was a mean, spineless little scrounger. He ran up large debts in the hotels he stayed at when he went to give lectures here, there and everywhere, or, rather, very occasionally and usually in some provincial town. He would demand that he be given a suite and that any extras should be paid for. It was rumoured that he took his sheets and his dirty washing on these trips, not because he was eccentric or obsessive, but so that he could have them washed at the hotel, even the socks – about which he did not consult me. This can’t have been true – travelling with all that extra weight in your luggage would have been a terrible hassle – but how else could one explain the huge laundry bill (about one thousand two hundred euros, so it was said) that the organizers of such an event were left to pay?

  ‘Do you happen to know how much cocaine sells for nowadays, María?’

  I didn’t know with any exactitude, but I thought it was about sixty euros a gram. I deliberately opted for a higher price in order to frighten and dissuade him. I was beginning to think I might succeed, or at least avoid the awful prospect of having to go and buy him some cocaine in who knows what dens of iniquity or godforsaken places.

  ‘I’ve an idea it’s about eighty euros a gram.’

  ‘Good heavens!’ He thought for a moment. I imagined he was making miserly calculations. ‘Yes, you may be right. Perhaps one gram would be enough, or even half. Can you buy half a gram?’

  ‘I have no idea, Señor Garay Fontina. I never use the stuff. But probably not.’ It was best not to let him think there was a cheap alternative. ‘Just as you can’t buy half a bottle of cologne, I suppose. Or half a pear.’ As soon as I said this, I realized how absurd these comparisons were. ‘Or half a tube of toothpaste.’ That seemed more sensible. However, I still needed to put him off the idea entirely, or else persuade him to buy the drugs himself, without forcing us into crime or giving him money up front. With him, you couldn’t rule out the possibility that he might do a runner, and the company really wasn’t in a position to throw money around like that. ‘If you don’t mind my asking, do you want it so that you can get stoned or do you simply want to look at it and touch it?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet. That depends on what my book asks of me tonight.’

  It seemed to me ridiculous that a book would ask anything day or night, especially when the book wasn’t yet written and the person being asked was the writer himself. I assumed he was being poetic and let the remark pass without comment.

  ‘You see, if it’s only the latter and all you want to do is describe cocaine … Now how can I put this? As a writer, you aspire to being universal, and you are, of course, which is why you attract readers of all ages. If you start explaining what cocaine is and what its effects are, your younger readers might think that you’re a drugs novice and that you’ve only just cottoned on, and then they might take the mickey. Because describing cocaine nowadays would be a bit like describing a traffic light. Let’s see, what adjectives would you use? Green, amber, red? Static, erect, imperturbable, metallic? People would laugh.’

  ‘Do you mean a traffic light in the street?’ he asked, alarmed.

  ‘The very same.’ What else could ‘traffic light’ possibly mean, at least in ordinary, everyday language?

  He fell silent for a moment.

  ‘Take the mickey, eh? Only just have cottoned on,’ he repeated. I saw that my use of those expressions had been a good move, they had made their mark.

  ‘But only as regards that part of the book, I’m sure, Señor Fontina.’

  The thought that some young readers might take the mickey out of anything he had written was obviously unbearable to him.

  ‘All right, let me think about it. Another day won’t make any difference. I’ll tell you tomorrow what I’ve decided.’

  I knew he would do nothing of the sort, that he would abandon any further idiotic experiments and investigations and would never again refer to that telephone conversation. He always made out that he was anti-conventional and trans-contemporary, but deep down he was just like Zola or some other such writer: he did his best actually to live what he imagined, with the result that his books sounded affected and contrived.

  When I hung up, I was surprised at my success in denying Garay Fontina one of his many requests, all by myself, without consulting my boss. I put this down to being more bad-tempered and more fed up than usual, to no longer enjoying breakfast with the perfect couple and thus no longer being infected by their optimism. Losing them did at least have that one advantage: it made me less tolerant of weaknesses, vanities and stupidities.

  That was the only advantage, which was, of course, worth nothing. The waiters were wrong, and when they found out they were wrong they didn’t bother telling me. Desvern would never come back, nor, therefore, would the cheerful couple, who had, as such, also been erased from the world. My colleague Beatriz – who also occasionally breakfasted at the café and with whom I had discussed that extraordinary pair – was the first to mention the incident to me, doubtless assuming that I would know, that I would have found out on my own account, either from the newspapers or from the waiters, and assuming, too, that we would have already talked about it, completely forgetting that I had been away during the days immediately after the murder. We were having a quick cup of coffee outside the café, when she suddenly paused, aimlessly stirring her coffee with her spoon, and said softly, looking over at the other tables, all of which were full:

  ‘How dreadful to have such a thing happen to you, I mean what happened to your favourite couple. To begin a day like any other with not the faintest idea that someone is going to take your life, and in the most brutal manner. Because, in a way, her life has been taken from her too. At least that’s how it will be for a long time, years probably, if you ever do recover from something like that, which I doubt. Such a stupid death, so unlucky, one of those deaths where you could spend your whole life thinking: “Why did it have to happen to him, why me, when there are millions of other people in the city?” I don’t know. I mean, I don’t really love Saverio any more, but if something like that happened to him, I’m not sure I could go on. It wouldn’t be the sense of loss so much as the feeling that I had somehow been marked out, as if someone had set my course for me and that there was no way of changing it, do you know what I mean?’ Beatriz was married to a cocky, parasitical Italian guy she could barely stand, but whom she put up with because of the kids, and also because she had a lover who filled her days with his salacious phone calls and the prospect of the occas
ional sporadic encounter, not that there were many of those, since both of them were married with children. And one of our authors filled her nocturnal imaginings, although not, it should be said, stout Cortezo or Garay Fontina, who was repulsive both physically and personally.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  And then she told me or, rather, started to tell me, astonished by my evident confusion and exclamations of ignorance, because it was getting late and her position at the publishing house was even more precarious than mine and she didn’t want to run any risks, as it was, Garay Fontina had taken against her and frequently complained about her to Eugeni.

  ‘Didn’t you read about it in the newspapers? There was even a photo of the poor man, all bloody and lying on the ground. I can’t remember the exact date, but if you look on the Internet, you’re sure to find it. His name was Deverne, apparently he was a member of the film distribution family, you know, “Deverne Films presents”, you’ll have seen it thousands of times at the cinema. You’ll find everything you need to know there. It was just horrible. Such terrible bad luck. Enough to make you despair. I don’t think I’d ever get over it if I was his wife. She must be out of her mind with grief.’ That was when I found out his name or, if you like, his stage name.

  That night, I typed in ‘Deverne Murder’ on my computer and the item came up at once, drawn from the local news sections of two or three Madrid papers. His real surname was Desvern, and it occurred to me that perhaps his family had changed it at some point for business purposes, to make it easier to pronounce for speakers of Castilian and possibly so that Catalan speakers would not immediately associate them with the town of Sant Just Desvern, a place I happened to know because several Barcelona publishing houses have their warehouses there. And perhaps also to give the appearance of being a French film distributor, because when the company was founded – in the 1960s or even earlier – everyone would still have been familiar with Jules Verne, and everything French was considered chic, not like now with that President who looks like Louis de Funès with hair. I learned, too, that the Deverne family used to own several large cinemas in the centre of Madrid and that, perhaps because such cinemas have been gradually disappearing, to be replaced by shopping malls, the company had diversified and now specialized in property development, not just in Madrid, but elsewhere too. So Miguel Desvern must have been even richer than I thought. I found it even more incomprehensible that he should have breakfasted nearly every morning in a café that was well within my more modest means. The incident had occurred on the last day that I saw him there, which is how I knew that his wife and I had said goodbye to him at the same time, she with her lips and I with my eyes only. In a further cruelly ironic touch, it was his birthday; he had thus died a year older than he had been the day before, at fifty.

  The versions in the press differed in some details (it doubtless depended on which neighbours or passers-by the reporters had spoken to), but they all agreed on the main facts. Deverne had parked his car, as, it seems, he always did, in a side street off Paseo de la Castellana at around two in the afternoon – he was probably going to meet Luisa for lunch at the restaurant – quite close to their house and even closer to a small car park belonging to the Technical College for Industrial Engineers. When he got out, he was accosted by a homeless guy who used to park cars in the area in exchange for tips from drivers – what we call a gorrilla – and who had then started berating Desvern, making incoherent, outrageous accusations. According to one witness – although none of them really understood what the man was talking about – he accused Deverne of having got his daughters involved in some international prostitution ring. According to others, he gave vent to a stream of unintelligible invective, of which they could make out only two phrases: ‘You’re trying to take my inheritance away from me!’ and ‘You’re stealing the bread from my children’s mouths!’ Desvern tried to shake the man off and reason with him for a few seconds, telling him that he had nothing to do with his daughters, whom he didn’t even know, and that he had clearly mistaken him for someone else. However, the gorrilla, Luis Felipe Vázquez Canella according to the reports, thirty-nine years old, very tall and heavily bearded, had grown even angrier and continued to hurl abuse at Desvern and heap him with incomprehensible curses. The porter of one house had heard him screaming hysterically: ‘You’re going to die today and, by tomorrow, your wife will have forgotten you!’ Another newspaper reported a still more wounding version: ‘You’re going to die today and, by tomorrow, your wife will have found another man!’ Deverne had made a dismissive gesture as if giving up on the fellow, and was about to set off towards Paseo de la Castellana, abandoning any further attempt to calm the man down, but then the gorrilla, as if he had decided to wait no longer for his curse to take effect, but to become, instead, its artificer, had produced a butterfly knife with a seven-centimetre blade and launched himself on Deverne from behind, stabbing him repeatedly, in the chest and side according to one newspaper, in the back and abdomen according to another, in the back, the chest and the side of the chest according to a third. The reports also disagreed on the number of stab wounds: nine, ten and sixteen, but the reporter who gave that last figure – and who was possibly the most reliable because he mentioned ‘autopsy results’ – added that ‘every blow struck a vital organ’ and that ‘according to the pathologist who carried out the autopsy, five proved fatal’.

  Desvern had initially tried to get away from the man and escape, but the blows had been so fast and furious and brutal – and, apparently, so accurate – that there had been no way he could evade them and he soon collapsed and fell to the ground. Only then did the murderer stop. A security guard at a nearby company ‘saw what was happening and managed to detain the man until the police arrived, saying: “You’re not leaving here until the police arrive!”’ There was no explanation as to how, with mere words, he had managed to immobilize an armed man, who was completely out of control and who had just spilled a great deal of blood – perhaps he did so at gunpoint, but none of the articles mentioned a gun or that he had got a gun out and pointed it at the assailant – because various sources stated that the gorrilla was still holding the knife when the police arrived, and that they had been the ones who ordered him to drop it. The man then threw it down on the ground, was handcuffed and taken to the local police station. ‘According to Madrid’s chief of police’ – these or similar words appeared in all the newspapers – ‘the alleged murderer was brought before a court, but refused to make a statement.’

  Luis Felipe Vázquez Canella had been living for some time in the area in an abandoned car, and here again the testimony of neighbours differed, as always happens when one asks or tells a story to more than one person. For some, he was a very calm, polite individual who never caused any trouble: he spent his time earning a little money by looking for parking spaces and guiding drivers to them with the usual imperious, obliging gestures that go with the job – his services were sometimes unnecessary or unwanted, but that is how all gorrillas work. He would arrive at about midday, leave his two blue rucksacks at the foot of a tree, and set about his intermittent task. Other residents, however, said that they had become fed up with ‘his violent outbursts and evident insanity’, and had often tried to get him thrown out of his static mobile home and have him removed from the neighbourhood, but without success. Although Vázquez Canella had no previous police record, Deverne’s chauffeur had been the victim of one of his outbursts only a month before. The beggar had addressed him very rudely and, taking advantage of the fact that the chauffeur had his window wound down, had punched him in the face. The police were duly informed and arrested him briefly for assault, but, in the end, the chauffeur, a
lthough ‘injured’, had taken pity on the man and decided not to make a formal complaint. And on the eve of Desvern’s death, victim and executioner had had their first argument. The gorrilla had made his usual wild allegations. According to one of the more talkative concierges in the street where the stabbing took place, ‘He talked about his daughters and about his money, saying that “they” wanted to take his money away from him.’ Another version described how: ‘The victim explained to him that he had got the wrong person and that he had nothing to do with his affairs. The bewildered beggar then wandered off, muttering to himself.’ Somewhat embellishing the narrative and taking a few liberties with the people actually involved, it added: ‘Miguel could never have imagined that, twenty-four hours later, Luis Felipe’s delusions would cost him his life. The script written for him had begun to take shape a month earlier’ – this was a reference to the incident with the chauffeur, who some neighbours saw as the real object of the beggar’s rage: ‘Who knows, perhaps he had it in for the chauffeur,’ one of them was reported to have said, ‘and got him mixed up with his boss.’ It was suggested that the gorrilla had been in a foul mood for a month or more, because, with the installation of parking meters in the area, he could no longer earn any money with his already sporadic work. One of the newspapers mentioned in passing a disconcerting fact that none of the others had picked up: ‘The alleged murderer refused to make a statement, and so we have been unable to confirm whether or not he and his victim were related by marriage, as some people in the neighbourhood believed.’