Barcelona Dreaming

by Rupert Thomson

  Nonetheless, appeals for Abdel ben Tajah to come forward appeared on all the local TV stations, and in the newspapers as well. The police claimed they needed him to assist with their inquiries, but I had the feeling that if he turned himself in he would be treated as an accomplice, if not the perpetrator, and I was relieved when the appeals had no effect. If I’d been him, I would have left the city. Perhaps he still had friends in Almería. He could make his way south and lie low. Wait for the whole sordid business to blow over.

  Since the press had taken to doorstepping me, camping on the pavement outside my apartment building, I closed my shop and went to stay with Montse and Jaume, who did everything they could to stop me thinking about the impending court case. Montse took a few days off work, and we drove up the coast to the Golf de Roses. We stayed at a hotel she knew, which had a small bay all to itself. We swam two or three times a day, and lay in the autumn sunlight, reading books. One afternoon, we explored the ruins of the ancient city of Empúries, with its wind-softened temple columns and its exquisite and virtually unspoiled floor mosaics, the dark-blue sea in the background, only a few miles away, its surface flecked with white.

  Back in Barcelona, we went for walks in the Parc de l’Oreneta and the Parc del Labyrinth. At the weekends we used the mushrooms we had picked in the Collserola to make omelettes and risotto. We sat up late and drank too much red wine. Though Montse was behind me “one hundred percent,” there was a night in the kitchen when she looked at me sidelong and said she’d been afraid that something like this might happen.

  “Something like this?” I was startled. “You mean you thought someone would get killed?”

  Montse smiled and shook her head, then crushed out her cigarette in the ashtray. “Of course not. But you’ve got to admit, the way you were behaving was extreme—”

  “You sound as if you’re blaming me.”

  “I’m not, love. All I’m saying is, I was worried about you.” Montse paused. “The whole thing seemed so volatile.”

  Of all the people who took my side, Mar was by far the most strident. She was back at Bristol, and in her final year, but she called and texted me so regularly that I was never in any doubt as to where her loyalties lay.

  “You stood up for your principles,” she said on the phone in late October. “You did the right thing.”

  “But he died—”

  “And who was the aggressor? Who started it?”

  Pol’s attitude couldn’t have been more different. His discovery that I had been seeing a Moroccan immigrant half my age shocked him even more than the fact that I was implicated in my next-door neighbor’s death. He believed I was trying to destroy myself. Kamikaze behavior, he called it.

  We met only once during that time, on the Carretera de les Aïgues, an unpaved road that wound its way across the hills at the back of the city. When I pulled up outside the Villa Paula he was already there, sitting behind the wheel of his BMW, and I had the illusion, just for a moment, that I was having an affair with him, and that we were about to have sex, either in my car or in his. I switched off the engine, then rubbed my eyes.

  Pol didn’t see me approaching—he was so deep in his thoughts, it seemed, that he hadn’t heard me arrive—and when I tapped on his window he started so violently that he almost hit his head on the roof. I stepped back, and he opened the door.

  “Do you have to creep up on me like that?” he said. “Jesus.” He got out of his car and locked it.

  “Shall we walk a little?” I said. “Do you have time?”

  “I have time.” His voice had a sigh in it, and I could imagine him as an old man suddenly, abrupt and querulous. The vision saddened me.

  We walked side by side for a while without speaking, though I felt him glancing at me surreptitiously, as if to catch a glimpse of the woman the media were talking about—the woman I’d become…

  “How have you been?” I asked.

  He laughed a quick dry laugh that came out through his nose.

  “I suppose you’re angry,” I said.

  He came to a halt. “Angry?” he said distantly. “Maybe.” He looked at me for the first time, and I saw that his face was flushed. “Christ, Amy. I mean, what did you think you were doing?”

  “Which part are you talking about?” There was an edge to my voice that I did nothing to disguise.

  “Don’t be obtuse.” He kicked at the road’s dusty surface.

  The city lay spread out below us, a city I now thought of as my own. I wondered whether Abdel was down there. If so, what would he be doing? Something ordinary, I imagined, like sitting at a table or taking a shower. Or was he in hiding? Had he left the city, after all? I stared at the clutter of pink-and-white buildings as if they might be about to let me know.

  “I fell for him,” I said, half to myself. “I really fell for him.”

  Pol looked away again. He seemed to be studying the grass verge. A cyclist in sunglasses and multicolored Lycra fizzed past.

  “Is that so strange?” I went on. “You fall for people all the time.”

  “He was a sex worker, Amy. He went with men.”

  “He was Moroccan too. You forgot to mention that.”

  “The way you sound,” Pol said, “you’d think it was me who was in the wrong.”

  I let his words hang on in the air for a few seconds. They were worth thinking about.

  “I don’t recognize you,” he said eventually.

  “You never did,” I said. “You never did recognize me.”

  I walked away from him before he could say anything else. I couldn’t bear to have him in front of me. He was as bad as all the others. Worse, actually. Because he had loved me once. Because he was supposed to know me. Because he was bound to me by what we had in common—a child. I stopped outside a house that was built on a steep slope in the land, its flat concrete roof on a level with the road. Though it overlooked the whole of the city, it had a feral, run-down feel to it, like a hideout for poachers or thieves. The front door used to be green, but most of the paint had flaked off, and chicken wire had been nailed over the windows. In the garden, which was made up of half a dozen narrow, unwatered terraces, there were bits of rusting machinery and several splintery wooden hutches. I had once seen a dog rooting about down there. With its rangy, muscular body and rheumy eyes, it had looked as wild and neglected as the property itself. I had no idea who the owners or the occupants might be. I must have walked past the house a hundred times, and I had never seen a living soul.

  “I’m sorry.”

  I spun round. I’d forgotten that I wasn’t alone.

  Pol was considering the ground in front of him, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders rounded, as if he had shrunk into himself. “I’m sorry for everything that happened,” he said. “I’m sorry for what went wrong between us.”

  “I’m sorry too,” I said.

  “What you were doing—it was reckless.”

  “So people keep telling me.”

  “But it’s over now…” His eyes lifted, and he looked at me warily.

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re all right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m all right.”

  He made a sound that wasn’t quite a word, then came up close and wrapped me in his arms. I was too astonished to resist. And then I didn’t want to. There was the sudden sound of people running towards us along the road. Lots of them. They seemed in step with each other, their footfalls coinciding, like a Roman cohort moving at full speed. Something was said as they passed by. I heard good-natured laughter. My face was turned to one side, my cheek against Pol’s jacket. A green lizard flickered across the flat roof of the house.

  “Did you see that?” Pol said.

  “See what?”

  “Some Barça players just ran past. Players who are injured sometimes train up here in the day.” He paused
. “Ronaldinho grinned at us.”

  I stepped back and looked into his face. “Will you visit me when I’m in prison?”

  He grasped me by the shoulders and held me at arm’s length. There was a lightness around his eyes, and everything poisonous or poisoned dropped away, revealing the outline of whatever it was I’d fallen in love with all those years ago.

  “It won’t come to that,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  THE MOMENT THE TRIAL BEGAN, things went against me. The principal witness for the prosecution was the driver of the car that had struck the deceased. Though he had not been charged, there was a sense in which he was defending himself. He had to make sure that I took all the blame for what had happened. Watching him testify in his dark-blue suit and his sensible brown shoes, I felt shabby, doomed. He told the court that events had unfolded right in front of him, lit up by his headlights. “Like a piece of theater,” he said. He was so fluent that I suspected he had been rehearsing. It was even possible that he’d been coached. He had seen two people push an old man into the road, he went on. Though he’d been driving slowly, he’d had no time to react. He identified me as one of those responsible. He said that I hadn’t lifted a finger to help. I hadn’t called an ambulance, or the police. He’d had to do all that himself. He had also heard me tell my accomplice, Abdel ben Tajah, to leave the scene. My lawyer challenged the use of the word “accomplice.” If Mr. ben Tajah was innocent, the driver said, why would he leave? The driver of the second car was able to confirm that Mr. ben Tajah had made a run for it. He didn’t run, I told the court later, when I was cross-examined. He walked. There was laughter in the public gallery, which angered the judge. And anyway, I went on, it was me. I was the one who gave Senyor Artes a push. My friend had nothing to do with it. Looking down at her papers, the prosecutor allowed herself a discreet smile, as if I had fallen into a trap she had laid for me. I might have pushed Senyor Artes, I added, but I’d had no intention of pushing him into the road. He had staggered backwards. Lost his balance. Senyor Artes assaulted my friend, I said, and I was just trying to protect him. But Abdel was absent, and couldn’t corroborate my version of events. The prosecution called several character witnesses for the deceased. It turned out that he had lived his entire life in Sarrià. He had worked as a waiter, then as a lorry driver. Later, he had run a shop that sold wines and spirits. He had even served on the council in a minor capacity. Much to my amazement, everyone seemed to have liked Artes. The worst that could be said of him, a work colleague told the court, was that he could sometimes be a little gruff. Gruff? I almost choked.

  On the third day, however, the trial took an unexpected turn. My lawyer called a new witness. Baltasar Gallego Magallón. The doors at the back of the court opened, and there was a gasp, as if all the air had been sucked out of the room. The name was unfamiliar to me, but I could hardly fail to recognize the man who stepped into the witness box. His extraordinary height, his old-fashioned hair. The way his knee and ankle joints seemed to need tightening. I would never forget the sight of him emerging from that side street at two-thirty in the morning as I walked home from Montse’s house.

  Once he had confirmed his name, he was asked to inform the court of his address. He lived on the same street as the defendant, he said, in the building opposite. His apartment was on the third floor, at the front. This came as a complete surprise to me. On meeting him, I had assumed he lived somewhere in Sarrià, but I’d had no idea that he might be my neighbor. I had never so much as caught a glimpse of him, even though it had been almost two years since I’d moved in. But I was missing his testimony.

  “…I usually sleep during the day. It’s my way of avoiding people.” He paused. “I should really be asleep right now.”

  A murmur of amusement went through the court.

  “You say you avoid people,” my lawyer said. “Why is that?”

  “Didn’t you notice the reaction when I walked into the room?”

  My lawyer nodded.

  “It’s what has always happened,” Senyor Magallón went on, “ever since I was a child. People pointing and staring—making jokes…”

  “But if you only go out at night,” my lawyer said, “there are fewer people around, and you attract less attention?”

  “Exactly.” Magallón glanced at me and smiled faintly, and I knew he was thinking of our chance meeting on Major de Sarrià.

  “On the evening in question, you woke at about seven o’clock. Is that correct?”

  Magallón nodded. “They’re digging up the drains not far from where I live, and the drilling kept me awake. I got up later than usual.”

  “Did you see the defendant that evening?”

  “Yes, I was on my terrace when she left her building. This would have been at about nine o’clock. Her Moroccan friend was with her.”

  “And did you see them return?”

  “I did.”

  It was close to midnight, he said, and he was sitting by his living-room window, looking down into the street. Unlike the driver of the first car, whose account was partial, at best, he had witnessed the entire incident, from beginning to end. He had seen Senyor Artes step out of the building and light a cigar. Looking to his left, he saw the defendant and her friend approaching. He noticed that the young man seemed to hang back, as if he wanted to avoid a confrontation. He thought he heard the defendant say, “It’s my home as well.” Words to that effect, anyway. The street was narrow, he explained, with tall apartment buildings on both sides. Voices tended to carry.

  When the couple arrived at the entrance to the building, he saw Senyor Artes bar their way. He also heard Artes use abusive language, he said, and this was nothing new. He had witnessed previous altercations between the defendant and the deceased, and had been shocked by the insults the defendant had been exposed to on a regular basis. In fact, he was surprised she had put up with it. If he—Magallón—had been the object of such treatment, he would have complained to the authorities.

  My lawyer interrupted. “But on that particular night?”

  Magallón looked across at me with somber eyes. On that particular night, he said, he had watched dumbfounded as Senyor Artes launched a completely unprovoked attack on the young Moroccan man, striking him across the face with his walking stick. It was true that the defendant had pushed Artes, but she had been acting in self-defense. After all, he might have struck her next. That night, he seemed capable of anything. The push caught Artes off balance, and he had lost his footing. That was why he had stumbled backwards into the path of the car that happened to be approaching at that moment. There had been no malicious intent on the part of the defendant. The whole thing had been an accident—an unfortunate accident. Magallón paused. In a way, he went on, Senyor Artes only had himself to blame. He, Baltasar Gallego Magallón, didn’t wish to speak ill of the dead, but he had never come across such an extreme example of irascibility and prejudice in his entire life—and as a giant, he added, using the word for the first time, and giving it a savage, sardonic twist, he was something of an expert in prejudice.

  * * *

  —

  NOT LONG AFTER the case against me was dropped, I closed my shop for good. I had been acquitted in a court of law—the judge ruled that the death was accidental—but I had slept with a man who was half my age, a man who had worked as a male prostitute, and thanks to the lurid media coverage I had acquired a kind of notoriety that could only damage a business like mine. I gave notice on my apartment and found a new place downtown, in the Raval, where no one knew me and no one cared. It had two tiny bedrooms, and a narrow balcony where I could put my lemon tree and my geraniums, and I was paying less than half what I had paid in Sarrià. I gave my Marquesa plant to Montse and Jaume. Mar told me she preferred the Raval. Though she had liked Sarrià well enough, she had always found it a bit conservative. Quiet too.

  “Well, it’ll be a whole lot
quieter now I’m not there,” I said.

  She laughed at that.

  In January, when I was settled, I went to call on Senyor Magallón. I wanted to thank him for coming to my aid. For saving me, really. It felt strange to turn the corner into my old street, to ignore my own building and enter the one that stood opposite. I climbed the stairs to the third floor. When Magallón answered the door, he didn’t seem overly surprised to see me. Inviting me in, he showed me to a table by the window and offered me red wine. I saw that he couldn’t stand upright, but had to walk through the small apartment with his head at a slight angle. He noticed me noticing. He dreamed of moving to the first floor, he told me, where the ceilings were higher. A rueful smile came and went on his huge face. It saddened him that I had left the area, he said—he had seen the removals van from his terrace—but at the same time he understood. He asked if I had succeeded in making a new life for myself, and I said that I had, and that it was all thanks to him. He looked at me steadily, then reached for his glass and emptied it.

  “I lied,” he said.

  I met his gaze, but didn’t follow.

  “In court,” he said. “I lied.”

  Not about the incident itself, he went on, which he had witnessed, as he claimed to have done, but about Senyor Artes constantly insulting me. He didn’t know anything about that. He’d made it up.

  “Why would you do that?” I said. “Why would you lie?”

  “Because I knew you were telling the truth. I knew you were innocent.”

  I told him he had risked his own freedom—he had committed perjury—but he shrugged and said he had no regrets. He would do the same again, if the opportunity arose. He felt justice had been done. He poured us both a second glass, and we talked of other things.