That spring, I took French classes, and soon became fluent in the language. In time, I was hired by an organization that worked with immigrants from North Africa. Though I had several contacts in the Moroccan community, I chose not to make any inquiries about Abdel. We had been involved in something that had endangered us. It was also more than I could have ever expected, or hoped for. To pursue it would be willful. Greedy. It was enough. I never saw him again, or heard mention of his name. I could only assume that he had moved elsewhere.
Once in a while, after work, I would take the metro up to Sarrià, and I would appear at Baltasar’s door with some delicacy I had bought in Foix—he was fond of the pinenut-encrusted marzipan balls known as panellets—or with a couple of Styrofoam boxes of patatas bravas from Bar Tomás. I would drink a glass of something with him, and later, towards midnight, when the streets had largely emptied of people, we would go for a walk, and I always wondered what local residents made of us if they happened to glance out of their windows as we went past.
THE KING OF CASTELLDEFELS
I’M LYING ON MY BACK in someone’s garden. It feels late. My mouth tastes of red wine. Cigarettes. There’s a big house behind me. I’m not sure whose it is. Above my head is an umbrella pine, its branches blacker than the sky.
I look down at myself. I’m wearing trousers I’ve never seen before. With their loud check pattern, they look like they might belong to a golfer, but I don’t know anybody who plays golf except a guy I call the dodgy Swede, and he’s been away all summer, in Helsinki.
I can hear the trickle of a filter system. There must be a pool nearby.
Where am I?
Everything’s floating, flowing. Brain, skin, lawn—it’s all the same.
My phone goes off. Tinny little ringtone. That’ll be my girlfriend, Cristiani. I let the phone take a message. I just need to lie here for a while.
If I lie here for a while, things’ll be okay.
* * *
—
MY NAME is Ignacio Gomez Cabrera—Nacho, to most people—and I’ve lived in Castelldefels for fifteen years, ever since my marriage ended. It’s half an hour southwest of Barcelona, along a strip of oil-stained, down-at-heel motorway. There are clubs with neon signs that crackle on and off, and tall stands of bleached-out pampas grass, and hookers in plastic miniskirts and wrap-around shades who look like they’ve just been teleported in from outer space. Part dormitory town, part beach resort, Castelldefels has always had its own unique atmosphere, especially at night—a low-level buzz, a foxiness, a slightly sleazy cool. My apartment dates from the 1970s. So does my furniture. Naugahyde armchairs, a teak stereogram. A glass-fronted cocktail cabinet. All original. I’m on the ground floor, three streets back from the Passeig Maritím, and I’ve got a patio with crazy paving and a kidney-shaped pool with a built-in jacuzzi. It’s a good setup.
For the last seven years I’ve been with Cristiani. I’m sixty-four, she’s thirty-nine. I met her in Carinhoso, a Brazilian club not far from where I live. I’d arranged to have a drink with Oriol, a musician friend I hadn’t seen for ages. He wasn’t there when I arrived, but that didn’t surprise me. Oriol was always late—for everything. I was sitting at a table in the corner when a waitress I didn’t recognize came over. I ordered a rum-and-Coke, then followed her with my eyes as she moved off. She was wearing metallic-blue high heels. When she had almost reached the bar, she glanced back at me, over one shoulder. Women always know when you’re watching them, even if they’re not looking. I felt empty, giddy, faintly sick, as if my blood sugar had plummeted.
I asked Emerson about her. Emerson owned the place.
“That’s Cristiani.” He looked across at her and ran his snaky tongue over his lips. “She’s new.”
Five minutes later my phone vibrated on the smoked-glass tabletop. It was Oriol. He said he’d been inexplicably delayed.
I lit a Camel. “Do you mean unavoidably, Oriol, or is it something you can’t explain?”
He laughed.
“You’re not coming, are you,” I said.
He told me he was in Terrassa, then called me a few choice names, as if it was all my fault.
Terrassa is about fifty kilometers northwest of Castelldefels, and there’s no easy way of getting from one to the other, not unless you have a car, and Oriol, being Oriol, had never bothered learning how to drive. I’d been stood up. But a Chico Buarque song was playing on the sound system and I was being waited on by Cristiani, so I wasn’t too put out. I stayed on at the club.
Towards midnight Cristiani took my lighter off the table without asking and lit a cigarette. Narrowing her eyes against the smoke, she stood back, one hand on her hip. “You’re pretty stylish, aren’t you—for an old guy.”
Old guy. I was only fifty-seven then.
“You’re pretty stylish yourself,” I said. “Those shoes.”
She looked down. “You like them?”
“I do. And your feet. I like your feet as well.”
“You can’t see my feet.”
I smiled mysteriously, as if I had X-ray vision or something, then I asked where she was from.
She tapped a few gray flakes into the ashtray. “Brazil.”
“Yes, but where?”
“São Luis?” She made it sound like a question because she didn’t think I would’ve heard of it.
“There’s an outdoor club in São Luis,” I said, “over the bridge. I forget the name of it. I went there once.”
“The Bela Vista?” She was so startled and delighted that her face had opened up wide. It wasn’t a smile exactly. More like a kind of radiance.
“The Bela Vista. That’s it!” Though to be honest I wasn’t sure.
“You were in the Bela Vista? I don’t believe it. I used to go there when I was, like, sixteen.”
I told her about the night I got into a VW Beetle with a guy called João and some of his friends, and how we drove to an apartment block on the far side of the river. We picked our way across a darkened room that was full of people lying on the floor, asleep, and then smoked grass on a tiny balcony, looking out into a warm wild blackness. We were six or seven stories up. There were almost no lights in that part of town, or maybe there had been a brownout. A strong wind blew the smell of mud into our faces. Later, we clattered down the stairs, laughing. When we parked outside the Bela Vista, the driver was so high he couldn’t even get out of the car. I went in with João and the others, and we ordered a round of drinks. A live band was playing a song made famous by Gilberto Gil. At some point I went to check on the driver. When I opened the car door, he toppled sideways like a sack of rice. I had to lift him up and wedge him back behind the wheel.
Cristiani was nodding. “I used to know guys like that.”
I had been to her hometown, which seemed enough of a basis on which to ask her out, and perhaps because she was still marveling at the coincidence she said yes.
A few nights later I took her to an upmarket seafood place where I was a regular. It turned out that she had been married before, as I had. She didn’t say much about her ex, only that he used to deal coke, and that she’d left him while he was doing time in La Modelo for assault and possession of a firearm. He came looking for her the moment he got out, as she had known he would. Men like that, she said, they don’t let nothing go, even if they don’t want it any more. Makes them look weak. There had been a few nervous years in the mid-nineties, when she didn’t answer the phone or the door for fear it might be him, but he was back in Brazil now—Fortaleza, last she heard—and she’d had no news from him in ages. He could be dead for all I know, she said. In fact, I kind of hope he is. She crossed herself, then glanced up through the ceiling to where God sat in judgment. I imagined him shaking his head in exasperation or dismay, and then forgiving her. God always forgave Cristiani. He just couldn’t help himself.
When she first mentioned her
ex, I felt like backing off—I’d been around some of those characters myself, and I knew how they could set fire to your life—but she swore that he was gone, and I was touched that she cared enough to want to put my mind at rest.
She asked me what I did, as people always do. I chose not to talk about the restaurants I used to own, and my other business interests were too complex to go into. Instead, I told her I was a musician, which was less true, though not a complete lie. As a young man, I’d played piano in a jazz ensemble called the Elsa Slump Quartet. Elsa came from east Tennessee, and she had one of those smoky cracked voices that make you think of neon in the rain at night and love gone wrong. We toured all over Europe, everywhere from Tromsø to Tarifa. We were even booked by the Blue Note in Greenwich Village once. Then, in the mid-seventies, we just sort of drifted apart. These days, when I played, it was usually with friends, after a few drinks, or sometimes I did a residency at one of the big hotels. The clientele wasn’t exactly classy—a mix of traveling salesmen, tourist couples with sunburnt shoulders, and husbands cheating on their wives—but at least I could walk home afterwards.
I made Cristiani laugh a lot that night, and when I asked if she fancied a nightcap she leaned across and kissed me on the mouth. Once in my apartment, I opened a bottle of Mount Gay and mixed two Hurricanes while she moved slowly from one room to another and then out through the sliding glass door onto the patio. When I brought her cocktail out to her, she was sitting by the pool, at the deep end, with her feet dangling in the water.
“Have a swim if you like,” I said.
She shook her head. “I’m way too drunk. I think I’d drown.”
I sat near her, on a lounger.
After a while, she looked back through the picture window. “It’s a lot of space,” she said, “for just one guy.”
I smiled, but didn’t say a word.
Back indoors, she asked me to play something, and I had a stab at “All the Things You Are,” my favorite Dave Brubeck track. I was drunk too, and I messed it up, but Cristiani didn’t notice. Later, she told me she’d been mesmerized by the way my fingers moved over the keys. Made her feel horny, she said.
When I woke the next day, the bathroom door was open and Cristiani was bent over the toilet in a pair of pale-green knickers, being sick. It was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.
“What did you do to me?” she murmured.
Afterwards, she lay across the crumpled sheets with a dishcloth full of ice cubes on her forehead. She swore in weak, husky Portuguese that she would never touch dark rum again.
Three months later, she was living in my apartment.
* * *
—
WHEN CRISTIANI MOVED IN, her seven-year-old son, Aristides, came with her, like one of those supermarket deals where you get a free mug with a wedge of Parmesan. I already had two children of my own, and I didn’t particularly want any more. I certainly didn’t want evidence of Cristiani’s shady past shoved in my face twenty-four hours a day—Ari was the child she’d had with the trigger-happy drug dealer—but what could I do? It was either both of them or nothing. During the time I had lived as a bachelor, I had fallen into the habit of spending my weekend mornings in a local bar called Bang Bang. I would have a few beers and catch up on the gossip with Pepe, the guy who ran the place. Some women would have tried to change me. Not Cristiani. On the first Saturday, when I told her I was going out, she just said she’d see me in a couple of hours, for lunch, confirming something I’d already guessed about her: she would let me be myself. I was so relieved I asked if she’d like me to take Ari.
“Sure,” she said. “You guys go to the bar.”
It became a ritual. Every Saturday, I would leave the apartment with Ari at about eleven. I taught him how to order drinks and how to get me cigarettes from the machine, but he spent most of his time by the window reading comics, a glass of Coke fizzing at his elbow. I would walk over now and then and ask if he needed anything—another soft drink? more crisps?—and he would smile, as if touched by my attentiveness.
Once, when I checked on him, I found him flipping through that day’s edition of Mundo Deportivo.
“You like football?” I said.
He looked up at me. “Doesn’t everyone?”
I hadn’t showed the slightest interest in sport before, not even as a boy. I had never understood what people got so worked up about. I knew there was an intense rivalry between the city’s two football teams, FC Barcelona and Espanyol, but it was Ari who taught me the difference between them. He gave me potted histories of the clubs, including their political affiliations, and then described the current squads, player by player. His conclusion was that we should support FC Barcelona—it was richer, and more successful—unless, of course, I had a fondness for the underdog.
“No,” I said. “Barça it is.”
I approved of his thorough, almost intellectual approach, and in the back of my mind there lurked the thought that Cristiani would love me all the more if I appeared to be bonding with her son.
On our first visit to the Camp Nou, we watched Barça play Real Mallorca in the league. It was early in the season, a regular Sunday evening in October, but as Ari said on the drive into the city—and this was typical of him—it was better to start quietly and then build up. All the same, when we walked into that deep well of a stadium, with the watered, floodlit green of the pitch below us and the full moon trapped in a neat circle of evening sky above, I don’t know which one of us was the more excited. Cristiani had called us her “two men” as she said goodbye to us, but we were more like a couple of kids, and as the weeks passed I began to look forward to arriving in Barcelona on a match night—the streets packed with fans on motorbikes, the scratchy feel of a ten-euro Barça scarf around my neck, the hot dogs with fried onions at halftime…
Towards the end of that first game, I nudged Ari in the ribs. “I want to thank you.”
He peered at me through his glasses. “For what?”
“You brought me here.” Looking around, I opened my hands. “Without you, none of this would’ve happened.”
* * *
—
IN THE SUMMER of 2003 FC Barcelona signed Ronaldinho from Paris Saint-Germain. He was already world famous by then, thanks partly to the spectacular forty-yard free kick he had scored against England in the World Cup quarterfinals the year before. Ari’s reaction to the news was muted. He was troubled by Ronaldinho’s tricks, and by his lack of consistency. He worried the Brazilian star was a show pony, and might not adapt to Barça’s style.
For as long as I could remember there had been a Brazilian community in Castelldefels, so it didn’t surprise me when I heard that Ronaldinho had bought a mansion in Las Heras, an exclusive neighborhood in the hills above the town.
Ronnie.
There was no one in Barcelona who didn’t know his name. He was more or less the first person you saw when you flew into the city. As you left the airport, passing the Estrella beer factory, there was a giant billboard with Ronnie on it, brandishing a packet of sugar-free gum—Ronnie with his glistening braids tied back in a ponytail, Ronnie with his infectious, bucktoothed grin…
One Saturday morning, about eighteen months after he had signed for Barça, I set out for the bar, as usual. Ari had a fever that day, and he had stayed at home, in bed. I’d just stopped at a junction to light a cigarette when a big silver SUV pulled up next to me. I looked round, and there was Ronnie, his eyes shielded by designer shades, reggaeton blasting through the half-open window. A diamond the size of a chick pea glittered in his ear.
“Ronnie!” I had to raise my voice to make myself heard over the music. “You’re a legend.”
He showed me those famous fucked-up teeth of his.
I remember Barça were playing at home the following evening, a game I would watch on TV with Ari, if he felt well enough.
“Good luck tomorrow,” I shouted.
Still grinning, Ronnie gave me a thumbs-up, then drove away.
What passed between us during those few, seemingly inconsequential seconds is difficult to describe. There was a current, certainly. A kind of connection.
When I let myself into the apartment two hours later, the heated-up remains of the previous night’s feijoada was already on the table, and Cristiani was standing at the sink, washing her hands. She was wearing a short skirt made of a stretchy, tight-fitting material, and her feet were bare. The cherry varnish on her toenails was chipped but vivid. It looked as if she had the hangover I should’ve had, a hangover I’d headed off with half a dozen cañas and the odd crafty belt of whiskey.
“That smells great,” I said as I fetched a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon and a corkscrew.
“You’re in a good mood,” she said, not looking round.
“You know why?”
“Because you’re drunk again?”
Cristiani had a vicious streak that always made me want to hug her. I felt quickened by her sharpness.
“As it happens,” I said, pouring us both a glass of mellow red, “I just met Ronaldinho.”
She turned to face me. “You’re kidding, right?”
I smiled. “I’m not kidding.”
Once we sat down to eat, I filled her in on my encounter with Ronnie, and how I had felt something pass between us.
“Strange you should see him first,” she said. “Emerson told me he showed up at the club.”
Cristiani still waitressed at Carinhoso now and then, if Emerson needed helping out. He’d always had a soft spot for her. It was Emerson who had bought her those metallic-blue high heels, though she swore blind that nothing had ever happened between them. She could never go with a man like that, she said. He looked like a pimp. She’d feel dirty. But you let him buy you a pair of shoes, I wanted to say. You gave him a foot in the door, so to speak. I kept quiet, though, knowing that if I seemed to be finding fault it would light a touchpaper in her. I didn’t bring up her convict of a husband either. If she felt the urge to rewrite her life story, that was fine by me. Maybe that was why she’d chosen me, so she could erase some old unhappy version of herself. And it was true that Emerson looked like a pimp. He wore his hair long, even though he was going bald—it snaggled over his collar in limp, oily ringlets—and he always left the top five or six buttons of his shirt undone so everybody could admire the slew of gold medallions that hung between his pumped-up pectorals. Cristiani once said it looked as if someone had dumped a whole pile of loose change on his chest, which made me laugh at the time. Later, I wondered if she hadn’t given herself away. To come up with an image like that, wouldn’t you have to see the person naked, and lying down?
Barcelona Dreaming Page 7