* * *
—
IT WAS MY HABIT, most evenings, to go for a walk. I would start near the yacht club and head off down the beach, into the setting sun, only turning round when I reached the final chiringuito. In its width and bleakness, the beach looked Dutch, though the Dutch beaches I had known were scoured by fierce winds and backed onto low dunes and tufts of marram grass, memories of Sunday outings with Elsa, the two of us in long black overcoats and sunglasses. In Castelldefels, I carried a pair of old espadrilles, and made sure I had Camels in my jacket pocket. I liked how they tasted when I smoked them by the sea.
One evening at the end of 2006, only a few months after the party at Carinhoso, I saw a familiar figure jogging towards me, his ponytail swishing from side to side. Dressed in a white baseball shirt and baggy white shorts, he was running barefoot on the firm damp sand, just out of reach of the waves. He was on his own, which surprised me. Somehow I had imagined that he was so valuable and so much in demand that he would be constantly surrounded, even while he slept.
When he noticed me, he slowed to a walk. A low sun shone over my shoulder, into his face. He wore his two-carat diamond ear studs, as usual, and his signature R10 medallion. Like a racehorse, he was handicapped—with jewelry. As the distance between us closed, I was struck by how vivid he was. It was as if he was differently constructed than the rest of us, more densely pixelated. He filled the space he occupied to the very limit. He pushed his own envelope. Physically, of course, but also spiritually. Esoterically. For that reason, perhaps, he seemed—I don’t know—bigger. I wondered which had come first, the charisma or the fame.
He clasped my hand. “Hey Nacho, you’re laughing.”
“I’m just happy to see you, Ronnie,” I said. “I don’t know what it is. You carry some kind of charge around with you. I feel it. The city feels it too. It’s glad you’re here.”
He looked beyond me, into the setting sun. He might have been jogging, but he hadn’t even broken sweat. “You want to go for a run?” He was trying not to grin. With Ronnie, a grin was never far away.
I lit a cigarette. “I’m sixty-something. It would probably kill me.”
“And that won’t?” He gestured at my cigarette.
“Your Spanish is coming along nicely.”
He moved past me, and I turned and walked with him, back the way I had come, my cigarette in one hand, my shoes in the other.
“Shouldn’t you keep going?” I said. “I don’t want to hold you up.”
“I already did two training sessions, at La Masia.”
“Are you feeling good about Sunday?”
He nodded. “What you just said about my Spanish—”
“I meant it.”
“No, I need to improve. My accent’s terrible.”
Bending down, I pressed my cigarette butt into the sand. I was tempted to tell him that he really should be learning Catalan—he was in Catalunya, after all—but this was Ronaldinho I was dealing with, so I bit my tongue.
“I’d be happy to help you out,” I said.
“Some conversation would be good,” he said. “You know, everyday stuff. Football, music—girls…”
He eased his toes under an abandoned Styrofoam coffee cup, balanced it on top of his foot, then flicked it up onto his forehead. It was magical, what he could do. But there was nobody anywhere nearby. Nobody saw. It must be strange for him, I thought, to be performing with an audience of one. No roar of the crowd, no rapturous chanting of his name…Perhaps it made a change, though. Perhaps it came as a relief. Time out. Or perhaps it was all connected, the private and the public, everything flowing from the horn of plenty that was his genius.
“You think you could do that, caballero?” His face was parallel with the sky, the Styrofoam cup resting, rim down, on his forehead. “You think you could talk to me now and then?” With a jerk of his neck muscles, he flipped the cup into the air and volleyed it right-footed into an approaching wave, then he looked heavenwards with both arms raised and the middle fingers of each hand tucked into his palms, as he always did when he scored a goal, and I suddenly saw how young he was, younger even than my daughters, almost still a boy.
“When do you want to start?” I said.
He lowered his arms. “Come over to the house. We’ll have a barbecue. Are you free next Tuesday?”
“Tuesday?” I pretended to be thinking. “I don’t know, Ronnie. I’ll have to see if I can fit it into my busy schedule.”
* * *
—
MY WIFE MONTSE divorced me because she thought I was having an affair. Appearing without warning at the restaurant one afternoon, she found me sitting on the terrace with a waitress called Carmen. I was holding Carmen’s hand and talking to her in a low murmur. I wanted her to remember what I was saying, and I didn’t want anybody else to overhear. Carmen was a beauty—dark-blond hair, dark-brown eyes—but she had rejected my advances not long after I hired her, only to be dumped a few months later by her racing-driver boyfriend, and on the afternoon in question I was trying to comfort her, with no hidden agenda of my own, my attentiveness heightened by the slightly sadistic pleasure I was taking in the fact that she was suffering. I don’t know how long Montse watched us for. Long enough, in any case, to see what she’d expected to see. Long enough to have her suspicions confirmed.
“I knew it,” she said as she stepped onto the terrace.
“Montse? What are you doing here?” I turned to Carmen. “Carmen, this is Montse. My wife.”
Carmen stared up at her, swollen-eyed.
“Nice to meet you,” Montse said. “Now get lost.”
As Carmen ran back into the restaurant—she handed in her notice that same afternoon—I rose to my feet, lifting my arms away from my sides. “Montse, it’s not what you—”
“It’s not what I what?”
I sighed.
“I’ve had it up to here,” she said, “with your pathetic adolescent fucking around.”
People were beginning to stare.
The irony was, I was guilty—in general, at least. I had been unfaithful to Montse throughout our marriage, though not, as it happened, in the previous six months. Wiser then to focus on the specific charge, of which I was, sad to say, entirely innocent.
“Montse,” I said, managing to muster a little outrage, “there’s absolutely nothing going on between me and Carmen. She’s an em—”
“You think I’m a fool?” Montse said. “I know what I walked in on.” Her voice was scornful, withering. “You were telling her it’s over. That’s why she’s upset.”
She was so sure she was right and at the same time so wide of the mark that I had to laugh.
“All you walked in on,” I said, “was your own insecurity.”
Not a bad line, given I’d thought of it there and then.
Montse snatched up the ashtray and hurled it at me. A slurry of crushed butts, ash, and rainwater slid down the front of my white linen shirt. She stalked away, her long hair swinging like a soft pendulum against the small of her back, her legs taut and tanned.
“You know what your problem is?” she said, looking at me across one shoulder as she unlocked her jeep. “You’re a drunk.”
I pointed at the table where I’d been sitting. An empty coffee cup and Carmen’s can of Diet Coke. “I don’t see any alcohol.”
“Try looking in your bloodstream, fuckwit.”
The jeep roared away, back wheels spinning on the beige dirt of the restaurant car park.
Montse changed the locks that week, while I was at work, and I had to look for somewhere else to live. Though Beatriz and Imma were only four and two and a half, respectively, they were old enough to realize that something was broken, and they mourned its loss. I mourned it too. I couldn’t believe Montse was serious, and kept trying to persuade her that she was making a mistake, but she wou
ldn’t relent, not even for the sake of the girls. I had betrayed her, and she wanted to “cut my heart out,” as she told me more than once. She would never be able to trust me again. After two years, I stopped sending her pedres brunes from Foix and orchids from the garden center in Pedralbes. I also stopped taking her calls when her jeep wouldn’t start or when her income tax needed sorting out. I had done my utmost to win her back, and I had failed. It was time to turn away. Get on with my life. More than a decade had passed since I had touched a piano, but I bought a Yamaha DX7 secondhand and began to play again. I decided to make a study of Keith Jarrett—his technique had always impressed me—and I quickly grew to relish evenings spent in the apartment I rented round the corner from my old house. I would sit at my Yamaha in nothing but a pair of boxer shorts with the windows open and a bottle of wine or whiskey at my elbow, going over and over a piece called “Lalene.”
By the time Montse showed signs of wanting me back, it was too late. I had started dating Monica, a graphic designer in her thirties. Then it was Rosa. Then Mercé. I wasn’t with anyone for very long, which only confirmed Montse’s low opinion of me. I was faithless. Superficial. I was “a fucking butterfly.” So far as Beatriz and Imma were concerned, though, I lived on my own. I never introduced them to any of my girlfriends—not until Cristiani, that is. And you can imagine what Montse had to say about her. “Led by the balls” was one of her less provocative remarks. Well, yes. Obviously. But there was more to it than that. Cristiani didn’t try to force me to be something I didn’t want to be. There was no second-guessing involved, and no need for compromise. No sense that I might be letting her down. If I felt like staying out till four in the morning, that was fine with her. If I felt like staying home and watching TV, that was also fine.
To Montse’s surprise—and chagrin too, no doubt—Beatriz and Imma took to Cristiani right away. It would have been hard not to. She dressed them in flamboyant costumes and put on impromptu fashion shows. She taught them to cook Brazilian specialities like feijoada and moqueça. She transformed the patio into an outdoor nightclub—the Bela Vista!—with nonalcoholic cocktails and strings of colored lightbulbs, and the three of them would dance to bumba meu boi records from São Luis. Sometimes Ari would act as DJ or bartender. He was a few years younger than my daughters, and they liked to mother him and spoil him. They had always wanted a little brother, they said. First I’d heard of it, but still. There was I, thinking they would hate me, and that I would be constantly having to take sides or smooth ruffled feathers. Nothing of the kind. We all got on famously—for three or four years, anyway.
* * *
—
ONE SATURDAY in November 2006 I knocked on Ari’s door, as usual.
“It’s almost eleven,” I called through the painted wood.
There was no reply.
I opened the door. Ari was sitting on the edge of his bed with a magazine about BMX bikes open on his lap. He was staring at it so hard that I knew he wasn’t seeing it at all. It was just a way of not looking at me.
I kept my voice gentle, calm. “It’s time to go to the bar.”
“I’m not coming,” he muttered.
“What’s wrong? Are you ill?”
Without lifting his head, he shot me a fast, surly look that seemed to come from just below his eyebrows. “Do I look ill?”
I went to the window. It was a beautiful morning. I could already imagine how the light would fall in a bright wedge across the floor of the bar, and how the first gulp of beer would fizz down my parched throat.
“Guess who I saw the other day.”
Ari didn’t say anything, but I felt the curiosity rising out of him despite himself, like a genie.
“I was walking along the beach,” I went on, “as I often do in the evening, and who should come jogging along the sand but Ronaldinho.”
Ari shook his head. “That’s ridiculous.”
“There he was, like magic, right in front of me. He had this hip-hop outfit on—I don’t suppose ‘outfit’ is the right word—and he was wearing that medallion he always wears—you know, the one that says R10—”
“You’re making this up.”
“We started talking. He sort of teased me about going for a run.” I chuckled. “He seemed really friendly. You know—approachable. Wants me to give him Spanish lessons—”
“Spanish lessons?”
“He needs to work on his accent. He thinks I can help.”
“Why would he talk to you?”
“I’m the king,” I said, “remember?”
Ari gave me a different look this time, one of thinly veiled contempt. “It never happened.”
I had a strange slow feeling, as though my life force was ebbing away, and for a moment or two I thought I might pass out. Was it hypoglycemia? Or had I eaten something that disagreed with me? Then I realized what it was. My love for Ari was draining out of me, and I knew it would be hard to replenish or recapture. I felt emptier than I had in years. Worse still, I could hear Elsa singing in my head, her phrasing sluggish, sinister. Shoes on a table, broken mirror. One magpie on its own…
I turned away. “Well, if you don’t believe me—”
All of a sudden, Ari’s bike mag was splayed on the floor like a shot bird, and he was on his feet, shouting. “No, I don’t. I don’t believe you. You’re lying.”
I backed out of his room and closed the door.
In the kitchen, Cristiani was making juice. “What was all that about?” She tossed a hollowed-out half-orange in the bin.
“I asked Ari if he was coming to the bar, and he started shouting at me.” I paused. “I don’t know what’s got into him.”
She looked at me over her shoulder, then reached for another orange and cut it decisively in half.
* * *
—
ELSA WAS FOUND DEAD in a Marseille hotel, aged thirty-seven. On hearing the news, I drove up the coast with Dave Brubeck’s Time Further Out on the car stereo. I had told Montse an old friend of mine had died, though I didn’t mention that it was a woman, or that we had once been lovers. I said I’d be away for a day or two, no more.
By the time I arrived, the police had taken over, and since I wasn’t a member of Elsa’s family I wasn’t allowed to see the body. But her family’s in America, I said. Even as I spoke, it struck me that Elsa had never talked about her family at all. She viewed herself as a stand-alone, with no roots, no antecedents. I was her family, I told the police. I performed with her. This outburst seemed to puzzle them. Maybe it was my garbled French, or maybe they hadn’t expected me to start crying. I hadn’t expected it myself. She was a singer, I went on, dabbing my eyes. A great singer, actually. They asked me who I was. I played piano in her band, I told them. I went out with her too—for a while. They asked if I knew about the drugs. Of course, I said. We were musicians. They smiled bleakly. And then, just when it seemed they might relax the rules and let me see her after all, I told them I had changed my mind. I’d found Elsa strung out enough times to know what that might look like. I left the police station and stood on the pavement outside. Loud gulls wheeled overhead. The air smelled of fried fish. Though I had given up cigarettes, I bought a packet of Disque Bleu and chain-smoked three.
Built out of pale-yellow stucco, with black wrought-iron balconies, the Hotel Bellevue looked out over Marseille’s Vieux-Port. The man behind reception had black hair and colorless lips, and his ears lay flush against his head, as if they had been pinned or glued. I asked if I could have five minutes in the room where Miss Slump had died—I was a close friend, I told him—but he said it was a crime scene. It had been cordoned off. How much was it worth to him? I asked. Five hundred francs? A thousand? Adopting a haughty look, as if he had never done anything wrong in his entire life, let alone accepted a bribe, he moved his head slowly from side to side. I felt like hitting him in that pale mouth of his. I felt like twisting
those perfect little ears. Trying to keep my voice even, I asked if he had seen her. That slow shaking of the head again. He hadn’t been on duty when she checked in. I asked how many nights she’d stayed. Just the one, he said. I turned towards the window. So there’s really nothing you can tell me? I said. Nothing at all? Something about the rare deep blue of the sea, and no one knowing who Elsa was—no one knowing, or even caring…There were tears in my eyes again. The whole view wobbled.
“She was in bed when they found her,” the man said suddenly.
I nodded. That was how I’d imagined it.
“She had her shoes on.”
“That’s her,” I said. “That’s Elsa.” I thought I heard the man stifle a laugh, and I swung round. “What’s wrong with that?”
He shrugged.
Some lines from a song she’d written came back to me. He told me I was hollow / He said I was empty inside / It was so cold he wrapped me in his coat / I laughed / I cried / I whispered in his ear / If you ain’t hollow / How are you supposed to float?
On my return to Barcelona, I tried to locate Elsa’s family—the Slumps of Tennessee—but the Internet didn’t exist back then, and I got nowhere. Elsa was buried in Marseille, among strangers. I paid for a stone, and had it engraved with the words I’d remembered as I stood in the lobby of the Hotel Bellevue. Some weeks later, the French police sent me her few remaining possessions. That was almost the saddest part of the story, the fact that I was the only person she had left. The smell of summer was gone from her clothes, wiped out by something institutional like bleach or camphor. I had no use for any of her things—I gave them to a local charity—though I kept the shoes she’d died in. They brought back a time in my life that was so remote and skewed that it seemed like part of someone else’s.
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