* * *
—
RONNIE’S HOUSE didn’t disappoint me. Screened by a mature umbrella pine and a high stone wall topped with lavish sprays of bougainvillea, it wasn’t visible from the road. Once I’d been buzzed in through an electronic metal gate, I walked up a drive, past a row of gleaming cars. A maid in a black-and-white uniform was waiting for me. She led me through a series of cool dark rooms, the walls hung with folk art and musical instruments. Towards the rear, the house opened out into a living area that had the biggest sofas I had ever seen. Two people could lie facing each other, and their feet wouldn’t even touch. Beyond the living area were a paved terrace and a lawn. A blue pool glittered in the sun. Sprawled on a lounger, Ronnie had a phone pressed to his ear. As I stepped outside, he passed the phone to a man in a light-gray summer suit who was sitting beneath a huge white-and-orange beach umbrella. I recognized him from the sports pages. It was Ronnie’s brother, Roberto Assis, who also acted as his agent. Beyond the men, on the lush cropped grass, were two girls in micro-bikinis. They lay on their backs with their eyes closed, earbuds in their ears. Their oiled bodies shone like glass.
When Ronnie saw me, he grinned and told me to take a seat. His brother leaned over and shook my hand, just in case I was somebody who mattered, then he stood up and buttoned his jacket.
“Think it over, Ronnie,” he said. “I’ll call you later.”
They embraced quickly.
“You like the place?” Ronnie asked when his brother had gone.
“What’s not to like?” I let my gaze drift towards the trees at the back of the property. Their leaves stirred lazily. “Your family must be very happy here.”
Ronnie nodded. “Everyone’s happy.” But his dark eyes had misted over.
“Are you thinking about your father?”
“How did you guess?”
I shrugged.
Ronnie’s father used to work in the shipyard in Porto Alegre. He had died of a heart attack when Ronnie was just eight years old.
“I’ll never get over him passing away like that. It left a hole that can’t be filled.” He looked round at the house, the pool, the girls. “Not by this. Not by anything.”
“He’d be very proud of you.”
“You think?”
“I’m sure of it.”
Ronnie gave me a strange look, both his eyes half-closed. “Sometimes I get the feeling we’ve met before.”
“Really? Where?”
“I don’t know. Another life, maybe.”
“You believe in all that?”
“Why not?” And there was his grin again—natural, open, utterly infectious.
Growing up near Brazil’s southern border, Ronnie would probably have been exposed to Candomblé Ketu, a religion which, for me, bore more than a passing resemblance to voodoo, since it relied on ritual sacrifice, hypnotic drumming, and trance states. Among my friends, I’ve always been seen as a bit of a skeptic. They talk about my arching eyebrows and the jaundiced lines around my mouth. I even look like a skeptic. In the presence of Ronnie’s grin, though, my skepticism seemed out of place. Beside the point. If Ronnie thought we had known each other before, that was good enough for me. And Ronnie, being Ronnie, was used to people listening to him. Agreeing with what he said. His whole existence revolved around his intuitions. You only had to watch him play to know how in tune he was, how connected with the universe. His eyes would go one way, and the ball would squirt off somewhere else. He specialized in a kind of sombrero—or lob—that left opponents facing in the wrong direction, and looking stupid, while he moved smoothly away across the pitch. One touch from him and the game changed gear. Things clicked, things flowed. He was the stitching in the fabric, the oil in the machinery. So I chose to accept his version of events. If nothing else, it explained the feeling of familiarity I’d had when I first saw him. It also had the effect of binding us together still more closely.
Later, we worked on his pronunciation—especially his h’s, which were far too soft. The sound he needed to make, I told him, was harsh and aspirated. Think of a man clearing his throat before he spits. I demonstrated once or twice, and Ronnie copied me. One of the girls opened her eyes and squinted at us, a bewildered look on her beautiful blank face, and me and Ronnie grinned at each other.
Me and Ronnie.
* * *
—
WHEN I WOKE the next day, Cristiani was already up. Judging by the position of the sun on the bedroom floor, it was noon. I closed my eyes, hoping to doze off again. There was a hissing in my ears, as if I’d been listening to loud music, and my brain was rolling about in my skull, soft and clumsy, like a plastic bag full of water.
An hour passed.
Finally, I hauled myself out of bed and went into the living room. Cristiani was over by the picture window. She was just standing there, staring at the crazy paving. Light bounced off the pool, outlining her in gold. I sat down on the sofa. The apartment seemed quieter than usual. No radio playing, no TV. She turned to face me, leaning against the wall with her arms folded. I noticed a red mark and a slight swelling near her left eye. When she was drunk, she often bumped into things.
I asked her how she was.
She looked past me, towards the kitchen. “Where did you get to last night?”
“I was at Ronnie’s house. We were working on his accent. After that, it all gets kind of vague.”
“You made quite a speech,” she said, “when you came home.”
I searched around inside my head for an inkling of what I might have said, but there was nothing there.
“You don’t remember?”
“Sort of,” I said. “What was it about?”
“It was about how much you love me, and how special I am. Apparently, I’m the only person who understands you.”
“Sounds like I went on a bit.”
“You did. You went on for half an hour.” She paused. “Then you wanted sex.”
“How did that go?” I said lightly, trying not to sound as if I didn’t have the faintest idea.
“Not so good.”
“Oh.” Just then, I felt blood surge to the place where it should probably have been the night before. “That speech I made, though. It was true.”
She was looking at me quizzically, almost warily, as if she suspected me of trying to deceive her.
“Really,” I said. “It was.”
She lowered her eyes. “If you say so.”
“Where’s Ari?”
“He went out.”
“Come here a minute.”
She didn’t move.
I got up off the sofa and walked over. When I was close to her, I put my fingers gently to her chin and lifted it so I could see her face. “How did you get that bruise?”
* * *
—
ONE MONDAY IN LATE JUNE, Cristiani took the car and drove up the coast with Ari. School had finished, and she was planning to spend a few days with a friend of hers who owned a house in Tossa de Mar. I had a lot going on, I told her, but maybe I could join them at the weekend. I didn’t need to come at all, she said, not if I was busy, and she widened her eyes as she always did if she was trying to convince me of something, or if she was being sincere. I used to love that look. Over the years, some of the shine has worn off. It’s just not in the nature of things to keep gleaming when they’re no longer new.
On Friday, clouds started piling up in the northwest, and by the evening it was raining hard. I was sitting at home, watching old black-and-white footage of the Elsa Slump Quartet, when the bell rang. Someone was at the gate. I went to the front door and peered out, but the rain was torrential. I couldn’t see a thing. Thinking it must be one of my drinking partners from the bar—they knew I was on my own—I pressed the buzzer and the gate clicked open. To my surprise, Ronnie loped across the yard towards me.
I brought him a towel.
“You got any dry clothes?” he said.
“In your size?”
He grinned, but there was something swollen or misshapen about his face that told me he wasn’t feeling good. There had been problems at the football club, with Ronnie supposedly responsible for confrontations in the dressing room. Stories about his fluctuating weight and poor attendance at training sessions kept appearing in the sports pages. Ronaldinho’s in the gym had become a running joke.
I fetched him a pale-blue fleece and a pair of tracksuit pants. When he had changed, I took his wet clothes and put them in the dryer. Walking back into the lounge, I found him sitting in one of my armchairs with the towel wrapped round his head.
He stood up and did a twirl. “How do I look?”
I had to laugh at the sight of Ronnie in my clothes. The fleece came down to just below his ribs, and the tracksuit pants were skin-tight. “You look like a million dollars,” I said. Which, come to think of it, was probably only a fraction of his worth. “Can I get you something?”
“Is that a caipirinha?” He had noticed the lime segments in my glass.
I nodded.
“One of those,” he said. “But you’d better make it weak.”
He followed me out to the kitchen where I set to work on a pitcher of caipirinhas. While I chopped the limes and crushed the ice, he moved restlessly round the room. He didn’t seem to feel uncomfortable or out of place in my apartment. He had been brought up in far worse surroundings, of course—in a favela in Porto Alegre. Every now and then, he stopped at my elbow to check on my technique, but he was never still for very long.
“Hombre,” he said, “you really know what you’re doing.”
“My girlfriend’s Brazilian,” I told him.
“That’s right. I forgot.”
I reached for the cachaça. “So Ronnie,” I said casually, “I don’t suppose you came all the way over here in the rain just to work on your Spanish.”
He gave me a calculating look from under his eyebrows, his chin lowered, as if he was about to take a free kick twenty-five yards from goal. “My mother’s left for Brazil.”
“I think I read about that in the papers.” I poured a drink and handed it to him. “She’ll be back,” I said, “won’t she.”
He nodded, then sipped his drink. I asked him what he thought.
“Good,” he said. “Not exactly weak, though.”
“One won’t hurt.”
“She left at the beginning of the month. My brother too. The house feels kind of empty.”
“No girlfriends?”
“It’s not the same.”
“Well, I’m always here, if you need me.”
“Thanks, amigo.” He put his glass down on the work surface. “Sometimes the silence really gets to me.”
“I know that silence.”
I led him back to the lounge. Outside, it was still raining hard. The patio lights were on, and the pool looked like a bed of nails.
Ronnie’s eyes were drawn to the TV. “What are you watching?”
“It’s some footage of the jazz band I was in.”
“You were in a band?”
“This is us performing live in Hamburg. I’m not sure what year it was. Nineteen-seventy, I think—or it might have been ’71.” A thought struck me, and I shook my head. “You weren’t even born yet.”
Ronnie sat down and leaned forwards, his forearms resting on his knees, hands dangling. At that moment the camera panned across the stage to the piano.
“Nacho,” he said. “Is that you?”
“That’s me.”
“You weren’t bad-looking, were you—for a Spaniard.”
“Ronnie,” I said, “I’m Catalan.”
But he was quiet, just watching. Maybe the footage had taken him out of himself—temporarily, at least. If you were Ronaldinho, nobody ever let you forget it. The price he paid for all that wealth and fame was to be condemned to that one version of himself. In me, though, he had found a way of escaping. I freed him up. He was even wearing my clothes!
“That singer,” he murmured. “Spooky.”
I told him the story of our affair, then took him into my bedroom to show him Elsa’s shoes, which I kept in a box frame on the wall. I had never explained their significance to anyone, not even Cristiani. Ronnie was the first. You could run from an earthquake or a fire, I said. You could run from your childhood, your family. Your past. But you couldn’t run from death. Death would take you when it chose—shoes or no shoes.
Ronnie was standing so close to the box frame that his breath clouded the glass, and he didn’t move for a long time. Was he thinking, once again, about his father? Or was he thinking about the moment when he would have to hang up his boots? At last, he turned away and looked at me. His face was somber, grave. “Would you play something for me, Nacho?”
“I’m a bit rusty,” I said, “but I’ll give it a go.”
Back in the lounge I switched on my electric piano, and Ronnie settled in an armchair. I asked if he’d heard of Keith Jarrett. He hadn’t.
“This is something he used to play a lot,” I said. “It’s called ‘Lalene.’ ”
The first note dropped into the silence in the room like the ever-widening, ring-shaped ripple that happens when you lob a stone into a pond. A second note came soon after. Then a third. In no time at all, I was drawn into the darkness deep inside myself. When I approached a piece with the right degree of intensity, it always seemed to me that outer space was nothing compared to the space that was to be found in my own head. I saw myself as infinite—on the inside. And music was the craft or vessel that allowed me to explore that universe…
I played on.
I inhabited “Lalene” so thoroughly that night that I was able to move in all directions. I expanded on the piece. I improvised. I went to places I hadn’t known existed. When I finally lifted my fingers off the keys and looked around I saw that I was quite alone.
“Ronnie?”
I stood up and walked out to the kitchen. The jug of caipirinhas I had made was empty, as were three bottles of wine, and a pan of spaghetti carbonara had spilled down the front of the gas stove and onto the floor. My sunglasses lay in a mass of congealed pasta, their arms reaching blindly upwards, as if asking for help. Ronnie must’ve got hungry while I was playing. You could tell he didn’t cook too often. He’d probably have people to do that for him, of course. To clear up after him as well, judging by the state of the kitchen. What’d he been doing with my sunglasses, though?
I went into the bedroom, thinking he might be taking another look at Elsa’s shoes, but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t on the patio either, or in the pool. I checked the bathroom. His clothes had disappeared from the dryer, and the towel I had given him was screwed up on the floor. There was no sign of the pale-blue fleece or the tracksuit pants. He must still be wearing them. I opened my front door and went out to the gate. His SUV was nowhere to be seen. Strange that he’d left without a word—it wasn’t like him—but then it occurred to me that I might have been so wrapped up in the Jarrett piece that I hadn’t heard him say goodbye. Or perhaps he hadn’t wanted to interrupt me, out of respect. He could be sensitive that way. Or maybe, embarrassed by the mess he had made, he had slipped quietly out into the dark…The rain had moved inland, over the hills. Wet leaves gleamed. I glanced at my watch and was astonished to see that it was almost half past four. I had been playing for at least three hours.
* * *
—
FIERCE SUNLIGHT woke me. It was after midday. If I didn’t hurry, I would miss my session at the bar. Luckily, I had gone to sleep in my clothes, so there was no need to get dressed. I didn’t have time to wash or shave. Running the hot tap in the kitchen, I cleaned the egg an
d bacon off my sunglasses, then I put them on, picked up my wallet and keys, and left the apartment.
I was halfway across the yard when somebody called my name. It was Maite, the forty-something divorcee who lived upstairs. She was wearing a blouse with multicolored squares all over it. Without my shades, it would have hurt to look at her.
“You were making a lot of noise last night,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“Sorry. A friend came over.”
“Only one? It sounded like a party.”
“Did the music bother you?”
“The breaking glass bothered me. The yelling bothered me. I don’t remember any music.”
“My friend”—I shook my head fondly, despairingly—“he thought he’d try and cook spaghetti—”
“Didn’t you hear me banging on the ceiling?”
I thought hard. “No, I don’t think I heard anything like that.”
“I was using a broomstick. I was pounding on the floor.” Maite paused. “It’s got dents in it now.”
“A broomstick?”
“What about when I came to the door? It was two-thirty in the morning.”
“I was lost in the music—in a kind of trance. I’ve been working on this piece by Keith—”
“I knocked and knocked. You didn’t answer.”
“You know something, Maite? You need to relax a bit. Chill out.”
“That’s easy for you to say. You don’t have to work.” She turned away, and then turned back again. “Next time, I’m calling the police, okay?”
“I like your blouse. Is that new?”
She put her hands on her hips, but I thought I could see the beginning of a smile on her face. “You’re a real pain in the ass, Mr. Cabrera.”
It was another five minutes before I could get away. Some people just talk and talk. I suppose she was lonely—like Ronnie. By the time I got to the bar, it was quarter past one.
Barcelona Dreaming Page 10