Before I left, he asked me up to his apartment the following week. He was having some friends over for drinks. Most of them were Catalan, like me.
“Any time after ten,” he said. “Bring your girlfriend if you like.”
“How do you know I have a girlfriend?”
“Obvious, isn’t it—nice-looking bloke like you.”
Was it the fifteen-year gap in our ages that allowed him to compliment me without the slightest awkwardness, or was it because we came from different countries, different cultures? I wasn’t sure. Whatever the truth was, he was able to achieve an instant familiarity, and without having done anything to earn it.
I asked what his name was.
“Vic,” he said. “Like the city.”
He took out a business card and handed it to me. VIC DRAGO & PARTNERS. STORAGE SOLUTIONS.
“I’m Jordi,” I said. “Jordi Ferrer.”
He smiled with his mouth, but not, I noticed, with his eyes. “Translator. No wonder your English is so good.”
* * *
—
THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY, I arranged to meet Mireia in a bar not far from her apartment. Mireia was the manager of the Dalí, a boutique hotel in the Eixample. I had known her since my schooldays, and in the summer of 1998, when we were in our early twenties, we had slept together, but she put an end to it after a couple of weeks. It doesn’t feel right, she told me. We’re supposed to be friends, not lovers. Can’t we be both? I remember saying, and she let out a sigh, as if there was some basic principle I had failed to understand. Though my mother knew and liked Mireia’s family—my father and Mireia’s father had worked at the same law firm—she had disapproved of our involvement from the beginning. She’s not for you, she would say. She won’t make you happy. I thought she was wrong, of course.
When I walked into the bar on Santaló, Mireia was already there, dressed in jeans close-fitting enough to show off her slim thighs and a zip-up leather jacket that was the same color as her hair, a kind of tawny brown. She had the face of an elf, fine-boned and triangular, and a high fringe that drew attention to her smooth forehead and her wide eyes. As always, I wanted to hold her tight and feel the full length of her against me. Instead, we kissed on both cheeks.
“You’re so late,” she said. “I’ve been here for ages.”
Years ago, I had decided that if all I could ever hope for was her friendship the only way I could hold on to my self-esteem and even, now and then, exert a little power, was to be unpredictable. Pathetic, perhaps, but I couldn’t help myself. The trouble was, unpredictability didn’t come naturally to me. I really had to work at it.
I ordered a caña.
“Jordi, I’ve got to tell you something.” Mireia leaned over the table, beckoning me closer, as if she was about to impart a secret. “I keep finding keys.”
“What sort of keys?”
“Other people’s keys. Keys they’ve lost.” She took out a packet of Nobel and lit one. “What do you think it means?”
Not sure how to respond, I didn’t say anything. I reached for my beer instead.
“The first key I found was a dull gold color,” she went on. “For a front door, probably. Next, I found a tiny silver key, like the ones that come with a padlock—or a suitcase. Then, yesterday, I was in Sant Cugat, and I found these.” She rummaged in her bag, took out a key ring holding perhaps a dozen keys, and put them on the table between us, then she brought her cigarette up to her mouth. I had always loved watching Mireia smoke. Her lips seemed made for cigarettes.
“You’re staring at me,” she said.
My eyes dropped to the bunch of keys. “That’s someone’s entire life you’ve got there,” I said, and shivered.
Mireia shivered too. Then we both laughed.
Later, as we wandered along the Passeig Maritím, she hooked her arm through mine. The evening sky stretched before us, flawless as a cinema screen, and the palm trees looked black against the dimly glowing sea. A girl in aviator sunglasses roller-bladed past. Mireia leaned her head against my shoulder and murmured, Ah Jordi, not out of love, I thought, or even affection, but because I was a conundrum she had been presented with, a riddle she had no answer to.
* * *
—
THAT SPRING, I had three translations on the go at the same time, but one book interested me far more than the others. Giving was a short novel by a first-time French writer. The narrator was Jeanne, a middle-aged woman who discovers that her husband, Marc, is having an affair. Marc’s lover is a woman in her twenties called Sophie. Jeanne doesn’t leave Marc. She doesn’t even confront him. Instead, she hires a detective to find out where Sophie lives, and where she works. Once she has Sophie’s two addresses, she begins to send her presents. Flowers, chocolates—the kind of things lovers give each other. Though the presents arrive anonymously—no card, no note—Sophie naturally assumes they’re from Marc. She can’t believe how romantic he is—how romantic and how discreet, since he never refers to anything he has bought for her. Early one afternoon, when they have finished making love—they always meet at her apartment, at lunchtime—she breaks her silence and thanks him. He has no idea what she’s talking about. Presents? What presents? She stares at him, bewildered. In that moment, it occurs to Marc that Sophie might have another admirer, even, perhaps, another lover, but before he can say anything she promises him that there is no one else. The speed with which she preempts his question suggests to him that she is lying, and that he’s right to be suspicious, and he leaves her apartment abruptly, without saying another word. This is what Jeanne imagines, knowing Marc as she does, since the novel consists almost entirely of hunches and speculations, scenes she couldn’t possibly have witnessed. All she knows for sure is what she is able to observe—namely, that Sophie takes the rest of the day off, and Marc is distracted and irritable when he comes home. She continues to shower Sophie with presents. A red rose here, a silver locket there. Sophie believes Marc is filled with regret about having stormed out, and that he’s trying to buy his way back into her affections. These new presents are peace offerings. A few days go by, and they agree to meet—at lunchtime in her apartment, as usual. When Marc appears, he kisses her, then tells her that he wants to make something clear. The presents she has been receiving are not from him. He hasn’t given her anything at all. She thinks he’s lying. But why would he do that? Why would he lie? She’s utterly confused. Is that what you want? Marc says, his voice acidic now. To be given things? But if it’s not you, Sophie says, who is it? Unconvinced by her protestations, Marc accuses her of cheating on him—and cheating twice over: firstly, because she’s sleeping with somebody else, a fact she let slip without meaning to, and secondly, because she’s pretending not to know the presents are from this other man. Sophie is beginning to feel her head might explode. If I knew they were from another man, she says, why would I ask if it was you? She has a point, but Marc can’t see it. He’s blinkered by his jealousy, his lack of trust. And actually, coming from you, Sophie goes on, this is all a bit rich. After all, I’m not the one who’s being deceitful. I’m not the one who’s married. Marc storms out again. From that day on, the nature of the presents begins to change. A courier delivers a small square package to Sophie’s apartment. When she opens it, hundreds of red ants swarm out, stinging her hands. She screams and drops the box on the floor, then runs to the kitchen and holds her hands under the cold tap for a long time. Shortly afterwards, a Manila envelope arrives. Inside is a blown-up photo of Sophie with her eyes poked out. A week later, a pig’s heart is posted to her place of work. Jeanne wonders what effect these new “presents” are having. It seems likely that Sophie will hold Marc responsible, since he obviously has a grudge against her, and is seeking a kind of vengeance. It’s in the act of giving that he expresses all his deepest feelings, even if they’re negative or hostile. The unpleasantness escalates. In the space of three days, Sophie receives a liv
e bullet and a dead bird. By now, she’s a nervous wreck. She sends Marc a text, telling him that if he doesn’t stop at once she will contact the police. That weekend, he shows up unexpectedly. Stop what? he says. I haven’t done anything. She refuses to discuss it. She’s too upset. When she asks him to return the keys to her apartment, he loses his temper and throws them out of the window. He’s childish, she says. Malicious. He may even be unhinged. He’s staring at her. Why had he never noticed how shrill she sounded? How spoiled?
Though I kept thinking about the novella, I was finding it a challenge to translate. The atmosphere and tone were difficult to capture, maybe because the narrator, Jeanne, was such an enigma. She revealed nothing about herself, except through the characters she interacted with—her husband, and his lover. Except by default. And there was something else. I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling that the book was haunting me for a reason. It was as if it was commenting obliquely on my own personal situation. Perhaps it even included strategies that might prove useful. But they weren’t obvious to me. They lurked beneath the surface of the narrative, like fish at the bottom of a pond. Though the book was set in Lyon, I pictured Mireia passing beneath Sophie’s living-room window, picking the keys up off the pavement, and showing them to me later, in the bar on Santaló. My life and my work were echoing each other—but to what end?
* * *
—
YOU’RE THE FIRST TO ARRIVE,” Vic said.
When I walked into his apartment at ten o’clock on Thursday evening, he gave me a beer from the fridge, then led me through his living room and out onto a terrace that was the size of a five-a-side football pitch. Though I lived in the same building, it felt like a different world. Most of the city was laid out before me, all the way from Horta in the north to the Zona Franca and the Mediterranean in the southwest. Rising in front of us were the hills of the Collserola, their dark, scrubby slopes studded with mansions, and crowned by the floodlit church on the top of Tibidabo. Vic went and leaned on the railing at the edge of the terrace, and I joined him.
“What do you think?” he said.
I shook my head. “Amazing.”
“The moment I saw this view, I had to have the place.”
“Did you buy it?”
“It’s a rental.” Vic lit a cigarette and blew smoke into the void. “You didn’t bring your girlfriend.”
“She’s working tonight.”
He looked at me askance, as if he suspected me of lying—and I was, though not quite in the way he imagined. I watched the planes coming in to land, bright drops of light that seemed to wobble as they slid down through the deep blue of the sky towards El Prat.
“Something strange,” Vic said after a while.
It began in December last year, he went on. One afternoon, he was standing outside an estate agents’ in Sarrià, looking at the prices of apartments, when a man in a long dark overcoat appeared next to him. The man asked if he knew Bill Stone. Vic looked at the man. Yes, I know Bill Stone, he said. Bill worked at the international school where his wife Joanna taught.
“You remind me of him somehow—though you’re younger, of course.” The man smiled.
Vic didn’t get the joke. Bill Stone was pushing seventy, with almost no hair and a beer gut, and he, Vic, was only forty-four. He asked how the man knew Bill.
“I made him a rocking chair,” the man said.
“A rocking chair?”
“I work with wood.”
“Could you make me a chest of drawers?”
Vic had surprised himself. Though it was true that he and Joanna had agreed that the hallway needed a chest of drawers, he hadn’t actually started looking for one, let alone thought of having one made. He had never even had a suit made. The words seemed to have been teased out of him. No, not teased. Extracted. Without his knowledge or permission. The man was eyeing him with an innocent, wondering expression, as if he was still marveling at Vic’s resemblance to Bill Stone. He handed Vic a business card, which Vic studied in the light of a nearby streetlamp.
DANIEL FEDERMANN. There was an address too. Somewhere downtown. His eyes lifted to the man’s face. “You don’t look like someone who works with wood.”
Though the man was no longer smiling, a residue of good humor remained. “I don’t?”
“I would’ve taken you for a solicitor,” Vic went on, “or even”—and he used a thumb to indicate the window behind him—“an estate agent.”
The man nodded. He seemed to understand that Vic was getting his own back, and it didn’t bother him. Perhaps he felt he’d asked for it.
“If you’d really like something made,” he said, “come to my workshop, and we’ll discuss it. I’m there most days.”
He drew his overcoat more closely around himself, then turned away. Though Vic kept his eyes on the man, he had the impression that he simply dissolved into the air. One moment he was there, the next he was gone. But it was dusk by then, and a swirling mist had filled the narrow streets of Sarrià…
Still leaning on the railing, Vic drank some beer, then he looked at me. “I haven’t told anyone about this. To be honest, I’m not sure why I’m telling you.”
It was because I looked presentable, I thought. Unthreatening. I kept my hair cut short, though not overly short, and I wore glasses with simple frames, nothing too modern or pretentious. My clothes were pretty conservative as well. Jackets and jeans. Open-necked white shirts. Brown shoes. Or maybe he recognized a kind of attentiveness in me. I’d always been a good listener.
“What do you think so far?” Vic said. “What’s your feeling?”
“It sounds like the beginning of a story.”
“You mean, like I made it up?”
“No. It sounds as if it’s going to lead to something.”
“Oh, it does.” Vic’s jaw tightened. “It does.”
The doorbell rang, and Vic went to answer it. A couple appeared. The man was roughly Vic’s age, and wore a biker’s leather jacket with a white nuclear disarmament symbol on the back. The girl was in her early twenties. Vic showed them where the drinks were and told them to make themselves at home, then he opened the fridge, grabbed two more bottles of beer, and came outside again.
“You went to see him, didn’t you,” I said. “The carpenter.”
Vic laughed, then handed me a beer. “You’re not as stupid as you look.”
Shock or bemusement must have showed on my face because he slapped me on the shoulder. “Don’t be so sensitive. It was a joke.”
“A joke.” I nodded to myself. “Okay.”
Even at that stage, I saw how little use Vic had for diplomacy or tact. He didn’t care if he upset people. I wondered how many enemies he had.
A few days after his encounter outside the estate agents’, Vic said, he was driving down Las Ramblas when he decided to make a detour. He was curious to know where the carpenter’s workshop was. He had no intention of having a chest of drawers made, though as he parked in a side street off Avinguda Parallel he felt a twist of anticipation low down in his belly, an excitement he couldn’t explain.
Once he located the street, he walked from one end to the other, but he couldn’t find a house number that corresponded to the one on the card the carpenter had given him. He walked back again, then stood still, staring. How could he have missed it? He set off again, moving more slowly. The street divided straight down the middle, half sunlight, half shade. At the far end, it formed a T-junction with an unpaved track that hugged the steep, rocky flank of Montjuïc. In the distance he could hear the howl of a chainsaw.
He would never have found the place if he hadn’t glanced to his right as he was returning to his car. There, framed by an open ground-floor window that was covered with a rusting metal grille, was the carpenter. He was sitting down, head bent, as if reading or writing. Vic approached the door and tapped on one of the glass pan
es, which rattled in its frame. The door opened, and Federmann appeared. Vic didn’t have to remind him of the chance meeting in Sarrià a few nights earlier. Federmann had not forgotten.
“I didn’t expect you so soon,” he said.
Vic shrugged. “I happened to be passing.”
If Federmann knew Vic was lying, he didn’t let on.
“Come in,” he said. “Please.”
The interior of the workshop was tidy, but it had not been renovated or modernized. An old-fashioned writing desk stood by the window, a leather-bound ledger open on its sloping surface.
Federmann took a bottle of red wine from the shelf behind him. “Can I offer you a drink?”
“I just thought I’d drop in and say hello,” Vic said. “I’m not here to buy anything.”
Federmann smiled.
Uncorking the bottle, he poured them both a glass. Vic had an odd thought, which came quite unsolicited, and which he didn’t fully understand. I’m not the first.
They touched glasses. A thin, ringing note hung on in the air.
“Let me show you round,” Federmann said.
The front of the workshop functioned as a showroom, with a number of pieces of furniture on display, but as Vic followed Federmann deeper into the place, passing beneath a skylight, the space opened out. There was a long worktable, fitted with various lathes and vises. Rows of tools lined the walls. But there were also objects that seemed far less predictable. A crossbow, a brass astrolabe—and half a dozen snakeskins, which hung from a wooden beam like strips of flypaper. They were so delicate that they stirred as Vic walked by.
Federmann came to a halt with his back to Vic, both hands in his pockets. Vic glanced over his shoulder. A fall of dusty light stood between him and the front of the shop, and he could no longer see the door. Though it was by no means warm, he realized he was sweating.
They had stopped in front of a chest of drawers that was so pale that it hardly appeared to have a color, and as soon as Vic set eyes on it he could see it in his hallway. He could see it so clearly that he felt he wasn’t in the shadow of Montjuïc at all, or even downtown, but back in his apartment in Sant Gervasi.
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