by jordi Nopca
They had a small celebration after the civil ceremony. Both sets of parents were there, Nikki’s brother, six of her friends and five of his, and their dates—those that had them—plus his partner at the dog salon, Alejandro, and his grandmother, who’d been allowed to leave the home as long as she was with a caregiver, who got drunk before the cake was served while the old woman glared at her. During one trip to the bathroom, Rafel saw that he had a new message on his phone. It said: “Congratulations. Laura.” He deleted it as soon as he’d read it and then felt bad because he didn’t have his former high school classmate’s number saved in his contacts. He would look like a jackass, but there was no going back: The damage was done. He washed his hands and went back to the large dining hall of the Navarran restaurant where they were throwing the reception.
Since he hadn’t been able to save up enough to go to Australia, Rafel suggested another, less flashy honeymoon destination. But in the end, both sets of parents chipped in generously to make their dream come true. They bought tickets for Adelaide, planning to drive from there to Brisbane. Then from there, they’d go to Sydney, passing through Canberra and Melbourne before taking a boat to Tasmania. Once they’d seen the island, they’d return to Sydney and fly from there to Jakarta, where they would spend one night before catching a flight to Istanbul, then changing planes for Barcelona.
After the cutting of the cake and their final photogenic kiss, Rafel’s grandmother gestured for him to come over and asked him not to go on the trip.
“I have a premonition,” she warned him. “I think something bad is going to happen. Some disaster.”
Rafel planted a kiss on her forehead and promised her that in a month he’d be back with a little plastic kangaroo souvenir she could put on top of the TV to watch over her, even when she was sleeping.
“I don’t need anything anymore, dear.”
He took her hand and gave her another kiss on the forehead. The last one ever.
OKLAHOMA PANTHER
The author of a series of sixty-eight mystery novels set in Besalú had a dinner date with his Spanish translator. A meticulous, obsessively demanding man, the novelist would read the translations after they’d been copyedited and discuss them, always over a meal—preferably dinner—with the translator. The process had always been the same: The author would call and ask the translator to make a reservation, reminding him of his dislike for Japanese and Nepalese cuisine; he would show up half an hour late and with some improbable excuse that the translator didn’t buy, but which helped to reassert the author’s position of superiority; he was never satisfied with the meal, and when it came time to go over the book, he put undue emphasis on the mistakes, even though each time he found fewer; he would pay for the food, but the round of cocktails that followed it was on the translator’s tab, and sometimes more expensive than the meal.
The evening when they were set to go over novel number sixty-nine, the author had smoke coming out of his ears. His wife had left him just a couple of weeks earlier, and he had the firm intention of transmitting each and every one of his frustrations to his dinner companion. He would do so in the most egotistical way possible: picking apart the translation—which was nearly perfect—and, if it came to that, destroying his relationship with the man who, apart from him, had the closest and most abiding bond with his creative world of crime, shady characters, and sex in hotels off the highway.
Before arriving at the restaurant, he went by a bar he didn’t often frequent and drank three Singapore slings in less than half an hour. That time, he’d decided to reverse the order of the evening: He would pay for drinks, and the translator would foot the bill for the meal.
But when he arrived at the restaurant, the man wasn’t docilely waiting at the table they’d reserved. His usual jacket—faded denim—hung on a chair. Resting on the tablecloth was the same folder that had held the manuscripts of his last sixty-eight translations. The author sat down in the opposite chair and ordered a glass of white wine for the wait. How long could he take? A couple of minutes? Five at most?
“Shit’s about to hit the fan,” murmured the author after his second sip of wine.
He waited two minutes. Five. Ten. His wineglass was half-empty when he got up to ask the waiter if he knew where the man he was waiting for had gone.
“Indeed,” the waiter replied, enveloped in baggy black pants and a slightly discolored white shirt. He led him to the nonsmoking room and had him stop at the doorway.
“Do you see him? There at the back, with that girl in a cream-colored dress.”
The author squinted to focus better on the couple at the farthest table. The woman in the cream-colored dress had her back to him. From where he stood, he saw her nude back, sculpted by swimming and BodyCombat, and also a bit of her dress, which lowered in an attractive curve until the chair back hindered further view. Very close to her was a man with the scruffy yet bald head of a vulture—the translator—who was speaking with a smile etched into his face.
“I’d give anything to be in your friend’s place,” the waiter said to the author. It was a comment of pure admiration. “I’ve been a waiter for twenty-three years, and I know a filthy rich woman when I see one. And she definitely is. An American who doesn’t know what to do with her millions. But your friend threw his hat into the ring before I got the chance. …”
The author didn’t want to hear where the waiter was going with that. He had entered the restaurant with smoke coming out of his ears, and now he could scarcely manage to control the hatred gathering inside him, directed straight at the translator, about to drill through him mercilessly. The author approached without making much noise and attacked from behind.
“I’ve been waiting for some time,” he said, surprised at his ability to modulate the volume and tone of his words.
Two pairs of playful eyes observed him: the translator’s, which were dark and generic, and the strange woman’s, green and sweetened by alcohol.
“One moment, please,” the translator said to the woman in English before addressing the author. “I’ll come right over. Sorry.”
“If you don’t mind, we can have our meeting right here.”
“I’m sorry,” insisted the translator. He looked at the woman’s silverware, which was still clean. Her gaze was fixed on one of the abstract paintings hanging on the wall.
The author brought the translator over to his table. They were both escorted by the waiter, who couldn’t hide his smile—that of a smug teenager—which traveled from ear to ear.
###
The dinner went badly. The author started to attack the translation before the first course arrived. The translator barely got to taste his pig’s feet cannelloni; the insulting comments had ruined his appetite. The novelist, on the other hand, was able to combine his critical takedown with salmon tartar and avocado.
“This is the last time you’ll work for me,” he allowed himself to point out when the plates had been cleared.
The translator, who had suffered the shower of insults without a single reply, emptied his glass of wine in three—belabored—long slugs and said, “I know you’re going through a difficult time.”
“You’re wrong. I’ve finished up two more novels.”
“That’s not what I’m referring to, and you know it.”
The author grabbed his glass, again half-filled with white wine, brought it up to his eyes, and then placed it back down on the table.
“Go to hell,” he said.
“I think it’s best if we meet up another day.”
“Exactly.”
“I think that would be the best thing for both of us.”
“Clearly. Now you can go back to your little merkin whore. With any luck, you’ll get into her pants.”
This last comment upset the translator, who threw his napkin onto the table and shifted his butt in the chair as he put the manuscript back into the brown folder.
“I see it’s easy as pie for you to abandon me,” continued the author
. “You’re all the same. Bastards.”
“You’re being very unfair,” responded the translator as he pushed back the chair, stood up, and headed back to the nonsmoking room.
“I’ll give you a call, to find out how it went with your …”
The author didn’t know how to finish his sentence because, as the translator was walking away with the folder under his arm, he’d already decided to do his damnedest to ruin the man’s evening.
###
When the waiter brought the second courses—two portions of cod with samfaina sauce that were still steaming—he was not surprised to find the author sitting alone.
“I just saw your friend with that young lady,” he said.
“He’s not my friend; he works for me,” he retorted, and after the slightest pause, he added, “He worked for me, actually.”
“You fired him?”
“More or less.”
“Tonight?”
Instead of answering that last question, the author asked after the American woman.
“I want to know more about her,” he said, and he didn’t even have to show a couple of tattered bills to the waiter, who looked at him with the weary eyes of the catch of the day on ice at the market.
“You’re in luck. I chatted her up a little bit,” he explained in the confidential, gushing tone of a troubadour. “She asked me if I’d seen The Pink Panther, and I said, ‘The cartoons?’ Wait … you do understand some English, right?” The author nodded with disdain. “She said no. ‘The film?’ I asked her next. And she said, ‘Yeahhhhh!’ And she said the director was her grandfather.”
“Blake Edwards?” The author’s curiosity was stronger than his rage. The comedies of Blake Edwards were some of his earliest memories of going to the movies.
“I don’t know, I guess so. I’m really bad at remembering names,” the waiter said apologetically. “She told me she’s from Oklahoma and that she’s been traveling around Europe alone for the last two months. She arrived from Paris this morning, and she’ll be in Barcelona for three days. Your friend is very shrewd. If he hadn’t gotten there first, I probably …”
The author looked the waiter up and down. He had a considerable belly and a prominent double chin, features that seemed unlikely to seduce Blake Edwards’s granddaughter.
“I’ve been at this job for twenty-three years now.”
“You mentioned that. I still haven’t forgotten.”
“In all that time, I can count on one hand the opportunities I’ve had to get it on with a rich lady.”
“With Blake Edwards’s granddaughter.”
“Whatever. I already gave her a nickname. In my mind, she’s ‘the Oklahoma panther.’”
The waiter couldn’t help chortling loudly, which annoyed the author so much that right at that moment he made two decisions: He was done with that conversation, and he wasn’t going to leave that ballsy bastard any tip.
###
They took almost an hour to emerge from the nonsmoking room, the granddaughter and the translator. The novelist was chain-smoking and flicking ashes into the little plate that held the check. When they appeared, the woman’s movements, instead of being reminiscent of highly dangerous felines, were more like the hypnotic sinuosity of snakes. The translator didn’t even glance at him, just walked right past. But as he’d approached, he’d dared to place one of his skeletal mitts on the woman’s waist, as if trying to show that he had that animal—despite her ferocity and venom—under control.
“Losers,” said the author when they were out of hearing range.
He stood up as soon as they left the restaurant, preparing to follow them.
###
The author had published sixty-eight mystery novels set in Besalú, but he was incapable of behaving with the discernment and charm of his main character, Inspector Trujillo. He made sure not to lose sight of the couple he was stalking, and he waited for ten minutes outside the bar they’d gone into. He smoked, bored, and when his cell phone rang, he turned it off without even checking to see who was calling. After stomping out his second cigarette, the author walked into the bar and was immediately seen by the translator, who gave him a disgusted look, while the woman was distracted by a long swig on her drink. The author settled onto a bar stool and ordered a double whiskey.
“Neat,” he demanded of the barman, who had both arms decorated with tattoos of passages from the Bible.
From where he sat, he could easily observe the conversation between the translator and Blake Edwards’s granddaughter. He was gesturing a lot. She was listening with the utmost patience, and occasionally smiling in a way the author interpreted as polite.
“He’s got his work cut out for him, if he wants to get her into the sack,” he murmured every time he felt like sipping on his whiskey. If anyone had noticed him, they would have thought he was a poor drunk bemoaning his fate into his umpteenth, sad, confessional drink.
###
After half an hour, the couple left the bar. The author quickly paid for the two double whiskies he’d polished off and started following them again. Before crossing at the second corner, the translator turned around and shot him a look filled with daggers. The message the author received was that his former colleague wanted a little more privacy. He gave him his wish, and when the couple entered another bar—the place where they usually went for drinks, and where the check sometimes was more than the one at the restaurant—he smoked two cigarettes before turning his cell phone back on and seeing that the call earlier had been from his ex-wife. He returned it but got her voice mail.
“I don’t know what you want, but I don’t really care,” he said after the beep. “I don’t care at all, in fact. I don’t even know why I called you back. Fuck off.”
The author ended the call. Then he called his younger brother, the only person who still put up with his attacks of rage. He got his voice mail, too, and disconnected before offering up a collection of impressive insults that motivated him across the bar’s threshold.
Once inside, he sat down at the bar and greeted the usual bartender, who, after a “Good evening” that was somewhere between cordial and enigmatic, lifted his chin toward the translator.
“I know he’s here,” said the author without camouflaging his contempt for his former collaborator. “He’s in better company than usual tonight.”
“The woman is American. Seems they met today.”
“You don’t know who she is?”
“Why would I?”
“She’s a high-class whore,” said the author as he dramatically positioned a cigarette between his lips. “Goes by the name Oklahoma panther.”
###
An hour and a half later, the woman, the translator, and the brown folder with the manuscript left the bar. Both the translator and the woman looked straight at the author, whose eyes were screaming that he’d drank too much and who was trying to score with a blond woman in a tight emerald green dress who was playing along because he’d promised to pay for her drinks. The author didn’t realize they were leaving. He kept on chatting and taking tiny sips of his whiskey sour, which was his cocktail of choice when he was running out of steam. Minutes later, as he was returning from the bathroom, he saw that the couple he was following had disappeared.
“Where’d those two go?” he asked the bartender.
The author was slurring his words. He was losing air; he was a pricked balloon.
“They’re getting down to business. Must have cost your friend a pretty penny.”
“No doubt.”
The author went back to his seat beside the blonde and, instead of saying anything, pulled out a teeny notebook and pen he carried in his shirt pocket and jotted down three lines of dialogue:
Inspector Trujillo: Where’d those two go?
Barman: They’re getting down to business. Must have cost your friend a pretty penny.
Inspector Trujillo: It may even cost him his life. …
Those would be the first lines of hi
s detective’s next adventure. He’d made up his mind: He would rip up those three boring, misogynist chapters he’d written in the rare moments of concentration he’d had since his wife left him.
“What are you doing?” asked the blonde, who would never have guessed that she was sitting next to someone who earned his living writing mystery novels.
“Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it.”
The author paid for the drinks and left the bar with a lit cigarette between his lips. Every drag he took led him into corners of the plot labyrinth of his new book. He reached his house soaked in sweat and euphoric, prepared to begin the work that would distract him from his miserable life for two, three, maybe four months. When it was ready, he would call the translator—if he were still alive—and apologize before asking him about what happened that night with Blake Edwards’s granddaughter, a woman with a back sculpted by swimming and BodyCombat, who moved with the sinuosity of a snake, even though everyone associated her with a different sort of lethal animal, crossing themselves and widening their eyes. “She walks among us,” they would say, as if speaking of an unleashed Egyptian curse. “Terrible. Lethal. The Oklahoma panther.”
ÀNGELS QUINTANA AND FÈLIX PALME HAVE PROBLEMS
I might look like a cool guy, but I am most sentimental. I care about others, not too much about myself.
—Aki Kaurismäki
Barcelona is a tourist favorite, but it’s going through a delicate moment. Some of the most expensive boutiques in the world have opened up shop on the Passeig de Gràcia. The Old Quarter gleams with the urine of British, Swedish, Italian, and Russian visitors, which unabashedly blends in with the indigenous liquid evacuations. In Sarrià—Sant Gervasi and Les Corts, there are some neighbors whose only activity is walking their little dogs and holding on to their family inheritances. Pedralbes has a considerable concentration of houses with gardens, doormen in uniform, and business schools; there are also women who rejuvenate with a swish of the surgical magic wand. Poblenou has recently been invaded by a ton of luxury hotels and companies devoted to contacting the technological great beyond. The Eixample is full of old people and the odd young heir who still can’t decide whether to continue his education, try his luck abroad, or hang himself from the chandelier in the dining room. The district of Gràcia hopes to remain a neighborhood of designers, artists, and students obsessed with watching subtitled films and TV shows. They were lucky folks until they started to lose their jobs; soon they won’t have enough to pay their rents, which are too high, and they’ll have to settle for some shabby corner of Sants, Nou Barris, or Sant Antoni, where one can still live for a more or less affordable price. There are some who, expelled from those neighborhoods, have to look for an apartment in a more modest area, almost always located on the fringes of the city: the Verneda, Bon Pastor, Ciutat Meridiana, Marina de Port.