by Richard Gwyn
“Look,” he said, his voice trembling. “The grandfather of all the little bastards. He’s old and a bit slow, but still mean. He’d have your finger off, given half a chance. I call him Attila.” Manu held the rabbit up close to my face, baring the skin away from the mouth to show me Attila’s teeth.
“See this scar?”
He showed me a thin indentation along the edge of his thumb.
“That was this beauty. Seven years ago he did that. Can you imagine? He drew blood. I knew then I’d keep him as a breeder, and by God he’s done his share of shagging.”
Attila’s nose twitched horribly, as if the mention of blood had excited some submerged memory. His strong rear legs pushed against Manu’s gut.
“Hey, easy!” Manu rearranged the rabbit in his arms, keeping a tight hold on the head.
“Look at that, will you!”
A pink welt had appeared on the skin of Manu’s underarm, where the rabbit’s claws had dug in. He displayed the arm to me.
The white wine from Córdoba was on the bench. I filled a tumbler and passed it to him, cigarette drooping from his lip, rabbit folded reluctantly under his arm. His vest was twisted up on one side, so the belly-flab sagged over the waistband of his jeans. The rabbit still looked malevolent, but had stopped struggling.
“You know what they are good for, los funcionarios?” Again, the word went spinning across the terrace at volume, incandescent with loathing. “They are good for impaling through their arses on sharp sticks, and roasting over slow fires. No, wait. That’s too good for them.”
I waited while Manu conjured an appropriately grisly end for the functionaries, but when nothing sufficiently vile presented itself to him, he resorted to scatology.
“Mierda. May they drown in their own shit.” And he drained his glass, shuffled back towards the shed, tossed Attila into his hutch and quickly slammed the wooden latch.
“So what’s the story?” I asked.
Manu scratched his belly and looked at me, exasperated.
“I had a visit from the city’s Directorate of Public Health, the ones who have nothing better to do than to make others’ lives a misery. Somebody, no doubt that son-of-a-whore Ramos on the first floor or his wife, had made a complaint. They trooped up here, clutching their important papers, inspected all the rabbits, and then fucked off. Two weeks later, I get a letter telling me the rabbits are a danger to the public hygiene. How could they be a danger to anyone or anything? Apart from Attila, of course. So I have a deadline to dispose of them myself, otherwise the city will confiscate them and charge me for their destruction. Their destruction! What’s the point of that?”
“Can’t you sell them?”
“It’s not worth it. I have thirty rabbits. I have them for the pot, or else to give away to friends, like you. I’ve given you a few rabbits over the past couple of years, no?” He had indeed, and the process of skinning them was still distressing to me even after half a dozen occasions, particularly the sight of their pathetic floppy ears after the pelt had been removed.
“Of course. I realise it isn’t a business venture for you.”
“Precisely. Not a business. It’s my hobby, raising rabbits. I like to have something happening up here on the roof. Something useful. Some breeding going on. What could be more productive than having rabbits fornicating on your roof?”
“Nothing,” I agreed, “could be more bountiful.”
And it was true. The roof garden was a paradise of amorous activity. It occurred to me that there might be some kind of atmospheric fallout from all this procreation. Apart from the rabbits, cats made their way across neighbouring rooftops for regular gang-bangs on this veranda. I had spent absorbing afternoons during the siesta hours watching the passionate antics of one particular pair of cats. It often made me feel horny just sitting there. And I had recently come to realise that my apartment, which adjoined the veranda, was a place which seemed to encourage, enhance and prolong sexual congress in some mysterious way. If the rabbits went, all this might change. I had never before thought about them in this light.
“This is serious,” I said out loud.
“Serious? Of course it’s serious. Coño, it’s doing my head in,” replied Manu.
He poured us both full glasses of wine and sat down on the other canvas chair.
Just then my doorbell rang. I had to go inside my apartment and lean over the living-room veranda in order to see who was there. It was Nuria, as I expected. I dropped her a key to the street door, and shouted that I would be on the roof patio. Within a few moments, she appeared at the top of the stairs. She was wearing jeans, a black silk shirt open at the neck, and the silver necklace. Nuria and Manu had not met before. I introduced them, and summarized, for Nuria’s benefit, the rabbit situation and the cause of Manu’s grief. Manu then shuffled off down to his own apartment. Nuria and I stayed out for a while before moving to my place and sitting on the smaller terrace there. Nuria rolled a joint, blowing smoke into the deepening blue towards the sea, laughing and chatting about her day.
Later that evening our clothing lay strewn alongside the route our bodies had taken from the terrace to the bedroom to the hard floor of the studio. We showered in cool water and retired to bed, simply too content and light-limbed to venture out and address the city night. There was a weightless quality to the air that night, and if we were to wander too far from the familiar sites of bed, bath and kitchen, chances are we would have drifted away like helium balloons across to Tibidabo.
As we lay naked on our backs, the sheets kicked off in the heat of night, I made out patches of flaking paint on the ceiling, vertical patterns thrown by street-lamps against the window of my bedroom (barred by previous occupants against intruders from the terrace) and the gentle purring sounds that Nuria made, curled like a cat around a brace of pillows.
I must have been asleep when I heard the sound. A steady, persistent scratching, as though a stone were being rubbed softly on glass, followed by a prolonged hissing. I sat up at once, though at first I could not be sure how long the scratching had been inside my head, or if indeed the sound corresponded to something in the outer world, beyond the bedroom walls. Then the hissing sound was replaced by a muffled clunk, as though something heavy and metallic was being moved carefully on the tiles of my terrace.
I reached down for shorts and slid off the bed without a sound. Behind me, Nuria turned in her sleep, then settled. I crouched so as not to be seen through the window. There was a half-moon hanging low in the sky, and the street-lamps cast a vague light upwards. I decided against losing time searching for a weapon. The sight of one might cause the intruder or intruders to react in kind. I couldn’t remember whether I had locked the door leading to the veranda. Probably not. I rarely bothered unless I was going out. On all fours I edged around the corner of the bedroom into the studio and reached for the door handle. I pulled myself up and pushed the door open in one movement, jumping onto the veranda with a low guttural shout that was intended to convey extreme menace.
No one there. Not a shadow.
Only a sharp metallic smell that I could not at first identify.
I paced quickly along the tiles, then stepped on the low parapet overhanging the alleyway four floors below, and heaved myself onto the upper terrace, which slanted back behind my bedroom. This large terrace connected with the main communal rooftop patio where Manu kept his rabbits. I padded down the four steps connecting the terraces and circled the shed. The lock had been forced and the door was swinging open. I looked inside, but it was too dark to see anything. I fished in my pockets for a lighter. The flame cast a yellow, flickering light on the rabbits’ upturned faces, their noses twitching, frightened. The fact that they were all awake indicated some recent commotion. One of the cages had been broken into and the stick which Manu used to wedge it shut lay snapped in two on the concrete floor. Stepping out of the shed again, I sensed that I was being watched. I was in half a mind to return to bed, but I wanted to find out where the
thieves had gone, and, if possible, some clue as to where they had come from. Of course, they could have walked past the open door to the inner staircase and gone down to the street that way. But those stairs echoed, especially at night, and the door that led onto the street creaked loudly. I had heard nothing.
Staying close to the parapet, I crossed to the far side of the patio. There was a drop of a few feet to the roof of the adjacent building, where a flat area surrounded a central raised plinth of tiles, a jumble of chimney stacks and television aerials. Between the brickwork and the tiles I caught a movement, the flapping of cloth.
The wind from seaward reminded me that I hadn’t brought a shirt. My skin was goosepimpled and I was shaking. I jumped quietly down onto the neighbouring flat roof, catching my breath on landing, then walked straight towards the chimney stack, and almost tripped over one of them: a slight adult, or a tall child, swathed in black cloth like a Ninja warrior. The face was mostly obscured, eyes staring through a slit in the black headscarf. We stared at each other, he (as I imagined) with nervous concern, I with a charged curiosity. The Ninja was sitting on the floor with his back to the brickwork of the chimney. Then I noticed two others, squatting in the deeper shadows. Nobody spoke. There were two dark sacks on the floor between them. One sack appeared to contain something conical or triangular in shape. The other sack wriggled. I had a strong sense of the absurd, standing half-naked among these three cloaked figures, with their bags of booty. I dug a pack of Camels out of my shorts.
“Smoke?” I offered, in Spanish, taking one myself and lighting up. I took a deep draw, feeling oddly relaxed now, and in control. I was no longer shaking. One of the raiders stepped forward and took two cigarettes, without a word. He had on a long coarse smock, wore his head in dreadlocks, tied back with a piece of string. He was muscular, alert. I saw the tattoo of a bird in flight on his neck, and black curved lines were patterned on his forehead and cheeks, in the manner of a Maori warrior. He had sharp, inquisitive eyes. His companion stepped forward and took one of the cigarettes from him. She wore a roomy knee-length black dress covered with a sweatshirt of indeterminate colour, hanging loose at the shoulders. She had cropped hair, multiple piercings, an upturned nose and smouldering, distrustful eyes that were thickly outlined with black kohl. As we stood there, she began moving her body in rhythmic spasms, as though powered by a personal generator: jumping on the spot, stretching, and swinging her arms, before standing still again and lighting her cigarette from her companion’s.
At this point the wriggling bag let out a series of rapid squeaks, crescendo. The Ninja slid a hand inside his gown and produced a short, strong stick. Reaching over, he loosened the string around the neck of the moving sack. A pair of ears poked through, and in a flash he had the rabbit out of the sack, grabbed it by the hind legs and, holding it vertical, delivered two sharp blows to the back of the neck. The rabbit’s head slumped. Meanwhile, the Ninja’s headscarf had come loose, revealing him to be a boy of twelve or thirteen. He rolled back the neck of the sack and placed the limp body alongside another dead rabbit.
“Died of fright, that one,” explained Ninja boy to no one in particular, stroking the rabbit’s fur.
I watched this, thinking of Manu and the warning from the city council of his rabbits’ imminent confiscation. Better, I thought, that they be eaten by this hungry-looking troupe, whoever they were, than removed by the loathed functionaries.
I sat down. They sat down.
I told them I lived in the top flat behind us, and had heard them on the roof. They looked at the floor and nodded. They knew, they said. They knew where I lived, where everyone lived, all over this part of the city. I took this as hyperbole, bravado, but let it go. I asked them if they lived nearby. The muscular young man simply gestured around, palms up, indicating a circle in the air. They lived hereabouts. I probed, gently. They were, he said, part of a larger group, scattered across the Gothic quarter, who lived on the roofs, in disused ventilation systems, in wooden and cardboard constructs on the tops of buildings. They moved about. They were Spaniards, Basques and Catalans; Algerians, Moroccans, Germans, French, Italians, a few British and Irish, a smattering of Latinos. Ric, the athlete, was a Catalan, and did most of the talking. The girl was Irish-Galician, Ninja boy was Moroccan. They spoke a Spanish argot with occasional English phrases and words interposed, terms from the youth cultures of the past half-century mixed in at random and resulting in a bizarre form of poetry. They moved across buildings in the dead of night. They flew, interjected the girl, without smiling. Yes, they flew, agreed Ninja boy, looking up at me.
Ric held the heavy-looking bag aloft.
“Know what this is?”
I confessed I didn’t have a clue.
“The stuff of flight.”
He pulled a bulbous grappling hook out of the sack, displayed its sharp claws, then upturned the sack and a length of strong nylon rope tumbled out, falling loosely onto the ground like a coiled hose. A couple of cans of spray paint clanked out also. Ric scooped these up and dropped them back in the sack.
In this way, he explained, they launched themselves from the parapets across the narrow defiles of the barrio, flying and tumbling through the night like a troupe of renegade athlete-monks. Occasionally, of course, they needed to descend to ground level. For stealing vital provisions, for selling looted merchandise, for “shopping” (buying drugs, mainly hash, but also amphetamines, LSD and Ecstasy). Sometimes simply to cross a wider highway such as Via Laietana. On these occasions they would shimmy down the ropes on poorly lit or abandoned buildings, move in single file, with wide gaps between them, and cross the deserted road at a run before ascending the nearest appropriate building. No ropes were used for ascent, except for novices or those carrying a heavy load. There was a single criterion for becoming a roof person: the ability to scale, on demand, any building in the city without a rope. The grappling hooks were used only for crossing alleys. They were thrown with such delicacy and grace that they made little or no sound, Ric told me.
“We are artists. Los artistas de la noche. Artists of the night.”
I asked Ric why he was telling me all this.
“We know who you are. We’ve been told to answer your questions, to be helpful. And polite.”
“Who told you?”
“Sorry. Can’t tell that.”
“Were you sent to visit me?”
“Not exactly. But if you were awake and followed us we were told not to avoid you.”
“Why were you sent?”
“You’ll see.”
“Were you told to give that answer also?”
“Yes.”
“Have you visited my flat before?”
Ric hesitated.
“Don’t tell him any more,” said the girl urgently, in English. “It’s not the time or place. Not yet.”
Not the time or place. The girl spoke with a soft Irish accent, Galway, Clare. Ric hissed at her, “Let me answer the questions, Fionnula. It’s my job.”
The girl called Fionnula shrugged, traced patterns on the floor with her foot.
“Well, have you?” I persisted.
“We’ve been this way before,” answered Ric.
“In a manner of speaking,” added Fionnula quietly, with a subversive glance at Ric.
“Did you deliver a postcard to my home?”
Fionnula interrupted again, with a caustic laugh. “We’re not after posting mail,” she said. “We leave that to the postman. Why, have you been receiving dirty postcards, unsigned love letters, missives from the Jehovah’s Witnesses?” She used the Spanish term, Testigos de Jehová. She bounced up and down as she spoke, like some demonic toy with a faulty spring.
“Just an invite to an art gallery: a picture postcard,” I replied.
“Oh no, we don’t do art galleries,” she said, with finality.
Since the talk had switched to English, Ric backed off, watching the two of us in turn. I suspected, from the intimate way the two of them move
d in relation to one another, that they were lovers. Uncertain whether or not to believe the girl about the postcard, and bewildered by her allusion to a more appropriate time and place, I wondered whether I would get anywhere with direct questioning. She was operating according to a distinct set of rules. Or no rules at all. I was tired and sensed they’d told me as much as they were prepared to tell.
“And the rabbits?” I asked.
“Oh, the rabbits were incidental. We have to eat.” Ric smiled for the first time, showing off nice gold canines.
“Spoils of conquest,” sniggered Fionnula.
The Roof People. From my talk with Ixía earlier in the day, I had imagined a larger group, extras from a Pasolini movie, clustered round a fire on the top of some derelict property in the old city, turning rabbits on a spit. I had them wearing hats with earflaps and leather jerkins, blackened stumps of teeth or toothless gums, syphilitic noses, cauliflower ears, flattened foreheads, a self-parodying assembly of insane lepers. Nothing that would have prepared me for this rather beautiful trio.
“Why don’t the cops stop you?” I asked. “You must get hassle from them. Helicopters, roof patrols, stuff like that?”
“If there’s a break-in we sometimes draw the heat,” replied Ric, whose English had evidently been acquired in North America. “But we aren’t that easy to track down. We move around a lot. And we don’t make any noise, as a rule.”
“You woke me up.”
“We meant to. I scratched on your terrace with a stone,” said Fionnula.
Ric scowled at her.
“Why?”
“We wanted to lure you out. The thrill of the chase and all that.” She shrugged.
“You didn’t hide very well.”
“We didn’t try to.” Fionnula pretended to stifle a yawn. Like a speedfreak ballerina, she was all movement, jogging on the spot, miming kung-fu kicks in the air, and shrugging with every utterance she made. Her defining gesture was the vigorous shrug. The way her sweatshirt hung off her shoulders revealed the straps of her black dress, as if it had been shrugged out of place.