That man was César Barbosa.
He had no scruples when it came to wooing a woman. First he would let her talk at length about herself, because he knew that women like nothing more than to be listened to. Then, expertly, cunningly, he would identify her weak points. Finally, he would attack, aiming straight for the heart.
To a woman who feared loneliness, he promised undying love. To a woman who was smothered by commitment, an open relationship; to a woman who erred on the side of prudishness, a long courtship with plenty of respect; to a woman who suffered with sexual inhibition, 1,001 nights of rampant debauchery; and to María, an extramarital adventure with all the trimmings.
Secret meetings, clandestine dates, hotels, parks, and backseats, whatever you want, babe, we’ll act out your fantasies, your deepest desires, as filthy as you like, you’re so hot, you’re too young to feel so old, you’ve got a heart-stopping ass, what a waste, come on, be generous, if your husband doesn’t know how to value your body, then let Barbosa enjoy it.
She accepted the invitation to debauchery, of course. She had spent months dreaming of that day.
“I want you to call me Francesca,” she said as she entered the room of the little hotel that would become their meeting place from then on.
And he shushed her with kisses.
• • •
César Barbosa was the type of guy who put his faith in the university of life and awarded himself an A. Who showily scorned degrees and prizes because he secretly coveted them but knew he didn’t deserve them. Who believed he was an artist, with an artist’s vices, and thought that being an artist wasn’t an affectation but a way of life.
He dropped out of journalism school through a combination of complete failure and expulsion, after six years of clowning around in the cafeteria. He adopted the title “freelance photographer” to explain to his father why he should lend him the money for his first Kodak camera. Then he went out into the street in search of an image to can and flog to the papers for a fee that would finance his experimental artistic photography. He set up a studio in the attic of a derelict house. He called it a “loft” and managed to trick a few aspiring models into posing nude for him. He did indeed sell those photos for a tidy sum, but he used a pseudonym. Later, he specialized in the underground movement, and that was when he bought his leather jacket, on Portobello Road on a research trip to London paid for by a Sunday supplement, and some Dr. Martens boots that he destroyed going up Guadarrama on a motorbike.
He got a dragon tattooed on his arm. Time went by, fashions changed, and the underground movement emerged and went mainstream, but all the while César Barbosa refused to let go of his leather jacket.
“Few of us nostalgic types are left,” he often muttered at the bar. “True survivors of a mythical time when we had The Cure, punk, and Madonna’s fingerless gloves.”
“And Bruce Springsteen,” the barman would reply, raising his glass. “The Boss.”
In recent years he had done a few jobs for Librarte. He usually turned up at the office unshaven and reeking of stale tobacco, often wearing a sleeveless T-shirt to show off his dragon. The girls called him the Pirate behind his back, mainly because he had the same name as Captain Barbosa from Pirates of the Caribbean, but also because his cocky attitude and fondness for rum meant he was more than worthy of the nickname.
For two years, María paid no attention to the Pirate apart from muttering timid pleasantries—“morning, good morning, the invoice, thank you, we’ll transfer the money in a month, goodbye, bye”—and when she did pay him some attention it was quite by accident, and thanks to a silly, embarrassing mistake, which she blamed on the children’s tonsillitis. “I swear I don’t know what got into me, what a thing, come into the office when you can, César, and we’ll sort it out.” She had paid him twice for the same piece of work: a photo shoot with a truly ugly author, what a joke, the poor thing’s hideous.
“I didn’t even notice,” he lied, because he awaited each paycheck in cold sweats. “In any case, I’ve spent it now.”
“Then you’ll do the next job for free,” said María, ever pragmatic.
But César turned up at the office holding an envelope with the money, and he handed it to María with the same solemnity with which Sultan Boabdil handed over the keys to Granada to the Catholic kings.
“Come on, let me buy you a drink,” the Pirate said then.
And he took her straight into a scene from The Bridges of Madison County. While Clint Eastwood showers in the upstairs bathroom, Meryl Streep takes an ancient flowery dress out of the trunk, plonks it on, and looks like Laura Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie but fifty years older. Clint Eastwood stares at her in surprise, not understanding what the demure look is all about, because he knew, right from the very beginning when he asked her under the Madison Bridge how to get to the nearest town, that he was going to get her. María didn’t care. César Barbosa took her for drinks, listened to her talk about herself for hours on end, gave her a ride on his motorbike to the corner of her street, and on parting said the thing about the heart-stopping ass.
There was no turning back after that.
CHAPTER 23
A week after he arrived in Madrid, Atticus had moved into the flat on Calle del Alamillo and paid Señora Susana six months’ rent up front; this amount, according to his calculations, was equivalent to less than a week living like a king in the hotel his father had booked for him.
It wasn’t that he disliked hotel life. On the contrary, Atticus agreed that there was nothing better in the world than the absolute insouciance that comes from being a hotel guest: the discreet laundry service that asks no questions, the guiltless all-nighters, the permanent availability of the minibar and room service, the clean towels, the fresh flowers . . .
But an unyielding conscience, such as afflicts compassionate souls, had begun gnawing at his insides from the moment he crossed the threshold of the Librarte office and met the five victims of the magazine’s dire economic situation.
If he was to follow his father’s advice, he should simply have played the role of an unscrupulous businessman capable of leaving all sentimentalism to one side when it came to defending his own interests. No one but those five women was to blame for Librarte’s failure. “Don’t forget, son, that we gave them the opportunity to succeed and they failed to take advantage of it. We gave them the means, we protected, supported, and advised them, just as we did with the Germans at Krafts, and while they managed to top the sales lists, that lot in Spain have only managed to ruin the business.”
“They have, I’ll admit, achieved top marks when it comes to the art of messing up.”
But if, instead of following his father’s cold instructions, Atticus let himself be guided by the warm beating of his tin heart, he had no choice but to be sympathetic toward those five women who were about to lose their jobs.
They already had names and faces, and he saw visions of them in the corners of his luxury hotel room, pointing accusatory fingers at him: “You gave up on me, you abandoned me, it’s your fault that I’m living under a bridge, fishing for stinking carp to feed my children, washing clothes in the filthy water of the Manzanares, because you used me while I was useful to you and then threw me in the river.”
At times he was also confronted by the ghost of Karl Marx, despite being completely sure that Marx had never stayed at that hotel, which made him wonder why it really was that he used to see Tolkien’s ghost in his room at Oxford. If such visions weren’t tied to a physical space, as he had assumed at the time, then he was doomed because James Joyce might appear when he least expected it, furious with him for pretending to have read Ulysses from cover to cover when in fact he had only flicked through the Longman reader’s guide.
Literary digressions and unfounded fears aside, Atticus Craftsman felt that it was terribly bad taste to go on enjoying the pleasures of that ostentatious hotel while he was causing the girls at the office to suffer. If he did end up having to fir
e them, it would really be a slap in their faces to be staying in such an oasis of abundance.
That was when it occurred to him that he might rent a studio somewhere near the Librarte office—hence his unfussiness when it came to the imperfections of the flat on Calle del Alamillo, which did, he couldn’t deny, have a certain charm to it.
Señora Susana had turned out to be a housewife dedicated to the causes of crocheting, dried flowers, housework, stainless-steel cutlery, and amber-colored Duralex glasses. Strangely, instead of breaking like any other member of their vitreous family when thrown forcefully against a hard surface, these glasses shattered into thousands of tiny crystals. These looked so like confetti that Atticus had hurled half a dozen onto the kitchen floor and delighted in the spectacle like a small boy.
He hadn’t had time to fully admire the floral linings of the drawers, nor the wallpaper that adorned the backs of the wardrobes, nor the stuccoed walls in the hall, nor the collection of porcelain figures in the hall cabinet, because that earthmover Soleá Abad Heredia had convinced him that they should leave immediately for the Sierra Nevada, in whose foothills, she swore, they would find a treasure that had lain hidden for seventy years, waiting for Atticus Craftsman to unearth it.
“Don’t bring heaps of paperwork, Míster Crasman,” she had warned him, “because you’re not going to have time to work. My family is pretty intense, you’ll see, they won’t leave you alone for a minute.”
“Should I bring my overcoat?”
“What do you think, silly? It’s boiling in Granada!”
So with his suitcase packed with clothes, his wash bag, his pillow, his kettle, and plenty of Earl Grey, Atticus decided that he was ready. This time he left behind the small erotic library because, given the way things seemed to be going, it seemed inappropriate to carry such an arsenal of debauchery.
“My cousin Arcángel is going to give us a lift, if that’s all right with you, since he’s been in Madrid for business and is driving back to Granada with an empty truck tomorrow.” Soleá had suggested this so expectantly that he didn’t dare contradict her, despite having planned on hiring a two-seater soft top that would be more in keeping with her curves.
• • •
Soleá and Arcángel came to pick Atticus up at eight in the morning that Wednesday. They beeped the truck’s horn and blocked the traffic in Calle del Alamillo while they waited for him to come out. The logo on the side of the truck read ARCÁNGEL MELONES, GRANADA, and inside it smelled like a village fruit shop, not that the Englishman noticed, having never smelled such a thing. Nor had he ever shaken a hand like Soleá’s cousin’s, with long nails—“y’know, for playing the guitar”—and hairy fingers.
Arcángel was wearing a black shirt open almost to his navel, and a gold cross the size of an Order of the Garter medal hung from his neck. He was sporting a gold watch, two or three rings, another couple of chains around his neck, and pointy shoes. He had skinny legs and wide shoulders, and was about Soleá’s age, with a similarly intense gaze and the same manner—at once reserved and outraged, a mixture seemingly possible only in members of their family, who appeared to be both ready to be best friends with anyone and constantly on guard, ever attentive to the slightest insult or lack of respect, ready to flip their lids or come to blows. Atticus reminded himself that he ought to tread carefully if he didn’t want to end up in a brawl like the one he had with Soleá the day he met her.
Naturally, the three of them sat in the front of the truck, with Arcángel driving, Atticus by the window, and Soleá between them, somewhat squashed between their legs. To the Englishman, such proximity seemed embarrassingly invasive. He wasn’t used to having a woman in his personal space. Nor was he used to greeting someone with a pair of noisy kisses, one on each cheek, mouths crossing in the middle, and between kisses, a breath, the smell of flowers. The cousins, meanwhile, would have found it strange to spend the four-hour journey in separate seats. They treated each other with joking familiarity, pinching and slapping, laughing a lot, and sometimes, if there was a lull in the conversation, bursting into song.
“Is that man your father, Arcángel?” Atticus asked, pointing to the photo of an older man, who didn’t have many teeth and stared down from a metal frame stuck to the windshield.
Soleá and her cousin burst out laughing.
“That man is Camarón,” said Arcángel, with greater pride than if the photo had actually been of his father. “There’s a CD in the glove box, niña,” he told Soleá. “Stick it in.”
Soleá leaned over Atticus’s legs to get the CD. Atticus trembled. He was about to lift his hand and stroke her hair, but a weight, heavy as lead, kept his hand firmly pinned to the seat.
She put the radio on, inserted the CD, and the strains of a Spanish guitar cut through the air, followed by the cries of a flamenco singer.
“This is the man in the photo,” said Arcángel.
Then he started singing at the top of his voice, accompanying the singer in his agony. Soleá clapped the rhythm and Arcángel pounded the steering wheel like a drum.
“Don’t you sing?” Atticus asked Soleá.
“Badly,” she admitted.
And Atticus, respecting the sudden blush in her cheeks, didn’t want to insist.
After a couple of hours, Soleá fell asleep with her head on her cousin’s shoulder. They were crossing the Despeñaperros Bridge, the road winding through holm oak woods, when Arcángel suddenly took his eyes off the road and fixed them on Atticus.
“I’m not one to stick my nose in other people’s business, but if you touch even a thread of my cousin’s clothing,” he threatened, “I swear to God I’ll cut your ears off.”
Atticus swallowed. A tight bend was coming up.
“Please,” he begged, “keep your eyes on the road, Arcángel. You don’t need to worry about me,” he lied with a shaky voice. “I don’t intend to court your cousin.”
“You can court her all you like,” replied Arcángel. “But if I find out you’ve touched an inch of her skin, listen here: I’ll kill you.”
“Understood.”
“You married, Míster Crasman?”
“No.”
“Got a girlfriend, Míster Crasman?”
“No.”
“Then you can talk to her. That you can do. But no funny business. Is that clear?”
“If I misbehave with Soleá, I’ll have you to answer to.”
“Right.”
Once that matter was settled, Arcángel switched his attention back to the road. Camarón continued to sing duets with the truck’s owner, and Soleá carried on sleeping peacefully and lightly with a smile on her lips.
CHAPTER 24
At about nine in the evening, having first tried Shakespeare, then Stendhal, then the Brontë sisters, and ending up desperately, but unsuccessfully, seeking refuge in one of Corín Tellado’s romantic novels, Berta Quiñones had to admit that some troubles can’t be cured with books alone.
She couldn’t turn up at Asunción’s house and tell her about María’s affair. She didn’t usually keep secrets from her friend, and if it had been any other sort of problem—to do with work, health, or loneliness—she would have gone running to pour her heart out to her. But since it was a matter of infidelity, it seemed better to keep her worry to herself than spread it to Asunción, who had suffered enough with her own unhappy marriage to start sorting someone else’s out. Although they never talked about it, Berta knew that Asunción had to summon enormous courage not to burst out crying every time she remembered her ex-husband and the Iberia flight attendant.
In the end, having rejected the option of talking to her best friend, Berta decided to go to Gaby’s house to scrounge a cup of tea and some comfort. In Berta’s eyes, Gaby and Franklin were the perfect couple. They adored each other.
“Come in, Berta, what a surprise.”
“Is Franklin in?”
“No way. He’ll be back really late tonight. He’s got a commission for a mural on
the entrance to the Naval Museum. You wouldn’t believe how good it’s looking.”
“All the better, my love, because something bad has happened . . .”
“I can see that. You’re pale as a sheet, Berta. Shall I get you a glass of wine?”
The two of them sat on the orange sofa in the living room. The sofa and a blob that looked like squashed fruit—a vinyl on the far wall—were the only touches of color in the room. Everything else—the shag carpet, the coffee table, the cylindrical standard lamp, and the life-size plastic sculpture of a greyhound—was as white as snow.
“Oh, Gaby! This is so horrid that I don’t even know how to start telling you about it. I’m sorry to come bursting into your happy life with this.”
“We’re all worried, Berta. Atticus Craftsman is probably going to fire us all. We know that. But it’s not your fault, these things happen.”
Berta burst out crying.
“That too, what a mess. I swear to you, Gaby, I’ve been careful, I’ve never spent more than the magazine can handle. You know yourself the sacrifices we’ve all made to keep the business going. We haven’t allowed ourselves a single luxury, we’ve been honest, we’ve tried so hard. And, all the same, it turns out we’ve done everything wrong. It’s horrible. Mr. Craftsman spoke to me about debts, ruin, failure in every sense. He says no one reads us, we’ve got no credibility, no name for ourselves, no prestige. That we’re a stain on the Craftsman & Co. brand and we’re hemorrhaging money.”
Gaby went to get the tissues. The box was white as well.
“I don’t get it, Gaby,” Berta confessed. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Well, if your conscience is clear, that’s the main thing. You’ll see it’s not such a big deal. It might just be a question of tightening our belts on certain expenses, asking Craftsman to delay his decision, and putting our thinking caps on. I can do unpaid overtime, if you like.”
The Altogether Unexpected Disappearance of Atticus Craftsman Page 9