The Spanish Game am-3

by Charles Cumming

  I am lying wrapped in a cotton sheet in the bedroom, unable to keep an eye on Sofia as she wanders around the apartment, audibly picking up odd bits of paper and magazines, making no secret of her nosey fascination for my closed, obscure existence. In the sitting room she switches a CD from Mozart to Radiohead and then returns to give me a kiss. It surprises me that she has not picked up on what I said about Saul.

  ‘What time do you have to go home?’ I ask.

  ‘You want me to leave?’

  ‘Of course not. I want you to stay. I want you to stay for ever.’

  ‘Ten o’clock,’ she says, ignoring the flattery. ‘Julian thinks I have yoga with Maria.’

  She has left the room again. From the kitchen she asks if I would like some water and I hear her pour two glasses from a bottle in the rack. I put on a T-shirt, pull the duvet across me for warmth and catch Sofia’s perfume on the pillow.

  ‘You friend said that you used to work in oil,’ she calls out. ‘How come you never told me about this?’

  ‘Does that upset you?’

  ‘That you didn’t tell me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She comes back into the bedroom, hands me the glass of water and appears to give the question some serious thought.

  ‘It doesn’t upset me that you didn’t tell me,’ she says eventually. ‘It upsets me that you have things to hide.’

  ‘Well, that’s my problem, my past,’ I reply, with more candour than intended. ‘We all have secrets, Sofia. We all have things we conceal.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  This might be a way into the Julian situation, a chance to begin asking awkward questions. She is wearing one of my business shirts and a pair of thick winter socks, leaning up beautifully against the wall at the foot of the bed next to a Habitat Matisse.

  ‘You don’t have secrets? You don’t have things you hide from me?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she says, with melodramatic conviction. Lifting her foot onto the bed she begins stroking my leg through the duvet. I adore the shape of her thighs. ‘I show everything to you, carino. I trust you with my marriage. There is nothing I wouldn’t tell you.’

  ‘And Julian?’

  Her face falls. ‘What about Julian?’

  She doesn’t like it when we talk about him. It is a sour subject, guilt-gathering. She fucks me wearing his wedding ring but flinches if I ever touch it.

  ‘Does he keep things from me?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Fearing that I have been cack-handed, I adjust the pronoun in Spanish to alter the meaning of the sentence.

  ‘You misunderstood me. I said, “Does he keep things from you?”’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Sofia looks nonplussed.

  ‘You don’t think so?’

  ‘No.’ She pulls away, no longer touching my leg. I have played it badly. She walks up to the window, seems to pick a piece of dust off the wall and then flicks it out of her fingers like an insect. She turns to face me. ‘Why are you asking me these questions?’

  ‘I’m just interested.’ I’m also beginning to wish we had had this conversation on the telephone. ‘Don’t you like it when we talk? I don’t want us just to fuck and not speak. I want us to mean more to each other than that.’

  This turns out to be an effective if unpremeditated tactic. Sofia returns to the bed, touches my arm and looks at me with a mixture of surprise and delight. ‘Of course, of course. I don’t want that either. We make love, Alec, we have some time together, I like to talk.’

  ‘I just wanted to know more about Julian.’

  ‘Of course.’

  She kisses my forehead.

  ‘It’s just that Mikel Arenaza told me something. In San Sebastian. Something about him.’

  That stops her. Dead in her tracks. She sits up. ‘What?’

  ‘That he was married before you. That he had another life.’

  If Sofia and Arenaza are part of a conspiracy against me, they will have expected me to bring this up. Equally, if she has no inkling about Julian’s past, that may help to expose his true motivation. But she begins to smile.

  ‘You didn’t know about that? Julian never told you he was married?’

  ‘Never. And neither did you.’

  She begins to caress my palm with her thumb. ‘Well, that is his secret.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And he is ashamed by it, I think. A part of his life that went wrong. Julian is a very proud man.’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘And Mikel told you this?’

  ‘He was drunk.’

  ‘Mikel is a fascist.’

  She curls her bare legs up onto the bed so that her knees are almost tucked under my chin. This is how I wanted the conversation to progress. I would like to run my mouth along the bliss of her soft thigh, but need to stick to the task at hand.

  ‘He told me that Julian’s wife left him for another man. His best friend.’

  ‘Felipe, yes. An engineer.’

  ‘Where was he from?’

  ‘Colombia.’

  ‘Julian’s wife was Colombian? ’

  It doesn’t feel good to be feigning surprise like this, but it is necessary in the circumstances.

  ‘No. American. An East Coast family, lots of money. But they moved there because she was working for the government.’

  ‘The American government?’

  ‘Yes. She was some kind of banking or finance specialist. So boring’ Sofia uses a great Spanish expression here. Que conazo! What a drag. I feel a great sense of relief.

  ‘And that’s how she met Felipe?’

  ‘I suppose, sweetheart, I suppose.’

  For the sake of seeming disinterested I break off now and spend a wordless ten minutes exploring her naked body. Eventually we make love again, have a shower, and then head back to bed.

  ‘So what was Julian doing all day?’ By now it is as if I am making light of the whole thing, a joke of it. Both of us have a glass of wine in our hands and my skin is damp from the shower. ‘Was he working at the American embassy as well? Was he working for Endiom?’

  ‘Oh no.’ She laughs. ‘This is why he keeps it a secret. He was teaching English, like all good British people when they live away from home. In the old days Julian wasn’t the successful private banker. He was just following Nicole around the world.’

  ‘Nicole was her name?’

  ‘Si.’

  ‘Did you ever meet her?’ This elicits a brief look of Hispanic disgust, sour as old milk, which effectively provides me with an answer. ‘O?, but how come Julian’s best friend was Colombian?’

  Sofia spins on the bed and places her head next to mine. Perhaps she has finally grown tired of all the questions.

  ‘Felipe was not his best friend. Julian does not have friends. Only silly people from his school in England.’ She starts to imitate them, adopting a clipped Sloane, arching her neck so that she is kissing me as she speaks. ‘“ Sofia, darling! How charming to meet you! I don’t know how you put up with old Jules.” They are such idiots, these English. But not you, carino. Not you.’

  I reach for her stomach and walk my fingers up to her nipples.

  ‘So?’ she says, sighing. ‘You have no more questions? The little interrogation session is over?’

  ‘It’s over,’ I tell her. ‘It’s over,’ and I take the glass of wine out of her hand and place it on the floor.

  13. Development

  Late on Thursday morning the Nokia mobile shrills beside my bed.

  ‘Alec?’

  It’s Arenaza.

  ‘Mikel, hi. Sorry, I was asleep. How are you?’

  ‘You sleep? At eleven o’clock? Are you sick, Milius?’

  ‘I was up late last night.’

  ‘O?. I am ringing to tell you that I’m going to the airport now. I fly into Madrid this afternoon. We still going to have dinner, right? You want to meet up on Saturday?’

  ‘That sounds great.’ I twist a crick out of my neck and sit
up against the headboard. ‘Is Julian coming?’

  ‘No, I don’t call him this time. Who knows? Maybe I’ll see him for lunch on Sunday.’

  ‘What about your friend?’

  ‘You mean Rosalia?’ He must be calling from a public place because he says her name very quietly. ‘She meet me at Barajas this afternoon. We will be together tonight and tomorrow, but I will be free at the weekend. Let’s meet for a cocktail at Museo Chicote, yes? You know it?’

  ‘On Gran Via? Sure.’

  Chicote is probably the most famous and certainly one of the most expensive bars in Madrid. A haunt of Hemingway and Bunuel. A haunt of tourists.

  ‘Good. I will see you there at ten. Take it easy, my friend.’

  ‘You too, Mikel. You have a good flight.’

  Interesting that he should go cold on Julian. Is Sofia the problem? Does she refuse to have fascists in the house? I get dressed, make some coffee and head down the road to check emails at the internet cafe on Ventura Rodriguez. Julian has read the Endiom report and sounds happy. ‘Bloody good job,’ he writes. ‘Really chuffed with the magnum opus.’ So at least that’s out of the way. The Basque translations have also come through and I print them off, asking the bearded attendant for a large plastic bag in which to carry them. While I am waiting, an email comes through from Saul:

  From: sricken 1789@hotmail. comTo: almmlalam@aol. com

  Subject: On the road

  Hi mate

  Thought I’d drop you a line from sunny Cadiz. Andy’s had to go out of town until tomorrow but he has a nice apartment near the beach that doubled for Havana in Die Another Day. Have you ever been here? It’s on a peninsula that sticks out into the Atlantic. This morning an aircraft carrier the size of the Empire State Building sailed across the horizon en route for Iraq. Apparently there’s a US naval base five miles up the coast. Franco handed over the land in the 50s in exchange for economic aid and now there are thousands of Yank sailors in shorts eating Oreos and drinking ‘Bud’ and really making a big effort to blend in with the local culture. These are the kind of things that a man learns on holiday.

  Cordoba was great. I didn’t stay long. Met a girl from Bristol in the Mezquita and impressed her with my knowledge of mihrabs and caliphs culled from your Rough Guide to Spain (thanks). She was a bit shocked that Charles V had built a Catholic cathedral bang in the middle of a mosque and said something about the whole building being, like, a metaphor for what’s going on right now in the Middle East’ and I said: ‘You know what? You’re right’ and then lied about being late for a train.

  One bit of bad news. You remember Kate’s friend, Hesther? She’s apparently got cancer. Had just met a really nice bloke, they were probably going to settle down and get married, and now she’s got to deal with this. Anyway, she asked after you and I told her you were fine and she said to say hi.

  Don’t know when I’ll be back. Might well take you up on the idea of going to Fez/Morocco.

  Have heard nothing from Heloise.

  Take it easy pal -

  Saul

  Hesther. Someone I haven’t thought about for years. She was one of Kate’s friends from acting school who used to flirt with me and fall asleep after two glasses of wine. The random strike of incurable disease. It occurs to me that statistically my own chances of avoiding cancer have probably improved as a result of her illness: if one of my peers has it, then I should be OK. Sadly it no longer appals me that I am capable of such thoughts. I pay the attendant and leave.

  There’s a busy restaurant with a decent menu del dia on Calle de Serrano Jover, just opposite the big Corte Ingles supermarket in Arguelles. I go there for an early lunch at 1.30. The articles have been badly translated into barely comprehensible Spanish and I feel like registering a complaint with the website. However, it’s still possible to get the gist of their meaning and I quickly conclude that there is little about Arenaza that I did not already know. Mostly he is a rent-a-quote spokesman for Batasuna on any number of issues. I find the story in which he pledges to ‘analyse’ ETA’s murder of the six-year-old girl in Santa Pola, and discover that he was arrested for un alterador del orden publico – basically a ‘breach of the peace’ – during a Batasuna rally in 1998. Even the lecture at Bilbao University was on nothing more significant than voting patterns. Trying a different tack – and to give me something to talk about at Chicote – I cross the street after lunch and buy a paperback about ETA by an Irish journalist, heading home to read it on the sofa.

  According to the book, Basque nationalism as a political movement stretches back more than a hundred years, to the foundation of the PNV in 1895. Its founding father, Sabino Arana, who would nowadays be called an out-and-out racist, was concerned that Basque ethnicity was being diluted by peasant labourers flooding into the north-east from impoverished Andalucia and Extremadura. Arana, who is still regarded with almost saintly reverence in the region, essentially made eugenics a cornerstone of the party’s manifesto. Hardline nationalists to this day will tell you that the blood types of ‘pure’ Basques are different from those of Europeans from other regions; indeed, in its early years, the PNV would accept only those members who could prove that they had four ethnically Basque grandparents.

  Until the Civil War, the PNV was the dominant party of nationalism across the region, convinced that Euskal Herria was a country under occupation by Spain. That occupation became a reality in the Civil War when Bilbao fell to fascist troops in 1937. In the ensuing years the PNV banked everything on the fall of Hitler and was dangerously isolated when the Allies failed to kick Franco out in the aftermath of World War II. Instead, as the Cold War took hold, the West lifted a series of economic and diplomatic sanctions against Franco, forgave him his dalliance with Nazism and embraced him as a loyal anti-communist. It comes as no surprise to learn that the CIA worked briefly alongside members of the PNV with the idea of toppling Franco. For a while, the nationalists believed they might be part of a US-backed coup d’etat, until Eisenhower cut the rope and swung behind the General.

  According to the book, the roots of the armed struggle can be traced back to Franco’s brutal thirty-year suppression of Basque culture and identity. The General, motivated by a profound political and ideological contempt for Euskal Herria, and keen to punish the region for supporting the Republicans during the Civil War, banned all nationalist movements, forbade parents from giving their children Basque names, and made it illegal to speak Euskera in the streets. ETA was forged in this atmosphere – a country of checkpoints and police brutality, of torture and abuse – though at first the organization was little more than a small group of non-violent Catholic students who met in conditions of almost total secrecy in the 1950s. Dedicated to outright independence for all seven provinces in the region, ETA drew inspiration from anti-colonial struggles all over the world and had developed a military wing, inspired by the examples of Mao and Che Guevara, by the early 1960s. The organization claimed its first victim by accident, in the summer of 1968, but thereafter the killings became more discriminate. When they blew up Franco’s right-hand man and heir apparent, the deeply unpopular Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, ETA suddenly found itself on the world stage.

  The plan was stunning. In 1973, a comando unit led by Jose Miguel Benaran Ordenana dug a tunnel under a street in central Madrid along the route that Blanco passed every morning on his way to celebrate Mass. On 20 December, in an operation codenamed ‘Ogre’, the comando detonated three dynamite charges, killing Blanco and two of his bodyguards instantly, and blowing their car over an entire city apartment block into a neighbouring street. Committed today, such an act would be considered an outrage; thirty years ago, sympathy for ETA was running high, and Blanco’s murder was welcomed, even in international circles. Until recently you could still see the remains of the vehicle in the Museo del Ejercito on Calle de Mendez Nunez. It was just a short walk from the Prado.

  14. Chicote

  When it rains in Madrid, it rains for days on end, driving p
eople from the streets and changing the character of the city. These aren’t the thin, bloodless showers of England; these are subtropical storms accompanied by punchy, umbrella-inverting winds. When I step outside the flat at half past nine on Saturday night, en route to meet Arenaza at Chicote, gusts of rain are sweeping down Princesa so hard that it is an effort to cross the street in search of a cab. I wait in vain under the ineffective shelter of the bus stop and then make a run uphill to the metro at Ventura Rodriguez, shoes and trousers already soaked by the time I make it to the station.

  Seven high-school students – two girls and five boys – are smoking cigarettes and listening to music on a concrete bench beside the Legazpi platform, cartons of cheap red wine and litre bottles of Coke littering the ground around them. There is nothing unusual about this: smoking on the metro in Madrid takes place right up to the point at which passengers step onto the trains, and underage weekend drinking – known as the botellon – is a norm. Until they reach an age when they can afford to drink in bars, Spaniards will inebriate themselves on cut-price alcohol and then pool their money for entry into a late-night discoteca. On a (dry) Friday or Saturday night, particularly in summer, Plaza de Espana comes to resemble the location for a small, informal music festival, as vast numbers of students armed with stereos and bottles of J amp;B converge around the statue of Cervantes, drinking and snogging themselves into oblivion. Tonight they have been driven underground, and it will only be a matter of time before some jumped-up station attendant barrels along the platform and orders them to move on.

  It’s a short walk from Gran Via metro to the entrance of Museo Chicote. The bar is relatively quiet – it’s dinner time – and there’s no sign of Mikel. I take a small, leather-lined booth at the back and order a Rob Roy from a pretty waitress who hangs around for a chat after she has brought my drink. Her name is Marta. She has bobbed black hair and a gentle, possibly mischievous nature.

  ‘What are you reading?’ she asks.

  I brought the ETA book in case Mikel was late, and feel awkward showing her the cover. You never know how Spaniards are going to react to the Basque issue.