Murder in the Central Committee

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  ‘With the number of liaisons you have, Carmela, you’d always be on holiday.’

  ‘In fact, you’re just like them. And rather than stand up to Santos or Mir or Poncela, you’re quite capable of ignoring us altogether.’

  ‘I stand up to them all the time.’

  ‘But on serious, ideological questions. Not for us bloody rank and file.’

  ‘The mere foot soldiers.’

  Leveder was on his tenth chinchon. Carvalho concluded that it worked like an internal starch, heightening his stiffness from time to time.

  ‘I invite you to dinner. All of you. We’ll all dine with Cerdán and explain the problems of actually existing communists, not of his test-tube constructions. Cerdán!’

  Cerdán allowed himself to be promptly drawn by Leveder’s call, so that he should no longer be the centre of attention in the room. Leveder introduced him to Julio and Carmela, describing them as members of the bloody rank and file, and as half-witted survivors of the noisy dunghill.

  ‘Cerdán, we invite you to dinner at Gades, and in return you can explain whether the number of five-year assignments is built into KGB widows’ pensions.’

  Leveder did not conceal his wish to be heard, while Cerdán was equally anxious to leave the bookshop and bring the conversation to an end. Leveder was now starting his thirteenth chinchon amid speculation about why the KGB should recruit such contradictory figures as Sixto Cerdán and Paco Leveder. Cerdán held Leveder by the arm and led him out, ahead of Carvalho, Carmela and Julio. A girl whose face was half-covered by wavy hair complained that Cerdán had left them with an unclear book-list.

  ‘Come and eat with us,’ Carvalho suggested, without taking his eyes off the birth of a soft crevice at the top of her low-necked jumper.

  ‘I wouldn’t like to disturb you.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be disturbing us. We always like to see new faces.’

  ‘I know Leveder. I’ve been to his classes as an unregistered student.’

  ‘Well, then, you’re almost one of the family,’ Julio said, taking her by the arm.

  ‘I need six coffees and these two fingers,’ Leveder told the Gades head-waiter as soon as he came to greet them. He then went off to the washroom, all the time keeping his eyes on the two fingers that were to be of such mysterious service to him. Cerdán smiled in search of Carvalho’s complicity and got ready to complete the guest’s book-list ‘before we start to eat, drink and all that’. Carvalho took advantage of the cultural interlude to scrutinise the newcomer at his leisure. Her hair was between red and chestnut in colour, her eyes light-brown, and her lips more sensual than fleshy. A dark gulf appeared between her breasts at the top of a green woollen jumper, while her Germanic bone structure had been softened by three or four Latin American generations, possibly including some Indian element as witnessed by her almond-shaped eyes.

  ‘I’m no ignoramus, you know,’ Julio was joking with Carmela. ‘I’m doing a slang translation of Lenin. Just say something to me and I’ll translate it.’

  ‘I don’t know any Lenin. I’m a bloody rank-and-filer.’

  ‘You must know something.’

  ‘All right, explain the dictatorship of the proletariat in slang.’

  ‘Power, man, is the crucial factor. All power to the people. But that’s easy. . .Please be so kind as to say something by Lenin that I can translate into a language I understand.’

  ‘Something by Lenin?’ Cerdán searched his memory so hard that it seemed to creak. ‘Well, one of the April theses: an open break with the provisional government, pointing towards the transfer of all governmental power to the soviets.’

  Cerdán returned to his bibliography as Carmela laughed uncontrollably at Julio’s simultaneous translation.

  ‘Bourgeois democracy sucks. We gotta get it together at the grass-roots. Street credibility. . .’

  Cerdán was consulted.

  ‘What the hell’s that?’

  ‘It’s the language of my tribe: the jive-Leninists.’

  The Latin American girl laughed, and Cerdán felt he had the aesthetic duty to puff up his flabby cheeks in case the muscular movement produced a laugh.

  ‘What work of Lenin’s would you advise me to translate?’

  ‘Come on, don’t keep calling me usted. You could translate What Is To Be Done.’

  ‘I’ve already got the title: Getting Our Act Together.’

  Leveder suddenly appeared in his chair. The vomiting had made him feel lighter and able to control the situation.

  ‘Here I am. Ask me anything you like.’

  Cerdán told him to be quiet so that he could continue with the book-list.

  ‘Are you supervising a thesis?’

  The book-list reached its end.

  ‘Fine,’ the girl said happily, putting her notebook in her bag.

  Cerdán did not even look at the menu.

  ‘Anything at all. Spaghetti, I suppose.’

  ‘Espaghetti alla maricona arrabiata,’ Leveder ordered.

  ‘We haven’t any of that.’

  ‘I order it in every restaurant and no one ever has it. You’ve got a nerve if you think I’ll tell you who killed Garrido.’

  ‘If you think I’ll put up with your mental incontinence,’ Cerdán snapped back, ‘then you’re sadly mistaken. You’re old enough to control your sphincters. As Pavese said, every man over forty is responsible for his face.’

  The others were not sure whether it was said in earnest or in jest and decided to wait for Leveder’s reply.

  ‘You’ve convinced me,’ he said, and Carmela had to turn away so that Cerdán should not see her laughing.

  Cerdán gave up Leveder as lost and turned to Carvalho.

  ‘How long it’s been! What have you been doing with your life? University? Publishing?’

  ‘Import-export of capers and dried figs,’ Leveder cut in.

  No one seemed to hear him. Carvalho talked vaguely of business matters, while Cerdán was looking for the exact point at which their conversation had been interrupted twenty or twenty-five years earlier. He must have found it, for he looked hard at Carvalho and wanted to ask him something that could not be asked.

  ‘Was everything okay?’

  ‘A couple of years and then out on the street.’

  ‘Mine was a very rough time.’

  ‘It was written so.’

  Cerdán passed over Carvalho’s light irony and turned to face Leveder.

  ‘I must tell you that your evening homily struck me as a pile of horseshit,’ Leveder said.

  ‘If you don’t cut it out, I’ll have to get up and leave.’

  ‘It was the speech of a vulture, preying like that on Garrido’s human carrion-meat and political carrion-meat in general. Cheers! Cheers!’

  No one responded to the toast: all their eyes preferred to roam the packed restaurant. Each one remained on their island. Even Julio withdrew into himself, while Carmela looked in her bag for something she could not find. Leveder surprised them again by asking Cerdán whether his work on Socialism and Bureaucracy was very far advanced. From that moment, the two opened themselves up on the problems of education, on translations, on the need for time to reflect, travel or do nothing. It was a conversation between designers of the mind about the worth of various cloths or the inevitability of the return to the mini-skirt. They easily passed on to Garrido. How is Luisa? Carvalho suddenly discovered there had been a Luisa in Garrido’s life, just as there must be one in Cerdán’s. A Luisa. Children. Domestic questions. Everyday mental strains, never entirely stifled by big alibis.

  ‘The last time I saw him was at an unsuccessful meeting to organise a march to Torrejón against American bases. As usual, Garrido wanted to present an air of agreement. “Together, but not mixed into one. Each with their own slogans.” It was not possible. We had a very frank discussion. “I envy you,” he said. “You act as if history had only just begun.” That’s a big part of the drama of the traditional workers’ parties. They de
velop a privileged inner logic that cuts them off from reality.’

  Leveder did not put up any resistance. He had rather a gloomy ideology that evening and was not worried that Cerdán should fall into monolgue. He merely shook his head or went to the spaghetti with the delicacy of a well-trained table companion. Carmela and Julio listened with fascination to Cerdán, as if it was the first time they had sat in the stalls at the theatre of intelligence. Even Carvalho felt captivated by the litany of sad truths that came from Cerdán’s lips. Like someone fleeing from his own dream, Carvalho blinked heavily and made for the bar. He was thirsty for a draught beer.

  ‘My name is Gladys and I very much agree with what you didn’t say. The others talked and you kept silent.’

  ‘Argentinian? Chilean? Uruguayan?’

  ‘Why not Colombian, Peruvian or Costa Rican?’

  ‘Everyone has their own taste in exiles.’

  She laughed, throwing her head back in the manner of Rita Hayworth in Lollipop and revealing a young snake’s neck hardly touched by little rings. She gently rested her hand on Carvalho’s shoulder as if to regain her composure.

  ‘The truth is that I’m lost. Back home, I was quite used to all this tomfoolery. We spent years and years getting worked up about the transition to socialism or whatever. In the meantime the soldiers were sharpening their bayonets. I’m Chilean. And don’t get the idea I just looked on from a distance. I was in the front line, in the Freedom Express that criss-crossed the country with its message of culture and communism. But the others had the air force.’

  She sadly turned a glass that had become sad in turn, the icecubes as if frozen by her brooding eyes. Carvalho leant back with his elbows on the bar and looked at the dining-room where Leveder, Cerdán and Carmela were still tuning the instruments of an impossible orchestra.

  ‘Do you want an aspirin?’

  The Chilean woman opened her eyes so as to feign more than the expected degree of surprise.

  ‘An aspirin?’

  ‘I have a friend—or, rather, had a friend—who used to pick girls up like that. He’d go up to one and say: “Do you want an aspirin, señorita?”’

  ‘And did it work?’

  ‘Always.’

  ‘For you too?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Shall we drop these people? Are you interested in their speeches about History?’

  ‘I’ve had enough history for today. Since I arrived in this town, I seem to have been living in a book written by a sociologist or some such prick.’

  ‘You can’t stand sociologists?’

  ‘Among others.’

  ‘I’m one myself.’

  ‘I’ll try to forget it.’

  Carvalho began to move towards the door. Gladys followed, asking him to stop.

  ‘Aren’t you going to say goodbye? What kind of person are you?’

  ‘They don’t need us.’

  But when he looked back, he saw Carmela’s huge black eyes filled with malice. He paid no attention and this time pushed Gladys out of the door.

  ‘I invite you to walk in the old part of town.’

  ‘Madrid’s full of old parts.’

  ‘Around the Plaza Mayor.’

  Carvalho shrugged. He stopped a taxi that seemed drunk on diesel oil, blacked and spluttering. The driver had to lower his scarf in order to speak.

  ‘I’ve just had a tooth out,’ he grumbled, ‘and I’m still groggy.’

  Gladys laughed into her coat.

  ‘Why are you laughing?’

  ‘At the aspirin.’

  Carvalho put a hand on her shoulder as if to stop her laughing.

  ‘He’ll think we’re laughing at him.’

  ‘Señor, I’m not laughing at you. It’s just that something very funny happened to us.’

  ‘You can laugh at the mayor of Madrid for all I care. That’s what democracy is all about.’

  He dropped them opposite the Arco de Cuchilleros. They went into the Plaza Mayor as into an inner sanctum. The sound of clapping and harsh guitar-playing rose from cellars packed with winter tourists. They were almost alone in the lamp-lit square, with no other witness than the equestrian statue of King Felipe IV.

  ‘We’re like a couple of American tourists walking in a Rome square in some fifties film.’

  ‘I was very little then.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  Their shoulders touched as they walked. The deep warmth of a perfumed woman emanated from her ivory-like woollen coat. The curls of her lightly permed hair fell on her shoulders; and whenever she spoke, she had to toss them aside like soap-bubbles or snowdrops brighter than the yellowish street lighting. The balconies and windows seemed to enclose their own memories rather than to open on a time that did not belong to them. Carvalho remembered his own walks as a young, impecunious conspirator, or his rendezvous beneath the arches, usually next to the doorway of a municipal bureau that doubled as a tourist office with Entrambasaguas’s Madrid Cooking on display.

  ‘I’d like to check on something over there.’

  The book was there just like in the late fifties, and it seemed as unchanged as his companions in that chorus of Madrid sub-culture.

  ‘Do you want some literature for visiting the town?’

  ‘I was just reminiscing. Years ago, I often used to pass this window and had to read the titles of books that were of no interest to me. Now that one does interest me.’

  ‘The cookery book?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You too, Brutus?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘All the left in this city is into cooking. They invite each other round to try out their dishes. And the little blokes do it all on their own. You’d think they were nuts. They say they are regaining their sense of identity. They’ve even stopped getting divorced in order to spend time in the kitchen.’

  ‘Do you know a lot of people?’

  ‘Yes. I have to do something. Things haven’t been easy. The left here has given us quite genuine solidarity but very little money.’

  Some drunken foreigners flowed into the square singing Que viva España! Gladys and Carvalho felt driven from the square without anyone having said anything. They went into Calle Mayor and strayed down the little streets leading to the Opera and the Plaza de Oriente. They could hear their own footsteps between the neat grilles that seemed to be drawn on the white façades and the dark brown cornices and shutters.

  ‘Silence is golden after so much chatter.’

  Carvalho agreed and put an arm round her shoulder. She tossed her head back as if to catch the arm in the nape of her neck.

  ‘Why did you pick me? You could have gone off with Cerdán or Leveder or anyone else.’

  ‘I’ve seen a lot of Leveder, and I’d only go with Cerdán to a seminar on some spiritual concoction. You were quiet, and I like quiet men.’

  ‘I’m always hoping to meet a woman who likes quiet men. That’s why I keep quiet all the time.’

  ‘You’re certainly a sly one.’

  ‘Anyway I’m in a new city, and new cities always hold a promise of adventure.’‘I know that for youI am one more adventureAnd once the night is overYou will forget me in a trice.’

  ‘Los Panchos.’

  ‘I didn’t learn it from Los Panchos. How old you are!’

  Standing in her own light, Gladys presented a near-classic profile that was marred only by an excessively pointed nose. Carvalho ran a finger along her brow, her nose, her lips and her chin. Then he returned to her warm, moist lips. Gladys opened them gently to catch his finger, sucking it and then biting it between her teeth.

  ‘Not so fast, stranger!’

  She had run a few metres ahead before turning to see Carvalho’s reaction. He caught up again and they left the Opera for the Plaza de Oriente. Carvalho could not believe that shouts of ‘Franco, Franco, Franco’ had ever contaminated that urban prodigy of historical reverie protected by the papier-mâché palace wall, with its glimpse of fields in
the distance.

  ‘It’s the most anti-fascist place in the world. The demonstrations must have been with sunshades. It ought to be compulsory to come here with a sunshade.’

  They sat on a bench and she explained how she had come from Chile with the help of the Spanish embassy. She worked as a consultant for a Barcelona publishing-house and was just passing through Madrid.

  ‘Which publisher?’

  ‘Bruguera.’

  Gladys accompanied him to the entrance of his hotel. She read an invitation to come up in Carvalho’s eyes.

  ‘Not today. Can I see you tomorrow?’

  ‘I’ll have a very hectic day.’

  ‘So will I. Let’s say eleven in the evening. At Oliver’s.’

  He picked up his things from the hotel reception. He idled about the room with no desire for work, taking apart the memories shared with Cerdán that had just sprung from a forgotten trunk. A conversation on the passage from quantity to quality in connection with one of Sartre’s books. He would mercilessly hunt it down in his bookcase and consign it to the flames. As soon as he returned to Barcelona. Preparations for peaceful twenty-four-hour national strikes. A work on schematism, dogmatism and Caesarism that Cerdán advised him not to show the leadership. Whole days, nights and early mornings spent questioning life and History beneath the tall pine-trees of the villa where Cerdán’s parents spent their summer. I’m reading Jung. He’s not a Marxist. He’s a disciple of Freud, stated Cerdán with a certain lack of confidence. Then Cerdán as a constant example of the alternative to Carvalho’s progressive loss of willpower in a prison full of injured sparrows and mongoloid homosexuals, real or fake epileptics, introverted escapists like Wild West gunmen beaten once and for all. And far off, in another prison under an assuredly darker sky, the exemplary Cerdán with his seminars for the working class behind bars, his gymnastics, his David Ricardo, his Party work.

  ‘Are you doing Party work?’ asked the young spiritual guides who managed to get through the communications net; especially Gabardinetti, that Hollywood swordman’s stand-in who ended his days picking up Swedish girls in Australia or Australians in Sweden. At that time, behind half a kilometre of bars, he was shocked that Carvalho no longer practised, that he wasted his time following the swifts on their westward flight or listening to the story of Juanillo who stabbed women’s cunts. Are you doing Party work? Get stuffed, Gabardinetti. The peaceful twenty-four-hour national strike won’t happen in this prison and I won’t preach it to the little old man who used to dip his prick in condensed milk and give it to the kids to suck, nor to the man who killed his son-in-law for knocking his daughter about with a sleeveboard. A sleeveboard? Are you sure, old man? Get stuffed, Gabardinetti, you ought to follow Cerdán’s example—he set up a translator’s cell in Toledo. In Toledo? No, Burgos. You’re a communist wherever you happen to be, said Gabardinetti, before setting off on holiday to Lloret del Mar; Comrade Carvalho’s faith is slackening, he doesn’t give political reports, he hasn’t said anything about whether Squinty fucks a cow or a sow each time he goes to the prison farm. The cow and the sow will get over it in twenty-four hours on the day when the peaceful twenty-four-hour national strike is proclaimed. How young and stupid we all were, Gabardinetti, Cerdán! How the basic gestures have remained the same since then!