Murder in the Central Committee

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  ‘And who are you?’

  Carmela’s husband just had time to speak before Carvalho grabbed her by the hand and pulled her out of the room.

  ‘Carmela, where are you going?’

  ‘Beat it, you too!’

  ‘But what the fuck is happening?’

  Carvalho rushed onto the landing and raced down the stairs. His hand was still gripping Carmela’s.

  ‘Run, Paco, run!’ she shouted with her face turned upward.

  They went into the street. Carvalho took cover behind a car and forced Carmela to crouch down. Her eyes remained at the level of her jacket as he pulled out a heavy black pistol smelling of oil and confined places.

  ‘What’s happening to my Paco?’

  ‘The kid’s a bit slow.’

  ‘I’d like to have seen you in his place. I’m going to look for him.’

  ‘They won’t do anything to him. Keep still.’

  The door suddenly lit up and revealed the figures of the fat man and his assistant. They moved slowly and deliberately, conversing about a subject of moderate interest. They walked to the corner of the street, where their bodies and voices turned and disappeared. Carvalho motioned to Carmela that she should stay crouched down, while he inched forward behind the parked cars in a line parallel to the two men. When he reached the corner, he saw them get into a stationary car. He waited for its rear lights to vanish into the night and then returned to where he had left Carmela. She was no longer there. He crossed the street and climbed the stairs two by two. The door to the flat was closed.

  ‘It’s me, Pepe.’

  Carmela opened the door, her eyes filled with tears.

  ‘The brutes. Look what they’ve done to my Paco.’

  He brushed past her and reached the living-room in two strides. The man was sprawled on a chair with a red flower of blood on his parted lips. A broken arm hung awkwardly beside a body groaning from every pore. His eyes looked critically at Carvalho and then turned to Carmela for an explanation.

  ‘He’s a friend.’

  ‘Can he walk?’

  The man nodded that he could.

  ‘He should be taken to a clinic or an emergency centre, above all for his arm.’

  Once he was sitting in the rear of the car, the man looked now at the back of Carvalho’s neck and now at the back of Carmela’s, all the time working out the logic of what had happened.

  ‘Tell them it was a fight. That they tried to rob you. Make up two or three descriptions. If we told them the truth, they’d keep us all night and pass it right up to the minister of the interior.’

  The car went into the ambulance tunnel. While Carmela gave the details to the admissions clerk, an attendant wheeled Paco into the inner zones of the temple.

  ‘Relatives aren’t allowed in. We’ll give you a report in half-an-hour. You may go to the waiting-room.’

  An automatic coffee-machine and an equally automatic device for water, cola and orangeade. Parents of motor-cyclists flattened by the night; wives of anonymous victims of stab wounds; grown-up daughters of women seized by hemiplegia very soon after a rich meal of cabbage, potatoes and a snappy little hake; a taxi-driver who has crushed an old man in Calle Arturo Soria; the thin husband of a bulky pregnant woman who has burnt her hand in bubbling oil used to fry Roman-style squid. Carvalho left the room to light a cigar and let his mind focus on the ambulances depositing their shattered victims of the night. ‘When night falls and lengthens its shadows, few animals do not close their eyes and few sufferers do not feel greater pain.’ Carvalho translated the lines of Ausias March into Castilian, in a determined effort to mangle the versification. An old man hobbled into view on the nocturnal horizon, clutching his lower abdomen with one hand and spurring his frail body forward with the other.

  ‘Are you a doctor?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ve walked all the way from Lavapiés. They inserted a urine-lead the other night and now I’ve got spasms.’

  There was a few days’ growth of beard on his fleshless, chick-like face topped by a beret. He nervously opened his flies to show Carvalho a bandaged penis from which a plastic tube led to a urine-filled bag resting against a scrawny thigh covered with veins and empty skin.

  ‘You’ll catch cold.’

  ‘It hurts so much.’

  Carvalho took him by the arm and helped him into the admissions office. The receptionist tossed her head in irritation.

  ‘You again?’

  ‘It hurts very much.’

  ‘So you came back on foot? Come on. Go inside.’

  The old man penetrated the temple. The woman continued to shake her head and said to Carvalho:

  ‘He’s waiting for a bed for a prostate operation and he just keeps turning up, sometimes at four or five in the morning. He always comes alone on foot.’

  Dawn was already breaking when the taxi dropped Carvalho at the Hotel Opera. As he went up in the lift, he cocked his revolver in order to sweep aside anything that might prevent him from taking a warm shower and relaxing for a while between clean sheets. He threw open the room door and did the same at the entrance to the bathroom. He turned the lock and stood avidly under the shower for a very long time. Once in bed, he masturbated in an attempt to calm himself, then looked for a sleep-inducing pattern on the ceiling and on the cavernous sheets he pulled over his head. It was all in vain. He got up and put on his clothes. In the street he cast his eyes over a monotonous horizon of white coffee and variously shaped fritters on the bars of early-morning cafés. He eventually found one which, though not prepared to make him a ham and tomato sandwich, did not drive him away at the sound of such a ridiculous and evidently Catalan demand. They agreed to fry him some pickled pork, which inevitably had the typically Madrid taste of iguana or capon crocodile.

  Marcos Ordóñez Laguardia was a stalwart practitioner of the old Party culture marked above all by a sense of punctuality. ‘It was a bad sign if a comrade arrived five minutes late. It meant that he was certainly having problems. That trained us in a sense of punctuality.’ He was replying to Carvalho’s observation that the old communist had arrived at the entrance to the José Díaz Foundation just as the clock was striking nine. The other employees arrived in a broken trickle, greeted by Ordóñez’s tolerant smile and an occasional remark about the comforts of a warm bed. ‘I can see you’re one of the pre-war people, Marcos. A man of steel. A komsomol leader, that’s what you are, Marcos.’ The joke came from a brunette wearing seamed stockings and a mole beside her mouth. Marcos smiled contentedly at his ever-repeated morning victory, which encouraged him to begin the day under the sign of a small yet certain success. He looked like an ageing mandarin, polite, well-groomed, with an almost Japanese kindness.

  ‘I don’t want to mislead. I heard from Santos that you wanted to see me. He wanted to prepare me for the worst. Frankness is a communist virtue. That’s what I said to him.’

  Who killed Garrido? No one? Everybody? No, he accepted that he was incapable of isolating a face, an arm, a motive.

  ‘It’s clear why. To discredit the Party. The mystery is how a comrade could have taken such a crime upon himself. I know why you want to question me. I’ve had a pretty unhappy life, but it shouldn’t be exaggerated. There can be no birth without suffering. Nor History without suffering. At the very time that I was excluded from the leadership and sent to work in a factory in Czechoslovakia, thousands of Greeks were being butchered by the capitalist counter-revolution, thousands of Asians and Africans were being persecuted for their anti-imperialist ideas. How many were tortured to death? Who takes that into account? And yet, everyone points to the big and small errors—inhuman, I agree—committed by the communist movement. I could complain, but I don’t. I learnt a lot, that’s true. And I suffered a lot. But I knew that my suffering had a historical purpose beyond my personal fortunes.’

  ‘Did you take that into account when you shat all over the Party and Garrido?’

  ‘I won’t deny that I sometimes
shat on them, and on much else besides. At one time or another, we have all hated what we love most. Hate passes, but the love remains.’

  ‘Did Garrido ever try to justify himself to you?’

  ‘Not directly. Times were different. There was a fight against Stalinism, sometimes with Stalinist methods and while Stalin was still alive. In fact, the tendency or current of opinion to which I belonged was much more Stalinist than Garrido’s. History has proved him right.’

  ‘What did you feel when Garrido was murdered?’

  A sudden paralysis transformed the old face into a mask. But the muscles slowly started to move again and the lips murmered:

  ‘Bewilderment.’

  ‘You were on the Madrid front during the war—not behind the lines but right at the front. You’re a man who knows how to fight. Afterwards you saw battle in Catalonia.’

  ‘I know how to wield a machete, if that’s what you mean. Sure. With the right training, it’s possible that I’d have had the strength to use it at least once. Even if I’m an old man suffering from arteriosclerosis who can’t think as he used to. So, you may deduce that I stabbed Garrido in spite of the fact that he rehabilitated me and gave me a leadership position. Do you know what we Party leaders are called? The “Youth Front”. Because, roughly speaking, we have thirty years on each leg. But don’t go looking among the old ones. We belong to the old culture. We’re all Bukharins. We’d all have preferred to die rather than objectively harm the Party. The young ones are different. If you ask them whether they would sacrifice themselves for the march of History, they’ll tell you that the march is not to their liking. They’ve been through different times. I’d like to see them in a civil war or in the underground period of the forties or fifties. But no one can learn from someone else’s experience.’

  The speech continued with old examples of the Marxist culture of sacrifice. Do you know the Arthur London case? He only spoke out when his example was capable of helping the new communist perspective of socialism with a human face. Carvalho shut his eyes.

  ‘Are you sleepy?’

  ‘I hardly got any sleep.’

  ‘You ought to get the right number of hours. You have to pay for excesses.’

  Lecumberri Aranaz was boxed up in a little office of the José Díaz Foundation, operating an old-style calculator with paper rolls.

  ‘The accounts never work out right. Excuse me a moment.’

  Carvalho used the time to take a little nap, which soon became a short deep sleep. He awoke with saliva in the corner of his mouth, and his blinking eyes slowly returned Lecumberri’s mocking gaze.

  ‘Wouldn’t you do better to have a quick lie-down?’

  ‘Since I arrived in Madrid, I haven’t been able to sleep peacefully for a single night. When I’m not being knocked around, someone threatens me with a pistol.’

  ‘We were better off against Franco.’

  It was not the Basque style of sarcasm. More like the paradoxical remark of a Mediterranean aesthete. Carvalho shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘You’ve had a very interesting life. You were an ETA activist if I’m not mistaken.’

  ‘Well, ETA wasn’t the same as it is now. There was less activity. Just compare the rate of attacks then and now. It’s quite different.’

  He was so Basque that the only things missing were a beret on his head and a pan of stuffed peppers on the accounts table.

  ‘What is a Basque like you doing in a town like this?’

  ‘I sometimes wonder.’

  ‘As an ETA activist, you must have been given special training for armed combat.’

  ‘Rubbish! Four boring talks and a bit of target practice. But, as I say, the times were different. We were all part-time volunteers. Now they’re supposed to have a training camp in the Arab Emirates or Libya. In my days, we went to the mountains in the French Basque country. Four bits of nonsense and then off to put the wind up Franco.’

  ‘Why did you become a communist?’

  ‘Because I thought that the historical role of ETA had come to an end. All the same, I still believe that the Communist Party has never properly understood the national question. Even now it doesn’t. I also thought that if people like me joined, we could help to turn the CP in Euzkadi into a Basque party. Today I don’t know what to tell you. These walls are falling on top of me.’

  ‘Were you ever held by the police when you were in ETA?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tortured presumably.’

  ‘A good assumption.’

  ‘But you did not receive a particularly long sentence.’

  ‘The Burgos people had fallen and that was enough to vent their fury. Anyway, they couldn’t pin a lot on me.’

  ‘Didn’t the police give you any more trouble?’

  ‘A few skirmishes.’

  ‘I heard that you’ve asked for a leave of absence from being a Party full-timer.’

  ‘Did they announce it on television? I didn’t know I was so popular.’

  ‘What are your reasons?’

  ‘I’m not up to the present style of operation. A Party leader still has no private life. It used to be because of the underground conditions, and now it’s because there are too few cadres for all the areas of democratic life we have to work in. There’s family pressure. I’m nearly forty and I’ve hardly lived. I’d like to go round the world, for example, or do what I like at weekends. Go for a walk on the beaches of San Sebastian. See the kids playing in the sand. Watch them growing up. Listen to what they say. I’ve a career, not just the tasks of a Party activist. I’m tired. I’m not a revolutionary, only an anti-fascist. A lot of us discovered this after Franco’s death, but we haven’t made it clear enough to ourselves. It’s not good when political activity becomes a routine. I’m dried up—no drive, no imagination. I want to go home! I’ll be off as soon as we get rid of Garrido’s corpse.’

  A tight-lipped mouth, black shiny eyes, muscular rigidity in a small frame, words spat out with passion. They’ve killed my father. Fernando Garrido was more than a father to me, just like Santos. I’ve revered him ever since the first drop of my mother’s milk. Esparza Julve, a wholesale dealer in tropical fruit: lychees, kiwis, mangoes, papayas, passion fruit, pineapples.

  ‘How much are the Galicians?’

  ‘A hundred pesetas for the cheapest.’

  ‘Which Galicians are you talking about?’

  ‘There are New Zealand kiwis and hothouse-grown Galician kiwis. Buy some. Those from Australasia are the nicest. The Galician ones are coarser, although they taste very good. Perhaps a little acid, eh? Treat my crates like your mother! Or better than your mother! We had an argument, and now it’s pot luck how the goods arrive. There was a time when we were together all day. When my father died in prison, I went to France and stayed in Santos’s house. Well, Santos would come and go. Few people knew that he spent more time inside the country than outside, risking his life all the time. You’ve seen Santos: so jovial, so diplomatic, so well mannered. But has he got guts! I still go to him when I have any kind of problem. He looks as if he only understands politics, but he has a brain for any problem you care to mention. As for Fernando, I’d have done anything for him—well, anything he asked. Do you think they censured me when I decided to stop being a full-timer? No, sir. They actually tried to cheer me up, because they knew I’d done my duty even if my heart hadn’t been in it towards the end. It wasn’t the life for me. A thousand hours of meetings every week. I’ve always been a restless type, and I needed to develop things on my own initiative. Now I’m on the central committee as a representative of small businessmen, very small, but I serve the Party. Esparza, a little surety needed here. Esparza, fifty thousand pesetas over there. And Esparza keeps giving, because there are many ways of serving the Party. Some devote their whole life to it. Others all their intelligence. Still others contribute their good will or money. That’s the beauty of a new, modern party, a new-model party, as Fernando put it. The party based on cells was more u
p my street. Why should I deny it? I don’t know, it seemed more communist. But in these things, too, you either innovate or go to the wall.

  ‘What gets me about the conservatives is that these guys present themselves as the most wonderful progressives in the world, but when you look a bit closer their ideas turn out to be as old as the hills. Whether they’re Leninist or not. We’ll see. What would Lenin have done in Spain in 1975? Would he have hurled himself against the bayonets? No, he was no idiot, and only idiots do idiotic things. I’m none too keen on theories. My father was a miner and I was on the way to being a farmhand when they made me a Party full-timer. Then I set up in small-time trade like I’m doing now. But although I’m no theoretician, I know how to listen and I’ve had the chance to hear people who know what’s in the interest of the working class. A good communist is not only someone who busts his arse fighting the bourgeoisie or fills his mouth with phrases like the dictatorship of the proletariat. It’s someone who has an overall vision of things and of what should be done in the interests of the working class. Would you like to try a passion fruit?’

  An obscene old bollock filled with a little acidic juice.

  ‘You have to get used to the taste. In some restaurants, they even make ice-cream with it. They don’t know what to invent any more. If a peasant produced a melon that tasted of soused tuna fish, he’d make a fortune in no time.’

  ‘You were on close terms with Garrido. Did he ever say anything that could have been interpreted as a warning of what was about to happen?’

  ‘Garrido was a very calm and courageous man who didn’t get scared about every little thing. I saw him just a moment before he went into the central committee room. A group of comrades from La Mancha were waiting to pay him their respects. He saw me among them and put his arm round my shoulder. How goes it, Julvito? I don’t know why, but he always called me Julvito. Santos started it and all the old-timers followed suit. When I was a kid, I used to go on holiday in the Crimea or Romania with Santos’s and Garrido’s children. So many memories. So many hopes.’