Murder in the Central Committee

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  Carvalho nodded. He put the cheque in his pocket and returned to the large ante-room. As soon as he entered, he felt there had been a major change. A near-total silence mummified the still compact groups. The rigidity of their bodies was belied by the fact that their heads tried to look anywhere except at the spot where Esparza Julve was collecting his folder and chatting normally with the secretary. The two voices grew ever louder against the background of silence.

  Esparza Julve put the folder under his arm, went up to a group of comrades and said something that was greeted with monosyllables. He tried his luck with another group. Then another. His steps became heavy with fatigue. From his position in the room, Carvalho guessed that Esparza was trying to draw near the door without giving the impression of flight. But now Mir was in front of him with his eyes averted, giving the order for the meeting to begin. Esparza tried to slip by Mir, but the chief steward took him by the arm and gently pushed him towards the main room. Esparza put on a wan smile and attempted some jocular remark. Carvalho followed the pair until they entered the meeting. He stood in the doorway watching their backs as they went up to the first row of tables. Mir then left Esparza, who went to take his usual place.

  As if at a signal, the members of the central committee plenum of the Communist Party of Spain rose to their feet, noisily pushed aside the chairs and formed a compact circle around Esparza Julve. They stood silently at a distance, as if to create a zone of pure air around a putrified mass, their nail-like eyes hard, sometimes tearful, red, wild, contemptuous. Esparza Julve rose slowly, picked up his file and took a few steps forward. Apparently obeying a secret order, the circle opened at the point where he reached it. Then someone shouted in a choking voice: ‘We see, we feel, Garrido is here!’ Esparza Julve walked past Mir without looking at him. Carvalho moved away from the door, and the man passed alongside looking out of the corner of his eye, with a sweaty nose and the eyes of an animal afraid of death.

  ‘Keep your fear for outside. Here they’ve just morally executed you. But outside, you’ll have a gun pointed at you for as long as you’re alive. You’re the most troublesome accomplice in the world.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  But he did not stop. He escaped as if he were slipping through a tunnel of perspiration. The door to the main room was closed. The central committee had begun. Carvalho followed Esparza Julve, allowing him to draw some distance ahead. Down the marble stairs with the feigned agility of legs that felt as painful as his heart. Carvalho held back so that his presence would not be interpreted as persecution. Run, rabbit, run. And he let the rabbit leave, some thirty metres in front of him. The glass doors opened automatically, as if they were part of the stage-setting. As soon as they shut again, a burst of machine-gun fire turned them into a spider-web canopy against which the distorted silhouette of Esparza Julve fell like a wineskin drilled by a thousand deaths. Carvalho threw himself to the ground, while the Hotel Continental lounge filled with shouts and voices. He stood up and ran to the doors, which still had a battered consistency to them. Carvalho’s approach activated the photoelectric cell, so that the doors opened as if nothing had happened. Then they disintegrated into powdered glass, revealing the bloody Punch and Judy show on the steps to the street. The corpse of Esparza Julve could have been an empty dinner-suit for all the attention Carvalho paid it. Carmela looked at him inquisitively from the crowd held back by the police. The detective made her walk with him to the car. He got inside, waiting for her to react and take the wheel.

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘Garrido’s murderer. They killed him.’

  ‘It was from a car. I was phoning the nursery from the box on the corner. A car was parked on double lines, like many others, and suddenly it drove off spouting machine-gun bullets. Who was he?’

  ‘Esparza Julve.’

  ‘Are you mad? Do you know who you’re talking about?’

  ‘He was already a corpse when he left the hotel. They killed him with their scorn.’

  The Madrid end of the air route always seems like a dress rehearsal of repatriated Catalans in the context of a star-wars film. Carvalho put the blue ticket in his jacket pocket and, without any enthusiasm, tried to persuade her to go back to Madrid. She did not say yes or no, but she remained by his side as they walked up and down a stupid, narrow corridor that led from a shop selling atrocious plain sandwiches towards the most absolute nothingness. Desire was impossible, and they had also run out of words. Maybe for that reason Carvalho suggested that they have something like a beer, to the teetotaller Carmela. An Aguila, always cool with its oh-so-natural taste, she sang softly.

  ‘Two beers, double quick. And a pork patty.’

  ‘Will this one do?’

  ‘It’s just symbolic. A monument to the unknown pig.’

  But he ate it. He apologised to his neighbour while trying to find a more comfortable position for his elbows. Just a few inches away was Cerdán’s sad face, with its drooping eyebrows, its sunken eyes and its sagging lips.

  ‘So many years without seeing each other, and now it’s every other day.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘Have you finished in Madrid?’

  ‘Completely.’

  ‘I’m off to Barcelona.’

  ‘I guessed as much.’

  ‘There’s a lot to do there. Do you still keep in touch with old comrades?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I do. They’re nearly all disillusioned: it’s the result of a revisionist, reformist policy. I’m going to try to do something. The task is to achieve a minimal unity in action, and from there to force the historical parties to react by ditching a petty-bourgeois leadership.’

  ‘I wish you every success in your work.’

  ‘We are few. Slandered. Driven off our feet.’

  ‘You people remind me of the joke about the Galicians.’

  Cerdán sighed resignedly at having once again to face Carvalho’s rationalist incongruity.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The one about the five thousand Galicians who wandered around the Casa del Campo and sorrowfully complained: We’s lost!’

  ‘It makes me cry more than laugh.’

  ‘That’s up to you.’

  ‘We’re still living through times in which we cannot be on friendly terms. Where have the smiles of neo-capitalism led to? Aren’t the smiles of eurocommunist reconciliation a slap in the face for the working class and the oppressed peoples of the world?’

  Cerdán turned with little enthusiasm to chewing a horrible, Madrid-style ham sandwich: bread like stone, plastic ham, an unappetising appearance.

  ‘How’s your health?’

  ‘It’s not keeping up with me.’

  ‘Despite the exercises and strict diet?’

  ‘Despite everything.’

  ‘Have you tried a regime of salted codfish, iced champagne and screwing like mad?’

  ‘I’m on a modest assistant lecturer’s salary, whereas you’re not involved in politics, a university career or anything like that. Still, things are going well for you. You seemed rather shy but really you’re a man of resources. Of course. . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve forgotten what I was going to say. Let’s drop it.’

  ‘You haven’t forgotten. The other day, you were on the point of asking me after the bookshop do. But the question stuck inside you like a cyst. Shall I ask it for you?’

  ‘Okay. Let’s see.’

  ‘What were you doing that day in Via Layetana, the den of the Barcelona police? Why was a red like you walking calmly down the steps?’

  ‘That’s not quite it, but my question was quite similar.’

  ‘I’m tempted not to reply.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘We could agree to meet again in another twenty years, at this airport. During one of your stops in the postponed revolution and at the end of another one of my business trips. I’ll tell you then.’

  ‘I wo
n’t live another twenty years.’

  ‘Can you swear?’

  ‘Almost.’

  ‘Okay, then, I’ll take pity and let you in on my secret. I’ll confess my guilt. I’m more or less Galician, and there’s hardly anyone there who doesn’t have a maid-servant, a civil guarder or a policeman in the family, however close or distant. There’s no escaping it. As soon as I was born, I realised that I’d arrived in a family of maid-servants, civil guarders and reds condemned to death in 1936 or 1939. The proletariat, too, is pluricultural.’

  ‘A relative?’

  ‘A relative.’

  ‘You could have said so.’

  ‘I was a young aesthete.’

  Cerdán finally gave up the struggle with the ham sandwich. Carmela was reading El País, detached from the conversation between the two men.

  At the bottom of his glass, Carvalho could see his cousin Celestino: a strapping young man with Celtic features who knew little about anything; a decent guy whose hands were dirty with fascism.

  ‘I don’t like it, Pepino, but they’ll use it against me if I refuse. There’s no way round it. I’ll try to keep out of it as much as possible.’

  Either hands dirty with earth or hands dirty with human flesh.

  ‘We’ll be boarding soon.’

  ‘So it seems.’

  ‘Are we on the same plane?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Cerdán thought it was a scientific answer, although Carvalho had not bothered to check the colour of the boarding cards.

  ‘Goodbye.’

  Carmela raised her eyes from the paper.

  ‘That wasn’t a very friendly meeting. You obviously think very highly of him.’

  ‘I owe him fifty per cent of what I used to be and absolutely nothing of what I am now.’

  ‘He’s an honest enough man.’

  Carvalho shrugged his shoulders. Will passengers with blue cards please prepare for boarding. Carmela took him by the arm and they walked towards the boarding-lounge like a properly married couple.

  ‘Come back some day. When you’ve resolved the contradiction between the abstract and the concrete arse of women comrades.’

  ‘You’ll have to put on five kilos. My conscience stops me from going to bed with women under fifty kilos.’

  ‘But I weigh fifty-three!’

  ‘What a pity. Why didn’t you tell me?’

  Carmela kissed him on the lips with her small, soft mouth. He tried to put a hundred passengers between himself and Cerdán, who climbed up to the plane and took a seat without looking round.

  Although Biscuter assured him that Charo was well and although he was tempted to have a proper lunch near the office, Carvalho decided to ring Charo and then go straight to his house in Vallvidrera. To sleep or not to sleep, that is the question. All the more so after his display of nodding and snoring for the dozens of Madrid-Barcelona mongrel executives who had watched his desperate, gluttonous sleep with smiles, laughter and even clicks of the tongue.

  ‘Will I see you tonight?’

  ‘I’ll sleep all day and wait for you in Vallvidrera.’

  ‘I love you very much, Pepe.’

  ‘That’s your look out.’

  It was her look out. One day when he had nothing to do, he would mark a day for his marriage with Charo in some diary of the future. Before the year two thousand, of course. Or in the next fortnight. He could not remember where he had left the car in the huge airport parking area, and so he had to look for it as one scans a crowd for a particular face. Here I am, the deserted animal growled, showing all the marks of bad weather and neglect. It was the first contact with a part of his mobile den and he greeted it by asking how it had been. He received a tardy, mulish reply from the starter, but the engine lost patience several times and was on the point of seizing up as he waited to pay. In the end, however, it went cheerfully along the road to the Castelldefels motorway.

  It was a sunny day and the looming hills of Tibidabo and Montjuic seemed to be propped up by the Mediterranean, a sea which carried the blood of its shore-dwellers out to the most suitable four corners of the earth. A mediterranean faith in life gripped his weary muscles, and when he reached the ring-road exit at the Travesera de la Corts, he intentionally missed the way home and headed for the Diagonal with its solid lunches of roast meat and finely matched wines. After a good meal, sleep would be a precisely controlled pleasure rather than the flight of a lost, beaten, collarless dog. He went into La Estancia Vieja with the air of a man about to eat the world, to eat and drink it.

  ‘An aperitif?’ the owner Juan Cané suggested.

  ‘A sour pisco, for the two of us.’

  Cané went off to order a tapa de bife for Carvalho, not an entraña because it was too tough that day. After the second pisco, Carvalho décided that the world was all right and gave in to Cané’s tempting solicitude: assorted pâtés, a piece of grilled steak, a sweetbread pâté, green vegetables, a little of everything. Some chinchulines? Carvalho could not remember what they were. Lean, braided intestines cooked over charcoal. Right, chinchulines. How about roast sweetbreads? Also. Cheese fried with aromatic herbs? Why not? And tapa de bife as well? Of course. Cané began to grow alarmed at the dynamic he had unleashed. He sat at Carvalho’s table to witness the spectacle of an unleashed meal. A 1959-vintage Paternina. And now, tell me, even if it’s in Argentinian, what these marvellous words mean: asado de tira, tapa de bife, entraña, chimi-churri. The Argentinian took a ball-point pen from his pocket and began to draw dissected four-legged animals, showing the difference in cuts between the continental Spanish culture, short on meat, and the Argentinian culture in which meat is everything.

  ‘Here you slice the beef horizontally and use it for stews. There we cut it vertically and that is the asado de tira or roast strip. The fineness of the asado comes from the slow roasting. Tapa de bife? Entraña? Here you only cut the steak in one way. But what goes by the name of steak is really a number of different meats with distinctive texture and taste. According to how it is cut, this part of the bullock will provide tapa de bife or entraña. Entraña is a bit of a problem, because the meat will be tough if the animal is not a soft, well-constructed bullock. But when everything is all right, it is the best part of the animal. As for that ocean of chimi-churri in which you bathed the meat and the serving-dish, it is a roasting sauce made from garlic, parsley and peppers, something like the Mexican chillies but not so crude, aromatic herbs and oil. Are you still hungry enough to scrape up the chimi-churri?’

  ‘It’s not hunger but sleepiness.’

  The second bottle of Paternina ’59 was Carvalho’s exclusive property. Whereas Cané ate in the restaurant every day, Carvalho only did so from time to time: if he didn’t keep himself under control, he would end up with his liver in his gullet. Where have you been? Madrid. How are things shaping up? Will I also have to leave Spain with the restaurant on my back? Who was the character that went for Garrido? What did you think of Garrido?

  ‘What are they eating at the table over there?’

  ‘Do you still feel like looking at other people’s plates?’

  ‘One should always desire other people’s women and food.’

  ‘It’s roast breast of lamb.’

  Some other time. What were you saying? No. Nothing is going to happen. You won’t have to leave with the restaurant on your back. Garrido? It’s still not clear. What do I think of him? I don’t know. Only time will tell. Either an Indian chief or a revolutionary in transition between the assault on the Winter Palace and a socialism as clear and self-evident as ripe figs. But I’m no good at politics. It doesn’t interest me. Just as I’ll never make the slightest effort to learn the Watutsi language, so I won’t lift a finger to learn politics. I used to read the papers, but now I don’t even do that.

  As Carvalho spoke, Cané noticed that he had not taken his eyes off the table with the roast breast of lamb. He was about to repeat his offer of a trial taste when he realised that Ca
rvalho was looking not at the food, but at a woman with hair between red and chestnut-brown, a wonderful rosy skin, a perfect mouth and bones that would win an architecture prize. It even seemed that the woman’s eyes met Carvalho’s after each piece of conversation or mouthful of food, looking over the three men acompanying her and even the restauranteur himself.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Some coffees.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Five.’

  ‘Didn’t you want to sleep though?’

  ‘I’ve got the whole evening in front of me.’

  He followed Carvalho’s eyes as they hung on the table, the girl or the breast of lamb eaten slowly as a delicacy.

  ‘Cigar?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Something to drink?’

  ‘Do you know how to make a bajativo?’

  ‘It’s on the menu. But it’s Chilean not Argentinian. It’s an excellent after-dinner drink: cognac, crème de menthe.’

  The waiter brought the bajativo. Carvalho picked it up, examined the green topaz in the gloomy half-light and raised the glass as if holding it out to someone. In fact, Cané could see that he was offering a toast to the rosy woman and that she was furtively returning the toast with a glass of wine as she went on talking with her table-companions.

  ‘A pick-up?’

  ‘No, I know her. She’s called Gladys, a Chilean woman. She’s the one who first gave me a bajativo to try.’

  [1]* Cuadernos para el Diálogo: a broad opposition journal that appeared legally during the latter years of the Franco regime.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Praise for Manuel Vazquez Montalban and the Pepe Carvalho Series

  About the author and translator

  Title page

  Copyright

  Contents