Off Side

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

The Centellas manager, Justo Precioso, operated by similar standards. He was an accountant in one of Sánchez Zapico’s factories, and had become the club’s manager-in-residence after an obscure period as a Second Division player, first as a right-wing defender and by the end as a sweeper. He was a thin, miserable little man, bald, with a three-day growth round his chin and an Adam’s apple which looked like a third testicle as it strove to rival the club’s chairman in his metaphorical reference to the players’ sexual impedimenta.

  ‘Toté, I want more balls!’ he shouted to the club’s mid-field defender. ‘Pérez, let’s have more balls up front’ — this to the man who until that season had been the club’s centre forward but since the arrival of Palacín had been playing inside forward.

  Every now and then he went over to an old blackboard, to try and plan out moves, but he couldn’t always find the chalk, and, when he did, it screeched and set the more sensitive players’ teeth on edge. His real forte was training with the players, out on the pitch. ‘Out there, that’s where it matters. I want to see intelligence and balls,’ he would say, as he stood next to the south-end goal, onto which the club’s parsimonious lighting had been focused in a sort of half light which left the rest of the pitch in the dark, a ghostly landscape for the antics of these nocturnal footballers.

  ‘I don’t want to overdo it with my knee,’ Palacín warned him.

  ‘Do you mean just today, or for always?’ the manager asked, his Adam’s apple suddenly paralysed with alarm.

  ‘Gives me trouble every now and then. When I’ve had a bit of a warm-up, I’m fine.’

  ‘So I should hope. You just play the way you want to play. But I want balls, Palacín. Midfield players in the regional League are a lot more lethal than what you find in the Second or Third Division. Compared to most of them, Pontón was an angel.’ And he winked knowingly, because he had just named the player who had been responsible for crippling Palacín’s knee.

  During this first training session, the players were watching as much as playing. Palacín was the object of their evaluation, and in skirmishes for possession of the ball they were respectful but also at pains to demonstrate that they were not dazzled by the residual splendour of his past. Especially Toté, the central defender, who marked him so closely that it felt like having a limpet on his back. Each time that Palacín slowed down, protected the ball with his body, and was about to swing on one leg so as to wrong-foot his marker, an elbow would knock him off balance, or a knee in his thigh would stop him in his tracks. During one of these encounters, when Toté’s knee made contact with his old injury, Palacín suddenly went wild. He left the ball and went for his team-mate, grabbing him by his vest, and pulling him face to face as if he was about to chew his head off.

  ‘You just fucking take it easy, bastard …’

  ‘You too. We don’t play like young ladies here.’

  ‘What the fuck do you think you’re playing at?’ The manager ran up, arms flailing, to separate them.

  It wasn’t necessary. The two players backed off, knocking the earth from their boots. The manager put one arm round Toté’s shoulder and took him to the corner of the pitch, where he gave him a quiet talking to. Then he came over to where Palacín was cautiously checking his knee for damage.

  ‘I’m sorry about that. The man’s a bit of an animal …’

  ‘Exactly what I was just telling him.’

  ‘No need to get all worked up. Don’t let him upset you.’

  ‘Easier said than done.’

  ‘Come on! Let’s see you running! Hup, hup, hup!’

  The players broke from their statue-like immobility, and started running in Indian file, hopping alternately on one leg and then the other, and moving their arms and necks in a way that made them look dislocated. The trainer ran alongside, moving up and down the line to check how willingly or unwillingly his troupe was performing. He had banned the wearing of watches during training, but some players had them up their sleeves and checked them surreptitiously as they waited for the whistle that would signal the end of the session.

  ‘Look at your arse, man! You look as if you’re running sitting down! All of you, I want you to feel your balls, feel them bouncing, OK? Hup! Hup!’

  He finally ran out of breath and ideas for things to shout, and gave the long-awaited blast on his whistle. The line of players broke up, and some of them ran ahead to get to the changing room before the others. Sometimes there wasn’t enough hot water for everyone to shower, even though Sánchez Zapico had presented the club with a powerful gas water heater, the inauguration of which had been attended by the whole team, the club directors, and their respective wives and children. The water heater was about the only thing on the premises with any future. The changing room was full of leaks and the walls were decorated with damp patches and flaking paint, and whether the players’ lockers were lockable or not depended on some arcane logic which no carpenter in the past ten years had ever succeeded in fathoming. Palacín took his boots off and put them on the floor. The two showers were already occupied, so he kept his shirt on in order not to get cold.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ Toté said, as he walked past, completely naked, and reached out to shake hands with Palacín.

  ‘He’s a decent sort of person when you get to know him,’ said a blond-haired player as he sat next to Palacín and began taking off his boots. ‘He’s not got anything against you. It’s just that his contract ends in June, so he’s got to put on a bit of a show.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘My dad tells me that you were brilliant in your day.’

  The lad’s eyes consumed him as if he was an elixir, an alchemical residue of his former glory.

  ‘I’m a bit over the hill, these days.’

  ‘I was there when you scored in the match with Madrid Athletic, when the whole stadium was on its feet.’

  ‘Other times they were all booing me.’

  ‘You win some, you lose some. That’s what my dad says. He says you had a neck like a pile-driver. Boom, when you headed a ball it would go off like a rocket. He says you had as much power heading a ball as kicking it.’

  ‘That’s impossible, son.’

  ‘I know. But that’s what he says. I play midfield.’

  ‘Yes, I saw you.’

  ‘What do you think of the way I play?’

  ‘Very good. You play with your head up, and that’s very important for a midfield player. But you have to listen out more. Keep eyes in the back of your head.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘A midfield player has to be able to feel the waves of air coming off the player who’s following him, and when he’s got the ball and he’s looking for who to pass it to, he needs eyes in the back of his head, because that way he knows who’s coming up behind him. That’s the sort of thing you learn over the years.’

  ‘The trainer says I’m very intelligent.’

  The lad gave him a look that was obviously seeking confirmation, and Palacín laughed.

  ‘For sure. It shows.’

  Biscuter had tucked himself away in his kitchen; Charo was suffering an attack of indignation, and needing attention; Bromide was sick and scared — Carvalho’s family was falling apart, and he decided he needed to spend a bit of time putting it back together. He called to Biscuter to make his presence known, and when his assistant emerged from his lair, with his lank red hair bristling up in tufts and his large mournful eyes wide with surprise, Carvalho had a sudden revelation — that, in Biscuter’s case, time actually stood still. Of all the members of Carvalho’s bizarre family, he alone had remained unchanged since the day Carvalho had first met him, thirty years previously, in Aridel prison. The little hair he had was red, and he still looked like a foetus that had been abandoned by its mother in horror at the ugliness of the creature she had brought into the world. For all that he disliked admitting the passing of time, Carvalho reckoned that Biscuter had to be over fifty by now. Time passes with its own inexorable logic, and only the artist’s
technique can cheat it by freezing it in films and novels. Time was there, for all to see, in himself, in Biscuter, in Charo and in Bromide, and in each case it betrayed its victims in a different way. Charo, by a tendency to put on weight, Bromide by the fact that he was slowly rotting away inside, and Carvalho by the fact that he was ever-increasingly a passive spectator of his own time and of other people’s. For the time being, though, time had spared Biscuter — perhaps because it had already marked him from the moment of his birth. Biscuter was born ugly, and it was as if time had settled its account with him from the moment that he emerged from his mother’s womb.

  ‘Jesus, boss. So you’ve finally noticed that I exist!’

  Carvalho leapt to his feet abruptly and thumped the table.

  ‘Not you too, Biscuter! I seem to be surrounded by manic depressives. Why do I have to spend my life providing a shoulder for other people to cry on?’

  ‘It’s not that, boss. The problem is, these days you don’t seem to care if I’m alive or dead. I told you the other day I’d bought the Gastronomic Encyclopaedia. It cost me a small fortune, and you didn’t even ask to see it. And you never tell me if my cooking’s any good or not, or if I’m doing it right. I’ve always stood by you, boss, and every shopkeeper in the area knows it. I’m not asking for a reward or anything, but people are always telling me how lucky you are to have an assistant like me.’

  ‘Go and see Charo, and tell her that Bromide’s ill and she should take him to the doctor’s. If she starts throwing things at you and saying that I can come and tell her myself, tell her I’m tied up for the moment. I’ll ring her later.’

  ‘And I’ve got no security, either, boss. Do you ever stop to think about that? God forbid, but supposing something happens to you one day? What’s going to happen to poor old Biscuter? Out on the scrap heap?’

  With a vehemence that alarmed him, Carvalho assured him that this would not be the case. Biscuter was sufficiently alarmed to leave the office at a prudent speed, albeit with the satisfaction of a man who has just spoken his mind: ‘That told him,’ Biscuter repeated to himself as he went down the stairs, and he had the impression that his words had not passed unheard. Carvalho was perplexed, a state of mind which he found particularly repellent — a philosophical luxury unbefitting in a person of even average intelligence. He needed to clear his brain. He opened the desk drawer and took out a bottle of vintage Knockando, a good whisky for states of fundamental perplexity. He served himself three fingers in a large glass, and drank them in three long sips. This triple charging and discharging of alcohol and inhaled air did him good, and he was just preparing to go out and reconquer the streets and his state of mind when the phone rang. Even before the first words took shape at the other end, a kind of malignant vibration told him that it was Charo ringing to acknowledge receipt of Biscuter’s message.

  ‘Would señor José Carvalho happen to be in? Could his majesty come to the phone and oblige his humble servant by telling her exactly what was on his mind?’

  Carvalho decided to stick to the bare bones of conversation and ignore the provocative tone. Yes, she would be happy to go with Bromide, because Bromide was a nice person, not like some people she could name. In fact, a very nice person. Not like some people etc. Why in God’s name did he have to send a messenger? Had he forgotten her phone number? Surely at least he could have remembered her phone number, even if he seemed to have forgotten her. And sending Biscuter round just showed what a bad-mannered pig he was.

  ‘And a bastard … Do I make myself clear?’

  She made herself clear.

  ‘I’ll be round later this afternoon.’

  ‘You don’t have to treat me like a dog that has to be taken for walks. If I need a piss, I’m quite capable of going on my own.’

  ‘All right, so I won’t be round later this afternoon …’

  Since she now had him on the hook, there followed another monologue which eventually resolved into a plaintive ‘Just who do you think you are?’ And then silence, as she waited for Carvalho to give an answer that she knew he was incapable of giving. And then, finally, acceptance of his ‘I’ll be round later this afternoon,’ delivered in the tones of a man admitting defeat.

  Carvalho waited for Biscuter to return — a Biscuter still smarting from his dressing-down — and he explained the Mortimer case to him as if it was vital for Biscuter to be kept informed of its progress. It didn’t take long for him to take up his allotted role as a faithful Watson and to apply his analytical shrewdness to the situation in hand.

  ‘It must be the Arabs, boss.’

  ‘What Arabs?’

  ‘The Arab sheikhs, boss. They’re buying up all our best players and carting them off to their cities in the desert. They’ve got the money to build themselves teams that are unbeatable. First they put the wind up Mortimer, and then they sign him. I happened to hear what you were talking about with Bromide, and I’ve drawn my own conclusions. He wasn’t saying anything we don’t know already. I’ve been thinking more or less the same myself — you only have to walk round town to see what’s going on. You’ve been travelling too much lately, and either because of your travelling, or maybe because you’re stuck up in Vallvidrera, you haven’t noticed how things are changing round here. It’s the Wild West all over again, but this time it’s knives instead of guns. Are you in for supper? I’ve got the necessaries to make a brandada de urade.’

  ‘And what might that be, Biscuter?’

  ‘It’s a recipe I got out of the encyclopaedia I was telling you about. It just so happens I’ve still got a piece of fish left over from the other day. It won’t take long to prepare — all it needs is taking out the bones and adding oil and garlic, whisk the cream and add salt, pepper and a drop of tabasco. Put it through the blender and it’s done. Five minutes.’

  ‘Why not!’

  Biscuter was happier now, and as he disappeared into the kitchen he gave Carvalho an update on Charo’s state of mind.

  ‘She’s angry, boss, but it’ll pass. She told me she’s just about on the breadline these days, what with the Aids scare and all that, and the only clients she can still count on are her regulars, and they’re all getting old. One of them’s just died, in fact. A chemist from Tarasa. That’s why she was a bit depressed. You know what a softie she is.’

  Carvalho shared the brandada de urade with Biscuter, and they washed it down with a bottle of Milmanda de Torres, a fact which Biscuter found amazing until he realized that the bottle’s presence was his boss’s attempt at a peace offering. Carvalho ate hurriedly, because he felt an urgent need to get out into the streets and see or talk with people who weren’t going to burden him with hard-luck stories or premonitions of hard-luck stories to come. He used the pretext of his appointment with Charo and left. He decided to go on foot, so as to observe at first-hand the changes that Biscuter had talked about.

  ‘Mind how you go, boss. Honestly, the way things are going … The other day I read in the papers that they’re planning to pull down half the Barrio Chino, from Perecamps on upwards, because knocking it down will let some fresh air in, they say. The place is beginning to feel like a graveyard.’

  Carvalho was propelled out onto the street by a sense of irritation. Admittedly he had been travelling a lot, and admittedly Vallvidrera was a fair way from the city centre, but it was unreasonable to suggest that he would no longer recognize the places where he’d spent his childhood. How could they just spirit away all the old places? Presumably the fashion of imagining that everything had changed had now reached the lower classes, and Biscuter was singing, out of time, a hackneyed requiem for what had once been and what was no more, or for what might have been but never was. He recognized his old haunts, as he walked the streets reviewing a geography that had been his whole life, or almost his whole life, and everything seemed to be where it ought to be. He visited a couple of second-hand bookshops, and the feel of their dusty, mummified culture reminded him of his breathless hunger for books in the da
ys when he’d been a cultural junkie. He skimmed through a large, expensive book about Barcelona sporting a label on which the scandalous original price had been reduced by the bookseller’s sense of common decency: ‘Is the dream of free men living in a free city really realizable? At the moment, Barcelona is humanizing itself in each strip that it recovers or constructs for leisurely walking — that relation of space and time which gives us the freedom to do nothing, to fear nothing and to expect nothing. In other words, what we could call a beatific desideratum. Here we have a people that enjoys free things, and to whom one of their own philosophers promised that one day they would have everything paid for, wherever they went, for the simple fact of their being Catalan. These are people who get enthusiastic just collecting snails, or picking mushrooms, or drinking from public fountains and strolling round the city without a penny to pay. The average citizen relates to this city like a son to a mother: he knows that Barcelona is a woman, and he feels himself to be a child of the virgin Mother and the prostitute, of the Bronze Venus and of Pepita with the umbrella, of señora Josefina, of Reus, and many others. Over the years the city’s philosophers have tried to persuade us that Barcelona was a marble city, or a city state, or a city-region … But they failed. People recognize this city as a motherland which each of them is able to possess through the hegemony of his own memory. Some were born here. Others came from elsewhere. But this possessive memory began on the day when, like the ancient Chaldeans, they understood that the basic elements of their world ended with the hills that constituted their encircling horizon.’ He either agreed or disagreed with this sentiment, but he couldn’t be bothered to decide which. He deflated the bookseller’s expectation of an impending sale and exited decisively en route to see Charo. When he arrived at her door, he called up on the entryphone. Two minutes later Charo came stampeding out and flung herself at him in a huge exhalation of rose water and warm flesh. It was a railway station embrace, a wife’s embrace for her returning husband, and Carvalho let himself be hugged and kissed, all the while giving her little pats on the back, because he was at a loss what to do with his hands and his guilty conscience. Charo made it easy for him, because she was in a happy, chatty mood, and Carvalho suggested that they celebrate in style. First a film, and then up to Vallvidrera, always assuming she didn’t have clients waiting for her.