Off Side

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  ‘Clients? What are you talking about? I’m in a worse crisis than those poor devils in the steel industry. I tell you, Pepe, this Aids business has really messed things up. I’ve got regular clients that I’ve had for years, but that’s not what you’d call a decent living. I don’t want you to think I’m complaining, but I’ve got some important decisions to make, and I wanted to talk to you.’

  Carvalho knew that she’d get her say eventually, for all that he tried to delay the moment. He was willing to talk, but not until they first went to the cinema to see a film in which various people were getting drugged on gazpacho, and a girl was losing her virginity in her dreams, and a bunch of Shiite conspirators were somewhere in the background, making life complicated for a fashion model who had eyes like a doe and skin the colour of cream. Then, as they were on their way up to Vallvidrera, she repeated that she had things she wanted to talk about, decisions that she had to make. But first they made dinner, and then they made love, to the fullest of Charo’s expertise and the fullest of Carvalho’s capacity to evoke another body whose face he couldn’t exactly place, until at last he realized that it was Charo’s own — Charo as a younger woman. And as they relaxed afterwards, she with a cigarette, and he with a Churchill Cerdan, flat on their backs and with a blanket to protect them from the October chill of Vallvidrera, Charo finally explained what was on her mind. An old client was suggesting setting her up in business. Something simple. A boarding house, in fact.

  ‘What would you think of that, Pepe? A boarding house would be a good idea, wouldn’t it … I don’t have a penny to my name. Just a bit of money in the bank, but that’s going very fast because I’m using it to live on.’

  Whenever Charo was depressed, some client always seemed to pop up and suggest setting her up in business, and Carvalho had to be told all the details and was expected to offer advice. Carvalho shut his eyes in order not to catch Charo’s eye as he said: ‘That’s not a bad idea.’

  Calle Perecamps was to be extended, and would cut through the meat of the Old City towards Ensanche, forging a way through the defeated fibre of the city and the calcified skeletons of its direst architectural horrors. A gigantic mechanical digger with a head like some nightmare insect would convert the archaeology of poverty into archaeology pure and simple, but even if they demolished the houses, and got rid of the old people, the drug addicts, the pushers, the penniless prostitutes, the blacks, and the Arabs, all of them would have to find somewhere to escape to as the bulldozers drove them out. They would have to find a new home for their poverty, probably somewhere in the outskirts, where the city loses its name and thereby sheds responsibility for its disaster victims. A city with no name is a city which effectively doesn’t exist. It appears on no postcards, and only earns the sympathy of the front pages when its auto-destruction complex transcends the limits of tolerability in a permissive society, and it begins to kill, rape, and commit suicide with the lack of self-control which normally characterizes only the desperate and the insane. Streets of old people with almost empty shopping bags, eternally en route from one pitiful purchase to another, from one half-memory to another; what they’ve done with their lives, and what day it is today. A new generation of whores with varicose veins, who will be entered into the census statistics by a fifth-generation computer, and who will feed, as their mothers fed, on tuna sandwiches and squid tapas floating in a hybrid sauce and (as a concession to modernity) frankfurters doused in ketchup. Alongside the monumental prostitute, weathered by the passing years and the chill of the night, stands the skinny, wraith-like junkie prostitute, her shifty eyes flicking about like those of drunken sailors on a sea with no way out. Two classes of pimps, too: the old familiar type, a pachydermic stud with prominent buttocks and a barrel chest, and the post-modern pimp, wiped out by drug addiction, and with his eyes and fingers slipping like blades over the surface of a mad and hostile world. Dimly lit shopkeepers who are irretrievably up against the wall. Clean-living young men, unemployed through no fault of their own, who hurry through prohibited streets. Mothers, internal exiles in barrios where they have been growing geraniums on their balconies from five or six generations back. The contrast of honest poverty. Families of Moroccan moles and black gazelles from darkest Africa, inhabiting flats that have been abandoned by people fleeing a leprous city. Toilets with no running water. Dead bodies lying in flats barricaded from the inside. Old people, abandoned by memory and left by their own desires and those of others. Lost children kicking footballs around in the squares, up against the doors of Gothic churches that are so old that they’re half sunk into the ground, each with a recent history as street-corner tobacconists or the abodes of artisanal cutlery makers. Dog shit, and shit dogs, as faded and fearful as their owners — the women and mature children who look as if they are obliged to take the dog for a walk in order to take themselves for a walk, down the narrowness of narrow streets and worn paving stones. And something approaching the beauty of poverty has etched itself onto the façades of houses that were built shortly before or after the publication of the Communist Manifesto, a fact to which they remain oblivious, because this city was already old and has built itself, or rebuilt itself, on both sides of the medieval walls that were demolished in the middle of the nineteenth century. What excited Carvalho’s visual memory as he left Charo at the hairdresser’s and drove towards the southern parking lot on the Ramblas was not his own erudition, but a radio discussion on the problem of ‘Violence in the City’, where the contributors were an ex-terribly-modern-novelist, and a communist Jesuit, the former using as his spiritual inspiration a collage of various and opposing spiritual sources, principally a certain Georges Simmel, and the latter invoking Jesus Christ and Karl Marx. According to Simmel, since cities provide no ways of discharging aggression which do not involve great danger to the well-being of society, it becomes absolutely necessary to find ways of channelling that violence. One of the most familiar ways is what experts in ethics have come to recognize as aggression against a substitutive object.

  ‘Let us imagine,’ said the novelist, ‘that a terrified rabbit decides to kill the fox which has been making its life a misery. Obviously, the fox is stronger than it is. So instead it relieves its aggression by taking it out on a mouse. There’s a long tradition of these kinds of urban scapegoats: the persecution of Jews, blacks, Arabs, gypsies, Asians and foreigners in general gives the frustrated and aggressive citizenry a chance to lash out against minorities who are weaker than them and have no way of hitting back. Sport is another effective variant of substitutive objects. The ritualized interplay of aggressive actions and self-control enables the public to participate in a simulacrum of struggle, in an aggressiveness between players. The problem is that today’s generation of fans is no longer satisfied simply with simulated violence, but feels the need to materialize it on the terraces, or outside the ground, out of frustration at the feeling that their escape valve has become commercialized.’

  ‘Do you believe, señor Félix de Azúa, that if we made admission to football grounds free, soccer violence would disappear?’

  ‘I think it very likely.’

  ‘Do you have other forms of substitutive aggression on your list?’

  ‘Yes. Nationalism. Excessive patriotism, in the negative sense that it necessitates the existence of an external enemy. Also deaths in road-traffic accidents, and motorway deaths in particular. Industrial societies are willing to take on themselves the costs of deaths resulting from the use of motor cars, but not the cost of deaths arising from religion, politics or sex. Some deaths are permitted, others are not. Urban culture generates a scenario in which laws are able to distinguish between violence which is acceptable and violence which is not.’

  ‘Do you share this point of view, señor García Nieto?’

  The communist Jesuit agreed with the theory and the general scenario, and agreed that double standards were applied, but said that the causes of the violence and the disorder lay in the mystified values of wealth
and the inability of the majority of people to achieve that wealth, a sense of powerlessness which was becoming increasingly widespread in society.

  ‘Thirty per cent of Spanish society lives below the poverty line. How can it avoid being violent?’

  ‘And fewer and fewer people are going to football matches,’ the interviewer concluded, philosophically.

  Carvalho switched off the radio. Faced with the choice of either going to the office or examining once more on foot what his mind’s eye had reconstructed with the aid of the radio debate, he opted for the latter, parked the car, and headed off towards Arco del Teatro to examine the future path of the bulldozers, zigzagging down alleys that had an air of expectant mourning, and saying goodbye to buildings that had suddenly become ennobled by the death sentence hanging over them, because even the Boston Strangler inspired compassion and acquired dignity in the hours preceding his execution. Going up San Oligario, he emerged onto calle de San Rafael. On the left, Casa Leopoldo, an honest restaurant in the process of preparing its daily offerings; in front, pasaje de Martorell; to the right, calle de Robadors, with its now defunct bars for cheap prostitutes, and a couple of boarding houses, including one which announced itself as belonging to a certain ‘Conchi’, but whose neon sign evidently reserved its electric energies solely for the night. All the bars were more or less shut, except for one which reproduced a tropical environment reminiscent of some Third World country definitively ruined by foreign debt. Three ageing, early rising prostitutes were staring contemplatively into their coffees, and his presence as the only man in the place failed to arouse their interest. Carvalho went up to the bar and ordered a coffee, and instantly sensed a human warmth hovering by his right shoulder. He turned round to see a girl in such reduced circumstances that she looked more like a memory of her former self. The skin of her face was grey, and the way it was distributed over bones that were well proportioned but meagre reminded you of a skull. She sported a black eye, and a bruise on her forehead.

  ‘Excuse me, sir. Would you be interested in enjoying a literary screw this morning?’

  ‘Any particular type of literature?’

  ‘Type or genre?’

  ‘It’s all the same to me.’

  ‘We could screw like a Baudelaire poem.’

  ‘Poetry doesn’t turn me on.’

  ‘What the poetry doesn’t do, I’m sure I can.’

  ‘What faculty did you graduate from?’

  ‘The Faculty of Fellatio. Do you know what fellatio is?’

  ‘It’s a long time since I was at university …’

  ‘A blow-job.’

  ‘A blow-job,’ Carvalho mused as he grappled with the hidden etymology of this mysterious word.

  ‘At this time of day, you’ll get it cheap. The price goes up later.’

  ‘That’s a terrible way to do business. At this time of day you should be charging more. There’s less competition about.’

  The would-be intellectual retorted sharply: ‘Do you want it or not?’

  Her eyes flicked intermittently to a corner of the bar where Carvalho just about made out a young man with a pigtail, who was watching them in a vacant sort of way.

  ‘Is that your pimp?’

  ‘No. My father. What are you after, here?’

  ‘A coffee.’

  ‘Do you want coke?’

  ‘Do you have coke?’

  ‘No. But I know where you could get some.’

  ‘And that way you get some too. Are things really that bad?’

  ‘Things are as good or bad as my cunt happens to feel like.’

  ‘A professional prostitute would never have said anything so vulgar.’

  ‘What do you know about prostitutes?’

  ‘My girlfriend’s a prostitute.’

  ‘I bet your girlfriend’s a slag.’

  And she turned on her heel, but her legs were too skinny for the stylish exit she’d intended. She disappeared into the half light at the back of the bar and sat next to her boyfriend. From that moment on, two pairs of venomous eyes drilled into the back of Carvalho’s head until the moment when he finally finished his coffee and turned to glare sufficiently menacingly for the two of them to pretend to be scanning other horizons.

  Dorothy arrived with six suitcases in tow and an aunt who had reared her like a mother. The aunt was drinking Irish whiskey from a silver hip flask and assuring everyone within earshot that she would only be staying in Barcelona long enough to make sure that her niece was well installed and that the city had good specialists in liver complaints. Since the onset of puberty Dorothy had been afflicted by a delicate liver. This, however, had not prevented her from becoming a good sportswoman and a star dancer at Soho parties until the moment she met Jack, whereupon she had been forced to cool her arse, so to speak.

  ‘Thus spake Zarathustra,’ Camps O’Shea announced, as he concluded his unasked-for report on Dorothy’s impending arrival. ‘Have you heard of Sarah Ferguson? A daughter-in-law of the Queen of England.’

  ‘I can’t say I’ve had the pleasure.’

  ‘You must have read about her in the papers. Oh no — I forgot — you don’t read newspapers.’

  ‘I know the name.’

  ‘Well, Dorothy is like Sarah Ferguson, but a bit less chunky. For my taste the Ferguson woman has always seemed a bit on the fat side.’

  The word ‘fat’ was a serious insult when it came from the lips of the fastidious Camps.

  ‘And as for the aunt, let’s hope that she leaves as soon as possible, because she insists on sticking her nose in everywhere. She even wanted to see the dressing rooms where Jack will be changing. I told her that Aids is running rampant in Spain, and particularly in club changing rooms. Speaking of changing rooms, we’ve hired a company to put security guards at all the entrances to the ground, on the pretext that there’s been a lot of thieving at the club recently, and we’re concerned for the security of our players. Have you made any progress?’

  ‘Yes and no. To tell you the truth, I’m at a bit of a loss. I used to know where I was with Spanish criminals, but with this new breed of imported criminal I don’t know if I’m coming or going. The message I get from them isn’t capable of being translated. It’s very weird.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The contacts that I’ve made have so far led me to a non-Spanish Mafia, and from talking with them it’s obvious that they know nothing about what we’re hoping they know about, but they certainly know something that they don’t want us to know about.’

  ‘Isn’t the one the same as the other?’

  ‘No.’

  Camps had arranged to meet him at the gates of the Montjuich stadium, and they were strolling like a pair of sightseers past the building site where the rebuilding was taking place: the perimeter of the place was to be maintained intact, with the original façade, but the inside of the stadium was to be rebuilt entirely. A homage to memory, as Camps commented unenthusiastically.

  ‘It’s not that I think that all museums should be burned and the Parthenon knocked down once and for all. But I do think you can go too far in conserving heritage. If humanity had spent all its energies on conserving its heritage, we’d still be living in caves. Do you find anything particularly striking about this stadium?’

  ‘I couldn’t imagine walking through Montjuich without expecting to see it there.’

  ‘Imagine the scene here seventy years ago — what a surprise this building would have been for travellers who happened to come across it. I’m more interested in what our new buildings are going to look like, though. Barcelona is going to be a showcase for world architecture. The new is generally less banal at the start, although sometimes the new is already dead at birth. When I was in France this year, I visited a nuclear power station which is apparently never going to be operational. It was a frightening experience. Rather like walking round some abandoned ancient city. Palenque. Pompeii. Machu Picchu. Spoleto. Have you ever been to Spoleto? The city began life
around a temple to Diocletian, and its subsequent growth has maintained that original logic. It’s as if the town is growing out of the temple itself. Extraordinary, it is. Here, take this.’

  He casually handed Carvalho a piece of paper containing the latest anonymous letter, which was equally menacing and parallelistic as the one before: ‘Centre forwards have heads of stone, and bodies of pink coral, and that is why they shatter when they hurl themselves against cliffs.

  ‘And you grow in their shadow, you invalids who will never pose for an epic portrait, and in the destruction of the centre forward you will be reborn, because on his corpse will grow your status as biological remains.

  ‘All these are the reasons why you deserve that the centre forward should be killed, and at dusk. And if you ask me why the centre forward must be killed at dusk, I will tell you that it must be before night comes, and before I am left, alone, in the house of the dead whom only I remember.’

  ‘I’m not so keen on this one.’

  ‘It’s got a quote in it, from a poem by Espriu. Basté de Linyola spotted it. Look at the last sentence, and compare it with this bit.’

  Camps handed him another piece of paper, with two handwritten verses which he had presumably copied himself.

  Maybe tomorrow

  more slow hours will arrive,

  of clarity for the eyes

  of this greedy gaze

  But now it is night

  and I am left alone

  in the house of the dead

  whom only I remember.

  ‘How’s your Catalan?’

  ‘Fairly good.’

  ‘Our killer obviously has taste. Would you like to meet Dorothy?’