Off Side

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  ‘No. But I would like to have a quiet talk with you. I’d like to invite you to my house for supper. I live in Vallvidrera. I’ll be inviting a friend of mine too, a commercial agent. He collects autographs of PR men from famous football teams. I’ll be doing the cooking, so you’ll have the chance of being surprised at my practical abilities, since you were obviously impressed with my theoretical abilities the other day.’

  ‘I feel honoured by the invitation.’

  He meant it.

  ‘You can bring a friend, if you like.’

  ‘I don’t usually take friends to this kind of revelationary encounter. Sometimes it’s better to go without. And why is your agent friend coming?’

  ‘He’s a good talker, good at breaking the ice, and he doesn’t have my inquisitorial tendencies. I seem to spend my whole life questioning people.’

  ‘So I noticed. By the way, I have to report another appointment, which we might not find so agreeable. Inspector Contreras wants to have words with us. Both of us.’

  ‘Contreras, eh?’

  ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘From years back. He’s one of my favourite enemies. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. He’s become more sophisticated over the years. He started life like a cop out of some low-budget Spanish film from the 1950s. Then he turned into a policeman from the American film noir. Recently he’s had more substance to him. I don’t know what his role model is this time, because I haven’t been to the pictures for years, but he’s not the same Contreras that I once knew. When’s he expecting us?’

  ‘Whenever suits us.’

  ‘We could go right away.’

  They each arrived separately, in their own cars. Carvalho in a Renault on which he was still paying the HP instalments, and Camps in an Alfetta. But they contrived to enter the via Layetana police headquarters together. Contreras raised an amicable eyebrow for Camps, and a disapproving one for Carvalho.

  ‘Parasites like our friend here will continue to exist for as long as they find gentlemen like yourself willing to foot the bill. This is the first time I see you when you’re not in trouble with the law, Carvalho. Lucky for you, nobody’s been killed yet. A private detective is allowed to investigate a threat. But just you remember, the moment there’s a drop of blood, if I see you snooping about, I’ll have you. Why don’t you retire?’

  ‘I’m a terrible spendthrift. I haven’t saved enough money to retire.’

  ‘Aren’t you with a pension fund?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re making a big mistake. An old detective isn’t a detective any more — he’s just old. Take it from me. I’ve got the state standing behind me, but as far as I can see, you don’t have a penny to your name.’

  ‘I haven’t come here to talk about pensions.’

  ‘What do you think of this second letter? Damn stupid, if you ask me. That’s all we need, anonymous poets turning to crime! In the old days maybe we were less educated, but people were more honest. I’ve never seen such a load of drivel. I miss the old days, when anonymous letters were full of spelling mistakes, and used to start like the letters that people wrote before the war: “I hope that this letter finds you well. I am well too, thank the Lord”.’

  Camps let out an entirely inappropriate guffaw, and then repeated it. So inappropriate that to Carvalho it indicated a lack of respect and a streak of hysteria. Camps sensed what Carvalho was thinking, and this made him laugh even more, until by the end there were tears streaming down his face.

  ‘I’m glad you find me so amusing.’

  In Contreras’s eyes you could almost see the handcuffs that he was mentally preparing for the impertinent Camps O’Shea. The latter was having some difficulty regaining his composure.

  ‘Inspector, you’re brilliant.’

  Carvalho found this sentiment equally repellent. Police inspectors are never to be considered brilliant, and even less should they ever be told so. Camps’s apparent neutrality in relation to the police was ill-befitting in a sane-minded citizen. A person is entitled to love the police when he’s riddled with authoritarianism, and a vigilant citizen is entitled to be an enemy of the police, but to see the police as somehow part of a spectacle is only possible in times that are essentially ambiguous, times in which people have lost their sense of values. Contreras decided to re-establish the logic of the situation, and came to the point.

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s behind all this.’

  This offering aroused expectant surprise in his audience.

  ‘What we’re dealing with here is a polysemic delinquent.’

  ‘Even though it might surprise some people — Carvalho knows who I’m referring to — the police nowadays work with new methods. We have here a clear starting point. What stands out when you take a close look at the first letter, but more particularly the second? Is it the fact that a murder is being announced? No. Or is it that the object of the exercise, if you’ll pardon the expression, is a centre forward, an unusual target for a murder, as I’m sure you’ll agree? Well, maybe, but maybe not, because we’ve had boxers being murdered, and those that live by the sword … I say this without any disrespect to the worthy profession of footballer, and particularly to the centre forwards of this world, who are undoubtedly a very proper class of person … Now, put your imaginations to work, gentlemen. What stands out? The form, gentlemen, the form! The important thing here is the form in which the letters are written. You laughed when I compared the form of these letters with the kind of anonymous letters that we used to get in the old days. Please don’t think I was annoyed, because I realize that the comparison was rather comical, amusing, what have you. But the point is still worth making. The author of our anonymous letters is trying to be literary. He is creating an atmosphere, just like they do in films or at the theatre, where you slowly build up the audience, and then, bang, the coup d’effect. One problem is that they’re written in a transfer lettering, probably Letraset, which means that we might have to go and interview every graphic artist in Barcelona, which could take us half a lifetime, since there’s a lot of publishers in this city. But it’s useful to remember that we’re on the trail of somebody who knows how to write, and who wants to show that he knows how to write. And, as Inspector Lifante suggests, probably somebody with money, and somebody who has moved in Madrid circles. This person is using literary techniques to build our expectations, literary expectations, around a criminal act which has not yet taken place, but which, if it did take place, would provoke a major scandal. Let’s be in no doubt about that. If anybody ever killed you, Carvalho, not even God would notice. If they killed me, somebody might notice. But if they kill our centre forward, the whole world will know. Sort through the elements that I’ve put before you: the centre forward, the popular idol, a literary expectation, and major scandal … You’ll say we’re dealing with a disturbed person. Good. I accept the hypothesis. But let’s take a look at the statistics. How many times has a crazy writer ever killed anyone and announced his intentions in advance? In real life, I mean. None, to my knowledge. If you ask me, this is a publicity stunt. It feels like a trailer for a film. I can almost imagine the title: The Centre Forward will Die at Dusk. So, this little stunt is up and running. But now we have to analyse the actual content of the letters. Perhaps I’d best hand you over to Inspector Lifante, who is our expert in content analysis.’

  He pressed the button on his intercom and roared down it as if either the intercom was broken or Lifante was terminally deaf.

  ‘Come in, Lifante.’

  Lifante came in. He bore a remarkable resemblance to an Adolfo Domínguez model, with a jacket that could easily have held two Lifantes, and with a quantity of brilliantine sufficient to have supplied half the western world.

  ‘Lifante, would you mind running through your content analysis for these gentlemen?’

  ‘Are you familiar with the work that Moles has done on content analysis? Or the edited version which Kientz recently published?’


  ‘This isn’t a cop,’ Carvalho groused to himself. He rained mental curses on a system of culture that was capable of having intellectuals specialized in the art of repression. He had probably graduated from some Faculty of Repressive Sciences. But Lifante’s manner finally succeeded in winning him over. In Inspector Lifante, the medium was the message, and for him any crime was essentially a puzzle. He explained that he saw any given crime as a communication which had been interrupted by a noise. He waited for the others to ask him what noise he was talking about, but since they maintained a state of silent puzzlement, he continued: ‘With any message there has to be both a transmitter and a receptor, and the message has to be passed via a channel. But sometimes the transmission of the message can be interrupted by a noise. Well, crime acts as that kind of noise. It is a temporary noise which tends to deflect the message. Here a death is being announced. Somebody is engaged in trying to communicate this fact — and I stress the word “communicate”. If we succeed in tracing the path back, we will finally arrive at the transmitter, the communicator, that is to say, the criminal in question.’

  Contreras gave them a wink as if to say ‘This boy’s good.’

  ‘One should not confuse content analysis with ideological analysis, although obviously we might find it useful to establish an ideological portrait of the transmitter. Myself, I prefer to relate content analysis to psycholinguistics. I have constructed a method for myself, which uses psychology in order to define the psychological type of the person who is transmitting. Once we succeed in establishing this psychological type, that immediately takes us into the area of sociology, and via a combination of sociology and psychology we will finally be in a position to draw an Identikit of the person’s state of mind. And that state of mind will have a face to go with it.’

  ‘And an ID card,’ Carvalho added.

  The inspector laughed, briefly.

  ‘I probably shouldn’t say this, because I am a policeman after all, but actually the person’s identity card is what interests me least.’

  ‘I don’t like to hear this, Lifante.’

  ‘I’m just hypothesizing, chief, just hypothesizing. I know that the person’s going to have to be arrested, either by catching him red-handed, or by tracking him down via his record. But what interests me, scientifically speaking, is this whole process of defining a psycho-social type.’

  ‘Get to the point, Lifante, get to the point. Explain how you do this analysis.’

  ‘Well, first you take the texts and you differentiate the various basic semantic elements. You look at where these are repeated, and this tells you something about the person’s obsessions. Now, the problem here is that we have a message which is evidently polysemic.’

  ‘Polynesian?’ Carvalho inquired innocently.

  ‘No. Polysemic. Moles has done a lot of research into this, and he tells us …’

  ‘Tells who?’

  ‘Don’t interrupt Lifante, Carvalho.’

  ‘I used the word “us” in the sense of the plural receptor, in other words, Moles’s readers. Anyway, Moles tells us that messages can generally be divided into two sorts: those with a principally semantic content, and those with a principally aesthetic content. In other words, those which tend to prioritize signification and communicability, and those which introduce polysemic elements demanding a certain freedom of reading. For example, “Mummy, my tummy hurts” is a principally semantic message, whereas “I come, in my solitude, and in my solitude I go” is an aesthetic message. This is where the complication comes. The messages that we’re getting from our anonymous transmitter are both semantic and aesthetic; in other words they’re complex and polysemic. He’s telling us: “I am going to kill a centre forward.” But the way he says it makes it difficult for us to disentangle, because he’s put an aesthetic slant on it. This makes it difficult to isolate the various elements, and to establish their inter-relationship.’

  ‘Get on with it, Lifante.’

  They waited expectantly for Lifante to spell out his elements. The young inspector placed the two anonymous letters on the desk.

  ‘Here you have the two messages. I have attempted to isolate and correlate the various elements and what has been the result?’

  Their expectant gazes awaited the revelation that was about to come.

  ‘The result is that, unfortunately, it has proved impossible to establish a result.’

  ‘I see.’

  Contreras stirred restlessly in his seat.

  ‘But the fact that I haven’t come up with specific results still leaves us with a basic conclusion. Namely that here we are dealing with a polysemic personality. A polysemic message implies a personality who is also polysemic, someone torn between a desire to communicate and the need to embroider his communication. If I were a literary critic, which, by the way, I am not, although I hope to be, one day …’

  ‘He writes articles in Police Review,’ Contreras confirmed, with a wink.

  ‘If I were a literary critic, I would say that our man has fallen into a trap which is very common among writers who can’t tell the difference between journalism and literature. Our author has sufficient style to say: “I am going to kill a centre forward, and that’s all I have to say.” But when he tries to be literary, he starts dressing up a basically valueless message with a literary camouflage. Exactly that. A literary camouflage.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t share your diagnosis,’ Camps O’Shea cut in, shaking his head dubiously.

  Lifante shrugged and gave another little laugh which gave him the chance to swallow the saliva that had accumulated in his mouth.

  ‘That’s your prerogative. However, I’m sticking to my guns. Either you write journalistically, or you write literature. You can’t do both at once. If you do, the result ends up a hybrid, which is precisely what we have in this message.’

  There was a note of challenge in Camps’s reply: ‘I’d be interested to hear how you would have conveyed this message without combining the communicative with the literary?’

  ‘This is obviously a key question. We already know what the purely journalistic message would look like: “I am going to kill the centre forward.”

  ‘Full stop,’ Carvalho interjected, but he failed in his attempt to cut Lifante short.

  ‘And that would be sufficient. The message would be simple, functional and to the point. Commendable. If I were a true poet, I might have written it as follows: “Centre forward, paled before the fall of night, and usurped gods extract frustrated vengeance.” ’

  Camps appeared to be considering this. Finally he said: ‘Not bad, but you’d have to work on the rhythm a bit.’

  ‘OK. What do you suggest?’

  Camps and Carvalho exchanged the looks of bored guests at a dinner party.

  ‘It would sound better like this:

  The dusk fallen, the gods usurped,

  In the centre of the world is he who must die.’

  ‘I would say you’ve improved on the polysemic element, but not on the rhythm.’

  ‘I’m more interested in plurality of meanings than rhythm.’

  ‘Rhythm is an important element of linguistics; it’s indicative of particular ways of breathing.’

  ‘I agree that there’s a lot to be said about the relation between rhythm, or syntax as a whole, and the human respiratory system …’

  ‘Right … that’ll do.’

  Contreras was on his feet, looking as if he was about to thump the desk. Instead his hand hovered in the air, and he did his best to muster a smile from among the folds of his indignation.

  ‘Very interesting, gentlemen, but neither you nor I, Lifante, are paid in order to write poetry.’

  Lifante laughed again, and once again swallowed surplus saliva.

  ‘If you have any concrete conclusions to offer us, we’d be delighted to hear them; if not, you’d best go with Bolaños to check out the Guinardó.’

  ‘In a certain sense, yes, I do have a conclusion. First of all
, we already know that our writer has a tendency to polysemic hidden meanings. I suggest that this means he’s a frustrated writer; as he continues sending these anonymous letters, we’re going to find that he’ll tend to repeat significative elements in his discourse. All we have to do is wait, and when they arrive we run them through our analytic system.’

  ‘Off you go, Lifante. Time to check out the Guinardó.’

  Once the young inspector was gone, silence fell. The silence expressed a variety of perplexities. Contreras, on the one hand, was dizzy with words. Camps had a headful of alternative rhythms; and Carvalho was trying to make some relationship between the bizarre circumstances of this case and something approaching a proper professional situation. Unfortunately the effort defeated him, and he found this disconcerting. In normal circumstances the situations that he found himself in professionally generally had some single common denominator, but this one was proving annoyingly polysemic.

  ‘Contreras, I fear for the security of this city, in the hands of people like your young polysemic inspector.’

  ‘Out of respect for señor Camps, I won’t say what I was about to say. I will limit myself to saying that you are an ignoramus and a pest into the bargain. If we’d put this case in the hands of some routine blockhead, you’d be complaining that we’re prehistoric and primitive. But the minute we try to bring in new procedures, you treat us with the contempt of the ignorant. Who was it said that people can only be dismissive when they’re ignorant?’

  ‘Harpo Marx, I think.’

  Camps O’Shea was shrinking progressively further into himself. Carvalho had to repeat his name several times to bring him back to reality — namely that the time had come to leave.

  *

  The woman had peroxide hair, large, sad, brown, liverish eyes, and a mouth designed for moist but chaste kisses. A hint of carnality in a body that had been formed by gymnastics, ballet, massage, and an orderly life as an independent, upper middle-class lady, thanks to a business concern entitled ‘Beautiful People’ which her husband had financed for her so that she could have something to keep her amused, and which she had developed into an expanding empire that had already spread halfway down the block. Women were coming and going, in between doing their shopping, or in between the two traffic jams that they had to endure in order to take their children to and from schools which were located in the greener part of Barcelona just before you get to Tibidabo. Since Alberto Palacín cut a fairly fine figure in the place, the woman ushered him in from the main entrance and took him into an office with a desk which was occupied by photographs of her husband and children, and walls which were occupied by certificates proclaiming her expertise in various branches of the bodily sciences.