Tattoo

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  ‘Some people have all the luck.’

  ‘You said it.’

  ‘And was his sad voice filled with a yearning for rest?’

  ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

  The bootblack’s watery eyes sank still farther into the network of black lines that made up a face that was half wrinkles, half purple veins. He was laughing, or at least that was how Carvalho interpreted the seismic convulsion of the wrinkled mass down by his knees.

  ‘It’s an old song. It was called “Tattoo”. Concha Piquer used to sing it.’

  All at once, Carvalho remembered it too. With Bromuro’s help, he started to hum it, uncertainly at first, but then with more emphasis. The bootblack sang it as though it were flamenco, but in fact it was a waltz. Carvalho let him get on with it. When he had finished, he bent down as if he wanted to see the results of the work on his shoes.

  ‘I need anything you can find out about this.’

  ‘For the moment I haven’t heard a thing.’

  ‘But now you know I’m interested. Tomorrow at one I’ll be in the Versalles to have my shoes cleaned again.’

  ‘Are you going whoring?’

  Carvalho gave him an ambivalent smile and lifted his other foot. Through the few remaining strands of hair, he could see the flakes of dandruff on Bromuro’s skull. The bootblack made his living as a pimp, selling pornographic packs of cards or ingratiating himself by telling stories about how the occult powers used and abused bromides.

  ‘I tell you, they put bromide in everything we swallow, just so that we won’t go crazy, so that women can walk in the street without fear. It makes me feel so bad! So bad! So many women and we have so little to satisfy them with!’

  Bromuro knew he was on to a sure thing with his talk of the bromide conspiracies and the distance between reality and his desire. He had been entertaining the locals with his story for twenty years. He had started out using it as an example of his erudition, of how he knew all about the scientific progress of humanity. Then one day he discovered that people found what he was saying more amusing than troubling, and so he turned it into one of his main sources of tips. On this occasion, Carvalho slipped five hundred pesetas into the bootblack’s waistcoat pocket. Bromuro lifted his head to show his surprise.

  ‘Lots of dough involved?’

  ‘Enough.’

  ‘You don’t usually hand out five hundred pesetas like they were a glass of water.’

  ‘If you think it’s too much, you can give it back.’

  ‘No, I’ll see you tomorrow, OK, Pepe?’

  He picked up his box and walked away down the central passageway of the restaurant, peering to left and right at the customers’ feet as though he were mushroom hunting. Carvalho left the money for the meal on the saucer and went out. He could not immediately remember where he had left the car the night before, but felt intuitively it must have been farther up the Rambla. He walked up the centre of the avenue, stopping here and there at newspaper kiosks and bookstalls, picking up envelopes with plant seeds in them, wondering about the fate of the birds and small monkeys in their cages. But the Rambla was quickly filling up with afternoon crowds, so Carvalho made his way under the hanging sign at the entrance to the Boqueria Market. He wanted to eat well that night. He needed to be cooking while he mulled over the problem of the dead body in the solitude of his own home, and knew that the best way to end the day was with a good meal. He bought fresh monk fish and hake, a handful of clams and mussels, a few prawns. The white, treasure-filled plastic bags dangled from his hands as the market came to life again for the afternoon. A lot of the stalls were shut, and buying food this late in the day made it feel as though he were entering a different time zone, a strange ambience filled with almost total silence, disturbed only by the sounds of buying and selling.

  Strolling aimlessly around the market was one of the few ways that this tall, dark-haired man in his thirties, who somehow contrived to look slightly dishevelled despite wearing expensive suits from tailors in the smartest part of town, allowed himself some spiritual relaxation whenever he left Charo’s neighbourhood and headed back to his lair on the slopes of the mountain overlooking Barcelona.

  To reach Carvalho’s house you had to go up along a wide dirt road that wound between old, over-ornate villas, their white walls stained grey by rain over a period of fifty years. The house fronts were brightened up by a scattering of green or blue tiles, while clumps of bougainvillea or morning glory hung over their garden fences. Carvalho’s villa was not of the same pedigree. It had not been built when Vallvidrera was in its heyday, but during its second wave of popularity, when some of those who had made fortunes on the black market after the war had retired to the mountainside for the splendid view it gave them of the scene of their splendid achievements. They were small-time crooks who had got rich through small-time black-marketeering. People who saved their money and who still had the pre-war nostalgia for a house and a garden in the suburbs, if possible with a vegetable patch for their lettuces, potatoes and tomatoes, fascinating hobbies for those with free weekends and paid holidays.

  Carvalho had rented a small villa built vaguely in the modernist style popular between the wars. The architects had obviously designed a starkly functional building, but the client must have wanted ‘a bit more colour’, or ‘something to soften it’, so they had allowed him a few courses of red bricks which looked like the gaps between teeth up on the cornices, and stuck some yellow tiles on the front, which had once been ochre but now after thirty years had acquired a greenish tinge.

  Carvalho took the mail out of the box and walked across the bare garden with its loose paving stones that led up to the front door steps. Carvalho’s neglect had allowed weeds to sprout everywhere, and on the porch rotten leaves from the previous autumn had formed a slippery light brown mulch that any visitor’s shoes invariably brought into the house. Carvalho’s feet trod their way across the geometric tiles of the entrance hall, and followed the trail of light his hand magically produced from the switches. July filled the evening sky with warmth, but Carvalho needed to light a fire if he was to be able to think in a relaxed mood. To compensate, he stripped off to the waist and opened shutters and windows to allow the drier outside air and the last sunlight into the house. As he pushed open the shutters, his eyes took in the green horizons to the north and east, as well as the urban geometry of the city laid out at the foot of the mountain. Today the cloud of pollution was reduced to a kind of polar ice cap hanging over the industrial, working-class districts down by the port.

  Carvalho went to the basement to fetch firewood. He made several trips, and then had to clear out the remains of the fire from five days earlier. Four nights at Charo’s were too many. Carvalho was in two minds. On the one hand, he felt bad about abandoning his own home and a regular, more routine existence. On the other, he remembered Charo’s velvety skin, and the softness of her more intimate recesses. She had even caressed him tenderly.

  He searched in vain for some newspaper to help light the pile of firewood he had built according to the manual of good fire-lighters. From bottom to top, the wood formed a strict pyramid from smallest to heaviest. But he had no paper to start it with.

  ‘I should read the news more often,’ he said out loud to himself.

  In the end he had to go over to one of the bookshelves that lined the room. He hesitated, but finally chose a big green book with lots of pages. As he carried it to the funeral pyre, Carvalho read some fragments at random. It was entitled Spain as a Problem, written by someone called Laín Entralgo at a time when it was thought that Spain’s problems consisted simply of the problem of Spain itself. He pushed the open book under the sticks in the fireplace. As he lit it, he again felt torn: on the one hand, he did not like to see the book burn; on the other, he could hardly wait for the flames to shoot up and reduce it to a pile of obliterated words.

  Once the fire was burning brightly and warmly, Carvalho went to the kitchen and laid out everything he
had bought in the order he would need it to cook his meal. The first thing was to go down to his wine cellar. He had had the partition between two walls knocked down, which left the soil and rock of the mountainside exposed. In it he had dug a small cave, where the dusty sides of wine bottles gleamed dully by the light of an almost infrared bulb. Carvalho looked along the row of whites, and eventually chose a Fefiñanes that was one of the few Spanish wines in his selection. Clutching the Fefiñanes in one hand, he was tempted by a Blanc de blancs from Bordeaux. But his dinner was not even worthy of this second-rank great wine from France. Each time he came down to his cellar, he carefully picked up and looked at one of the three bottles of Sauternes that he was storing for his Christmas seafood feast. Sauternes were his favourite white wine, apart from the incomparable Pouilly-Fuissé, which in his opinion ought to be reserved exclusively for the last wishes of intelligent gourmets down on their luck. He sighed, still clutching his Fefiñanes, and climbed back up to the kitchen. He cleaned the fish and peeled the prawns, then boiled the fish bones and the pink shells together with an onion, a tomato, some cloves of garlic, a hot pepper and strips of celery and leek. This liquid was essential for Carvalho’s caldeirada. While he was gently bringing it to the boil, he fried some tomato, onion and more peppers. As soon as the mixture started to thicken, he poured it over some potatoes. Then in a pot he placed first the prawns, then the monkfish and finally the hake. The fish took on colour and added their juices to the mixture. Then Carvalho poured in a cup of the strong fish broth. Ten minutes later, the caldeirada was done.

  Carvalho laid the table in front of the fire and ate straight from the pot. The chilled Fefiñanes, though, had to be drunk from a tall, elegant wineglass. Each wine had to have its own special glass. Carvalho did not usually follow style diktats, but this was one he strictly adhered to.

  After his meal he drank a cup of the weak American coffee he had learned to prepare in San Francisco, and lit up a Montecristo No. 1. He sprawled across two sofas so that he could get completely horizontal, and lay with cigar in one hand and coffee in the other, gazing dreamily at the flames wavering as they disappeared up into the sooty heights of the chimney. He was imagining the body of a young, blond man, ‘bold and blond as beer’, according to the song. A man capable of having that motto tattooed on his back: Born to raise hell in hell. Among the stories about tattoos he could recall, one stood out: the poor crook who had put Death to all cops on his chest. He had paid dearly for this open declaration of principles, spending almost thirty years in jail alternately for petty crimes and for being a vagrant. Looking at El Madriles’ tattoo had become a favourite pastime in all the police stations of Spain.

  ‘Come on, Madriles, let’s have a look at it.’

  ‘I swear it was nothing more than a mistake, Inspector, sir. I was drunk when it occurred to me. The maestro who tattooed me warned me at the time: Madriles, it’ll only bring you trouble.’

  ‘So another spot of bother won’t matter much. Go on, Madriles, take your shirt off.’

  The tattooist. Somebody must have given the young man ‘as bold and blond as beer’ that tattoo. There weren’t many experts left, but was this a professional tattoo, or one out of a Parisian drugstore, the sort young girls went in for when they wanted to leave a mark on their flesh and in their minds. This one must have been done by a professional. If not, the same water that had given the fishes the time they needed to gorge themselves on the dead man’s face would have washed away the motto by now, and the body would have emerged from the sea not only stripped bare by death, but rendered completely anonymous – unless his fingerprints were in police records somewhere. His ID card, thought Carvalho. Of course they would be in the police records. He pondered on a possible link between the dead man and his client. There must be some connection between them. Carvalho tried to brush aside this hypothesis. He knew from experience that the worst thing to do in any investigation was to start from a hypothesis. That can only restrict the approach to the truth, and sometimes even distort it.

  By the time he had finished his first litre of coffee for the night, the fire was crackling loudly and had turned the entire room into the backdrop for its wild but fettered dancing. Carvalho was hot; he stripped to his underpants. This lasted only a moment, just long enough for him to identify his own white body with that of the corpse: he shuddered, and rushed to get the protection of a second skin, his pyjama jacket.

  He woke when he was tired of sleeping. Through the shutters of the half-open window he could hear the birds chattering among themselves about how bright and hot the day was. He looked out of the window and saw that everything was where it ought to be: the sky was up, the earth down. The electric heater and the Italian coffee-making machine helped him recover a sense of self. The shower and the coffee he drank forced him to recognise the here and now, and the idea that he had work to do that would help him get through another day: not that he had any better notion of what to do with it.

  His cleaning woman was due that afternoon, so Carvalho made a rapid check to make sure there was nothing visible that Máxima should not see. It was while he was doing this that he realised he had not even looked at his post. He peered at the envelopes and divided the letters into those that were worth reading and those that were not. Almost all of it was junk mail, except for two items: one was from the savings bank, the other from his uncle in Galicia. Carvalho began with the letter from the bank. It was a current account statement: a hundred and seventy-two thousand pesetas. He felt in his jacket pocket for the fifty thousand Don Ramón had given him, and briefly wondered whether it would be better to deposit it in his current account or in his savings book. He looked for the book in a small money box he kept in the bottom drawer of a writing desk. Savings: three hundred and fifty thousand pesetas. Together with what he had in his current account, that made a total of almost half a million pesetas. After ten years’ work, that was neither good nor bad. It simply meant that after another ten he should have reached a million, and would not die of poverty in his old age.

  Carvalho decided to put the money into his savings account. Somehow money in a current account is always more ephemeral, more at threat from sudden splurges courtesy of a handy chequebook. It would be safer in his savings account. He counted the fifty banknotes again, then spread them out on the table like a gangster showing off. He picked them up one by one, stacked them in a careful pile, and fanned the air with them. After that, he put the notes in an envelope and stashed it away with his savings book. Next came the letter from his native village. His father’s younger brother had written to him in his almost illegible handwriting, with strange gaps between syllables and sudden bursts of high-flown rhetoric which made the meaning even more obscure.

  Following a lengthy introduction covering health matters and memories of his father, Carvalho’s uncle painted a not unskilful picture of arable despair: the harvests had failed. Then it was the turn of the unfortunate livestock: one of his cows had died after eating some grass it shouldn’t have, or perhaps, who could tell, owing to poison administered by one of his neighbours. As if all this weren’t bad enough, his wife was ill and he had sent her to Guitiriz to take the waters. A fortune! If Carvalho’s father had been alive, he would surely have responded to such a dramatic situation, and so he and his wife were wondering whether he could perhaps see his way to helping out a bit, only if he could, of course, and without wishing to cause him problems of any kind. By the way, he was sending a dozen sausages, two cheeses and a bottle of brandy by a slow but sure delivery man.

  Carvalho let out a string of curses in Galician against families and mothers who would have them. He thought about writing a tough reply in which he told his uncle straight out about how stupid his father had been to share the inheritance with them, to help them as much as he could throughout his life, and to die with scarcely anything to his name. And all because he had gone off first to Cuba and then to Madrid and Barcelona, which meant the rest of the family saw him as the black she
ep.

  But he did not do it. Instead, he scrawled a few lines telling them he was sending a money order for five thousand pesetas. He reckoned his father would have done the same, and that in so doing he was in some way reincarnating the poor old man. Carvalho’s eyes grew misty when he remembered seeing him laid out cold and shrunken on the slab in the mortuary at a Barcelona hospital after an exhausting journey back from San Francisco. This was the second five thousand pesetas his father had cost him, the second cow he helped his uncles pay for in posthumous honour of him.

  Carvalho had a lot to do before he met Bromuro again, almost all of it connected to his Galician roots. He drove quickly down the highway from Vallvidrera, deposited the money at the branch on Carlos III, then sent the money order from the post office in Avenida Madrid. By the end of half an hour, he was at peace with himself and with his future.

  He left his red Seat coupé in the car park in Villa de Madrid square. He liked to park his car near the top of the Rambla so that he could stroll down it to Charo’s neighbourhood. Carvalho walked in a leisurely way under the plane trees, stopping now and then to allow himself to be distracted by the most unlikely attractions. Patches of white and yellow sunlight filtered through the leaves of the trees on to the rare morning passers-by. Carvalho walked under the arcades of Plaza Real and the eighteenth-century atmosphere gave him an immediate sense of peace and harmony. He headed for a wide porch and walked up some marble steps surrounded by unpolished wood. A little old man in a chequered apron appeared at a door also made of heavy wood that was varnished a chocolate colour. When he saw it was Carvalho he opened the door and ushered him along a corridor lined with wallpaper featuring scenes from Pompeii. They soon reached a dining room done out in a vaguely English style, full of small plaster statues, ships in bottles and a display of faded brown family photographs in front of which two wavering candles floated in bowls. The room smelt of wax and boiled cabbage, and reminded Carvalho of childhood summer holidays spent in Souto in Galicia, with cows’ muzzles peering directly into the family dining room from their barn next door.