Tattoo

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  By the time the tour was over, there was already a photo waiting for him of the moment he had stepped on board. Carvalho bought it, and then headed for the watchtower standing high above the warehouse roofs. He followed instructions, and stayed on the observation platform beneath the top floor. Rotterdam stretched out to left and right in a maze of docks and piers, a forest of cranes which from this vantage point looked like small threads on some vast tapestry conceived by a pointillist painter anxious to convey his sense of the still life composed by trade and industry. Green, blue, white and red ships. Black ships that seemed destined for evil. Ships heading north, but mostly ships heading south. Carvalho could feel the urge to set sail rushing through his veins.

  He was early for his appointment. He was almost alone on the platform apart from a Japanese couple in one corner busy photographing each other with the port as backdrop. Then he saw a woman in her thirties walking along the platform. One gloved hand followed the rail round, while she continued to stare out to sea as though she wanted to have a constant panorama of all that was going on down below. A pair of binoculars hung from her well-endowed chest. She had a long nose, a broad, freckled face and a mass of shoulder-length red hair. She was wearing a green sleeveless dress, and her skin looked as though the tan was artificial, or perhaps it was just the characteristic bright pink that redheads suffer from. Her legs were inviting, although her ankles betrayed the passage of time or the fact that she had bad circulation. Carvalho felt a passing desire, but almost at once it seemed crass and destructive to start to want a woman he would never see again. The woman reached the point where Carvalho stood leaning against the rail. To carry on with her tour of the platform she would have to walk round him. She came to a halt. Only a few inches from Pepe’s body. She turned and looked up at the face of the man who was standing in her way. Her lips moved and she said in hesitant Spanish:

  ‘Are you the man Singel sent?’

  She said her name was Salomons. The widow of Cees Salomons, she explained. They took the lift down to the ground. While the attendant was busy with his levers, she whispered in Carvalho’s ear:

  ‘Is it true Julio is dead?’

  ‘So it seems.’

  ‘That’s dreadful.’

  She seemed genuinely upset. She strode out of the lift in front of Pepe and led him towards a Volvo parked at the foot of the tower. On their way to one of the least new districts of Rotterdam neither of them said a word. She came to a halt in a tree-lined street. At the far end a canal was visible. She opened the front door to an apartment block, then they went across an internal garden where a few girls in bikinis, bearded young men and straw-blond kids playing with a rubber ball were all out enjoying the sun. The widow Salomons opened her apartment door, and Carvalho found he was directly in a light kitchen-cum-dining-room. A staircase led directly off it up to another floor. She gestured for him to take a seat on one of the stools that went with a high white lacquer table. She sat opposite him. In the centre of the table between them sat a wicker fruit bowl full of glistening Mediterranean fruit. The widow Salomons seemed to be lost in thought: she sat staring at a stainless-steel kettle on the unlit stove.

  ‘It’s dreadful.’

  ‘Did you know him?’

  ‘Yes, I knew him well.’

  She raised her head to the ceiling. Tears were welling up in her eyes. As she stretched, he could see she had a thick but beautiful white throat.

  ‘Very well.’

  The tears poured down. Carvalho started to play with a grapefruit that seemed to have been polished with a cloth. The oranges and lemons were just as shiny. The widow raised her head again, and Carvalho sank his visual fangs into her beautiful white throat. He had the fleeting impression that she must have taken a course run by the Actors’ Studio in Rotterdam. She wept like Warren Beatty in Splendour in the Grass. It was all so staged that to Carvalho her grief seemed to be delicately poised between the theatrical and the cinematographic. It takes all sorts, he said to himself, and began to peel an orange. The widow Salomons got up to fetch him a plate to put the peel on. Carvalho remembered an old joke he had heard from a professor of French literature, Juan Petit: ‘Imagine that one of Jean-Paul Sartre’s angst-ridden characters is in mid-crisis when he hears his doorbell ring. He goes and answers: it’s the man from the electricity company. If he has enough money to pay, he’s fine. He can go back to his metaphysical angst. But if he can’t, his metaphysical angst goes out the window and an everyday angst takes its place.’ Professor Petit had been as lucid as he was scary, sitting there clutching the vaporiser he used all the time to control his asthma attacks.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m making a fool of myself.’

  Carvalho made an ambiguous gesture which she interpreted as giving her permission to carry on sobbing her heart out. There they were again, huge, heavy teardrops racking her body. Carvalho finished the orange and got up to wash his hands under the kitchen tap. Through the window he could see the sun-worshippers curing all their bodily and spiritual ills thanks to the oldest and most reliable god of all. He leant his backside against the sink, gazing at the picture of desolation that the widow Salomons and the bits of orange peel on a small Delft plate offered him.

  ‘So you knew him well?’

  ‘Yes, as I already told you. I can’t help it, I’m upset.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m interested in learning a few things about my friend. His relatives are worried. They haven’t heard from him in almost two years. The last letters they got were from Amsterdam.’

  ‘After that he lived here in Rotterdam nearly all the time.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Was he still with Singel?’

  ‘Yes. No, I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know what?’

  ‘I don’t know if his friendship with Singel did him any good. But it did give him the chance to make a break. Do you follow me? He was someone who was born to be something more than a factory worker at Philips.’

  ‘Nobody is born to be a factory worker.’

  ‘You know what I mean. He was naturally intelligent. He had a quick mind. Come and see.’

  The widow Salomons got up and climbed the staircase. Carvalho followed. At the top was a landing lined with books, prints and real paintings. Off the landing was a bedroom that was also full of books. Under the window was a work desk. Out of the window Carvalho could see the sun-worshippers still performing their silent rites.

  ‘He read almost all of these. And don’t think that they’re easy books. He could read English almost fluently: he had taken an intensive course in Amsterdam. How could I describe him? He was … deep.’

  ‘Profound.’

  ‘Yes, that’s it. Profound. He reflected a lot on things. He always thought everything over a lot. And he was a rebel.’

  As she talked about Julio Chesma, the widow Salomons paced up and down the room, cupping her elbows in her hands. Within ten minutes Carvalho had an excellent picture of him. He was born in Puertollano (province of Ciudad Real). A polluted, horribly polluted town, insisted the widow. Dreadful pollution. Naturally, he was an orphan, perhaps in fact because of that pollution. Raised in an orphanage, naturally. Everywhere he had been he had left traces of his brutal, useless sense of rebellion. The Spanish Legion, naturally. Petty crime and prison, naturally. He had found a girlfriend in Bilbao and that was the first time his feet had been on the ground. He studied at evening classes, then decided to work outside Spain so he could see something of the world, to discover what lay beyond the horizon.

  ‘He was never going to stay at Philips for long. He couldn’t get used to this,’ she said, making the gesture of clocking in with a card.

  ‘Were you the first woman he got close to in Holland?’

  ‘No, I suppose not. After the Philips factory he went to Amsterdam and found work as a doorman at a live-sex club.’

  ‘A doorman?’

  ‘Well, he us
ed to be in some of the acts. And in that line of business, you know, you meet lots of people, not all of them honest.’

  ‘In other words, he fell in with crooks.’

  ‘No, not exactly. Singel told me you already knew all about it. I don’t think people who sell drugs are necessarily crooks. That depends on the drugs. If it’s heroin or cocaine or opium, that is criminal.’

  The widow was speaking without looking at Carvalho. Just like everyone else, her ideology justified her own way of life.

  ‘Did Chesma meet you through Singel?’

  ‘No, the other way round. I got to know Singel and all the rest through Julio. Two years ago. He came to Rotterdam often on business. I don’t know how, but he had got hold of a pass for meals in an artists’ centre. It’s cheaper, and the food is decent. I always eat there. I work organising the artistic festivals of Rotterdam, in the Doolen, just by Central Station. We met at the restaurant there. I was fascinated by the huge gap between what that boy was and what he could be.’

  ‘So you entered their organisation.’

  All at once she was on her guard.

  ‘Singel told me I wasn’t to answer anything about that kind of thing.’

  ‘I simply wanted to know if Julio was a strong enough personality to drag you into something illegal.’

  ‘I did a few things. Only a very few, and above all to keep him from doing them. If he had been caught, they would have thrown him out of the country or put him in jail. Can you imagine Julio in a jail?’

  ‘I can imagine anyone in a jail.’

  ‘Some people wouldn’t be able to stand it.’

  ‘You could count them on the fingers of one hand, and there are something like three billion people in the world today. In fact we’re made up of two groups: those who go to jail and those who might go to jail. That’s the secret of success of all politicians everywhere.’

  ‘But some people are especially sensitive. Julio was one of them.’

  ‘Beware of people who are especially sensitive. They’re capable of cleaning out the worst latrines in the filthiest jails in the world.’

  ‘You didn’t really know him.’

  ‘OK, go on. Julio shows up, you fall in love. You see him off and on. He gets you involved in the drug business. You get him involved in the literature business. Fair exchange: you get money and he gets culture.’

  ‘I never made a penny out if it! I only did it to protect him!’

  Carvalho felt a desire to arouse sincere anger in this woman who was so good at playing a role without realising she was doing it. The secret of seduction lay in the wide, soft bed with its red-and-white sheets. All the rest was literature or an ideological mask to disguise the skeleton of the most primordial instinct of all.

  The widow Salomons sat on the bed. Her legs were slightly splayed, revealing the firm consistency of her thighs. Carvalho feasted his eyes. ‘Bit by bit he started staying longer in Rotterdam. He made two or three trips to Spain before going back the last time.’

  ‘Have you any idea how it occurred to him to have a tattoo like that done?’

  ‘No, but perhaps he thought it was his personal motto. Nothing he got involved with ever ended happily. He was thrown out of everywhere, but he was a leader. A born leader.’

  ‘Why did he decide to go back to Spain to live?’

  ‘I’ve no idea if he meant to stay there. Our relationship gradually fell apart.’

  ‘From your side too?’

  ‘No.’

  It was a faint, uncertain ‘no’, as if on a low flame.

  ‘No,’ she said again, more firmly. ‘I still loved him. A lot. But he wasn’t someone to settle down.’

  ‘Do you have children?’

  ‘A boy.’

  ‘He goes to boarding school?’

  ‘Did Singel tell you that?’

  ‘No, but it’s obvious.’

  ‘He would never have understood my relationship with Julio. In fact, it was Julio who was most against him being sent away to school, but that was the only way. This is a small apartment.’

  ‘Will the boy come back to live with you now?’

  ‘I’ve got used to this way of life. So has he. He’s very happy as he is. Besides, I’m still young.’

  ‘Did Julio ever write to you about anything specific in Spain? About people he knew?’

  ‘No, he tried to avoid it. The letters he wrote were very sincere: he would tell me when he met other women, but never said who they were.’

  ‘Had he been writing to you recently?’

  ‘Less.’

  ‘Have you kept his letters?’

  ‘Some of them perhaps. At first I kept them all, but then I grew scared my son might find them. He spends the weekends with me, and they were very intimate letters.’

  ‘Can I read them?’

  ‘I’m sorry, but they’re personal.’

  ‘Are there any that might give me some clue as to what he was doing in Spain, where he was, who he was seeing?’

  ‘He never mentioned any names.’

  ‘But if he wrote to you about the women in his life, he must have said something specific about them.’

  ‘No. Never. He had grown used to being careful.’

  ‘No addresses either?’

  ‘Yes, he did give those.’

  She got up and rummaged in the desk drawers. She took out an envelope and handed it to Carvalho. The handwriting was laborious, as though it had been carefully studied at school, although the neatness of the strokes was spoilt by the use of a cheap biro. Carvalho looked at the sender’s address on the back, and noted it down: ‘Teresa Marsé, 46 Avenida General Mitre, Barcelona’.

  ‘What links did he have with the organisation from Spain?’

  ‘I can’t answer that.’

  ‘I mean personal links, not business ones. Did Singel and the others still feel they could trust him?’

  ‘Completely. When he heard Julio was dead, Singel was really upset. Such a horrible death!’

  The tears began to flow again. She peered at Pepe through the waterfall.

  ‘Did you see the body?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is it true he had no face left?’

  ‘So I heard.’

  ‘Well then, it might not be him. Has the body’s identity been confirmed?’

  It’s easy enough to do a tattoo. A dead body can be switched. It could well not have been Julio Chesma. In his mind’s eye Carvalho no longer saw the limp, tear-stained widow, but Señor Ramón. What was he trying to confirm? The identity of a dead man, or the confirmation of an identity?

  ‘So Julio never gave you any idea of what he was up to in Barcelona?’

  ‘Don’t start that again. You know I can’t tell you anything about that. Besides, I haven’t the faintest idea. I know nothing.’

  ‘His death could have been a settling of accounts.’

  ‘Singel thought the same and is very worried.’

  The widow had got up from the bed. She was not a limp rag doll any more. She glanced at her watch: Carvalho had been told it was time to go in many less polite ways.

  ‘I have to go,’ he said, making as if to set off downstairs.

  ‘Have you found out all you wanted to know?’

  ‘Not everything. But the circle is closing.’

  ‘And where is it taking you?’

  ‘Back to the beginning. That’s the surprise you get when things come full circle.’

  He led the way down the stairs because he had learnt that is it polite to go upstairs behind women and to go down in front of them. Not all women understood why this was how it should be, and on more than one occasion Carvalho had seen his efforts at politeness interpreted in quite the wrong way. But the widow Salomons was well educated, and even smiled when Carvalho started down the steps ahead of her. Pepe was wondering whether he should throw a lifeline, to make their meeting into something more than a wake for a lost lover. All he had to say was: ‘I’m sorry we had to meet in
such tragic circumstances. Are you doing anything this evening?’ By the time this thought had been transferred from brain to face, he had turned to the widow and was leering at her like a professional undertaker enquiring whether she had found the ceremony to her satisfaction.

  ‘I’m sorry you had to go through this difficult moment. Some things are best forgotten.’

  The widow Salomons’ head dropped to her ample chest. Carvalho feared more waterworks. But then she lifted her head again and smiled at him through her tears with the stoic look of a Trojan woman accepting her destiny and death. Carvalho cast a last backward look at this suffering Trojan determined despite everything to seek new lovers she could regenerate through culture. Hypersensitive lovers who deserved to be more than they were; lovers who fought the good fight in bed and kept her feeling young as long as her skin was smooth and her flesh firm.

  The desk sergeant said he did not know whether Kayser was in the building. A minute later, the big blond inspector who had visited Carvalho twice at his hotel came into the room. Kayser was in, and would not be long. The inspector again offered Carvalho one of his tiny cheroots. Usually Carvalho smoked only heavyweight cigars, but he took one because novelties always fascinated him.

  ‘Have you got something interesting for Kayser?’

  ‘My farewell. I’m leaving tomorrow morning.’

  ‘That is interesting. We’ve been very worried about you, Mr Carvalho.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have worried. I’m only here as a tourist.’

  ‘I see your eye is a lot better. There were two more attacks in the red light district last night.’

  ‘It seems such a peaceful place.’

  ‘Appearances can be deceptive.’

  The glass door opened. An arm appeared, and then a man equally as massive as the blond inspector came into the office. His hair was grey, but he had such an air of energy about him that he immediately dominated the room, like one of those charismatic actors who drive everyone else off the stage. As soon as Kayser walked in, Carvalho forgot about the other man. He hardly even realised he was still in the room, sitting in a corner as though he were in the front stalls to watch the show of fake conviviality Kayser and Carvalho were putting on.