That was exactly what Carvalho never wanted to eat, but he adopted all the resigned dignity of a true Galician and they agreed to meet a couple of hours later in a café on Calle Muntaner. Opposite Boccaccio, Teresa Marsé explained, to make it absolutely clear. Carvalho decided to make the best of a bad job: opposite the café she had mentioned he knew there was a superb Italian delicatessen. He could choose himself a delicious dinner that would make up for the horror of ‘any old thing’. He walked uphill and stood gazing with pleasure at the fresh pasta laid out in the window. He did not know whether to have fettuccini or cappelletti. Once inside the shop he let several women obviously in a hurry get served in front of him. He looked along the shelves of wine for a bottle of Marcelli, found one, and then his eyes plunged into the soft mounds of cappelletti. He had made his choice, but still ran his eyes over the Parma ham, the balls of mozzarella, the jars of sauce. He already knew what the menu would be, and asked for all the ingredients without hesitation.
The imagined delights of his dinner often came to Carvalho’s aid to get him through the next few hours. Just as he had feared, Teresa Marsé turned out to have a complete lack of interest in food. She belonged to that social class which is tired of duck with orange by the time they are ten, and has drunk so much good wine that they see no difference between a bottle of plonk and a 1948 Chateau Laffitte. Only such tired palates could choose the kind of café food she ate: tinned artichokes and a quarter of grilled chicken and chips. Carvalho tried in vain to lead by example, and opted for a simple plate of eggs and bacon, but with the eggs properly fried: none of your rubbish cooked on a hotplate, he warned the waiter, because if you do I’ll wrap them round your head. He insisted they change the bottle of plonk for a Paternina 1928, the only variety of that wine which succeeded in combining a reasonable price with reasonable levels of chemicals.
Teresa was observing his struggle to preserve some gastronomic pride with an irritating air of superiority. She did not even have a decent appetite, and left half the plastic chicken and all the chips untouched.
‘Are you on a diet?’
‘No, sometimes I eat like a horse. I buy myself two kilos of peaches and don’t stop till I’ve finished them.’
‘That’s healthy food at least.’
Teresa returned to their main topic of conversation over the black coffee with no sugar that she ordered. In that at least she shared Carvalho’s tastes. She had always suspected that Julio was mixed up in something. The fact that he used her address for his correspondence, for example. Carvalho explained exactly what he was mixed up in.
‘Why didn’t he tell me? I wouldn’t have minded. I don’t get it. Are you sure you don’t know anything more? Has something happened to him?’
‘Something could happen to him. We need to find him at once.’
‘I can’t help you, I’m afraid.’
‘Where did he live in Barcelona?’
‘No idea.’
‘I don’t believe you. You must have seen him somewhere, and it wouldn’t have been in your apartment.’
‘Why not there?’
‘Because you wouldn’t risk the scandal. I suppose your husband is a tolerant man, but not to the extent of wanting to see you receive lovers in the same apartment where his son lives.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘Julio told me.’
‘That’s not true. It was the caretaker. I called her and she told me everything. She thought she was doing me a favour because you were a spy from my husband.’
‘Fine, let’s forget about that. Where did you two meet?’
‘My parents have a house they no longer use. Quite close to here: at Caldetas, by the seaside.’
‘I know where Caldetas is.’
‘We used to go there. My parents never visit it. They keep saying they’re going to sell it, but they can never make up their minds. I think they’ve even forgotten they still have it. We used to meet there. That way we didn’t have to go to my apartment or to Julio’s.’
‘Did you ever meet any of his friends? Do you know what he got up to? Did he often go somewhere? Where did he eat?’
‘When we ate together we used to come here. I don’t know anything more about his life.’
‘How did you meet?’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘I have the time.’
‘I don’t.’
But she found time from somewhere. They crossed the street to the Oxford. It was a showy place that was almost empty, which made it perfect for talk. Between the waiters and the tables was the loud wall of customers enjoying a late aperitif at the bar. Teresa told Carvalho how she had met Julio in the office of an importer of Dutch products. She had gone to pick up her order of Indonesian knick-knacks and Amsterdam hippy creations. Julio was there enquiring about a load of Edam cheese. As she said this, Teresa burst out laughing. Carvalho joined in, relieved he did not have to suppress his mirth as he had done the first time he heard such an unlikely story.
‘Julio made fun of some of the things I was buying. I did the same. Then he started on my clothes, and I replied in kind. I said he dressed like a country bumpkin from Vitoria who was dazzled by big-city executives. I knew he was trying to pick me up, but I liked the look of him and I thought it might be worthwhile trying to find out whether there was anything more to him. And there was. He had class.’
She was talking about her past with Chesma in a way that Carvalho thought was too flippant. She was aware it had all been a game. She was not as emotionally involved as the widow Salomons had been. Teresa Marsé went through life willing to be surprised, but in fact was not often caught unawares. Julio Chesma offered her the novelty of someone she could not easily categorise. A rough-and-ready sort who knew how to disguise the fact. A man with no education who had taught himself a lot. A man of imagination with hands strong enough to get a good grasp on reality.
‘We didn’t have what you might call a steady relationship. I made things very clear to him from the outset: I hadn’t got free of the marriage yoke just to imprison myself again. At first he didn’t understand. I think that jealousy was one of the many contradictions about him. He was terribly jealous. Just the thought that I might go out with other men drove him crazy.’
‘Did you take them to the same place in Caldetas?’
‘Why not? Julio himself used to go there with other women. After I had managed to convince him we shouldn’t be each other’s jailer, he asked me several times if he could use the house. I knew what it was for, and left him the key. Would you like it?’
‘Would you come with me?’
Teresa Marsé weighed him up with a sceptical smile.
‘It’s a possibility. But at the moment I’m in the midst of a passionate affair.’
‘With Julio?’
‘No, that’s almost completely finished with. By the way, what time is it?’
‘How come a woman as busy as you doesn’t wear a watch?’
‘It leaves a mark on your wrist. And besides, I think it’s a stupid habit.’
‘But you must be glad that others have them …’
‘Yes, that’s true.’
Carvalho followed her out. As she had done in the café, Teresa let him pay.
‘Stop by the shop another day and then I’ll buy, OK?’
‘Which day?’
‘Don’t press too hard.’
‘I’m not pressing at all. I just want you to tell me the day and time you might be able to see me.’
‘Don’t be so sensitive! Give me a call. That’s the best way.’
She took a business card with the boutique details on it from her seemingly bottomless embroidered bag. Carvalho put it in his pocket, then did something he hardly ever did: he gave her his address in Vallvidrera.
‘So you don’t need to take anyone to your parents’ place. Is it your house or your bachelor pad?’
‘Both things.’
‘Men! You always get away with things we women n
ever can.’
They were walking along a side street that came out almost exactly level with her boutique in Calle Ganduxer.
‘Julio used to get letters from a previous flame in Amsterdam, didn’t he?’
‘Yes, he did. The widow Salomons. He read me one once.’ She raised her hand to her face and giggled. Then she went on: ‘You should have heard it! She even quoted Catullus at him! That gives you some idea of what it was like. Julio was very grateful to her because she helped him educate himself. He was very quick, very receptive. I used to leave him books and he would return them with whole passages underlined. He was what you might call “a mind wasted from lack of opportunities”. But he was doing well in life. He was earning a lot more than many non-wasted minds. It’s all relative, isn’t it? He made a lot of money, or at least he seemed to. He always had a lot on him, and was always well dressed. Too well dressed. There was nothing I could do about it: he had an almost religious respect for made-to-measure suits, shiny shoes, slick ties and so on.’
‘He was born to raise hell in hell.’
‘So you know about the tattoo? He told me he had always been a rebel. As a kid in the orphanage, in the Spanish Legion, and then in jail. Did you know he’d been in jail? A priest told him in the orphanage one day: “You’re worse than the devil.” Julio told everyone that. It used to amuse him, because in recent months he was living like a lord, he had a happy, settled existence and yet he still had that tattoo.’
‘Perhaps it was his way of making sure he hung on to that part of himself.’
‘Could be. Give me a call one of these days.’
With that she vanished inside her shop of disguises.
No. She was not the sort of woman who waited in weary bars for the return of a young sailor with a heart tattooed on his chest. Carvalho was sure that such a woman existed in Julio Chesma’s life, but that neither the theatrical and literary widow Salomons nor the playful Teresa Marsé were the one. Somewhere, although he did not know where, before or after Chesma had begun his journey towards a faceless death, a woman had been stamped for ever by his vitality and strength. Carvalho had no idea if he was so convinced of this because of the song, or if it was thanks to his own instinct. A man like Julio Chesma could never have been satisfied with a melodramatic widow or a tennis partner like Teresa Marsé. He needed someone who could identify completely with his tattoo’s message. The tattoo was aimed at someone who had taken Julio Chesma’s life as seriously as her own.
He arranged to meet Charo and her friend from Andalusia at a restaurant in San Cugat. It was quite close for Carvalho, but Charo was as mad as hell when she arrived.
‘I don’t understand why you can’t come down to my place. Why are you playing this game of hide-and-seek?’
Her friend tried to soothe her.
‘He knows what’s he’s doing.’
‘You could at least have made us dinner at your house.’
‘I bought things for dinner but I wasn’t in the mood to make it. There’s a time for everything. Perhaps I’ll cook anyway, and have a late supper.’
Charo turned to the Andalusian as though she had caught Pepe red handed.
‘See? And he’s serious. Can you believe it? He’s capable of starting to cook at four in the morning.’
Charo was looking at Carvalho the way a mother looks at a beloved child unfortunately born with two heads. Her friend laughed so much Carvalho could see her two gold back teeth.
‘I just love this place,’ she said, like an actress from a Spanish soap opera.
Carvalho was not so sure, especially as it was decorated like the Escorial Palace, with period furniture made in the nearby neighbourhood of San Cugat. He was unsure about its specialities as well: bread smeared with tomato, sausage and beans, barbecued meat, or rabbit with alioli sauce. In the previous decade something like ten thousand restaurants had opened in Catalonia purporting to offer their customers the marvels of simple rustic Catalan cooking. But far too often, their bread with tomato (an imaginative creation far superior to pizza with tomato) was little more than a lump of humid, undercooked dough made even more soggy by a layer of tomato puree out of a tin. And the alioli sauce had usually not been prepared with enough patience and had the egg yolk added as if it were mayonnaise, with the result that it was usually so yellow it looked like house paint. Carvalho found himself giving the astounded ladies a lecture on the gastronomic roots of humanity. But it wasn’t so much Charo’s friend’s exclamation ‘My God, what a lot this guy knows’ which made him wonder about what he was doing talking like this, as the moment when he heard himself utter the word ‘matrix’ to describe the common origin of some dishes.
‘Just as we can speak of a linguistic matrix and can situate the common source of Aryan languages in Indo-European, so we can trace a gastronomic matrix, one of whose manifestations is the combination of bread with tomato. This is obviously related to pizza, but is even easier to prepare. Pizza dough has to be cooked, whereas bread with tomato is simply that: bread and tomato with a little salt and oil sprinkled on it.’
‘And it’s really delicious,’ said the Andalusian girl, full of enthusiasm for all the mysteries Carvalho was revealing to her. ‘It’s refreshing and filling. And it has a lot of goodness in it. Dr Cardelús told me so when I took my boy to see him because he was a bit anaemic. Give him bones llesques of bread with tomàquet y pernil, he said. It worked like a charm. My boy is in a house in the country near Gavá. And I always tell the people looking after him to give him bread and tomato, heaps of it.’
Carvalho was worried that the scientific tone of the debate had languished somewhat, but at that moment the famous bread with tomato arrived. It was not of a quality to figure in the best cookbooks, but it was a proper bread and tomato. The two women waited expectantly for Carvalho’s verdict. He rolled it around the roof of his mouth, trying to decide how good the bread was, if the tomato was fresh, and to judge the quality of the oil.
‘They’ve used slightly damp salt, but it’ll do.’
‘My God, is there nothing he doesn’t know?’
Charo already knew all Carvalho’s party tricks and was not yet ready to forgive him for having made them travel so far. She grunted.
‘Well, I like it,’ she said. ‘Besides, I’m hungry. You’re too finicky, Pepe. It’s obvious you’ve never been really hungry in your life.’
‘Yes, it’s dreadful to go hungry,’ her Andalusian friend agreed. She was determined to have her say about anything the other two mentioned. Her thin lips were smothered in oil, and Carvalho was pleased to see her make short work of the barbecued ribs. They were served a bottle of rosé. Pepe thought it was quite sweet, but it had an interesting aftertaste, so he asked where it came from.
‘It tastes to me like a wine from the Ampurdán, somewhere around Perelada or Corbella.’
‘You’re almost there. We have it brought from up above Montmany.’
‘It’s not bad at all.’
‘It goes down well. It’s not too strong, but it’s very pleasant.’
‘Not strong?’ the Andalusian girl was doing her Jerry Lewis impression. ‘Not strong?’
Her eyes had crossed.
‘It’s already gone straight to my head.’
She straightened her eyes again and roared with laughter at her own joke, all the while picking shreds of meat from between her teeth with a toothpick.
‘Never mind that, tell him how you got on this morning.’
‘Oh yes, Pepe, I had a real laugh. Don’t you need an assistant more often?’
She lowered her voice to a stage whisper.
‘I was spying on them the whole morning. Look at what they did to my hair. Not bad, is it? I thought it was going to be worse. I got them to do the whole works: I was in there from nine in the morning till two this afternoon.’
‘So?’
‘So what?’
‘So what did you find out?’
‘They’re very busy. Very. The four girls and Q
ueta can hardly cope. If only I’d listened to my mother! You know, Pepe, I’m from Bilbao really, but in our line of business you have to say you’re Andalusian if you want to keep your client happy. I’ve no idea why. So I soon started speaking with an accent and swaying my hips like a flamenco dancer, and I half believe I’m from Seville myself.’
Carvalho had always thought that prostitutes from the Basque country, Catalonia or even Madrid pretended they were Andalusians out of pure racism. They transferred their shame about how they earned their living on to Spain’s least developed region, in this way somehow preserving the ethnic purity of the Basques, the noble lineage of Castille, and Catalan industrial prowess. But Charo’s friend insisted it was all down to the clients.
‘It’s what they want. If you tell them you’re from Bilbao they look at you disappointed. As if you’re not going to give them a good time.’
It was her turn to give them a lecture. She demonstrated that even in whoring theory is the inseparable companion of practice, and that the division of labour has produced disasters splitting the two apart not only in almost every area of art and the professions, but also in philosophy, sociology and even whorology. The authors of the vast majority of books written about prostitution are therapists who know nothing about what really goes on, and the Basque-Andalusian girl’s critical capacities knocked all their theories into a cocked hat.
‘As soon as they see a client, lots of the girls start with their Andalusian lovey-dovey stuff and lisping about what a good time they’re going to give them. Some clients like it, but there are others who don’t. It all depends.’
Carvalho tried to bring her spaceship back into the earth’s atmosphere, and in particular to Queta’s hair salon.
‘Oh yes, that. They work so hard! It reminded me of my poor mother who wanted me to be a hairdresser. If I had listened to her I’d be set up for life and earning a fortune by now.’
‘You’re not doing so badly. You can’t complain.’
‘This isn’t the moment to tell me that, Pepe. I’ve been in hiding for more than a week and haven’t earned a cent. Not like your friend here. She’s been clever, thanks to you. There’s not many men who would have done what you did for Charo, Pepe. A lot of them would have just exploited her. You told her to choose her clients carefully and to wait for them to come to her. Not to go out on to the streets looking for them. She’s almost respectable.’
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