Carvalho went down the last of the stairs separating him from the gathering, and waited in the hope that during one of his leisurely eyebrow raisings Marcos Nuñez would raise at least one eye sufficiently to notice his presence. Some of the faces were familiar to him from his university days, and he even managed to put names to them with a fair degree of success. He was aware that people were trying to work out who he was. Carvalho came closer to the group and stopped when his eyes met those of Nuñez. He guessed that he was about to invite him to join the group, and pre-empted the invitation by indicating that they needed to speak in private. Nuñez did not break off his discourse immediately; he first cropped its wings and then killed it with a few well-turned phrases which caused a lady equipped with the large eyes of a nocturnal animal to laugh.
‘You’re a cynic, and you like people telling you so.’
‘Me? A cynic? I’m such a simple soul that you could twist me round your little finger.’
Nuñez got up and followed Carvalho to an adjoining room in which two married couples were drinking double scotch with ice but no water, a gin and tonic, and a vodka and orange.
‘You seem to keep yourself amused.’
‘If I keep myself amused I don’t get bored. I see it as preventive medicine.’
‘I was wondering whether you could help me with an inquiry. I’ve been trying to track down a man who was an inspector for Petnay—a friend of Antonio Jauma—Dieter Rhomberg. Do you know him?’
‘I know the name. Jauma used to say that he had the biggest penis in the world.’
‘The day before yesterday he was in San Francisco. But then, this morning, they told me that he’d disappeared two months ago, and that his whereabouts were unknown.’
‘Are you sure he was in San Francisco?’
‘A voice told me, “He’s gone for dinner at the Fairmont, and he’ll be back later.” Then, the day after, another voice told me that he’d gone on leave and disappeared. Anyway, you’ve hardly told me anything about Jauma’s life and habits. What sort of people did he mix with?’
‘In part old friends from the university, particularly the ones who had achieved a social status similar to his own. Not because this was what Jauma particularly wanted, but because circumstances dictated it. Of those of us who haven’t made it, only I and one other ex-comrade still have dealings with him.’
‘As friends? Or politically?’
‘Jauma’s only remaining link with politics was financial. He used to contribute to Party funds. Occasionally we would discuss things to do with the unions and the labour movement. He didn’t want problems with his workers, and he used to ask our advice. The last political talk we had together was when the embryo of new organizations began appearing in his firm, operating outside the Comisiones Obreras. Anarchists for the most part.
‘Had he had labour problems recently?’
‘No. But he would have had, sooner or later. He usually showed his face in only a small number of the concerns under his control, but he always took special care in choosing his personnel managers, and he would follow every dispute, however small, very closely.’
‘Because he had a moral itch?’
‘Partly. He had a particular conception of history that he couldn’t get rid of, if you know what I mean. In other words, his political upbringing told him that the working class was always right, and that he was an administrator of a capitalism that was on the defensive. He also had an image problem. He didn’t want to lose the image that he had of himself, but the image was in contradiction with the reality—that he was an exploiter. Inevitably he became paternalistic. He would go to his employees’ weddings. Or when he saw that one of his workers was having a hard time with domestic problems, he would give him a couple of days off.’
‘Curious—a manager in a multinational company behaving like he was the boss of a family firm. Tell me, did you think highly of him?’
Nuñez laughed a controlled laugh.
‘I’ll show you a photograph of our year at university. In it you’ll see six students who were inseparable. I would say that, in some ways, we’ll always be dependent on each other for our identities. Each one of those other five holds a part of my identity, and I hold a part of theirs. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. Between us we could do a reconstruction of what were the best years of our lives—if you leave aside the political persecution, the brutality that you laid yourself open to, and the darkness ruling the country. We could go for years without seeing each other, and then we could meet and just pick up where we’d left off. Not completely, obviously, but in relation to the past, yes.’
‘Were you the hero?’
‘The martyr. They idealized me during the period when I was in exile. They didn’t expect me to return in such a cynical frame of mind. They found it a bit of a disappointment, and reacted rather bitterly. But in the end they accepted me for what I was. Partly because I offered them the certainty that I would never take from them anything they had, and that I lead a modest life, with just one sweater, two pairs of jeans, and a couple of shirts. Perhaps they would have preferred me to have had more power. They have power—economic, political, cultural, moral, what have you. I have no power, though. No power at all.’
‘I’d be interested in seeing that photo, and who was in it. Maybe we could lunch together tomorrow. Where do you suggest?’
‘There’s a little French restaurant downtown, where you can eat something unique. A confit d’oie that the lady of the house brings in from Périgord.’
Carvalho was beginning to see Marcos Nuñez as a fellow human being.
During the drive up to his house at Vallvidrera, Carvalho was barely aware of being behind the wheel. Memories of his university days came flooding back, and in particular the memory of Marcos Nuñez’s influence on the generations of students that came after him. The story of Nuñez’s resistance to the Brigada Social, and how he had been the ‘first red student’ of the post-War period and the organizer of the first university cadres, went hand in hand with a reputation as an intellectual.
‘Malibran says that he has great powers of synthesis, which complement useful powers of analysis.’
Those were the days when Professor Malibran used to apportion powers of analysis and synthesis among his students as if he were Ceres sharing out the fruits of the earth. When his judgment descended on a student, it was as if the apostolic ball of fire had passed above him. He would hear the nasal voice of the professor thunder from the heavens: ‘This is my well-beloved student, in whom I have laid all my hopes in matters of analysis and/or synthesis.’ Marcos Nuñez was the principal point of reference in the martyrology of the student resistance, and his travels in France and Germany were followed from Spain as if they were the voyage of one of God’s apprentices to the source of definitive knowledge. By the time Carvalho came to be arrested, tried, and sentenced, the history of the resistance in the universities was still seen as having begun with Marcos Nuñez: ‘I was in the fourth year after Nuñez.’
Dozens of more or less adolescent faces loomed up from the past. Those evenings at Juliana’s. All of them with very little money, welcomed to a big house in the old part of Barcelona, with a portrait on the wall of Alfonso XIII standing next to a member of the family who had been a bishop, and antique furniture, and Bach and Shostakovich, and Montand singing:
C’est nous qui brisons les barreaux de prisons pour nos freres.
La Mancha cheese, cheap wine and chorizo, discussions about attacking first-level contradictions, furtive contacts between hands and brains. Then came the first ideological differences, and the first acts of political militancy. ‘Colonel Parra’ was arrested a few weeks before Carvalho, only to be set free seventy-two hours later. Then he told his epic tale, and most people found it very impressive, particularly when he told how he had deliberately stubbed out a cigarette on his hand to test how he would react to torture. ‘Colonel’ Parra wrote a rep
ort, and it was read religiously at all the student meetings, where it was generally well received. For Carvalho, the incident would have made an excellent sequence for an anti-German film with James Cagney and Richard Conte. Later he was to discover for himself that torture creates an entirely personal and unshareable dialectic, where the only rule that applies is one’s ability to resist and not say anything that might destroy one’s own dignity. Once your dignity is broken, you become a plaything in the hands of your torturers.
And what a quantity of culture! All the books that you had to have read, and the intellectual debates that had to be followed! The polemic in the French Communist Party between Naville and Lefebvre. To hell with the pair of them! The act of parking his car at the gate of his villa converted all this into a handful of broken images, as if a mental magic mirror had fallen to the floor and shattered. One hand for his mail and the other to keep his balance as he climbed the muddy steps. The first smells arising from the earth and the shrubbery with the approach of rain. He opened the door and dumped what he was carrying. Wide awake and relaxed, he contemplated the bookcase in the corridor, where an irregular array of books was taking up space, sometimes upright and tightly packed, and sometimes falling allover the place, or with their titles the wrong way up. He hunted out Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sholokov’s Quietly Flows the Don and Sacristan’s Essays on Heine. He went over to the fireplace, tearing up the books with the relaxed expertise of one who is well practised, and arranged the dismembered tomes in a little pile, on top of which he placed dry twigs and kindling wood. The flames caught at once and spread rapidly, and as the printed matter burned it fulfilled its historical mission of fuelling fires that were more real than itself.
To eat or not to eat, that was the question.
‘Cholesterol, boss. . . !’
Two in the morning. It was raining gently, and the night was filled with the smell of damp pine-leaves and the sound of flames crackling and the rain falling on the ivy that covered most of the garden like a green mantle.
A contortion of his bowels drove him to the toilet. As he went, he picked up a thriller by Nicholson—The Case of the Smiling Jesuit—and a newspaper. The advantage of living on your own is that you can shit with the toilet door open, Carvalho thought to himself as he strained his bowels. Having overcome his intestinal resistance, as he awaited a second offloading of faecal detritus he read ten lines of one of the most contrived detective stories ever written. The murder of an ex-girlfriend from his youth provides the narrator with a pretext for a long journey through his past as a British soldier in India. A dog’s dinner made up of bits of Bromfield’s And the Rains Came, Hesse’s fascination with oriental religions, and Agatha Christie. A curious book altogether. Final intestinal peace coincided with his arrival at the end of a chapter. He filled the bidet and went in search of the arts review pages in the newspaper, and on recent trends in Polish theatre by Fernando Monegal, who was Carvalho’s favourite, partly because of the absorbent qualities of the paper, but also because of the equally absorbent qualities of what was printed on it. One could say that a wonderful synthesis was effected between the paper and the article in leaving his arse suitably prepared for the final act of ablution in the bidet. Having taken his trousers off, Carvalho decided to go the whole hog and strip off. He grabbed a dressing gown off the toilet door and decided to broach the question of what to eat. As he gazed at a cupboardful of tinned food, he was caught between the simplicity of just having hot milk and the alchemical possibilities of actually cooking something at that hour of the night. What could he have? How about pasta? He sought out the necessary ingredients from the fridge and from the little larder next to the cupboard. The pork chop was salted slightly, and then subjected to the rigour of a small quantity of oil sizzling in the earthenware casserole. Then came a diced potato, grated onion, pepper and tomato. Once the frying was under way, Carvalho added a little salt and paprika before putting in the pasta and giving it a turn in the pan. It was time to pour in the broth, to a depth of about half an inch. When the broth began to simmer, Carvalho added four slices of thick butifarra sausage and just before removing the pan from the flame he gave the final touch, a pinch of garlic and pimento fried separately. He had learned this way of cooking pasta with black butifarra from the nuns in a convent where he had gone into hiding at the end of the 1950s after the discovery of his party’s printing press. The nuns would leave his food on a long, scrubbed wooden table, the most beautiful table Carvalho had ever seen in his life. Carvalho still had a soft spot for nuns, a throwback to his childhood days, when he had attended a school run by the nuns of St Vincent of Paul.
‘Jose, what do you want to be when you grow up?’
‘A saint.’
‘Like St Tarsicio?’
‘Yes, like St Tarsicio. Or like St Genevieve of Brabant.’
‘You’d have to be like St Tarsicio, because you’re a boy. St Genevieve was a woman.’
At that time he’d had no idea that angels were one sex or the other.
‘Pardon me, sir. Excuse my asking. . . would you happen to be going to Barcelona?’
‘Yes.’
‘My car’s broken down. I saw you pulling in to eat, and I wondered whether you could give me a lift.’
The owner of the voice was short and, in the opinion of Dieter Rhomberg, had too much hair. He ran his eye over the man’s neatly-trimmed beard and unassuming suit.
‘I’m a traveling rep for a sports equipment firm, and I’ve seen everyone I had to see round here. I was on my way home, and I thought, if it’s no bother for you. . .’
‘No, no bother at all.’
‘I fancy a bite too. I’ll sit at that table over there, and when you’re ready to go, you just tell me.’ ‘Why don’t you join me at my table?’ That’s very kind of you. I’d be delighted.’ The man gave a sigh of relief as he sat down. ‘You’ve saved my life, you know. If I don’t get home tonight I’d have a hell of a job convincing the wife that it was because the car broke down.’
‘Doesn’t she trust you?’
‘No. And with good reason.’
He gave a knowing wink. A huge gold Signet ring and a slender wedding ring glittered side by side on one finger.
‘It’s because of my job. Swimming pools, tennis courts, and so on. Would you like my card?’
‘It’s unlikely that I’ll ever need it. I’m a foreigner. Just passing through.’
‘I thought you sounded a bit foreign. You speak very good Spanish, though.’
‘I come here quite often.’
‘Well keep my card anyway. One of these days you might want to buy a villa in Spain. Just ring me. Juan Higueras Fernandez, at your service.’
‘Peter Herzen.’
‘Peter? That sounds English.’
‘I’m German. Peter’s the same in English and in German.’
The waiter brought Rhomberg his steak and salad.
‘I’ll have just a portion of cod. I have an ulcer.’
Two different types of pill appeared on the table.
‘I keep my daily dose in my pocket. That way I don’t forget. Otherwise I find I’ve left them in my suitcase, or left them behind somewhere, and then I’m in trouble. When you have too many things banging around in your brain, that’s when you get ulcers, and worse! You look pretty healthy, though. You obviously look after yourself. Steak. . . salad. . . Do you do any sports?’
‘I do what I can. Swimming, mainly.’
‘Very healthy. A real all-round sport. Imagine it, though—I spend all my time round swimming pools and I can’t even swim. What kind of schooling did they ever give us? A bit of reading, a bit of arithmetic, and that was that. If you wanted physical exercise, you’d get it kicking a ball around in the street. Or a tin can on a bit of open space—in the days when you could still find a bit of open space. Kids today are something else, though. My boy’s ta
king swimming lessons. Twice a week. When we go to the beach in the summer I feel a bit of an idiot, because he takes to the water like a fish, and I’m left paddling about on the beach with my trousers rolled up.’
He ate his meal quickly so as to catch up with Rhomberg.
‘There’s one thing I won’t give up, though—ulcer or no ulcer—and that’s my coffee.’
He got up, excused himself, and went over to the waiter. Rhomberg saw him take out his wallet and point to the table, and realized that he was about to pay for their meal. The German got up to protest, but was too late to stop him.
‘It’s the least I can do, seeing you’ve just about saved my life.’
The man commented on how comfortable the BMW was.
‘It’s not mine. It’s a hire car.’
‘You’ve started your holidays early! It’s still spring!’
‘This was the only time I could get free.’
‘Things don’t always turn out the way we want them, do they? Listen, would you mind if I stretch out on the back seat for a bit? It’s my ulcer. It helps if! can rest up for a while after a meal.’
Rhomberg settled himself at the wheel. He carefully adjusted his seat belt and then turned around. The man fitted along the length of the seat just nicely. He had his hands folded on his stomach and gave him a contented smile.
‘This is brilliant. Like traveling in a sleeper-car.’
They left the service area and joined the motorway. It was a good seventy kilometres to Barcelona. Dieter put his foot down, and glanced in the rearview mirror to check that his traveling companion wasn’t alarmed by the speed. The man seemed to be absorbed in staring at the roof, or perhaps he was dozing with his eyes half closed. Dieter would have liked to get his business with Carvalho over with as soon as possible, so as not to have to spend a night in Barcelona. He wanted to reach Valencia in one haul, and then, the next day, get the car on a ferry for Oran. In his mind he mulled over the best way to approach Carvalho—giving him enough information to convince him, but not so much as to compromise himself. He felt his whole body in the grip of a fear that was compounded by his sense of personal isolation. He felt the anxiety tighten in his throat, and found himself murmuring the name of his dead wife—Gertrude—under his breath. His eyes became misty with self-pity. Then he thought of his son, and the pain became too much.
The Angst-Ridden Executive Page 6