The Angst-Ridden Executive

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  ‘That waist—that waist—work that waist. That’s it, that’s the way, go on—be angry—one-two, one-two!’

  Still panting, Fontanillas abandoned the circuit-training session and headed for the exercise bike. Meanwhile Carvalho changed into the clothes that were provided for visitors. A vest and white shorts, and under the shorts a pair of red nylon trunks for the sauna and the pool. Carvalho did a bit of running on the spot, as if warming up for a football match. His knee-joints were creaking, but he had sufficient muscular elasticity to be able to warm up in his gym-shoes. Fontanillas, who was panting and sweating and looking like he’d just completed the Stations of the Cross, signaled to him to follow. They picked up a pair of rackets and made their way into the squash court, which was painted spring green. The first balls resounded against the hard, hollow walls. Sometimes the ball hit the metal perimeter mesh with a noise like the chattering of a lie detector. This is truly a sport for atomic fall-out shelters, because the ball has no way of escaping to the sky or disappearing behind some bank in search of a hiding place. The balls are condemned to bounce and bash around until their balding rubber ages prematurely and one day someone gives them a mighty whack which breaks them open, liberates the air inside them, and sends their rubber soul upwards to heaven.

  Fontanillas had reflexes which had been tuned to this subterranean, animal style of game. Every well-placed stroke stretched his muscles to the limit, and the smile half-hidden in a gesture of fatigue indicated that he both loved and needed this minor victory. For Carvalho, the coming and going of the ball as it bounced back from the side walls or rebounded with undiminished force onto the playing-wall meant a lot of running around to not much effect. As a thin sweat began to appear on his skin, he found he was getting his eye in and he played as best he could, in the knowledge that Fontanillas was making no allowances for him. The lawyer consulted his watch and decided that he wasn’t going to run for the next ball.

  ‘Sauna now. And then the pool. We can talk in there.’

  In their red trunks they made their way down the carpeted corridor, and a swing door brought them into the club’s humid zone. A cold shower, a few strokes up and down the small swimming pool, which was joined to the roof by a jet of constantly-flowing water, and then drying themselves with towels before passing through a heavy wooden door to enter the ante-chamber of hell. A brazier of hot coals, wooden benches, magazines that had suffered in the heat of the place, and thermometers and hour-glasses on the walls. Their two bodies lay flat on a raised bench as if they were loaves pushed into an oven by the baker’s pallet and slowly baking. Carvalho’s reserves of sweat were flowing like a river in flood, and Fontanillas observed with satisfaction that Carvalho had been lucky to have had the opportunity of this experience.

  ‘This is very good for you. Not because it helps you slim, but because it opens your pores.’

  ‘Isn’t there a less painful way of getting your pores open?’

  ‘This is nothing—it’s just the pre-sauna. That narrow door there takes you into the real hell. I’m having a house built in the wilds of Sarria, and I’m having a little sauna put in. I find it very refreshing. Anyway, time’s running out—go ahead, say your piece.’

  ‘No. You. You’re supposed to be telling me about Jauma.’

  ‘I suppose you want concrete facts rather than chit-chat.’

  ‘Did Jauma ever consult you about anything that might explain why he was killed? Dodgy dealings, that sort of thing?’

  ‘I’m a heavyweight lawyer, señor Carvalho. Field artillery, battleships and long-range bombers. I won my spurs in the law courts fighting big-company cases. I’ve made money for some clients, and lost money for others, but in none of my cases has anybody ever ended up dead. You might get farmers killing each other over land boundaries, or shopkeepers because they’re competing for trade in the same street, but in the world of big business the rules of the game are Dante-esque, señor Carvalho, and the whole world knows it. That said, I did have occasion to advise Jauma in a couple of instances where his business life touched on his personal life, but for company matters Petnay keeps its own team of lawyers.’

  ‘It’s strange. There’s Jauma, with all the resources of a major multinational right at his fingertips, and he feels the need to hire his own personal accountants and lawyers. Presumably he paid them out of his own pocket too.’

  ‘My time was paid by Petnay, not Jauma. I’m afraid I know nothing that could be of use to you. Our discussions were very technical.’

  ‘How would you explain Jauma’s death?’

  ‘I have no explanation other than the official one, and it surprises me that Concha isn’t going along with it.’

  ‘From what I hear, experts in pimps and prostitution don’t believe the official explanation either. The detail of the knickers is too contrived. What’s more, they were new. Never worn. Never been anywhere near a woman. What’s the point of having women’s knickers in your pocket if they don’t carry the smell of a woman?’

  ‘He doesn’t have to have been killed by a pimp or a prostitute. Why couldn’t it have been revenge by a jealous husband, or a jilted lover, or the father of one of the girls? The police looked into all this, interviewed all sorts of people, and came up with nothing. Concha was moved by pure emotion, which was understandable but less than helpful.’

  ‘You don’t want complications in this case, do you.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘You’d prefer it to be an open and shut case, wouldn’t you. It’s obvious from the way you deny any possibility of complication.’

  ‘I don’t like pointless complications. I never have, and I’ve found it a perfect recipe for getting on in life. Concha is looking for pointless complications, and it’s all Nuñez’s fault. I like Nuñez a lot, but the man’s a disaster. At the age of forty-five he still goes round behaving like a budding teenager. In another five years he’ll be a failed fifty-year-old. He enjoys going round looking for problems where there are none. Now he’s decided to query the motives of Jauma’s death. He’s managed to convince Concha, and now we’re all caught up in it. Why? Just because Nuñez has nothing better to do with his time. So why pick on this? So as to make up for his understandable frustration at never being able to do anything useful.’

  ‘Like having a wife and children, and a house in the wilds of Sarria, and a sauna. . .’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re a politico too! I thought private detectives were men of the world and had a bit of sense. . . Am I to presume that you’re in the private detective cell of the Communist Party?’

  ‘No—the gastronomic cell.’

  ‘In that case you should call round to the aforementioned sauna, because good eating makes you fat, and so does ethical smugness and political self-righteousness.’

  Carvalho felt an undeniable sensation of lightness, floating, as he made his way out of the gym for out-of-shape executives. He felt as if his pores really were more open, and as he went up the stairs to the office of the labour lawyer Biedma, his legs felt as if they were trying to get there before him. In the reception area a group of workers was listening attentively to a report of something that had happened that morning at a Labour Tribunal. In a corner a secretary was typing under a poster of the Portuguese Revolution: a picture of a boy holding out his hand to take a carnation poking out of the barrel of a rifle. Forget the flower and take the gun, kid, Carvalho thought to himself, because otherwise one day someone will shoot you and you’ll discover that the carnation was really a bullet. What the workers were discussing was the closure of a section of a sanitary-ware factory. He found himself in an Ensanche apartment, with decorated mosaics, a fake alabaster fireplace, embossed wooden doors that had been painted over with blue paint, and in the sea of blue a rectangular space that was occupied almost entirely by Tomas Biedma—tall, solid, with large, wide-awake eyes set in a cylindrical face. The workers fell silent and g
reeted him with the sort of respect they would have accorded to a doctor. Carvalho allowed himself to be swallowed up in the sea of blue, leaving Biedma behind to exchange information with the group outside. An efficient-looking office, full of 1940s bits and pieces very similar to the furniture in Carvalho’s: a wooden filing cabinet with a roll-down shutter; a glass bookcase; two leatherette armchairs worn at the seat and arms. On the desk there was a degree of disorder, which seemed to lose importance when Biedma sat down, leaned forward on his elbows as if his arms were architraves for the weight of the rest of his body, and, in a voice that was slow, deep, and youthful, confirmed the air of moderation that radiated from his face—an appearance that was belied only by an intermittent tic as he frowned slightly and his gaze wandered off apparently in search of some non-existent point somewhere to the north-east.

  ‘I’ve just been for a sauna with Fontanillas.’

  Biedma laughed.

  ‘Was it free, or did he make you pay?’

  ‘He’s sending you the bill.’

  Biedma laughed again, and his face —which could have been that of Louis XV’s elder brother —grew boyish.

  ‘He’s always been that way. When we were students we were all short of money. None of us came from wealthy families, except Vilaseca maybe, because his father was a lawyer. Most of us had to duck and dive to get money—private lessons, selling encyclopaedias and so on. It wasn’t that we didn’t have money to eat—we just needed extra cash to spend. And one way or another we all became smalltime traders. Fontanillas especially. He’d go up to the girls in the philosophy department and try selling them nylons and contraband French perfumes. He even went and had two inside pockets stitched into his jackets so that he could open them and show his wares—watches, lighters, nylons and so on. He used to go round shouting like a street trader. “Watches! Lighters! Roll up, roll up!’”

  ‘Now he’s rich.’

  ‘Very rich.’

  ‘And you’re not.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you will go to heaven, and he will most definitely be down for a spell in Purgatory.’

  ‘I console myself with that thought.’

  ‘How come you’re such a red?’

  Suspecting that he was being made fun of, Biedma momentarily forgot his tic and studied the slightly mocking look in Carvalho’s eyes.

  ‘Because I’m faithful to my own logic. Politically speaking, we all started from the same place. Take Fontanillas and Argemi. They played their part. They printed leaflets, and handed them out. They set up Marxist study groups—I’m not joking. It was Fontanillas who first explained to me the law of supply and demand. He was always the first to understand things, the first to try them, and the first to abandon them. If you look at my friends, they’ve either abandoned their politics, over time, or they’ve become stuck in a rut—like Nuñez, a lifelong supporter of a party which was once revolutionary but today is openly reformist. He supports the Party because he’s married to it, and because he doesn’t want to renounce the sentimental vows that he made thirty years ago. Thirty years, give or take. . . ! I, for my part, have remained faithful to a logic which ties political action to a real desire to change history, in a progressive direction, and as quickly as possible, Without falling into electoral agreements and compromises that merely conceal their revolutionary impotence.’

  ‘You’re not the only “red”. Vilaseca sounds like a bit of a revolutionary too.’

  ‘Pah—he’s a snob. Very intelligent, but a snob. Having run through every group in the ultra-Left he’s now settled on anarchism. I, on the other hand, am now what I was in 1950, applied to the historical necessities of 1977: a Marxist-Leninist.’

  ‘So as far as you’re concerned, Argemi, Fontanillas, and Jauma are traitors to the cause, Nuñez is stuck in a time warp, and Vilaseca is a snob. You make things very easy for yourself.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that Argemi, Fontanillas and Jauma ever actually betrayed anything. They simply followed the logic of their class positions and then went back to an assured place in the bosom of the bourgeoisie. Nuñez used his political militancy as a way of not ending up as a has-been, and Vilaseca is a curiosity, a voyeur of history and politics.’

  ‘And Dorronsoro?’

  ‘He’s a writer, an artist, and artists should be left to their own devices unless they’re out-and-out reactionaries.’

  ‘Jauma is dead. Why did he die?’ A mist, possibly resulting from the evaporation of hidden tears, clouded Biedma’s vision. He hung his head for a moment.

  ‘It’s as if it’s us that they’ve mutilated. As if it was my life that they cut short. A man who was the life and soul of any company. He never changed—just carried on the way he was—emotional, sex-mad, crazy. . .’

  He sank into a reverie, with his gaze fixed on a pile of duplicated pamphlets with the title Red Notes:

  No to the Fascist Monarchy!

  Down with the Status Quo!

  ‘We had dinner together a few days before he died. He’d just got back from a trip to San Francisco and wanted me to fill him in on the labour scene, and what was happening with the coming legalization of the trade unions.’

  ‘Did you advise him on how to deal with the union people in his factories?’

  ‘I’m not a business consultant, señor Carvalho. With Jauma have always simply given my political interpretation of the situation as it stands. I never give him advice so that he can outsmart the working class. Only so that he doesn’t delude himself.’

  ‘Do you have your own ideas about why he was killed?’

  ‘At first I accepted the police version, and for the moment I don’t have enough evidence to suggest that their version is not correct. You, however, do, or so it seems.’

  ‘Not at all. I was sitting happily at home dealing with adultery cases and over-emotional runaway teenagers when all of a sudden they wanted me to show that the official explanation of Jauma’s murder actually explains nothing. So here I am. I’m a professional, and my motivation in this case is strictly economic, although I did actually meet Jauma once, years ago, in the United States. We had three days together. We traveled together through the Mojave Desert, from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. The last time I saw him he was playing roulette at Caesar’s Palace. I tried to say goodbye several times, but he didn’t even raise his eyes from the baize. When he did finally look up, I gave him a wave from the other side of the table, but I don’t know if he even saw me.’

  ‘He was an orderly man, who had a passionate and dangerous hobby—gambling. I, on the other hand, am a disorderly man, but I have a hobby which is soothing and relaxed, almost decadent.’

  ‘You play the violin?’

  ‘No. Art. I’m a specialist in second-rank artists. Do you know what separates a second-rank artist from a first-rank artist in the majority of cases?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The history of art, and I suppose the history of literature too, is full of bitter injustices. A given era creates sacrosanct values and transmits them to the next. Nobody ever questions whether the original classification was fair in the first place. In Velazquez’s studio there were at least two students who painted as well as he did. Look.’

  He got up slowly and went over to a cupboard. It opened to reveal an interior filled with identical metal boxes that contained rows of slides. He took several slides from one of them and placed a viewer on the table.

  ‘Look at these. What do you see?’

  ‘A painting. Girls paddling in a stream.’

  ‘Who would you say painted it?’

  ‘It looks Dutch.’

  ‘Well done. Carry on.’

  ‘Rembrandt?’

  ‘Not at all!’

  With evident satisfaction that his theory had been proved, Biedma came round the table and settled down with a view to expounding his the
ories.

  ‘It’s by Lucas Paulus, one of Rembrandt’s students. You should see the original. You won’t find it in any gallery. It’s part of the treasures of a tenth-rate Flemish church in Holland. If it had Rembrandt’s signature on it, it would feature in every art history book in the world. Look—here’s another one. . .’

  ‘I’m sorry, señor Biedma. I’ve got a busy day ahead of me meeting all your friends. I’m on my way to see Vilaseca now. You’ve still not answered the question that interests me, though. When you last saw him, did Jauma show signs of being especially worried about anything?’

  ‘He wanted to give up his job. Find another job before he reached fifty. He was very dramatic about it at first. That was during the last time we dined together. Then the conversation took a lighter turn, and by the end he was laughing at himself, and quoting Saint Teresa: “I live in myself without living in myself, etc, etc.” Then he ended with his favourite phrase.’

  ‘What phrase?’

  ‘The angst of the senior executive.’

  Compared with the youthful, parsimonious neatness of Marcos Nuñez, Vilaseca cultivated a provocative image of marginalization. Long unruly hair, a moustache, an unkempt beard, an ex-army combat jacket that probably once belonged to some hero of the Sierra Maestra, a pair of jeans that looked as if they had been rescued from a dustbin and then ironed by a steamroller, a post-war military haversack and soldiers’ boots darkened with dubbin. He arrived at their rendezvous with a girl who was slim as a bamboo cane, with willowy hands, brown hair worn in an Afro, and two breasts that seemed to apologize for their smallness beneath a camisette that looked as if it had been stolen from some Museum of Slavery.