‘Argemi Blanc, Jordi. Born Barcelona 1932, died Palausator (Gerona). 2002. A late-developing Catalan poet. His first book, Keep the Wood on the Quay, published in 1980, revealed a previously unknown link between the poetry of Salvat-Papasseit and Gabriel Ferrater, a poetry of personal experience which sometimes tends towards social comment (Salvat-Papasseit), and sometimes adopts a hermetic style of intimate love poetry (Ferrater). Fruit Skin (1985) returns to more traditional themes of love poetry, drawing on the Catullan tradition of lyric poetry to create a libretto for a rock-opera. A poet without a poetic history, and with no links with the literary movements of his time, Argemi maintained a constant development in his thematic material and his poetic forms, which culminated in his masterpiece Yoghurt, a Laocontian attempt to convert poetry into a synthesis of different literary genres. Some writers on Argemi have seen in Yoghurt (1990) symbolic elements which go beyond the formal and expressional challenge contained in it. In the words of Pedro Gimferrer, Yoghurt is “an attempt at poetic apprehension of the essence of a country —Catalonia —at the historic moment when, for the fourth time, its desire for independence is frustrated. In this sense, Yoghurt forms one part of the great triptych of Catalonia’s national poetry, alongside Verdaguer’s Atlantis and Josep Carner’s Nabi.” Between 1990 and 2002, the year of his death, Argemi’s only published work was a curious book of “sensual memoirs” entitled Capital Pleasures. A year after his death, in 2003, a minor work was published which revealed the creative decline of the seventy-year-old poet, although it still had the characteristic linguistic inventiveness which was so typical of his writing: The Smoke of a Davidoff (2003). Essential bibliographic reading: Argemi Through the Looking Glass, ed. P. Gimferrer. La Coqueluche. 1995; Final Poems, Josep M. Castellet. Edicions 62. 1983; Argemi Alone, Franyoise Wagener. Editions Gallimard. 1990.’
‘All these books, of course, will have been written by myself.’ Argemi concluded as he sat half-hidden behind a final puff of smoke from the Davidoff.
In a solidly modern flat located in a part of Barcelona that was high enough up a hillside to escape the hurly-burly of the urban masses and central enough to enable its owner to go on foot to any of the city’s art movie houses or one of the restaurants catering for reasonably well-off cultural minorities, lived Juan Dorronsoro, the youngest son of a family whose eldest son was a poet featured in seventy-three per cent of international anthologies of Spanish poetry and whose second eldest was Pedro Dorronsoro, the best known of all Spanish novelists, who had even been mentioned in an American TV mini-series.
‘Who are your favourite writers?’
‘I’ve just finished a Hemingway, and now I’m starting something by Pedro Dorronsoro, whom I find a very interesting writer. . .’
While it lacked the socio-cultural representativeness of the one brother, and did not enjoy the intellectual repute of the other, the work of Juan Dorronsoro had advanced slowly but steadily in the form of just three novels, which had met with more critical than popular acclaim. He was a man who wrote ten lines a day, and he lived life as a function of his writing, in a time-scale all his own, and in a physical space limited solely to the present. He lived in the antechamber of a photographic memory that was sufficiently falsificatory to provide material for his novels and at the same time not transgress the bounds of a decent and socially desirable forgetfulness. He had the features of a young duke, the gangling walk of an adolescent, and was the living image of his mother —the classic description of young dukes in novels wherein they contract tropical diseases and impossible passions. And beneath the delicacy of features that had probably remained unchanged since puberty lay the passion of a rationalist writer whose self-imposed brief was to leave some testimony to the collective mediocrity of this city. A silk dressing gown, worn over a mohair jumper; leather slippers; culture piled high on tables and stacked up the walls in the shape of books, files, and pieces of paper; the look of a writer who has just finished one line and is thinking about the next; and a study with the restrained lighting characteristic of the serious writer—a room where only the sun is allowed to enter without knocking, and even sunlight is only permitted in small quantities, for fear that it might impede the writer’s capacities for re-inventing reality.
‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you a lot. My relationship with Jauma was very one-sided. He talked and I listened. I wrote, and he read what I wrote. He was a pleasant sort of chap—intelligent, wealthy, and a bit of an extrovert. But he was dangerous. He was like a character in a book who ends up endearing himself to the reader without the writer intending it.’
‘Is that bad?’
‘Bad in every sense. If his appeal derives from the author, it means that the author has been unacceptably partisan in expressing his personal preferences. On the other hand, if he is sympathetic despite his author, it means that the writer has lost control of the book’s internal equilibrium.’
‘So for you Jauma was just a character?’
‘Recently, yes. I have reduced my level of receptivity to real flesh and blood people. My close friends I can handle. The rest are just characters. In the past Jauma meant something quite different to me. Now he’s just a character.’
‘What about the way he died?’
‘Lacking in verisimilitude. It reads like a Spanish erotic novel of the 1920s—Pedro de Repide, Alvaro de Retana, or Lopez de Hoyos. The decadent aristocrat is stabbed to death, and expires on a rubbish tip, having fornicated his way through every sexual aberration known to man.’
‘How would you have scripted his last days, if it had been up to you?’
‘Jauma at the age of seventy. He goes to the pictures every afternoon with a view to groping girls. His name comes up in the gossip columns. His eldest son starts knocking him about, and the old man takes off to the zoo to watch the monkeys masturbate.’
‘And the real facts of his death?’
‘That his death was real.’
‘I mean the real causes of his death.’
‘He died of real causes. A bullet, I believe.’
‘But someone must have fired that bullet.’
‘This is a detective novel, and generally speaking I prefer to steer clear of naturalistic literature. But if you insist on playing at detectives, at least let’s divide the parts fairly. You want to be Philip Marlowe? Well, I want to be Sherlock Holmes. I’m serious. I really can’t help you. It’s possible that my friends will be able to help you in imagining the real causes of Jauma’s death. I, however, spend my time imagining other things. Many other things. My whole job is precisely that—to create things in my imagination but within a proper logical framework, within my narrative discourse. What happened to Jauma was terribly sad, and, believe me, I was very upset about it at the time. But I feel that to carry on raking it over now would be like arguing about the sex of angels, or whether Muhammad Ali would have beaten Rocky Marciano.’
The audience had ended, Dorronsoro uncrossed his legs and prepared to get up and show Carvalho to the door as good manners required. The detective didn’t take the hint. The novelist hesitated for a moment, and then settled into a waiting mode. He stared into nothingness, to avoid letting Carvalho see the impatience in his eyes, and half absentmindedly he opened a book that was lying on the table, and began flicking through it. In a space between two of the shelves hung a hunting rifle, which was evidently well looked after.
‘Do you hunt?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you any good?’
‘It depends what it is. I’m good with partridge, but not so good with rabbits.’
‘Ever tried big game?’
‘I learned my shooting in Maresme, in the hills around San Vicente de Montalt and Arenys de Munt. They have no big game there.’
‘Intellectuals aren’t supposed to like violence, though. . .’
‘Aggression is another matter. We writers are as aggressive as anyone else,
and I find that hunting releases my aggression. It enables me to contemplate other people’s aggressiveness as a spectacle and then describe it.’
‘But you still kill.’
‘I hunt.’
‘You kill.’
‘Killing is something different. It’s cutting a chicken’s throat in a farmyard, or shooting someone, or taking an axe to your neighbour. In hunting there are rules. . .’
‘Which the hunter imposes on an animal that has no weapons to defend itself with.’
‘I suppose you’d prefer it if pigeons went around armed with shotguns? Hunting has a certain aesthetic justice. It has its own morality too. If you ask me, you’re a puritan. For my part, I love animals. I’m passionate about dogs. I’ll introduce you to my dogs, if you like. You’ve stirred my guilty conscience, and now you’re making me feel like a criminal. If we carry on like this I’ll end up confessing that it was me that killed Jauma, with this rifle.’
‘What would have been your motive?’
‘That he didn’t like my latest novel.’
Now it was the novelist’s turn not to want to terminate their meeting, and he began to study Carvalho as a possible character for his next book.
‘Have you never killed?’
‘Yes. I’ve killed.’
‘Animals?’
‘People.’
‘You must have been a hit-man, or part of a firing squad, because you’re too young to have been in the war.’
‘I was in the CIA.’
‘This is getting interesting. A double agent?’
‘Treble.’
‘They’re the best sort. Did you kill them with your own bare hands?’
‘I’ve trained in hand-to-hand combat. The human body has twenty-five points where you can be killed by somebody with their bare hands. But I prefer to use weapons.’
‘Who did you kill? Russians? Chinese? Koreans? Vietnamese?’
‘Some of each.’
‘With those hands?’
Carvalho placed his hands in full view of the writer, who looked at them with mock panic.
‘Your hands don’t look particularly special.’
That’s because I haven’t killed anyone recently.’
‘If you don’t practise, you’ll lose the knack.’
Now the audience was over. Dorronsoro got up and stood back to enable Carvalho to leave. The detective didn’t take the hint. He got up, went over to the rifle, took it down, raised it to his shoulder and aimed it at the novelist, who by now was thoroughly annoyed.
‘That’s not funny. Put it down.’
‘Don’t worry, chief, I’ll put the camp bed next to the phone.’
Biscuter was prepared to stay awake all night in the event of Rhomberg’s call not arriving during what was left of the day. Concha Hijar had replied to say that she could only see Carvalho after nine, because she had to feed the children first. The papers were full of their usual contradictory news items. On the one hand the police were arresting the extreme Left, and on the other they were setting them free. In the afternoon they were persecuting the extreme Right, and at night the extreme Right was given a free hand. The political parties were preparing for the forthcoming elections. The fascist International had its headquarters in Spain. There was still no sign of the driver of the BMW that had crashed into the Tordera. The Peter Herzen Mystery: It appears that Mr. “Peter Herzen” had hired the BMW with false papers.’
‘I’m going out before the trouble starts on the Ramblas.’
‘I’ve got your dinner ready, chief. Kidneys in sherry and rice pilaf.’
‘What sort of rice?’
‘Uncle Ben’s.’
‘Keep it for me till tomorrow, and keep an ear out for Rhomberg’s phone call.’
‘God—anyone would think I’d ever let you down, boss.’
It seemed that the stage was being set for a scene similar to the night before. The police were waiting for the demonstrators, and the demonstrators seemed to be waiting for the police to take up positions. A drunk with a face blackened by his own grime began calling to imaginary chickens: ‘Here, chook. . . Chookie, chookie. . . !’ And then he began to sing:
The wine of my Asuncion
Is neither white nor red,
It has no colour at all.
Somewhere between his chest and his shoulders, Carvalho could feel a psychological chill. He tried to work out which of his recent experiences could be worrying him. Probably the drunk. But possibly not this drunk in particular.
The wine of my Asuncion
Is neither white nor red,
It has no colour at all.
A few five-and ten-cent coins clattered down into the street. They glittered on top of the cobblestones where they fell, or down the cracks in-between. The old singers gathered up their harvest, and didn’t turn up their noses at a small coin that had fallen into a pile of horse-dung.
‘Give him some—that one there.’
‘Why that one, and not the one before?’
‘Because this one’s old.’
The street singers were old, and were disabled. The people of District 5 leaned over their balconies and were selective in their charity.
‘He must have been wounded in the war,’ his mother would say. Wounded in the war. And grown old from what? Grown old from the war? Who hadn’t grown old from, the war? Who wasn’t war-wounded in one way or another?
‘Thank you, sir.’
The drunkard took the hundred-peseta note that Carvalho passed out of the car window. Between the black of his face and the yellow that bore no relation to what should have been the whites of his naked eyes, the drunk stared uncomprehendingly, trying to resurrect a semblance of dignity in gratitude. Despite the fact that his body and his ulcerous lips were aimed towards Carvalho, he wasn’t capable of looking straight ahead of him. He smelt of cheap sherry and death.
‘He’s asleep. He’s drunk.’
‘No, he’s dead.’
Somebody pulled him away from the circle of onlookers surrounding the fallen body.
‘It’s the Murcians’ son.’
When he had got out of the concentration camp, the Murcians’ son had survived on the few vegetables that his parents managed to sell clandestinely, when they weren’t being caught by the sergeant, who would give the old man a kick that sent him sprawling among his scattered vegetables. When the Murcians’ son was drunk, he would take up a position at the junction of calle Cera and Botella, and would give a military salute and shout: ‘Franco! I shit on you!’
The Angst-Ridden Executive Page 12