Yesterday, as I do every evening, I went to the bar. First, a game of dominoes, then the chance to get your revenge with a few hands of cards. My partner’s Justino—he’s an occasional associate of Pedrós, whereas I’m an associate around whose neck Pedrós has tied a very large stone, just as Bernal’s father—Bernal is partners with Francisco today—did with the corpses he threw into the Canal de Ibiza. After the game of dominoes—the losing pair pay for the coffee—we bet a couple of drinks on a few hands of tute, and that’s when Justino announces that Pedrós’s businesses—the hardware store, the domestic appliances shop, the offices—have been “intervened.”
“‘Intervened’? Like what happens to banks or to EU member states? What does that mean? That they’ve sent in the men in black?” asks Francisco.
And Justino says:
“They’ve impounded the delivery vans, the trucks; they’ve confiscated all the stuff in the warehouse, they’ve sealed off the shops, they’ve even confiscated the blowtorches, and not only have they halted all work on all the sites, they’ve taken away the accounts books. Apparently, Pedrós has disappeared from Olba, vanished, and no one knows where he is. His creditors are looking for him. Some of them have sworn they’ll have him killed when they find him and I believe a few of them have clubbed together to pay some Moldavian or Ukrainian mafiosi, ready to scour the entire planet to find him.”
“Cut the bureaucratic language, Justino. ‘Intervene’ is what the EU is doing to the PIGS, you know, Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain. What’s happening to Pedrós, here and elsewhere, is what we call ‘seizure of goods.’ You mean he’s bankrupt, that they’ve seized his property,” says Francisco. “Anyway, I knew about it already, we all did, didn’t we?”
I had been convinced for some days that the subject would come up eventually—and probably because of me. But until today, not a word. And no one asks me now if Pedrós going bankrupt will affect me at all, knowing as they do, because I’ve been boasting about it for ages, that I’m responsible—or was responsible—for all the carpentry work in his developments. Fortunately, I’ve never told anyone that I’m also his partner in the construction company, that I put all my savings into his company and mortgaged my properties. It seemed so profitable and, yes, even the safest thing to do. I didn’t tell them about that, but it will leak out eventually, these things always do, Pedrós himself might have announced it at suppers, at bars, at social gatherings. They’d probably been talking about it, about me, before I arrived. Carlos, the manager of the savings bank in Olba, may have mentioned it when he came in for his post-lunch coffee and sat—as he always does—in the bar opposite the bank. Or here, over a game of cards. I don’t think he cares much about confidentiality. He’d be spilling the beans—quite openly now that the creditors have come knocking at the door: now that my account with the savings bank is no longer an account but a black hole. The only reason the people here haven’t asked me is because they already know; besides, Álvaro must have told them that the workshop isn’t just closed until further notice for renovation, as it says on the sign I pinned on the door. You don’t start renovating when you’re seventy; and the only things that are likely to give you notice at that age are your heart, your colon or your prostate. You just have to see the way the police have sealed off the building sites. It’s obvious that I’m not trotting down to the market each morning with my shopping bag because I’m retired now, having simply chosen not to take myself off to a spa or to the Mexican Riviera Maya. Of course they know, and they probably know more than I do, there’s bound to have been gossip about what Pedrós has done with my money and just where my participation in his business has landed me, namely in the garbage dump. They’ve probably known about his bankruptcy for some time and, indirectly, about mine, and in fact, they probably knew before I did. The cuckold is always the last to find out and, of course, the one who knows least about the kinky things his wife gets up to with her lover. But these bastards are perfectly capable of keeping quiet and waiting for me to be the one to give in and confess, for me to break down in tears in the arms of my childhood friend and reveal all, to open up my heart: dear Francisco, Pedrós has bankrupted me. Help me. Save me. At least console me. That’s what they want me to say. Or else I should get drunk with Justino and—stumbling and stuttering—tell him what everyone already knows: that I’m bankrupt and about to land in jail, and ask him tearfully not to forget me, not to abandon me; not to leave me alone behind bars, but to come and visit on the odd weekend and bring me a couple of slices of tortilla and a few packs of cigarettes. Of course I will, don’t you worry, Esteban, I’ll come with my plastic bucket and the tortilla wrapped in tin foil, I’ll stand in line with the gypsy women, the criminals from Eastern Europe, the mothers of junkies from nice families who keep their faces half-covered with scarves and tell you: my husband and I are only here because of our son, poor thing. He got into bad company, and, well, you know what boys are like when they get into drugs. We’re not like these other people in the line, and I could see at once that you’re from a different class as well. And I can see it’s your first time (and I have to laugh at the thought of Justino as the innocent virgin,
ha
), I’ll tell you what you have to do, no, no need to thank me. And in a low voice: just take a look at them—it’s frightening. Gypsies, Romanians, Colombians, Italian mafia, Russians. Riffraff the lot of them. I could see at once that you weren’t like them. Anyway, let me explain: you have to put any clothes in one of those big black trash bags; and any food or soap or shampoo has to go in a plastic bucket. The gypsies on the corner sell them . . . Yes, that’s what the bastards in this bar are waiting for. There’s a simple reason why they’re in no hurry to get the prisoner to tell all—they’ve already passed sentence on him. But I’m a wise old dog, and over the years, I’ve learned how to deal with interrogations because, as the saying goes, it’s as easy to say a No that could save you as a Yes that could condemn you: I glance at the other card players and all three are impassively studying their hands. You’re late today, Esteban, says Francisco. We played a game of tute to pass the time until you came. And Justino: Come on, let’s finish this hand and have a game of dominoes. They all know. Word of Pedrós’s bankruptcy came out more than two weeks ago, although news of his disappearance only reached this table today, and it’s nearly two months since I put that sign up on the workshop door. The police sealed it all off ten days ago. But it’s the details they like here, they want to squeeze every bit of juice out of the orange. I can feel them squeezing me gently with their fingers to see if they can get the first drops. They know they have time to squeeze hard, to milk me properly or stick me in the juicer. No hurry, they’re not being pushy. Like Francisco said, it’s what we call “seizure of goods” (and that’s just the prologue, the easiest part to admit). Every little dart they stick into Pedrós this afternoon will hurt me too. I’m the real target. I need to give myself an epidural: I close my eyes. That’s it. The needle hurts when it goes in, but afterward you feel nice and calm. Let them say what they like. Let the birth begin. If the baby’s got a beard, we’ll call him St. Anthony and, if not, then La Purisima Concepción. Francisco smiles when he says the word “seizure.” He’s above all this: anything that doesn’t affect him directly he just brushes off, and the truth is, he doesn’t give a shit about what might affect us. As Justino says—mind you, Justino is jealous because he’s no longer the center of attention as he was for so many years—Francisco only comes to the bar in order to take notes, to pick up a bit of local color to give his books some street cred—jargon, stock phrases, gestures, atmosphere. He studies our meals and our drinks, which once were also his; our customs, our traditions: like an anthropologist, he asks us when exactly our mothers used to add the paprika to a dish of
all-i-pebre
, should you or should you not sauté the paella rice first? Was there a special name for those esparto shopping baskets or for the wicker baskets they used to collect the grapes in—even I don’t remember that. My friend Francisco should know, after all, his family owned a vineyard and even had shares in the winery where they made moscatel. He could have asked his father about the baskets, and also about how his family came by those vineyards and those shares in the first place, and what became of the people who owned them before the war. To reconstruct that episode of village life, he could have arranged for his father and the father of Bernal—the same Bernal who’s sitting here right now—to sit down together and get them talking. That would be a real surf-and-turf menu, as the chefs of the restaurants he frequents might call it, restaurants he may still frequent when
he
disappears from Olba. His father would provide the turf, Bernal’s father the surf. It’s a shame he never did that, never got them together for a good long chat, that he didn’t order them a coffee and a glass of wine and leave them to natter away, swapping anecdotes about the old days. That would have been real ethnology. But they both disappeared a long time ago. As far as Francisco is concerned, our evening get-togethers at Bar Castañer are pure anecdote, whereas for us, the bar is an indispensable part of our lives, or has been; for him, it’s an exotic landscape, and we are his own personal
tristes tropiques
, colorful local figures. He observes us the way anthropologists observe a Bedouin village, the desert, the pyramids, the Arab with his turban and his camel; or the potbellied, loin-clothed inhabitants of the Amazonian jungle, the cannibal with a bone through his nose or worn as an ornamental comb, a bone saved from the missionary he ate earlier. For a time, Bar Castañer stopped being my sole refuge: I had wanted to leave that village forever and perhaps only return as he has returned, like a professor with a camera, butterfly net and tape recorder; that had been my intention. When I returned, I’d been convinced I’d only stay a short time. I thought I was coming back in order to gather strength for the great leap, but, instead, I settled back onto a soft flesh mattress, and what was temporary ended up becoming permanent. I lost the mattress years ago and have been sleeping on the floor ever since. That’s what usually happens, it happens to a lot of people: they think the situation they’re in is merely temporary and that all they’re doing is living their life, the life they’ve been given or the life they wanted—Olba, until my last breath.
I’ve left and returned a few times over the years—I don’t mean the village, but the bar; there have been periods when I’ve abandoned it entirely, but I’ve always come back in the end, to that stimulating daily journey, the one that pries me out of my solitude at the workshop in the evenings: down Calle de San Ramón where I live, along Calle del Carmen, Calle de la Paz, Paseo de la Constitución (formerly known as General Mola), and here I am—as on so many evenings for so many years—in Bar Castañer, my refuge: the protective gauze of cigarette smoke, which, today, like the snows of yesteryear, has vanished. You can’t smoke inside any more. Although, even after all these months of the smoking ban, the smell of nicotine that used to impregnate walls and tables may have gone, but other components of that comforting olfactory gauze linger on: the smell of old cooking oil, damp wool, sweaty vests and overalls, the smell of cheap beer and sour wine. All of these still allow me to recognize the place, to snuggle down in my nest and shuffle the cards. Lately, I’ve been coming almost every evening. Saying goodbye to all this was the dream of an empty-headed youth who ended up staying and who has, in the meantime, become a decrepit old man without ever passing through maturity. I think I was trying to avoid maturity, and there was the added attraction of getting away, of not thinking too much and leaving it to Time to resolve everything. The result: I have adorned my old age with bankruptcy, a little twist of angostura bitters to spice up my last drink. I’ll say goodbye before they put a name to the disease (because they’ve already detected it, this transmittable disease, to be kept at arm’s length), before they hang the leper’s bell around my neck. I’ll snatch victory from under their noses when they’ve already prepared the pyre, guns at the ready; leaving them without any prey in their sights. Screw them all. I finally feel able to say goodbye: burnt cooking oil coffee beer anis wine and damp wool. Goodbye to the overflowing ashtray outside the street door which we visit from time to time, stretching our legs and receiving, cigarette clamped firmly between our lips, a breath of clean winter air.
But Justino is speaking:
“At least he doesn’t have to spend money any more on radio ads or appear in the directors’ box at the soccer stadium or preside at their suppers along with the players and the powers-that-be paying homage to him, the generous builder of their new changing-room with its hot and cold showers, to the man who gave them the south stand. Right now, his creditors are providing him with an ad campaign gratis, for nothing. If he wanted to be talked about, he’s certainly succeeded, because he’s left an awful lot of people in the lurch: suppliers, clients who’ve paid for materials he’s never delivered, would-be owners of apartments who’ve put down a deposit they’re never going to recoup, not to mention paid for all the stuff that’s already installed in those unfinished buildings. No, he’s on the run, who knows where, to China or Brazil perhaps, to some more or less civilized place where there’s no extradition treaty.”
Francisco says:
“Given how few such places are left, things don’t look so good for our friend. I can’t see Pedrós plunging into darkest Africa armed with pistol, pith helmet and bug spray. He’s not exactly into
extreme travel
, as they say, he’s more your civilized, cosmopolitan, urban tourist, looking for a nice central hotel and some Cartier perfumes.”
Bernal adds:
“What with the Schengen Agreement and the mess the Swiss bankers have got into, it’s not so easy now to bury money, it’s really difficult to find a nice quiet resting-place, a mausoleum where your money can safely repose; and it’s even harder for the owner of the money to disappear. There must be places, of course, certainly for the money, gigantic black holes where by day you can stash the cash that races back and forth in the night: between drug traffickers, Arab sheikhs, financiers in London and New York, the owners of oil wells, the people who attend art auctions, because they’re the truly rich. If you yourself want to disappear, there’s always the Pitanguy option, one of those plastic surgery magicians who can change your face and even swap your fingerprints for those of some anonymous third world corpse who was never fingerprinted while alive, there must be hundreds of thousands of them.”