Southern Seas (15 page)

‘You’re like a pensioned-off duke. With haemorrhoids. This very morning you’ll be trying to get a passage to the South Seas. Waiter, please commission my fellow countryman, the Valenciano, to make me an ice-swan filled with fresh lychees … What the hell is a Valencian waiter doing in this story?!’

He had read it somewhere. Or maybe he would make a sailing boat for his shipwrecked companions. Read until late in the night, and then all go south in the winter. Do you all really have any idea where the south is? But when I tell him that he is among the lucky ones who have seen day break over the most beautiful
islands on earth, he smiles at the memory and replies that when the sun rose, the day was already old for them.

‘The south is the other face of the moon.’

As he said, or rather shouted, the word ‘moon’, he felt grateful for the water’s coolness as it assuaged the heat of the alcohol and the self-disgust inside him. The other face of the moon. A shower—first hot, then cold—refreshed the skin round his brain. Six in the morning. Day was trying to break through. Trees were already imposing their shape on the horizon.

‘The other face of the moon.’

He was telling himself something. He caught himself looking for a street map of the city, that he kept for his more sordid investigations. The wife entered the furnished flat on Avenida de Hospital Militar at 4.30 pm. A surprising time, since adulterous women generally prefer to enter furnished flats after dark. A bit silly for you to ask me whether she was with anyone. The tatty street map lay open before him, like the tired skin of some overworked beast of burden, falling apart at the seams. He put his finger on the area where Stuart Pedrell’s body had been found. His eye travelled across to the other end of town, to San Magín. A man is stabbed to death, and his killers have an idea. Decontextualize him. He’s to be taken right across town, but to a human and urban setting where his death would still make sense.

‘Did you travel to the South Seas by underground?’

As no reply was forthcoming from Stuart Pedrell, Carvalho focused his attention on San Magín. He opened the book which the man from Morella had lent him. A large number of speculative ventures were credited to Stuart Pedrell, of which the most important was the one in the
barrio
of San Magín. He thumbed through the reference book.

‘In the late 1950s, as part of Mayor Porcioles’s speculative expansion policy, the Iberisa Construction Co. (see Munt, Marquess of; Planas Ruberola; Stuart Pedrell) bought up areas of unused land at very low prices. The little remaining industry in the
district was on its last legs, and the family market gardens of the “Camp de Sant Magí” came under the jurisdiction of the Hospitalet municipal council. Between the Camp de Sant Magí and the outer limits of Hospitalet, there was a large area of open ground on which the ring-development tendency of property speculation was once again in evidence. Development land was bought up quite a long way outside the city limits, so that the zone between the new urban development and the old city limit rose in value. Iberisa Construction built a whole suburb in Sant Magí, and at the same time bought up cheaply the remaining land between the new development and Hospitalet. In the second phase, this no-man’s land was also urbanized, and the company’s initial investment grew a thousandfold …’

San Magín was populated by a mainly immigrant proletariat. The sewage system was not properly completed until five years after they had moved in. Municipal services were completely lacking. There were angry demands for a health clinic. Between ten and twelve thousand inhabitants. A smart piece of work, Stuart Pedrell. Was there a church? Yes. A modern church was built next to the old San Magín hermitage. The whole development gets flooded when the Llobregat drainage system overflows.

Yes, Stuart Pedrell. The criminal returns to the scene of his crime. You went to San Magín to take a close look at your handiwork, to see how your coolies were living in their purpose-built hovels. A voyage of exploration? Researching true popular culture? What were you studying—the habits and customs of immigrants? The intervocalic pronunciation of the letter ‘d’? Why the hell did you go to San Magín, Stuart Pedrell? Did you go by taxi? Or bus? No. Underground. You must have gone by underground, so as to achieve a closer identity of form and content on your long trip to the South Seas. And people say that poetry and adventure are impossible in the twentieth century! You only have to take the underground and you’re off on a low-cost emotional safari. Someone killed you. They transported you back across the
border. Then they dumped you on what, for them, was the far side of the moon.

The alcohol branched out through his veins like molten lead, and he fell asleep on the sofa. The street map finally tore beneath the weight of his body. He was awakened by the cold and by Bleda licking his face. He slowly retraced the logical steps of his journey earlier that morning. He tried to resuscitate his fragmented city map, but succeeded only in tearing it further. He was left holding the portion displaying San Magín.

Hazy memories came back to him. Of country houses and cement reservoirs. His mother coming towards him with a shopping basket full of rice and oil bought on the black market from one such house. They crossed the railway tracks. In the distance loomed a sparse, raggedy post-war town, full of grey wood and empty spaces.

They poured the oil from a musty wineskin and he watched it fill the bottle like a stream of green liquid mercury. This was real oil, not the stuff you got with ration coupons. He walked back. In his oilskin bag were five long loaves of white bread, as white as gypsum. Field after field. Stony tracks which bore cyclists coloured mauve by the setting sun, and carts drawn by horses as slow and heavy as their own manure. Then the streets of the town began to spread out into a suburb of dingy modern blocks which co-existed with little old turretted houses and homes expropriated by the Civil War victors to complete the punishment of the vanquished. Streets that changed from earth to paving stone, before finally being dissected by the splintering metal of tramlines. They trudged home, tired from the long walk, with adventure in their basket and the hope of a sated hunger in their eyes.

‘I’ll make up some red pepper, salt and oil, and we’ll have butter on the bread.’

‘But I like bread with oil and sugar.’

‘It’ll give you worms.’

But his mother could not leave the disappointment in his eyes for long.

‘All right. But if you get worms, I’ll have to give you a tea-spoonful of Dr Sastre y Marqués syrup.’

The underground, any underground, is an animal resigned to its subterranean bondage. Some of this resignation rubs off on the passengers as they travel to their appointed destinations, their faces tinged by utilitarian lighting and their bodies gently rocking with the rhythmic motion of the brutish machine. For Carvalho, taking the subway was to experience once again the feelings of a young man going somewhere, contemptuous of this gathered mass of submissive, cattle-like humanity, while he himself only used the metro to reach the green grass of promotion and higher things. He recalled his youthful daily surprise at all the fresh marks of personal defeat on people’s faces. He recalled how aware he had been of his own uniqueness and superiority, as he fought off the sickness that seemed to engulf the mediocre lives of these travellers. He was uncomfortable with his fellow-passengers. He felt that his journey was taking him forward, while theirs was simply taking them back.

Twenty years later, he found himself feeling only solidarity and fear. Solidarity with the old man in the two-tone suit and a three-day growth of beard, clutching in his hand a greasy wallet full of unpaid bills. Solidarity with the cubic, slant-eyed women from Murcia, chatting in incomprehensible dialect about Aunt Encarnación’s birthday. Solidarity with all the neatly dressed children of the poor who had joined the freedom train of culture too
late.
The Road to Confidence in Self-Expression … Anaya’s Dictionary of the Spanish Language
. Girls dressed as Olivia Newton-John if you imagined Olivia Newton-John buying her clothes at an end-of-season sale in some Spanish department store. Boys with the masks of disco spivs and the muscles of the long-term unemployed. Here and there, the reassuring bone structure of a junior real-estate executive whose car was being repaired and who had therefore decided to use public transport in order to lose weight and save a bit of money which he would then spend on small, mediocre whiskies probably served by an inept barman with dandruff, dirty nails and ambitions that extended no further than the opportunity to call him Don Roberto or Señor Ventura as occasion demanded. The fear on all their faces, of being the victims of a banal, irreversible journey from poverty into nothingness. Their world was a landscape of filthy, latrine-like stations, covered with tiles stained black by the invisible dirt of subterranean electricity and the foul breath of the masses. As they shuttled to and fro, the people seemed to be performing a ritual transfer in justification of the machine’s routine drudgery.

Carvalho went up the worn, jagged metal steps two at a time, and emerged at a junction of two narrow streets jammed with juggernaut lorries and battered buses.
Make your voice heard. Vote Communist. Vote PSUC. Socialism has no answers. Down with reformism! Vote for the Party of Labour
. The posters did not quite obscure walls of prematurely aged brick and flaking plaster. On the hoardings, the generously financed neatness of government propaganda flaunted itself like a tour operator’s promotion:
The Centre Lives Up To Its Promise
. Above the makeshift left-wing posters, above the sophisticated propaganda of a government of young turks razor-trimmed by top class barbers, almost on a level with a sky the colour of cheap toy metal, a triumphant banner proclaimed:
You are now entering San Magín
.

It was not quite true. San Magín rose at the end of a street of irregular buildings, where the weatherbeaten functionalism of
1950s-style housing for the poor co-existed with the prefabricated beehives of more recent years. San Magín itself presented a symmetrical horizon of identical blocks of flats that advanced towards Carvalho and promised a labyrinth. The skyborne announcement added:
A new town for a better life. The satellite town of San Magín was inaugurated by His Excellency the Head of State on 24 June 1966
. The inscription stone was in the centre of an obelisk which had seemingly been placed there by a prodigious feat of strength on the part of some Herculean crane. The sharp concrete edges hurt the eyes, and were not softened by the humanizing presence of women in padded nylon housecoats, or by the dull sounds of humanity that emerged from every recess. The air smelt of frying oil and the dankness characteristic of fitted cupboards. Butane delivery men; women on their daily trail to the supermarket; fishmongers’ shops displaying grey, sad-eyed fish. Two bars: El Zamorano and El Cachelo. One dry-cleaner’s: Turolense. Sale—Big Reductions on All Fabrics. Graffiti:
Free Carrillo. The Fascists Are the Real Terrorists. Special Classes for Handicapped Children. Day Nursery at Hamelín
. Each of these phrases had survived by some miracle, as if they were vegetation growing from the concrete. Each frontage was like a face, complete with square, pupil-less eyes darkened by an advancing leprosy.

‘Have you ever seen this man?’

The woman took a step back and looked at Carvalho, but not at the photograph he held out to her.

‘What did you say?’

‘Do you recognize this man?’

‘I’m in a hurry.’

Without giving him time to explain, she moved off with the ease and resolve of a helicopter. Carvalho was left clutching the photograph and scolding himself for making such a dismal start to a quest in which he intended to leave no stone unturned until he was sure he was hot on Stuart Pedrell’s Paco Rabane scent. As if watching from the outside, Carvalho saw himself going into
shop after shop and showing the photograph time and time again. Only twice did anyone look at it, and only then because they thought it was some kind of free offer. Most of them did not even look. Instead, they scrutinized Carvalho, while their nostrils shied at his scent of policeman.

‘I’m trying to find him. He’s a relative of mine. Didn’t you hear the appeal for information on Radio Nacional?’

No. They hadn’t heard the appeal on Radio Nacional. Carvalho retraced his steps down streets with regional names that tried to convey the illusion of an immigrant Spanish microcosm that had been assembled there through the creative genius of the satellite town’s developers. He followed a number of hard-hatted bricklayers into a bar-cum-restaurant, where upwards of a hundred workers were bent over the midday special of lentil stew and veal casserole. Carvalho wolfed down the set meal and used a fifty-peseta tip to establish a link with the waiter—a shy young man from Galicia, with a pimple on each cheek and a rash of festering chilblains on his hands. He answered Carvalho’s questions without once looking him in the eye. He had been living in the area for two years. He was a nephew of the bar’s cleaning lady. He had been told to come from his village. He ate and slept on the bar premises, in the room where they stored the empty drink crates.