Southern Seas (8 page)

‘The point is …’

‘In my opinion …’

‘If you will allow me to …’

They didn’t allow anything. For a few moments, he tried to squeeze in the sentence: ‘The
roman noir
was born with the Great Depression …’ But his voice only reached the first row and part of the second, where Pepe Carvalho was seated. The particular way in which the two soloists moved their Adam’s apples suggested that they were about to pronounce a final conclusion or enunciate some synthesizing formula.

‘We could say …’

Silence. Expectant faces.

‘I don’t know if my dear Juan Carlos will agree …’

‘How could I not agree with you, Carlos?’

Carvalho deduced that their ascendancy was due to a degree of onomastic complicity.

‘The
roman noir
is a sub-genre, to which only a few great novelists were committed. Chandler, Hammett, McDonald …’

‘What about Chester Himes?’

The voice which tried to make itself heard had a high-pitched tone—the result, perhaps, of having been bottled up for so long. But this initial defect proved to be an advantage, because it impinged on the duologue, and they turned to trace the origin of that thin sound.

‘You were saying?’ said the short-sighted man, with a tired affability.

‘I was saying that those three names should be supplemented by Chester Himes, with his great descriptions of life in Harlem. Himes’s work was on a par with that of Balzac.’ The two leading actors seemed temporarily tired from their exertions, and left the intruder to explain himself. Now everything was wheeled into play, from Chrétien de Troyes’
La Matière de Bretagne
to the death of the novel following on the epistemological excesses of Proust and Joyce; not to mention McCarthyism, the crisis of capitalist society, and the social marginalization inevitably induced by capitalism, which provides the suitable cultural milieu for the
roman noir
. The audience was impatient to intervene. As soon as he had the opportunity, one of them got up to denounce Ross McDonald as a fascist. Someone else added that the
roman noir
writers always tended to be on the brink of adopting fascist positions. Hammett was excused on the grounds that he had been a member of the American Communist Party at a time when the communists were above suspicion and had not yet been decaffeinated. Every
roman noir
has a single hero, and that in itself is dangerous. It’s simply neo-Romanticism, retorted another contributor, intent on rescuing the
roman noir
from the inferno of history.

‘I’d prefer to say that there exists a certain neo-Romanticism which is the driving force of the
roman noir
, and which makes it necessary in the times we live in.’

Moral ambiguity. Moral ambiguity. That’s the key to the
roman noir
. Marlowe, Archer, the Continental Op—they’re all awash in this moral ambiguity.

The two stars were not pleased to have lost their leading role. They now tried to reassert themselves within the rising flood of words: closed universe … lack of motivation … linguistic conventions … the new rhetoric … it’s the opposite of the
Tel Quel
school in that it affirms the personal specificity of the author and the central hero … the viewpoint of
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
 …

Carvalho left at this point, with a thick head and a dry throat. He went to order a beer at the bar, and found himself next to a brunette with huge green eyes, whose body was enveloped in a poncho that first saw life on some arid plain of the Andes.

‘Hello!’

‘Hello! I know you … You’re …’

‘Dashiell Hammett.’

She laughed, and then insisted that he give his real name.

‘Horacio introduced us at the signing of Juan’s book, isn’t that right? It’s boring in there. That’s why I left. I’m not to keen on all this
roman noir
business. I agree with Varese: when the bourgeoisie can’t keep control of the novel, it starts to lay on the colours. I’ve read what you write. I like it a lot.’

Carvalho was bemused. Had Biscuter or Charo published something under his name? He would ask them for an explanation as soon as he returned home.

‘Well, my heart hasn’t really been in it recently.’

‘Yes. One can see that. But it happens to all of us. I agree with Cañedo Marras: great tiredness presages great enthusiasm.’

Carvalho felt like saying: Take off your poncho,
mi amor
, and let’s go to bed. I don’t care whether the bed’s black or white, or round or square, because when the bourgeoisie can’t keep control of bed, it starts to lay on the adjectives.

‘Are you going to stay here? Or would you fancy coming and drinking six bottles of absolutely sensational white wine?’

‘You’re quick on the draw, stranger. What are you getting at?’

‘That we go to bed.’

‘Obviously. Do you know Juanito Marsé? That’s his technique too. He says he’s had a lot of slaps in the face, but also quite a few lays.’

‘What do I get? A slap in the face?’

‘No. But not a lay either. I’m waiting for my girlfriend. She’s still stuck in there. You see, ours is an impossible love!’

‘It never got beyond birth.’

‘That’s the best sort.’

Carvalho made a slight bow and left. Outside, he mused on the theme of budding affairs. He went back to his days as an adolescent, falling for girls in the street, following them, taking their bus or tram, saying nothing, but hoping for an encounter charged with a sense of the aesthetic. Any minute now, she’ll turn round, take my hand, and carry me to the end of the rainbow, where I shall live forever, in contemplation of the one I love. When he actually fell in love with someone, he found himself expecting that she would be waiting for him at some precise point in the city, probably by the harbour. He would turn up there, impatiently glancing at his watch, and convinced that the appointment would be kept.

Maybe I needed to be in love, maybe I needed a degree of self-deception. You can’t survive stripped of everything, without the possibility even of entering some church. You can’t live without prayer. Nowadays, you can’t even believe in the liturgy of wine, ever since the experts decreed that red wine should be chilled and not served at room temperature. Who ever heard of such a thing!
The race is degenerating. Civilizations go under when they start to question the unquestionable. The Franco regime began to collapse on the day when Franco first said: ‘It’s not that I …’ A dictator must never start a speech by placing a negation before himself.

You can’t escape by getting drunk every day. Nor suddenly surprise yourself with gritted teeth, as if you’d been making some superhuman effort. What superhuman effort were you making? I suppose you think it’s nothing? To wake up. Day after day. In a city where the restaurants are all mediocre, uninspired and expensive. Two weeks ago, he had taken his car and set off south in search of a Murcian restaurant. He had a nap en route, to give himself an excuse for a large lunch. And as soon as he arrived at Murcia, he transferred himself from the car seat to the restaurant seat and bewildered the head waiter by ordering a dish of local sausages, prawns and aubergines in a cream sauce, Tía Josefa partridges, and a milk pudding. He drank four carafes of the Jumilla house wine, asked to be given the partridge recipe, and thought once again that if the Thirty Years’ War had not sealed France’s hegemony in Europe, it might just be possible that French cuisine was currently passing under the hegemony of the Spanish. His only patriotism was gastronomic.

Without realizing it, he had walked all the way to the Rondas. He gazed at their decomposed geography, feeling hurt, as always, by the violation of his childhood landscape. Just as he was about to plumb the depths of self-pity, he went into a telephone booth and called Enric Fuster, his friend, accountant and neighbour in Vallvidrera.

‘You know the literary types at the university. Find me someone who can unravel the meaning of some Italian poetry. No. If I knew who it was by, I wouldn’t be needing to ring you.’

Fuster seized the opportunity to arrange a meal.

‘I’ll get in touch with Sergio, my fellow-countryman from Morella. He’ll make us a fine old meal. He doesn’t cook very well, but he’s always got good, fresh ingredients.’

Like the Chaldeans who thought that the world ended with the mountains that encircled them, Enric Fuster, along with everyone else from the Maestrazgo, thought that anything beyond his own horizon was intergalactic. Carvalho sat down to restore his strength for the evening. The white, acidic after-effects of drunkenness were wearing off. He was thirsty. He looked at girls in blossom and imagined what they would be like twenty years hence, when they too would have passed the forty-year meridian. He looked at forty- and fifty-year-old women, and imagined them as young girls playing at princesses. He remembered a poem by Gabriela Mistral.

And now to reconstruct a year in the life of a dead man. It seems grotesque. Every murder reveals that humanism has no existence in the real world. Society is interested in the dead man only in order to find the murderer and inflict an ‘exemplary’ punishment. If there is no chance of finding the murderer, neither the dead man nor the murderer has any further interest. Except to someone who has a good cry on your shoulder. Like children cry when they’ve lost their parents in a crowd. He started walking faster towards his parked car, but then he thought of the effort of driving off, finding the Marquess of Munt’s house, parking the car again, and then driving it home. He got into a taxi and began examining the driver’s ideological credentials. A medallion of the Virgin of Montserrat. Photos of a rather plain-looking family. A warning sticker: ‘Drive Carefully, Dad’. A little ribbon with the colours of the Barcelona football team. The taxi man was speaking Andalucian, and after two minutes’ conversation had already confided that he voted PSUC at the last general election.

‘What does the Virgin say about the fact that you voted communist?’

‘It’s my wife who’s into all that.’

‘Is she religious?’

‘Like hell! My wife, religious?! No. But she likes Montserrat, you know. Every year, I go to rent some cells at the monastery.
Well, they call them cells, but they’re really hotel rooms. Simple, but very clean. There’s everything you need. So I have to rent them every May and go up there with my wife and children for three days. You probably think it’s a bit crazy given that neither of us pisses holy water. But she likes the mountain.’

They read Marx much of the night, and go to the holy mountain in spring.

‘I tell you, I’m the one who gets most out of it now. There’s a kind of peace up there. I get the urge to become a monk. And it’s incredibly beautiful, the mountain. Almost magical. How those stones stand up! For centuries, you know, for centuries. Before my grandfather was born, or his grandfather.’

‘Or your great-great-great-grandfather’s grandfather.’

‘Nature teaches us everything. On the one hand, just look around you here. Shit. Nothing but shit. If we knew what we were breathing! Sometimes I have to drive up to Tibidabo. And from Vallvidrera—Jesus!—you can see all the shit floating over the city.’

‘I live in Vallvidrera.’

‘Lucky you.’

The taxi dropped him on a street in Tres Torres, an old residential district whose family houses had been pulled down to make way for bright, low-rise blocks, nicely set back from the pavement to allow a growth of dwarf cypresses, myrtles, a well-protected banana tree, palms and oleanders. An entrance hall, which would not have disgraced the New York Sheraton, served as a vast backdrop for the bustling of a musical-comedy porter, who registered the name Marquess of Munt with more respect than Carvalho had shown in uttering it. He opened the door to the lift and got in with Carvalho. As they were going up, he murmured nothing more than: ‘The Marquess is expecting you.’ The lift passed the doors of all four tenants of the four-storey building. Carvalho was shown into a reception room, thirty metres square, decorated in a Japanese style that predated
Madame Butterfly
.

A mulatto servant dressed in white and pink took charge of the detective and led him into a bizarre stage-setting. A vast space of eighty square metres, carpeted white throughout. The only furniture was a piano and, at the far end, designer seating fastened to floor and wall. On the white carpet, the only foreign body was a metal cone which tapered up from the floor to an ultra-fine point, in an apparently vain attempt to reach the ceiling. The Marquess of Munt was relaxing on a sofa, with a perfectly composed air of gravity. Seventy years of snobbish living were condensed in the thin frame of a fair-skinned, smartly dressed old man, with eyes like shining slots in which a pair of malignant pupils danced and darted. The lilac veins in his lightly made-up face had been raised like scratch marks by the wine that was keeping cool in the ice bucket. He held a glass in his right hand, and a copy of Michel Guérard’s
Cuisine Minceur
in the left. The book beckoned to Carvalho to sit down on any of the lumps that emerged from the milky landscape.