‘María,’ he said to me one morning over the phone, ‘I need you to get me a couple of grams of cocaine for a scene in my new book. Have someone come over to my house as soon as possible, or, at any rate, before it gets dark. I want to see what colour cocaine is in daylight, so that I don’t get it wrong.’
‘But, Señor Garay …’
‘I’ve told you before, my dear, it’s Garay Fontina. Just plain Garay could be anyone, be it in the Basque Country, in Mexico or in Argentina. It could even be the name of a footballer.’ He insisted on this so much that I became convinced he had made up that second surname (I looked in the Madrid telephone directory one day and there was no Fontina, only a certain Laurence Fontinoy, an even more improbable name, like a character out of
Wuthering Heights
), or perhaps he had made up both surnames and was really called Gómez Gómez or García García or some other such repetitive name that would have offended his sensibilities. If it was a pseudonym, he was doubtless unaware when he chose it that Fontina is a type of Italian cheese, made either from goat’s or cow’s milk, I’m not sure, and which is produced, I believe, in Val d’Aosta, and which apparently melts easily. But then again there are some peanuts called Borges, and I doubt Borges would have been greatly bothered by that.
‘Sorry, Señor Garay Fontina, I was merely trying to keep things short. But listen,’ I had to say this, even though it was far from being the most important thing I had to say, ‘don’t worry about the colour. I can assure you that cocaine is white, both in daylight and under artificial lighting, almost everyone knows that. It’s always coming up in films, didn’t you ever go to any Tarantino films? Or that other one starring Al Pacino where there’s a shot of the stuff in little piles?’
‘That much I know, dear María,’ he retorted, rather stung. ‘I do live on this grubby planet of ours, you know, even though it may not seem so when I’m in full creative flow. But please don’t undersell yourself, you who not only make books, like your colleague Beatriz and so many others, but read them too, and show excellent judgement if I may say so.’ He used to come out with such comments occasionally, I imagine so as to win me over; I had never actually
given my opinion on any of his books, that wasn’t what I was paid to do. ‘I’m just worried about not choosing the right adjectives. Can you tell me, for example, is it milky white or more calcareous? And what about the texture? Is it like chalk dust or sugar? Like salt or flour or talcum powder? Come on, tell me.’
Given the susceptibility of the Nobel Laureate-to-be, I found myself embroiled in an absurd and dangerous conversation. And it was entirely my fault.
‘It’s like cocaine, Señor Garay Fontina. There’s no point in describing it these days, because even if someone hasn’t tried it, they will have seen it. Apart from old people, of course, but they’re sure to have seen it on television thousands of times.’
‘Are you telling me how I should write, María? Whether I should or should not use adjectives? What I should describe and what is superfluous? Are you trying to give lessons to Garay Fontina?’
‘No, Señor Fontina …’ I was incapable of calling him by his two surnames every time, it took too long, was hardly a sonorous combination of words and, more to the point, I simply didn’t like it. Oddly, he seemed less put out if I omitted the Garay.
‘I have my reasons for asking you for those two grams of cocaine today. Probably because tonight the book is going to need them, and you want there to be a new book and you want it mistake-free, don’t you? All you have to do is get me the cocaine and send it to me, not argue with me. Or must I speak personally to Eugeni?’
Here I took a risk by digging my heels in, and came out with a Catalan turn of phrase. I picked them up from my boss, who was Catalan by birth and full of Catalanisms, despite having lived in Madrid all his life. If Garay’s request reached his ears, he was capable of sending us all out into the street to pick up drugs (in dodgy areas and places where taxi drivers refuse to go) just to please the author.
He took his most conceited author far too seriously; it never ceases to amaze me how these vain people manage to persuade so many others of their worth; it’s one of the world’s great enigmas.
‘
¿Que nos toma por camellos?
’ I said. ‘What do you take us for, Señor Fontina? Drug-pushers? I don’t know if you realize it, but you’re asking us to break the law. As I’m sure you’re aware, you can’t buy cocaine at the local tobacconist’s nor in your local bar. And what are you going to do with two whole grams? Do you have any idea how much two grams of cocaine is, how many lines of coke you could get out of that? You might overdose, and imagine what a loss that would be! To your wife and to literature. You might have a stroke. You could become an addict and be unable to think of anything else, not even writing, a mere piece of human flotsam unable to travel, because you can’t cross frontiers if you have drugs on you. You could kiss goodbye to the ceremony in Sweden and to that impertinent speech of yours to Carl Gustaf.’
Garay Fontina remained silent for a moment, as if weighing up whether or not he had overstepped the mark with his request. But I think he was more concerned by the dreadful prospect of never treading the red carpets of Stockholm.
‘No, not drug-pushers,’ he said at last. ‘You would just have to buy it, not sell it.’
I took advantage of his hesitation to clarify in passing an important detail of the operation he was proposing:
‘Ah, but what about us handing it over to you? We would give you the two grams and you, presumably, would give us money. What’s that if not drug-pushing? A policeman would certainly think so.’ This was a somewhat sore point, because Garay Fontina did not always reimburse us for the cost of the dry-cleaning or the painters’ wages or the hotel reservations in Batticaloa, or, at best, took a long
while to cough up, and my boss would get embarrassed and nervous whenever the time came to demand payment. The last thing we needed was to start financing the vices he was writing about in his new and unfinished novel for which he had not even been given a contract yet.
This, I saw, gave him further pause for thought. Perhaps, unaccustomed as he was, he hadn’t stopped to think of the expense. Like so many writers, he was a mean, spineless little scrounger. He ran up large debts in the hotels he stayed at when he went to give lectures here, there and everywhere, or, rather, very occasionally and usually in some provincial town. He would demand that he be given a suite and that any extras should be paid for. It was rumoured that he took his sheets and his dirty washing on these trips, not because he was eccentric or obsessive, but so that he could have them washed at the hotel, even the socks – about which he did not consult me. This can’t have been true – travelling with all that extra weight in your luggage would have been a terrible hassle – but how else could one explain the huge laundry bill (about one thousand two hundred euros, so it was said) that the organizers of such an event were left to pay?
‘Do you happen to know how much cocaine sells for nowadays, María?’
I didn’t know with any exactitude, but I thought it was about sixty euros a gram. I deliberately opted for a higher price in order to frighten and dissuade him. I was beginning to think I might succeed, or at least avoid the awful prospect of having to go and buy him some cocaine in who knows what dens of iniquity or godforsaken places.
‘I’ve an idea it’s about eighty euros a gram.’
‘Good heavens!’ He thought for a moment. I imagined he was making miserly calculations. ‘Yes, you may be right. Perhaps one gram would be enough, or even half. Can you buy half a gram?’
‘I have no idea, Señor Garay Fontina. I never use the stuff. But probably not.’ It was best not to let him think there was a cheap alternative. ‘Just as you can’t buy half a bottle of cologne, I suppose. Or half a pear.’ As soon as I said this, I realized how absurd these comparisons were. ‘Or half a tube of toothpaste.’ That seemed more sensible. However, I still needed to put him off the idea entirely, or else persuade him to buy the drugs himself, without forcing us into crime or giving him money up front. With him, you couldn’t rule out the possibility that he might do a runner, and the company really wasn’t in a position to throw money around like that. ‘If you don’t mind my asking, do you want it so that you can get stoned or do you simply want to look at it and touch it?’
‘I’m not sure yet. That depends on what my book asks of me tonight.’
It seemed to me ridiculous that a book would ask anything day or night, especially when the book wasn’t yet written and the person being asked was the writer himself. I assumed he was being poetic and let the remark pass without comment.
‘You see, if it’s only the latter and all you want to do is describe cocaine … Now how can I put this? As a writer, you aspire to being universal, and you are, of course, which is why you attract readers of all ages. If you start explaining what cocaine is and what its effects are, your younger readers might think that you’re a drugs novice and that you’ve only just cottoned on, and then they might take the mickey. Because describing cocaine nowadays would be a bit like describing a traffic light. Let’s see, what adjectives would you use? Green, amber, red? Static, erect, imperturbable, metallic? People would laugh.’
‘Do you mean a traffic light in the street?’ he asked, alarmed.
‘The very same.’ What else could ‘traffic light’ possibly mean, at least in ordinary, everyday language?
He fell silent for a moment.
‘Take the mickey, eh? Only just have cottoned on,’ he repeated. I saw that my use of those expressions had been a good move, they had made their mark.
‘But only as regards that part of the book, I’m sure, Señor Fontina.’
The thought that some young readers might take the mickey out of anything he had written was obviously unbearable to him.
‘All right, let me think about it. Another day won’t make any difference. I’ll tell you tomorrow what I’ve decided.’
I knew he would do nothing of the sort, that he would abandon any further idiotic experiments and investigations and would never again refer to that telephone conversation. He always made out that he was anti-conventional and trans-contemporary, but deep down he was just like Zola or some other such writer: he did his best actually to live what he imagined, with the result that his books sounded affected and contrived.
When I hung up, I was surprised at my success in denying Garay Fontina one of his many requests, all by myself, without consulting my boss. I put this down to being more bad-tempered and more fed up than usual, to no longer enjoying breakfast with the perfect couple and thus no longer being infected by their optimism. Losing them did at least have that one advantage: it made me less tolerant of weaknesses, vanities and stupidities.
That was the only advantage, which was, of course, worth nothing. The waiters were wrong, and when they found out they were wrong they didn’t bother telling me. Desvern would never come back, nor, therefore, would the cheerful couple, who had, as such, also been erased from the world. My colleague Beatriz – who also occasionally breakfasted at the café and with whom I had discussed that extraordinary pair – was the first to mention the incident to me, doubtless assuming that I would know, that I would have found out on my own account, either from the newspapers or from the waiters, and assuming, too, that we would have already talked about it, completely forgetting that I had been away during the days immediately after the murder. We were having a quick cup of coffee outside the café, when she suddenly paused, aimlessly stirring her coffee with her spoon, and said softly, looking over at the other tables, all of which were full:
‘How dreadful to have such a thing happen to you, I mean what happened to your favourite couple. To begin a day like any other with not the faintest idea that someone is going to take your life, and in the most brutal manner. Because, in a way, her life has been taken from her too. At least that’s how it will be for a long time, years probably, if you ever do recover from something like that, which I doubt. Such a stupid death, so unlucky, one of those deaths where you could
spend your whole life thinking: “Why did it have to happen to him, why me, when there are millions of other people in the city?” I don’t know. I mean, I don’t really love Saverio any more, but if something like that happened to him, I’m not sure I could go on. It wouldn’t be the sense of loss so much as the feeling that I had somehow been marked out, as if someone had set my course for me and that there was no way of changing it, do you know what I mean?’ Beatriz was married to a cocky, parasitical Italian guy she could barely stand, but whom she put up with because of the kids, and also because she had a lover who filled her days with his salacious phone calls and the prospect of the occasional sporadic encounter, not that there were many of those, since both of them were married with children. And one of our authors filled her nocturnal imaginings, although not, it should be said, stout Cortezo or Garay Fontina, who was repulsive both physically and personally.
‘What
are
you talking about?’
And then she told me or, rather, started to tell me, astonished by my evident confusion and exclamations of ignorance, because it was getting late and her position at the publishing house was even more precarious than mine and she didn’t want to run any risks, as it was, Garay Fontina had taken against her and frequently complained about her to Eugeni.
‘Didn’t you read about it in the newspapers? There was even a photo of the poor man, all bloody and lying on the ground. I can’t remember the exact date, but if you look on the Internet, you’re sure to find it. His name was Deverne, apparently he was a member of the film distribution family, you know, “Deverne Films presents”, you’ll have seen it thousands of times at the cinema. You’ll find everything you need to know there. It was just horrible. Such terrible bad luck. Enough to make you despair. I don’t think I’d ever get over it if I was
his wife. She must be out of her mind with grief.’ That was when I found out his name or, if you like, his stage name.