Woes of the True Policeman (2 page)

His relationship with his father was good, though somewhat distant and perhaps a little sad. The abrupt and enigmatic messages they flung at each other with seeming carelessness tended to be misinterpreted on both sides. Padilla’s father believed that his son was very intelligent, of higher-than-average intelligence, but at the same time deeply unhappy. And he blamed himself and fate. Padilla believed that his father might long ago have been an interesting person or might have had the chance to become one, but the deaths in the family had turned him into a spiritless, resigned man, sometimes mysteriously happy (when a soccer match was on TV), but usually quiet and hardworking, a man who demanded nothing of Padilla beyond perhaps the occasional bit of trivial conversation. Nothing more. They weren’t rich, but since his father owned the apartment and hardly spent a thing, Padilla always had a decent amount of money at his disposal. With it he bought movie and theater tickets; went out to dinner; bought books, jeans, a leather jacket with metal studs, boots, sunglasses, a small weekly supply of hash, very occasionally some cocaine, albums by Satie; paid for his college tuition, his metro passes, his black and purple blazers, the rooms in Distrito V where he brought his lovers. He never went on vacation.

Padilla’s father never went on vacation, either. When summer came, Padilla and his father slept until late, with the blinds down and the apartment plunged into a gentle dusk, redolent of the previous night’s dinner. Then Padilla would go out to roam the streets of Barcelona, and his father, after washing the dishes and giving the kitchen a once-over, would spend the rest of the day watching television.

At eighteen Padilla completed his first book of poetry. He sent a copy to Leopoldo María Panero at the Mondragón asylum, put the original in a drawer in his desk—the only one with a lock and key—and forgot all about it. Three years later, when he met Amalfitano, he retrieved the poems from the drawer and begged him to read them. Amalfitano thought they were interesting, maybe too faithful to certain conventions, but elegant and polished. Their subjects were the city of Barcelona, sex, illness, crime. In one of them, for example, the poet described in perfect alexandrines some fifty ways of masturbating, each more painful and terrible than the last, as a nuclear twilight settled slowly over the city’s suburbs. In another he minutely chronicled the death of his father, alone in his room, as the poet cleans the house, cooks, rations out the provisions (ever dwindling) in the pantry, searches for good music on the radio, reads curled up on the sofa in the living room, and tries in vain to reorder his memories. His father takes his time dying, of course, and stretching between his sleep and the poet’s wakefulness, lost in the mist, is a ruined bridge. Vladimir Holan is my model in the art of survival, he told Amalfitano. Wonderful, thought Amalfitano, one of my favorite poets.

Up until this point, Amalfitano had hardly seen Padilla, who only very rarely showed up in class. After the reading and the favorable comments, he was never absent again. Soon they became friends. By then Padilla wasn’t living with his father anymore; he had rented a studio near the university, where he hosted parties and gatherings that Amalfitano soon began to attend. Poems were read and later on in the evening the guests put on little plays in Catalan. Amalfitano found it charming, like the
tertulias
of South American literary circles in the old days, but with more style and taste, more flair, something like what the
tertulias
of Mexico’s Contemporáneos might have been if the Contemporáneos had written plays, which Amalfitano doubted. Also: there was a lot of drinking and sometimes one of the guests had a breakdown that usually ended—after much screaming and sobbing—with the sufferer shut in the bathroom and two volunteers trying to calm him down. Every so often a woman made an appearance, but usually it was just men, most of them young, students of literature and art history. A painter also came, a strange man, maybe forty-five, who wore only leather and who sat silently in a corner during the
tertulias
, not drinking, chain-smoking little hash cigarettes that he selected, pre-rolled, from a gold cigarette case. And the owner of a pastry shop in Gracia, a cheerful, animated fat man who talked to everyone and who was, as Amalfitano soon realized, the one bankrolling Padilla and the other boys.

One night, as they were performing one of the
Dialogues with Leucò
translated into Catalan by a very tall, fair-skinned boy, Padilla surreptitiously took one of Amalfitano’s hands. Amalfitano didn’t let go.

The first time they made love was one Sunday morning, with the dawn light filtering through the lowered blinds, when everyone else had gone and all that was left in the studio were cigarette butts and a jumble of glasses and scattered cushions. Amalfitano was fifty and it was the first time he had slept with a man. I’m not a man, said Padilla, I’m your angel.

At some point, as they were coming out of a movie theater, remembered Amalfitano, Padilla confessed that in the not-too-distant future he planned to make a movie. The movie would be called
Leopardi
, and according to Padilla it would be a Hollywood-style biopic about the famous and multidisciplinary Italian poet. Like John Huston’s Toulouse-Lautrec movie. But since Padilla’s movie wouldn’t have a big budget (in fact it had no budget), the main roles would be played not by great actors but by fellow writers, who would work for the love of art in general, love of the
gobbo
in particular, or simply to be included. The role of Leopardi was reserved for a young poet and heroin addict from La Coruña whose name Amalfitano had forgotten. The role of Antonio Ranieri was reserved for Padilla himself. It’s the most interesting of all, he declared. Count Monaldo Leopardi would be played by Vargas Llosa, who, with a brooding look and some talcum powder, would be perfect for the role. Paolina Leopardi would go to Blanca Andreu, and Carlo Leopardi to Enrique Vila-Matas. The role of Countess Adelaida Antici, mother of the poet, was to be offered to Josefina Aldecoa. Adelaida García Morales and Carmen Martín Gaite would play peasants from Recanati. Giordani, faithful friend and epistolary confidant—a bit of a drip, really—would go to Muñoz Molina. Manzoni: Javier Marías. Two Vatican cardinals, tremulous Latinists, loathsome Hellenists: Cela and Juan Goytisolo. Uncle Carlo Antici was reserved for Juan Marsé. Stella, the publisher, would be offered to Herralde. Fanny Targioni, the fickle and too-human Fanny, to Soledad Puértolas. And then there were some of the poems, which—to make them more comprehensible to the audience–would be played by actors. That is, the poems would be given physical presence instead of being ladders of words. Example: Leopardi is writing “The Infinite” and from beneath the table springs Martín de Riquer, in a small but effective role, though Padilla doubted that the eminent academic would accept the ephemeral glory of the cinema. The “Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd in Asia,” Padilla’s favorite poem, would be played by Leopoldo María Panero, naked or in a tiny bathing suit. Eduardo Mendicutti would play “To Silvia.” Enrique Vila-Matas: “The Calm After the Storm.” “To Italy,” the poet Pere Girau, Padilla’s best friend. He planned to shoot the interiors in his own Eixample apartment and at the gym of an ex-lover in Gracia. The exteriors: Sitges, Manresa, the Barrio Gótico of Barcelona, Girona, Olot, Palamós. He even had a completely original and revolutionary idea for re-creating Naples in 1839 and the cholera epidemic that ravaged the city, an idea that he could have sold to the big Hollywood studios, but Amalfitano couldn’t remember what it was.

On the Ruin of Amalfitano at the University of Barcelona

The rector and the head of the literature department entrusted Professor Carrera with the mission of informing Amalfitano of his situation at the university. Antoni Carrera was forty-eight, a former anti-Franco militant, someone who at first glance led an enviable life. He seemed reasonably content, a happy man. His salary and that of his wife, a high school French teacher, covered the mortgage on an old house that he had renovated to suit himself and the occasional whims of an architect friend. The house was magnificent, with six bedrooms, a huge, bright living room, a garden, and a little sauna that was Professor Carrera’s greatest domestic pride.

His son, seventeen, was a good student, or so his parents thought. He was six foot two, and every Saturday aftenoon the Carreras went to watch him play basketball at a club in Sant Andreu. All three were in good health. Antoni Carrera and Anna Carrera had gone through some hard times and once, long ago, had even come close to divorcing, but that was in the past and their marriage had gradually stabilized; now they were good friends, they shared some things, but in general each led his or her own life. One of the things they shared was their friendship with Amalfitano. When he arrived at the university he didn’t know anyone, and Carrera, taking pity on him and following the unwritten rules of scholarly hospitality, held a dinner at his house—his welcoming, wonderful house—and invited Amalfitano and three other department colleagues. It was a peculiar affair. The professors didn’t know each other, nor did they have any particular interest in getting to know Amalfitano (Latin American literature no longer roused passions); the professors’ wives looked terminally bored; Carrera’s own wife wasn’t in the best of moods. And Amalfitano didn’t appear at the agreed-upon time. In fact, he was very late, and the hungry professors got impatient. One suggested that they begin without him. Most would have seconded the motion, but Anna Carrera had no interest in starting the same dinner twice. So they ate cheese and Serrano ham and reflected on the impunctuality of South Americans. When Amalfitano arrived at last he was accompanied by a strikingly beautiful adolescent. At first the Carreras assumed, stunned, that it was his wife. Humbert Humbert, thought Antoni in terror, seconds before Amalfitano introduced her as his only daughter. I’m a widower, he remarked later, unprompted.

The dinner, as Anna had feared, proceeded in the usual fashion. The Amalfitanos, father and daughter, weren’t very chatty. The professors discussed seminars, books, university politics, and gossip, though no one could say exactly what the topic was at any given moment: gossip turned into seminars, university politics into books, seminars into university politics, books into gossip, until every permutation was exhausted. In fact they were really only talking about one thing: their work. When they tried to get Amalfitano to tell the same kind of stories about his previous university (it was very small and I taught only one course, on Rodolfo Wilcock, he said, politely and abashedly), the result was disappointing. No one had read Rodolfo Wilcock, no one cared about him. His daughter talked even less. Despite all their efforts, the professors’ wives got monosyllabic replies to their questions: did she like Barcelona, yes, could she speak some Catalan yet, no, had she lived in many countries, yes, did she find it difficult to keep house for her widowed father, the classic absentminded literature professor, no. Though at the coffee hour (
after
eating, thought Carrera, as if father and daughter were used to eating in silence) the Amalfitanos began to take part in the conversation. Someone, taking pity on them, brought up a subject having to do with Latin American literature, which led to the first lengthy remarks by Amalfitano. They talked about poetry. To everyone’s surprise, and to the disgust of some (feigned surprise and disgust, of course), Amalfitano held Nicanor Parra in higher esteem than Octavio Paz. After that, as far as the Carreras—who hadn’t read Parra and didn’t care much about Octavio Paz—were concerned, everything began to go well. By the time the whiskey was brought out, Amalfitano was frankly winning, witty, brilliant, and Rosa Amalfitano, as her father’s happiness drew everyone into its embrace, grew more talkative, more forthcoming, though she never shed a certain reserve, a watchfulness, that made her even more charming in a way that struck Anna Carrera as most unusual. An intelligent girl, an attractive and responsible girl, she thought, realizing that imperceptibly she had begun to love her.

A week later the Carreras invited the Amalfitanos for dinner again, but this time, instead of the professors and their wives, the fifth person at the table was Jordi Carrera, the pride of his mother, a slender adolescent with a shyness that was in some ways like Rosa’s.

As Anna hoped, they became friends on the spot. And the children’s friendship ran parallel to their parents’ friendship, at least during the time the Amalfitanos lived in Barcelona. Rosa and Jordi began to see each other at least twice a week. Once a week or once every two weeks Amalfitano and the Carreras talked on the phone, dined together, went to the movies, attended exhibitions and concerts, spent hours—the three of them—in the Carreras’ living room, by the fireplace in winter or in the garden in summer, talking and telling stories about when they were twenty, thirty, and possessed of an invincible courage. Concerning the past—their personal pasts—the opinions of the three diverged. Anna looked back on those days with sadness, a fond and rather serene sadness, but sadness nonetheless. Antoni viewed his heroic years with indifference, as something necessary but almost nonexistent; he despised nostalgia and melancholy as pointless, sterile emotions. Amalfitano, on the other hand, was dizzied, thrilled, depressed by remembering, capable of weeping in front of his friends or bursting into laughter.

They usually talked late into the night, when Carrera would give Amalfitano a ride back to his apartment on the other side of Barcelona, wondering how he had come to confide in him so easily, how he had learned to trust him in a way that he hardly ever trusted anyone. Amalfitano, meanwhile, usually made the trip half-asleep, watching through half-closed eyes the empty streets, the yellow signs, the dark and bright windows, at peace with himself in Carrera’s car, sure of arriving home safe and sound, of coming in the door quietly, jacket on the coatrack, glass of water, and before getting into bed, a last glance into Rosa’s room, out of pure habit.