Yes Man (45 page)

He wrote back the same day.

It was, of course, to say
si!

querido danny,

in this moments i’m in la riviera (italy), over a mountain surrounded of a full power nature; clear days you can see Corsica from here, and the cinghiale come into the garden to eat fruits …

after two thunder trips it is now possible for me to be in barcelona this thursday—we could have a shock proteico de gambas and seafood in taller de tapas and burn a part of barcelona …

si a encontrarnos, si al shock proteico,
y SI A TODO
! ! !

it would be very elegant to meet with you … are you free to come on thursday??

saludos cordiales, me parece atomico el encuentro,

marc

Thursday! Was I free to come on Thursday?

What kind of Yes Man would I be if I said no?

So here I was, on Thursday morning, on a bus to the airport, and excited.

Everything was sorted. One night in Barcelona—the flights courtesy of the good people at Siemens, who, because they offered me a new handset all those weeks ago, had also come good on their offer of a free return flight to anywhere in Europe. I couldn’t believe my luck. It was like Yes was looking after me all of a sudden.

I didn’t know what to expect from my trip to Barcelona. I didn’t know what to expect from life anymore. I got to the airport, got on the plane, and flew to another country.

I was standing, as agreed, in the square at Plaza Del Juamo, waiting for Marc. I had no idea what he looked like, no idea what we’d be doing tonight, no idea what to expect. I didn’t know how old he was, how he dressed—all I knew was his name, and that he worked in PR. I didn’t know what Marc would be like. Whether other than a predisposal to say yes to things, we’d have anything in common. But it was too late to worry about that, now. I cast my eyes about the place … an old man in a hat with his hands in his pockets. Could be him, I guess. Over there—a middle-aged man with a pipe. Maybe. But none of them seemed to be looking for anyone. None of them seemed to be looking for me.

Another five minutes passed. Then another.

And then, on the other side of the square, a taxi furiously revved its way through the streets and came to an abrupt halt. A tanned and handsome man in his thirties, wearing a suit jacket and T-shirt jumped out of the back and gave the driver a high-five through the open window before leaning down to give him a little hug. He waved good-bye, and then looked up across the square. He was searching for someone. He was searching for me.

It was Marc.

“Come on, we go first to a friend of mine,” said Marc, “and then we do fullpower Barcelona! Atomico, Danny—come, we walk through here …”

Marc was marching me through the back streets of the Gothic Old Town, through narrow, dark streets, and he was a friendly ball of energy. He was also whistling. Not a normal whistle, either. A kind of …
chirp
. The noise a small, happy bird makes—in bursts of one or two seconds—and like no noise any other human being has ever made in my presence. It was happening a lot. Between every few sentences or whenever we rounded a corner … a short, sharp
chirp
. It was a pleasant noise, but not one that you could ever really say you’d been expecting.

“Come, it is not much farther
“—chirp—”
we find my friend in his shop.”

I was struggling to keep up with Marc’s pace. He was moving quickly, striding through the alleyways and streets as if there just wasn’t enough time for everything we had to do tonight.

“Hola, Marc!” came a shout from high above, quite suddenly. I looked up to see a large, bald man, leaning out of his window, waving at Marc.

“Hola, Emilio!” shouted Marc, and we continued on just as quickly.

We pounded through a square, where teenagers were playing experimental
music with keyboards, and smoking cigarettes. The walls were pockmarked with bullet holes that Marc—pausing for only the quickest of split seconds—explained remained from the Civil War.

“Barcelona is the finest city, I think,” he said. “I have always lived here until recently. Now, I live in the quietest village in Italy, but Barcelona is always my home…. It is a special place, a mediterranean city in Europe …”

“Hey, Marc!” shouted another voice from high above, and Marc raised his hand and continued on, and chirped his chirp by way of an answer.

“You have been here before?” he asked.

“Never,” I said. “But I like it …”

Then it happened
again—
someone else leaning out of a window, three or four floors up, and shouting his name … and then I realised. Marc was only chirping when we walked through residential areas, places where people would have their windows open and the sound could drift in. He was chirping for his friends. People here knew his chirp, and this was his way of saying he was back in town.

I tried a chirp of my own. It was rubbish. Marc laughed and was about to say something, when we heard a voice coming from the end of the alleyway. We looked up to see yet another someone waving at Marc. He’d heard the chirp, but he’d been late to react. He’d nearly missed us. Marc said, “Back in one minute,” ran back down the alleyway, and in just three or four swift and impressive movements, scaled the front of the building and pulled himself through the appropriate window. A minute later he appeared at the front door of a building opposite and walked casually toward me. It was a little confusing.

“So,” he said. “Now we continue …”

“Marc,” I said. “You just scaled the front of a building and appeared from somewhere totally different.”

“Yes,” he said as if nothing odd had happened at all. “I had to say hello to my friend.”

The next friend we had to drop in on owned an antiques shop, hidden away on another tiny street. His name was Oleos, and he didn’t speak any English, but he looked delighted when he heard Marc chirping. Oleos shook my hand with vigour, and I can only assume Marc then told him why I was there, because suddenly he started saying,
“Si a todo!”
over and over again before running off to fetch three antique glasses and a bottle of whiskey. He dusted the glasses off, filled them, and handed them round.

“Si a todo!”
he said.

“Si a todo!”
said Marc.

“Si a todo!”
I said.

I was enjoying myself.

An hour later and we were in a cramped but friendly bar in the Old Town. Amazingly everyone—customers and bar staff alike—had cheered when Marc the Barcelona Yes Man had walked in. Perhaps he was secretly a hypnotist.

Since our whiskey in the antiques shop, we had been joined by Oleos and his little dog, Melvyn; a German photographer called Jonas; and a Spanish soap star called Isabel, who had come straight from filming another episode of the slightly depressing-sounding TV drama
The Town of My Life, It Hurts!

Marc had once again explained what I was doing in Spain, and everyone had seemed delighted.

“So you just thought, yes, I will go to Barcelona?” asked Isabel. “Just like that?”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“Just because a man you met had met Marc?”

“Yup.”

“And you just said, Marc, I will come to meet you?”

“That’s right. And Marc said yes.”

“And then you just got on a plane and came? All the way to Spain? To meet a stranger?”

I shrugged.

“Yes. It was an odd coincidence. A man I only met because I said yes to a job had met Marc a couple of years ago, and it turns out that he only says yes too!”

“La casualidad no existe
, Danny!” said Marc. “There is no such thing as coincidence!
Si a todo!
It is the only way!”

“Si a todo,”
said Oleos, and everyone raised their glasses.

“It is good to say yes!” said Isabel. “Yes to everything!”

We were a small and happy group, and I felt incredibly welcome. There was such warmth in the air. Warmth toward me but also an overwhelming warmth toward Marc. It seemed to me that he was one of those people you meet in life who have an almost magnetic optimism. Nothing ever seemed like too much trouble for Marc. He loved life, and life seemed to love him right back. Maybe he seemed so comfortable in his own skin because he knew what was important to him—and right up there at the top of the list was friends.

But I wanted to know more about what saying yes meant to him.

“Marc … could I ask you something about, you know,
si a todo?”
I said. “How has it affected …”

But Marc wasn’t listening.

“Danny!” he said. “An egg!”

Eh?

“Here—take this …”

Marc suddenly produced an egg. By which I mean he took one out of his pocket—not that he sat down and laid one.

“An egg?” I said.

“Here! For you!”

And then he slammed it onto the table, rolled it, and peeled off its shell in one elaborate movement.

“An egg for you!”

I didn’t quite know what to say. It’s not often men I’ve just met take eggs out of their pockets and peel them for me.

“Si a todo,”
he said. “Take the egg!”

“Take the egg?”

“Take the egg!”

I could only imagine that this was some kind of proud Spanish tradition, and to refuse a boiled egg when it is both peeled and offered would be a major racial slur. I took the egg and raised it at the girl behind the bar.

“I am taking the egg!” I said, and then popped it in my mouth.

“So, is this a Spanish tradition?” I asked Jonas, the German, between chews.

“No,” he said. “Sometimes Marc just likes to eat an egg.”

“Come on!” said Marc. “We continue on …
si a todo
, Danny, we go somewhere else, now … a party for a new club, I have invitations for us both …”

“Great!” I said. A party! An exclusive nightclub opening, in a hip and slick city! I was filled with a new hope. Surely this was what being a Yes Man was all about. Marc knew it, and now so did I.

“Come on, we go now …”

And so Marc and I left the others at the bar and set off in search of this brand-new party. For once it wasn’t
me
chasing a Yes…. I was saying yes to someone
else’s
Yes. It was like Yes squared!

“Hey, Marc,” I said as we walked through a precinct and around a man on
Rollerblades who appeared to be doing tai-chi. “Could I talk to you a bit now about saying yes, because I’ve been saying it for some months now, and while it’s been great, there have also been downsides. I’ve done things I should never have done, and—”

“Like what?”

“Well, saying yes has been great. But certain things have happened. And”—I thought of Lizzie, and then of Kristen, but pushed the thoughts aside again—“I just want to make sure I’m doing this properly. I mean, did you ever …”

“Here we are! The club!”

Marc approached a bouncer and pointed at me and said something. The bouncer nodded, and we were ushered straight in.

I had been desperate to talk to Marc and seek his advice. But almost as soon as we’d entered the club, I’d ended up speaking to a friend of a friend of his friend, who seemed determined to tell me every last detail of her life.

“My ex-boyfriend,” she said as my eyes darted round the room, trying to find Marc again, “he went to London in the summer.”

“Oh, did he?” I said.

I couldn’t see Marc anywhere. Just acres of suited, booted, ultra smart and trendy Spaniards in Barcelona’s newest—and most velvety—club.

“Yes. He liked London very much.”

“Good,” I said.

A man in a black suit with his shirt unbuttoned to the waist walked past me. He stopped at a mirror to check himself out. I think he was wearing foundation.

“My ex, he is a liar,” said the girl, and my ears pricked up.

“A liar?” I said.

“Yes. A liar,” she said.

She didn’t seem at all sad about it, but I felt bad for her.

“God,” I said. “I’m sorry about that.”

The man was still checking himself out in the mirror. He seemed to be really enjoying the view.

“Why you say you are sorry?” said the girl.

“Well … it’s not good to be a liar.”

“It’s good!” she said, a little offended. “He was liar, famous Spanish liar!”

“He was a famous Spanish liar?”

“Yes. A criminal liar.”

The man in the mirror had been joined by his friend, this one with the most
elaborately crafted facial hair I have ever seen and who had now also locked eyes with himself in the mirror.

“He was a famous Spanish criminal liar? Are you sure that’s good?”

Both men nodded at themselves, then at each other, and wandered off, probably to find another mirror.

“My ex was a liar in the best court in Spain!”

“Oh,” I said, realising what she’d meant. “A
lawyer?”

“Yes. Liar. What did you say?”

“I said lawyer.’ I thought
you
said ‘liar.’”

“What is different?”

A more cynical man than I would say she probably had a point.

“Danny!
Si a todo!”
shouted Marc, when he was back by my side. He had two glasses of champagne in his hand, and he now appeared to be wearing a cravatte. He handed me a glass, and then slapped me on the back. I laughed. I really, really liked Marc. I found it hard to explain. After all, we’d only just met. But it seemed like he had a passion for life that up until now I’d been trying to force. It just seemed to come naturally to him.

“Come, sit up there,” he said, pointing to a raised area near the dance floor. A few people sat there, sipping drinks and looking like the Barcelona elite. The man with the elaborate facial hair was staring into his glass, probably trying to catch a glimpse of himself in an ice cube.

“I will,” I said. “And perhaps then you could talk to me about being a Yes Man …”

I was keen to bond with Marc. Not just as friends—but as Yes Men.

“Sure, sure, we will,” he said. “But remember—this is only the beginning! We have plenty of time!”

It didn’t feel like the right moment to remind Marc that I’d be returning home to London the very next day, so I took my drink over to the raised area, and took a seat. Marc made it halfway, but was whisked away by a glamourous woman who seemed to want to speak to him. A moment after I sat down, I was joined by a gentleman in a shiny, sequinned suit.