Southern Seas Read online

  ‘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.

  ‘No. I’ve never seen this gentleman.’

  ‘Is there a smarter restaurant in the area?’

  ‘Smarter, yes. But I don’t think you’ll eat better there. The food here is simple, but it’s good.’

  ‘I’m sure it is. I was just thinking that my relative might have gone to the other one. People like variety.’

  The air smelt of coffee laced with Fundador brandy. Young workers were laughing, talking in loud voices, pushing each other, threatening to crush each other’s balls, or arguing over who was the better wing-forward, Carrasco or Juanito. The older ones were stirring the sugar in their coffee with the air of connoisseurs. They took the photo, held it at a distance from eyelids dusted with cement, and fingered it a little as if in search of some clue. The answer on the face of the collective was a consistent ‘no’.

  The landlord was loth to waste time that could be used to ring up another two hundred and fifty pesetas for two set meals. He glanced at the photo over his shoulder and shook his head. His wife was peeling potatoes with one hand while pouring coffee with the other and simultaneously giving her daughter a tongue-lashing. The girl, who had spots on her face and beads of sweat in her armpits, proceeded to clear the tables at the speed required by her mother. The next-in-line to inherit the business, a potato-nosed John Travolta, was meticulously pruning his fingernails. With his denim legs crossed and his small buttocks gently propped against the refrigerator, he was totally immersed in removing a tiny particle of flesh from the little finger of his left hand.

  ‘Best wines from Jumilla.’

  Carvalho went into the wine shop, which was architectually no different from any restaurant, chemist or dry-cleaner’s in the area, and asked for a bottle of white Jumilla. The owner was a hundred and fifty kilos of white-skinned humanity whose pallor was relieved only by a dark pair of creased rings under his eyes. He and Carvalho were the only people in a shop dominated by a huge cold store. As its wood and chrome door swung open and shut, the noise reminded Carvalho of the refrigerators in the bars and taverns of his own end of town. It was a huge reproduction, built on the scale of its owner and lined internally with green tiles. The man sought to penetrate the zone of silence surrounding Carvalho.

  ‘What a ridiculous situation! A disaster! I’d set them to work with a shovel and pick. And as for the rest of them—up against the wall! We’re sixteen million too many. Not one more and not one less. It’ll take a war to sort it out.’

  Carvalho downed another glass and nodded without enthusiasm, but just sufficiently for the hundred and fifty kilos to shuffle over and spread themselves on the chair opposite.

  ‘Do you think it’s right? Obviously not. I’m a man who likes to get things straight. I like to be treated right. See the wood for the trees. But to be strung along by some smart-arsed talker. No sir! That’s not for me. Like I say, there are sixteen million too many of us in Spain. Nobody’s got the answers. He knew how to keep us knuckled down. If anyone stepped out of line—whoosh! Off with their heads! I never tire of saying it: I prefer to be told things straight. I like to know the truth. If that’s the way you want it, OK. But don’t start dressing it all up and pussy-footing around. No. That won’t wash. As far as I’m concerned, they can all take a running jump. I’ve always spoken my mind, just like I am now. And I’ve had all I can take. Do you see what I mean?’

  Carvalho nodded.

  ‘Just the other day, we were talking about what needs to be done. You do this, I do that. Fine. We agreed it. But would you believe it—an hour later, everything was up in the air again. And he still went on laughing. So much that I thought fuck it, and gave him a kick where it hurts. Do I make myself clear?’

  Carvalho emptied the bottle and deposited a hundred pesetas next to ten kilos of forearm.

  ‘Stick to your guns, friend. Otherwise they’ll walk all over you.’

  ‘They don’t know who they’re messing with.’

  The man barely lifted his eyes from the ring of wine that Carvalho’s glass had left on the formica tabletop. Carvalho went into the street and entered the fanciest barber shop he could find. The walls were hung with photos of hairdressing models, over which was displayed a sign from the old days: We sculpt your hair. He asked for a trim and a shave. He kept a careful eye on the barber’s hands—a habit he had acquired in prison, where the most one could hope for was a tolerable level of hygiene, and where the job was always performed by a convicted murderer.

  Carvalho recounted the story of his missing relation, and held out the photograph. The barber viewed it rather than studied it, as if it comprised part of the visual field that he was slicing with his other hand.

  The picture passed from one customer to the next, and then back to the barber. He studied it more closely.

  ‘His face reminds me of something … But,’ he added hastily, ‘I don’t know what.’ He handed it back to Carvalho.

  ‘Keep it and give it a look now and then. I’ll pass by tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m sure I’ve seen that face before, you know.’

  Carvalho passed the Wines-from-Jumil
la bodega again. The proprietor was taking the air. He was muttering to himself.

  ‘Same as before?’

  ‘Worse.’

  ‘Don’t give in.’

  ‘I’d sooner die.’

  Carvalho left him to his thoughts and continued his perambulation. The only dentist in the whole of San Magín had seen neither the face nor the teeth of Stuart Pedrell. He learned no more from the two doctors, either, whose waiting rooms were filled with toothless pensioners chewing over softly spoken words. He called into dry-cleaning establishments, and visited a boutique where silk ties jostled men’s underwear. He left no chemist’s shop or newspaper kiosk unturned. Occasionally the photograph seemed to stir a flicker of recognition. But only a flicker. Nor did anyone know Stuart Pedrell in the two night schools, managed by a couple of brothers who were teachers from Cartagena. His heart was slowly sinking, and only his previous investment in walking and talking persuaded him to pursue this suicidal investigation.

  ‘Come to a mass rally this evening! Organized by the Socialists of Catalonia. Workers, if you want a San Magín in which you feel at home, and not the speculators, come to the Socialist rally at the Creueta Sports Centre! The speakers will be Martín Toval, José Ignacio Urenda, Joan Reventós and Francisco Ramos. The Socialists have the answer!’

  The voice was coming from loudhailers attached to a slow-moving van. The communication aroused little excitement among the local population—evidently aware that they should vote Communist or Socialist as some kind of bio-urban necessity, but not as a matter of great enthusiasm. A few children stuck their heads through the van windows and asked for leaflets. But they soon returned to their game: the UCD ones had been prettier. A cooked meat wholesaler put the photo down beneath a hanging leg of cured pork, and a heavy gob of Trevélez ham-fat splattered Stuart Pedrell’s features. The wholesaler compounded his offence by wiping the photograph with his sleeve, so that it suddenly seemed to acquire the dark glaze of twenty years in an album.