Southern Seas Read online

  ‘Have you been as imaginative in your business life?’

  ‘It hasn’t been necessary. While my father was alive, it was all plain sailing. He respected my personality. He knew that I was creative and that I needed to change my life and other people’s. When he died, I was nearly fifty years old, and came into an absolutely staggering inheritance. I put a lot of it into fixed-interest securities, so that I could live like a prince for the rest of my life. I used some more to compensate my wife for bearing me five children, and I made them my heirs. With the remainder, I set myself up in business, always using fellows like Planas or Stuart Pedrell. Fellows with drive, with a fierce ambition for power, but with the possibility of gaining only economic power. Planas is an impressive and dangerous operator: in four years he can triple any sum of money you care to give him. Eat and drink, Señor Carvalho, before the revolution comes.’

  He gave no opportunity for the conversation to take a different track. His observations were entirely self-centred, and he went on to talk of his travels.

  ‘Yes, Señor Carvalho, I stand guilty of having travelled three times around the world—by ship, by plane and by land. I know all the worlds there are to know on this earth. I don’t have time today—Caballé is singing Norma at the Liceo and I don’t want to miss it. But another day, I’ll take you round my private museum. It’s in my ancestral home at Munt de Montornés.

  ‘It alarms me that the possibility of enjoying life seems to be disappearing. It’s not just a question of money, although that’s not unimportant. When I was a child, I discovered what happiness was, what pleasure was—in a piece of pumpkin and a slice of salami. Have you read Cuore by D’Amicis? Nowadays, the educational experts rule it out of court, but it was part of the sentimental education of my generation, and probably yours too. I remember one scene where Enrico, the young hero, goes on a trip to the country with some of his school friends, including Procusa, the son of a bricklayer. In fact it’s Procusa’s father who organizes the trip, and at one point he gives them a slice of pumpkin with salami on top. How does that strike you? I find it truly marvellous. A simple joy in nature and in spontaneous eating. You have to wait for Hemingway before there’s an eating scene that even compares. In Beyond the River and Into the Trees, he describes in simple language a scene with a fisherman eating a plate of beans and bacon that he has cooked over a fire by the river. None of the great banquets of baroque literature come anywhere near the meals in Cuore and Hemingway’s short story. But such possibilities of enjoyment are coming to an end. The stars don’t lie. Everything is carrying us towards death and extinction.’

  ‘But you’re still making money …’

  ‘It’s my duty.’

  ‘You’d be ready to defend your heritage by every available means. Even war.’

  ‘I don’t know. It depends. Not if it was a very dirty war. Although I suppose that any war can be made to look attractive. But no, I don’t think that I’d come round to supporting violence.’

  ‘So? What are you afraid of?’

  ‘That an era in which necessity rules over imagination will deprive me of this house, this servant, this chablis and this morteruelo—although the morteruelo may just survive, because the left has recently promised to preserve the “hallmarks of popular identity”, and cooking is one of those.’

  ‘Stuart Pedrell tried to escape from his condition. You take yours on, and try to turn it into an aesthetic. Planas is the only one who works.’

  ‘He’s the only one who’s alienated, although he doesn’t recognize it himself. I’ve tried to help him. But he has the balance of an unbalanced mind. The day he looks in the mirror and says “I’m mad”, he’ll fall apart.’

  ‘I imagine that your pessimism stems from a fear that the forces of evil—the communists, for instance—will become masters of the things that you love and possess.’

  ‘Not just the communists. The Marxist horde is more diverse nowadays. It even contains bishops and flamenco dancers. They’re fighting to change the world, to change man. If the struggle between communism and capitalism keeps to the road of peaceful competition, communism is bound to win. The only escape open to capitalism is war, so long as it’s a conventional war without nuclear weapons. But that’s going to be very difficult to achieve by agreement. So, there’s no solution. Sooner or later there will be a full-scale war. The survivors will be very happy. They will live in a sparsely populated world and enjoy the technological legacy of millennia. Automation plus a low population. Perfect! Just keep the demographic pressure under control, and happiness will become a real possibility.

  ‘You may ask what kind of political regime will prevail in this heavenly future. Well, I’ll tell you. A very liberal social democracy. If there’s no war, and we continue along the path of co-existence, we’ll reach a blockage of growth in the capitalist system, and maybe in the socialist system too. Have you read Wolfgang Harich’s Communism Without Growth? It’s just been published in Spain, but I’d already read it in German. Harich is a German communist, and he predicts: “If the present rhythm of world growth continues unchanged, mankind will disappear in two or three generations.” He advocates a communism of austerity—a model for economic survival that is opposed both to the capitalist programme of continual growth and to the Eurocommunist idea of an alternative controlled development, financed by taxation of the masses and designed to secure the rule of the working class. I’m already an old man and I won’t live to see it.

  ‘I’m not particularly worried about what will become of my family. What does sadden me, though, is the thought that Barcelona and my beloved landscapes will disappear. Have you ever seen the sun go down over Mykonos? I have a house on Mykonos, built on rocks which face the setting sun and the island of Delos. I love beautiful views. But there are very few people that interest me—in an emotional sense, I mean. Stuart Pedrell and Planas are like children to me. I could almost be their father. But they have too many ties to this century and the one to come. They believe in the rising curve of history, that humanity is progressing. Of course, they see it from a capitalist perspective, but they still believe in it. Planas is standing in the elections to the CEOE—the “Employers’ Union”, as the press calls it. I’d never have done anything like that.’

  ‘Of your alternatives for the future, which would you lay your money on?’

  ‘I’m too old for betting. Everything will happen after I’m dead. I haven’t got long to go.’

  He poured Carvalho some more wine and filled his own glass to the brim.

  ‘It was a Goytisolo, Distinguishing Marks, which taught me to drink white wine between meals. White wine was also used to sensational effect in the Resnais film Providence. Until then, I’d always stuck to strong-bodied ports and sherries. But this is a real blessing. It’s also the alcoholic drink with the fewest calories—if one excludes beer. Which white wine do you drink?’

  ‘Blanc de blancs, Marqués de Monistrol.’

  ‘I don’t know it. I’m a fanatic for chablis. This one in particular. And if it can’t be chablis, then let it be an Albariño Fefiñanes. It’s an impressive hybrid, with roots in Alsace or Galicia. One of the best things they brought us along the road from Santiago de Compostela.’

  ‘Did you have anything in common with Stuart Pedrell?’

  ‘Nothing. He was a man who never knew how to get the best out of life. A narcissistic sufferer. He suffered for himself. He had a Jewish anxiety. But he was a high-flier in the business world. I knew him as an adolescent, almost as a child. I was a good friend of his father’s. The Stuarts set up in Catalonia in the early nineteenth century. They were involved in the hazelnut trade between Reus and London.’

  ‘Where could a man like him have disappeared to, for a whole year, without leaving a single trace?’

  ‘Maybe he enrolled at some foreign university. He’d been getting interested in ecology—he was always getting carried away with some new idea. I once told him: your great advantage over ninety-nine
per cent of the population of this country is that you read the New York Times every day. If Planas had had the same curiosity, by now he’d be planning some deal to import water purification plant. What do you think of this morteruelo? Excellent, isn’t it. I sent my cook to Cuenca for a month to learn how to make it. It’s the best pâté I have ever tasted. Have you ever thought that if you exclude stews, Spain hasn’t created a single major hot soup. But it is a world leader in the field of cold soups. There are as many different gazpachos as there are rice dishes. Morteruelo is wonderful at this time of day, especially with the bread—which I have sent from Palafrugell. Other people drink tea at this time of day, but how can you compare tea to this chilled white wine and morteruelo? Pity grapes aren’t in season. It would be perfection to round off this little snack with a few muscatel.’

  ‘Do you have any actual evidence that Stuart enrolled at a foreign university?’

  ‘None at all.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Maybe he went on a trip, but not to the South Seas. Border controls aren’t infallible, you know. In fact, I’d say the opposite. A man with an urge to disappear will disappear. Do you know what people were claiming when I went off to the Sacromonte caves? That I had gone to Antarctica with an expedition that I financed. There was even a report in the Movimiento press commenting on the mettle of the Spanish race—that would not be intimidated by the most inaccessible secrets of the world. I remember one sentence in particular: “Our holy ones explored the heavens with their aesthetics; our heroes are able to explore even in hell.” That appeared in the press, Señor Carvalho. I do believe it did.’

  He called Biscuter to find out what was new at the office.

  ‘A girl called Yes phoned.’

  ‘What did she want?’

  ‘To speak with you.’

  ‘She’ll have to wait …’

  Carvalho picked up his car and drove up Tibidabo to his house in Vallvidrera. He threw in the rubbish bin a pile of unsolicited mail that he found in his letter box, and lit the fire with Eugenio Trias’s Philosophy and Its Shadow. He calculated that he would have to slow down with burning his library. He still had some two thousand books to go: at one a day, they would last six years or so. Intervals between books would have to be introduced, or he would have to go out and buy more—an option that was not attractive. Maybe he could play for time by splitting the various volumes of Brahier’s Philosophy and the Pléiade classics collection. It hurt him to burn the Pléiade classics, because they had such a good feel to them. Sometimes he would take down a volume or two, just to feel them, before returning them to the jumble of the bookshelves and erasing the memory of how, once, he had thought it enriching to read them.

  He did a little tidying up, so that the cleaning lady would not complain too much. He took a long, slow shower. Then he made himself a long sandwich of French bread with tomatoes and swallowed down the Jabugo ham. He was still wavering over whether to open a bottle of wine when someone rang the bell on the garden door. He looked out of the window and saw through the heavy bars the silhouette of a girl. As he went down the stairs to the door, the silhouette took on the shape of Jésica.

  He opened the wrought-iron gate. She walked towards the house and turned at the front doorstep.

  ‘May I come in?’

  Carvalho invited her in with a sweep of his hand. Bleda came out to meet her and cleaned one of her shoes with a couple of hefty, well-aimed licks.

  ‘Does it bite?’

  ‘She doesn’t know the meaning of the word.’

  ‘I adore dogs,’ she said, not altogether convincingly. ‘But I was bitten by one when I was a kid, and now I’m afraid of them. What a lovely house you’ve got. Wow, what a beautiful fireplace!’

  She marvelled at everything, with that polite insincerity which well-bred people adopt to show that they still have a capacity for envy and surprise. The air of a class fugitive, thought Carvalho, as he adjusted his dressing-gown to avoid some sudden display of his private parts, but still a product of her class.

  ‘You look like you’ve settled down for the night. Were you in bed?’

  ‘No. I’d just finished eating. Would you like something?’

  ‘No. Food makes me feel sick.’

  She spread her perfectly shaped hips on the sofa.

  ‘I behaved like an idiot this morning, and didn’t help you at all. I wanted to apologize. I’d like to help you as much as possible.’

  ‘This is out of working hours. I’m not on piecework, you know.’

  ‘Forgive me.’

  ‘Shall we have a glass of something?’

  ‘I don’t drink. I’m macrobiotic.’

  Carvalho had to do something with his hands. He looked for his cigar box and took out a Filipino Flor de Isabela. It was smooth and substantial.

  ‘I’ve been suffering remorse ever since my father’s body was found. I could have prevented it. If I’d been here at the time, it would never have happened. My father went away because he was lonely. My eldest brother is an egotist. And so is my mother. My other brothers are lumps of meat who happen to have been baptized. I’m the only one he got on with. I’d grown up enough to talk with him, to look after him. I’d always admired him from a distance. He was so handsome, so intelligent and sure of himself, so elegant. Yes, he was an elegant man: I don’t mean in the way he dressed, but in the way he was. Warm.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘A brute.’

  ‘Did your father have anything important to say when he wrote to you in England?’

  ‘No. Just a few postcards. One or two lines, usually. Maybe something he’d read, that he found interesting. He came to London twice, on business, and it was marvellous. At least, it seems marvellous now. At the time, I have to admit, he got on my nerves a bit—I felt he was taking up my time. If only we could turn the clock back. Here. Read this.’

  She took a folded sheet of paper from her straw basket:

  You will return from the world of shadow

  On an ash-coloured horse

  You will pick me up by the waist

  And carry me over the horizon;

  I will beg your forgiveness

  For not having known

  How to stop you dying of desire.

  ‘Not bad.’

  ‘I’m not asking for your literary opinion. I know it’s awful. I’m trying to show you how this is getting to be an obsession with me. I can’t go on like this.’

  ‘I’m a private detective, not a psychiatrist.’

  ‘Do you want me to go?’

  Their eyes met. Despite the distance between them, Carvalho could smell the life in her body. It hadn’t been a defiant question—more a complaint. Carvalho let himself relax. He sat on the sofa opposite Jésica, presenting an easy target for Bleda, who started worrying at his slipper.

  ‘Put some music on,’ she said.

  Carvalho stood up. As he picked Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, he saw out of the corner of his eye that Yes was settling back and relaxing. She moved her legs apart, spread her arms, and rested her neck on the back of the sofa.

  ‘It’s nice here. If you had to live in that mausoleum …’

  ‘Not bad, for a mausoleum …’

  ‘Appearances can be deceptive. It’s so cold and constricting. It’s mother’s style. Of course, she doesn’t care two hoots about protocol and all that. But since she had to go through so much to get herself established, now she gets her own back by making everyone else suffer.’

  She opened her eyes, and turned to Carvalho, as if preparing to say something momentous.

  ‘I want to leave home.’

  ‘I didn’t think people said things like that nowadays. I thought they just did them. It sounds kind of old-fashioned.’

  ‘Very old-fashioned. That’s the way I am.’

  ‘I still don’t see what all this has to do with me. I’m working for your mother. A temp job. But a job all the same. I’m investigating your father’s death. That’s all.
’

  ‘You’ve got kind, human eyes. The same as him. You won’t let me down.’

  ‘You’re well-proportioned yourself … I mean, you’ve got all kinds of resources to pull you through. Anyway, it’s not my field. I don’t see how I can help.’

  The girl moved from her seat and knelt in front of Carvalho. She rested her head on his lap.

  ‘Let me stay here.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just tonight.’

  Carvalho’s fingers began to stroke her mane of hair. Then they moved down the secret paths leading to the nape of her neck.

  She stood naked, as if emerging from the night sea. With slow, hesitant gestures, she nervously tucked a strand of hair behind each ear, and then hunted in her bag and brought out a mirror and a crumpled piece of tissue. She held out her hand, as if to give or ask for something, but she wasn’t even looking at him. She left the room with jerky steps, and returned with a knife in her hand. Carvalho drew up the sheets to cover himself, and the girl sat at the bedroom table. She cleared a space among the jumble of papers and objects, put down the mirror in the way that a priest might handle the sacred host, gently opened the tissue and removed something resembling a tiny piece of chalk. She scraped the cocaine with a knife until it was a pile of dust on the mirror.

  ‘Have you got a straw?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or a biro?’

  Not waiting for an answer, she returned to her bag, and took out a cheap biro made of transparent plastic. She removed the refill and placed the crystalline tube next to the mirror. Then she ran over to the bed, took Carvalho’s hand and smilingly pulled him out from under the sheet. He found himself sitting naked beside the girl, under a metal lamp which highlighted the little pile of cocaine on the table. Closing one nostril with her finger, she took the biro tube into the other and snorted up the cocaine. Then she offered the tube to Carvalho. She met his refusal with a slow smile and snorted up some more. Carvalho went off to find a bottle of wine and a glass. He sat down and started to drink, while the girl dealt with the white dust with the concentration of an expert.