Michael Pearce - A dead man of Barcelona

‘To Gibraltar?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Dolores,’ protested the elderly man, ‘he had a wife already.’

‘I know, but there would have been room for another. I wouldn’t have made any fuss. We could have managed.’

‘Dolores, he was spinning you along.’

‘Don’t all men do that?’ She shrugged. ‘Anyway, I didn’t mind. It was nice to think of him in that way. That’s the way he thought of me, too. As his wife. Almost.’

‘He was staying with Dolores that night,’ said the elderly man.

‘When-?’

‘When it happened,’ said the elderly man, pulling up a chair for her to sit down. ‘Tell him.’

‘We heard shooting,’ she said. ‘There had been trouble. Those boys. They were making them go on the ships. There had been shooting before but this time it was close, just outside, in the street. “This is the stuff!” he said. He was quite excited. And then he wanted to go out. “You’d do better to stay in,” I said. “You don’t want to get mixed up in this. You stick to business.” “Ah, but this is business,” he said. ’

‘What did he mean by that?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t know what he was talking about.’

‘What was his business?’

‘Something to do with the docks. He had an office down there. Just past the church. But I never quite knew what his business was. We didn’t talk about it. Well, you wouldn’t, would you? In bed? Anyway, that night he insisted on going out. And then he didn’t come back.

‘There was more shooting, not just in our street but in all the streets, and I got frightened and ran back here to the cafe. And Manuel — he’s the boss, he owns the cafe — said, “You stay right here until it’s all over.” He said that to all of us, and we all stayed. “There’s no point in getting mixed up in it,” he said. “It’s not your fight.”

‘But Inez — she’s another of the waitresses — said it was her fight. She’s Catalan, you see. Well, I am, too, but not like her. I mean I wasn’t sure it was my fight. But she said it was our boys, and she went out. And she didn’t come back, either.

‘I was in a hell of a state, I can tell you. We were all in a state. But Manuel said, “Just stay here. You’ll be all right here.” Although it didn’t seem so.

‘It was hours before the shooting stopped. But then Manuel went out. There were a lot of bodies, he said, but hers wasn’t among them. He came back and said we should stay inside.

‘But I wanted to see. I mean, he had looked for Inez but I wanted to look for Lockhart. So I went out and another of the girls came with me. But I couldn’t find anything. He wasn’t among the bodies. “That’s good,” Marie said. “It means he’s alive.” But I couldn’t believe that. Not until I’d really seen him. They said a lot of people had been taken to the prison so I went along and asked to see him. But they wouldn’t let me, they wouldn’t let anybody. And then Manuel said to come home and he would fix it when things had settled down. So I went back to the cafe.

‘And a couple of days later he did fix it and I went to see him.’

‘You saw Lockhart when he was in prison?’ said Seymour.

‘Yes. I couldn’t see him really properly, though, it was so dark. He was lying in a corner and I thought maybe he had been wounded, but he said not. He told me to go away and not come again. “Don’t get mixed up in this!” he said. I said I could bring him things, food, perhaps. I wasn’t sure that they’d fed him and I’m damned sure they weren’t giving him enough water, but he said keep out of it. “Don’t come back,” he said. But I would have gone back. But then we heard that he was dead. Those bastards had killed him — killed him in the prison!’

Her voice had risen. Everyone else in the cafe had stopped talking. Then a man’s voice said soothingly, ‘It’s okay, Dolores, it’s okay. You come here now. Get back into the kitchen.’

Dolores got up from the table.

‘I’d better go,’ she said. She managed a smile. ‘Or Manuel will have my ass.’

‘Did he say anything else?’

‘Only to tell Nina.’

‘Who’s Nina?’

‘She’s a girl in Barcelona. He always used to go and see her when he was over here. Why, I can’t think, because she’s a real pain in the ass. I used to wonder if he had a thing for her but I reckon not. It wouldn’t be easy to get a thing going with Nina. It would be like being in bed with a hedgehog.’

‘Did he say why?’

‘No. Just told me to tell her. Well, I did, but that was a waste of time. She knew anyway. She just looked at me with those cold eyes and nodded. That was all. A hard bitch. As well as prickly.’

She set off across the room.

‘I’ve got to go,’ she said.

She was back, however, after two steps.

‘Why do you want to know about Lockhart?’ she demanded.

‘Friends are interested in what happened to him,’ he said. ‘Friends in England,’ he added with emphasis.

‘Tell them to go on being interested,’ she said fiercely. ‘Tell them to ask questions and go on asking questions. In the end someone’s got to answer.’

The conversation in the cafe resumed.

‘You see?’ said the elderly man. ‘You see now how it was?’

‘I am sorry,’ said Seymour. ‘I did not mean to upset her.’

The man shrugged.

‘She’ll get over it,’ he said. ‘It may even help her.’

He got up from the table and put out his hand.

‘Marques,’ he said. ‘Ricardo Marques.’

‘Seymour.’

‘Do what she says: go on asking questions. Perhaps we will be able to help you.’

He shook Seymour’s hand once more.

‘We shall meet again,’ he said.

An hour later Seymour was walking up Las Ramblas with Chantale. As it left the port area the street opened up and became an airy boulevard crowded with people. They seemed in no particular hurry, stopping frequently to chat with acquaintances or study the great bunches of flowers hung above the flower stalls. There were flowers everywhere, not just on the stalls but spread out in swathes of colour along the side of the road and bunched in miniature fields at the foot of the trees: roses, sweetpeas, carnations, chrysanthemums and great streaked tiger lilies whose powerful scent reached out right across the boulevard.

Everywhere, too, there seemed to be street performers, fire-eaters, jugglers, acrobats, dancers, and strange figures straight from a carnival, huge figures sometimes on stilts with grotesquely large papier-mache heads. A Spanish word came into his mind: cabezudos. That’s what they must be, cabezudos, the bizarre, capering figures that were part of every procession at carnival time.

The whole street was like a carnival. There were floats, there were musicians, there were clowns. From the floats people in bright costumes were throwing sweets for the children. The children dashed in among the cabezudos to retrieve the sweets and the cabezudos affected to trip over them. Everyone was laughing. Surely this must actually be a carnival? But no. He learned later that every day was like that on Las Ramblas.

Chantale, responding to the mood, had unbound the headscarf she normally wore in Tangier, even when she was in European dress, and let her hair fall down on to her shoulders.

If she had done that in Morocco it would have caused a riot. For some reason a woman’s hair seemed especially sexually inflammatory to Arabs.

But here, on Las Ramblas, Chantale suddenly felt a great expansion of personal freedom, as if a huge weight had been lifted from her shoulders. She let her hair fall and felt as if she had come out into the sunshine.

Seymour had been recommended a hotel in a small square off Las Ramblas. The square was little more than a patch of baked mud surrounded by apartment blocks. The blocks were three or four storeys high and many had rooms with little balconies fenced in by a kind of iron fretwork. Children played on the balconies and from time to time women dressed in black would come out and pick one up. Then they would lean on the balcony and monitor events in the plaza below. There was a play area in one corner of the plaza and perhaps they were keeping an eye on other offspring.