Jaume Cabré - Winter Journey

Listen, in a place like this, with waitresses who're, you know, friendly, it's insulting when they call you Sir. That girl was saying You're thirty-seven, you idiot, don't you even notice you're going bald, you fool, you've broken up with three different women and everybody knows about it, you haven't even been able to finish a lousy university degree, what are you doing here? You think you're Tarzan? But 1 controlled myself, pumping myself up even more, and I said, Don't call me Sir, sweetie, like that, politely. And then they go and put on Child in Time, a mess with no sense of rhythm and stupid crappy lyrics, and 1 was starting to get pissed off, pumping myself up, with Gillan's high little neuter voice, he's worse than Farinelli. 1'd take all the queers and all the Bosnians and 1'd boil them in a pressure cooker. Quousque tandem abutere, Deep Purple, patientia nostra? says Saint Matthew 13:22, which 1 repeat and make mine. 1 mean, l don't think you always have to score the first time…

If I weren't sniffing Crimson and traveling with Neal and Jack through the streets of Paris, 1 wouldn't be able to take any more, it seems like even from the Here and Now 1'd be able to hear how this guy gives orders. I think she's looked in the direction of Here and Now and I can't have that because I'm God, 1 kill when 1 want and I don't have to explain anything to anybody. Besides, from this distance the guy looks like Pepus. I'd like to get a look at his neck, but it's as short as the sleeves on a vest. Just a minute, Pepus, the guitars have gone back to that impossible rhythm, oh, oh, hearing the Truth in the Truth. Saint Robert Fripp, ora pro nobis… Where were we? Pepus. That fucking son of a bitch Pepus. It's your turn, man. Can you imagine being Pepus? There. Calm down Let's see… Bingo. Right in his nonexistent neck. You're something else, QuiquIn.

…but if a girl turns up her nose 1 tell her, No problem, I've got a full schedule and I wouldn't have had five minutes for you anyway. And that's when they soften up and when you say, Now get screwed and I'm gonna find somebody else. And she just keeps looking at me, moving her gum around with a shit-eating grin, and she comes back with, What'll you have, sir, as if 1 hadn't said, Don't call me Sir, honey. 1 decided to be nice and pump myself up even more, if that were virtually possible.

"A nice cold Estrella and the time you get off work, Jane," 1 said with a smile.

That's what I'm like: if somebody wants a fight, l bow down and bend like bamboo because, you ignoramuses, it takes two to fight, as Lao Tse teaches. And 1 looked back at her with the same shiteating grin.

Now it looks like they're starting to realize that something's going on. People are really slow. It's like they walk around without looking at one another, ignoring one another as He has ignored everybody.

At that moment Our Father Time had had enough of Gillan's yelps and we were supposed to listen to Barber's Adagio for Strings, the most saccharine thing ever to emerge from the human mind, and 1 kept on holding back and grinning shittily like the waitress. 1 was starting to notice how hot it was that time of year, which was made worse by the vulgarity of the DJ, the hired gun of the Bad Taste Mafia.

"We don't have Estrella. It'll have to be Voll Damm."

"What the hell do you mean you don't have Estrella?" It just came out; 1 know 1 shouldn't have said it, but what's done is done. And Samuel Barber kept on greasing up the walls and nobody even noticed. Maybe that's the worst thing: that people don't notice whether it's Lou Reed or a fucking Bosnian tone poem, for God's sake.

"1 mean we're out. So it's Voll Damm or come back tomorrow,

So she was still calling me Sir and she was inviting me to get lost. And chewing gum the whole time. So instead of blowing up I thought of Luke 2:27 where he says, be more whorish than the Guineans and more clever than the foxes, and I didn't react. I said Fine, honey, a Voll Damm. And when do you get off?

"Go to hell."

See, friends? She stopped calling me Sir. She didn't give me time to say, And what time is Go to Hell, exactly? Ten? Eleven? Eleven twenty-three? Huh? She'd walked away, nose in the air, to get the beer, and I'm thinking so hard that, if it weren't for the saccharine Barber, you could probably hear my brain whirring from outside my cranium. Three columns away, 1 saw the fatty laughing like crazy by a table where two boys were being very nice to her. The little pig probably wanted to make it with both of them and I jotted this down in my memory book. The Barber wasn't over yet and all of a sudden Jane was right there. She banged the bottle and the mug down on the table.

"Four euros."

She tossed the tab as if it were confetti, and it fell into the puddle made by the sweating bottle. Four euros for a beer, hell, even if it's a fashionable bar, come on, even if it did just open, four euros for a beer isn't right. 1 felt like 1 could hear the gum rubbing against Jane's very white teeth.

"Do I have to pay now?"

1 said that because 1'd just realized that 1 didn't have enough fuel in my coin purse. And what did she do? She didn't say yes or no. She just stood there waiting. Then 1 noticed her breasts. Amazing, 1 admit. 1 closed my wallet and said, How much did you say it was, love?

Jane snorted, looked around as if she were searching for a friendlier client to do business with, and stared impatiently at me. Her voice was shaking with an anger 1 didn't deserve.

"Four thirty-five," the little whore said, smiling like a bishop's secretary.

"You told me four euros!" 1 yelled, shocked.

"So why did you ask me?"

A logical woman. 1 took a gulp of Voll Damm to try and repair my ego, which was a little damaged. Then 1 saw the damp tab and you know what it said, friends? Two eighty-five. Two euros and eighty-five cents, it said. It's infuriating, so infuriating that I can't think about it because it makes my heart pound.

"Here it says two eighty-five!" 1 said this objectively, sure that 1 was on the side of the angels. And so, buttressed by my strict sense of justice as a son of Hammurabi and Charles Lynch, 1 opened my wallet again, reached inside and left two puny euros on the table, to get back at her.

"Go fuck yourself," 1 said just as, finally, Barber was becoming history and some ancient nonexpert was trying to refresh our neurons with Jethro Tull. Jane-not because of Tull, because she was part of the immense majority who live without listening-froze her tongue, her lips, her teeth and her gum. After a few seconds she blew a pretty little dry bubble and popped it.

"Do you want me to call Pepus?"

I've never known anybody named Pepus. Well, now I do. But before meeting Jane, I didn't know anybody named Pepus. But it didn't seem right that she would say, Do you want me to call Pepus, as if everybody on earth knew who Pepus was. Back when I was in college, the way things worked was that if a woman who just popped her gum asked, Do you want me to call Pepus, you knew Pepus was a refrigerator with fists like hammers and a very short neck, fuse and hair. So, 1 decided to retreat, but 1 immediately wrote down the incident in my memory book and thought about the first letter to the Corinthians 5:2, when the Apostle to the Gentiles says that the Bosnians should be delivered to Satan for the perdition of their flesh. 1 took my wallet out of my pocket and left the biggest bill 1 had on the wettest part of the table.

"For your services," 1 blessed her.

Jane took the bill and disappeared without responding to my provocation, which shows that she really was as slutty as they come.

Let's see, let's see, the guy with the white hair who looks all worried and wants to run everything… Don't mess with me, because I… Oh… for the fourth and last time the guitars according to Saint Fripp, the most godly crim of all, the eternal crim, the essence, the DNA of Crimson, I said not to look over here. I don't know why they don't realize they're all in danger. My God, when people can't comprehend the movement of God they become animals in God's eyes, they're like beetles, or ants, poor things. Take a deep breath. Goodbye, man with white hair. And that's three, Quiquin. Now it looks like everybody's getting really nervous. It took them long enough.