Barcelona Tales by Helen Constantine & Peter Bush

Author:Helen Constantine & Peter Bush [Constantine, Helen & Bush, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192519290
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2019-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

4

Juanito Marés drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and looked out. The wind had stopped but the clouds were rushing in packs across the gloomy sky, and the evening gleamed a clay-red, as if it were about to rain mud.

‘Which way did the taxi go?’

‘Up,’ I said, ‘Plaza Lesseps.’

‘OK.’ Maré looked for David’s face in the rearview mirror. ‘Your turn now, David. Tell us it as it was.’

David cleared his throat before deciding to speak. He stared at me. He started his report with a statement that surprised me: ‘The man I followed was following you when you were following that lady. Nervy and intrigued, he added: ‘He walked past here just after you’d gone after her, and the boss gave me my orders: follow that man. The guy trailed you as far as the Bar Monumental. He stopped when you stopped, he waited for you when there was the encounter with Charles Lafiton, he changed pavement when you did. The whole lot.’

‘Crikey!’

‘And he always kept the same distance, about twenty metres.’

‘Fantastic! But you’re inventing all this, David.’

‘Jaime saw it too. He’ll say if I’m lying.’

The boss didn’t open his mouth. We looked at him, awaiting his verdict. He only said: ‘Describe him.’

‘Smallish, a bit of a big head, medium to small build, around thirty-five, black, flattened hair, with a centre parting and a paper-white face, made up, old-fashioned and charming as if he used rouge and brilliantine, as if one day he’d been the bee’s knees, high society and rich, or very loved and happy, far from here, in another district and another era. From close-up you see the pallor of his face comes from rice-powder makeup, and his thin, black lips look like painted wooden lips. He’s carrying a lady’s umbrella with an ivory handle inset with silver and precious stones, though one spoke is broken, and is wearing a black overcoat over striped pyjamas and felt house slippers, as if he’d just left a theatre stage to buy a newspaper on the street corner.’

‘When you went into the Monumental,’ David went on, ‘he stood there on the pavement, closed his umbrella and I thought he’d go in too. But he didn’t. He stayed there like a statue, staring at the door.

‘By his side, at the top of an alley, a young layabout with an aviator’s or biker’s glasses on his forehead and a shabby military blanket over his shoulders slips slowly by, his back against a lamp post and then collapses onto the ground, hands in pockets, smiling at passers-by. They put him up against the wall and hit him, but he doesn’t react: he keeps his eyes open and his hands in his trouser pockets, as if he was fine, on top of the world, but doesn’t react.

‘The man with the make-up and pyjamas under an overcoat ignored everything around him, had eyes only for the bar-door,’ said David. ‘He suddenly went up to the door and his mug hit the glass.

‘He kept his nose stuck up against the glass for a while, and when he moved away, he looked like a changed person.

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