‘Wait a minute. I’ll be with you right away and we can go.’
Carvalho appreciated the way she was as good as her word. Charo would have taken twenty times as long, always finding new things she had to do before she could fulfil that ‘right away’. But Teresa was ready in no time, and the only surprise she gave Carvalho was when she took off her blonde
Angela Davis wig. Her own hair was an attractive auburn. She combed it through with a couple of expert strokes then turned to Carvalho, all set for adventure. Stripped of the caricature of curls, Teresa once more became a daughter of the upper middle classes, her features sculptured by healthy eating and proper hygiene. She had the relaxed, self-confident look of a high-wire acrobat who knows they are working with a safety net. Charo by contrast had never had a safety net, and occasionally Carvalho caught the cruel, trapped look on her face of someone who would kill to defend herself, or was frightened of a fall. Working-class faces seem to be as stiff as caryatids: either laughter or tears. Teresa’s face conveyed a sense of calm that was logical in anyone who knew they could survive anywhere and at any time.
Teresa was carrying a beach bag in one hand, and pulled Pepe along with the other. They decided to take his car.
‘Which beach should we go to? There’s always wind at Castelldefels and Garraf.’
‘Let’s head north. What about Caldetas?’
Teresa had suggested it without Carvalho even having to intervene. They drove in silence because she seemed interested only in listening to the radio or a cassette. Whenever a song she liked came on the radio, she leaned back in her seat, closed her eyes and folded her arms behind her head. This gave Carvalho the chance to study the flat contours of her body, for once more evident under her tunic. But what he liked about Teresa was her attitude, a capacity for lovemaking that was obvious from the nonchalant way she played the game, a theatrical
savoir faire
which she would doubtless know how to adapt to any situation.
‘We’re there.’
She seemed to wake up. Without hesitation, she lifted her tunic over her head and sat there in her bikini. Carvalho
looked her body up and down appreciatively. The second time he was moving up from her ankles, her eyes met his. She was smiling.
‘
Pas mal
?’
‘
Pas mal
.’
She burst out laughing, touched him on the arm and for a split second leant her cheek on his shoulder. The car headed down towards the centre of Caldetas, aiming for the passageway under the railway line. The rows of villas looked as if they came straight out of a history of modern architecture in Catalonia, and gave the impression that the resort offered more as a living museum than as somewhere suitable for a swim. The sight of all the turn-of-the-century houses, many of them run down and dark, led Carvalho to think that when they reached the beach they would stumble on a scene of belle époque bathers sitting under parasols in their long bathing costumes, engaged in polite conversation with remarks such as:
‘What a beautiful morning it is.’
But when they got to the beach and lay down with their backs to the town, Caldetas was just like any other Costa Brava beach, with unspectacular sand full of people trying to get away from the polluted beaches of Barcelona. Whereas to the south of the city you could find Charo’s friends busy tanning their merchandise and swarthy Romeos in the briefest of swimwear, the northern beaches like this one attracted middle-class women who could not get enough of the sun, surrounded by children who all of a sudden would rush off shouting ‘Papa! Papa!’ when the head of the family appeared, having successfully made his escape from his arduous duties back in the city.
Teresa plunged into the sea with the ease of someone who has the habit of swimming and knows she can do a
perfect breaststroke. Carvalho lay on the sand with his hands behind his head. He watched as Teresa ploughed up and down, then headed back towards the shore in a perfect straight line. She ran up the beach shaking herself to get rid of the water streaming down her, then flung herself down next to Carvalho on the towel waiting for her on the sand like a rectangular parking space.
Carvalho did not like lying in the sun like a lizard, but Teresa showed that her body thermostat was the same as that of all other women, cold-blooded creatures who need the sun and are capable of soaking up its rays with the beatific expression of someone taking communion, or even the ecstatic look of a mystic surrendering to the godhead. Teresa’s face beamed ecstatically. It was more than Carvalho could bear, so he decided to go for a swim, even though he had no great wish to. He realised his nose was blocked, and immediately linked it to having spent most of the previous night out in the cold air, and his craving for orange juice when he had woken up that morning. Despite this, he dived in and swam for five minutes so that he could somehow identify with Teresa and flop down beside her again with a sense of shared pleasure.
‘I
’m hungry,’ she said, and for once did not add the feared: ‘Let’s go and eat any old thing’. ‘We could have lunch in a restaurant. There must be some good ones here. When I used to spend the summer in Caldetas with my parents we sometimes used to go to one on the promenade. I don’t know if it’s still there. Or we could have sausages and beer. That would save time, and I could show you our house.’
Carvalho felt something flutter inside his chest. To avoid stumbling over the words, he said nothing. They dried themselves and went back to his car. Carvalho kept guard outside while she got changed. She put her tunic on and took off her wet things underneath. Then she carefully dried between her legs. Carvalho wrapped his towel round his waist, let his trunks fall to the ground, and sat inside the car. He dressed quickly, trying to avoid anyone passing by and catching him unawares.
‘We could walk. It’s right here. Then we could pick up the car to go to the house.’
They walked hand in hand up to the promenade. The sausage stall was surrounded by a crowd of bathers and others who had returned to more conventional attire, all of them attracted by the smell of sausages on the grill. Carvalho was pleased to see that the choice was not limited to the tyranny of the frankfurter, but that there were also smoked
sausages cooking. He was afraid Teresa might submit their stomachs to the indoctrination of the frankfurter, so he quickly suggested:
‘Why don’t we have some of the smoked sausages?’
‘I’ve never tried them. Are they the white ones over there?’
‘No, but the white ones are good as well. We could eat one smoked sausage and one of the white ones if you like.’
‘No frankfurters?’
It seemed as though Teresa’s stomach would be lost without them, so Carvalho relented:
‘All right, have a frankfurter, but try a smoked sausage as well.’
Carvalho smeared his sausages with ketchup. Teresa opted for the tried-and-tested mustard. The draught beer was surprisingly good, and Pepe was taken aback to find that after the smoked sausage and a frankfurter he still had room for a hot dog with mustard.
‘It was excellent. There’s only one place in Barcelona that can copy German sausages as well as this.’
‘Which place is that?’
Carvalho gave her the details and how to get there. Teresa looked interested and amused. Then they walked back to the car and drove until they came to the iron gates at the entrance to her family villa. She got out to undo the padlock linking the two sides. She opened it wide, and Carvalho found himself confronted by a gravel drive that looped round two sides of a planted border chiefly occupied by several dwarf palm trees. He turned down the right-hand side and drove slowly past untended hedges and straggly oleander bushes that pushed weakly against the windshield of his car. Behind the bushes were cement walls encrusted with pieces of coloured tile, and there were more pots in a similar style that
boasted huge tangles of geraniums. The drive ended in front of the main entrance to the house. The huge villa built in almost purple stone was topped off by ornate pointed turrets that were decorated with more brightly coloured shards of glass tile.
Mosaic steps led up to a triple-arched door excavated in the mass of purplish sandstone, which glittered with thousand of crystals and more bits of tile set in the walls like precious stones. Teresa came panting up behind Carvalho.
‘Why didn’t you wait for me?’
She opened the middle arch of the door and Carvalho found himself in a grand hallway. The dampness inside was almost solid, pierced here and there like a Gruyère cheese by the coloured rays of sunlight streaming in through the cracked stained-glass windows. They showed scenes from the arts and crafts of medieval and Renaissance Catalonia. Neo-Gothic columns were prominent in the high walls, interrupted every so often by stucco bas-reliefs painted in what must once have been a shiny brown. At the start of the coffee-coloured marble balustrade a faded plaster San Jorge was raising his lance above the head of a twisting, sullen-looking lizard-cum-dragon. Set high in the wall at the far end of the hall was a small rose window, where the Catalan flag concentrated the gaze in an intentional effort to exalt the power and the glory of a bourgeoisie in its creative and productive prime.
‘I can’t possibly show you all of it. There are some rooms I haven’t seen since I was a child. They’re locked anyway. When we all came for our holidays we used to have four maids.’
To one side of the staircase was the library. It was lined with wooden bookshelves, while the ceiling was made of wooden stalactites hanging down like a fairy-tale forest. Every inch of the walls was crammed with books. They went
into the living room next door, where lumpy armchairs seemed to be waiting for a fire to miraculously spring up in the grey granite hearth, meant to be a faithful copy of the ones in the ancient farmhouses of the Catalan countryside. Carvalho stooped to examine the chimney: no sign of any inferior wood ever being burned there in the past five hundred years at least, he decided indignantly. From the living room they passed into the dining room, as majestic as the boardroom of an English bank, decorated according to the precepts of William Morris, although its neo-Gothic splendour seemed at odds with the four Sunyer paintings hanging from the walls. Peasants for the posh, thought Carvalho. A narrow passageway connected the dining room to the kitchens, which still had the rancid smell of age-old stew. The kitchen was badly laid out, with sets of battered saucepans hanging from the walls and coke-burning stoves with doors that had buckled from the heat.
Another passageway led out of the other side of the kitchen. Halfway along it, a set of steps went down to the wine-cellar basement. At the end of the corridor, they were back in the entrance hall.
‘The bedrooms are upstairs.’
Teresa took the stairs two at a time. Carvalho followed in her wake, and they soon arrived at the embossed wooden doors of the main bedroom. A high Gothic-looking four-poster bed. A neoclassical dressing table with a tilting mirror. A mahogany chest of drawers with flowery scrolls and a marble top with blackened cracks on it. At first, Carvalho did not notice the painting above the chest of drawers facing the bed. It was only when Teresa took him by the hand and pulled him over to the wooden platform around the four-poster that he paid it any real attention. As he fell on to it and began to get serious with Teresa he looked round the
room one last time and was struck by the painting’s livid, almost phosphorescent colours. It was an example of the classic moral painting that the pious Catalan bourgeoisie hung in their bedrooms to help them avoid the temptation of wanting more contact than the slit in their wife’s nightgown or even, God forbid! the acting out of something they had only heard of in a smutty joke. The painting represented the biblical scene of Lucifer’s revolt. The fallen angel appeared in the bottom right-hand corner of the canvas, about to begin his descent down a mysterious staircase to avoid the deadly threat of the archangel Michael’s broadsword.
‘Born to raise hell in hell,’ thought Carvalho, just as he sensed Teresa’s warm skin calling out to him and felt her hand wriggling like a cool dove beneath his shirt.
‘W
e should be getting back. You have to pick up your boy.’
‘His father’s collecting him today. It’s his granny’s birthday and he’s going there for tea.’
She said the word ‘granny’ with heavy sarcasm. Carvalho had curled up against her body under a yellowing sheet. From that position all he could see was the silk pouch of the four-poster canopy above his head or the painting of Lucifer, neatly framed in between the two posts at the foot of the bed.
‘Did Julio spend many hours in this bed?’
‘Quite a few. Why?’
‘Look.’
Teresa raised her body and turned to gaze at the picture.
‘I didn’t remember that was there,’ she said, lying down again a bit farther away from Carvalho. ‘Do you always spend your time in bed talking about people who have been there before you?’
‘We don’t have that much in common to talk about.’
‘If that’s how you feel, ask away. I’m an open book.’
‘Did he talk to you about his tattoo?’
‘When I saw it I couldn’t stop laughing. I asked him to get rid of it. He wouldn’t hear of it.’
‘You met when he came back from Holland two years ago. How long did your relationship last?’
‘Not long, four or five months. After that we saw each other occasionally until a few months ago.’
‘Did he ask you for the key to here a lot?’
‘At first, yes. Then I told him to get come copies cut and have done with it.’
‘Did you never visit here at the same time?’
‘Yes. Once. I didn’t want to tell you the other night because you frightened me. It was seven or eight months ago. In January, I think. I came with a member of the Persian royal family. Yes, that’s right. A third cousin of the shah. He wrote to me because he has a store selling hippy stuff. I could tell someone was here because the garden gate was open. But there are lots of bedrooms in the house. I consulted his royal highness, and although at first he was put out, he agreed anyway. We came in and went to another room at the far end of this floor. I was dying of curiosity, so I sneaked back here. I opened the door as quietly as I could. Julio was on the bed, and looked as though he was fast asleep. Next to him lay an older woman. Well, not that old really: she must have been around forty. She wasn’t asleep. She seemed to be staring from the bed out of the window. The shutters were slightly open and she was staring at the sky.’