The dog talks, man, says Ahmed as he shows me the coat stand where he’s hung the leash, in the entrance hall of his apartment. What? I say. I’m telling you, man, the dog talks, he says again, I know you’ll think I’m crazy, but it’s the truth, man, the dog talks. I look at him with the sympathy of knowing that he’s not crazy (or not yet) and that his survival strategy (disconnecting from reality) might actually be healthier than mine (suffering a nervous breakdown). I guess Ahmed’s conversations with Viridiana must have been a sublimation of his fears, the schizophrenic expression of the threats from the lawyer. And what does she say? I say. I don’t know, man, he says, the dog speaks Catalan. I don’t understand Catalan, he says. Do you know any? he says. Some, I say, I can understand it well enough. That’s great, man, he says, so you can tell me what the dog says to you. Sure, I say. Are you going out now? he says. No, I say, later. Don’t take too long, he says, if you don’t take her out soon she’ll wet herself. Take her to the Rambla del Raval, she loves peeing on the paws of the fat cat sculpture. Botero’s cat? I ask. Whose? he says. Forget it, I say. Don’t take too long, he says again, if she pisses herself you’re cleaning it up, and careful with the rugs. Don’t worry, I say, I’m sure she’ll tell me when she’s got to go. Christ, man, he says, it’s true. I got to take some Catalan classes.
He opens the door to go out. I close it before he’s gone out. So look, I say. Why’ve you got to talk to this guy? I say. I’m referring to Laia’s father, who’s waiting for him in an office on Avenida Diagonal. It’s my job, says Ahmed. Are you a hacker? I say. You watch a lot of movies, man, he says. Is it you who cleans the cash? I say. What? he says. I’m asking if it’s you who launders the dough, I say. Don’t use that kind of language, man, he says. So it is you, I say. You don’t know who I am, man, he says, I went to Yale, man, I used to work in a bank, he says, you don’t know who I am. In a bank in Pakistan? I say. In London, he says. Is that where you met the lawyer? I say. The guy I know is the lawyer’s boss, he says, but I’m not going to talk to you about that, he says. It’s for your own safety. I look at his neatly trimmed little moustache, his wool sweater, his scarf, the rat-gray overcoat he still hasn’t put on, folded over his forearm. Only now do I think about how well dressed he always is (perceptiveness to fashion is always diminished in emergency situations). He bends down to pick up the green plastic bag with six cans of beer from the floor. Hey, man, I say, you’re dressed kind of fancy for someone who’s supposed to be selling beer on the street. Doesn’t matter, he says, people don’t look at your clothes, man, they look at your face. You don’t notice because you’re white, you’ve got blue eyes, it’s not till you open your mouth that people even realize you’re Mexican. I’m going, man, he says, it’s getting late. And will your work take long? I say. What? he says. I’m asking how long you’re going to be? I say, I’ve got things to do (I’m supposed to be reading an essay by Jung). I don’t know, he says, it’s not up to me, it depends on this guy. I really got to go, he says.
I go fetch the dog while Ahmed’s on his way out and I find her sprawled in the middle of the living room, dozing. I take the opportunity to have a look around. It is, very evidently, one of those apartments on short-term rental, furnished, decorated in the standardized taste of the petit bourgeoisie. The pictures are a reminder that this city is still the capital of the Informalists. I find three, four laptop computers in drawers (two), closets (one) and backpacks (one). I turn them on but they immediately ask for a password. I put them back where I found them.
There’s nothing unusual to be discovered in the apartment, it’s just as you’d expect: a place for a businessman who’s passing through, working in the city for a few days. In my pants pocket, my cell vibrates. I make an automatic association: right pocket, social cell phone. I pull it out. It’s Laia. Hi Mexicano, she says, have you got plans for this afternoon? I tell her I don’t have anything special on, but that I should get to work on some stuff for the doctorate. I need to ask you a favor, she says. I ask her what, by means of a protracted silence that she doesn’t understand. Are you there, Mexicano? she says. Yes, I say, tell me, tell me. I’ve got to go to my uncle’s place and I don’t want to go alone, she says. It’s a weird situation. Now it’s her who falls silent. Because? I say. We haven’t heard from him in days, she says, he’s, she says, and she pauses, he’s kind of a bit disappeared. I wait for her to say something more, but she says nothing, it’s my turn. Maybe he’s gone on vacation, I say, just to say something. No, she says, he’d have told us, and also he didn’t bring gifts. What gifts? I say. Happy Epiphany, Mexicano, she says. And does he not have a family? I ask. We’re his family, she says. His own, I mean, I say. He’s not married, she says, will you go with me? Where? I say. I don’t understand? To his flat, she says, my mom’s managed to get the key from the building manager but she didn’t dare go in. Another pause, a longer one this time, enough for the image of a decomposing body to establish itself between us. Why’s she calling me? I think. Why doesn’t her dad go or one of the domestic staff? Instead I ask her if her uncle’s very old. Not really, she says, he’s seventy-two. Will you go with me? she asks again. Isn’t there anyone else who can go? I say. I want to go myself, says Laia, emphatic. My uncle and me, we’re super-close. In the living room, Viridiana is whining. I cover the microphone on the cell phone. Forget it, says Laia, I shouldn’t have asked you the favor. What time? I say. At five, she says. I’ll see you at the corner of Còrsega and Enric Granados.
I walk over to the coat stand to fetch the leash, a leash with the Barça colors and crest. Let’s go, I say, poking my head into the living room, with the front door already open. The dog gets up, lazily. She allows the leash to be put on her, uncomplaining. Do you know what it is Ahmed does? I say. I repeat the question in Catalan, in what I think is Catalan, in broken Catalan. But the dog doesn’t answer.
It’s this one, says Laia, stopping outside a yellow building. On the top floor there’s a relief of modernist flowers. At the mezzanine level, a balcony with Doric columns. I know this building, I know it very well, so well that suddenly my heart is in my throat and I feel the rashes rising one by one to announce their itching torture. Are you sure? I nearly say, but I don’t say it, because I’m sure of what’s going to happen, all of a sudden I understand everything, that when I ask her which apartment her uncle lives in, she’ll answer Penthouse A.
So like, I say, which apartment does your uncle live in? Laia puts the key into the lock of the wrought iron and glass door, which also has modernist details on it. Oh man, she says, you’ve become covered in rashes in like a second! she says, and she holds the door half-open without going in, to look at me in the fading light of the winter evening. Are you not well? she says. It’s my bastard allergy, I say, my motherfucking bastard allergy, to be precise. Why’s it happening now? she says. What are you feeling? Like I’m suffocating, I say, like I can’t breathe, it’s a feeling that makes me real anxious. It looks like a panic attack, she says, don’t you maybe have dermatitis nervosa? It’s an allergy, I say, pressing toward her to make her go inside (let’s just get this over with), it’s a bit like asthma, I say, the allergist explained it all to me, I lie. You’ve already been to the allergist? she says, pushing the door and finally stepping into the building, and while we walk to the elevator, call it and wait for it to come down from the third floor I explain that I got an emergency appointment to ask for something for the itching and by pure chance there happened to be an allergist on duty. An allergist at the community health center?! says Laia, outraged. So like, no, I say, like, no, I try to correct my lie, I try to breathe normally, I went to a private clinic, I’ve got insurance with my scholarship (as in literature, a small insignificant truth in the middle of a whole heap of lies creates an illusion of reality). Still, it’s weird, isn’t it? says Laia. Neus is allergic and when my mother tries to get her to an allergist they give her an appointment for like two or three weeks later, at least. Well, I don’t know, I say, seems like it might be low season now, I say, as if allergies were hotels or cruises. What? says Laia. Yeah, I say, it’s just that allergies are at their worst when the seasons are changing, so like, specially in spring (I read this on the internet). Well, you’d best take care, Mexicano, she says, running her hand over the back of my neck, if you’re already like this in winter, just think what you’ll be like in spring. I might not even make it to spring, I say, as if joking, but serious. Don’t be such a moron, Mexicano, says Laia.
The elevator arrives, we get in, and Laia does indeed press the button for the penthouse. I don’t even bother asking her again which apartment we’re headed for. The elevator climbs slowly, with a stateliness well suited to the bourgeois solidity of the building. I use these moments to try to calm myself. I close my eyes and breathe normally, the way I imagine people breathe normally, if I can even still remember what normal’s like. Laia puts her hand on the back of my neck again, she says nothing, instead of saying anything she gives me a gentle squeeze with her fingers, respecting the silence.
I need to calm myself down. What could possibly happen now? Nothing. Nothing. I breathe normally, apparently normally. Nothing. Nothing’s going to happen now, no cause for alarm. Laia’s uncle’s corpse isn’t going to be rotting in his bed, and we aren’t going to find him bleeding to death in the bathtub, as Laia and her mother must be fearing, though they don’t dare admit it. This I’m sure of, I couldn’t be surer: Laia’s uncle’s corpse was taken away by Chucky right after I fired three shots into it. Two in the chest. One in the neck. How else to explain that we’re now at the same address, Enric Granados 98, that’s registered on the dog’s microchip?
But nothing’s going to happen now, no, I breathe with all the normality of someone still totally panicking, just like nothing happened yesterday either when I spent a while watching the building, seeing the neighbors come in and out and imagining how that one there might be the detective’s wife, that one his teenage son, her the maid. And if there wasn’t a police car yesterday or any strange movement to worry about, and there was nothing of the kind on our arrival now either, nor would there be later when we leave, because what we’re going to find is an empty apartment, suspended in its curtailed everyday-ness, like the house of somebody who’s just run down to buy cigarettes and never come back (if Laia’s uncle did in fact smoke), the way people do in the suburbs in North American novels.
The elevator reaches the penthouse. Are you feeling better? asks Laia, stopping her massage and taking her hand from my neck. She pushes the elevator door and walks falteringly toward the right, toward the door to apartment A, hesitating out of nervousness, not indecisiveness. Yes, I say, it’s passing now, I say, as if making a wish. You really don’t smell anything, right, Juan? says Laia, scared. It’s the first time she calls me Juan, like my mother, it’s the first time I’ve seen her acting like a little girl. If I didn’t know that she really was scared I’d think she was a terrible actress. Your uncle’s gone on vacation, I say, you’ll see, we’re going to go in and not find anything. Whenever he goes away he always tells my mother, she says. Besides, he’s got a dog, when he goes on vacation he leaves her with us. He must have hooked up with some girl and set himself up in her place for a few days, I say. My uncle’s gay, she says. Oh, I say, well then a guy. She passes the keys from hand to hand, hesitating.
Could you go in first? says Laia. If you don’t find anything, you can tell me. OK? Please. I answer yes. Laia opens the door and takes two steps back, three steps, as if a long-dreaded truth was about to pounce on her and flatten her. I push the door and immediately feel a suspicion gnawing at the pit of my stomach. I turn to Laia. So like, I say, so wait for me here, I’ll tell you, and I shut the door.
I walk across the entrance hall, where several overcoats are hanging from the coat stand. As I cross the living room I kick something that wets the ankle of my right sock: a plastic bowl of water. Next to it there’s another container with kibble. Two of the walls have floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with books, my instinct wants me to stop to take a look at them (a bad habit of mine), but I don’t. I go all the way around the apartment, frantic, jumpy, hysterical, on the verge of a respiratory and dermatological breakdown, and paranoid, but I find nothing, however paranoid I may be my paranoia doesn’t manage to produce a piece of proof or evidence to incriminate me. I go around the whole apartment one more time, and another, checking there’s nothing that might compromise me, I go through the drawers of the desk in the study, in the chest of drawers in the master bedroom and in the guest room, I even inspect the larder, the drawers with the cleaning products, then finally I return to the front door, recover my breath and open it.
Laia’s sitting on the floor of the landing, in tears. I told you, I say, nothing’s happened. I told you, I say, there’s nothing wrong. You’re such an idiot, she says, sobbing, you’re such an idiot. You took ages. So like, I’m sorry, I say, I wanted to check the place properly. Last time I saw him we had an argument, she says. I don’t want my uncle to die, she says. He’s the only person in the world who’s always supported me, she says. He isn’t going to die, I say. You promise? she says, and sniffs, breathes in hard and then out again, to try to regain her composure.
The sound of her cell phone rescues me from making a false promise. Laia looks at the little screen and tells me it’s her mother. She answers. Don’t worry, Mamá, she says, in Catalan. He’s not in the flat. Yes, she says. I’m going to do that now. I’ll call you later. She holds out her right hand for me to help her up, I pull her and when she’s on her feet she hugs me. Thank you, Mexicano, she whispers in my ear. I’ve got to admit, it is nice feeling protected, she says (could this be one of the findings of her research? The confirmation of a hypothesis?). She moves away. She takes a piece of toilet paper from her bag and blows her nose. All that militant feminism, she says, laughing sadly, only to end up as a helpless little girl in the arms of a manly Mexican (I like the idea of this phrase as the subtitle of her thesis). Let’s go inside, she says. Maybe we’ll find something to explain where my uncle is.
I push the door, let Laia go in and then follow her respectfully, or feigning respect, or caution, at least: the care of the guilty. What does your uncle do? I say, when I again see the hundreds of books in the living room. Nothing, says Laia. He lives off his rental income. Oh, I say. My mother’s family is loaded, she says. Or rather, it was. Look, she says, picking up a photo frame from on top of a display cabinet, that’s him. I take the photo and nod, recognizing the protagonist of my nightmares, some ten years younger. And that’s his dog, she says, showing me another photo. What’s his name? I say, realizing I ought to ask. Pedro, she says, didn’t I tell you? He changed his name to Pere after Franco, on his ID card, on his papers, but everyone went on calling him Pedro. I meant the dog, I say, I saw your uncle’s name written on the gas bill that’s on the desk in the office, I say (I don’t say, of course, that that was where I saw it for the second time, or that the first time it had been written on a document from the Veterinary College). Sorry, I say, as if that intrusion were the worst of my sins. No problem, she says. She’s called Viridiana.
Laia wanders around the living room and stops to look in an address book. Then she goes into the master bedroom, then the guest bedroom, the study, and glances into each of the bathrooms. Meanwhile I fake an interest in the library (that’s something I do know how to do). He’s got good taste, your uncle, I tell Laia when she comes back to the living room (it looks like the western canon, with Mexican literature represented only by the most obvious things: the two Rulfo books, Paz’s poetry and a handful of Fuentes novels, the worst of them all, curiously). I’m not sure he’s read all that, she says. I pull out four books at random: three of them are new, one has definite signs of having been read. I don’t see anything strange, says Laia, half-opening a drawer. You? she says. I don’t know, I say, like, I don’t think so. Look, she says, and she points at the little puddle of water that spilled from the dog’s bowl. That was me, I say, I tripped. No, she says, the food. What about it? I say, looking at the bowl half full of kibble. Laia’s cell phone rings again.
Hi Mamá, says Laia. No, she says in Catalan, nothing. It’s like he just went down to walk the dog or buy the paper and didn’t come back, she says (he clearly doesn’t smoke or she would have said that inevitable thing about his having just run out to buy cigarettes). We’ve got to notify the police, says Laia. Yes, she says. Yes, she says. Tell Papá, she says.
The master bedroom has a balcony, fifteen square meters, that seems to float over the Mediterranean. But it only seems so – in reality the Mediterranean is just eight meters away (or at least that’s what’s promised by the large advertisements at the front of the building). The lawyer stares straight out at the beach, his back to the empty apartment. I thought we’d be alone, I say, when I discover the Chinaman sitting in a corner, smoking, and two other people, both ethnically undifferentiated, roaming around the apartment pretending to be deep in their pretend thoughts. To judge by their outfits, they’re liberal professionals. One of them is holding a folder crammed with documents and another is tapping into a tiny little phone. The lawyer turns around to address the guy with the folder. Write that down, too, he says. The one with the folder opens up the folder and rummages among the papers. Man, says the Chinaman to me, you’re worse every time I see you. I’m going to talk to my grandmother to get her to give you an appointment. I tell him there’s no need. What do you mean, no need? he answers. You look like you’ve got mange. Wait here for me while I talk to this asshole, says the lawyer. He crosses the apartment toward the exit and I follow him.
We climb the building’s marble staircase in silence to the upper floor, we go into another apartment identical to the previous one, and identically empty. The door is wide open, though, and once we’ve stepped through the lawyer shuts it behind us.
The detective was Laia’s uncle, I say, immediately, following the lawyer as he walks across the entrance hall, the living room, the master bedroom and out onto the balcony. He wasn’t a detective, I mean, I say, he was Laia’s uncle, her mother’s brother. Why’d you call me, asshole? says the lawyer, resting his elbows on the guardrail, adopting the same contemplative position he’d taken in the apartment downstairs. Was that the totally urgent thing you couldn’t tell me on the phone? he says. You could have saved yourself the trip, there’s nothing to see in this shithole town. How did you get here? he says. So like, by train, I say, recalling the forty-minute journey from Plaza Cataluña station on the line that runs up Maresme. To the building, asshole, says the lawyer. Don’t tell me you took a cab at the station. No, I lie, I walked. Sure about that? he says. It’s a long way. Sure, I say, lying again. Every motherfucker’s the same, says the lawyer, looking away at the row of buildings running along the coast. I think he’s about to say that everybody lies, like a jilted bride, but he’s actually already changed the subject: I don’t know why the fuck people like the beach so much, he says. It’s the most uncomfortable thing in the world, getting sand everywhere, smeared in suntan lotion. People are serious assholes. When I lived in Cancún I had it up to here with them, there’s no worse race on the planet than tourists on a beach. Worse still if they’re foreign.
He was Laia’s uncle, I say again, interrupting this sociological digression, returning to the subject that made me, yet again, suspend for this latest emergency the plan I had for the evening (rereading Albert Cohen’s Les Valeureux and underlining all the passages that allowed me to relate it to the idea of laughter as a sign of superiority from Baudelaire’s essay on the comic). The lawyer turns his head to look at me. He was her uncle, I insist. You think I didn’t know that, asshole? he says. You think I’m such an asshole to ask an asshole to kill another asshole without knowing who he is? You think I didn’t know the asshole was Laia’s fag uncle? You told me Laia’s family had hired him, I say. I told you Laia’s family had sent him, he says, not that they’d hired him. But I was wrong. Poor old bastard had started following you of his own accord, fucking unemployed people are just the worst. Or at least that’s what he told Chucky, this fucking European middle class, they can’t bear anything, a couple little knocks on the nuts and out pours the whole story. About how Laia had talked to him about you and it’d all seemed real suspicious. How his lesbian niece suddenly came out with this crap about some asshole she was dating. A fucking Mexican immigrant, on top of it. They were real close, you know, they were the family weirdos. You know why he started following you? he says. I say nothing. Or rather, I say that he should tell me by raising my eyebrows. Because he thought you were a hustler, that you wanted to take advantage of the family’s money, her father’s political influence, that you were going to use her to get yourself some papers. He was real prejudiced against immigrants, the son of a bitch. I’m going to tell you a secret, he says, but you aren’t going to tell your little girlfriend: we’ve still got hold of his ears and fingers. What? I say. Chucky cut them off before getting rid of the corpse, asshole, he says. We’re keeping them in the freezer of a Chinese restaurant. If Laia’s father starts being an asshole, we send him one of his brother-in-law’s ears. If he rebels, we send him a thumb. If he disobeys us, we send him the ring finger, for him to stick it up his ass. The serene tone with which he’s describing these atrocities is giving me a troubling sense of calm, which is what I suspect the terminally ill feel when they’re told they’re in the hands of the greatest specialist in the world. We were about to send him an ear to stop him making such a fucking noise about the initial capital of the project, says the lawyer. Just as well Ahmed managed to persuade him, I wouldn’t have wanted to have to spend one of our ears so early on. He’s a genius that fucking fag, he says, you really think I’d have let him keep the bitch if he wasn’t a fucking genius? And he’s as patient as an elementary school teacher, he had to explain to him how you do divisions and how you calculate percentages. Persuading him that 3 percent of a hundred and thirty is better than 3 percent of fifteen. That asshole Oriol gets scared because he’s Catalan and Catalans are naturally pessimistic. We’re giving him the opportunity of a lifetime, if he makes the most of it he could end up as a minister, or president of the autonomous government, if that’s what he wants, or rather if that’s what we want, and instead of seeing things like that the asshole starts imagining they’re going to put him in prison. You know what Catalans think when Barça’s five–nil up? That the other guys are about to bring them to a draw.
And what if they notify the police? I say. So like, they must have told the police about the disappearance already, I say, but the lawyer interrupts me: They’re not going to tell the police yet, he says. He gives a rhetorical pause, then smiles, amused. His teeth are perfectly aligned and natural, without the fixes that are so obvious in the smiles of the nouveaux riches. That fucker Chucky has been sending the asshole Oriol messages from his cell phone, he says. From Pere’s cell phone, or Pedro’s, or whatever he’s fucking called. Total garbage. He laughs, somewhat unenthusiastically, as if he’s just been told a joke that’s a very good one but super-well known, one of those puns that an average Mexican will repeat twenty thousand times in his lifetime. About how he’s shut up in an orgy in Sitges, he says. An orgy with Brazilian transvestites. That Chucky’s such a dick, he laughs. Laia’s father hasn’t said anything, I say, Laia doesn’t know anything about this. Oh, really? he says. Why do you think that would be? Seems to me fucking Oriol’s canoe has also sprung a leak. Those Opus types always turn out to be the real crazies. Forget about Laia’s uncle, it’s all under control.
He straightens up and stretches his back, turning his head that way and this, then up and down, he puts his right hand over his shoulder and links it with his left behind his back. I should go to yoga, he says. It’s just with all this fucking traveling I can’t, damn it, he says. He takes off his dark glasses and starts to wipe them clean.
I’ve talked to Riquer, he says. He turns around and leans on the guardrail with his back to the seascape. It’s the first time I’ve seen his eyes: his eyes are the color of coffee, quite ordinary. To who? I say. To the head of the Mossos, asshole, he says, do I have to keep telling you the same things over and over? They’ve found the Italian, he says. They found him with Valentina. What? I say. He’s a lawyer from Milan with a record of minor offenses that look like an alibi to hide something else, he says. I told you, he says, you shouldn’t have let Valentina go. He finishes cleaning his glasses and puts them back on. I told you, he says again.
The mention of Valentina’s name distracts me from the explanation, and though the lawyer keeps talking I only take in isolated fragments of what he says: squatter, Plaza del Sol, plane ticket, another Italian called Gabriele. How come Valentina’s with the Italian? I say, when I manage to return from my astonishment. Fuck’s sake, says the lawyer, don’t you understand what I’m telling you? I don’t say anything, because I don’t understand anything. Those Italians are trying to take our project away from us, fuck’s sake! he says. It doesn’t surprise me, he says, but what we’ve got to find out is how Valentina fits into all this. What Italians? I say. The Italians from Italy, asshole, he says, which ones do you think? Valentina’s real smart, not like you. I told you, he says, you shouldn’t have let Valentina go. I told you, he says.
I’m dumbfounded, looking without looking at the Mediterranean, contemplating the ludicrous suggestion that Valentina has been recruited by the Italian Mafia. Or that my cousin could have involved her in this in some other way. Answer me, asshole! shouts the lawyer. I don’t know what he’s talking about. What? I say. Can you not hear me? he says. I say nothing. I’m asking what you’ve heard from Valentina, asshole, he says, and don’t make me ask again. So like, nothing, I say, I haven’t seen her since she left the apartment. His mouth twists into a grimace, annoyed, really annoyed. I never wanted it to come to this, he says. I like people who come up from below. But there’s no other way around it. You shouldn’t have let Valentina go, he says. I told you.