I’ve left and returned a few times over the years — I don’t mean the village, but the bar; there have been periods when I’ve abandoned it entirely, but I’ve always come back in the end, to that stimulating daily journey, the one that pries me out of my solitude at the workshop in the evenings: down Calle de San Ramón where I live, along Calle del Carmen, Calle de la Paz, Paseo de la Constitución (formerly known as General Mola), and here I am — as on so many evenings for so many years — in Bar Castañer, my refuge: the protective gauze of cigarette smoke, which, today, like the snows of yesteryear, has vanished. You can’t smoke inside any more. Although, even after all these months of the smoking ban, the smell of nicotine that used to impregnate walls and tables may have gone, but other components of that comforting olfactory gauze linger on: the smell of old cooking oil, damp wool, sweaty vests and overalls, the smell of cheap beer and sour wine. All of these still allow me to recognize the place, to snuggle down in my nest and shuffle the cards. Lately, I’ve been coming almost every evening. Saying goodbye to all this was the dream of an empty-headed youth who ended up staying and who has, in the meantime, become a decrepit old man without ever passing through maturity. I think I was trying to avoid maturity, and there was the added attraction of getting away, of not thinking too much and leaving it to Time to resolve everything. The result: I have adorned my old age with bankruptcy, a little twist of angostura bitters to spice up my last drink. I’ll say goodbye before they put a name to the disease (because they’ve already detected it, this transmittable disease, to be kept at arm’s length), before they hang the leper’s bell around my neck. I’ll snatch victory from under their noses when they’ve already prepared the pyre, guns at the ready; leaving them without any prey in their sights. Screw them all. I finally feel able to say goodbye: burnt cooking oil coffee beer anis wine and damp wool. Goodbye to the overflowing ashtray outside the street door which we visit from time to time, stretching our legs and receiving, cigarette clamped firmly between our lips, a breath of clean winter air.
But Justino is speaking:
“At least he doesn’t have to spend money any more on radio ads or appear in the directors’ box at the soccer stadium or preside at their suppers along with the players and the powers-that-be paying homage to him, the generous builder of their new changing-room with its hot and cold showers, to the man who gave them the south stand. Right now, his creditors are providing him with an ad campaign gratis, for nothing. If he wanted to be talked about, he’s certainly succeeded, because he’s left an awful lot of people in the lurch: suppliers, clients who’ve paid for materials he’s never delivered, would-be owners of apartments who’ve put down a deposit they’re never going to recoup, not to mention paid for all the stuff that’s already installed in those unfinished buildings. No, he’s on the run, who knows where, to China or Brazil perhaps, to some more or less civilized place where there’s no extradition treaty.”
Francisco says:
“Given how few such places are left, things don’t look so good for our friend. I can’t see Pedrós plunging into darkest Africa armed with pistol, pith helmet and bug spray. He’s not exactly into extreme travel, as they say, he’s more your civilized, cosmopolitan, urban tourist, looking for a nice central hotel and some Cartier perfumes.”
Bernal adds:
“What with the Schengen Agreement and the mess the Swiss bankers have got into, it’s not so easy now to bury money, it’s really difficult to find a nice quiet resting-place, a mausoleum where your money can safely repose; and it’s even harder for the owner of the money to disappear. There must be places, of course, certainly for the money, gigantic black holes where by day you can stash the cash that races back and forth in the night: between drug traffickers, Arab sheikhs, financiers in London and New York, the owners of oil wells, the people who attend art auctions, because they’re the truly rich. If you yourself want to disappear, there’s always the Pitanguy option, one of those plastic surgery magicians who can change your face and even swap your fingerprints for those of some anonymous third world corpse who was never fingerprinted while alive, there must be hundreds of thousands of them.”
Justino clearly knows a lot about the subject: “Why, just down the road, a drug dealer got caught because he’d replaced the skin on his fingertips with the skin on the ends of his toes, just so that he could change the prints on his passport. I’m not making it up. It was in the newspapers.”