Slamming down an ace of clubs on the table, Francisco, who has never liked Pedrós — perhaps because he feels that, in the bar and in local society, Pedrós is stealing some of the limelight he doesn’t want to share with anyone — completes our piratical Lecter’s thought (strange times make for strange bedfellows):
“Yes, the local radio and TV ads — the soccer club director, the local events committee chairman. Sheer greed. The man’s a glutton; he’s tried to shove all the spoons in his mouth at once. At Chinese feasts, they put all the different dishes on the table, serve them up at the same time, but you take a little from each dish on the lazy Susan in the middle, a bit like a roulette wheel, except that you decide where the wheel should stop. You don’t put everything in your mouth at one time. The hardware store, the electronics store, the real estate business, the shares in the waste management company and the water treatment plant: that man has, or had, more departments than one of the giant superstores.”
“Yes — using what he calls synergies (in the language of the big multinationals) to make his way on every front — with his taste for bossing people around, showing off, and cutting a prominent figure in society — add that up and you get a very explosive mix, ready to go off at any moment: envy is a very dangerous thing. If someone sticks his head above the parapet, everyone wants to chop it off; if someone’s winning the marathon, there’s always some spectator ready to stick out a leg and trip him up. What can you do, if that’s how the good Lord or nature made us? People can’t bear to see anyone rising to the top. The more relationships you maintain and the more friends you seek, the more enemies you acquire and the more threads you weave in to your own failure. I don’t know if he was hoping to become mayor or deputy. There isn’t a councilor he hasn’t had in his pocket, who he hasn’t done favors for: invited to suppers, presented with crates of champagne, anointed with money from some business deal or other, or taken to a brothel or sent on a cruise. That’s all very well day-to-day, but in the end, it just evaporates. The councilor doesn’t get re-elected or another associate with more possibilities turns up and then that’s all wasted time and money and you ask yourself: what was it all for? Feast or famine,” concludes Bernal, who’s always been jealous of Pedrós.
Justino disagrees, even though Francisco and Bernal have basically been saying more or less what he said. He tries to differentiate his position by focusing on some nuance. Proud of his own pride, he doesn’t like to always agree with Francisco, he needs to show that he has his own criteria and isn’t going to have someone from Madrid come along and explain to us how things work here:
“If he’d wanted to be a politician, he would have run for office. You have more power and more control if you stay in the wings, you’re free then, not controlled by any one party, out of sight of the journalists and politicians, free from their in-fighting, better to be lurking in the shadows, pulling the puppets’ strings.” The slave-driver, the gang-master, the exploiter of the workforce — as, when he was young, Francisco would have described him — but now his partner at the card table tonight in the village bar where the most anyone ever bets is a round of coffees or drinks, at least during the day.
At night, after closing time, things get more serious — players will sometimes bet hundreds or even thousands of euros or offer a kind of IOU in the form of the price of a night out at the local so-called gentleman’s club. But, by then, Francisco is no longer in the bar. Cinderella has gone home before his carriage turns into a pumpkin, leaving no delicate glass slipper to mark his trail; he hides away in his lair to read and write, or so he tells me:
“At night, there’s no noise, no phone calls, no one ringing the doorbell. That’s my favorite time,” he says, as if his night were not as crowded with ghosts as any other seventy-year-old’s. The body sleeps, but ambition keeps working away. Seated at his fine desk made of lignum vitae wood, Francisco scribbles on paper or types at his computer, working on the novel or memoir he hopes will bring him the prestige that the last few agitated years have denied him. Wine tastings, reviews of books and restaurants, the wittily written bimonthly editorial, the half-dozen pages of an article on some particular wine region, minor works that will never bring with them the posterity that ambitious writers always demand, that promise of life after death, even if it means ruining their nerves and health spending long, difficult nights writing, not to mention the terrible frustration when their present-day voice fails to produce the expected strokes of genius. At seventy years of age, late at night, you’re besieged not by brilliant ideas but by the half-buried dead — although which of our dead could be said to be entirely buried? Not a single one, they all have at least one limb or another sticking out. For some reason, you end up having an outstanding debt with each of them, a debt that requires repayment. You’ve either done something you shouldn’t have done to all of them, or else failed to do something you should have done. As I well know. But Francisco, that night owl, probably has enough sangfroid to meet them face to face; he has what I lack and he always has. He’ll form alliances with a few ghosts and pit them against the others and he’ll choose his allies wisely. He’ll flip the coin and make an educated guess, heads or tails. At night, he shuts himself up at home. That, he says, is when he sits down to work, but I think his need to keep to himself springs not only from the tiredness that comes with age — and, really, who wants to go flitting about at night at seventy? — but even so, with Francisco, it has more to do with image. He takes great care not to fall into the dark holes that open up late at night in the outside world, even in a village like Olba: the card games after the bar has closed its doors that go on until sunrise, the constantly replenished glasses (