with what joy, my home, I now behold thee, covering up the economic fact that a house in Olba costs exactly half what a house in Misent would cost; like Francisco, some are peacefully retired, others — like the man from the bank — are in the first phase of their socio-economic rise. A card game that enjoys great local prestige has been joined by the local carpenter, who, since Francisco’s return, has changed tables and now plays with the crème de la crème, legitimized by his vaguely well-traveled, vaguely adventurous, vaguely hippie past and by his vaguely cultivated present (you can have a conversation with the carpenter, he knows what he’s talking about), and by his mysterious, solitary, sedentary life, shut away from the world, which has gone on for decades now; legitimized by the fact that I often used to join Pedrós at the bar and, above all, because Francisco slaps me on the back and refers to me openly as his childhood friend, his traveling companion, his colleague who has rejected the vanities of this world to embrace the profession of those who prefer a simple life on the margins, saints like St. Joseph, a good artisan. More like the perfect profession for a cuckold, I think. Francisco casually stirs his post-prandial coffee, as if that ritual and that way of life were the only acceptable ones, the same nonchalance with which, at one time, he aligned himself — as if inadvertently — with what my old friend Morán, whom I met in Ibiza and whose articles I also used to read in the national press (I don’t know what’s become of him either), defined as “an elite poised to plunder.” Now, beatus ille, he has, in the serenity of his mature years, embraced scorn for the court and praise of the village. Here the days and months pass, and there’s not so much as a hint of Francisco’s former alliance with that ruthless, voracious elite, no sense of what was once the very hub of his existence. It’s as if nothing had happened between us or within us since those shared years of childhood and adolescence; I even find myself believing it, I can even understand why he bought that house, after all, who doesn’t want the perfect place in which to spend his declining years, a luxurious monastery, until, that is, you go to Misent with him one day, and, as if by chance and after much random wandering about, we find that our walk — apparently unplanned — has led us to the marina. And he distractedly raises one arm and points, saying, look, Esteban, just perfect for a little trip around the bay one morning, his finger still pointing, inviting me to look, and what he’s inviting me to look at, what, according to him, is just perfect for a little trip around the bay one morning, is a sailboat moored in the port, an elegant sailboat that turns out to be his, the little boat he’d mentioned once, as if in passing, while you were discussing something else, and whose existence you’d completely forgotten about, because you didn’t believe there was much truth in it: a little boat, you assumed, the kind that any guy could afford during the boom years, what people call a motorboat and which is little more than a dinghy. But no, you suddenly realize that the reason he’s taken you on this excursion is so you won’t die without seeing it, yes, he has to make sure that the carpenter sees it, he has to deliver the coup de grâce before the carpenter bites the dust of a natural death, pretty much as a matador does with a bull, finishing the animal off quickly before the spectators start booing because the bull is taking too long to die, and as we all know, no one is so young that he might not die tomorrow, so it’s just as well that the carpenter should see the sailboat and feel envy and pain and sadness, I may have lost Leonor — except that you lost her first, I think to myself. I wonder, did he ever find out about us? Did Leonor ever tell him? I don’t believe so, a relationship with no added value is just a piece of junk you get rid of — but I have a beautiful house and a sailboat (it’s like that nursery rhyme: I have, I have, but you have nothing, I have three sheep, one to milk and another to keep), and so he invites you to jump on board, you walk across the teak deck, he takes you down to the saloon with its kitchen and its dining table, which is laid as if for some imminent banquet, and the little bar with its shelves of bottles, and he opens the door of the bathroom, and then shows you the two bedrooms, holy shit, this is just amazing, says the artisan, the cuckolded St. Joseph, so skilled at planing a piece of wood, who climbs up a few steps to see the screens of blinking lights on the instrument panel. It’s very comfortable, says Francisco, adding for further emphasis, yes, it really is very comfortable. As if I were trembling with admiration and emotion and pride just to know that what I see and touch and caress belongs to my old friend, my traveling companion, and as if he wanted to bring me back down to a modest reality. There’s the plain language he uses as proof: yes, she’s a cozy old thing. You can sail her or use the motor, she’s got a 200-horsepower engine. But this cozy old thing isn’t moored in the harbor built by the town council for the small boats of those who define themselves as the new middle class and who are, in fact, a conglomerate of variants of the conscienceless working-class created by Thatcherism and which the current crisis is sweeping away, taking them down a notch or two, and, as a consequence, many of the small boats moored in that popular, municipal harbor now have cardboard signs saying for sale bargain price. No, Francisco doesn’t have his yacht moored there, but in the Marina Esmeralda, where the yachts of German or Gibraltarian or Russian millionaires rub shoulders, ninety-foot-long boats that belong to traffickers of something or other — sausages, mass-produced bread and cakes, works of art, money or weapons — yachts owned by builders who’ve put more tons of cocaine into the market than they have cement; launderers of dollars, euros, pounds. Is there anyone in that marina who has earned an honest living, apart from the waiters, who, tray in hand, ply the quayside bars, alongside the shops offering yachts for sale at more than half a million euros? And even those waiters can be rather alarming if they happen to meet your eye while pouring out the whisky-on-the-rocks you ordered. They’re not waiters, they’re thugs, bodyguards, dealers in stolen goods and illegal substances, pimps, hitmen, mules, drug smugglers, the rent boys of yacht owners, the servants of smarmy mafiosi who, when interviewed on the local TV news, describe themselves as owners of nocturnal marketing businesses. Yes, Francisco, that’s what le grand monde is. I know the good life is essentially contrary to the law and to justice, and is rigorously incompatible with charity, but life is short, and no one is so young that he cannot die tomorrow and no one so old as to think he cannot live another year. Do you remember that quote? You studied philosophy at university and you read it out to me once, to this idiot whose father was forcing him to be an artist and who didn’t know what he wanted to be, but knew absolutely what he didn’t want to be. In showing me his yacht — as when he showed me his house — Francisco is confirming that for him the rustic life — playing cards at the Bar Castañer included — is merely a game in a toy shop, and that these are the rules imposed by the game he has chosen to play, like in the game of the goose, where, if you land on a square with a goose on it, that allows you to jump over your competitors; or when you play Battleship, you call out the number and letter of the target square and the other player says hit or miss, and you can then either cross it out or not: every game has its rules, rules that are only valid for as long as the game lasts, and that’s certainly so in his case, the rules governing his game as humble villager last only as long as the evening round of cards, and those rules no longer obtain (one day, we really must share a fantastic peaty whisky I’ve put aside especially for us, he says, closing a small wooden door) when he allows you a second viewing of his house, the now restored Civera house; and the carpenter who never even made it to cabinetmaker grade sees the furniture: kingwood, rosewood, mahogany, the glass cabinets in which Francisco keeps ancient volumes bound in silk or shagreen, then there are the paintings by Gordillo, engravings by Tàpies, watercolors by Barceló and Broto. But all this must be worth a fortune, I say, and he laughs, yes, I haven’t done too badly, I’ll tell you about it some time, and so with him I always have the impression that when he talks about the people he hates (he specializes in public rants against unscrupulous businessmen and unethical bankers, fulminating against the mad speculative property bubble of the last few years, although not, of course, when he’s with Pedrós, Justino or Bernal), he is, in fact, inveighing against himself, shitting on his own biography — the cosmopolitan Mr. Hyde versus the card-playing country bumpkin Dr. Jekyll. But all this paints a very hasty, even clumsy portrait. We need to delve back into his past as a young Catholic with a social vocation, a member of JEC, JOC and HOAC and so on. He even considered becoming a seminarian; he yearned for justice, aspired to a universal, egalitarian happiness, well, who didn’t at the time, with all that talk of liberation theology: becoming a worker-priest in Franco’s Spain or a guerrilla priest — as Camilo Torres went on to be — somewhere in Latin America, but his cock was made of a material all too susceptible to the magnet of sex, a psychophysiological remora that many priests manage to transform into a precious pastoral tool thanks to the invaluable collaboration of that authentic network of erotic contacts — the confessional; although what closed that particular path to him was, I believe, his realization that power within the Church was being offered to him as a very demanding fruit, born of a combination of overly complex codes and rhetorics, strict regulations, and, at the same time, certain very subtle movements, insinuations, hints, a slightly raised eyebrow, an imperceptible pursing of the lips. He preferred to take more direct action than was usual among the clergy, whose complicated labyrinth, designed on baroque lines, was the legacy of the Council of Trent, which required that any advances should be made very slowly indeed; going through the motions of submitting to the hierarchy, engaging in secret intrigues, irrational surrenders or acts of obedience, too much whispering and not enough shouting, and shouting was precisely what politics offered him when he took it by the horns in the late 1970s: politics, it must be said, was a far franker world, its tactics and strategies more overt (the very opposite of his father’s modus operandi), and one’s own image had a public dimension, true, Francisco’s first steps were taken in the age of clandestinity — even though the transition had already begun — but all the people involved knew each other, and there were no secret negotiations in the corridors of parishes, sacristies and archbishops’ palaces: you ran the cells, you held semi-clandestine meetings and you gained a certain prestige, still under your nom de guerre, while the dictatorless dictatorship continued to crumble, but once democracy was in place, that was it — stripped of your nom de guerre, you appeared under your real name, and with this one slogan, politics as the supreme and almost unique value, far superior to any other form of social activism: you would climb onto the platform and shout, your shouts amplified thanks to a superb sound system (paid for by your Swedish, German and French comrades, social democrats showing their solidarity with the anti-Franco struggle) and accompanied by drums and flutes played at full blast,