Carlos, the manager of the bankrupt bank, arrived a short while ago and, seated behind us, is watching our game. He smiles all the time as if everything we said amused him. If the play we put on each evening was a morality play, he would represent geniality and fairness: the honest bank manager. Tenacity, transparency, public service. The servant of our most neglected citizens. Wasn’t that why banks came into being — to meet the needs of what we call ordinary people? He acts as though he doesn’t know that every light casts a shadow, that every day has its night, and that the night is a breeding ground in which evil grows fat and in which the needs of the unfortunate pay for the whims of the powerful. As if he didn’t know that all the rhetoric about the common good had gone down the drain. No one believes it any more. He himself is a discreet nest of shadows when he signs the documents, mine included, warning of repossession for failure to keep up mortgage repayments. Anyone would think someone else did that for him. Anyway, I’m quite sure that, this evening, the name “Pedrós” will not be on his lips, a name he knows to be irremediably linked with mine, because he’s in charge of all the files and all the mortgage documents, and he was the one who gave his blessing to our bankruptcy; he looks at me out of the corner of one eye, telling me that I’m a witness to the fact that no one will be able to say he spoke ill of Pedrós. Just for the record. Just in case. So that no one will take him to court for breach of confidentiality. While he’s talking, I’m thinking that, from the terrace of my house, I can see the cranes standing motionless above the unfinished blocks of apartments, some still with wheelbarrows hanging from them, and those loads are the seal signifying disaster, my disaster, the end of all my plans, the sign that the cranes are no longer being used and that the company is bankrupt. I see the blocks of apartments, some mere skeletons, others with bare, unplastered walls. I notice particularly those that belong — or belonged — to us, to Pedrós and me: the crane silhouetted against the sky and the wheelbarrow dangling there, swaying like a hanged man at the end of his rope. I try to divert the conversation onto more abstract subjects. Like Carlos, I’m particularly keen to stay well away from any mention of Pedrós:
“Attracting attention is really quite difficult nowadays, but the idiotic fools who appear on those trashy TV programs want exactly that. They’re not trying to attract attention because of something they actually do or produce, they’re just attracting attention for attention’s sake. It’s a kind of imbecilic vicious circle, you’re there because you’re in the news and you’re in the news because you’re there, but if you’re not, and you’re not nice-looking — at least according to current criteria — and shameless too, and you want to jump on the merry-go-round, but don’t know how to do anything useful, like inventing a new kind of engine or a vaccine against cancer, then you have to do something really big. I can think of a few things: poisoning your children or finding out that they’ve been raped and chopped up into little pieces; stabbing your wife and jumping off a viaduct. The possibilities are endless: then you’ll be guaranteed your three or four minutes on the news. The announcer puts on a sorrowful face and says: a horrifying case of parricide, another instance of domestic violence, another sex crime, and there’s your ID photo all over the news. The civil guard are looking for you, they’re searching the nearby fields with police dogs, and when the neighbor tells the reporter that he saw you leap in your car and race off into the mountains, they search the rocky slopes and the caves of Montdor; and if, on the following day’s news, they say you’ve been caught hiding, crouched behind an olive tree, or sprawled at the bottom of a ravine, or hanging from a rope in the shade of a leafy carob tree, then there’s a good chance they’ll show your photo again. If you don’t commit suicide, but hand yourself in, the aura grows still larger: you’re back on the screen the day you’re taken to court, walking unsteadily, as if you were drunk, you’re in handcuffs and your head is covered by a blanket, with a policeman’s hand pressing firmly down on it, or else it’s concealed beneath a balaclava or a crash helmet. The first time I saw defendants with their heads covered when they went into court was twenty or so years ago: the newspaper showed two smartly dressed men in suits and ties, each wearing a bull’s head; apparently they were a pair of American drug-runners about to be put on trial. We were watching in the bar and we all just burst out laughing. We couldn’t understand what was going on. Now, we’ve gotten used to seeing defendants going into court wearing a crash helmet with the visor down, or a Batman mask or a mask bearing Rajoy’s or George W.’s face. You also get to be on TV if you’ve been murdered in a particularly gruesome fashion: if you get chopped up and the pieces are mailed to your brother-in-law or your cousins, or they find your butchered thighs in the freezer of an apartment in some rough outlying suburb, and catch the murderer sitting at the table eating your testicles fried in breadcrumbs (much tastier than bull’s testicles, he told the police who arrested him, according to newspaper reports the next day); if, rather than being the victim, you decide to be the person doing the chopping up, you’re guaranteed to see your face in the newspaper (the headline: cannibal ate victim’s testicles, and the reader gets all excited: how big were they? a meal in themselves? how did the murderer cook them?), but this comes at a very high price. The photo is no compensation, not even if your entire family album is handed over to be used in a TV debate about the decline in law and order and the rise of a new kind of crime, or about serial killers or cannibalism in the modern world. Or a panel of gastronomes and nutritionists discussing the advantages, as regards taste and nutritional value, of human flesh over lamb, mentioning the Mayans, Caribs and certain African or Polynesian tribes, who all had a passion for a delicacy available nowadays only to a privileged few.”
“The only recourse left to the bankrupt is violence, unless he’s a decent sort, then he can always sell his own body. In the Third World, people sell a kidney or an eye just to earn enough money to make it through to the end of the month. They sell themselves off piecemeal.”