Little by little, various questions began to come to mind, but I decided that it wasn't the moment to be sensible. There's a time for everything. The first thing we discussed was the choice of weapon. I suggested balloons filled with red dye. Or a battle of exaggerated sombrero doffing. Arturo insisted that it had to be with sabers. To first blood? I proposed. Grudgingly, although deep down probably in relief, Arturo accepted my suggestion. Then we went looking for the sabers.
My original plan was to buy them in one of those tourist stores that sell everything from blades made in Toledo to samurai swords, but informed of our intentions, my friend said that her late father had left a pair of swords, so we went to look at them and they turned out to be real ones. After giving them a good polish, we decided to use them. Then we looked for the perfect place. I suggested the Parque de la Ciudadela, at midnight, but Arturo preferred a nudist beach halfway between Barcelona and the town where he lived. Then we got Iñaki Echevarne's telephone number and called him. It took us a long time to convince him that it wasn't a joke. Arturo spoke to him three times all together. Finally Iñaki Echevarne said that he agreed and that we should let him know the date and time. The afternoon of the duel we ate at a snack bar in Sant Pol de Mar. Fried cuttlefish and shrimp. My friend (who had come this far with us but wasn't planning to attend the duel), Arturo, and me. The meal, I have to say, was a little gloomy, and while we were eating Arturo pulled out a plane ticket and showed it to us. I thought it would be to Chile or Mexico and that Arturo was, in some sense, bidding farewell to Catalonia and Europe. But the ticket was for a flight to Dar es Salaam with stopovers in Rome and Cairo. Then I realized that my friend had gone completely insane and that if the critic Echevarne didn't kill him with a whack on the head he would be eaten by the black or red ants of Africa.
Jaume Planells, Bar Salambó, Calle Torrijos, Barcelona, June 1994. One morning my friend and colleague Iñaki Echevarne called me and said he needed a second for a duel. I was a little hungover, so at first I didn't understand what Iñaki was saying, and anyway he hardly ever calls me, especially at that time of day. Then, when he explained, I thought he was kidding and I went along with him, people are always kidding me, but I don't mind, and anyway Iñaki is a little strange, strange but attractive, the kind of guy women think is really handsome and men think is nice, if slightly intimidating, and whom they secretly admire. Not long ago he'd had a feud with the great Madrid novelist Aurelio Baca, and even though Baca thundered and stormed, hurling abuse at him, Iñaki managed to emerge unscathed from the exchange of hostilities, coming out even with Baca, you might say.
The funny thing is that Iñaki hadn't criticized Baca but a friend of Baca's, so you can only imagine what would've happened if he'd gone after the great man himself. As far as I could tell, the problem was that Baca was a writer on the model of Unamuno, there being no lack of them nowadays, who would launch into some lecture full of cheap moralizing whenever he got the chance, the typical preachy, irate Spanish lecture, and Iñaki was the typical provocative, kamikaze critic who liked making enemies and who had a habit of leaping in with both feet. It was a matter of time before they clashed. Or at least Baca had to clash with Echevarne, call him to order, give him a slap on the wrist, something like that. Underneath, they both fell somewhere along the increasingly vague spectrum we call the left.
So when Iñaki explained to me about the duel, I thought he must be joking. The passions Baca had unleashed couldn't be so powerful that authors were taking justice into their own hands now, and in such a melodramatic way. But Iñaki said it had nothing to do with that. He sounded a little bit confused but he said this was something different and he had to accept the challenge (could he have mentioned the Nude Descending a Staircase? but what did Picasso have to do with it?) and I should tell him once and for all whether I was prepared to be his second or not, and he had no time to waste because the duel was taking place that very afternoon.
What could I say but yes, of course I'll do it, tell me where and when, although afterward, when Iñaki hung up, I started to think that maybe I'd just gotten myself mixed up in some serious shit, and that I, who have a pretty nice life and enjoy a good joke every once in a while like any normal guy so long as it doesn't go too far, might be landing myself in one of those messes that never end well. And then, on top of that, I got to thinking (something a person should never, ever do in cases like this), and I came to the conclusion that it was strange to begin with that Iñaki would call me to be his second in a duel, since I'm not exactly one of his best friends. We work for the same newspaper, we run into each other sometimes at the Giardinetto or the Salambó or the bar at Laie, but we're not really what you'd call friends.