“But if you give me yours, what are you going to do?” I said.
“We can share them, if you don’t mind us watching the races together,” he said. “Are you on your own?”
“Yes, I am.”
“The only thing is,” the man added, “we’d have to watch all the races from here. I’m on surveillance duty, and this is my post today. I can’t move from here.”
“Are you a policeman?”
“Bloody hell, no, I’d starve. I know a few though. Besides, do you think I could dress the way I do if I was a policeman? Look at me.”
And as he said that, the man stretched out his arms and took a step back, his hands outspread as if he were a magician. The fact is that (to my taste) he was extremely badly, albeit expensively, dressed: a double-breasted suit (but with the jacket open, as I said) in an unlikely greenish-grey colour, undoubtedly difficult to find; the shirt, which seemed overly starched for the times, was, I fear, wine, not an ugly colour in itself, but inappropriate in such a tall man; his tie was an incomprehensible swarm (birds, insects, repellent Mirós, cats’ eyes), in which the predominant colour was yellow; the oddest thing were his shoes: they weren’t lace-ups or moccasins, they were like children’s ankle-high bootees, he must have thought them very modern, and the rest he would imagine was semi-classic. His cufflinks weren’t too bad, possibly by Durán, very shiny and in the shape of a leaf. He was not a discreet man, nor original, he had simply never been taught how to coordinate his clothes.
“I see,” I said, not knowing what to say. “So what have you got to watch?”
“I’m a bodyguard,” he said.
“Oh, and who are you guarding?”
The man took the binoculars that he had just lent me and peered through them at the grandstand which was a short distance away (you didn’t really need magnifying lenses to see it). He handed them back to me. He seemed relieved.
“He hasn’t arrived yet, there’s still time. If he does come, he won’t get here until the fourth race, to say hello to his friends. Like everyone else, he’s only really interested in the fifth race, and he can’t waste a moment, I mean, you probably came early just to pass the time. He, on the other hand, will be doing deals over the phone or taking a nap so as to have a clear head. I came early, just to see how things are going this afternoon, to check that things aren’t getting heavy here and to take any necessary steps.”
“Heavy? What do you mean? What could possibly happen here?”
“Probably nothing, but someone always has to go on ahead. And someone else stays behind with him, of course. I’m usually the one who goes on ahead. For example, if we’re going to a restaurant or a casino, or we stop to have a beer at a roadside bar, I always go in first to see the way the land lies. You never know when you go into a public place, two guys might be beating the hell out of each other at that very moment. It doesn’t happen very often, but you never know, a waiter might have spilled some wine, and an awkward customer might be giving him a hard time. I wouldn’t want my boss to see that or have him mixed up in a mess like that. Before you know it, bottles are flying. During the day a lot more bottles go flying about in Madrid than you might imagine, knives come out, people hit each other, people can be very thin-skinned. And if, in the middle of all this, someone with a bit of money turns up, then everyone stops and thinks: ‘Let the rich man pay.’ The ones doing the fighting are quite capable of coming to some instant agreement and laying into the man with the dosh: ‘To hell with the rich.’ You have to keep a very sharp eye out.”
The man raised a finger to his eye.
“Really?” I said. “Is your boss that rich, then? Is it so obvious?”
“It’s written all over his face, he’s got the face of a rich man. Even if he didn’t shave for three days and dressed like a beggar, you could tell from his face he was rich. I wish I had that face. Whenever we go into an expensive shop, I go first, as usual. And despite the fact that I’m well dressed, as soon as the assistants see me they pull a face or ignore me, pretend they haven’t seen me, they start serving other customers who they hadn’t taken a blind bit of notice of before or they start rummaging around in drawers as if they were stocktaking. I don’t say a word, I just check that everything’s all right and then I go back to the door to open it for the boss and let him in. And as soon as they see his face, the assistants abandon their other customers and the drawers they were rummaging in to come and serve him, all smiles.”
“Isn’t it just that they recognize your boss because he’s famous, if he’s as rich as you say he is?”
“Possibly,” said the bodyguard, as if that hadn’t occurred to him. “He is getting quite well known. He’s in banking, you know. I won’t tell you who with, but he is. But listen, why don’t we go down to the paddock for a bit, it’ll be time to start betting on the third race soon.”
So we did and, on the way, we finally tore up our tickets and threw them to the ground, huh, when we saw that we had lost. I passed a philosopher who’s there every Sunday, as well as Admiral Admira (with his predestined and incomplete surname) and his lovely and undeserved wife, who both nodded to me without saying a word, as if they were embarrassed to see me in the company of that rather gigantic individual, I only came up to his shoulder. I was now wearing his binoculars round my neck and carrying my own broken pair, mine are small and powerful, his were enormous and very heavy, the strap cut into my neck, but I couldn’t run the risk of dropping them as well. While we were watching the horses walking round the paddock, I sensed that the bodyguard was about to ask me what I did, and since I didn’t feel like talking about myself, I got in first and said:
“What do you think of number fourteen?”
“He looks good,” he said, which is what those who know nothing about horses always say. “I think I might bet on him.”
“I don’t think I will, he looks a bit highly-strung to me. He might even get stuck at the starting gate.”
“Really, do you think so?”
“Having a rich man’s face counts for nothing here.”
The man burst out laughing. It was a spontaneous laugh, without the slightest forethought, the laugh of an unpolished man, the laugh of a man who does not stop to worry about whether or not it is appropriate to laugh. What I’d said wasn’t that funny. Then, without asking my permission, he grabbed his binoculars and looked quickly through them at the grandstand, which you couldn’t actually see from the paddock. It hurt my neck, the man pulled too hard on the strap.
“So, has he arrived yet?” I said.
“No, luckily he hasn’t,” he said, going by instinct, I assume.
“Does he give you a lot of work? I mean, do you often have to intervene, intervene seriously I mean, when it’s dangerous.”
“Not as much as I’d like, really, it’s very stressful this job, but at the same time, very inactive, you have to be permanently on the alert, you have to anticipate trouble, on a couple of occasions I’ve grabbed hold of really distinguished people who were just going up to my boss to say hello. I’ve pinned their hands behind their backs and overpowered them, for no reason at all, they’ve even been on the receiving end of a few expert blows. I got hauled over the coals for it too. So you have to be very careful and not anticipate too much. You have to guess people’s intentions, that’s what you have to do. Not that anything much ever happens, and it’s difficult to stay alert if you have the feeling that it’s not really necessary.”
“I suppose you tend to lower your guard a bit.”
“No, I don’t, but I have a really hard time making sure that I don’t. My colleague, the one who stays with him while I go on ahead, I notice that he lowers his guard much more. I tell him off about it sometimes. He plays portable video games while he’s waiting, he’s a bit of an addict. And you just can’t do that, you see.”