Read Online Off Side by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán - Free Book Online Page A

repeated that she had things she wanted to talk about, decisionsthat she had to make. But first they made dinner, and then they made love, to the fullest of Charo’s expertise and the fullest of Carvalho’s capacity to evoke another body whose face he couldn’t exactly place, until at last he realized that it was Charo’s own — Charo as a younger woman. And as they relaxed afterwards, she with a cigarette, and he with a Churchill Cerdan, flat on their backs and with a blanket to protect them from the October chill of Vallvidrera, Charo finally explained what was on her mind. An old client was suggesting setting her up in business. Something simple. A boarding house, in fact.
    ‘What would you think of that, Pepe? A boarding house would be a good idea, wouldn’t it … I don’t have a penny to my name. Just a bit of money in the bank, but that’s going very fast because I’m using it to live on.’
    Whenever Charo was depressed, some client always seemed to pop up and suggest setting her up in business, and Carvalho had to be told all the details and was expected to offer advice. Carvalho shut his eyes in order not to catch Charo’s eye as he said: ‘That’s not a bad idea.’
    Calle Perecamps was to be extended, and would cut through the meat of the Old City towards Ensanche, forging a way through the defeated fibre of the city and the calcified skeletons of its direst architectural horrors. A gigantic mechanical digger with a head like some nightmare insect would convert the archaeology of poverty into archaeology pure and simple, but even if they demolished the houses, and got rid of the old people, the drug addicts, the pushers, the penniless prostitutes, the blacks, and the Arabs, all of them would have to find somewhere to escape to as the bulldozers drove them out. They would have to find a new home for their poverty, probably somewhere in the outskirts, where the city loses its name and thereby sheds responsibility for its disaster victims. A city with no name is a city which effectivelydoesn’t exist. It appears on no postcards, and only earns the sympathy of the front pages when its auto-destruction complex transcends the limits of tolerability in a permissive society, and it begins to kill, rape, and commit suicide with the lack of self-control which normally characterizes only the desperate and the insane. Streets of old people with almost empty shopping bags, eternally en route from one pitiful purchase to another, from one half-memory to another; what they’ve done with their lives, and what day it is today. A new generation of whores with varicose veins, who will be entered into the census statistics by a fifth-generation computer, and who will feed, as their mothers fed, on tuna sandwiches and squid tapas floating in a hybrid sauce and (as a concession to modernity) frankfurters doused in ketchup. Alongside the monumental prostitute, weathered by the passing years and the chill of the night, stands the skinny, wraith-like junkie prostitute, her shifty eyes flicking about like those of drunken sailors on a sea with no way out. Two classes of pimps, too: the old familiar type, a pachydermic stud with prominent buttocks and a barrel chest, and the post-modern pimp, wiped out by drug addiction, and with his eyes and fingers slipping like blades over the surface of a mad and hostile world. Dimly lit shopkeepers who are irretrievably up against the wall. Clean-living young men, unemployed through no fault of their own, who hurry through prohibited streets. Mothers, internal exiles in barrios where they have been growing geraniums on their balconies from five or six generations back. The contrast of honest poverty. Families of Moroccan moles and black gazelles from darkest Africa, inhabiting flats that have been abandoned by people fleeing a leprous city. Toilets with no running water. Dead bodies lying in flats barricaded from the inside. Old people, abandoned by memory and left by their own desires