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

and those of others. Lost children kicking footballs around in the squares, up against the doors of Gothic churches that are so old that they’re half sunk into the ground, each with a recent history as street-corner tobacconists or the abodes of artisanalcutlery makers. Dog shit, and shit dogs, as faded and fearful as their owners — the women and mature children who look as if they are obliged to take the dog for a walk in order to take themselves for a walk, down the narrowness of narrow streets and worn paving stones. And something approaching the beauty of poverty has etched itself onto the façades of houses that were built shortly before or after the publication of the
Communist Manifesto
, a fact to which they remain oblivious, because this city was already old and has built itself, or rebuilt itself, on both sides of the medieval walls that were demolished in the middle of the nineteenth century. What excited Carvalho’s visual memory as he left Charo at the hairdresser’s and drove towards the southern parking lot on the Ramblas was not his own erudition, but a radio discussion on the problem of ‘Violence in the City’, where the contributors were an ex-terribly-modern-novelist, and a communist Jesuit, the former using as his spiritual inspiration a collage of various and opposing spiritual sources, principally a certain Georges Simmel, and the latter invoking Jesus Christ and Karl Marx. According to Simmel, since cities provide no ways of discharging aggression which do not involve great danger to the well-being of society, it becomes absolutely necessary to find ways of channelling that violence. One of the most familiar ways is what experts in ethics have come to recognize as aggression against a substitutive object.
    ‘Let us imagine,’ said the novelist, ‘that a terrified rabbit decides to kill the fox which has been making its life a misery. Obviously, the fox is stronger than it is. So instead it relieves its aggression by taking it out on a mouse. There’s a long tradition of these kinds of urban scapegoats: the persecution of Jews, blacks, Arabs, gypsies, Asians and foreigners in general gives the frustrated and aggressive citizenry a chance to lash out against minorities who are weaker than them and have no way of hitting back. Sport is another effective variant of substitutive objects. The ritualized interplay of aggressive actions and self-control enables the public to participate in a simulacrum of struggle, in an aggressivenessbetween players. The problem is that today’s generation of fans is no longer satisfied simply with simulated violence, but feels the need to materialize it on the terraces, or outside the ground, out of frustration at the feeling that their escape valve has become commercialized.’
    ‘Do you believe, señor Félix de Azúa, that if we made admission to football grounds free, soccer violence would disappear?’
    ‘I think it very likely.’
    ‘Do you have other forms of substitutive aggression on your list?’
    ‘Yes. Nationalism. Excessive patriotism, in the negative sense that it necessitates the existence of an external enemy. Also deaths in road-traffic accidents, and motorway deaths in particular. Industrial societies are willing to take on themselves the costs of deaths resulting from the use of motor cars, but not the cost of deaths arising from religion, politics or sex. Some deaths are permitted, others are not. Urban culture generates a scenario in which laws are able to distinguish between violence which is acceptable and violence which is not.’
    ‘Do you share this point of view, señor García Nieto?’
    The communist Jesuit agreed with the theory and the general scenario, and agreed that double standards were applied, but said that the causes of the violence and the disorder lay in the mystified values of wealth and the inability of the majority of people to achieve that wealth, a sense of powerlessness which was becoming increasingly widespread