Read Online The Buenos Aires Quintet by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán - Free Book Online Page B

the first night of any play.
    ‘I’m getting rid of you. A quick mutilation. Because you pointed out impossible people, things and desires.’
    He redoubles his efforts to cut off his finger. A booming voice is heard offstage.
    ‘Son of a bitch!’
    The actor shakes his head furiously, throws the knife to the floor, tears off the rubber finger and makes to leave.
    ‘No, no, you’re not getting out of it that easily!’
    Norman leaps on stage and throws himself at the actor. He pulls him to the floor, kicks him, puts a foot on his neck.
    ‘Go on, say it: I’m a son of a bitch!’
    ‘I’m a son of a bitch.’
    ‘Louder!’
    ‘I’m a son of a bitch!’
    ‘That’s better. Now get up, and pick the knife up again.’
    By now he’s got the actor by the hair, and thrusts his face at him.
    ‘You’re going to cut off your finger properly! Because you’re a son of a bitch! Tell me again what you are?’
    Tm a son of a great bitch.’
    ‘No need to boast about your mother. It’s enough you admit what you are.’
    Norman leaves the stage. The actor spits after him and shouts: ‘I hate you, Norman!’
    Norman’s voice sounds strangely calm as it floats up from the stalls.
    ‘That’s more like it!’
    The actor can barely hide his hatred for Norman, but he puts the rubber finger back on again, picks up the knife, and shouts with all his might: ‘I’m getting rid of you. A quick mutilation. Because you pointed out impossible people, things, desires.’
    Applause from the stalls. Norman’s voice again.
    ‘That’s great, son of a bitch, fantastic!’
    Norman is sitting, elbows on the back of the seat in front, cupping his head in his hands, muttering the lines to himself as the actor speaks them on stage.
    ‘Obscene reality! If I don’t point you out, do you exist?’
    Norman seems a bit happier, until he hears Carvalho’s voice next to him.
    ‘Is that the Stanislavksi method?’
    Carvalho and Alma sit down on either side of him. Alma places her hand on his arm to try to keep him calm. Carvalho is finishing his cigar.
    ‘It’s my method.’
    Alma puts her arm round Norman’s shoulders, as if she is both protecting him and presenting him to Carvalho.
    ‘Norman is an impostor. He’s an architect, not an actor. When he was in exile in Barcelona he pretended he was a psychotherapist because there were lots of architects but not many therapists.’
    ‘You can only know about your own nation’s madnesses. Freud could only cure Austrians, because he himself was a crazy Austrian struggling to come to terms with the crisis in the Austro-Hungarian empire and in the bourgeois ego. So how could I hope to cure any Catalans? The only patients I had any success with in Barcelona were two Siamese cats. They had suicidal tendencies because I was sleeping with their owner – and she was a psychobolshie.’
    Alma tries to put in a good word for Carvalho.
    ‘We have to help our friend here.’
    ‘If you start helping private detectives, you end up collaborating with the police. Private detectives are simply the embodiment of nostalgia for a supposed golden age, an ancient civilization organized around a collective myth and ideology, a way of life governed by unshakeable authorities – the laws of the aristocracy and the Church, or the dogma of a political leader heading a single-party state. There’s no real difference between one of Chesterton’s detectives and a Marxist one. Both of them are reactionaries, nostalgic for a lost order.’
    Norman is very pleased with his little speech.
    ‘I must write that down. It’s fantastic. Remind me, will you? But now I expect you want to see the scene of the catastrophe. Follow me!’
    They follow him to the tiny staircase leading to the basement dressing-rooms.
    ‘Just imagine you’re living a mixture of Le Dernier Métro by Truffaut and Phantom of the Opera!
    Norman leads the way, with Carvalho and Alma following. They descend a spiral metal staircase that looks as if no