The Angst-Ridden Executive by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán Page B

other on Rhomberg’s telegram, Carvalho reached for the phone. This was the signal for Biscuter to clear the table. An inexplicable sense of misgiving prevented Carvalho from informing Jauma’s widow of Dieter Rhomberg’s unexpected resurrection.
    To arrive at a bar where the principal spectacle is the clientele, and to have to go down the stairs to centre-stage, tends to endow your shoulders with the stance of the lead actor in a New York movie, and your legs with the tension of a tightrope walker. Up until two in the morning the place is populated by two or three couples trying to escape bachelorhood or married life. From two onwards it’s taken over by mainstream actors from the fringe theatre and fringe actors from the mainstream, not to mention executives with a smattering of culture and sensibility, and people who would be film directors if the film industry wasn’t such an industry, and writers of protest songs and the ubiquitous political cartoonist, and so on.
    ‘To live in Barcelona is to live in Europe!’
    A poet and ex-prisoner seeking in El Sot a double life that will give him back part of the twenty-five years spent in prison; an extremely young official of the workers’ commissions, with grey eyes; organizational and petitional ladies of the local Left; professional night-owls of more than thirty years’ standing, ever hoping for that one night in which everything will prove possible; a homosexual novelist; a concrete poet who has read Trotsky; a chairman of political round-table discussions, the owner of just the right magic gesture to make sure people take it in turns to speak, and who can conjure up a synthesis where there wasn’t even a thesis to start with; the occasional sensitive intellectual who turns up in the hopes of l’amour fou something even hardened regulars of the place have never achieved; ex-politicos still into things more or less ethical; young islanders from one or other of the islands; wild and soon-to-be-rich youth; Uruguayans fleeing the terror in Uruguay; Chileans fleeing the terror in Chile; Argentinians fleeing successive terrors in Argentina; one of Carillo’s ten right-hand men; an almost young ex-industrial engineer now publishing independent and radical-Marxist thinkers; a few leftovers of the 1940s, nourished on a diet of Stefan Zweig; puritan left-wing cadres intent on coming into contact with the decadent and definitely scandalous Barcelona Left for just one night. Cocktails somewhere between the low level of a mediocre bar in Manhattan and the abysmal level of Barcelona cocktail bars. A space that is divided into functional seating areas with differing degrees of intimacy, and a bar where people strike up conversations with the owner and the bartenders with a degree of camaraderie that reflects a nightly familiarity and the certainty that afterwards there will be a whole day to wash away its after-taste.
    On this particular night the gathering around Marcos Nuñez was only ten strong, and the ageing youth was holding forth with his habitual sibylline style and a narrative rhythm acquired in his university days. A tone which is capable of imbuing even the story of a broken-down bus with sublime nostalgia, or firing wicked irony into the description of a Spanish sausage. Nuñez had been a pioneer in the reconstruction of the Left in Barcelona University during the nineteen fifties. After torture, and spells in prison, he had fled to France, where he had embarked on a life that would have made him ideal material for the bureaucracy of his own party, or a doctorate in social science and an assured place in a future democratic Spain. Too cynical to be a bureaucrat and too apathetic to be an academic, he plumped for the role of an onlooker, a role which he exercised with a dedication that was half-hearted only in appearance. Nuñez was one of the old guard, and he remained attached to the vision of moral renewal held by the Left when Franco was alive. His capacity for