He was set down in a town the name of which he obviously didn’t know. Having travelled in two cars, the fact was he hadn’t made much progress. He could carry on like this until the following day without ever getting to London.
The same snow was falling. He again started walking blindly. What time would the buses go back to working? If it was six, he still had triple the time that had passed until then.
Everything was deserted. All these towns looked alike: the same sensation of cleanliness, the same streets, the same shops – closed at that hour – with their tins of meat, eggs and bottles of condensed milk.
At a crossroads, he came across a policeman on the edge of the pavement, holding a bicycle by the handlebars in one hand and a lit torch in the other. He went up to the policeman and greeted him. The policeman, enormous and correct, wearing a raincoat in the form of a large cape, beneath the typical, lofty helmet they always had on, gazed at him in curiosity and surprise. Imagining what the effects of the question would be, after the usual “excuse me, please”, he asked him which way it was to London. The policeman raised the hand that held the torch and pointed to one of the streets at the crossroads, but immediately added that London was very far away. Yes, he answered, but since there weren’t any buses or trains… The policeman accepted the veracity of this remark. “Italian?” he asked. “No, Spanish,” he said. “Spanish,” repeated the policeman. Then he must have been feeling the cold… Not too much, he said, it also snowed in Spain. “Ah, yes!” exclaimed the policeman, as if grateful to him for this clarification. And after a very brief pause he asked him where he had been.
That would have been difficult to explain, even if it hadn’t been in English.
“You see now. It turns out I wanted to be a merchant seaman. I worked on various ships as an apprentice engineer and visited ports in different parts of the world. On a trip to Buenos Aires, I became friends with an English girl who went from Buenos Aires to Mexico and only just returned home two weeks ago. We wrote to each other from time to time; she knew my address in England. So we decided to meet up. She invited me over for lunch twice, including today’s invitation. She lives in Nr. Coulsdon or somewhere nearby; to tell the truth, I’m not even sure what Nr. Coulsdon is. In short, I had lunch and dinner with her and her parents and missed the last bus, which left at eleven o’clock, by a matter of seconds. When I reached the stop, the bus, a hundred metres away – I’m afraid I can’t say what that would be in the equivalent English unit of measure – was slipping away in front of my eyes.”
He came out with a much shorter reply. All he said was that he’d been to dinner in the house of some English friends and missed the bus. Even so, the policeman remained silent for a while, as if he’d only half understood. But it didn’t take him long to say the best thing would be to see if they could stop a car that was heading to London, he didn’t like to do such things, being an authority figure, but he would do it this one time. He would do it, he said, not feeling displeased, but happy and encouraged. He replied that he was grateful, but there was really no need. The policeman, however, insisted.
He stopped the first car that was passing. It was large, white, American in style. The policeman peered in through one of the front windows, holding on to his bike and torch. He heard him say, “Excuse me, please…” Some difficulties must have arisen because the conversation between the policeman and the occupants of the car dragged on. In the end, the policeman signalled to him to get in the car, and they opened the back door for him from inside. Before saying goodbye, the policeman explained where they would take him. He pronounced a couple of names which meant nothing to him.
For the third time, the back seat was completely empty. In front, two men in their forties (one driving, of course) chatted quietly and laconically from time to time, about business, he thought. It was far and away the best of the three cars he had been in. It swept along the road quickly, noiselessly, softly. He was tempted to succumb to sleep, right there and then, on that plush seat.
He wished the moment of their arrival could be delayed for hours…
He didn’t have to be sorry, he thought, about leaving the judge’s house. That man was a wretch and a maniac; he was always complaining that things weren’t in their proper place or clean… When, in fact, cleaning the house was not, properly speaking or only to a small degree, part of his responsibilities, his work was in the kitchen, but such things the judge would not have understood… Besides, living so far from London was a big disadvantage.
Yes, all these considerations were very well, but wasn’t he just trying to make himself feel better? Had he left the judge’s house out of his own free will or had he, with greater or lesser diplomacy, been sacked?
What did it matter?
Seeking consolation, deforming the truth, wasn’t a manly thing to do. Even so, he had to admit it, recently everything had gone against him. What hurt the most was the failure of the project he had envisaged with the help of Mr Strata (who had been so good to him). Living in Mr Strata’s house in legal terms as his butler, but really as his guest, paying for his lodging and working in some café – the Fiesta, for example, with ten or twelve pounds a week as wage – that would have been a grand solution. But they’d smelt a rat in the Home Office. “It is regretted that your employment cannot be accepted.”
Two motives might have influenced this decision: the first, the fact that Mr Strata was in the business of renting out rooms; the second, that, given he was from Gibraltar, the Home Office would have considered him a kind of semi-compatriot or at least suspected him of some kind of complicity. And yet other, much worse, much more obvious, trickery had gone on. Like that of Miguel, better known in certain surroundings by the nickname Spirit of Evil… Of course, in Miguel’s case, he may have received some help from the Rotarians, since his father, they said, was a Rotarian. All the same, there was the chance Miguel might find himself one day…
The worst part was not being able to remain in England unless it was working as a butler, not being able to extricate himself from this condition, from the necessity of fulfilling the role effectively. All because of a misjudgement, not having ignored bad advice, having applied for that work permit…
He wasn’t suited to domestic service. He would never get used to domestic service. If, on the other hand, he had been registered, like almost all his friends, in the Home Office as a student, he could have had almost complete freedom. That said, Vicente, the doctor he shared a room with, was registered as a student, but had been out of work for a week and was on the cusp of using up all his savings. Then again he could always find a job. In fact, there would soon be an opening in the kitchen at the Fiesta. Anyway, Vicente had a back-up plan: he could always go back to Santander, where he had family, and return to the job he’d been doing, and that way get by.
All of them, it didn’t matter who they were, lived with a larger or smaller amount of insecurity. And if the threat of being expelled from the United Kingdom didn’t weigh over Paco, the kitchen assistant in the Baltimore Hotel, it was only after all those hardships, all those wars…
