CAT ON A URALITE ROOF
Dedicated to my daughter, Clara,
who always got on well with cats and dogs
Two initial words – later there will be more – about myself. I have never had a thing against cats or even had problems with them; with spiders I have, in a hallucinatory fashion. But after my attack of delirium tremens, I took the decision never to try a drop of alcohol again. How then to explain that I should spend every morning in an inhospitable bar-cafeteria called the Montparnasse (its owner had been an emigrant in Paris)?
First of all, I only ever drank innocuous infusions, tea and other such nonsense. Second, even uglier than the Montparnasse is the bedsit I rented thanks to the wretched pension I was given for total and permanent incapacity, having been sent to a hundred places. Last, uglier than the Montparnasse, and uglier than my bedsit, is this city, or ex-city, this indigestible pile of apartment blocks inhabited by people who express themselves in a loud and grating caricature of language. Suffice it to say I cannot bear being out in the street – not just, as will become obvious, because of its wild, deafening traffic. Will that do to explain my loyalty to the Montparnasse café? Perhaps not, but it wasn’t about myself that I wanted to talk. I just wanted to reconstruct the circumstances surrounding the long, final story of Brandariz.
Fair, solid in appearance, he could chat at ease, with an expert’s opinion, about disk brakes, gearboxes, distributors, horsepower and refrigerated cargo ships. Nothing surprising in that – Brandariz had worked in a shipyard, in several garages and other mechanical positions, and had almost emigrated to Rotterdam as a qualified labourer. And yet, on account of health problems, he’d ended his professional life as a porter in a pretentious residential building, tall, eleven floors – not counting the basement, of course – with numerous apartments and flats, perhaps eighty in total or something like that. One of its sides gives on to an alleyway; the opposite faces a street that is lower than the one at the front; the back of the building, I’m not quite sure where it leads. The building is called the Caracas; its promoter must have been an emigrant in Venezuela. Strangely enough, it is thought these urbanistic-architectonic aberrations are worthy of a christening, as if they were beautiful ocean liners.
Few porters are left nowadays. No doubt, Brandariz wouldn’t find such a job today. It’s more common to skimp on the cost of a porter, replacing them with one of those electronic gadgets and, above all, making sure the entrance hall is permanently closed.
Now then, in my opinion the Caracas has gone downhill since Brandariz left. He was a jack-of-all-trades and, to tell the truth, his least important role was that of porter sensu stricto – keeping an eye on who is coming in, preventing the access of beggars, gypsies and others. Brandariz was a mechanic, plumber, electrician and bricklayer all rolled into one. If any inhabitant of the Caracas had a problem with his car, he would go to Brandariz; any faults in the boiler would be resolved by Brandariz; Brandariz guaranteed the normal supply of hot water, fixed the lifts and handled electric cables with the brash confidence of professional electricians, who grab them without harm, however many sparks are flying. In fact, Brandariz was far from leading the kind of life that would have been in keeping with his fragile state of health. But he didn’t complain. On the contrary, he seemed satisfied, happy and complaisant.
There were two parts of the Caracas where he reigned with absolute dominion. One was the basement, the whole of which was given over to a garage, a shelter for a sprawling mass of cars, where the boilers and other vessels were kept. The other was the attic, also immense, with a multitude of small, dark rooms, one for each apartment – around eighty in all, if my calculations are correct – always closed, used as lumber rooms, arranged on either side of long corridors with concrete floors and only ever lit by bulbs that automatically went out after a couple of minutes. The attic also held the two Elevator Rooms, as Brandariz used to call them somewhat pompously, each equipped with a skylight that gives on to the roof and forms the only – insufficient, perhaps – means of direct communication with the outside world on that floor. The roof slopes a little and is made of uralite.
Of all the regulars in the Montparnasse, it was Brandariz I got on best with. He would turn up at the most diverse times, often more than once in a morning, taking advantage of his moments of leisure, which is to say whenever he was tired of playing the role of porter sensu stricto. The doctors had put him on a severe diet, but he interpreted this in his own way. So, for example, the prohibition to imbibe alcohol he took to mean doing without “white” drinks, by which he understood any kind of alcoholic drink except wine. This meant a bowl of white wine was not a white drink, in his opinion, whereas a black coffee liqueur was.
Brandariz would talk to most of his friends in the Montparnasse as an urban exile. That is to say, about football, lottery draws, cars and other technical innovations, as I have explained, and against politicians. This was his social appearance, his outer light, an anodyne and uninterrupted surface.
But Brandariz also had his Shadow. In other words, he hadn’t lost his depths, his contact with the earth – his house, now in the suburbs, had formed part of the rural world when he was born – his link to the past, all the intrahistorical undercurrent of his class. His Shadow was one of the last, so to speak, by which I mean that Brandariz’s children had grown up as pure urban light, public neon light, one of them even playing in a rock band.
Cela va sans dire (I also worked in France), what interested me most about Brandariz was his Shadow. For example, his thoughts on Destiny, or firewater – a white drink, but Brandariz continued to prescribe it for himself for purely therapeutic reasons – or the purge of the sea, or the influence of the moon on the sex of children – those conceived during a waxing moon would be males; during a waning moon, females – or the wickedness of the fox, clearly illustrated by the story of the fox that pretended to be dead in a courtyard, where it had been caught, having been in with the chickens, and took advantage of the owner of the house leaving the door open to run away at top speed. I was also very interested in Brandariz’s knowledge of the monetary reserves in Spain before the outbreak of civil war in 1936.
Of course, I wasn’t the only one Brandariz could communicate with from his Shadow. He also talked to the owner of the Montparnasse, and to Mr Oia, a regular of the café and an inhabitant, like Brandariz, of the semi-rural suburbs, as sparing with his words as he was generous with open smiles of comprehension, acquiescence and compassion. Mr Oia was a bricklayer, but was lame because of a work accident and also drew an incapacity benefit, albeit with a difference: he continued doing odd jobs on the side, on the margins of legality, comme il faut; to be precise, Brandariz would call him whenever he needed help with a repair in the Caracas, since Mr Oia was also a dab hand.
Of Destiny, Brandariz had as pessimistic an idea as the Greek tragedians. If a friend of his was killed in a car accident, Brandariz would blame Destiny. And yet he never explained happy events, such as winning the lottery, as an act of Destiny. He never actually used the word “Destiny” – Brandariz’s Shadow hated abstractions and grand words. He would say something like “it was written” or “we’ve all been born with our paths marked out”.
On the other hand, there was Nature – another word Brandariz never used. As far as I know, he had never bothered clarifying the relationship between Destiny and Nature. But he took it as a given, I think, that Nature was wise, just and even patient, unlike Destiny, blind and capricious. And yet, or so I believed, Destiny had no choice but to manifest itself through Nature. As for the latter, it would sometimes protest, quite rightly, because of all the tricks and insults of man, and change the climate, winters were not winters anymore, or summers summers, because of all those artificial satellites that were being launched, all that scrap metal flying overhead. For Brandariz, outer space, as it’s known, was sacred – sacred and, after a certain height, inviolable: Brandariz did not believe that men had set foot on the moon; this, for him, was a propagandistic lie on the part of the politicians. Rivers, to go no further, were sacred as well, and Brandariz told me how a river had regained its rights by flooding and thereby demolishing a house that had been built on its bank without maintaining a certain distance.
In short, Brandariz was a sailing vessel – not monotonous, but free of important mishaps, because of his age and experience. Until a surge of the sea turned everything upside down. And ended up sinking him.
