Off Side by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán Read Free Book Online

hurting all over, Pepe, I can hardly tell you. One day it’s my kidneys, the next it’s my liver. I can hardly piss, Pepe, I can hardly even piss. When I shake my ding-a-ling, it’s like a lump of wood, and I don’t know why I bother, because even if I shake it, all that comes out is drops. I could shake it for two days on end, but all I’d get would be drops.’
    Carvalho had let him talk on, but even though he pretended to himself that he wasn’t really listening, he slowly found himself getting involved. What the old man was saying now was no different to what he’d been saying as he’d got more and more pessimistic over the years, but this time it sounded less rhetorical and more a sincere declaration of impotence. A powerlessness at the core of his being. And his gestures as he pointed to the various aches were the gestures of a man who could hardly bare to touch where it hurt because it was hurting so badly.
    ‘There are doctors, Bromide.’
    ‘The trouble is, they find all sorts of things wrong with you, Pepe. I used to go to one before, a National Health doctor, and he was very good. He’d ask me: “Do you want me to find something wrong with you? No? That’s fine. Goodbye, then.” And off I went, and for sixty years now I’ve been fit as a fiddle. But then my doctor retired, and I’ve not been back from that day to this. Or rather, I did go back one day, and I saw his replacement. He was an idiot. No sooner did he set eyes on me than he started dreaming up all kinds of things wrong with me. Some of them were right, as itturned out, but he was making up the rest. I waited till he went to answer the phone, and I cleared off. If he’d been right about everything he said was wrong with me, by rights I should be dead by now. And the other thing is, I feel a bit awkward about going to doctors.’
    Carvalho caught himself saying: ‘I’ll come with you.’
    Bromide stood and looked at him, letting the words sink in. Then he swallowed heavily.
    ‘I’d be embarrassed to go to the doctor with you, Pepe. It’d be different if I was married … I’ve always dreamed of having a wife to go to the doctor’s with me, but then you know what a hard time I’ve had, trying to find a decent woman. I’d like to be married. It’s good to go to the doctor’s with your wife.’
    This time Carvalho heard himself say: ‘Charo could go with you.’
    All the dirty wrinkles on the shoeshine’s face creaked into action and his eyes suddenly shone with happiness.
    ‘Would Charo do that for me?’
    ‘Charo needs a dad to take to the doctor’s.’
    ‘You’re making fun of me, Pepe.’
    ‘I’m serious.’
    Bromide finished off his wine and savoured it with a tongue that ranged around a mouth that was more or less devoid of teeth.
    ‘I’ll see what I can do to find you a contact. But be careful with what you find out.’
    Carvalho stuck a thousand-peseta note in Bromide’s jacket pocket, and the shoeshine closed his eyes as the money made contact with his body.
    Juan Sánchez Zapico was a self-made man, and he had surrounded himself with people who were incapable of seeing that what he’d made of himself didn’t actually amount to much. The four apartment blocks that he had constructed in the barrio; the sixscrap-metal yards which extended his domain to the outskirts where Pueblo Nuevo meets with San Adrián; a small sugared-almond factory which had all the latest technology, as he never tired of telling anyone who was willing to listen — all this had made him moderately rich, and likely to remain so. This meant that he could dedicate part of his leisure time to being chairman of Centellas, a historic club in a historic barrio. In the early days of football in Catalonia, Centellas had been capable of competing with Barça, Europa, Espagñol and San Andrés. But then, after the Civil War, it was lucky to survive at all. Its continued existence was due in part to the solid support of its fans in the barrio, and