Tattoo by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán Read Free Book Online Page B

stretched his head so that he could look out of the window beyond the old French woman and see the orderly green fields of Holland getting larger and larger as the plane began its descent. Awake again, his neighbour tried to engage him in talk about Holland. Carvalho told her he knew Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Leiden. The old French woman was going to her daughter’s house in Rotterdam. She was married to the foils teacher for the Dutch Olympic team. Was Carvalho going to Rotterdam?
    ‘No, Amsterdam.’
    Despite the fact that his real destination was The Hague, Carvalho had chosen Amsterdam as his base. Firstly because distances do not exist in Holland, above all the distances between Amsterdam, The Hague and Rotterdam. Secondly because Amsterdam was one of the cities in the world he adored, and something told him that the man as bold and blond as beer did not exactly fit into the mould of a Spanish worker stuck in the Philips factory at The Hague. His passage must have left some traces in the splendid city of Amsterdam, and in particular in the night-time red light district.
    The plane landed at Schiphol airport, only a stone’s throw from Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Carvalho knew where to go in the airport, and headed straight for the bus station. His bus soon filled up with workers coming back tanned,moustachioed and loud voiced from holidays spent back in their home countries. Turks, Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese: a whole alphabet of poor European countries where life was hard. It was growing dark, but Carvalho still had time to take in the green, watery geometry of the Dutch landscape between Schiphol and Amsterdam. Fugitives from a dry country, the Turks had lost their initial boisterousness and gradually accepted the convention of silence imposed by this part of Europe, where everything looked as though it were drawn with a ruler.
    For Carvalho, the old Schiller hotel was one of the attractions of Amsterdam. From the window of one of its slightly shabby rooms he looked out over Rembrandtplein. In the centre stood a statue of the heavyweight painter, displaying a serenity he would never have shown in his lifetime. If the Dutch could, thought Carvalho, they would turn Rembrandt’s tortured paintings into eighteenth-century French pastels. Above the rooftops he could see the gilded figure of an angel with a trumpet on top of a clock tower in a nearby square. He decided to postpone his visit to The Hague until the next day. It was growing dark with Nordic rapidity, and he wanted to make use of the last daylight to reacquaint himself with paths he had traced on previous visits along the canals down to the red light district, the Central Station and the port. Also, he did not want to miss having dinner in an Indonesian restaurant. He knew Amsterdam boasted two outstanding choices: the Indonesia or the Bali. The first of these was only two or three blocks from his hotel, and its Rysttafel was unbeatable.
    Nothing in the world could stop him enjoying two glasses of genever, washed down with an equal number of mugs of beer, in the first tavern he found. Places like this in Englandand Holland appealed to their customers with the warmth of their wooden panels and well-worn tables, the space they offered for people to sit and talk, the time allowed for beer to settle into the contours of stomachs. Carvalho realised yet again that it is the small details that create the overall meaning of something. One of the things he had been most looking forward to on his journey to Holland was to be able to drink those two glasses of Dutch gin, washed down with mugs of beer. Genever, made from grain and juniper berries, is unclassifiable, much less refined and elaborated than English dry gin. You have to ask especially for it from the waiters, because they consider it too rough for palates that are not accustomed to it, and prefer to offer English gin instead. There was a time and a place for everything. Carvalho remembered the ghastly