The Buenos Aires Quintet by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán Read Free Book Online

guarantee you would survive. It just happened that sometimes the torturers took you out of the cave where all you saw were shadows of reality, and allowed you a glimpse for an hour or two of the life you had left on hold. They took you to the cinema. Or showed you the bills for flowers they had sent in your name to their wives, or to your mother. The Captain took him to see Being There with Peter Sellers, and within a few minutes both he and his torturer were laughing, taking time out from their real roles. But then back in the underground cell, there was no guarantee that the good mood would continue, that a beating or a torture session with the cattle prod would not immerse you once again in the only possible reality. And you couldn’t take advantage of being outside to escape, because your family was facing all kinds of threats, as were you, and then beneath or beyond those threats was the syndrome of the grateful hostage.
    ‘That’s an excellent idea, Señor Tourón,’ the Captain said to him on one of these outings. ‘And it was you who first thought of it. The grateful hostage! I remember that in your research into animal behaviour you wrote brilliantly about awarding a prize arbitrarily and very rarely, as a powerful exception to the rule of constant and equally arbitrary punishment.’
    Then one day they let him see his father. That was a sign they were not going to kill him, that he wasn’t going to disappear – or if he was, his father would disappear too. But he seemed in control. He was very sure of himself, and the Captain seemed to respect him. Raúl was allowed to speak alone with him, but they didn’t manage to say anything to each other. They never managed to say anything ever again. Not when a few days later the two of them returned to Spain. Not for almost twenty years in Spain. Only when Raúl, his mind made up, told him he was leaving the next day for Buenos Aires. And then all the old man had said was: ‘What will be, will be. And all I’ve done is useless.’
    The students listened to her perhaps because she had the look of a mature Madonna, with scars on her face that looked gentle or traced with her permission. The lecture room of a university fallen on hard times, in keeping with a pauper culture. Alma is sitting behind a table up on the platform. Carvalho has slipped in through the half-open door, behind the backs of the carefully scruffy students sitting in this carelessly scruffy room, a rundown, cheap and mercenary scene that is completely at odds with the words coming from Alma’s pale, sensual lips.
    ‘The criticism that the language of marginalized people is a non-language merely disguises the fact that all language has now become non-language. Look at all the usual messages we get from politics or advertising. They are not trying to convey knowledge, truth, or a sense of mystery. All they want to do is convince us. And we all pretend we have been convinced, because we doubt whether there is any point in doubting, suspecting, or still less, denying. Steiner asks himself the Romantic question of whether it is still possible that words can reacquire the mystery they had at the dawn of tragic poetry’
    The lecturer is as beautiful as she is sure of herself, and sceptical.
    ‘But why does Steiner ask himself that question? Isn’t he doing it from a position where his own language has become false? Isn’t he laying claim to an impossible nostalgia?’
    Silence.
    ‘Thank you for your attention. Tomorrow we’ll look at the topic from the point of view of Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. ’
    Carvalho pushes his way forward through the scrum of young bodies. He observes how Alma rhythmically collects up her books, straightens her cardigan, stands up and accommodates her dainty muscles to her remarkable forty-year-old frame. She smiles briefly to dismiss everyone, and when she raises her head to decide which corridor she should make her escape down, she sees Carvalho standing by the