THE ENGLISH WITNESS by John C. Bailey Read Free Book Online Page B

for what happened—initially Steve’s pride
but ultimately my own.
    The Bar Alarra was something of an
institution back then, and I hear it’s still going strong today. Apart from a tiny
dance floor in the basement it was no different from most of the other drinking
haunts in the Old Quarter—little more than a large area of floor adorned with a
sprinkling of sawdust and a few stools. However, it boasted a tiny basement
dance floor and kept the longest hours of all the city’s drinking haunts. From
around 2 a.m. onwards it was the last port of call—the place people ended up
when everywhere else had closed and they weren’t ready to call it a night. On
show night after night was a cross-section of society that mixed innocence and
cynicism in equal parts:  local revellers, tourists, students, predators,
victims, in fact the universal assortment of urban night-creatures.
    I was in the Alarra with my colleague Steve
and a small group of local teens, some time in early June, when the
conversation turned to their new folk-hero Txako and his miraculous escape.
Steve had been drinking more heavily since our friend’s departure, and in a careless
moment he gave away what had so far been a closely guarded secret: that we had
set up Txako’s exodus and escorted him across the border.
    As I stood there next to Steve and heard
the words tumble out of his mouth, the room seemed to go dark and distant. I
could hear the blood pounding in my ears. My mind raced, trying to come up with
a way of changing the subject. But I needn’t have worried, because his
admission had been enough to kill the conversation and the evening stone dead.
Our little crowd had gone so quiet that I could hear a drunk singing in the
lane outside. The local lads looked at one another nervously. For several
seconds there was no movement. Then one of them, a long-standing friend named
Pablo, fished in his pocket and scooped some coins onto the bar before heading
towards the exit.
    One by one the rest of the locals broke
eye contact with us. They each put money on the bar, and one of them put out a
hand to stop me when I moved to do the same. Then, suddenly it seemed, Steve
and I had one end of the bar to ourselves. “That went down well,” he said.
    I smiled wryly in return. “I think at
least one of us might have said the wrong thing,” were my words as we left.
    To my pleasant surprise, Pablo was waiting
for us in the doorway of a souvenir shop fifty metres along the cobbled lane,
but he looked agitated rather than pleased to see us again. “My friends,” he
began, then paused as if unsure whether to continue. He looked back the way we
had come towards the sound of footsteps, and suddenly took each of us by the
arm and urged us along a dark alley heading away from the bar and the lights.
    For several minutes Pablo and I walked
briskly ahead, with Steve absorbed in misery a few feet behind us. We turned
this way and that, and nothing further was said until we reached the seafront.
Here we stopped a few metres away from another small group of men. A couple of them
looked in our direction, but once they realised we were neither friend nor foe they
ignored us. Pablo slouched for a moment with his elbows on the parapet and his
eyes fixed on the sand below, while my eyes were drawn up to the brilliant
stars visible over the bay now that the massive circle of floodlights had been
switched off.
    “Just relax,” he urged us. “Try to act
like the maricones over there. And if any of them come over, just stay
relaxed and chat nicely. They won’t harm you, and the police mostly leave them
alone. Unlike political troublemakers.” He turned and looked at us then, and at
last there was a smile on his face. “It was amazing what you did, but you
mustn’t talk about it. It’s dangerous for you and for us.”
    “We thought it was alright with friends,” blustered
Steve, looking at me for support.
    “We are friends of a sort, all the kids,”
replied Pablo.