The South by Colm Tóibín Read Free Book Online Page B

come across before; he insisted on a familiarity she still found disconcerting.Even now as he talked to her and half jeered her, she could not rule out the possibility that this Michael Graves might go away and leave them alone, and that she would greet his departure with mixed feelings. She had become used to his face, yellow and sunken like an apple left out in the sun. Miguel too had warmed to him. He liked foreigners, he told her once, adding so would she, if she had lived in Barcelona for ten years. She had tried to tell him that there were other foreigners available should he tire of the ones he was with now, but he had missed her point.
    “How many drinks did you have with Miguel before I met you this evening?” she asked Michael Graves.
    “Five,” he said.
    “Five what?”
    “Five drinks.”
    “What was in them?” she asked.
    “Miguel ordered them. Miguel paid for them. I am the innocent party.”
    Miguel’s paintings covered the walls. He had been working hard for weeks finishing off paintings that he had previously cast aside, trying to recover paintings he had done years before and beginning new work. These last weeks he had painted all night in a corner of Ramon Rogent’s studio in Puertaferrisa. His eyes glazed over, Katherine noticed, when anything except his exhibition was mentioned. She had watched Michael Graves become Miguel’s friend and adviser, telling him in broken Spanish what he should do with his paintings, how he should frame them, whether he should varnish them and which he should discard.
    At some point in every day Michael Graves would turn up. If he came in the late afternoon he would stay drinking and talking as long as there was company; but sometimes he arrived in the morning and disappeared by lunchtime. Helived in a pensión in the Barrio Chino. It was cheap, he said, and he enjoyed the atmosphere. They knew nothing about him: they did not know why he was there, nor how long he intended to stay, nor what he did with his time. His head was full of information from books he had read and people he had met. One day he brought them a pile of his drawings of scenes in the Barrio Chino. All the students were impressed. Ramon Rogent wanted to buy one of them.
    That afternoon she took him to one of the bars in the market off the Ramblas. He seemed nervous and overwrought.
    “Maybe I shouldn’t have brought those drawings in,” he said.
    “Everybody thinks they’re very good,” Katherine replied.
    “I have a basic competence, that’s what Rogent liked, the native thing, the thing you’re born with. I don’t know how much I should charge for the drawings. I need the money.”
    “He’s not rich.”
    “I need to sell more than one of those drawings. I have no money. Otherwise I’d keep them myself.”
    “Didn’t you have money before you came here?” she asked.
    “I did but I spent it. I need a few commissions.”
    “Do you want a loan of money?”
    “Yes.”
    “How much?”
    “This much plus a bit more.” He put his pensión bill on the table. It was not high.
    “I can give you that tomorrow,” she said.
    “I need it today. They have my passport in the pensión and if they don’t get paid today they’re going to call the police.”
    “Let’s go to the bank.”
    “I’ll give it back to you,” he said. She was surprised at how calm he was.
    *   *   *
    In the week before the exhibition, a small man appeared once a day at Ramon Rogent’s studio and took away the paintings that were ready. Rogent and Miguel called him Jordi Gil. Michael Graves, who disliked him, called him Shylock and did imitations of him rubbing his hands gleefully at the sight of money. Michael went to the British Institute and joined the library in order to borrow The Complete Shakespeare from which he made Katherine read The Merchant of Venice. He cast her in the role of Jessica, Shylock’s daughter. “Sit Jessica,” he would say at any opportunity, “look how the floor of heaven is