At Close Quarters Read Online Free PDF Page A

carrying himself, as though he were always on the defensive.
    Now it all seemed forgotten. His father was dead, the old warehouse had been sold and knocked down to build flats, and he lived far from the city centre. Yet deep down he was still that spineless, insecure adolescent who tried to hide the family business. In fact, his own business was an extension of his father’s, even if adapted to modern times: nowadays no one took a load of old paper to be weighed on scales for a few coins in return. In any case, that was his occupation and his patrimony, and with that he intended to live in peace and comfort. As he drove, the more obscure details of his work vanished before the intense satisfaction of the half hour he’d spent with Marina.

2
Barracks Without Soldiers
    He hadn’t left the house in uniform for over ten years, because that was what security regulations recommended – and he was obsessive about regulations – but also because the military leadership had restricted the presence of army personnel on the streets and among civilians, confining it to the barracks and only allowing uniforms outside on days of patriotic celebrations. In any case, he still found civilian clothes awkward, and would fumble for the pockets of his army jacket while wearing a coat, or would take an extra fraction of a second to recognise himself in the mirror of the vestibule without his greenish clothes on, or would step in a puddle on the pavement shod in moccasins and, only when the cold water soaked his foot, realise that he was not wearing the army boots he’d always liked so much, from the first time he put them on and felt the firm hold on his heel, making him walk more energetically and emphasising the strength of his legs. But today was an exception, and he was wearing a uniform because the importance of his meeting warranted it.
    How he loved his job! To be an officer! An officer among civilians ! Whenever he walked into a bank to withdraw cash, or into a shop to buy anything, his uniform turned him into the centre of attention and gave rise to admiration or negative responses, but never indifference. He was treated with courtesy and respect, too, of course, especially since the disappearance of the last residual Francoist cliques – fallen from favour even within the barracks – who had thought the army should take the place of the legislature,because they didn’t accept that the first obligation of a soldier is not to write laws, or to seek supporters, or to indoctrinate people, but actually to obey the law as it stands.
    Yet neither public esteem nor public rejection altered his conduct. Just as the former didn’t reassure him the latter didn’t alarm him; if anything, both tickled his pride. Pride, he knew, was his weakness and his obsession. He was positive that, if there was a cardinal virtue in a military man, it wasn’t courage, strategic intelligence, ambition or equitableness, but pride, and that all other qualities depended on it. He took pride in his name and surname, Camilo Olmedo, and in representing a lineage of soldiers that harked back to the first Carlist war; pride in his medals and unblemished professional record; pride in the fact that no one would be able to name a single country where Spanish troops had been deployed in recent years and where he hadn’t been present. And so he didn’t mean to do without pride; he would just validate it by doing his job well. Besides, that trait of his character had never been an obstacle in the path of his career. On the one hand, the sovereign peacefulness with which he embodied it separated him from boastful types, like Bramante, who mistook conceitedness for pride, and were constantly bragging about their muscles and courage; on the other, pride had helped him at difficult moments to alleviate feelings of insecurity such as those experienced by Ucha – to name only two of the colleagues whose criticisms he’d have to deal with over the next few hours.
    He put