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The only masking effect that I accept with good grace is cooking.’
    ‘And sex?’
    ‘Adulterated sex is bad for your health.’
    When Carvalho fell silent in order to light a Rey del Mundo Special which he had ordered from the waiter, Camps waited for him to finish his lighting-up ritual in the hope that he would continue his explanation. But Carvalho limited himself to the quiet contentment of simply smoking.
    ‘Carry on. I’m very interested in what you’re saying. You’re a philosopher.’
    ‘That’s all I know. I’ve already told you everything I know, and it surprises me that I’ve said so much. I’m getting old. I like to know the reasons for the things that I do.’ And all of a sudden, as if he’d received some sort of internal message, he rose to his feet.
    ‘I’m going to have to leave you to look after your Englishman.I have to get a move on. I have people I need to catch after lunch.’
    Coffee-time is the best time to catch shoeshines around town, Carvalho thought as he left the Barceloneta restaurant, a little wobbly from the effects of two bottles of Brut Barocco which he’d had to drink virtually on his own because Camps was more or less teetotal, and Mortimer barely touched the stuff, not even the
cava
which Camps had promoted as part of the framework of what was quintessentially Catalonian.
Pan con tomate, cava
, the
seques amb butifarra
, the
escudella i carn d’olla …
Camps had run through the list as if he was declaiming a patriotic poem. On the crowded beaches of Barceloneta, scores of tanned bodies, bronzed with the assistance of atmospheric pollution, were taking the afternoon sun. Two images came to his mind’s eye, faded images of days that he had spent on that beach during his childhood, and he was just on the point of turning sentimental when a sudden whiff of oil that had been reused after frying frozen scampi erected an insuperable obstacle to nostalgia. So instead he went looking for a taxi in paseo Maritimo, a street seemingly frozen in time and place as it waited for the extension which would link it to the Olympic Village. In the distance, the houses that had been demolished for the construction of the Olympic sports facilities looked more like a set for a film about the bombing of Dresden. The new city would no longer feel like the city he knew, the city which had lived within the confines of Tibidabo to the north and Barceloneta and the sea to the south. The taxi dropped him in the Ramblas, at the foot of the Pitarra monument in plaza del Arco del Teatro. The young prostitutes, made up to look like even younger prostitutes, were still there, lined up along the pavement outside the Amaya and the Palacio Marc, which was now the seat of the Cultural Council of the Generalitat of Catalonia. The frontage of the church of Santa Monica was showing signs of the plastic surgery which was about to turn it into a Museum of Contemporary Catalan Art, and at his shoulder the bulldozers were poised over the Raval barrio, intent on opening an exit routefor those who were trying to escape from the unpleasant realities of drugs and Aids and black and Arab immigrants. As long as there are young prostitutes, there will also be contemporary art, he thought, and this thought proved to him that he had reached the desired level of alcoholic surrealism. Bromide was not cleaning shoes outside the Cosmos, so Carvalho set off down calle de Escudillers, expecting to find his old and balding friend kneeling at the feet of some somnolent citizen. Why, he wondered, don’t women use shoeshines? Outside yet another restaurant advertising the delights of paellas and
calamares alla Romana
he found Bromide labouring over the shoes of a self-satisfied man who was either Swiss or a rich Catalan from Vic.
    ‘You’ll have to wait a moment, Pepiño. I’ve another customer after this gentleman.’
    ‘Glad to see you’ve got plenty of work, Bromide.’
    ‘Touch wood.’
    Carvalho leaned up against the