Conversations at the Next Table

The tip wasn't reliable enough for me to be there. Not because my presence was out of place among the regulars at Tropezón, as I had frequented the place for years, but because I couldn't believe Pulpo was using that dive as the center of his current operations. But there he was, and I had it out for him.

Gutiérrez had warned me, an old dockworker who, after tearing his cruciate ligaments, spent his days driving a garbage truck. He got the tip from someone in the union: "Pulpo is back in the mud and hangs out at Club Unión."

The bar in question wasn't a nightclub but the buffet of a civil association that in its heyday had been the cradle of great basketball players and was now about to mark two decades as a haven for drunks and gamblers gathered around a bocce court. I had left at the beginning of that decline, more precisely when the fire happened. That's how it was. I caught the first bus heading to the Valley and took off.

Back then, I was studying literature and working as a volunteer giving tutoring to the club's scholarship kids, kids from the nearby neighborhoods. My future plan was to set up a community library and turn an abandoned part of the bocce courts into a cultural center. Of course, many didn't seem inclined to forgive me for that. Or maybe it was just Pulpo, but I was young and stupid and militant and had to live it that way: a kind of conspiracy, a matter of sides. And on my side was Angelito García, a Spaniard who had survived the Spanish Civil War and the generation of founding members. "Do whatever you think is necessary to keep this from becoming a dive," the old man would tell me with that beautiful accent, stressing discretion. "We'll see what we can do, Don Ángel... it's going to take time."

In the Valley, they placed me as an errand boy in the newsroom of the city's third newspaper, and I worked my way up. One day, they gave me the job of inventing horoscopes and what is now called fake news but was then called gossip. It took me five years to adapt press releases and organize a modest cultural agenda until they let me review and interview the first writers.

Years went by, about twenty, and many things changed names too. So when I returned to the city to sell my recently deceased mother's house, I assumed that when one disappears for so long, things change. But no: the bad stuff always sticks around.

I got in the car and drove the 40 blocks that still separated my parents' house from what was left of the club's headquarters. Since the fire, the intentions inside had been definitively marked.

It was the late afternoon of an October that forced the regulars to have their vermouths and look out the open window. Some of the older faces still seemed familiar. The bookmaker's son was taking notes on the sidewalk with the same speed as his late father before they shut down the heads. The TV was different, though it was stuck on that channel with red bulletins where the programming oscillates between horse races and lottery drawings with brief jumps to a sports channel when the event warranted it. Nothing seemed to have changed. Nothing except me, bearded and much fatter. Would they recognize me? How could I enter without drawing attention? Should I do that or the exact opposite?

I said "good afternoon," and everyone greeted me with the respect that was customary in my time. It didn't take me more than a minute to locate Pulpo at the muss table next to the pool table. I suppose those guys were his bodyguards. Raúl, the bartender I thought was dead, looked at me as if not wanting to give me away.

"Do they still make the best milanesas in town here?" I asked as he approached with his characteristic limp and a rag to wipe the greasy melamine.

"The prodigal son returns," he replied, as if about to hug me but not doing so.

"Can I sit here?" I said as I sat at a table and left my open backpack on another, smaller table they still used for drinks.

"Why ask if you already sat down?" he smiled, showing he hadn't lost his sense of humor.

Old Paciarotti, who had been a member of that committee and was a distant cousin of Ángel, was trying to see me through his thick glasses and murmured at the back table, which we used to call the domino condemned table.

"How are you, after so long?" said Raúl. "I thought you were in the south."

"Time doesn't pass here, I see. Don't these old bastards ever die?" I said while taking out a book and placing it on the table.

"Bad weed... Want a beer?"

"Sure, and make me one of your sandwiches. From what I see, only Pucho and Esparsa are left..."

"And Tato, who comes by from time to time. Usually when there's a bocce game."

"And basketball never came back?"

"After you left, everything fell apart. No one wanted to take on the reconstruction. The soot was painted over, and it was patched up a bit, but over the years..."

"Don't say anything... a subsidy Chiche got."

"Correct."

There was a silence. Raúl pretended to be in a hurry that he didn't have.

"And the rats that caused the fire...?" My question made him uncomfortable. I lowered my voice. "You know I had nothing to do with it. They tried to pin it on me..."

"Angelito," Raúl made a pathetic and desperate gesture, something like an agnostic crossing himself.

The conversations at the nearby tables turned into murmurs. A tense murmur, as if those regulars used to the unchanging had sensed the imminence of a rupture. From the corner of my eye or directly, all the tables seemed to be pointing at me. All except the one in the center. At it, with his back to me, Pulpo was playing truco with Chiche, an old companion who had the knack of always landing on his feet but who, by my calculations, might suffer collateral damage this time.

The book I placed on the table was one of the few things I had managed to save that night. "The Catcher in the Rye," Salinger, a great book.

I reached into my backpack and cocked the gun, waiting for some snitch to alert Pulpo, but I noticed that his presence there was more uncomfortable than mine.