Free Off Side by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

in society.
    ‘Thirty per cent of Spanish society lives below the poverty line. How can it avoid being violent?’
    ‘And fewer and fewer people are going to football matches,’ the interviewer concluded, philosophically.
    Carvalho switched off the radio. Faced with the choice of either going to the office or examining once more on foot what his mind’s eye had reconstructed with the aid of the radio debate, he opted for the latter, parked the car, and headed off towardsArco del Teatro to examine the future path of the bulldozers, zigzagging down alleys that had an air of expectant mourning, and saying goodbye to buildings that had suddenly become ennobled by the death sentence hanging over them, because even the Boston Strangler inspired compassion and acquired dignity in the hours preceding his execution. Going up San Oligario, he emerged onto calle de San Rafael. On the left, Casa Leopoldo, an honest restaurant in the process of preparing its daily offerings; in front, pasaje de Martorell; to the right, calle de Robadors, with its now defunct bars for cheap prostitutes, and a couple of boarding houses, including one which announced itself as belonging to a certain ‘Conchi’, but whose neon sign evidently reserved its electric energies solely for the night. All the bars were more or less shut, except for one which reproduced a tropical environment reminiscent of some Third World country definitively ruined by foreign debt. Three ageing, early rising prostitutes were staring contemplatively into their coffees, and his presence as the only man in the place failed to arouse their interest. Carvalho went up to the bar and ordered a coffee, and instantly sensed a human warmth hovering by his right shoulder. He turned round to see a girl in such reduced circumstances that she looked more like a memory of her former self. The skin of her face was grey, and the way it was distributed over bones that were well proportioned but meagre reminded you of a skull. She sported a black eye, and a bruise on her forehead.
    ‘Excuse me, sir. Would you be interested in enjoying a literary screw this morning?’
    ‘Any particular type of literature?’
    ‘Type or genre?’
    ‘It’s all the same to me.’
    ‘We could screw like a Baudelaire poem.’
    ‘Poetry doesn’t turn me on.’
    ‘What the poetry doesn’t do, I’m sure I can.’
    ‘What faculty did you graduate from?’
    ‘The Faculty of Fellatio. Do you know what fellatio is?’
    ‘It’s a long time since I was at university …’
    ‘A blow-job.’
    ‘A blow-job,’ Carvalho mused as he grappled with the hidden etymology of this mysterious word.
    ‘At this time of day, you’ll get it cheap. The price goes up later.’
    ‘That’s a terrible way to do business. At this time of day you should be charging more. There’s less competition about.’
    The would-be intellectual retorted sharply: ‘Do you want it or not?’
    Her eyes flicked intermittently to a corner of the bar where Carvalho just about made out a young man with a pigtail, who was watching them in a vacant sort of way.
    ‘Is that your pimp?’
    ‘No. My father. What are you after, here?’
    ‘A coffee.’
    ‘Do you want coke?’
    ‘Do you have coke?’
    ‘No. But I know where you could get some.’
    ‘And that way you get some too. Are things really that bad?’
    ‘Things are as good or bad as my cunt happens to feel like.’
    ‘A professional prostitute would never have said anything so vulgar.’
    ‘What do you know about prostitutes?’
    ‘My girlfriend’s a prostitute.’
    ‘I bet your girlfriend’s a slag.’
    And she turned on her heel, but her legs were too skinny for the stylish exit she’d intended. She disappeared into the half light at the back of the bar and sat next to her boyfriend. From that moment on, two pairs of venomous eyes drilled into the back of Carvalho’s head until the moment when he finally finished his coffee and turned to glare sufficiently menacingly for the