Woes of the True Policeman

playing for Barcelona at the Palau Sant Jordi alongside the stars of Catalan basketball. The opposing team was Real Madrid, but it wasn’t the usual Real Madrid. The only player he recognized was Sabonis, but this Sabonis was much older and slower and his hands shook when he caught the ball. The rest of the Madrid players were strangers, and not only were they strangers, even their bodies were indistinct. Their legs were legs, but at the same time there was something about them that was uncharacteristic of a pair of limbs, as if they were constantly coming in and out of focus. The same was true of their arms and faces, which never seemed to settle into a fixed expression or firm outline, though this strange phenomenon didn’t seem to bother the other Barcelona players. The Palau was full to bursting and the shouting of the spectators was so loud that for a moment Jordi thought he would pass out. Without much surprise he realized that he was playing point guard, not center. The Madrid players soon began to commit fouls and almost all of them were against him. He didn’t know the score. So focused was he on the game that he never lifted his head to glance at the electronic scoreboard. In fact, he had no idea where the scoreboard was, but he suspected that his team was winning, and this made him incredibly happy. When he noticed that he was bleeding from the nose, the brow, and the upper lip, the scene underwent a radical shift.
    Now he wasn’t on the Palau court but in a dark locker room with raw cement walls and long, damp benches and a constant noise of water, as if a river were running above the changing room. He wasn’t alone. A shadowy figure was watching him from a corner. Jordi felt his bloody face and cursed the shadow in Catalan. He said son of a bitch in Catalan, then he said bastard , though the word was the same in Spanish. The shadowy figure quivered like a broken fan. Jordi told himself that he should take a shower, but the ominous presence in the corner made it an ordeal to undress. Feeling cramps in both legs, he sat down and covered his face with his hands. Incomprehensibly, he saw his father, his mother, and Amalfitano drinking whiskey in the yard one fall afternoon, happy, with no problems on the horizon. The afternoon, the sky, and the rooftops of the neighboring buildings were heartrendingly beautiful. Where is Rosa? he asked longingly, careful not to disturb the equilibrium of the scene, which he sensed was precarious. But his parents didn’t seem to hear him. He soon realized that they were in another dimension. Then the dream lifted, drifting away in a balloon or on a cloud, and below, in the streets of Barcelona, Catalan nationalists fought house to house against the Spanish army. Jordi knew the name of the army without being told: it was the King’s Army, the National Army, and it fought with commendable tenacity against him and his compatriots. But this time it wasn’t just the Castilian soldiers whose faces and limbs were blurred. The Catalan militiamen also grew hazy amid the rubble and even the cries of the wounded or the leaders ordering their men to advance or retreat took on the same quality, blurring in the air, fleeing the Catalan and Spanish languages for a kingdom where words were like electrocardiograms, where voices were like Tartar dreams.
    In the last image of his dream Jordi saw himself huddled in a corner, hugging his knees as hard as he could and thinking of Rosa, Rosa, Rosa, so far away.

6
    Celestino Arraya, whose house Rosa Amalfitano visited on the third day after her arrival in Santa Teresa, was born in Villaviciosa in 1900 and died at a cantina called Los Primos Hermanos in 1933, a few months after Hitler came to power. Little information is available about his childhood: legend has him as a brave young soldier with Pancho Villa when the reality is that he spent the Villa years hiding away on a ranch where his friend Federico Montero—an eminent politician and landowner who managed to navigate the turbulent years of the Revolution with courage and unerring instinct—bred fighting bulls. It was the Piedras Negras bullring that saw his first triumph, in 1920. After that, successful appearances followed in other border cities and towns: Ojinaga, Nogales, Matamoros, Nueva Rosita. These were some of the rings from which he emerged raised aloft, clutching tail and ears in his hands like a shipwrecked sailor frozen stiff with cold. He was extremely adept in the art