Woes of the True Policeman

Amalfitanos for dinner again, but this time, instead of the professors and their wives, the fifth person at the table was Jordi Carrera, the pride of his mother, a slender adolescent with a shyness that was in some ways like Rosa’s.
    As Anna hoped, they became friends on the spot. And the children’s friendship ran parallel to their parents’ friendship, at least during the time the Amalfitanos lived in Barcelona. Rosa and Jordi began to see each other at least twice a week. Once a week or once every two weeks Amalfitano and the Carreras talked on the phone, dined together, went to the movies, attended exhibitions and concerts, spent hours—the three of them—in the Carreras’ living room, by the fireplace in winter or in the garden in summer, talking and telling stories about when they were twenty, thirty, and possessed of an invincible courage. Concerning the past—their personal pasts—the opinions of the three diverged. Anna looked back on those days with sadness, a fond and rather serene sadness, but sadness nonetheless. Antoni viewed his heroic years with indifference, as something necessary but almost nonexistent; he despised nostalgia and melancholy as pointless, sterile emotions. Amalfitano, on the other hand, was dizzied, thrilled, depressed by remembering, capable of weeping in front of his friends or bursting into laughter.
    They usually talked late into the night, when Carrera would give Amalfitano a ride back to his apartment on the other side of Barcelona, wondering how he had come to confide in him so easily, how he had learned to trust him in a way that he hardly ever trusted anyone. Amalfitano, meanwhile, usually made the trip half-asleep, watching through half-closed eyes the empty streets, the yellow signs, the dark and bright windows, at peace with himself in Carrera’s car, sure of arriving home safe and sound, of coming in the door quietly, jacket on the coatrack, glass of water, and before getting into bed, a last glance into Rosa’s room, out of pure habit.
    And now the rector and the department head, always so prudent, so circumspect, had assigned Carrera—because you see him socially, one might call him your friend, he’ll listen to you (was there a threat there? a joke that only the rector and the department head understood?)—this delicate mission which had to be carried out tactfully, with decorum, persuasively, and at the same time firmly. With unshakable firmness. And who better than you, Antoni. Who better than you to find a solution to this problem.
    So Amalfitano wasn’t surprised when Carrera told him that he had to leave the university. Jordi, under instructions from his parents, had taken Rosa to his room, and from the end of the hallway came the faint sound of the stereo. For a while Amalfitano was quiet, looking down at the rug and at the feet of the Carreras sitting one next to the other on the sofa. So they want to get rid of me, he said at last.
    “They want you to go voluntarily, as quietly as possible,” said Antoni Carrera.
    “If you don’t they’ll take you to court,” said Anna Carrera.
    “I’ve been talking to some people in the department and it’s the best you can hope for,” said Antoni Carrera. “Otherwise, you risk everything.”
    “What’s everything?” Amalfitano wanted to know.
    The Carreras gave him looks of pity. Then Anna got up, went to the kitchen, and came back with three glasses. When her husband, the night before, had told her that Amalfitano’s days at the university were numbered, and why they were numbered, she had begun to cry. Where’s the cognac? she asked. After a few seconds in which Amalfitano couldn’t understand what the hell this woman wanted, he answered that he didn’t drink cognac anymore. I gave it up, he said, closing his eyes, his lungs filling with air like someone about to scale a hill. Not a hill, thought Amalfitano as he imagined the whole faculty hearing about his indiscretions, a mountain. The mountain of my guilt. On the sideboard there was a bottle of apple brandy.
    “Don’t complain now,” said Antoni Carrera, as if reading his thoughts. “After all, it’s your own fault. You should have been more careful choosing your friends.”
    “I didn’t choose them,” said Amalfitano, smiling. “They chose me, or life did.”
    “Don’t wax poetic, for God’s sake,” said Anna Carrera, secretly angry that a man who was still handsome—and she really did find him handsome, tall and lean as he