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…?’
    ‘Montserrat and Dídac, for example.’
    ‘All right, then. Will you call the child Dídac or Montserrat?’
    ‘I said that they
could
be called Montserrat or Dídac, but they could equally well be called Núria and Jordi, or Pepet and Maria Salud, or Xifré, or Mercè …’
    Some of the journalists were beginning to show impatience with this process of onomastic accretion, and Mortimer sat by, puzzled but none the less smiling, as they proceeded to choose names for children that he didn’t even have yet.
    ‘Señor Mortimer, have you tried
pan con tomate
?’
    Camps O’Shea patiently described to Mortimer the composition of
pan con tomate alla catalana
: bread, oil, tomato and salt.
    ‘Is that all?’
    ‘Yes, that’s all.’
    Mortimer gave the matter some thought, and announcedwithout great enthusiasm that he would make sure to incorporate
pan con tomate
into his diet at the earliest opportunity. Then he added, with the ponderous determination of a novice linguist: ‘Me gusta mucho la paella.’
    ‘Do you prefer Catalan paella, or Valencian paella?’
    Camps O’Shea asked the journalist to explain the difference between Catalan paella and Valencian paella, and the journalist said that it had been a joke. Camps gave him a poker-faced look and continued: ‘Are there any more questions?’
    ‘Mortimer, are you one of those centre forwards who go out looking for the ball, or do you prefer to stay in your area?’
    When this had been translated, Mortimer pondered for a moment and replied: ‘A good centre forward should almost never come out of his area.’
    Camps O’Shea got up, to indicate that the press conference was at an end. The press photographers flashed away as if their lives depended on it. Camps ushered Mortimer into another room, followed by the club’s directors, with the club chairman, Basté de Linyola, at their head. Once the photographers and the journalists were gone, Mortimer lost his aura as the god of the stadium. Now he looked like a young lad who had ended up in the wrong room by mistake. Especially when you put him next to Basté de Linyola, a businessman and ex-politician who had transformed the club’s presidency into a position of ultimate social significance. He had been on the point of becoming, variously, a minister in the Spanish government, a councillor in the autonomous government of Catalonia, and mayor of Barcelona. At sixty years of age he had suddenly discovered tiredness, and a fear that this tiredness would cause him to disappear from the public stage that he had occupied continuously ever since he had become the great white hope of the progressive business community under Franco. The chairmanship of this football club was his last position before retiring, but he had converted it into a hot seat, and he was a man who loved power as the only antidote to his ownself-destruction. By the age of sixty, either you have power or you commit suicide — this was what he told himself every morning as he stood in front of the mirror which reflected back unpityingly the tired face of that other being who was growing inside him, and who would eventually turn into his worst enemy. The idea of taking up this presidency after a long period in which the club had been run by uncouth and uncultivated businessmen had struck him as a worthwhile task, to which he brought his qualifications as an engineer and a master in fine arts at the University of Boston, a cultural schizophrenia which had provided him with a few entries for his CV.
    ‘Now that we’re here, this club is coming home,’ he had said in his first address as club chairman. And the sentiment was well received, as was his observation that the club was not just a club but was the symbolic army of Catalonia.
    Now he permitted himself a closer look at Mortimer. He felt both curiosity and a certain populist tenderness towards him. The lad could have been one of his factory workers in Valles, one of those young workers who