The Angst-Ridden Executive Read Free

beads of golden water onto the Y-front of his underpants.
    He had no choice. He got out of the car, hunched his shoulders as if shoring up his body against the weight of the cold, and crossed the verge with what he imagined was a spring in his step. He plunged into the undergrowth, looking back as he went, to check whether the people waiting on the road could still see him. The hidden stream was demanding to be liberated; it seemed to take a sadistic pleasure in the domination it was able to exert over a man who was both its master and its slave. ‘There you go, there you go,’ the man murmured to himself. He spotted the substantial bulk of a lime tree, and reached to unzip his fly. His hand went into his fly as if trying to get hold of a soft, live creature that was hard to get hold of. He fumbled for the slit in his underpants and grasped the warm, fleshy substance of his penis. Once again he looked to the front and behind him, then to right and left, as he extracted his appendage and dangled it with two fingers of his right hand while the other fingers made a kind of roof, or rather a canopy, for the almost religious devotion with which he pissed. As he relieved the weight on his bladder, he felt a sense of euphoria, and no longer cared whether people could see him or not. He was trying to trace a pattern with his piss on the bark of the tree, but his eye was suddenly caught by something odd on the ground—something that seemed to have been buried there, and which was slowly being uncovered by the jet of piss. Like an electric probe, the urine slowly washed the shape clean, and before the staring eyes of Juan de can Gubern there finally appeared the shape of a hand. His eyes rested on the hand momentarily, as if trying to make sense of it, and then passed to the muddied sleeve of a jacket, which seemed to contain a man’s arm, and then to the entire jacket, and then to the man himself, face downwards, and half hidden by earth, hoarfrost, and weeds. Juan Gubern’s member turned limp as the cold got to it, and then swiftly retracted. He thought: ‘I should shout,’ but he didn’t, because he suddenly heard the sound of the train approaching and remembered that he had left his car blocking the road. He hurriedly retraced his steps, struggling to return his penis to its rightful place as he went.
    ‘I was just on my way to the office. Was your business really so urgent that you had to come up to Vallvidrera?
    As he asked the question, Carvalho pointedly did not invite his visitor to sit down. The detective was irritated by the feeling of having been caught unawares in his lair, and his eyes traveled across the various signs of disorder in his household: the unwashed plates on the dinner table; the record on the turntable and its sleeve lying on the floor; the overflowing ashtray next to the sofa; and the open book on the floor, covered in ash. He first resolved the problem of the book, by shutting it and tossing it onto a shelf on the other side of the room. He kicked the ashtray under the sofa while at the same time piling up plates and glasses, and taking them to the kitchen. When he returned he found that his visitor had retrieved the book from the shelf and was flicking through it, blowing out the ash from between its pages.
    ‘Don’t worry, it’s only a book.’
    His visitor smiled a smile of enigmatic complicity. Forty years old, Carvalho thought to himself, but looks younger. Wearing a sweater, with the tabs of his shirt collar sticking out like little wings. ‘Judging by the way he moves, he must be hooked on James Dean,’ the detective decided, as he watched his visitor put his hands into his pockets, raise his shoulders and smile boyishly as he scanned the room with eyes that were shrewd and calculating.
    ‘There are worse things in life than books, señor Carvalho. Nice place you’ve got here. Does it cost much to rent?’
    ‘I think I bought it.’
    ‘You think. . .?’
    Carvalho went over to the