More Than a Team: A Father, a Son, and Barça

By Vicenç Villatoro

The modern-day odyssey of a father and son who are held together by a single thread: Football Club Barcelona

“Why have you come back?” Fifteen-year-old Albert calmly faces his father, Jaume, who left his family four years ago. Back in his son’s bedroom, surrounded by the blue and scarlet colors of Barcelona’s soccer team, Jaume offers to take Albert to the 2006 Champions League final in Paris, where FC Barcelona will face the fearsome Arsenal team. On the train journey they share a compartment with a group of Barça fans in their twenties, whose presence complicates Jaume’s efforts to reconnect with his son. Although amazed by one supporter’s encyclopedic knowledge of past matches, Albert is particularly fascinated by another fan’s stories of hooliganism: joining a gang at away games and getting into fights. Once they get to the stadium, Jaume finds out that his father, whose health has been declining, is near death. As tension builds on the pitch and in the stands, it provokes different emotions in those witnessing the match live in the stadium and those watching it on TV, including Jaume’s ex-wife, his estranged daughter in Dublin, and his mother nursing his father at home. A masterful exploration of soccer fandom and the sense of belonging to a tribe, More Than a Team tells the moving story of a family navigating the passing of time, personal sacrifices, and the complexities of communication with those we love most.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barcelona eBooks
• Release date: Jan 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781453264157

Book preview

1

Ulysses has at last indeed come home again.

—The Odyssey

Why have you come back?

Jaume thinks that parents shouldn’t have to knock on their children’s bedroom doors, that the doors should always be open. Well, that is what he thought. That is what he thought four years ago, before he left. But back then Albert was eleven. Things were different. Jaume has just walked into Albert’s room without knocking and finds him sitting at the computer, with the music cranked up. Rosa told him to go in, without her, it’s better if you go in on your own. Jaume nodded and crossed the hallway. Years ago, there was a time when it had been the hallway of his home. The white of the walls has yellowed a little and there is a painting that wasn’t there before. But the important things are still where they used to be, they haven’t changed that much. At the end, on the right, next to the bathroom, is Albert’s bedroom with the door shut.

Can I come in?

Yeah, sure.

Albert hasn’t lifted his eyes from the computer screen and Jaume thinks he has minimized something, as if he was trying to hide it.

I wanted to speak to you.

Now?

No, it doesn’t have to be right now. Or we can if you want. Whatever you want.

The bedroom is a jumbled den. Clothes on the floor. The bed unmade. A shelf full of books and exotic miniature cars bought on vacations. A photo of Barça from the last season between two flags: the enormous Catalan independence flag with its blue triangle; and a crude plastic flag in the Barça colors, blue and scarlet, that was probably given away free at a match. A Braveheart poster. Scarlett Johansson in Match Point. Lots of photos pinned to a cork notice board, taken from very close up, distorted, Albert and messy-haired friends that Jaume doesn’t know pulling faces into the camera: tired faces, adolescent and pale, dressed up as punks, in groups of twos and threes. On the football shirt hanging from the ceiling is Ronaldinho’s number ten but with Albert’s name. His first name. Not his family name: Cortès, Albert and Jaume’s family name. Nor did it have Rosa’s family name, Albert’s other name: Mercadal. Tenim un nom i el sap tothom: We have a name that everyone knows. Everyone chooses which name to put on the back of his or her shirt. The essential name: footballers only have one name, sometimes a shortened name, sometimes a nickname, sometimes their family name, sometimes their first name, sometimes a kind of nom de guerre. But on this shirt, it says Albert. It’s a choice.

Why have you come back?

I’d arranged to see your mother. And I wanted to see you too.

I don’t mean today, right now. I mean after so many years.

Do you want us to talk about it?

Maybe some other time.

Yes, that would be better. Right now Jaume doesn’t know what to say to his son, he wasn’t expecting that question. It’s not a question he can answer quickly. Maybe: because of my father, who’s dying. Because of your mother. Because of you. Because of work. He rehearses a few replies without voicing any of them out loud, he doesn’t like them.

Yeah, maybe it’s better another day.

Albert has lifted his eyes from the computer screen. Jaume looks discreetly at the screen but he only sees a cluster of icons over a blurred photo. Maybe this out-of-focus blurriness is precisely the point. Maybe it evokes, despite its lack of focus, an extraordinary, secret, and intimate moment. He doesn’t know what to say to him. Suddenly, he feels as though he doesn’t have the strength to talk about anything serious, it’s the last thing he feels like doing. Why have you come back? I ask myself the same question, why have I come back. I’ve missed the boat. I can’t act like nothing has happened. Why have you come back? If you ran away once, you can run away again. I don’t trust you. They don’t say it, but maybe they sense it. Jaume pauses for an instant, perplexed. Coward. You’re a coward. I’m a coward. What if I don’t say what I’ve come to say? But it needs to be said. Otherwise I’ll regret it afterwards. He takes a deep breath, like someone leaping into the void.

I just wanted to say I have a couple of tickets to the Champions final in Paris. I’d really like you to come with me, if that’s what you want.

He says it tentatively, like a diplomat. Like someone slipping a note under the door, to see what happens. He is afraid of a sharp, curt response. But Albert doesn’t say anything. Rosa has stayed in the living room, in front of the television, waiting, drinking a beer and snacking on potato chips, her weakness. Jaume wants to leave to go back home, his current home, the home that was his before, his parents’ home. He looks back at Albert’s bedroom and it doesn’t seem that messy after all. It is packed full of stuff, in the baroque sense, but there is a certain order to it. There are books; a few, not too many. He can’t make out the titles; he’d have to look closely, it wouldn’t be very discreet. Albert has grown lanky, he is wearing an old black t-shirt with No Future written in white graffiti letters and some baggy combat shorts that are falling down. His hair is long and messy, studiously messy.

You don’t have to tell me right now. Just think about it, if you want, and let me know when you’re ready.

OK. I’ll let you know soon.

Jaume responds with a nod and a measured smile, he doesn’t want it to look like a proclamation of victory. Too premature. He carefully closes the door behind him leaving it ajar and steps back into the hallway just as he used to years before when he would leave a glass of water in Albert’s room in the middle of the night, barefoot in the hallway, half-asleep and bleary-eyed, happy without knowing it.

***

It’s a good thing you came back. Otherwise I don’t know how I’d manage.

Llúcia takes Jaume’s hand because there are things that have to be said through touch. The sense of touch expresses things, it takes the sting out of words, and it gives them the right tone. No, Jaume’s mother doesn’t know how she’d manage with her bedridden husband; at times feverish, in pain, absent. But that isn’t why she needs her son’s help, that isn’t the tough part, she has always taken care of her husband. There is this atavistic instinct of protection, a genetic sense of reality in the face of illness and pain, even death. All the women in the family have it, it has always been there, passed down from mothers to daughters or sometimes straight to granddaughters. No, she needs Jaume when the doctor comes and says things in that particular way and she doesn’t know exactly what he means, what she has to do, and what will happen. Jaume works with words, he understands them. He translates them for Llúcia, his mother, into scheduled doses of pills and into concrete and comprehensible symptoms, prognoses for the following day: he’ll have a stomachache, a fuzzy head, and he’ll have difficulty breathing. Then Llúcia follows the instructions. The doing isn’t the problem. It is the understanding. The knowing what to do. Speaking and listening to the visiting doctor, the high priest of a hidden truth, about a secret that he protects with convoluted words. Llúcia leaves that to her son.

Jaume has gone back to his parents’ house, to the family apartment on Rutlla Street. He has moved back into his bedroom, the bedroom he had before he got married, his childhood bedroom. He looks at the room and compares it to his son’s room. There are still things from when he was a child, not everything, some of his books on the shelves, and the furniture that has become dated, more dated than antique, old-fashioned. The cups from when he played indoor football at school. There are no posters. But there were posters once. Not too different from his son’s. There were posters of other films and other actresses, less vivacious and less explicit. There was a different Barça lineup, from the time of Cruyff when he first arrived from Holland, the year of the five-nil win away at Madrid, the era of Sotil and Rexach and Asensi. After years, yes, fourteen years without winning a league. The old La Trinca record that he used to sing must be here, too, at the back of some chest of drawers. Records that you can no longer listen to, because there aren’t any old record players left to play them on anymore, though nobody dares throw them away or take them to the Sant Antoni market to sell. Jaume puts his jacket down in his childhood bedroom and his mother walks in without knocking; you don’t knock on children’s doors.

He’s awake. The pills have taken effect. He’s OK now.

She means he should go and see him. He is stretched out on the marital bed with the blinds half drawn so that it isn’t too light and to stop the noise from the street drifting up. It’s a busy street, especially at midday. On the console table there is a photo of Albert, among others, when he was a little boy, dressed in a football shirt, the Barça shirt, with a trophy in his hand, a photographer’s portrait. His father is sitting up slightly with cushions at his back, like a convalescent in recovery phase. But he looks ill. Yellowing skin and dark circles under his eyes.

How are you feeling?

Bad. How do you think I feel? But he doesn’t say it angrily. He is just acting out a theatrical role, the old grouch.

Well you look OK to me.

That’s because it’s very dark in here.

That must be it.

The mother arrives but she hangs back, she doesn’t want to get in the way. She spends enough hours in this bedroom as it is. All her life, in fact. Now it is her son’s turn. She plays the role of Chief of Protocol, an umbilical cord with the outside world.

He’s just been to see Albert, says his mother.

Really? Is everything OK? says his father, hopeful.

I want to take him to Paris with me, to see the Barça final.

That’s very good. I’d go too if I could.

You’ll see it on TV. We’ll wave at you when the camera zooms in on us.

It won’t zoom in on you. There’ll be tons of people there.

Jaume’s father hasn’t fully digested the separation. There are couples who stay together to spare their parents the upset. There are parents who think that if a child of theirs separates it is because they haven’t done their job properly. Antoni Cortès, Jaume’s father, is one of those who thinks everything is their fault, that if there is a very long silence at dinner it is because they didn’t know what to say. Every time he finds out Jaume has gone to see his son—and his ex-wife who Antoni always liked when she was young—he thinks that maybe things will go back to how they were, to what it should never have ceased to be.

Do you need anything?

No, you should both go and have dinner. It’s getting late.

Some of that fresh Jell-O…

His father refuses with a shake of the head and takes the cushion from behind his back, flattens it, and gets into a comfortable position to sleep. But he won’t sleep, he already knows it. He’ll go over and over everything in his head, life, all the things that he wishes would remain forever but that he will take with him to the grave. All the things that should have happened and have never happened. Jaume coming back from Buenos Aires was a surprise. A good one. As he weighs up everything, the good and the bad, his eyes half closed, alone in bed, he puts Jaume’s return onto the plus side. When Jaume leaves with his Llúcia, he looks at the photographs on the console table, the photo of his wedding day, the photo of his son holding up a football cup that he had just won, a photo of his grandchildren, Glòria and Albert, who haven’t been to see him for such a long time.

***

Tell dad I’ll go to Paris with him.

I think you should be the one to tell him, says Rosa, maternal.

Albert knows that he has to call his father, OK, count me in, when are we leaving? But he’s not in any rush. Or rather, he’s dragging his feet. He doesn’t know how to say it, what tone of voice to use. He doesn’t want to be rude, or unfair, or bitter. But even more than that he doesn’t want to be a pushover, he doesn’t want to trade the apologies he is owed in exchange for tickets to the final. It’s more complicated. Rosa, his mother, has always told him that nothing is easy. The only things that look easy are things that are poorly articulated. If you explain something well, the whole story, it is bound to get complicated. Jaume only comes over from time to time to what had once been his home, an apartment that is too big for two people, Rosa and Albert, next to the old cemetery, on the other side of Vallparadís, the site of building works for years now to divert the trains underground. An apartment that has become dated and worn with the years, but Albert doesn’t notice; he has always seen it the same. But if Jaume came to dinner, tonight for instance, he would say OK, fine, as if he wasn’t bothered, without being rude, without any grumpy or scornful looks. But he doesn’t want him to think that everything has gone back to normal. Because this isn’t normal. Coming out with these things, so many years later, as if nothing had happened. And what’s more, his father won’t come for dinner tonight. Or tomorrow night. Or the night after.

You’ve already got the tickets? says Xavi, incredulous.

Yeah, my dad got them. I don’t know how.

A couple of kids from Albert’s class, at the Piarists school, want to go to Paris. He knew they would. Xavi’s older brother says he’ll plant himself in front of the ticketing agency the night before the tickets go on sale, he’ll spend the night sleeping outside on the sidewalk to be the first in line when they open and to be sure he’ll get them. One for Xavi, a couple for some other friends. Albert spoke to them about the trip to Paris, before he gave his father an answer, before he told him yes, he would go with him. Albert’s father having tickets before the agencies even open looks like special privileges. But it is a privilege that is admired and envied. There will be no revolutions against privilege in this case. Your dad’s a journalist, isn’t he? Yeah, but not a sports journalist. He doesn’t talk about football. He’s really into it but he doesn’t write about it. But he must’ve got the tickets because he’s a journalist. How much’ll they have cost him? No idea. He might’ve even got them for free, journalists live the good life. I wanna be a journalist. You don’t have to study much, right? But a sports journalist. Or a music journalist. Like the ones who write gig reviews. Not the ones who go to war zones.

There are some kids in class who only think about football. About Barça. And Xavi seems to be one of them. Not Albert. Not exactly. Actually, he has never stopped to think about what he thinks about. Of course, there is football. It’s a way of being part of something, having a conversation with friends, to feel part of a deep ancestral tribe with its own anthems and colors. Not an obsession. He didn’t ever choose to be a Barça fan, he just is, period. There was no decision, no conversion, no day that he decided after carefully considering and measuring it against other equally weighted options, that he would be a lifelong Barça fan. He found himself, like everyone else, carried along by the very force of things, the strength of the tribe. He hasn’t been to the stadium much. Maybe his father had taken him the odd time when he was little, before he left. He doesn’t remember much. He has gone back a few times thanks to friends who have lent him their season tickets. He liked it, more so in the stadium than watching it on TV. But he isn’t at all obsessed. If they show the matches on television, you watch them. Albert is rather quiet, he doesn’t shout much, not even when they play football in the school yard, not even when they go out on Thursday evenings. To his classmates at Can Culapi, he is a boy like any other, he isn’t a freak, maybe a little more silent, a little more in his own shell than the average boy, he does his own thing. But for an adult, outside observer these differences in comparison to the rest of the kids in the class would be imperceptible. He isn’t the most popular kid. But neither is he a loner. The list of things he isn’t is longer than the list of things he is.

If not, we’ll go and see it together. They’ll definitely put screens up in Vella Square. Or if not, in Barcelona.

You can all come to my place. There’s a TV in the basement. We’ll have the place to ourselves. My parents will be watching it in the living room.

Xavi and Arnau, and Laura too, talk about watching the match together if in the end Xavi doesn’t go to Paris. They have met up on other occasions to watch the weekly game together, or to go to a bar in Sabadell, or to climb La Mola on a Saturday morning. Albert used to go with them sometimes. They are the ones who plaster their folders with laminated photos of Barça, like his, but also photos of the same bands, the same Catalan independence flag, the actors from the Ventdelplà TV series, Princess Leia from Star Wars. They are from the same world, the world that makes Albert feel warm and protected. And what if he stayed here with them? It would just be a question of saying no to his father. Deep down, he doesn’t even like football that much. Or maybe he does. It doesn’t matter. But he doesn’t say anything to them. That’s not his way. He doesn’t care about the giant screen or the television in the basement. He is going to Paris. He’ll be one of those who go to Paris. With his father. He’s lucky.

For a second, when Xavi looked at him incredulously, envious of his father’s privilege, of the trip and the tickets, Albert thought he had found, underneath the layers upon layers of compressed sedimentary rock, the fossil of an ancient and forgotten age. A childish and primitive feeling, well-worn but not completely expired, a surprising and simple form of pride. Yeah, it’s my dad. My dad got them. I’m going with my dad. Just for a second.

***

I can’t confirm yet. Have I got a bit of time?

Yes, but not much. They’ve been reserved in your name, from the Barça agency, because it’s us. But we can’t cancel them the night before. They’re very sought-after.

The production girl from the sports section is very friendly, the kind that ends each phone call with affectionate niceties and calls people honey and sweetheart. Jaume likes her; he didn’t know her at all, until he asked her for this favor. But now she seems a little irritated, you don’t have all the time in the world, they keep these tickets for us because we’re from the radio, but we can’t take advantage. They are all so young in the sports section; there is almost nobody from the crowd that Jaume knew before he left to take up the post of correspondent. In fact, the sports section is always a little set apart, it is on another floor, in their own newsroom, you have to go up another flight of stairs. Jaume went up a few days ago with a certain timidity, they definitely know who he is, one of the veterans, a familiar voice, Jaume Cortès, Buenos Aires, and they said of course, that they at the production department would take care of dealing with the official travel agency, that they’d be sure to find a package with the travel and tickets to the match before they went on sale. Would he like to fly there? No, better to go by train. Two tickets to the match and two sleeper berths. Nothing too fancy, just the standard.

He felt bad asking them to wait a few more days over the phone, favors should be asked in person. That is why he has come. He hasn’t been to the radio station much since he got back. It’s a strange situation. He is one of them, but he doesn’t have a job. He came back because he wanted to, he can’t turn up now making demands. He will probably end up in the international section, as an editor, or deputy director, but he needs a few weeks to tie it all up. In the meantime, he waits at home. He says hello to the girl at reception and to the security guy, he goes up the stairs because he has always gone up them but he wouldn’t know what to do with himself in there if he had to stay there for any length of time. He goes to see the people in the international section but he won’t distract them with philosophical conversations, they have lots of work to do, radio never stops, you always have to start work on the next bulletin, not like a newspaper where one edition a day is enough. Today he has gone straight to the sports section, there is hardly anyone there. The editor is downstairs in the studio, working on the bulletin. The team from the nighttime program will arrive after lunch. The people from production are there.

Have they already left for Paris? Jaume tries to be pleasant.

A few. Loads of people are going. There’s a lot to do. All the news programs are asking for content. They have to work on the program every night as well as the live broadcast, of course.

What about you? Aren’t you going?

I wish! No, they don’t take me out to play. I may as well be a telephone extension. They could tattoo Bang & Olufsen on my arm as if I was a cordless answering machine. Just a machine to make and receive calls.

The journalists in the sports section have covered their editorial office with photos of themselves at stadiums all over the world, all the celebrations, wearing headsets, the microphone sponge a centimeter from their mouths, next to Koeman at Wembley, player and reporter united in the celebrations on the pitch. With Eto’o on the pitch at Levante last year, the day they won the league. Hanging on the walls there are old press passes from previous Olympic Games, World Athletics Championships, Champions League finals, they are souvenirs, it would be distressing to throw them away. They are laminated and glamorous, ID photos with know-it-all faces and PRESS written in big letters. Press passes from all kinds of sports, we don’t spend all our time talking about Barça, even if that is what people think. We talk about everything here, canoeing, and even field hockey, and because you’re from Terrassa, you should know that.

Maybe Jaume would have liked to have worked in sports journalism when he was younger. In fact, he liked everything about journalism, he is a journalist because that is just who he is, inquisitive, eager. He was that way before he started studying. He sees the world in the form of articles, reports, and editorials. As he experiences things, he thinks about how he would write about them, what the headline would be. But he could also cross over into sport, why not? But you don’t get to choose much in this job. You mostly end up doing what happens to come your way by chance. He went into political journalism, he doesn’t have very good memories of that time, and then he was put in charge. When you’re in charge, as a journalist, you end up having to do a bit of everything. You have to evaluate and choose the order of the top stories, the running order as they say at journalism school. But how the hell do you decide whether to open with the Barça semi-final, the AIDS vaccine, or the bombing in Afghanistan? How do you compare them? Jaume used to get flustered when he was in charge. And he was only in charge a little, once in a while. Better to be a correspondent. You’re on your own. The editors are thousands of miles away. Ideal for solitary people. No need to take responsibility for other people’s work. Only your own. Jaume is a loner. He has sometimes been called a coward. He doesn’t like being in charge. But neither does he like people being in charge of him.

Maybe that was the reason for that whole mess before he went to South America. Back then he was the night editor. It was after eleven and the news editor wasn’t there, neither was the editor-in-chief, which was normal at that hour. Then there was that terrorist attack in the Basque Country and we ran it in the bulletin, we broke the story, I got the correspondent out of bed so that he could do a news summary and a report. But he didn’t dare open the twelve o’clock bulletin with the story or interrupt the programming to do a special report. He called the news editor but simply got the automated message the number you are calling is temporarily unavailable.

Afterwards, when all the chaos erupted, letters from listeners, the protests by politicians, everyone wanted to dodge the bullets and Jaume took the fall. Various political interpretations, hysteria. This is down to the night editor, Cortès. Nothing happened to him. No dismissal, no disciplinary action, nothing. That would really have been the icing on the cake. But it was unofficially established and generously divulged that it had been Jaume’s fault. He had done something wrong. You couldn’t trust him. There was a great scandal. It was talked about extensively in the journalists’ bars. Rival stations also made a big deal out of it; the news was carried far and wide. He tried not to talk about it too much at home; it put him in a bad mood. He thought it was unfair. Indecent. He thought he had acted reasonably. He would have quit, he was sick of everything, but he had a mortgage to pay and it wasn’t the best time to look for another job with everything that was being whispered in the corridors about him. Without shouting, shouting didn’t come easy to him, Jaume complained to the editor-in-chief:

Christ, you can’t throw all this shit at me. We can discuss it, we can talk about it, whatever you want. But don’t make me look like an idiot, because you know it wasn’t my fault. In this job we have nothing more than our name. We have a name, nothing more. We make a living off our name. If you taint mine, I’m finished. I can deal with anything, failure, triumph, muddling through, but not the tarnishing of my name. If I’d done something wrong, fine. But I just did what had to be done. You know that.

After that he went to Buenos Aires. Almost straight away, the first chance he had. And now he has come back. Could people really still remember all that? When he leaves the sports section, halfway down the stairs, he bumps into the news editor, the new one, not the one who was there when Jaume left. Back then he was in the business section. He will have to ask him about his situation, when his posting is going to come through. The news editor will have to tell him that he still doesn’t know. Jaume will have to ask whether everything that happened years ago is still an issue, whether they haven’t been able to find him a posting because of that, and whether it left his name tarnished. And the news editor won’t know what to say to him. Neither of them has any appetite for a duel in the middle of the staircase.

I hear you’re going to Paris to see Barça.

Well, I think so. With my son, but it’s still not certain.

Wow, I’m so jealous!

Sometimes Barça is handy when you’re looking for something else to talk about. To avoid arguments. To disguise conflicts. To speak to someone on a neutral subject, whoever you happen to meet in the elevator or on the staircase of the radio station, on your way out of the sports section.

***

Don’t come back late. But if you are going to be late, at least call and let me know.

Since her eldest daughter, Glòria, went to study in Dublin, Rosa Mercadal’s life has revolved around Albert, as if he was her very foundation, an essential but ever more delicate, more brittle, foundation. It’s not that she only lives for Albert, but her son has become her great source of meaning, a necessary worry, the reason or the excuse for all her decisions. Living alone, for instance. Alone with him. Without a man. When Jaume left, she very nearly moved in with Gabriel, they were just a step away from it, but they decided to stay each living in their own house, until the children were older. And when the children were old enough, it no longer mattered, she had got used to living alone and everything between them became languid like a worn-out marriage: it’s not always true that life gets damaged when you use it. Sometimes it gets damaged precisely when you don’t use it.

Now Jaume has come back and she absolutely wouldn’t want him at home. Neither has he asked to come home, he hasn’t even suggested it. Rosa doesn’t even think that he wants to. He says he has come back because his father is sick. Maybe. But he came straight to see Albert. And now, all this about the tickets for Paris. Albert must be really happy about it; he has already said he will go. But what is it that is making him happy? Going to see the match, or taking this trip with his father after so many years? Of course, Albert is crazy about football, he thinks of nothing else, all those photos on his bedroom wall, meeting up with his friends on Saturday nights to see the match. No more explanation is needed. It’s the Champions League final, isn’t it? The ultimate match. He wouldn’t miss it for anything in the world.

While he was in Buenos Aires working as a correspondent, Jaume didn’t call Albert very often. And he called Rosa even less. He used to write, though, every now and again. She has always thought that Jaume is the type to say things in writing, that he feels more secure writing than talking, maybe because he doesn’t want to see the eyes of the person he is talking to. He isn’t brave. He plays the innocent. Or maybe not. That isn’t fair. Rosa decided never to speak unfairly about Jaume in front of the children, not that she wasn’t tempted at the beginning. It wasn’t just out of kindness: it was a way of showing that she was the one who was balanced, fair, and to justify her righteousness. She wanted to aspire to the celebrated and admired status of martyr. She had never spoken badly of Jaume to Albert. She had always insisted—without much success—that he go to visit his grandparents, Jaume’s parents, even though Jaume wasn’t there. Now she would push him as much as she had to so that he would go to Paris with his father. Nobody could reproach her for anything. She was fairer than anybody, like all Librans. Calm and serene. Hurt.

Why don’t you go and visit your grandparents? It’d be no bother. Just a quick visit. They’d love that.

Because I don’t know what to say. And neither do they. They only talk about dad. About when dad was young, when he played football, when he knew he wanted to be a journalist…

Rosa had been once or twice to her in-laws’ place after Jaume left. It was a bit awkward. It wasn’t their fault, the poor things, they’re good people. It must have been very difficult for them too but they plucked up the courage and they went out of their way for her. But Rosa didn’t know what to say either. She didn’t even know what to say to herself. Jaume explained that he was going to Buenos Aires, that there was a correspondent’s position on the radio and that nobody else was going: everyone says they would go wherever, but when push comes to shove, they all have small children, parents that are ill, and