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excited his poetic sense of himself as an enlightened businessman, and who stirred in him the envy that every cultured rich man feels in the face of young men with promise. His English was better than Mortimer’s, a provocation that would have enraged the learned professor of Shaw’s
Pygmalion
, and as the golden boy of European football became aware of this fact, he suddenly became reticent, as if he was speaking with some superior being who stood for the bosses and all they represented. Basté de Linyola passed him a box and told him to open it. In the box were the keys of three-hundred square metres of apartment located in a residential area of the city close to the club’s ground, where Mortimer would be able to house and raise his family during the four years of his contract with the club. Thereupon the club’s vice-chairman, the young banker Riutort who had connections with Arab investors and Japanese microchip manufacturers, handed him another box, in which there shonewith almost indecent brightness the keys of the Porsche that Mortimer had requested as one of the terms of his contract. The entire board broke into applause, and Basté de Linyola decided that it was the responsibility of his PR man to utter the banalities which the act required. Camps O’Shea spoke up accordingly: ‘Mortimer, may we welcome you as one more citizen of our city of Barcelona.’
    The young footballer was happy, and caressed the car keys as if somehow expecting the vehicle to appear miraculously in the room. Somebody opened a bottle of
cava
, and a waiter dutifully poured it. This gave Basté de Linyola his cue for a toast. He had a complete mental collection of toasts which he had tried for size that morning before leaving home. He was particularly proud of the one which he had pronounced on the occasion of the homage which Barcelona’s up-and-coming entrepreneurs had offered to Juan Carlos when he was still a princeling in the shadow of General Franco.
    ‘Your Highness, in these bubbles you see the impatience of a people waiting to make the leap to modernity.’
    The toast that he’d made to the president of the reconstituted Generalitat wasn’t bad either, on the occasion of his elevation to the post of president of the Chamber of Industry and Commerce.
    ‘Sir,
cava
is our symbol. It has been necessary to give it a new name, but for us it is still what it always was.’
    Basté de Linyola’s toasts were much appreciated among the so-called political classes, and there were some who suggested that they might reflect the presence of a certain well-known writer as a regular guest on his yacht. Basté de Linyola was aware of this calumny, and cultivated it, in the same way that he secretly wrote pieces for the theatre and composed small items of classical music which he would play in the loneliness of his study, with the voluptuousness of a person buried alive, who knows the hour and the day of his resurrection. But this time he sensed that a simpler toast was required — not least when he looked at Mortimer’s smiling, freckled face, poised and eager to absorb the strangesounds that were about to fall from the lips of his club’s chairman.
    ‘Mortimer, we hope you’re going to score many goals. Behind every goal you score stands a whole city’s desire for victory.’
    Camps O’Shea took advantage of the ensuing applause to lean in Mortimer’s direction and translate what the chairman had said. The footballer nodded with a determined affirmation that some might have found excessive, and his enthusiasm was slightly at odds with the rest of the hall, because by now people were inventing excuses for having to leave. Basté de Linyola himself was the first to move, having first instructed his PR man to be sure not to abandon their new purchase.
    ‘The first few days are important, Camps. Until his wife arrives, you’re even going to have to make his bed for him.’
    The chairman glanced momentarily at a silent man with a