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these days are rubbish. You don’t get players like you, going right up to the goal area and driving it in, straight past the goalkeeper … What are you doing nowadays? I suppose you’re retired and living off rent. Or is it business?’
    ‘Business, really. Not rent.’
    ‘Well, that’s good. You deserved a break after what happened … What was it, now …? You were injured, that’s it. That animal, what was his name …?’
    ‘What does it matter?’
    ‘What do you mean, what does it matter? The bastard had it in for you. I remember it like it was yesterday. They showed it on TV. In those days I only had a black-and-white set, but when I remember it I see it in techni-colour. By the time he’d finished with you, your knee looked like raw meat. What was it the doctors said …?’
    Reaching into the recesses of his memory he produced the answer to his own question: ‘Fracture of the meniscus, and a tearing of the internal ligament and the front right ligament.’
    ‘A bastard, that. Like having to buy yourself another leg.’
    ‘That’s right. Like having to buy yourself another leg.’
    The porter cast a critical eye over his leg.
    ‘You don’t seem to have a limp, though.’
    ‘I don’t limp.’
    ‘That was bad luck, that was. You’d be making a packet by now. You were making good money, but not like they make nowadays. They’re all millionaires, but half of them are nothing to write home about. They only play when they feel like it, and if they don’t feel like it they run off and hide behind the ref or behind the goalposts. Have you seen that Butragueño play? He looks like an orphan … And what about Lineker … A joke …! And this one they’ve signed now — it’s like taking lambs to the slaughter. The kind of thugs you get in Spanish football these days will teach him a thing or two. In no time at all he’ll be wanting to hang up his boots.’
    ‘They’re good players. They’re all very good.’
    ‘But there’s no one like you.’
    ‘No, that’s not true.’
    ‘No one, Ballarín, no one!’
    The porter took him by one arm to emphasize the point. He took another look at the photograph, and was clearly full of sympathy and willing to help.
    ‘A hell of a girl, you had there. She didn’t leave a forwarding address, but you could try asking at the beauty parlour on thecorner. The lady spent a lot of time there. It’s very well equipped — they’ve got everything, a gymnasium, a sauna, a hairdresser’s … I’m sure they’ll be able to help you.’
    As Palacín left, the porter called him back.
    ‘You wouldn’t happen to have a photo you could sign for me …?’
    Palacín smiled, and then shrugged to indicate that he couldn’t oblige.
    ‘I haven’t carried photos of myself for years. I used to, in Mexico, but here …’
    ‘That’s a shame. My grandson would love one. He’s got a signed photo of Carrasco.’
    Now that Palacín was alone again, he walked down a pavement that was almost deserted, in the shade of trees that had too much September about them. The trees were young, in the same way that the area was young, and the plants hanging off people’s balconies, too. Fifty yards down the road was a sign for the ‘Beautiful People’ beauty parlour, but the watch on his wrist was signalling an urgency of which only he was aware. At any rate, he knew what he’d be doing with his free time the following day, in this city where he now felt such a stranger.

 
    The worst of it had been the taste of reused frying oil which had provided the base for a paella apparently cooked by a gastronomical natural scientist with a mania for combining every botanical and zoological possibility imaginable together into one single dish. Apart from
foie gras
, the paella contained just about everything you could think of, and each species left in his mouth the aftertaste of its death-throes before sinking down to let itself be drowned in his gastric juices. Mortimer was still