Barcelona Shadows by Marc Pastor Page A

go up to the room and open themselves up. The man and woman arrive shortly after and while her hair and make-up are done bybrushes that float through the air, he receives an expert shoeshine. Things move as if by magic, and the clients seem satisfied. Moisès Corvo doesn’t look away from the film, which is no more than five minutes long, while the ash gains ground on his cigarette.
    “Doesn’t matter how many times I watch it, I don’t know how they do it,” he thinks out loud.
    “The comb can’t fly and the suitcases can’t walk. It’s a trick. They film the movement bit by bit as if they were photographs, and then they stick them together.”
    “It looks real.”
    See what I was saying? For Corvo, the more fantastic the fiction, the better.
    “It’s an illusion. The photographs are static, it’s our brains that recreate the movement.”
    “Have you been reading Freud too?” he says. He knows Freud from the magazines and because he is one of the city’s favourite conversation topics.
    “What are you, barmy? I’m not saying anything that’s not true.”
    “No, but every evening you sell lies.”
    Sebastián shrugs his shoulders.
    “They’re on screen, right? So it’s no lie. It’s happening or, at least, you believe it’s happening.”
    “Two realities,” says Moisès, putting on a deep voice. He can smell the pickled lupini beans and the sawdust, despite the odour of shag tobacco. “One that’s true and one we imagine.”
    “You want to see the one with the acrobats?”
    “The Chinese?”
    “They’re Japanese.”
    “I never say no to Japanese ladies. Not the real ones and not the imitations.”
    A bunch of actors dressed as Orientals swirl around and twist into impossible shapes, one atop the other, in a display of prodigious strength and agility. Moisès quickly catches on to the trick: the camera is hanging from the ceiling and frames the group dragging themselves along the floor, pretending they are standing.
    “It’s better with a pianist,” Sebastián apologizes, needlessly.
    But Moisès has already grabbed his jacket and is getting up. He doesn’t say goodbye, he never says goodbye, and Sebastián is left alone, thinking that he still has a lot of sweeping up to do.
    There is a wrought-iron dragon on the staircase of the police station on Conde del Asalto, one of those modern things he can’t be bothered to try to understand. He greets the policeman at the door, a man who’s been watching over the same stones for 300 years, and he ascends the stairs two by two. At this time of the day there is no movement. Juan Malsano hears him coming before he enters through the door.
    “Hey, man without a shadow,” calls out his somewhat dishevelled partner from his desk. “Looks like they pay a salary if you come and spend some time here.”
    “I was busy working, Juan. More or less like you, but without sitting around scratching my balls.”
    Malsano throws a pencil that Corvo doesn’t dodge.
    “Well, then it’s my balls that had to listen to that bastard, Buenaventura.”
    “Congratulations, it’s the first time in months they’ve had a visitor.”
    “Quit it, Moisès, he’s been shown up again.”
    “What happened?”
    “The damn gangsters, up to their old tricks.”
    “Don’t they know to stay home, these guys, when it starts to get cold? Anybody dead?”
    “No, unfortunately not. They were shooting each other up, but only one was wounded.”
    “And what does he want? Us to go and finish him off?”
    “No. He wants us to go by the hospital and check in on him, ask him a few things and stay there to make sure nobody comes by to dispatch him.”
    “Oh, sorry, I missed the huge red cross on the station door when I came in: I was too loaded down with chamomile and linden tea for the needy.”
    “If you keep this up it’ll be Buenaventura who goes to the hospital tomorrow to make sure I don’t finish you off.”
    “Is there anything else?”
    “In this city? More than