Read When I Was Mortal for Free Online

first to see the way the land lies. You never know when you go into a public place, two guys might be beating the hell out of each other at that very moment. It doesn’t happen very often, but you never know, a waiter might have spilled some wine, and an awkward customer might be giving him a hard time. I wouldn’t want my boss to see that or have him mixed up in a mess like that. Before you know it, bottles are flying. During the day a lot more bottles go flying about in Madrid than you might imagine, knives come out, people hit each other, people can be very thin-skinned. And if, in the middle of all this, someone with a bit of money turns up, then everyone stops and thinks: ‘Let the rich man pay.’ The ones doing the fighting are quite capable of coming to some instant agreement and laying into the man with the dosh: ‘To hell with the rich.’ You have to keep a very sharp eye out.”
    The man raised a finger to his eye.
    “Really?” I said. “Is your boss that rich, then? Is it so obvious?”
    “It’s written all over his face, he’s got the face of a rich man. Even if he didn’t shave for three days and dressed like a beggar, you could tell from his face he was rich. I wish I had that face. Whenever we go into an expensive shop, I go first, as usual. And despite the fact that I’m well dressed, as soon as the assistants see me they pull a face or ignore me, pretend they haven’t seen me, they start serving other customers who they hadn’ttaken a blind bit of notice of before or they start rummaging around in drawers as if they were stocktaking. I don’t say a word, I just check that everything’s all right and then I go back to the door to open it for the boss and let him in. And as soon as they see his face, the assistants abandon their other customers and the drawers they were rummaging in to come and serve him, all smiles.”
    “Isn’t it just that they recognize your boss because he’s famous, if he’s as rich as you say he is?”
    “Possibly,” said the bodyguard, as if that hadn’t occurred to him. “He is getting quite well known. He’s in banking, you know. I won’t tell you who with, but he is. But listen, why don’t we go down to the paddock for a bit, it’ll be time to start betting on the third race soon.”
    So we did and, on the way, we finally tore up our tickets and threw them to the ground, huh, when we saw that we had lost. I passed a philosopher who’s there every Sunday, as well as Admiral Admira (with his predestined and incomplete surname) and his lovely and undeserved wife, who both nodded to me without saying a word, as if they were embarrassed to see me in the company of that rather gigantic individual, I only came up to his shoulder. I was now wearing his binoculars round my neck and carrying my own broken pair, mine are small and powerful, his were enormous and very heavy, the strap cut into my neck, but I couldn’t run the risk of dropping them as well. While we were watching the horses walking round the paddock, I sensed that the bodyguard was about to ask me what I did, and since I didn’t feel like talking about myself, I got in first and said:
    “What do you think of number fourteen?”
    “He looks good,” he said, which is what those who know nothing about horses always say. “I think I might bet on him.”
    “I don’t think I will, he looks a bit highly-strung to me. Hemight even get stuck at the starting gate.”
    “Really, do you think so?”
    “Having a rich man’s face counts for nothing here.”
    The man burst out laughing. It was a spontaneous laugh, without the slightest forethought, the laugh of an unpolished man, the laugh of a man who does not stop to worry about whether or not it is appropriate to laugh. What I’d said wasn’t that funny. Then, without asking my permission, he grabbed his binoculars and looked quickly through them at the grandstand, which you couldn’t actually see from the paddock. It hurt my neck, the man pulled