Juan Marsé - The Calligraphy of Dreams

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When Señora Mir lays her body across the abandoned tracks for a tram that will never arrive, she presents Ringo Kid with a riddle he will not unravel until after her death.
In Ringo's Barcelona, life endures in the shadow of civil war — the Fascist regime oversees all. Inspired by glimpses of Hollywood glamour, he finds his own form of resistance, escaping into myths of his own making, recast as a heroic cowboy or an intrepid big-game hunter. But when he finds himself inveigled as a go-between into an affair far beyond his juvenile comprehension, he is forced to turn from his interior world and unleash his talent for invention on the lives of others.
And all the while he is left to wonder — what could have happened to Señora Mir that day to send her so far beyond the edge of reason?

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Is all that a thing of the past? he asks himself now. Is the nine-fingered pianist condemned to be nothing more than a fairground attraction? Perhaps he couldn’t even hope for that much, because at home there was still no money to pay for any more classes — always supposing that the maestro Emery would one day agree to take back the nine-fingered pupil — let alone rent a piano, still less buy one. We’ll see if it’s possible in the future, his mother had said when she cancelled the lessons. The bad times can’t last forever, son, and for now if you’re so interested in music, why don’t you amuse yourself playing the harmonica?

Those were her exact words, Gorry. Would you believe it!

Don’t judge your mother.

She isn’t my mother.

Never say that, you ungrateful wretch!

If she recommended a harmonica back then, what would she say now? That I try the flute?

The sparrow is in the washbasin, glancing sideways at him with his dead eye while still busily pecking at some insects crawling out of the plughole. This is how Ringo likes to imagine him, wherever and whenever he can, predatory, talkative, and vengeful, pecking shamelessly at whatever he can. Ringo, meanwhile, is sitting on a stool opposite the basin, staring at himself in the mirror while he patiently allows his mother to remove the bandage. Red stars of iodine splash the white porcelain and finally drive away the little brown bird.

“What are you muttering?” asks his mother, standing next to him, a safety pin in her mouth. “Raise your arm. Afterwards I’ll wash your hair, you should see how it looks.”

“I can’t have showers.”

“Of course you can, if you keep your arm out.”

“I could fall.”

“You could stop talking nonsense.”

She has thrown the dirty bandage into a waste bin under the basin. She uses a piece of gauze to press down on the yellowish areas of pus around the stitches on the stump of his finger, then washes the wound with peroxide, keeping the safety pin in her mouth the whole time. She’s becoming more and more like grandma, thinks Ringo, staring at the pin. The image of domesticity, grandmother Tecla, whether she is sweeping or sewing or shelling broad beans, always has a safety pin in the corner of her mouth.

“Did it hurt? One of the stitches was infected.”

“No, it didn’t hurt,” he lies. “What hurts is the nail. Why does it bother me like that? How can it possibly hurt, if I don’t have one anymore?”

“Well, as you know, what we don’t have is what hurts. You’ve always believed in ghosts, and you talk to them as well, don’t you? So I don’t know why you think it’s so odd. The nail hurts because it’s no longer there.”

“It’s just that sometimes it’s really painful. And this shoulder too.”

“I believe you, son.”

She examines the puffiness around the knuckles and puts more iodine on the stitches. Ringo wrinkles his nose at the sight of the bruised, limp-looking hand — it’s as if it had been crushed and then pumped up with air — and then watches his mother’s reddened hands hovering delicately above his missing finger.

“How long have you been left-handed, Mother?”

“Ever since I was born, I suppose. Don’t move.”

“Jack the Ripper and Saint Paul were left-handed too.”

“Well, I must say, that’s not much comfort,” she smiles, searching for the boy’s face in the bathroom mirror, “but it will amuse your father to know that.”

The Rat-catcher has been away for some time now, and Ringo has absolutely no desire to ask when he will be back. A short time ago he was in the Panadés region with Uncle Luis and the Cleansing Brigade, carrying out work in the wine cellars and warehouses, as well as some farmhouses. According to his mother, there had been a plague of voles in the crops, and Ringo suspects that these are not official jobs, but individual requests that have not been authorised, and are probably therefore more lucrative. He also knows that the Rat-catcher often works on his own. He has begun to wonder about this, harbouring suspicions he cannot yet define, and has had the same dream two nights running: dressed up like the magician Fu Ching, his father puts a smoking gun into his top hat, and then pulls out a dead rat that’s still got green froth round its mouth … Be that as it may, Ringo does not expect or want his mother to clarify his suspicions, because he vaguely intuits (although he could not say how) that to bring this up would make her cry. He’s waiting for the day when he hears her say: You’ll never see me cry again, not for that reason or any other.

“The Bioscas have got a piano. They’re good neighbours, aren’t they, Mother?”

“Yes, they are.”

“So do you think they would let me practise scales a few minutes every day if you asked them?”

“No. Are you forgetting they’ve got poor Rosita very sick at home? What you should do,” his mother says as she wraps a clean gauze round the stump of his finger, “is to be more careful with this hand of yours. Try not to use it, or at least not until the wound has healed.”

“Don’t say that,” he begs her. “I need to keep practising. It’s good to do finger exercises, even if it’s only on the table. We could also buy a keyboard. Maestro Emery says they’re not expensive.”

His mother shakes her head, at a loss.

“I don’t understand. Can you tell me why you always take your music theory book with you, wherever you go?” She searches for the right words before adding as gently as she can: “Why are you still studying those scores, my love? Do you really think you’ll be able to play the piano again one day, with that hand of yours?”

“Of course I will. I’ll be a nine-fingered pianist. Why is that so extraordinary?”

Roll up, roll up, ladies and gentlemen. DOMINGO KID, THE GREAT NINE-FINGERED PIANIST. He can already see the posters announcing him in concert halls: HUNGARIAN RHAPSODY NUMBER 2 FOR NINE FINGERS. Why shouldn’t it be a good selling point? He can picture himself on the platform after he has performed his favourite sonata — No.14 by Mozart. The young virtuoso acknowledging the applause, the grand piano open beside him like a gigantic black dahlia, bowing his head over and over again, tousled hair flopping over his face, wild-eyed, almost in a trance, receiving the ovation with the celebrated maimed hand folded across his chest. And who knows whether there might be a sonata especially composed for the left hand?

For now, his mother takes the celebrated hand and rubs the numb fingers with her thumb to help the circulation.

“Victoria Mir taught me this.” She gently massages the four fingers, one by one. After a while, she adds: “Is it true what they say, Son? That she came out of her apartment half-naked and wanted to throw herself under a tram?”

Taken by surprise, he clicks his tongue.

“What tram? There was no tram anywhere near.”

“So she wasn’t serious?”

“Of course not. It was a sham, a joke. But she didn’t fool me. She even dozed off on the rails, and was snoring …”

“You don’t say!” She is pensive for a while. “Poor Victoria, people have always criticised her so … and what did her daughter do? She must have come and helped her.”

“She’d gone to the beach with a friend. Well, that’s what her mother said then. Because some time later, in the bar, I heard her tell Señora Paqui that Violeta was at home that Sunday… in other words, the poor woman can’t get it straight, she’s off her rocker, she’s lost it.”

“You’re the one who’s lost it! And what did people say when they saw her stretched out in the street like that?”

“I don’t really know, I was busy reading,” he replies reluctantly, with no interest in the matter. He sees himself there again, among the crowd of onlookers, but with his thoughts far off, and feeling a cold wind on his face, his favourite book tucked under his arm, a burning question in his mind: what was the leopard looking for up on the mountain top? He senses that this question, raising the enigma of the animal in the distant snows, is somehow much closer and more important to him than the grotesque spectacle of Señora Mir collapsing on the remnants of the tram tracks.

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