Juan Marsé - The Calligraphy of Dreams

This had been the case for almost a year, ever since one rainy Sunday in May when they saw him coming into the bar for the first time, a soaking newspaper over his head, to ask where a nurse or masseuse lived, someone who had been strongly recommended to him, by the name of Doña Victoria López Ayala, originally from a village outside Segovia, married to someone called Ramón Mir, who didn’t have a telephone. He knew all this about her, and seemed to know even more, and from the very first attracted attention. He looked about fifty, but close to it was plain he was considerably older. Even so, there was a youthful, taunting look in his eye. The light-blue jacket he wore was of excellent quality but worn and shapeless, with baggy pockets, and for all his natural elegance and neatness, he had a slightly marginal air about him. I was given that lady’s business card and I haven’t the slightest idea where I put it, I only know she lives on this street, he grunted as he searched his pockets. Señora Paquita came out from behind the bar and pointed out the house, twenty metres further up on the far side of the road, look, you can see it from here, it’s number 117.

The man threw the wet newspaper into a basket where some of the customers left their umbrellas. He went on searching for the card in his pockets, gave up, asked for a coffee and murmured with a smile:

“The name suits it.”

“What’s that?” asked Señora Paquita.

“The street. We’re in the Torrente de las Flores, aren’t we? But the name of the tavern — Rosales, doesn’t fit at all.”

“Oh, because there are no roses, you mean?” she said, flattered. “It’s because our name is Rosales.”

That first day he drank down his coffee scalding hot, his face devoid of expression, then went out again into the rain and crossed the road to number 117. Señora Mir’s card appeared later on, behind the basket with the umbrellas.

His mother keeps an identical one together with an image of the Virgin, in a book by Apel-les Mestres with illustrations of lovely fairies and water nymphs.

VICTORIA MIR

KINESIOLOGIST AND CHIRO-MASSEUSE

Expert in lumbar and back pains .

Treatment of muscular, nervous and emotional neurasthenias .

BY APPOINTMENT ONLY

This is the text on her extravagant card, which she herself designed. It’s a homemade affair, a small piece of cardboard handwritten in green ink in a neat, cramped writing. His mother thinks that the word chiromasseuse is a bit obscure and pretentious, but then again, who doesn’t make exaggerated claims these days just to get by. The good woman claims to have been a pupil of Doctor Ferrándiz, the naturalist who founded the School of Quiropractice; she claims she is a psychologist and practises scraps of what she has learnt of a therapy based on touch. Ringo remembers that even the Rat-catcher, some time earlier, had considered turning to her to alleviate a persistent pain in his neck. His mother comments that she likes to talk while she is pummelling muscles and tendons, and she could swear she dabbles in folk healing, but that does no-one any harm. Apparently in fact she does more than cure a simple backache. They say she can detect tumours before they grow, especially in women. The two women met on night shifts in the Clínica Nuestra Señora del Remedio when Victoria Mir was still working as a nurse. She was awarded her nurse’s certificate thanks to her husband’s Falange connections, but there was no doubt she was very good at dealing with patients.

“Doctor Goday used to say that her back-rubs and herbal treatments were not to be dismissed lightly. One day she gave me a head massage that left me like new,” she says, starting to wind the bandage round his arm. “By the way, didn’t you go out with her daughter?”

“Violeta? You must be joking. She’s a lot older than me.”

“Only two years, I’m sure. She can’t be more than seventeen.”

“O.K., but she’s a real pain.” Closing his eyes, he can see her in the tavern, standing there waiting as if in a daze while her bottle is being filled, or to be given the soda siphon. A long neck, wide gums that flash pink when she smiles, reddish hair, tiny breasts and a pert backside. He will never admit that this apparent lack of harmony, this mismatch between her arse and her tits is precisely what attracts him. “Besides, she’s a bit deaf. A dead loss.”

“Is that so? Just look at Mister Cool. Well, I heard that last summer during the fiesta you asked her to dance more than once.”

“But I don’t like her, Mother. Yuk!”

No, he doesn’t like the girl, of course not. She’s odd, unfriendly, she looks weird, and yet not a day goes by without him thinking of her buttocks swaying as she crosses the street or tautening as she turns behind the counter of the stationer’s shop she works in. Again and again in the hottest depths of his dreams, he conjures up that summer night when she sought refuge in his arms, head lowered and without a word, resigned to the furtive pushing at her thighs and pelvis. She raised her indolent eyes, too close to a nose whose dilating nostrils are the only thing in her face that seem alive, while he, on hearing the opening bars of the orchestra, and merely brushing her wasp waist with his hand, found himself unable to think of anything else but the saucy buttocks that Quique Pegamil had so close to him that day on the crowded tram platform.

“Every Sunday,” Ringo adds unenthusiastically, “winter or summer, and even when it’s raining, her mother goes with her to the dance at the Verdi. Sometimes they go on to the Salón Cibeles or the Cooperativa La Lealtad. They always leave their place arm-in-arm, made up like clowns. You have to laugh when you see them like that in the street, done up to the nines, clinging to one another as if they were cold or afraid of falling down …”

“You’re the one who makes me laugh.”

“Violeta Pricktease. That’s what the lads in the bar call her … Ow!”

He’s rewarded with a slap to the back of his head and a telling-off.

“Don’t let me ever hear you repeating such filthy language. Poor girl.”

No girl is ugly, his mother often insists: when you’re young, you can’t be ugly. How wrong can you be, he thinks, even though he still cannot explain to himself why, whenever he sees Violeta, he feels irresistibly attracted by that combination of ugly face and pretty legs, why he finds that odd mismatch so arousing.

“Can you wind the bandage up to the middle of my arm, please, mother.”

“You don’t need so much, it’s fine as it is.”

“Will you lend me your silk scarf, the one Don Victor gave you? To make the sling, instead of the ordinary scarf. That’s how Bill Barnes, Air Adventurer, would wear it, if his plane had been shot down …”

“Vain as well as silly,” says his mother. She remembers how he wore a sling for days and days when he was only ten, after he had scraped his wrist jumping down from the glass-topped wall at the Clínica del Remedio. “If you want a snack, there’s a tin of condensed milk and some quince left. What are you going to do today? Are you going to read up at Parque Güell, or will you spend the afternoon sitting in that bar?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“If you go up to the park, see if you can find some oregano. And bring me a small branch of bay.”

“I really don’t know yet, Mother. If my finger hurts a lot I feel dizzy, and I prefer to stay in the Rosales, because it’s close by. It’s the finger of fate, you know.”

“What do you do all those hours you spend shut up in that dreadful bar?” she asks for the umpteenth time. “You can’t play table football with your hand in that state.”

“I don’t like table football.”