Juan Marsé - The Calligraphy of Dreams

A few minutes later, as he is hiding the airgun in the wardrobe where Grandma Tecla stores aromatic quinces, his eyes start to brim with tears. At first he weeps out of a confused feeling of self-pity, but this soon turns to a profound sadness. He is still weeping when he goes back to the vegetable garden, and when he picks up the bird. By now it is nothing more than a bundle of feathers, spongy to the touch. He wraps it in a handkerchief and buries it under the almond tree, placing on the grave a small cross made from pieces of cane, on which he has written the name Gorry. He feels the tears welling up from the deepest, blackest corner of his ruthless, murderous soul, and makes a secret vow. Every year in February when the almond tree is in bloom, I’ll come to visit you. He only calms down two hours later, when he sees Grandma Tecla tickling a white rabbit she is holding by the rear legs, and whispering in its ear in an affectionate, sing-song voice, before breaking its neck with a single, deadly chop of her hand. Wow, that’s some jujitsu blow granny’s learnt! Later on he sees her with that same hand on her backside as she raises the wine jug to take a swig behind his grandfather’s back, and the stream of wine splashing against her teeth impresses him still further. But that night in bed when he closes his eyes, the feelings of remorse return; he peers into the dark corners of his dreams and sinks beneath the garden soil to recover the sparrow’s tiny corpse, which is already being devoured by worms and almond-tree roots. As he imagines the pellets buried in its diminutive body, and above all when he thinks that one of them could have lodged in the bird’s living spirit, however ephemeral and fleeting that might have been at the moment of death, he can again feel the bird’s little head in his hands, flopping from side to side as if it were made of lead, and the image turns into a nightmare.

He will never pick up the gun again except with the intention of getting rid of it, and since then not a single day of his life has gone by when he hasn’t remembered that bird. Its beady eye, staring at him from the threshold of death, will accompany him to the end of his days.

“Today you’ll have to go up to the vines on your own, Mingo,” his grandmother tells him the next day. “Take your cowboy comics and be off with you. You’re not frightened of going on your own, are you?”

“Of course not. And I don’t need my air rifle.”

“Fine, goodbye airguns then. And when you go back to Barcelona, you can take it with you.”

He knows every inch of the old cart track leading from the village to the vines. It twists and turns up beyond the farmhouse with the mysterious name of La Carroña, the place of carrion. He loves to submerge himself in the white dust of this lonely path, deafened by the sound of cicadas. It is a bright, breezy July day. The track is barely three kilometres, but time and dreams expand along it to cover more than forty years. Wherever he goes in the future after this morning as he sets out along the path, all alone but accompanied first by Mowgli and then Winnetou, carrying the lunch basket for his grandfather who is spraying the vines, wherever life takes him in the years to come, his feet will always be treading this track, and the dust smelling of esparto grass, dung, and crushed grapes will always fill his nostrils. Something of this germinal dust will stay with him for ever. Even today he is convinced that there is not and never could be any other track in the world like this one, nor one he has set off along so often in his memory.

Chewing a green almond or a sprig of fennel, he pauses beside the fields to survey the majestic stems of wheat waving in the sunshine, the placid to and fro of the ears in a golden sea stretching from one plot to another as far as the wooded areas at the foot of the distant hills of Castellví de la Marca, beyond the fallow fields, the expanse of vineyards, the gentle slopes of almond and carob trees. Sometimes at evening when he is on his way back to the village, a burst of pink light from the setting sun slowly rides the rippling wheat towards the dark horizon. Beneath a sky streaked with clouds, when he hears the wind whistling in the electric cables and the silence hovering over the ploughed fields, and observes the symmetrical languor and endless rows of furrows in shadow, the fine red dust hanging in the air round the shire horses, he believes he can grasp the fleeting nature of time, and ponders the mystery and certainty of death.

His errand fulfilled and back by now in the village, close to the Sant Pau wood he meets up again with Winnetou and Old Shatterhand. Together they decide to take another route across the endless windswept prairie, until at length they reach the house where his grandmother is waiting, looking very serious, urging him to eat as quickly as possible so that she can take him to the school to meet Señor Benito, the teacher. It’s time to put a stop to your spending the whole day roaming around without doing anything useful, says his grandmother, time to stop the running wild with your friend Ramón Bartra’s gang, bathing naked in the ponds, stealing peaches and watermelons, hiding in the wheat fields with your faces painted and feathers in your hair: all that’s finished.

“For as long as you’re here with me, you’re going to school, like it or not. I’ll feel a lot happier.”

Grandma Tecla is a short, stocky and resolute old woman. She is black-eyed, with thick eyebrows and a snub nose above the faint outline of a moustache like a Mexican bandit’s, a threatening shadow that the boy is fascinated by. Besides the moustache and the black velvet of her eyes, many other things about his grandmother often clamour for his attention, like the slow, stiff way in which she lifts the wine-jug high and keeps the red stream splashing against her small, brilliant white teeth without spilling a drop, her head flung back and the other hand on her backside, as though to prevent the liquid leaking out through there. That’s what she is doing now, standing in front of the big kitchen hearth where the wind is moaning, before she takes the boy by the hand and goes out into the square with him.

It was written that this radiant, windy afternoon, so well-suited to daydreaming and adventures, here in Panadés just as much on the Arizona prairies where Old Shatterhand rides in search of Winnetou, is the one when the best-kept secret is finally revealed, a secret withheld for many years, though he had occasionally seen it surface in his mother’s sad gaze after he had heard her scold her father or somebody else for an indiscreet comment. And the first hint of this secret slips out thanks to a gossipy old peasant woman who suddenly appears like a ghost out of the thick dust cloud the wind is raising as grandmother and grandson are crossing the square hand-in-hand, the boy rubbing his eyes.

“What a good-looking child, Tecla!” the old woman exclaims with a sly smile. “Who does he take after? Because it’s only natural he doesn’t look like Pep or Berta. It’s obvious just seeing him that he isn’t theirs. I mean it’s natural he doesn’t look like them, as it’s natural that, well …”

“Why don’t you scratch your arse rather than gab on so, Domitila?” is his grandmother’s furious retort, as she tugs at the boy’s hand to drag him away.

That name, Domitila, sounds to him so mysterious and funny, as if it came out of a comic with Hipo, Monito and Fifi, although it’s not as resonant as Tecla, the word for the keyboard of the longed-for piano that one day he has no doubt will be his. But for now he has no wish to think of that, or of the even deeper mystery of old Domitila’s arse, but rather her bewildering words.

“What did that lady mean, Grandma? Why did she say … what she said?”