Juan Marsé - The Calligraphy of Dreams

He doesn’t feel like crying, or anything of the kind. Not even a snivel, even though he doesn’t in any way feel blessed. All that’s going through his mind is a wish to play down everything he’s just heard. He feels the immediate need, in order to guard against any new, unexpected revelations, surreptitiously to convince himself that deep in his heart he always knew what he has just heard. Together with an observation of his grandmother’s, which over the course of time makes him smile: if that taxi with its headlights on had passed by just a minute before, in all likelihood he would not be here now staring at the flames in the hearth, he would never have come to this village or entered this house, there would be no airgun hidden in a wardrobe, nor any bird buried out in the vegetable garden with two pellets in its body … So it was all the result of a stroke of luck, a tremendous stroke of luck, and as a consequence, from this moment on the least stable and questioning part of himself will enjoy frequently venturing into the most incredible part of this story, in which a pair of taxi headlights shine brightly through the lashing rain.

“And be careful with what the schoolteacher is so fond of repeating,” his grandmother admonishes him in conclusion. “About a rich interior life! Interior life! Be very careful. Don’t go looking for trouble.”

“Of course not, Grandma. And listen,” he says, to confuse her and change the subject, “if we stuff the ball with corduroy as well, it will last longer. And it will look real.”

Now that he thinks about it, weren’t even the cloth balls his grandmother sewed for him so skilfully little more than well-intentioned lies? Down the tunnel of time, he sees her face pressed close to his, a cheery gleam in her moist eyes, squinting slightly because she is so near to him and because of the ambiguous itch of a conviction that she would not be able to put into words even if she wanted to: that life can be so unfair, unpredictable and precarious, so profoundly marked by loss and abandonment, that sometimes there is a need for compensation in the form of a stroke of luck or a soothing white lie.

That night he sleeps lulled by the perfume of the yellow winter melons under his bed. In the early hours, Gorry silently lands on one of the melons, grasps the silky rind in its claws, gathers its body and from its arse shoots its tiny machine gun: dark little droppings intended for Ringo as it peers defiantly at him through the slats of the bed and the mattress. It is about to fly off again when Ringo says:

Don’t go yet. Stay a while.

What for? So that you can shoot another pellet in my body?

No, so we can talk as friends.

Me, talk to you? What rubbish, nano ! How can anybody imagine I want to talk to you as a friend, when you’re my murderer?

That morning his grandmother makes him another ball with the big needle she uses to sew sacks, one more that ends up with its innards hanging out between the feet of the boys playing in the square. Yet from that day on, Ringo prefers to spend many afternoons alone, reading in the vegetable garden. His grandmother has told him that when his mother comes she’ll tell him the whole story, because there are lots of things not even I know, things they haven’t wanted to tell me yet. But the oft-mentioned “bad patch” the Rat-catcher and Berta are going through down in the city, occasionally relieved by the grandmother’s trips with a basket of eggs, oil, a rabbit or hen, means that it is a long time before his mother reappears, and throughout that winter he spends many hours on his own in the garden, or in the improvised swing under the almond tree, or at school.

When spring arrives, his mother brings him from Barcelona Geneviève de Brabant, Treasure Island and the new adventures of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand, and chooses the right moment to talk to him. Bright-eyed, she delicately and knowingly brings together the random strands of the story until she has constructed a verbal artefact containing, she swears, the truth and nothing but the truth. When the boy insists, she finds herself forced to admit that it was her and not his father who saw the taxi headlights in the distance through the rainstorm.

“Why are you so interested in that anyway?”

“I thought Grandma had invented it. Because taxis don’t have their headlights on during the day, do they?”

“Well, this one did. Perhaps because of the rain, or because the driver had forgotten … You see, there’s an explanation for everything. But that’s not what is important for me. What’s important is that you believe me. You do, don’t you, Son?”

Her face and tender mouth so close to him, the faint aroma from the cherry-red lipstick, the dimples in her cheeks when she smiles, the quick flutter of her rough, reddened hands, the rain and the cab’s headlights, the gift of so eagerly anticipated new books, comics and annuals (better and more numerous than on previous occasions) to be read by the fire in the hearth on rainy days. He gives a silent nod, to avoid shouting it out loud: Yes, I believe you.

Later on, when she sees him lying out under the almond tree with his books and comics, she reminds him what a good idea it is to cover them — that way they’ll always be new, and again mentions how lucky he is.

“Just as well they weren’t burnt with all the rest, isn’t it?” she says, and adds with a smile: “ Just in case, because of the flies . Do you remember, Son?”

And the memory of a big bonfire in the middle of the night, with the tallest, fiercest flames he has ever seen, takes him back for an instant to a ghostly scene in his own neighbourhood two years earlier, to a small, shadow-filled private garden where a pile of books, notebooks, photographs and documents splutter and burn, just in case.

“Just in case, because of the flies!” his father says as he tosses books on the fire, one after the other with barely a glance, without checking the title or the name of the author and making jokes the whole time to encourage all those present. “Just in case there are any flies around, isn’t that so, Son? We’re not doing this because we like it.”

He could do it better and more quickly if he had a spade, thinks Ringo, and remembers Harpo Marx shovelling books onto a fire in a comedy movie. But he can’t see anything here to make him laugh. Some of the men are staring into the bonfire with grim, solemn expressions, and the glow is printed on their faces like a plaster mask.

So Señor Gaspar Huguet is burning part of his library “just in case, because of the flies”, the boy deduces from the grown-ups’ comments. His father has made a makeshift bonfire from dry branches and splintered trunks in Señor Huguet’s own garden, behind the shed that is a lumber room by day and by night is used for clandestine coffee roasting. This bonfire is nothing like the festive ones on Saint John’s Eve: Ringo knows that no children are going to come and jump over these flames or throw firecrackers. This is a tedious ceremony presided over by grown-ups who for some reason are extremely downcast. And as though the boredom were not enough, if he moves away from the fire it’s freezing. He also knows that his father works with Señor Huguet roasting coffee in this shed three or four nights a week, from two to five in the morning, hidden from everyone, especially from the local nightwatchman. He can tell when his father has been here, because the next day his woollen jersey and his scarf smell of sugary roast coffee. Now Señor Huguet, seeing Ringo so close to the flames and almost hypnotised by them, comes over and, trying but failing to lend his voice a jovial tone, asks if he’d like to burn something of his own. He says yes he would, thinking of his detested school arithmetic book and also of Fu-Manchu’s daughter and of the blue rats, a mass of writhing blue rats in the flames.