Juan Marsé - The Calligraphy of Dreams

“Yes, great, just great.”

“Well, that’s that,” his father concludes, lowering his voice. “So now we’ve had our little talk.”

Shortly afterwards he comes to a halt on the pavement, caught up all of a sudden in concerns of his own. Staring down at the glistening road surface, he unhurriedly raises a bent cigarette to his lips and lights it with a flickering, badly aimed match.

It’s cold, and it is as if the street prolongs the sadness and smell of the metro corridors. Heavy raincoats and autumnal overcoats that seem to be parading along suspended from their hangers, old women wearing black mantillas, children in mourning with wide-open, inquisitive eyes, chilled pedestrians hurrying by, couples in their Sunday best coming and going from the Monumental bar, all pass them and fade into the greyest hour. His father stands there, the weight of sorrow and regret making him stoop as he watches night fall on the wet cobbles. They’re moving like clockwork toys, aren’t they, Ringo hears him mutter. He knows these mood swings well: just as when least expected he can play the fool, so equally unexpectedly the wastrel, the merry priest-baiter, the charlatan as his mother calls him, suddenly disappears and in his place remains this embittered and anti-social grouch, this rough, insensitive fellow. At that moment everything connected to him, the surprise absences, the case with poison in it, his colleagues in the pest control brigade, his work tools, all turn into something clandestine, vaguely dangerous. Even now, as he stands on the edge of the pavement engrossed in thoughts of his own, his back turned to the people going up and down the street, his thickset body in the raincoat with raised collar, he creates an atmosphere of secrecy, as does his voice, thickened by cigarette smoke and his own hoarseness, like a belch that turns into a private prayer: We’re in the arsehole of the world, son, we are the arsehole of the world.

His mood lightens half an hour later when he says exactly the same thing at the Maryland cinema in Plaza Urquinaona, the one furthest from their house. He explains that its English-sounding name has been changed to the Plaza, since officially these days they are Germanophile, but that he still calls it the Maryland. This week they are showing “Blood, Sweat, and Tears” and — as at the Roxy — “Buffalo Bill”. In the foyer, after he has been presented to Señor Batallé, the doorman and usher, Ringo pokes his head through the curtains into the stalls, and sees that Wild Bill Hickok has not been shot yet. His father’s voice grows gruffer as he chokes back his anger and says: “Who cares what happens here in Spain, Batallé? Do you still think that the solution to all our problems will come from abroad? To which Señor Batallé responds in a cautious whisper: Where else from, Pep? You can start looking for another job, because in case you haven’t heard, the war with the Boches is over, and soon Canfranc won’t be Europe’s rich storeroom any more. They’ve closed the border and blocked the tunnel, there are at least ten thousand soldiers in the area and they’re building bunkers all along the Pyrenees, but it’s not like it used to be, when the Gestapo guarded the frontier on the other side, and the Falange on this. Why do you keep going to the British consulate near here when they no longer need to communicate with the border? Nowadays I go by Pont de Rei and sleep in Vilella, his father says. Marcelino sends you greetings. And whatever you might say, there’s still a lot to be done … I agree, but it’s not the same, now we have to wait for things to improve, the doorman insists: Didn’t you know that the United Nations has just condemned the regime? So what? Do you think that means they’re going to come? How naïve can you get? his father grumbles. Of course they will. And they’ll toss the bastard Generalissimo in the same sewer where they pitched the Nazis. And we’ll live to see that day, Pep! You think so? You really think we’re that important to those gentlemen of the United Nations? You really have become gullible, haven’t you, damn and blast it! Have you forgotten that only two years ago we had four thousand men in the Valle de Arán just waiting for those sons of bitches, who never arrived? We’re living a lie dammit, so don’t pin your hopes on it!

By now both of them are on their high horse. They think they are debating the currents of the great waves of recent history; in fact they are yet again doing nothing more than revealing their deep-seated melancholy, their intimate defeats. It is from repeated conversations and arguments of this kind that the boy becomes accustomed to living in an atmosphere heavy with daily doses of bitterness and a sadness that he sees as a curse. He wants nothing to do with history, he feels no need to settle scores with any of that, and so he prefers to slip into the stalls once more and recover Bill Hickok’s black Stetson and silver revolver after he has been treacherously shot in the back, while he hears the Rat-catcher’s plaintive voice whispering to his friend Batallé: They’ll never come, dammit! Can’t you see we don’t count, can’t you see we’re the arsehole of the world?

In his father’s mouth, this arsehole of the world always expresses the same sense of loss and lack of self-esteem, however ludicrously and sarcastically he puts it, whatever the different variations he uses: we’re the greatest shit that history has ever produced; we’re the sewer of the West; we’re the greatest scum that ever has been or ever will be on the face of this earth; we’re less than nothing of the most absolute nothing there is. Whatever the reasoning behind this well-worn catchphrase, Ringo does not think that this self-incriminating we are includes him and his mother, but is more directed at the group of his father’s semi-clandestine friends, his colleagues in the pest control brigade, the filthy, stinking holes where they sometimes have to work during his forced, lengthy absences, whether the commissions he received for his trips to Canfranc — and did this mysterious Canfranc really exist? — or the farmhouse at La Carroña were legal or not. Ringo thought about the poverty and hardships he must have shared with his Alberta light of my life for so many years, the family’s past and present misfortunes … No, he would never have compared his Alberta light of my life to the arsehole of the world, always supposing the world did have an arsehole. Not directly, at least, because in spite of frequently behaving like a wastrel and scatterbrain, he never avoided what he saw as his main responsibility as father and husband: to bring money home whenever he could, a little or a lot, however he could and whatever the cost.

The arsehole of the world. For a long time the boy took those words as a simple respite, a bar-room quip that had become a habit, the snort of a man sick and tired of his own jokes, blaspheming and lies, but eventually he understood that this so-often mentioned arse is nothing other than the country he lives in, and that the relation spoken about in such derogatory terms between country and arse reflects a general feeling of exclusion, self-loathing and defeat, a lack of esteem they all recognise and accept, the sad conclusion that we count for nothing in the world. So we are the greatest shit, and even worse than that, as his father says, and so do Señor Sucre and Capitán Blay, who are always ranting as they sit on a bench on Plaza Rovira or at the bar counter. In this grey city, with its penitence and ashes, where nothing interests the rest of the world, when, as he heard Señor Sucre comment, even foreign ambassadors are sent packing, and we are suffering unprecedented international isolation, why on earth should we be listened to anywhere, with that sewer rat we have in the Pardo taking himself for the Moorish guard and the sentinel of the Occident — Señor Sucre is well read, and people listen to him when he speaks — always surrounded by those yokes and arrows like black spiders, those blue prayers and anthems. We are nothing, my boy, even our football team can only play Portugal, we’ve ended up so badly that the rest of the world doesn’t even know we exist, we are their laughing stock, nano .