Juan Marsé - The Calligraphy of Dreams

*

The following Sunday he is sitting in the front row at the Delicias cinema, together with El Quique and El Chato. All he had to tell the doorman was I’m Pep the Rat-catcher’s son and all three of them got in for free. He’s known El Quique by his nickname Pegamil for some time now, and lately all he talks about are girls he is sure would let you grope them if we took them up on Montaña Pelada, and how much Victoria Mir looks like María Montez when she’s in a swimsuit with her towel wrapped round her head like a turban, although you won’t have noticed, he tells Ringo, because when you watch a film you look for other things, but they really do resemble one another.

“That’s because of their arses!” shouts Chato.

El Quique claims to have been the first to think of her when the gang was having a collective wank in the ruins of Can Xirot. They were all doing it imagining María Montez, but he started thinking of Violeta and came almost at once. He said it was like feeling a gentle electric shock go through him. Ringo considers El Quique as his best friend, although he couldn’t really say why, and often invites him to the cinema. To keep him quiet during the film, he always promises to make up a tale where Violeta is abducted and is about to be tortured by the dacoits or the Sioux, with El Quique as her only hope. This deference has its origin in one of his first fantasies, which has El Quique as protagonist, which he later turned into a recurring dream: Violeta Mir is living in the jungle in a semi-wild state, threatened by a thousand dangers — she is chased by a panther that pounces on her, tears her clothes, and is on the verge of devouring her. El Quique arrives with his bow, and kills the panther just in the nick of time with an arrow between the eyes. Then he picks Violeta up in his arms, soothes her scratches, and takes her to swim in the lake with Tarzan and Jane. For a long while this was El Pegamil’s favourite tall tale, which he often asked for. Then one day the narrator added a variant: El Quique misses with his first arrow, and the panther eats one of Violeta’s legs. A second, well-aimed arrow kills the beast, and El Quique manages to save the girl, whom we soon see not only swimming in the lake but beating Jane in a race.

“Alright, but later on they meet the wizard Merlin, who restores her leg,” Ringo added when he noticed how crestfallen his friend was as he refused to accept the change and demanded he hit the target with his first arrow. Ringo insisted, and so the two friends fell out. Ringo’s uneasy conscience advised him to bring back Violeta’s thigh and to make his peace with El Quique, but for some time his pride would not let him do so. By the time he finally relented and went back to the first version of the story, this devoured thigh had become an obsession with El Quique: in his own tales, which were always breathless and thrown together any old how, a panther would suddenly appear at the most unlikely moment, about to take a bite out of Violeta’s dark thigh; she would scream for help, and he would appear with his bow and arrows …

Now, lounging in the stalls in the Delicias, he is silent until midway through the film, but then can contain himself no longer, and whispers in Ringo’s ear:

“Don’t make it the dacoits, Ringo. This time she is abducted by Yellow Hand and his Cheyenne.”

“Okay.”

“And I’m an explorer in the jungle, and my name is Alan Baxter. And I save her just as she’s about to drown in the lake.”

“Alright.”

“And she’s dressed like María Montez in ‘The Thousand and One Nights’, with a turban on her head …”

“Fine, whatever you like, but now we’re watching the film, so be quiet.”

Basil Rathbone stabs an orange with his knife, and Tyrone Power watches with an ironic smile as they dine in the house of the crooked mayor of Los Angeles, a flabby, cowardly marionette manipulated by his ambitious captain of the guard. Among the other guests are the stunningly beautiful Linda Darnell, but for the moment the boys only have eyes for Tyrone Power and Basil Rathbone. The latter does not yet realise that his guest Diego Vega is Zorro himself, the masked avenger. The boys know Basil Rathbone very well, they have seen him play the villain in “Captain Blood”, in “The Adventures of Robin Hood” and “The Adventures of Marco Polo”, and even in “David Copperfield”, where he portrayed the evil Mister Murstone, always looking like some sinister bird of prey with that hooked nose of his. His sadistic smile broadens as he tortures the orange with his knife and stares disdainfully at Tyrone Power who, masterfully accentuating the mask of a foppish dandy so that nobody will suspect he is Zorro, says to him:

“ I see you treat that fruit like an enemy .”

“ Or a rival ,” replies the captain, and then the plump, obsequious mayor comes out with the incredible line:

“ My great Esteban here misses no opportunity to cross swords with someone. Not for nothing was he a fencing master in Barcelona! ”

Stupefied, Ringo springs upright in his seat in the Delicias and, still bemused, digs his friend in the ribs.

“Quique! Did you hear that? Did you hear what he said?”

“I think so.”

“He said: in Barcelona! That’s right, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s right,” confirms El Chato to his left. “I swear I heard it! He said in Barcelona.”

Unbelievable, it’s unbelievably incredible. What a surprise, boys. How wonderful, how strange to hear the name of their city spoken by famous Hollywood actors, so far away from them, from this parochial, irredeemable Sunday afternoon gloom. Ringo intends to tell all the rest of the gang who haven’t seen the film yet, and his mother the moment he gets home, but above all his father, when he returns from Canfranc. They know we exist, we’re not so insignificant, Father, they haven’t forgotten us! In Hollywood they know our city exists! Basil Rathbone was a fencing master in Barcelona!

His astonishment and joy are not shared in the least by his father, who is amused and surprised at his euphoria, and confesses he has no idea who Basil Rathbone is, and nor has he seen the film. Although Ringo is disappointed his father doesn’t remember how often he has complained bitterly for precisely this reason, for being or being in the arsehole of the world, he himself, all of us, our city, and the whole of Spain including its football team, which is also the arsehole of the world because nowadays only Portugal will play them, he forgives him because he knows he has never been the slightest bit interested in the cinema, not even as a pastime; he is so unimpressed it takes a great effort for him to stay awake to the end of a film.

His mother, on the other hand, smiles when she hears him tell the story, turning her face away from him. But he notices her slight nod of pleasure, as if she could hear a distant, pleasing music.

On the southern slope of the hill, near the summit, there are three steps of a staircase cut into the rock .

“Hello there, Paqui, has the letter arrived?”

The greeting and the question thrust into the bar a few seconds before the opulent curves bursting out of the white uniform. She has only left home for a moment to have a small glass of brandy and to ask if there’s any news. The tavern is empty as usual in mid-afternoon, so there is no danger of being indiscreet, although everyone knows she is not afraid of gossip. The therapist is wearing her normal domestic work clothes, with slippers, curlers in her hair, eyebrows plucked and the familiar smell of embrocation wafting from her hands as she waves them in the air, making her bracelets clink. Almost immediately she notices Berta’s son sitting still by the window, camouflaged by the greenish light filtering in through the blinds. When he hears the hoarse, annoying voice invading the bar, he drops his head still lower over his book.