Juan Marsé - The Calligraphy of Dreams

“Ringo, are you coming to the Barrio Chino?”

This is the third Saturday running that El Quique has come into the Rosales bar after supper with the same suggestion. If you’ve never set foot in a whorehouse in Barrio Chino, nano , you’ve never lived. There are three in Calle Robadors almost next to each other: El Recreo, El Jardín and La Gaucha, it’s easy to slip inside. And although El Quique is not allowed in because he’s too young, and usually ends up in the gutter outside with a slapped face or a kick up the backside, nosing around in brothels has become his favourite pastime.

“You should see the fat cows in El Jardín, they look like they’re from before the war! But there’s one, La Manoli … Wow, I get a hard-on just looking at her.”

“Alright, you don’t have to be crude about it.”

“Well, are you coming or not?”

Ringo is enjoying the cool of evening on the pavement outside the bar, sitting with his chair pushed up against the wall, his jacket over his shoulders, a beer in his undamaged hand, watching the world go by. He doesn’t seem to want to do anything. A while ago he was reading his very dog-eared but favourite book of short stories, and now he stuffs it into the baggiest pocket of his jacket.

“Not if you’re going in a gang,” he says. “Too much fuss.”

“Just you and me.”

It’s a misty, muggy evening towards the end of September. El Quique has burst into the bar dressed up in a stifling, brown double-breasted suit, with a polka-dot tie, a litre of brilliantine on his hair and extravagantly framed sunglasses, because sunglasses make you look older, nano , so it’s easier to sneak in. Four Lucky Strike cigarettes snitched from his father are poking out of the top pocket of his jacket. Very pleased with himself, hot but all smiles, he pushes his round, greasy face close to his friend’s and awaits his response. When he saw Ringo so caught up in his book, he stared at him in astonishment, wondering how on earth he could spend Saturday night sitting out here or inside the bar reading or listening to the old-timers’ boring conversations or the slap of dominoes on the marble tabletops. He sometimes thinks Ringo isn’t growing up normally like the rest of them, like him and Roger for example, as if he is still fantasising with his outlandish stories, lying flat on a stagecoach roof firing at the Apaches chasing him across the prairie. He feels like telling him: Ringo, those horses are cardboard cutouts!

“Jesus, don’t be such a dummy. Come on, let’s do it!”

“Find somebody else,” he says. “I haven’t even got enough for the tram.”

Before he left home, after his mother went to La Esperanza to do her night shift, he had looked in a small coffee cup on the sideboard where on some Saturdays she leaves him two or three pesetas. This time there is only small change. The sight of his mother fiddling with this money always makes him sad; whenever he saw her pale, skinny hand fumbling for a few coins in the bottom of her small purse just for him, he felt selfish, useless and a spendthrift. There was a five-peseta note under a small plate, but that was for the bread and milk and a kilo of sweet potatoes that he himself had to buy early next morning before she got up, and, if there was enough, for a pot of cream sprinkled with sugar.

“It won’t cost you a thing,” El Quique insists brightly. “I’ll pay. I’m flush, kid, I won at dominoes this afternoon. Come on! We’ll go for a stroll to El Jardín to see what’s going on.”

“What will that be? Nothing.”

“Well, we can only look, but …”

“Yeah, like wallflowers.”

“What else can we do? They don’t let you touch them. And as for a fuck, for now don’t even dream of it … In El Recreo it’s fifteen pesetas a time. But you can see the girls close up. Then at home you have a toss, and that’s that.”

“They won’t let us in.”

“Of course they will! What do you bet? We’ll get in whenever you like, kid, I swear. On Saturday nights it’s crowded with guys and they don’t pay much attention, you just have to get in the queue and slip through. The only place where they wouldn’t let me in was at La Carola, oh, and in La Madame Petit, the women there cost the earth … Look, I’ll show you things you’ve never seen, Ringo. In a shop window on Calle San Ramón there’s a dildo that looks like a donkey’s donger, you’ll split your sides laughing when you see it … but first we’ll have a few beers in Los Cabales, to get in the mood. I’ll pay. What do you say?”

Ringo excuses himself by raising his bandaged hand.

“I can’t even put my hand in my pocket to buy a round.”

“Like I said, I’m paying. Come on, man!”

You can see from his dull, bulging eyes that all he thinks about is naked women. Out of the gang from four years earlier, El Quique, Roger and Rafa Cazorla are the only ones who still go to the Rosales bar, at first for the table football more than anything else, then to play dominoes, and to go together to a dance every Sunday. El Quique, who doesn’t hide his soft spot for Ringo and claims to be his best friend, and to understand and respect his love of pianos and novels — and not just thrillers or cowboy books — has often tried to get him to the Verdi or the Cooperativa La Lealtad, the two dancehalls where Violeta goes, with her mother as chaperone, but he has always refused.

Tonight though, he lets himself be dragged along out of curiosity. And after he has seen what was to be seen, it occurs to him that to some extent the fantasies El Quique demanded in the tales he used to invent, fantasies of tits and arses, wherever possible glimpsed through Oriental veils, odalisques in brilliant Technicolor concealed beneath gauzes and tulles like Yvonne de Carlo or María Montez, have finally become real in his Saturday night forays into the roughest brothels, especially in the crowded, poorly lit salon at El Jardín where eight or ten women parade round the centre like in an Arab slave market. They display themselves in their slips or nothing more than bras and suspender belts, flushed and bumping into each other because of the lack of room. They walk round as if in their sleep, rolls of flesh rippling as they fan themselves, their greasy, thick hair falling in waves onto bare shoulders; one of them has a towel wrapped round her head like a turban. On their feet they wear threadbare satin slippers or green and red very high-heeled shoes; another has black stockings and a suspender belt, and bruises all over her body; the youngest is wearing white socks and rubber sandals. They sway their fat buttocks in a bored fashion, and smile at the men peering at them with mocking looks of desire or submissive melancholy. Most of the men are standing, although some occupy the bench that runs round walls painted a greeny-yellow colour, as lumpy as a pool of vomit. A small door leads to a darkened staircase, and in the corners spittoons are overflowing with cigarette butts and gobs of spit. A thin layer of bluish cigarette smoke floats in air saturated with bursts of sour sweat and talcum powder, murmuring and occasional laughter can be heard between long silences laden with all kinds of coughs, the insidious clearing of throats, and the uneasy movement of feet in an inhibited, reverent shuffle that for an instant reminds Ringo of Good Fridays in the Las Ánimas chapel packed with the faithful advancing like sleepwalkers towards the altar. A few of the whores are singing softly to themselves as they turn and turn, apparently oblivious to the charms they are displaying. One of them has her hands busy doing some crochet-work, while the youngest and least ugly (although she is still ugly) with bushy eyebrows and dimples like slits in her doll’s face, catches his attention by glancing at him over her shoulder with a sorrowful look, as if saying: What are you doing here, child, how old are you?