Juan Marsé - The Calligraphy of Dreams

“I also make jam. Do you like blackberry jam?”

“No. But come with me, please.”

The girl smiles vaguely as she looks at him and says nothing. She has sat down again on the corner of the bed where she’s hidden the towel, and carries on energetically brushing her hair. As she does so, she reveals the fuzz under her arm. It looks like a black flower, or a small hedgehog hiding there. Yet again Ringo confirms that she is not pretty. She isn’t. Why then do even the most trivial of her gestures attract him? What is there beneath her docile eyelids, why are her silences and her gaze so disturbing?

Oblivious now to everything that doesn’t involve looking after her hair, Violeta lowers her eyes and starts to sing softly — “The sea, mirror of my heart …” — while he relives the moment when everyone was booing and whistling on the night of the saint’s day fiesta, and sees her running home, the cloud of confetti bursting round her head.

*

He had thought it would be a more or less private atmosphere, protected from any indiscreet glances, rather than this brightly lit end of the verandah, with its coloured glass panes (some of them broken), and with a view of the backs of other buildings, all of them with similar rusty verandahs with broken panes and moth-eaten blinds. From some of these galleries baking in the noonday sun comes the clucking of tame hens. There’s a trolley on wheels like the ones he has seen in the corridors at the Nuestra Señora del Remedio clinic, a white cupboard, and unpainted shelves holding towels, pillows, clay bowls and jars with creams and potions in them. There is also a rack with a white coat hanging from it, and a battered wicker chair in which he has now been sitting for several minutes, surrounded by the smell of hot leather and herbs treated with alcohol, listening to Señora Mir arguing with her daughter somewhere in the apartment. Then there is the sound of a door slamming once more.

“So here we have this polite, well-brought up young boy, so spoilt by his mother,” says Señora Mir seconds before she appears on the verandah, wrapped in her white coat, wearing the slippers with the pink pompoms, her hair drawn up in an untidy bun. Her eyelashes are thick with blue mascara, but her full, pale pine-cone lips have no lipstick on them. They look strangely youthful, and traces of rouge at the corners of her mouth lend her smile a weary look. “So let’s see, what’s wrong with you?”

“Hello, Señora Mir.”

“You’ve got your mother into a state, haven’t you? Well anyway, first let’s deal with that sling. We don’t want to see it any more. Get rid of it, okay?”

“I don’t know, I think it helps …”

“Not a bit of it, my dear. Put the scarf away in your pocket, and take off your jacket, shirt, and sandals. Let me see your hand.” She takes hold of it, removes the bandage roughly but efficiently, then examines the scar. “Don’t worry. We’ll put some corn oil on it and it’ll look a lot better. Fancy ruining such a pretty headscarf to make a sling! And what for? You think it helps the arm to stay still and rest, don’t you? Well, it doesn’t, because the arms drops anyway without you realising it, it hangs down and becomes lazy, and in the end the muscles contract. Sit here on the trolley. That’s right. Now lift your right arm on your own, little by little … No, not like that,” she laughs hoarsely, “not like my Ramón’s salute, my boy, we’ve already had enough of that in this house. Raise your arm straight above your head, as if you were lifting a weight, and tell me if it hurts here when you do so, here in your shoulder. Does it?”

“No.”

“Now do the same, but with your elbow in the air, and your hand facing downwards … That’s right. How does that feel?”

“That hurts.”

“Okay, so there we have another problem. Undo your belt and lie face down. Rest your chin on the pillow, with your arms down by your sides. That’s right.”

The pillow greets him with a stale reminder of heavy, faded smells. Face down on the trolley, his eyes discover a glass vase almost hidden behind the white coat hanging from the rack. Inside, a slender blue rose amid a bunch of lavender. Too slender, too perfect, and too blue not to be made of paper. The blue rose of forgetfulness in Señora Mir’s apartment! But it’s not the perfume of roses that his nostrils can now detect, rather the intense odour of camphorated alcohol. Gradually, the arcane air in the verandah starts to distil denser, more disturbing essences, closer to the secrets of adult sex than to aromatic herbs, oils and potions. Out of the corner of his eye he can see Señora Mir lubricating her small, podgy hands with the yellowish contents of a glass pot, and then, for a brief moment, he sees them approaching, hanging by her sides like the talons of a bird of prey. To ward off the ill omens Ringo closes his eyes and amuses himself with a rapid re-run of his personal collection of risible images of the plump Señora Mir having sex with the lame ex-footballer … Where could they have done it? Right here, on this trolley? On the floor in a great hurry and laughing all the time, with stifled caresses and groans, her on top and him underneath? Don’t miss it, my boy. She strips off and gives her man a sweet smile. She kneels down willingly and raises her arse. Rolls of fat on her thighs and bulbous pink buttocks. But where? In Violeta’s room or in the marriage bed itself, with the photograph of the local councillor, the ex-combatant, smiling at them from the bedside table? The bare, kissable mouth is now suspended only a few inches from his defenceless back. He can sense her breath on him.

“Loosen your belt, sweetheart,” Señora Mir orders, and he can feel her sticky fingers probing the tendons round the nape of his neck. “You’re tense, little one. Relax or I’ll be annoyed.” She taps him on the behind, and recites: “Just a little scratch, you’ll hardly notice it … I bet that’s what they said to you when you were small and they were giving you an injection, wasn’t it? Well, don’t be frightened, Vicky’s not going to hurt you either.”

“I’m not frightened.”

At any rate, it’s not the fear or nervousness that this hopeless, corny romantic imagines, forever caught up in the web of her own feelings; no, it’s something very confused that is worming into his consciousness, a bitter, intermittent but crushing melancholy. Beneath the constant pressure of her perfumed fingers, fingers that now are incisive and surprisingly strong, he himself wants, and yet doesn’t want, to feel guilty. It occurs to him that such an awkward situation, where all of a sudden he finds himself at the mercy of these hands and potions, is the result of his cowardice the other afternoon when he hid round the corner, and above all, is the punishment he deserves for his irresponsible, delirious fantasy the other night in the rain … He wasn’t able to shake off this nervousness as he flopped onto the trolley, the fear of the conversation he is bound to have to listen and reply to, similar to the way he feels when he is having his hair cut: there’s no way of escaping the traditional chat with the barber, which is always a boring waste of time, a torture. But here it could be a lot worse. Even though he thinks she knows, or ought to know, that a boy scarcely more than fifteen is not an appropriate audience for the secrets of a woman of over forty, he can’t help remembering how little she has ever cared about scandalising either adults or children in the neighbourhood, turning her ridiculous romances into a source of great hilarity. Humorous variations, usually quite rude if not downright smutty, of the same story. What Señora Mir calls “a bit of extra affection” could be the reason behind her current frayed temper while she desperately awaits the longed-for letter and possible reconciliation with the last man to take to his heels and leave her: so be ready with your lies, kid, or, if you prefer, be prepared to withhold the truth.