Juan Marsé - The Calligraphy of Dreams

In bed that night he abandons Amok because he can’t help thinking about the Rat-catcher. Even then he can’t get to sleep; he keeps tossing and turning, and at one particular moment, his head drooping for the umpteenth time on the pillow, he suddenly feels as if he were peering over the edge of the abyss, plunging headlong into his own vertigo. Waking in different surroundings, he becomes aware that it’s the end of a phase of his life. Let’s face facts, Ringo, fumigate those doubts and accept the truth: your father is a smuggler, or something worse. In the first mists of sleep, he recalls a hot August day some two or three years earlier, when he was still employed as an apprentice. Before returning to work after lunch, he had gone to the newspaper kiosk in Plaza Rovira to look at the new supply of comics, when behind him he heard those two hoarse, mocking voices that so often bewildered him, the verbal ribaldry of the outrageous pair of gossipy clowns, those kings of tall tales who roam the neighbourhood at all hours. On this occasion they are chatting next to the kiosk, under the shade of a leafy plane tree.

“No two ways about it, Blay!” exclaims Señor Sucre. “If you’re a smuggler or a black-marketeer and they catch you, you’ll be tried as a black-marketeer and a smuggler, in other words, as a criminal, a wrong-doer, not for anything else.”

“But he is something else,” says old man Blay.

“Ha. But that something else is usually up to the people at the border. And he isn’t someone at the border. He’s a travelling salesman, shall we say. In other words, in inverted commas.”

“Here it’s a question of fumigating well without being seen. And Pep knows how to fumigate.”

“It doesn’t matter if he’s fumigating or plotting. Call it what you will. If they catch him, he’ll be a criminal.”

“I know what I’m talking about. Fumigate is the word, Sucre my friend. We have to fumigate as much as we can. That’s what.”

They fall silent for a while. Then Señor Sucre’s throaty rattle starts up once more:

“What do you think, Blay? I’m thinking of showing work again at the October Salon this year. It’s been so long since I’ve shown anything that many of my friends must think I don’t paint anymore, that I’m doing something else.”

“Aha, is that so? It’s just as I was telling you. That’s right.”

They are sitting shoulder to shoulder on the stone bench. Capitán Blay has his glass of coffee laced with aniseed from the Comulada bar, and Señor Sucre is fanning himself with an oriental metal fan. Standing at the side of the kiosk where the comics are displayed, Ringo can see them out of the corner of his eye. They say more than they know, and on top of that they make a joke of it, he thinks, and yet he can’t stop listening to them while he pretends to be interested in the weekly delivery of new adventures, the brightly coloured display of comics, cheap novels, and annuals pegged to the sides of the kiosk.

“It’s true, Pep is a man of many facets,” says Señor Sucre. “And invisibility is one of them. Sometimes it seems to me he is no longer with us, as if he were already dead … Blay, have you heard of the asphodel, the plant that makes the dead visible?”

“No; ‘Neither God, nor master’. That’s my motto.”

“It’s a plant that grows straight out of a rock.”

“Strewth! How can a plant grow out of a rock?”

When he hears this, Ringo recalls the flat rock up on Montaña Pelada.

“Pep is a rare kind of asphodel,” says Señor Sucre. “He’s what’s needed in the Rosales bar or any other tavern. I think I know him well, though he never ceases to surprise me. One night, in the Comulada bar, he bought a drink for that dolt Ramón Mir, and was laughing and joking with him … By the way, they say our dear councillor is getting worse every day. Apparently he lost his left ball fighting with the Blue Division.”

“He did? Well, ‘we lost more in Cuba’.”

“A lot more, friend, there’s no comparison! Oh, those imperial glories are a thing of the past, Blay, and the misfortunes of the present will soon pass too, and who knows what a dismal future awaits us! I think I’ll have a coffee and aniseed as well. Aha, look over there. Isn’t that Pep’s son standing by the kiosk, about to take a comic?”

“Yes, you’re right. Do you think he’s going to pinch a comic? He’s a bit old for them, isn’t he?”

“Hmmm. I know forty-year old men who read comics. But look, he’s been standing there a long time, pretending to read.”

Ringo feels the man’s little eyes crawling like insects over the back of his neck. The screech of a tram braking at a stop, the cooing of pigeons as they hop across the square, Rip Kirby punching a hoodlum, a rabbit and a pistol appearing out of Merlin the Magician’s hat on the cover of his annual.

“So then,” he hears Señor Sucre’s jerky voice once more, “you reckon there’s something important behind all those trips to the border?”

“Important? I wouldn’t know,” says Capitán Blay. “Nothing’s been important to me for a long while now.”

“No? Really? How old are you, Blay?”

“Too old. A lot older than you, dammit!”

“You’ve nothing to complain about. You’ll bury the lot of us, I’m sure. Do you know something, Blay? Have you ever stopped to think that at the start of the century the average life expectancy for men was only thirty-five?”

At this time of day, the August sun is fierce on Ringo’s bare neck. He doesn’t flinch, and continues listening intently.

“Be that as it may,” says Señor Sucre, “with Spain the way it is, thirty-five is more than enough, don’t you reckon? Well, I’m going to get my drink. But I want it with rum in it, it’s healthier … I was thinking I haven’t seen much of that Pep in the Comulada recently. A shame, isn’t it?”

“I’ve already told you, he spends the whole time fumigating. Have some aniseed in your coffee, dammit, you’ll thank me for it … I’m not sure whether you know it or not, but at the border post at Canfranc you can get a French rat poison that’s more powerful than any they sell here, and cheaper. They allow it through the customs on the quiet. Everyone knows we don’t have good rat poison here in Spain. Of course, a lot more things get through as well. I know of someone called Massana who used to manage to avoid the Gestapo and the Civil Guard and brought in nylon stockings and kilos of saccharine, and at the same time used the journey to smuggle in Jews, spies and airmen … But nowadays things have changed. Now they smuggle in that infallible rat poison.”

“Goodness! To call what Pep brings in rat poison! You’re quite something, my dear Blay!”

“Yes, you can laugh. But ask Gaspar Huguet, the coffee roaster. He’ll tell you that all that’s missing is the signal.”

“What signal?”

“One day you’ll get a postcard from the Valley of the Fallen and the stamp with Franco’s head on it will be upside down. That’ll be the signal.”

“The signal for what, Blay?”

“Ah, nobody knows as yet. But it will be the signal, you can be sure of that.”

The clink of the spoon against the glass as he stirs the coffee, the rhythmic rustle of the fan through the hot air, and then Señor Sucre calling to him:

“Hey you, boy!”

He stuffs his hands in his trouser pockets, sinks his head between his shoulders, and turns round towards them. He narrows his eyes, suspicious and bristling with premonitions like a cat.

“Yes, you,” says Señor Sucre. “Come here a moment … Could you do me a favour? Go to the Comulada bar and ask for a coffee laced with rum for me. Tell them I’ll come by later to pay.”