Juan Marsé - The Calligraphy of Dreams

After a while, annoyed at the lack of response, he brings his mouth to her deaf ear:

“Listen, Violeta, there’s something I want you to explain. Last summer, when your mother made that scene in the middle of the street, you were at home, weren’t you? I heard your mother say so to Señora Paquita … Why didn’t you come down to help her?”

“Why do you ask? Is it that important?”

“I couldn’t give a damn. But your mother was lying out there in the street and you didn’t even come out on to your balcony.”

“I didn’t know anything about it. I was in bed with a bump on my head.”

“A bump?”

“I’d had a fall in the bathroom. Just as well I had the towel wrapped round my head, because otherwise …”

“Well, somebody wanted to go and fetch you, but your mother said you weren’t at home, that you’d gone to the beach with a girlfriend. Why did she lie?”

“I don’t know … I guess she didn’t want me to see her in a state like that.”

The crooner sings with his fish lips pressed up against the microphone; the loudspeaker converts his nasal drawl into crashing scrap metal. Cabaretera, mi dulce arrabalera . Every so often as Ringo takes a forward step he misses the beat in his haste to press himself against her and treads on her foot. Think of my poor feet occasionally, she murmurs jokingly. But the clumsy Ringo cannot think of her feet, because in his mind’s eye he is seeing her in the bathroom, towel wrapped round her head like a turban, staring at herself naked in the mirror before she slips; because he is seeing her on the floor and considering the rising groin that he is now pressing gently with his thigh without getting any reaction, without any sign of acceptance from her. It’s like rubbing yourself lovingly against a sack of potatoes.

“So you were the little innocent,” he mutters. “And that day, when your mother and the lame footballer had their fight, you were there … What happened? Why did they argue?”

She says nothing, but lets her forehead droop on to his shoulder. Over a stupid little thing, she says after some time; it had to happen, and I was glad it did. She presses herself against him, flinging her arm round his neck, her mouth tight against the lapel of his jacket, and stammers something he doesn’t understand, but which sounds like a swear word, followed by a garbled string of reproaches: it was a misunderstanding, some nonsense of her mother’s, a misapprehension she still hasn’t got over, but which I’m glad of. She describes all this in a flat monotone, as if she were reading it with great difficulty on his lapel, pausing and hesitating the whole time: if she had gone to the beach that Sunday with her friend Merche as planned, if Señora Terol had not had cellulite and her mother gone to visit her, if that man had not stayed at home to wait for her, if I had only taken a shower half an hour later … A brief account of facts linked by a fateful outcome. A strange voice with a murmur of rain. Ringo closes his eyes in order to see her more clearly: beyond the emotionless words there is a pretty bathroom, and she is looking at herself naked in the mirror as she wraps the towel round her head. Barefoot and still damp, she leans forward, then straightens up with the towel in place. Her small breasts and ample thighs push forward, but as she turns to reach for the bathrobe she slips and falls backwards, hitting the back of her head on the edge of the bath. It could have been worse, she says, the turban softened the blow, but even so I saw stars and could hardly speak. At that moment, the ex-footballer was in the dining-room laying the table, he liked to help, he always set the places when he stayed for a free meal, and he must have heard her cry out. He rushed in, lifted her in his arms, covered her with the bathrobe, took her to her room and laid her out on her camp bed — but she only learnt all this sometime later.

“I’m not saying he touched me, eh? But who knows …”

“Oh yes? Why do you say that?”

“Touched me in a certain way, I mean. You know … If he did, I wasn’t aware of it, I didn’t realise.”

“Huh! A girl always realises something like that.”

How long has passed? she asked herself when she came to. And she cannot say for certain if he touched her, but all of a sudden she finds herself stretched out on the bed, half-covered and still groggy, completely defenceless, with the towel wrapped round her head like a turban. How long had she been like that? And he’s bending over her trying to revive her by tapping her on the cheek and calling to her, Violeta, my child, his voice and hands leave a scalding sensation, and what could she do, she was unable to react, she had no idea what was going on, and neither of them heard the front door or the footsteps along the corridor, until they saw her standing in the doorway in her white coat and holding the vanity case with her creams and potions …

Ringo would like to see her face while she is talking, because her voice sounds so strange and muffled with her mouth pressed against his chest that it conveys no emotion. Almost at once, she loosens the arm round his neck and raises her head, as if she had been unburdening herself of a secret and had needed to bury herself in him to do so, hiding her face and adopting another voice.

“He tried to explain,” she goes on. “But without making much effort. Mama didn’t listen anyway, she said some terrible things to him. Terrible. That he was to get out of the house and never come back. She slapped him and threw everything on the table at him — plates and glasses and a bottle, everything he had laid out for the three of us. She was sobbing all the while, and suddenly rushed out into the corridor and downstairs … And he gathered his things and left as well. I thought he had gone after her to bring her back and explain, but not a bit of it: he vanished completely and never came back.”

“And what did you do?”

“Nothing. I shut myself in the bathroom again, and kept quiet.”

“You kept quiet? Why?”

“Because deep down I was pleased he was gone. Because he would have left her anyway. That’s why.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he didn’t love her anymore. She didn’t realise it, but I did. He managed to say to her: I promise to forgive you, and I’ll write to you, or something of the sort, but he took advantage of what had happened to leave her for good.” She falls silent for a while, then adds: “I’ve told you all this so you’ll see I’m not making it up. It was all so terrible for Mama.”

And she refuses to understand, adds Violeta reluctantly, her voice thick with a spiteful delight. That woman cannot or will not understand; she’s always been like that, she trusts other people too much, and when they deceive her she never learns, she’s so damned stupid and naive, she’ll always be looking for someone to look after her and protect her, someone who’s kind and attentive. She’s always needed that, and that’s precisely why she’s ended up losing all her self-esteem. For some time now, Papa has been nothing more than a distant memory for her, and an unpleasant one at that, and so that man is all she thinks about. The days after that rogue left her, she said some unbearable things.

“Do you know what she said one day? She said that the worst thing of all, what had hurt her most, was not that I was half-naked in bed with him almost on top of me, but to see me with his towel on my head — because that was the towel he used! See how unhinged she was? That towel was mine, it always had been!”

The next tune is a slow one, but Ringo isn’t listening or following the rhythm, simply turning very slowly, pushing his pelvis forward, getting aroused every so often. That girl already does it, Roger told him one day as they watched Violeta leaving the bar carrying a bottle of wine and the soda siphon. How can you tell if a girl’s already done it? he had asked, and quick as a flash El Quique had replied on Roger’s behalf: It’s easy, kid, you can tell by the dark lines under her eyes and by the way she walks so stiffly, as if she’s swallowed a broom.