Juan Marsé - The Calligraphy of Dreams

Torrente de las Flores. He never thought that a street whose name meant a river of flowers could be the backdrop to a tragedy. From the top of Travesera de Dalt, the street slopes steeply downwards, levelling out where it meets Travesera de Gràcia. It has forty-six corners, is seven-and-a half metres wide, is lined with low-rise buildings, and boasts three taverns. In summer, during the perfumed days of the patron saint’s fiesta, drowsy beneath an ornamental bower of paper bunting and multi-coloured garlands, the street takes on a sound like reeds rustling in the breeze, and a quavering, underwater glow that makes it seem otherworldly. After supper on nights of stifling heat, it becomes a prolongation of everyone’s home.

These events happened many years ago, when the city was less believable than now, but more real. One July Sunday, shortly before two in the afternoon, the blazing sun and a sudden shower mingle for a few minutes, and the air is filled with a shimmering light, a wavering, deceptive transparency that envelops the whole street. This is turning out to be a very hot summer, and by this time of day the blackish road surface has become so heated that the drizzle evaporates even before it hits the ground. When the shower ends, on the pavement outside the Rosales bar-cum-wine cellar a block of ice delivered by a truck and loosely wrapped in a cloth is melting in the remorseless sunlight. It’s not long before tubby Agustín, the bar owner, emerges with bucket and ice pick, squats down, and starts chipping pieces off it.

On the stroke of half-past two, a little higher up than the bar and across the street, where the optical illusion is at its strongest, Señora Mir comes running out of the doorway of number 117. She is clearly in distress, as if she is fleeing a fire or an apparition. She stands in the middle of the road in her slippers, her white nurse’s uniform only half done up, apparently unconcerned that she is revealing what she shouldn’t. For a few seconds she doesn’t seem to know where she is; she twists round, clawing the air with both hands until she stops spinning and, head sunk on her chest, lets out a long, hoarse cry that seems to come from the pit of her stomach, a scream that slowly subsides into sighs and then tails off like a kitten’s mewling. She takes a few stumbling steps up the street, comes to a halt. She turns as if searching for support, and then, closing her eyes and crossing her arms over her chest, she kneels down, slowly folding her body into itself as if this offered her some relief or respite, and lies on her back on the tram tracks embedded into what remains of the old cobbled surface.

Her neighbours and the few weary passers-by toiling along the upper end of the street at this time of day can scarcely believe their eyes. What can have got into this woman? Stretched out full length (not that this is saying much, in her case) her chubby knees, tanned from the Barceloneta beach, peeking out of her half-open housecoat, her feet in their satin slippers with grubby pompoms pressed tightly together: what the devil is she up to? Can it really be she intends to end her life under the wheels of a tram?

“Victoria!” yells a woman from the pavement. “What are you doing, poor thing?”

There’s no response. Not even the blink of an eye. A small group of curious onlookers quickly gathers round the prone figure, most of them fearing they are the butt of some cruel hoax. An elderly man goes over and prods the woman’s ample hip several times with the tip of his cane, as if unsure she is alive.

“Hey you, what nonsense is this?” he mutters, poking her. “What on earth do you think you’re doing?”

Making tongues wag, as always, more than one of her woman neigh-bours must have been thinking: what wouldn’t that slut do to get her man’s attention? A blonde forty-something with flashing blue eyes, sociable by nature and very popular in the neighbourhood, the plump Señora Mir, who had been a Registered Nurse trained in the Falange College and now worked as a therapist and professional kinesiologist (as stated on her business cards) has forever given rise to gossip thanks to her daring hands, which give massages and soothe a variety of pains. Her ambiguous talents have encouraged many an amorous adventure, especially since her husband, a bullying, loud-mouthed former local councillor, has been shut away in the San Andrés sanatorium since the end of the previous year. In the Rosales bar, Señora Mir’s manual dexterity has always provoked mocking delight, if not cruel sarcasm, and yet to see her now, flat on her back in the middle of the street in a parody of suicide — or perhaps actually meaning it, led to this extremity by some mental disturbance, and looking so firm and resolute in her decision — to see her lying there in the stream, with her round, pale-complexioned face edged with curls and her bewildered lips smeared as ever with lipstick, was beyond their wildest dreams. She appeared so sure of her imminent, ghastly demise beneath the wheel that was coming to slice off her head that it was hard to credit that such determination, such a desperate urge could be based on a complete miscalculation. Something terrible but at the same time laughable was obviously going on beneath those peroxide curls because, although the initial reaction of the passers-by when they saw her prone on the tram rails was one of stupefaction and pity, now that they could assess the dramatic scene unfolding before their eyes more coolly, it became risible: nobody in their right mind could imagine anything so absurd, a more impossible way to be run over and killed. Years earlier, a prostrate body like hers would have caused much greater alarm, even horrified protests, and could possibly have had fatal consequences (although, on second thoughts, the tram would have been going so slowly on this stretch of the street that it would have been highly unlikely) but the fact is that nowadays there is no way anything like that could happen, because Señora Mir appears to have overlooked one vital detail: the rail on which her little head is so anxiously seeking the dream of death, as well as its parallel counterpart where her ample knees are resting, is all that remains of the former tramway system — two bars of laminated steel barely a metre long, rusting now and almost buried in a block of cobblestones. The whole street was asphalted over a long time previously, but for some unknown reason this short, three metre-long section of cobbles was spared, together with the two worn bits of rail. In the last few feet of its downhill trajectory, the disused tracks begin a gentle turn to the right as they approach the next corner: silent witnesses to an abolished, forgotten route. No-one in the neighbourhood could have explained why they were not torn up along with all the rest of the track, what reasoning or lack of it had left them to grow rusty and sink further each day into the brief stretch of the now vanished cobblestones, but the more pertinent question that several of the women neighbours find themselves asking is: does that scatterbrain Victoria Mir really think a tram is going to come along and kill her? Has she gone nuts like her husband? She only has to open her eyes to see there’s no electric cable up there for a tramcar pole to connect to.

“Sweet Jesus! Just look at this, for the love of God!” cries an old lady standing on the kerb, a black mantilla covering her head and a rosary between her fingers. “Just look at that poor creature!”