The Calligraphy of Dreams

10. CALLIGRAPHY OF DREAMS

On the southern slope of the hill, near the summit, there are three steps of a staircase cut into the rock.

“Hello there, Paqui, has the letter arrived?”

The greeting and the question thrust into the bar a few seconds before the opulent curves bursting out of the white uniform. She has only left home for a moment to have a small glass of brandy and to ask if there’s any news. The tavern is empty as usual in mid-afternoon, so there is no danger of being indiscreet, although everyone knows she is not afraid of gossip. The therapist is wearing her normal domestic work clothes, with slippers, curlers in her hair, eyebrows plucked and the familiar smell of embrocation wafting from her hands as she waves them in the air, making her bracelets clink. Almost immediately she notices Berta’s son sitting still by the window, camouflaged by the greenish light filtering in through the blinds. When he hears the hoarse, annoying voice invading the bar, he drops his head still lower over his book.

“Didn’t you hear me, Paqui?” says Señora Mir, making a beeline for the counter. “Has it arrived, or shall I throw myself under a tram, for real this time?”

“You do like to exaggerate, don’t you, Vicky?” the other woman replies.

“Well, has it or hasn’t it?”

Standing on a stool to clean the dusty bottles on the highest shelf, Señora Paqui stops and turns to her friend.

“Do you know something, sweetheart? You’re taking this far too seriously …”

“Do you mind just giving me an answer, Paqui? What about that business of mine? The letter should be here by now! Didn’t he say he was going to bring it the next day?”

“No, my treasure, that’s not what he said. He had to write it first. Besides, as you know, love letters always take ages to arrive …” Shaking the dust off the cloth she has been using, she adds with a scornful twist of the mouth: “Well, so they say.”

“You’re not here all day. Your brother serves in the mornings. Perhaps he knows something. Ask him.”

“He would have told me.”

“Have you asked him?”

“Of course.”

“Where is he now?”

Without waiting for a reply, Señora Mir strides to the back of the bar. As she passes the boy, she raises a plump arm and tousles his hair.

“How’s that hand of yours doing, mister pianist?” she says without stopping. “Writing to your girlfriend?”

He gives a start, and in a rapid reflex action hides his bandaged hand and pencil inside his sling, as though stung by an insect. With the other hand he covers the small squared-off school notebook he has placed on top of the novel he is reading. How distant he is from these whispered confidences and simpering, from the plump, perfumed hand in his hair, from those dreamy blue eyes. Hunched over the pages of Beware of Pity he struggles to clasp the yellow pencil between thumb and middle finger. To be seen with the pencil in his fingers makes him feel self-conscious and ridiculous: he thinks he’s been found out, caught out in a deception, trying to catch smoke in his hand or something similar. As long as this nosy woman is around, he prefers to keep his hand and pencil hidden, with his head down over the novel, and the novel covering the school notebook, where he is concealing what he has just written with his other hand.

“Agustín! Come out a moment!” Señora Paqui shouts from the bar counter. “Is there anything for Vicky?”

The tavern keeper, with a belly as heavy as he is world-weary, is an affable, red-faced man in his fifties, with bulging eyes and a bushy, greying moustache. He appears at the kitchen door in his black and grey striped apron, holding a bottle of oil. He calls out: “Here!” in a tired, mocking voice. Before Señora Mir has even reached him, he says no, that nobody came with any letter the whole morning.

“I’m frying some little birds that’ll make you lick your fingers, Señora Mir,” he adds with a smile. “Like to try one?”

“Not on your life!” And swinging round her ample bulk, a look of reproach on her face, she heads back to the bar, where her glass of brandy is waiting. “That’s disgusting, Paqui. Where does he get those poor little sparrows?”

“I know, I know, I’m furious about it. The wine wholesaler is the one, he buys them from a grower in the Panadés. I told my brother that next time I’ll feed them to the cat.” She adds in a resigned voice: “Well, you heard him. Nothing yet. And we’re keeping an eye out, I promise you. It might come through the post …”

“No chance! Why do you think he prefers to leave it here? Don’t you remember I told you that letter mustn’t get into the hands of the girl?” She downs the brandy in two quick gulps, and stares blankly in front of her. She seems very upset. “Do you know what, sweetheart? Pour me another one.”

Those poor little sparrows, she said! Can you imagine anything more corny? In order not to have to see her so close to, or no more than necessary, because it’s impossible not to hear her, Ringo turns his head and looks out into the street. On the edge of the far pavement a little boy of about six, in a short-sleeved shirt and with unkempt hair, is pedalling furiously on a small yellow bicycle. Two small stabilising wheels help him keep his balance. Ringo knows him: it’s Tito, the hairdresser Rufina’s youngest. The boy dismounts, and crossly examines the poorly fixed stabilisers, which are preventing him going any faster.

Even though he is looking out into the street, Ringo cannot help noticing out of the corner of his eye that Señora Mir is fluffing up her hair with her podgy fingers, biting her fleshy bottom lip, and staring at the wall behind the bar counter. She says despairingly:

“He’d be better kneeling down.”

She is staring at a calendar advertising a soft drink. In the centre is a blown-up, hand-tinted old photograph which shows eleven tough football players posing before they play a historic game. This museum piece of muscular legs is what has caught her attention. It is the previous year’s calendar, with the month of December still attached thanks to Agustín’s enthusiasm for the historic football team that used to be the neighbourhood’s local club. The photograph is something of a relic: underneath, in bold letters, it reads: C.D. EUROPA, 1924–25 SEASON. Five sturdy players are posing shoulder to shoulder with one knee on the ground, the centre-half holding the ball. Behind them, arms folded and grim-faced, stand six more, including the goalkeeper in his cap and kneepads. They are all wearing baggy shorts down to the knees, and tight-fitting shirts, with the blue V on the chest. These battle-hardened players are staring fiercely at the camera, ready for a fight, as if they were facing a blizzard. The left-winger, with a handkerchief round his forehead and hair sticking up like a feather duster, is so bow-legged you could drive a tram between his legs.

“Don’t be so pig-headed,” says Señora Paqui. “It’s not him.”

Señora Mir tosses down the second glass of brandy and leaves it on the counter, saying sadly, “Put it on the slate, my love,” and immediately heading for the door. But before she leaves she turns round again, hands on hips.

“I could swear it is. What would you do, Paqui? Tell me the truth.”

“What would I do about what …?”

“Would you wait?”

“I would. Of course I would.”

“How long?”

Paqui takes her time before responding, and does so in a whisper.

“He’s crazy about you, Vicky. Or haven’t you realised that yet?”

“Did he give you that impression? Really?” Señora Mir wants to know, eyes gleaming.

“You should have seen him sitting there, writing away. He found it so hard! And he promised he would get that letter to you. You’re the one he wants, you’re his beloved!”

“Yes, but how long would you wait?”

“Tell me something first. What happened that day you lay down in the street? Was it bad news from France? You told me your brother was ill …”

“No. That was when he was in the concentration camp … It’s over now, he’s fine. No, it was me, I lost my rag … I don’t know how to explain it.”

“So what happened to make you go out into the street like that?”

“I don’t know, Paqui! I’ll tell you some day.” Pensive as she lifts her left breast to fit into the bra more comfortably, she slyly half-closes her eyes and whispers: “That filthy towel wrapped round her head, to pretend … If only I’d believed him, if only.”

“Believed what, Vicky? What did you mean?”

“Nothing. Okay, don’t change the subject. I asked you how long you would wait.”

“However long it takes, of course!” She stares at her friend, annoyed that she has not managed to get anything clear, then says more gently: “Don’t get him wrong, Vicky. He’s not like other men. He doesn’t say things just for the sake of it.”

“Ah, no? And what would you know?”

“I’ve never seen anyone so determined to keep a promise. He’s mad about you, Vicky.”

“Do you really think so? Or are you just saying it to encourage me?”

Without waiting for her reply, Señora Mir purses her pine-cone mouth thoughtfully, pats her haunches and says goodbye with a vague wave of the hand that could mean either I don’t care, or God be with you.

Yet again, Ringo cannot help viewing all this as ridiculous. Oh the heartaches of Doña Floripondio! He simply finds it hard to believe that this caricature of a woman is capable of living a real love story, and hard to believe that Señora Paquita, who has so often made fun of her, is now egging her on, encouraging her to wait for that letter. How could she, an old maid, say that an old wreck like her friend could be anyone’s beloved? What did Señora Paquita mean by beloved anyway? Has she seen her slobbering over any of her previous pick-ups in Parque Güell or letting them fondle her in some cave on Montaña Pelada?

Weighed in the balance of the boy’s daily arguments with himself, what he imagines is far more important than what he has lived, and although the frontier between what he sees and what he struggles to make out is very imprecise, he usually has no doubt when it comes to the moment of choice: even if he is unsure whether his voluptuous neighbour warrants compassion or laughter, in this case he feels disinclined to feel sorry for her. However fascinating the prospects of her amorous misadventures might seem, for him they will always represent the lowest level of the grotesque and farcical.

With Señora Mir gone, the unwilling witness no longer pays any attention to the bar, but instead allows his gaze to wander to the quiet, sunny street through the slats of the blind. A while ago he saw Señor Sucre and Capitán Blay walk past, chatting on their way to Plaza Rovira. They took it in turns every two metres or so to emphasise a point in their interminable argument, but without shouting or gesticulating, their heads close together, hands behind their backs, staring down at the ground. At the far side of the street, on the peeling wall without doors or windows, a large patch of damp looks like a tornado whirling ominously towards the little boy pedalling on the pavement edge. As he goes up and down on his tiny bike, head straining as he hunches over the handlebars, he seems to be carrying out some boring task or punishment. The bicycle is an old piece of junk with a fixed wheel and no brakes. The two stabilisers help him keep his balance and stop him falling over, but slow him down and cancel out all his efforts, preventing him from sprinting across the imaginary finishing line as the winner. The boy gets off the bike and starts kicking it.

Ringo’s eyes stray from the street to his writing. He is still clumsily holding the pencil in his bandaged hand, while with the other he is shyly concealing his first effort. All at once, sensitive to other echoes, another rhythm, other readings, he decides to correct it and to be more precise.

On its southern slope, cut from a rock, there are three lonely steps of a staircase that was never finished, which no-one knows where it was leading to

.

He thinks that it is only in this unknown, abrupt territory of writing and its resonances that he will be able to discover the luminous passage between words and deeds, a propitious place where he can keep his hostile surroundings at bay and reinvent himself. He would like to be able to proclaim that for the best part of the day his spirit is not where he is in his body, whether he is sitting in the undulating grounds of Parque Güell, book in hand, or at a table next to the window in this gloomy bar, but that it is roaming far from his neighbourhood and city across very different landscapes and often in a delicate sentimental balance, nourishing his sense of exile on long, lonely walks on the crunching snow of the Nevksy Prospect, for example, or travelling by carriage along the paths of Yarmouth, or perhaps strolling along the foggy alleyways of Blackfriars on the banks of the Thames, or among the desolate heights of Yorkshire where the wind always howls, or entering the pension Vauquer in the Rue NeuveSainte-Geneviève, or on his stomach on the plains of Kenya near Mount Kilimanjaro, under the shady trees at Thornfield or even wandering the hills of Balaclava among the shrapnel and slaughtered cavalrymen. Because everything beyond these walls, outside the tavern, has been robbed of meaning, beauty and future. There is nothing beyond a routine of downtrodden beings and trivial desires: because who can be happy day after day with this monotonous, endless succession of grey, cowering facades, these streets with potholed or still not asphalted pavements, beaten earth tracks on which the local kids draw the skull and crossbones with their penknives, empty waste lots and crumbling, filthy corners with the black spider stencilled on them. What little keeps him here is all that he is missing. Every time he lifts his gaze from his book he feels lost, displaced by an unexpected twist of fate, and this sense of not belonging becomes even keener whenever he thinks about his fortuitous family origin; if he stops to consider it, he also is a fraud perpetrated by destiny, a huge fraud, because he appears to be the son of somebody who is not in reality his mother, not to mention his father, the king of deception. And it does not take long to discover a whole lot of things that might have been different, because perhaps his biological father is still alive somewhere, and who knows how many half-brothers and sisters, cousins and nephews and uncles and aunts he might have, although he is never likely to meet any of them, and the most reasonable thing is to accept he has four parents and eight grandparents, a network of ghostly blood relations as well as another equally ghostly network of fictional creations, and that everything is naturally strange, accidental and deceitful. For example, this sunny gently sloping street that he is looking at through the bar window without really seeing as a boy struggles along on his little bike: this street also hides a fraud, a mystification that few people know about, because its name is not what it seems, as Señor Sucre explained in great detail to Capitán Blay one summer evening when they were sitting outside the bar with a porrón of wine cooling in an ice bucket. Known as Torrente de las Flores, said Señor Sucre, our beloved street, which runs straight down from Travesera de Dalt to Travesera de Gràcia, coming out directly opposite the Delicias cinema, is popularly thought long ago to have been a rushing stream of crystalline waters bordered by flowers, hence the name. But this belief is based on a misconception, as Señor Sucre explained that night to anyone who would listen — that is, to nobody apart from Capitán Blay, smoking pensively next to him, and Berta’s boy, all ears as usual, fascinated by the two old men’s eccentric memory — this district of La Salud of which today we are so proud, must effectively have originally, thousands of years ago, been a virgin, extraordinary orchard, a flowery, splendid Eden, but out of respect for the truth it has to be said that the street takes its name from the family names of a gentleman from El Ferrol called Manuel Torrent Flores, the owner of the land and the stream here that he sold for development at the end of the nineteenth century.

“So any idea of flowers and torrents is completely wrong. Nowadays, as with so many things in this rat-ridden city,” Señor Sucre craftily concludes, “even the name of our street is nothing but a damn lie.”

“And what do you say, young man?” Capitán Blay teases him when he sees Ringo listening to them open-mouthed. “Would you say the street goes from the mountains to the sea, or from the sea to the mountains?”

Laughter mixed with coughing from the two cranky old pensioners. Although he realised they were making fun of him yet again, he still chose a reply based on logic. He always wanted to keep on their good side.

“From the mountains to the sea, Capitán, because the street runs downhill.”

“This part of the street is where you’re most likely to see optical illusions,” Capitán Blay had said on one occasion, studying the old lengths of rail. Perhaps that’s what the kid on the bike is experiencing now, thinks Ringo: he just has to set off down the street to gain his balance and win his bet. This is a very common experience, something lots of children his age have been through — if of course by luck or thanks to their parents they own a bike, which was not his case — and something that on this occasion, although he doesn’t know why, seems to him significant. Recently, lots of things have begun to seem significant to him, but today it takes him some time to discover that the tiny, furious cyclist is not intent on destroying his bicycle but only the part that is denying him victory and preventing him from enjoying the wind in his face, frustrating the great adventure of learning how to balance on his own without help or advice from anybody else. Sitting on the edge of the pavement near the drain, the boy is angrily shaking the struts holding on the supporting wheels, trying to loosen the screws. He has a determined expression on his face: he is going to get rid of the stupid little wheels if he has to tear them off with his teeth. But after quite some time he has got almost nowhere. When he sees somebody he knows going past, a house-painter with a ladder over his shoulder, he asks him for help. Please, have you got a hammer? The man is in a hurry, and smiles without stopping, although he ruffles his hair affectionately and continues on his way. Over the next half hour, the boy asks several passers-by for help, whether he knows them or not. Some of them don’t even look at him; others do not stop, merely listen with a smile and give different excuses. A spanner? I’m sorry, I’ve run out of them. And another: Why don’t you go home and tell your mother what you’re trying to do, my little man? The boy stands up, slips his little penis out of the side of his shorts and pees against the wall where the tornado appears to be whirling towards him. The last person to stop when he hears his appeal is a locksmith from Calle Martí. He explains that these little stabilisers that he wants to get rid of are there to help him balance and to prevent him coming a cropper. The boy also hates the bike’s fixed wheel, and asks him if it’s possible to change it, but the man doesn’t respond. I don’t want to ride with a fixed wheel! he complains when he is on his own again. Every so often he gets up to kick and thump the bike, and then sits down again.

Ringo stops looking at him for a moment when he realises his numbed fingers are still holding the pencil. He lets go of it finally and examines what he has written. He notes down a correction, but he doesn’t like it, so he rejects it, then passes the time doodling a winged gruppetto on an imaginary stave. When he raises his head again, Tito is shaking the stabilisers even more furiously and stubbornly, now on the verge of tears. His insistence, the interminable argument between boy and bike as to who should be in control of the balancing and can claim victory, holds Ringo’s attention for some considerable time. Finally, Tito manages to unscrew the metal supports. He throws them and the stabiliser wheels into the open drain. Then he stands the bike at the edge of the pavement and climbs on. With one foot on the pedal and the other on the ground, he shoots a triumphant glance over his shoulder in the direction of the tavern window before he launches himself down the street, well aware he is being watched.

He is bound to crash many times before he succeeds, and will return home with scraped knees and a few bruises. Ringo looks away from the street and drops the blind. He raises it again quickly when he hears the sound of crashing metal. No, he hasn’t been hit by a car, and nobody seems to have seen him — apart from Ringo. The boy gets to his feet in the gutter, casts a defiant glance towards the bar, licks a scrape on his hand, shakes the dust off his shorts, and wheels his bike back up the hill. As he goes past the tavern, he gives another sideways, challenging glance in the direction of the only witness to his feat. And this time the witness has understood. Dropping the pencil on to the scrawled-on sheet of paper, he watches with an intense, unwavering attention, surprisingly focused on capturing the details, as the little boy launches himself at full tilt down the street, determined and fast despite the lurches and crashes, his chin to the handle-bar, eyes fixed ahead of him with a manic intensity, a powerful tension created in equal measure by optimism and frustration plain on his face, until he falls yet again in a tangle of wheels, arms, and legs, only to spring up at once, knees scraped bare and blood on his cheeks, walk back up the street, sit on the saddle and set off again from the pavement edge, pushing off with one foot and a determination that negates all fear of crashing. From the bar, with his maimed hand raised in the air, and feeling the lack of the pencil between his fingers, Ringo cannot help but observe this persistent, desperate pedalling that ends time and again in a fall, the repeated mental pressure on the pedals, the enraged lowered head charging at the air and everything else in its way. Some passers-by advise him to stop, but the kid won’t listen to anybody, there is no way he is going to get off his bike. He is in a race against time, because he knows someone is bound to tell his mother. His worst crash comes when he hits the disused tram tracks: without meaning to, he gets one of the wheels stuck in a rail, the bicycle stops and Tito is flung over the handlebars. He gets up again and rides on, and a short while later, when he has lost count of the falls — the last few increasingly controlled — all of a sudden he steadies himself and begins to ride round in circles, a broad grin on his face as he glances back at Ringo. Still looking at him and smiling, Tito turns the corner into Calle Martí and disappears in the direction of Plaza del Norte with a victory whoop.

All this time, ideas for his writing have been germinating, and something leads Ringo to tear out the page he has been scribbling on and use a clean one. He picks up the pencil with his painful fingers and listens to the music of the words as they come back to him. It’s not a banal tune like the ones he often hums, unconsciously falling back on the imaginary four-four rhythm he has learnt from the music scores; from the start, from his first timid attempt, it was like a well-known melody he had heard a thousand times but never completed, a mutilated succession of notes that his auditive memory had stored away and was now converting into words; a musical phrase with echoes that could not be traced back this time to the lines of any musical stave (there was no room for any mistake in this, the echoes were clear and consciously assumed) but to the heights of a mountain covered in perpetual snows. And so the bandaged hand which a short while before had been immobile now picks up the pencil and, with renewed energy despite occasional stabbing pains in his sacrificed finger, he corrects and concludes what will turn out to be (although as yet he does not know it) a seminal paragraph.

The Montaña Pelada is a bare, arid hill some two hundred and sixty-six metres high, and the origin of its name is confused. On its eastern flank fossils of prehistoric tortoises and mammoth bones have been found. Near the summit stands a large, flat rock with three steps of a staircase that was never finished. No-one has ever been able to explain where a staircase was intended to lead in such a barren, desolate place.