The Calligraphy of Dreams

2. A PLAGUE OF BLUE RATS

“The devil take this country!”

In his underwear, the boy’s father flicks the torch on and off three times to show it doesn’t work, and for the third time curses his bad luck. It is as though the lack of contact of a poorly fitting battery in an old torch represents to him a degrading metaphor for the wretched country he so profoundly loathes. Alternatively, it might also seem as though he were sending a coded message to somebody hidden in the shadows, were it not for the fact that he is all alone in the bedroom, with the shutters closed. This possibility arises because, even sitting on the edge of the bed in his underpants and with socks and suspenders on his hairy legs like this, dishevelled and half-asleep, there is something of the man of action about him, refusal to accept everyday routine or grow accustomed to defeat. His alert features seem to sniff out adversity and, ready to confront it once again, he suddenly rises to his feet, puffs out his cheeks, puts the torch away in the small suitcase beside him, and starts getting dressed.

That case must already contain the revolver, the poison and the bait, thinks his son, peering through the half-open door. The boy hesitates a moment, then enters the bedroom, fists stuffed in his trouser pockets, trying to look tough.

“I want to go with you, Father. I’ll help you kill them.”

“No chance.”

He allows a few seconds to elapse, then pleads: “Please, I’d really like to.”

“No. You wouldn’t like it. You’re not old enough for that kind of work.”

“I could keep an eye out at the exit. There’s always some sneaky rat that tries to escape. I’m not frightened of them anymore, you know?”

“The answer’s still no, my boy. Besides, they’re already dead. We just have to pick them up.”

“Are you sure they’re all dead? There’s always one or two that get away.”

“Am I speaking Chinese? I said no.”

It’s a Saturday afternoon, and the boy doesn’t have school. He has an hour of music theory and piano, but although reading music and practising his scales is what he most enjoys in the world, for once he would be willing to skip his lesson.

“Why don’t you want me to go?” he whines.

“You’d faint as soon as you got inside.”

“Nonsense! I could hold the torch while you finish them off …”

His father is sitting on the bed again, his shirt half on. He scratches the palm of his hand with long, grubby nails. As he is doing this, he stares into space with such a lost, empty look that all at once he looks like a completely different person.

“Is something wrong, father?”

He reacts immediately, and stands up.

“What is wrong is that I’ve had it up to here with just about everything. I said no, and that means no.”

Glancing down at his watch, he mutters under his breath: “I overslept, godammit.”

“You promised. You said you’d teach me to hunt blue rats.”

His father is the head of a team from the Municipal Cleansing and Pest Control Service. They work in public places: cinemas, theatres, restaurants, markets, shops. When the boy first learnt this on his eighth birthday, his mother warned him not to tell his friends at school or in the parish, because they might laugh at him for having a rat-catcher father. Back in those days, he imagined him wearing a gas mask, club in hand, chasing huge rats among the seats of a cinema. That image had stayed with him for a year or two, but nowadays he suspects that the exterminator uses more rapid and drastic methods alongside the poisoned bait and pesticides, especially with the blue rats. He often hears him curse and blaspheme against the terrible, disgusting plague of blue rodents infesting the city, from the port and Montjuich right up to Tibidabo, although he himself has never come face-to-face with a blue rat, alive or dead.

In his mind’s eye he sees once more his father at the counter of the Rosales bar, slowly turning towards him. He is very stiff and tipsy, clutching the glass of wine against his chest as if afraid somebody might snatch it from him, and muttering as he sees him pushing the door open:

“Here comes my dearly beloved son.” A sly smile. “You like Barcelona don’t you, my boy? You feel very safe in the big city, together with your second mother who saved you from the orphanage, don’t you? Your mother who loves you so much and cares for you. Isn’t that right?”

He ignores the reference to the orphanage and the second mother. He’s still on the threshold, holding the door open but not coming in.

“Mother’s waiting for you.”

“You prefer to live here, don’t you? Here, in this beautiful, damned capital of Catalonia. And all because I happened to see that taxi going by in the rain …”

“Mother says to come home, supper’s ready.”

“Don’t interrupt me! We live in the arsehole of the world, in the furthest, shittiest corner of our Catholic realm, and yet you’re as happy as can be. This is the city that saw you born almost by a miracle, and here you are, alive and kicking, and I’m pleased for you, my boy, but just so you remember, I was the one who spotted that taxi … Yes, this is where you’ll become a useful member of society, a famous pianist admired by all upstanding citizens: that’s what you think, isn’t it? Well, not exactly, pumpkin head! Your fine city is nothing more than a stinking sewer riddled with blue rats! You need to know that, because you grand piano virtuosos tend to be over-sensitive.”

With that he turned back to the counter, holding his glass out for Señora Paquita to fill for the umpteenth time. I’m not keeping count, he says, the tally of the glasses I’ve drunk is being kept by the Judeomasonic conspiracy. Oh yes, the intrepid Rat-catcher often says outrageous things like this, or even worse, while the bartender and the other customers laugh and exchange knowing winks, and the boy wonders why they laugh at the jokes, why they encourage him.

“I’ve never seen a blue rat, father,” he says now in the bedroom. “One day in the sacristy at Las Ánimas I saw a big, fat rat on its hind legs chewing a cassock hanging from a peg. But it was grey, almost black.”

“Yes, rats and cassocks, pests the lot of them!” his father grunts as he puts on his work overall. “But it’s not the same, Son. Have you ever seen a fat, shiny rat writhing with poison? They crawl along squealing like condemned souls, vomiting blood from the mouth and arse. You wouldn’t be able to bear the sight.”

“Yes I would.”

“No, you wouldn’t. You’d wet your pants, I’m sure of it.”

In recent months he has grown exasperated that his father still considers him a child. He peers at the case on the bed, wondering about the mysteries it contains. His father shakes his head violently as though to rid himself of a bad dream. His unruly hair, with a greenish tinge that lends it a furious look, gives off a strong aroma of roasted coffee, and that is another mystery. A secret, he was told, yet another one. Sometimes he comes to the conclusion that the poverty and other ills his family suffer are due to all these secrets in his father’s life.

“Stay home and practise for your music lesson,” his father advises him. “Do-re-mi-fa-sol, that’s what you like best. Aren’t you always saying you want to be a musician when you grow up? Well then, get studying. Besides, your mother will be back soon from the clinic.”

“Oh, shit,” the boy moans to himself, then stretches out his hand to stroke the case with his fingertips, imagining its lethal contents. “Can I at least carry the poison case for you?”

Pulling on his rubber boots, his father snorts impatiently.

“Oh alright, you pain in the neck. But don’t get your hopes up, you’re to wait for me in the street.”

“All the time?”

“All the time. You’re not to come in. So take your music scores with you and do something useful.”

“Can I hold your revolver a moment?”

“What revolver? D’you think we’re in a gangster movie? Take a look at the world-famous pianist!”

*

The cloud-cast shadow slowly climbing the façade of the Selecto cinema appears to him like a theatre curtain rising when, alone and resigned to having to wait, he bends one knee on the pavement to tie his shoelaces. It’s a sunny but windy April afternoon. There’s not much traffic and the people going up or down Calle Salmerón don’t seem to detect the smell of poison he thinks must even now be spreading silently like a deadly green gas beneath the sealed-off entrance to the cinema and out of the projection room. He sees the men from the rat-catching brigade go in one by one through a small side door. They arrive at half-minute intervals; there are three of them, two in work clothes and one in ordinary attire. They walk by quickly without noticing him, although he knows the first two. The one in ordinary clothes is called Luis. He often comes to breakfast with his father when the latter is spending any length of time at home. The other is Manuel, and he arrives on a bike, and the boy includes the third man in the team because he approaches with the same stealthy walk as the other two, hands in the pockets of his faded overall and head sunk on his shoulders as though he were publicly ashamed of his rat-killing abilities. Some years earlier, when he was only a small boy, he had imagined the rat-catchers moving like squat robots, with green flashing eyes and knife-like fingers.

He whiles the time away by singing in his nasal, droning voice: “I’m King Rat the First, and I’m the Second, and I’m the Third”, parodying the zarzuela comic opera tune his music teacher is so fond of and sings whenever he sits at the piano. Before long he’s bored sick, and so devotes himself to obsessively imagining what is going on inside the cinema: he imagines his nose pricking at the smell of the pesticides floating over the stalls, he sees blue rats kicking the bucket, their bellies swollen, vomiting bloody froth from their mouths, crawling around under the seats and at the bottom of the screen, and also in the aisles, the toilets and the artistes’ dressing rooms. He sees his father holding one by the tail, a big, jowly rat with a snow-white lock of hair over its bloodshot eye, driven out of its mind by the poison. He sees all this from out in the street, and lives it intensely without missing a single detail, just as if he were listening to one of Fatty Cazorla’s tall tales.

He is hopping outside the cinema, scrupulously respecting the maze traced by the pavement tiles, aiming for a manhole cover with a worn, blurred maker’s name on it. Once he reaches it he turns round, still on one leg, and repeats his hops time and again. At each new turn he expects to see his father at the cinema entrance beckoning to him to join the hunt and extermination of the blue rats. His father doesn’t appear, but among the multi-coloured billboards announcing the acts of the variety artistes scheduled to appear, his attention is drawn to a poster about two metres high propped against the front of the building that shows a slender, smiling dancer in a figure-hugging black costume.

CHEN-LI, PUSS IN BOOTS

EXOTIC AND ACROBATIC DANCER

This Puss in Boots has pretty legs painted in golden glitter. She is portrayed as if crouching in mid-air, or rather falling backwards towards the ground, her body arched at an incredible angle, one leg stretched out straight, the other doubled beneath her buttocks. She is wearing a black skullcap with a mask and cat’s ears, red patent calf-length boots, and her pert rear culminates in a bright red tail. The Selecto also puts on second-rate variety acts, with singers, jugglers and comedians who once enjoyed a fame of sorts in the popular musical reviews at the Paralelo theatre, but whose glory days have long since passed. Minors are forbidden entry to these shows, as he is well aware. Pinned to another board are blown-up stills from the two films being shown that week: “Seventh Heaven” with Simone Signoret, and “The Cat and the Canary” with Paulette Goddard. He is crazy about both these cat-like stars: their charms have often left him hot and bothered between the sheets. Now, though, he only has eyes for Puss in Boots. Why does her stomach fold in so softly above her groin? The curve of her thighs and buttocks seems to him strangely immaculate and poignant, far more beautiful than anything he has ever seen before on movie posters or the handbills he collects. Slowly, he traces the outline of her thigh, then strokes her golden skin and senses the inner tautness that propels her leap high into the air. Reflected in a window on the far side of the street, the sun’s rays make the glitter sparkle for an instant, but do not spoil or lessen the urgent tension of her inner thigh, a generously delicate muscular promise he finds profoundly disturbing.

“What are you doing, my lad? What are you staring at?”

He turns round. A small, stooped man with slumped shoulders is standing on the manhole cover, blocking his path. He tries his magic trick — blinking his eyes twice — but the little man is still there, peering sternly at him.

“Me?”

“Yes, you. What are you looking at, if I might ask?”

“Me? Nothing.”

“Nothing, you say. But you’re fascinated by the way that little Chinese girl moves.”

Ringo looks at the poster again.

“But she isn’t moving …”

“She isn’t? Can’t you spot it? Those exotic dancers are never still, lad. Especially if they’re Chinese and from the Paralelo.”

He blinks again, and it’s true, her thighs do move. The little man is scarcely taller than he is, and is clasping a leash in the fingers of a bony hand with a delicate, casual gesture as if holding a cigarette. At the other end, something is growling softly at his feet: a small, emaciated dog with a rat-like muzzle and ragged tail. It has one leg missing.

“What’s that sticking out of your pocket?”

“My music book.”

“Oh, my. So I can see you’re a sensitive boy,” says the stranger almost inaudibly. “You are sensitive, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

“And someday soon you’ll be a nice, good-looking and respectful young man. I’m sure of it.”

“No, sir. I’ll be a pianist.”

“Oh, that’s very good. A pianist.” The dog raises its head and stares at its master with yellow, rheumy eyes. “And what are you doing here?”

“Waiting for my father.”

“Thinking dirty thoughts, that’s what you’re doing. Come on, don’t deny it.” A sound like a rasping file or fingernails scratching iron is coming from beneath the manhole cover. Alerted by something, the little man suddenly turns round, and his bird-like silhouette stands out against the grey solitude of the entrance to Plaza Trilla on the far side of the street. “Mind you, I’m not blaming you, you scamp. But listen carefully to what I say,” he goes on, drawing closer, a sharper edge to his voice. “I bet you she can do things you couldn’t even imagine, not if you stood here looking at her for a thousand years.”

“You don’t say! My goodness! A thousand years! Are you serious?” the boy asks, his voice deepening. “I could be here looking at her for a thousand years? And she could be dancing here for a thousand years, dancing the dance of the seven veils like Salome? Could she really?”

This is how some see him: a lively, observant youth alert to certain absurdities, endowed with a keen perception of other people’s most extravagant, unlikely illusions, and ready to launch himself into whatever deception or intrigue the world lays before him. That’s how he will be remembered: diligent, polite, steeped in the future. He does not blush, hesitate or muddle his words: he knows what he means to say at all times and why, and yet he is only too pleased to step resolutely over the threshold of the improbable or imperceptible. He stands quite still, facing the stranger on guard, noting the bony eyes with sparse lashes in a long, hollow-cheeked face, the small, pursed mouth, the shirt’s crumpled collar and the black suit with shiny knees in trousers that are too wide and too big and sag over a sad, tame-looking pair of house slippers. He looks down at the crippled dog, and adopts an expression and voice to fit the melodramatic aspect of what he can see before him: “She’s my stepsister, you know.”

He wonders whether to add that the dancer’s real name is Diana Palmer, once Edmund Dantés’ other true love, and then the secret love of Winnetou, and now is linked to the villain Rupert de Hentzau, and that she could have been his half sister, but with a Chinese mother, and that she ran away from home to be a dancer because she wanted to see the world and was ashamed of having a father who was a rat-catcher and whose great paws always stink of disinfectant or sulphur or worse. But instead he only thinks all this, and the only thing he adds is: “My poor eldest stepsister. I have five more …”

The little man raises his hand to silence him. There is a sudden gleam in his ravaged eyes.

“So we’re a little liar, are we?” Offended, he stamps on the manhole cover three times, as though giving a prearranged sign to the rats that live in the pestilential shadows beneath. Then, pointing to the poster, the stranger adds in his fluty voice: “Well anyway, let’s concentrate on what’s important. Besides being an exotic dancer, this lovely girl is a contortionist. Do you know what that means?”

“Of course.”

“That she knows how to move in a special way.”

“Of course.”

“And she’s really pretty, isn’t she? So pretty it hurts to look at her, doesn’t it?”

“Excuse me, sir, your dog has only got three legs but it stays on its feet very well, doesn’t it? What’s it called?”

“Tula. It’s a little bitch. And what’s your name, my boy?”

“Ringo. I won’t shake hands because I’ve touched rat poison. Ringo Kid, that’s my name.”

He kneels down to look at the little dog, feigning a sudden interest. It has almond-shaped eyes and stiff ears. On one of them he sees a tick as round and shiny as a pearl. It’s so fat you would need a pair of pliers to pull it off, he thinks.

“That’s some ti—”

“Keep away from toxic products that aren’t edible,” the little man cuts in. “That’s my advice to you. And as for that Chinese girl …” he hesitates a moment, gazing sorrowfully, his skinny finger pointing at the dancer in the poster, “stay away from her too. You should know that this week’s programme is not suitable for minors. How old are you?”

“Eleven, almost twelve, sir.”

“Besides, they’ve fumigated the building, so for now it’s closed and sealed off.”

“I know.”

“So what are you doing here all on your own?”

“I’ve just told you, I’m waiting for my father.”

“And where is your father?”

“In the cinema, catching rats.”

“That’s good. Rats bring the black plague.”

“The plague these days isn’t black, señor, it’s blue. My father said so.”

Right now he and his team are inspecting the poisoned bait they laid a few days ago, he says, when they sprinkled the place with pesticides and closed it down on orders from City Hall. My father knows all the official regulations, he’s an authority, he knows how to combat the rat menace. No, they don’t use traps and a piece of cheese anymore, they don’t have cats or brooms to chase them with, no señor. Not even the Nogat powders — Nogat: Terror of the Rats — they’re old-fashioned; my father has a Colt 45. When he grows up, he says, he will also devote himself to getting rid of all kinds of pests: rats, bugs, fleas, cockroaches and green lice.

The little dog is standing patiently on the pavement, listing slightly to one side. Its owner keeps looking furtively around him; the boy can see he is also precariously balanced, and the dandruff on his shoulders is like a layer of ash. The man nods, he’s well aware of what happened in the cinema. In the middle of the magician Fu-Ching’s performance, he says, a pair of rodents appeared on stage out of nowhere. Many in the public thought it was part of the act, and applauded, but not him. He was in the front row and immediately knew what was going on: they were two enormous, disgustingly real rats, the size of rabbits. They stood defiantly in front of the footlights baring their fangs, and soon panic and confusion spread among the audience.

“Do you realise how blind and stupid people have become, my boy?” the little man mutters, looking round him as though in search of visual support. “When did you ever see such a thing? Just imagine, the audience could clearly see they were rats — they were right in front of them, hairy and repulsive, and yet they all wanted to think it was a magic trick! No-one dares see things for what they are these days!”

Ringo shuts his eyes, trying to imagine the uproar and fear of people stampeding through the stalls of the cinema that night, but the golden thighs of Chen-Li the Puss in Boots are still glowing beneath his eyelids, and for now there is no room for anything else.

“That’s because they’re blue rats, señor. My father explained to me that blue rats suck your blood. And when they die,” he goes on, frowning, “they go up and guard the evening stars.”

“Your father. I see, I see.”

“You may not have seen them, but they’re a plague. And something else. When the magician Fu-Ching pulls a rabbit out of his hat, it’s because it was already there, isn’t it?”

“Ah, who knows? But I’ll tell you one thing. This beautiful Chen-Li is about as Chinese as I am Japanese. Take my word for it.”

“Please, señor, tell me the truth.”

“The truth, the truth! Not worth a fig these days.”

With stiff fingers he shakes the dandruff blooming on his black, shabby shoulders. He stands pensively staring at the nothing in front of his eyes, grimacing oddly as if about to sneeze, then bends down and strokes the back of his scrawny little three-legged dog. He thinks some more, until finally he loses his self-control and lets out a deep sigh. It’s a momentary show of emotion that lasts less than a second, then he recovers his composure, straightens up, tugs gently on the lead, and whispers something to his pet. Another rapid flash of sunlight bounces off a window and falls, more gently this time, on the proud, glittering thighs of the Puss in Boots as she leaps in mid-air.

The boy has turned again to look at her when he hears the little man’s resigned voice:

“Farewell, my lad, behave yourself. Next week,” he adds as he starts moving away, “they’re showing films I’m sure you’d like, if you could get in. If there are no more rats, they’re putting on ‘Topper’ and ‘The Scarlet Claw’.”

“I’ve already seen ‘The Scarlet Claw’. The murderer is the village postman.”

Fog and marshes, Sherlock Holmes’ hook nose, a bloody metal claw and mutilated corpses gnawed at by rats: he can remember the dark film very clearly as he watches the little man walk off down the street limping slightly, falling in step with his dog’s lopsided gait, occasionally stretching down to give its head a pat, both of them leaning over and treading cautiously as if to avoid invisible obstacles. He turns back to again admire Chen-Li the Cat suspended in mid-air. Everything about her soaring body is fleeting and volatile, beyond reach. She has been caught at the moment she is rising, hoping never to fall, to stay forever fixed in this instant in memory and desire. Ringo peers at her inner thigh, that delicate, taut region that troubles him so. He spots something he had not seen before: it looks like a small tear in the skin, but peering more closely, he realises it is a caterpillar stuck to the glitter. The caterpillar has a greenish back with purple dots. It could have been attracted to the glitter by mistake, thinking it was honey, and yet it is odd to see it there. If it climbed a little higher, it would reach the groin beneath the satin shorts and it wouldn’t take it long to reach the pelvis and then it could even slip inside the dancer’s muff itself. Dark, moist, and sweet. But the insect is not moving. Ringo touches it cautiously, then pushes at it with his fingernail. The caterpillar falls to the ground, stiff as a board.

The Rat-catcher’s poison has even got as far as this, he thinks.

*

He is sitting on the tram with the case on his lap. His father is standing beside him, in the middle of the aisle. It’s a crowded number 24, and is going up Calle Salmerón where it crosses Calle Carolinas. An apologetic, mild-looking priest is shouldering his way through the crowded rear platform, uttering snatches of prayer from thick pink lips. He reaches the aisle, but there are no free seats; lots of passengers are having to stand. The reverend is thickset, with a ruddy complexion, heavy jowls, and a proud head of snowy-white tousled hair. Just the sort of hearty, plain-talking clergyman that my father eats for breakfast every day, the boy groans inwardly, dreading the imminent drama and how ashamed he’s going to feel. His mind is still dazzled by the image of the honeyed thighs of Puss in Boots as he watches the priest advance determinedly along the aisle. He gives a magic blink to shoo him away, but he keeps on coming, and now to make things even worse is staring at him with a smile on his face, as though taking it for granted that this good, well-brought-up young boy is bound to get up and offer him his seat.

His father remains standing beside him, his hand pressing lightly but persistently on his shoulder in a gesture the boy sees as one of possession and authority that embarrasses him in public. His father’s hand is large, with prominent nerves and cracked, greenish skin like a lizard’s. Even when, as now, the hand is resting in a friendly way on his shoulder, or when it is clutching the neck of a wine bottle, or sweeping up crumbs on a tablecloth, or dangling over the edge of the table or the arm of a chair — even when it is cupped very still and peaceful on his mother’s accommodating knee — the boy has always noted a latent fury in the knuckles, a permanent tension. It is so close to his face now that he catches a whiff of rat poison ingrained beneath his father’s fingernails, the same acrid stench impregnated on his rubber boots, his blue overalls and a very strange tool dangling from his belt next to a electric torch that he must use to blind and immobilise the rats before finishing them off. Even stranger and more incongruous is the effect produced by the striped navy-blue jacket he is wearing over his work clothes, a fitted sports jacket in good condition: it is as if from the waist up his father were coming from a posh party, whereas from the waist down he had just emerged from a stinking sewer full of dead rats. For some unknown reason, the boy is suddenly reminded of the little man tapping his foot on the manhole cover with his three-legged dog beside him.

One of the buttons on the chest of the priest’s cassock has come undone, doubtless due to the pushing and shoving on the platform. His bushy eyebrows curl in every direction, and are as white as his impressive mane of hair. By now he is close by and continues to stare at Ringo. The good-mannered boy is thinking he ought to stand up and offer him his seat: at school he has been taught to be polite to women, especially if they are elderly or pregnant, but also to nuns and priests. That is what is expected of the well-educated boys who attend catechism classes. The calloused reptilian hand lifts from his shoulder, which he interprets as a sign of approval and so starts to get up, but no sooner has his backside left the seat than the hand drops on to his shoulder again with such force he is obliged to stay seated.

“Don’t move,” he hears his father say loudly and clearly. “He isn’t a an old woman and he isn’t pregnant.”

The cleric smiles beatifically at the boy.

“Thank you for the thought, my son,” he says, half-closing his eyes. Then to his father: “The boy is well brought up.”

“We try our best, Reverend.”

“His intentions were good.”

“That’s right. But I take care of his good intentions.”

“Of course you do.”

The priest nods and blinks affably. Raising his hands and turning his head to one side like a father confessor, he appears to have sunk into a sympathetic meditation, when he hears the other man say:

“I also take care of handing out the beatings if he deserves them.”

“Of course. You are concerned for your son. That’s good.”

“You see, Reverend Father, my beatings have more God, a lot more God in them, than anything you or Bishop Modrego hand out at Mass.”

The nearby passengers forced to witness the scene start to look away. It’s not so much that they don’t want to hear, but that they wish they were a long way away. After a brief pause, the intrepid Rat-catcher resumes the charge.

“The wine you lot use for consecration is useless.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes. It’s not worth shit.”

“My word. Well anyway,” the priest intones, with an unexpected saintly calm, “we’re not going to argue over that, are we? Although believe me, you make me very sad, my man, very sad.”

“You know where you can stick your sadness.”

“I’ve no idea what your intentions are, but I must ask you not to set such a bad example for your son. I’m asking you as a favour.”

“A bad example? Me, a bad example? Listen, in your schools they teach something called The Formation of the National Spirit, a piece of crap blessed by the Church that almost left my boy a gibbering idiot. So don’t talk to me about bad examples, Reverend.”

I wish the earth would swallow me up, he thought. He’s got rat poison under his fingernails, in his voice, his eyes, and in everything he says, and there’s no-one who can stop him now.

“In my church we teach other things as well,” the cleric points out.

“The thing is, I don’t believe in the church as the saviour of souls and all that stuff.”

“Aha.”

“My wife does. She’s a believer.”

“You don’t say? Laus Deo.”

“Yes, she’s friendly with priests. But she doesn’t want anything to do with the bishop. We keep our scorn for canons, bishops and the hierarchy.”

“Well, well. But there’s no need to get so worked up.”

“My wife only goes to church to pray. You know, Kyrie Eleison and such like.”

“From what I can see, my son, you’re fortunate to have the wife you do …”

“I don’t believe,” the Rat-catcher butted in, “that you lot help us get to heaven. I really don’t.” Then in an insolent imitation of a nasal, clerical voice, he adds: “Alll theese cassocks in the streets! Alll theese cassocks? Where will it end with alll theese cassocks?”

“Oh my Lord, my Lord!” the priest shakes his head wearily, then blows out his cheeks, his snorts sending his white, bushy eyebrows into even greater confusion. He stares at the boy’s father and for a moment it appears he is about to rebuke him. But, filling his lungs with air and patience, and lowering his eyes mildly, he adds: “Look, I’m sure that deep down you are a good Christian. The problem is you don’t know it.”

The great Rat-catcher throws his head back, as if trying to avoid the cleric’s hypocritical halitosis, and steals a look at the pale, podgy hands folded across his prominent belly. Now he’s laughing to himself, thinks the boy.

“That’s possible, Reverend, that’s possible. Will you believe me if I say that sometimes in dreams I see myself falling to my knees at the feet of your bishop, exclaiming: Your Most Holy Eminence, I’m lost! Lost without hope, Your Eminence!” He pauses, then changes his tone, “Well, my humblest genuflection, Reverend Father. The truth is, I don’t know if I am a good Christian. What I’m not, and that you can be sure of, is the servant of a Church that parades the Sentinel of the West with such great pomp.”

There it is, he’s come out with it, the boy groans, closing his eyes tightly as he hears the guffaw that follows this hoary anti-clerical rant, the stupidly sacrilegious boast, not just foolhardy but extremely risky, as his mother is constantly reproaching him. Fortunately she’s not here to see the scene.

“You’re not looking for trouble, are you?” the priest can be heard muttering. But the incorrigible loudmouth has said his piece and now stands there proudly, laughing on the inside. Let’s hope he doesn’t insist, thinks the boy, let’s hope this doesn’t end up at the police station. He can feel the huge paw circling round his shoulders once more, and so decides to concentrate on reading the adverts over the tram windows: Cerebrino Mandri for headaches and neuralgia, it never fails and blah blah blah. Tobías Fabregat Raincoats, elegance and comfort in instalments or in cash, and blah, blah, blah. Luis Griera’s Bridal Bouquets and blah, blah, blah. C. Borja, buttons lined while you wait. NO BLASPHEMING OR SWEARING. Youth, beauty and vigour with Bella Aurora every day, and blah, blah, blah, an advert that always makes him think of a friend of his mother’s, Señora Mir, and the shiny, bronze fish-tail she wears in her cleavage.

When he turns back he sees the priest’s sly glance as he raises a finger to his lips as if to say: best not to pay him any attention, my boy. Although the cleric’s huge head has something rugged and wild about it, as though an invisible wind were ruffling his white hair and eyebrows, the expression on his face does not reveal the slightest annoyance or offence, but rather a cheerful, stubborn benevolence, a calmness that arouses a certain sympathy in the boy. At the end of one of the priest’s eyebrows he spots an incredibly long white hair that curls dramatically upwards; the tram wheels grate as it turns into Plaza Lesseps and then clanks its way on to the tracks of the Travesera de Dalt. The nearest passengers have long since turned to statues, offering only their backs and the napes of their necks.

His father’s histrionic, reckless behaviour with the priest is nothing new to him. Nor is the fact that he decides to get off the tram a stop before the right one. When he gets the signal, the boy stands up and follows him, case in hand, to the rear platform, from where they both prepare to jump down to the pavement as the tram slows for a bend. The boy leans out first, and gets ready to jump carefully, hanging onto the rail with his left hand and feeling ostentatiously for the ground with his foot. As a result, his father has to suddenly alter his trajectory in order to avoid knocking him over, and in doing so slightly twists his ankle. When he starts to walk on it, the ankle becomes painful, so he curses and lets out a few very theatrical “ow!”s. They have quite a way to go to reach home; he has the case slung over his shoulder and his father limping alongside him. Even so, the Rat-catcher strides out impetuously and there is something comical about the way his arms swing so wildly to the squelching rhythm of his rubber boots.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he pants, limping and stifling his groans. “That heaven has punished me by messing up my ankle. That’s right, isn’t it?”

“It was just bad luck, Father.”

“My eye! It was you, jumping off in your sleep. Well anyway, no harm done.” He smiles and ruffles the boy’s hair. “Don’t forget: rats as black as cassocks, cassocks as black as rats.”

“Fine, but let’s see …” his voice fails him. He is reluctant to go on as he stares angrily at the limping figure’s huge, crushing feet. “You know things like that always make Mother cry … Why? Why do you always have to make her cry?”

“Well, you know what our Alberta the light of my life is like. She suffers over everything and everyone. Always. But she understands me … What’s wrong, lad?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on, Mingo, don’t be angry with me …”

“My name is Ringo!”

“Alright. Come here.”

The hand with its greenish-black nails feels for his shoulder, as so often seeking not just support for his physical weakness but also comradeship and complicity. The rough, poisonous hand slides from shoulder to averted cheek to give it a friendly pinch, but he rejects the contact and hurries on several metres, head down and distraught. What he most hates is the fact that his father will not yet treat him as an adult. He walks faster and faster, the case bouncing on his back and the rolled-up music theory notebook and sheet music poking out of his trouser pocket. All of a sudden he cannot contain his tears, and breaks into a run. He does so keeping a tight hold on the case with one hand and the music books with the other, and does not stop running or crying until he reaches home.

“Benedictus Domine, my son,” he hears his father’s tobacco-inflected voice in the distance. “A curse on them.”

— What is music?

The art of sounds.

— How is music written down?

By means of symbols, some of them known as principals, and others as secondaries.

— Which are the principal symbols?

There are four of them: the notes, the clefs, the rests and the accidentals.

— Where are they written?

On the stave.