The Calligraphy of Dreams

5. THE FINGER OF FATE

In the summer of 1948 the boy turns fifteen. He has loose change in his pocket, and a phantom finger on his right hand. In the workshop one grey, muggy morning that was weighing heavily on him, he was caught daydreaming at the electric rolling mill, trying to hum the first notes of a simple tune he could not remember properly, when in a flash the machine swallowed his index finger.

The fatal distraction, the unfortunate musical teaser that led to the accident were due above all, he thinks, to the sense of frustration that has been at the back of his mind ever since, three years earlier, he had to give up his classes in music theory and piano (his mother was forced to remind him that they were poor) and to his increasing distaste for the workshop and the jewellery trade, for gold, platinum, diamonds and their sparkle. He remembers that on that fateful morning as he left the apartment very early, his lunch tucked under his arm wrapped in a sheet of newspaper, he felt particularly bitter as he went over, as usual, the questions and answers from his favourite theory book from the Municipal Conservatoire. Half an hour later, standing at the rolling mill and persistently trying to recall the song, something in English that began with the words “Long ago and far away” that he had heard in a Technicolor film two days earlier, annoyed because he couldn’t quite get it, and carelessly not paying attention to what he was doing, he brought disaster on himself. But his musical obsession was only partly to blame. Even though he might not care to admit it, the fatal slip that cost him his finger was mostly due to the fact that he had not the slightest interest in his prospects in the workshop, to a secret abandonment that had long been building up inside him. After spending two years sweeping the floor until he completed his time as apprentice and message boy, he had been working for three months on the craftsmen’s bench using the blowtorch, the files and the saw, and trying hard to do things properly, but his initial enthusiasm for the trade had dimmed. Deep down inside, he had begun to doubt whether he was suited to becoming a goldsmith. To make things worse, all he is given to do now are simple, boring tasks like repairs, soldering little chains, making the occasional plain wedding ring, melting and preparing alloys for welding. He cannot say he hates the job, but something isn’t as it should be. He feels he is capable of creating delicate, highly artistic pieces, and those simple tasks bore him so much he finishes them as quickly as he can without paying them any great attention. Besides, it’s no life having to spend all these hours shut up in the workshop: from nine in the morning to one in the afternoon, and then from three to seven: eight hours a day altogether from Monday to Friday, plus five hours on Saturday morning, five times eight hours makes forty, plus five on a Saturday gives forty-five, and then there are four hours each Saturday afternoon when as an apprentice he had to sweep the floor and clean the workmen’s benches: altogether that comes to forty-nine hours a week. No, dammit, that’s not a life.

He is working standing up at the electric rolling mill, alternating these gloomy thoughts with questions and answers he has learnt by heart from his old theory book …

— What is the musical stave?

A guideline comprising five parallel and equidistant horizontal lines.

— How are the lines of the stave counted?

From the bottom up.

… while at the same time reliving the scene where Gene Kelly sings as he stacks chairs on the tables of his bar, but he can’t get the start of the tune right, it stubbornly slips away from him in the workshop’s busy thrum, the buzz of saws and files, beating hammers, the hiss of welding torches. At the outset, the block of gold he is rolling is the size and shape of a half-used bar of soap. All he has to do is start up the machine and push the gold between the two steel rollers so that it gradually grows thinner and thinner, taking it out on the far side and carefully pushing it back in once more, making sure to keep his fingers well away from the machine, because the thinner the bar becomes, the more dangerous it is. Ringo knows this, he knows the way the gold starts to coil and snake and lash out as it is swallowed by the rollers, but now his mind is elsewhere, and his finger has gone to sleep, as if it is resting on the bottom line of the stave.

Just a few seconds before the drama occurs, Gorry has joined him in his musical daydreaming. For some time now Ringo has had the feeling that the blasted bird he killed years before with an airgun is lurking nearby; first he hears him chirping inside the jukebox of his head and closes his eyes, and then, as he gazes back through the looking-glass of time, still blurred from the rain falling on his grandfather’s vegetable patch, he imagines he can see him beneath the workbench, pecking at the greasy sheet of newspaper in which he wrapped his lunchtime roll of tinned anchovies. After five years buried in the earth, the sparrow’s leaden eye has grown even darker, but the bird is not illuminated by any spotlight, surrounded by any glow or fake shining halo: this is not a hallucination, it is simply there, trotting like a little clockwork bird with a live worm in its mouth. Ringo has his finger on the trigger once more. Isn’t it a relief that it is guzzling a worm? thinks the repentant hunter: the sparrow also hunts and kills, so it’s a case of everyone for themselves … Yes, but you don’t keep your promises, my lad, you swore you’d come and visit me in my humble grave, but I’m still waiting.

“He’s talking to himself,” someone comments behind his back. “He’s always on another planet, that boy. Wake up, nano!”

Too late. For the workmen, the rollers swallow Ringo’s stupid finger because he is always talking to himself at the machine, and because the stupid finger is right where it shouldn’t be, recklessly poised on the gold bar as it slides through the rollers, a bar that has become increasingly bent, twisting uncontrollably up and down on itself, transformed all of a sudden into a lethal snare. Ringo has always preferred to believe it happened because the finger, obeying the secret suicidal impulse of a depressive music-lover, simply did not wish to lift off in time. I’ll be the doh and soh on the ivory keyboard of fame or I’ll be nothing in this life, he imagined the finger whispering to him before it sacrificed itself, a verbal fantasy born of the musical stave, but which he sees as being more real even than the workshop itself, with everything it contains, more real even than his own home and the church and the gang who love to tell their tall tales in the Las Ánimas garden or on the slopes of the Montaña Pelada. The suicidal act occurred far from the keyboard and sheet music, far from the piano and the lesson book — everything that, cursing his fate, he was forced to give up because there was no money to pay for any more classes. Distracted by this feeling of resentment and by his musical daydreaming, he scarcely notices the tug at the metacarpus of his index finger or the subsequent crushing of the three knuckles as they are flattened by the rollers, together with the gold bar.

The blood does not spurt immediately, but starts to flow a few seconds after the finger has been snapped up. No-one in the workshop hears him cry out or moan, partly because, to his surprise, it doesn’t hurt. He switches the machine off, and doesn’t want, or doesn’t dare, look down at his hand yet. Raising it to his eyes, he doesn’t want to see it; when he can finally bring himself to do so, he stares at it as if it were alien to him, a fleshy appendage not part of his body. He turns slowly, hand held aloft, towards the nearest craftsman, who is horrified when he sees the blood gushing. Ringo himself has still not felt anything apart from a slight tickling sensation, but as soon as he realises he has lost a finger, he feels dizzy, his legs give way, and he starts to pour with sweat. Shouts and curses all round him; a race to the first aid box. Wrapped in an improvised bandage, and with his arm held high in the air, he is rushed to the emergency department at the Hospital Clínico, from where he is later discharged.

*

Where do pianists’ dead fingers go? he wonders bitterly. He asks out loud:

“Why is it that the finger I don’t have hurts so much, mother?”

“If you keep still a moment, I’ll explain,” she replies, cutting open the end of the bandage round the wound with her left hand. “Goodness me, just look at this. How did you let it get infected? What have you been doing?”

“I haven’t done anything.”

“But look at it. Hasn’t it been hurting?”

“Well, now you mention it, I do feel a bit feverish.”

“There you go again. It’s almost as if you want to have a fever.”

“What really hurts is my fingernail. Why does that hurt, if I haven’t got one?”

“And look at this scarf, all covered with blood. I’ll have to throw it away.”

“Couldn’t you make me a sling with one of your headscarves? One of those pretty ones you have.”

His hand is a mass of bloody gauze, and his mother changes his bandage as often as she can because the wound is suppurating. But the long hours she works at the old people’s home means she cannot do all her tasks at home, and so she leaves his lunch prepared for him — boiled rice with sweet potato, or an onion or bean tortilla — which her son eats on his own, listening to music on the radio and with a novel open beside his plate. He has finished La peau de chagrin and started Hunger. In the evening he waits for his mother so they can have supper together, and sometimes peels potatoes or sweet potatoes, or shucks beans or peas while he is waiting, even though she tells him off because he could get the wound infected. It is a week since the accident in the workshop, and two since the Cleansing Brigade left to fumigate some warehouses down by the River Oñar, in Gerona. This is what his mother has told him, and that there was so much to be done in the area that it would be some time before his father got back from the trip.

Occasionally, the missing finger is unbelievably painful. Especially the nail, wherever it is now. The loss of his index finger has left Ringo in a permanent state of bemusement and melancholy, often made worse by an anxious concern over what life holds in store for him. He thinks that with his finger amputated, there is very little he will be able to do in the jeweller’s workshop; beyond that, he feels his life has changed decisively. What work could he do after the amputation? How would four fingers cope, for example, with handling a saw in a delicate, complex operation on a pendant with enamel and precious stones? He would no longer be able to hold the file or the pliers properly: he might not even be able to grip a pair of pincers, or a borax brush. Files, pliers, a drill and its bits, anvil, dies, blowtorch, saw, doming block, buff — words that until now had stood for the tools of his trade no longer demanded his attention, and were beginning to settle into the past of his artisan memory, becoming as rusty as the two useless lengths of track half-buried in the old cobblestones of the street.

Then there is the other painful consequence of the accident, one that for him is much more important than work: he imagines his right hand scuttling up and down the piano keyboard like a grotesque, maimed spider, the hand that retains a memory of the very first notes and rhythms, of the five-finger exercises and the beginning of some simple pieces that had taken him so much effort to learn, such as “Für Elise” or the “Vals de las olas”. Dooo-re-me-soh-dooo, ti-doh-re-doh-ti-do-mi-soh-tiii … He had always hoped that one day he would be able to renew his theory and piano lessons, and now, in spite of what has happened, with only nine fingers and all the odds against him, he still clings to this hope. He has no intention of giving up the chords or the rapid two-handed scales he used to play on the old, yellowing keyboard at maestro Emery’s — cigarette burns on the lowest keys, squawking bird sounds from the highest. Emery, a pianist who had played in popular orchestras but satisfied his love of classical music by giving lessons twice a week for twelve pesetas a month in the filthy, gloomy dining-room of a tiny flat on Calle Tres Señoras. Something tells Ringo that the old maestro, with his shiny bald head and tiny grey eyes like slits behind metal-framed glasses, with his seagull’s nose in unshaven cheeks, his quiet, translucent hands spotted with age, his incisive profile above the black outline of the piano and the poverty of his domestic setting, has only vanished temporarily from his life. He has had to bid farewell to the finger swallowed by the rolling mill, but not to the musical stave or the keyboard, which he hopes to recover some day along with the lessons. In the meantime, where do pianists’ dead fingers go? he notes in tiny handwriting in his secret black-backed notebook.

His relationship with music has always been an intuitive one, and is far from being selective. He hums with just as much respect and pleasure a Cole Porter tune or the soundtrack of films he has enjoyed — he knows by heart the stirring music from “Stagecoach” or “The Thief of Baghdad”, or the waltz from “Jezebel” — as he does a few bars from a Mozart sonata. He thinks of the musical scores he has stored away, and the dreams he had invested in them until the day of the accident, and waits for better days. Destiny has decided that the finger to be sacrificed would be his index finger, the fickle finger of fate, the one that also pulled the trigger in his grandfather’s vegetable garden five years earlier, the one that plays the re in the five-finger exercises he misses so badly. He didn’t have time to learn much, it had been barely ten months, one hour each on Mondays and Thursdays caressing the keys and reading music out loud at a three-four rhythm, but he considers what little he did learn as a treasure, a rare privilege. “Raise your head, don’t look down at the keyboard so much,” the maestro’s smoke-filled voice still floats in the air: “The music isn’t in the keys, it’s in the memory of your fingers and in your heart.”

His fingers’ memory. He would find it hard to explain, but he could have sworn that sitting at that battered, nicotine-stained keyboard, he had learnt lessons that would help him to live. It wasn’t that Emery ever gave him explicit advice about anything — except on one occasion, when he had made fun of a companion whom he was way ahead of, and the maestro told him that to be good at the piano you had to be a good person — and yet, simply by the way he stilled Ringo’s hands, obliging him to leave them resting on the keyboard, calm and docile but alert, their tips barely touching the warped ivory and the black varnish of the semitones, refusing to allow him to press down until he had sung the whole score from memory, he had allowed him to absorb a knowledge that went far beyond these rudimentary lessons in music theory and piano, a certain way of understanding and accepting everything that was happening to him. He remembers that it was from this whirlwind of notes dancing on the stave and in his mind that one day he suddenly sniffed the scent of a new and strange discipline that he was more than willing to adopt in the future. Habits as simple as raising his arm as he started a bar, catching the notes in mid-air as if they were butterflies of light dancing in the darkness, or the routine of keeping his hands still but alert on the keys, anticipating the miracle of playing a harmonious chord: as the days went by, these habits somehow tended to turn into tiny moral precepts. As each lesson was ending, after a series of repeated, rapid scales, the maestro would always allow his pupil to close the piano, and every time Ringo, hands still on fire, carefully lowered the heavy lid on to the keyboard, he would let it drop the last few inches, and from the depths of the ancient piano he would be rewarded with an echoing boom that sounded both like a friendly farewell and a future promise. It was as if, during those happy days, music was the only thread in the loom of life, and in among the five lines of the musical stave he could glimpse the secret of the beauty the world had to offer. In his precarious adolescence, memorising a piece of music became something much more than a task to educate his ear; even though he could not know it at the time, the spirit and rhythm hidden in the stave would get into his bloodstream and make the readings of his favourite authors all the more memorable.

Is all that a thing of the past? he asks himself now. Is the nine-fingered pianist condemned to be nothing more than a fairground attraction? Perhaps he couldn’t even hope for that much, because at home there was still no money to pay for any more classes — always supposing that the maestro Emery would one day agree to take back the nine-fingered pupil — let alone rent a piano, still less buy one. We’ll see if it’s possible in the future, his mother had said when she cancelled the lessons. The bad times can’t last forever, son, and for now if you’re so interested in music, why don’t you amuse yourself playing the harmonica?

Those were her exact words, Gorry. Would you believe it!

Don’t judge your mother.

She isn’t my mother.

Never say that, you ungrateful wretch!

If she recommended a harmonica back then, what would she say now? That I try the flute?

The sparrow is in the washbasin, glancing sideways at him with his dead eye while still busily pecking at some insects crawling out of the plughole. This is how Ringo likes to imagine him, wherever and whenever he can, predatory, talkative, and vengeful, pecking shamelessly at whatever he can. Ringo, meanwhile, is sitting on a stool opposite the basin, staring at himself in the mirror while he patiently allows his mother to remove the bandage. Red stars of iodine splash the white porcelain and finally drive away the little brown bird.

“What are you muttering?” asks his mother, standing next to him, a safety pin in her mouth. “Raise your arm. Afterwards I’ll wash your hair, you should see how it looks.”

“I can’t have showers.”

“Of course you can, if you keep your arm out.”

“I could fall.”

“You could stop talking nonsense.”

She has thrown the dirty bandage into a waste bin under the basin. She uses a piece of gauze to press down on the yellowish areas of pus around the stitches on the stump of his finger, then washes the wound with peroxide, keeping the safety pin in her mouth the whole time. She’s becoming more and more like grandma, thinks Ringo, staring at the pin. The image of domesticity, grandmother Tecla, whether she is sweeping or sewing or shelling broad beans, always has a safety pin in the corner of her mouth.

“Did it hurt? One of the stitches was infected.”

“No, it didn’t hurt,” he lies. “What hurts is the nail. Why does it bother me like that? How can it possibly hurt, if I don’t have one anymore?”

“Well, as you know, what we don’t have is what hurts. You’ve always believed in ghosts, and you talk to them as well, don’t you? So I don’t know why you think it’s so odd. The nail hurts because it’s no longer there.”

“It’s just that sometimes it’s really painful. And this shoulder too.”

“I believe you, son.”

She examines the puffiness around the knuckles and puts more iodine on the stitches. Ringo wrinkles his nose at the sight of the bruised, limp-looking hand — it’s as if it had been crushed and then pumped up with air — and then watches his mother’s reddened hands hovering delicately above his missing finger.

“How long have you been left-handed, Mother?”

“Ever since I was born, I suppose. Don’t move.”

“Jack the Ripper and Saint Paul were left-handed too.”

“Well, I must say, that’s not much comfort,” she smiles, searching for the boy’s face in the bathroom mirror, “but it will amuse your father to know that.”

The Rat-catcher has been away for some time now, and Ringo has absolutely no desire to ask when he will be back. A short time ago he was in the Panadés region with Uncle Luis and the Cleansing Brigade, carrying out work in the wine cellars and warehouses, as well as some farmhouses. According to his mother, there had been a plague of voles in the crops, and Ringo suspects that these are not official jobs, but individual requests that have not been authorised, and are probably therefore more lucrative. He also knows that the Rat-catcher often works on his own. He has begun to wonder about this, harbouring suspicions he cannot yet define, and has had the same dream two nights running: dressed up like the magician Fu Ching, his father puts a smoking gun into his top hat, and then pulls out a dead rat that’s still got green froth round its mouth … Be that as it may, Ringo does not expect or want his mother to clarify his suspicions, because he vaguely intuits (although he could not say how) that to bring this up would make her cry. He’s waiting for the day when he hears her say: You’ll never see me cry again, not for that reason or any other.

“The Bioscas have got a piano. They’re good neighbours, aren’t they, Mother?”

“Yes, they are.”

“So do you think they would let me practise scales a few minutes every day if you asked them?”

“No. Are you forgetting they’ve got poor Rosita very sick at home? What you should do,” his mother says as she wraps a clean gauze round the stump of his finger, “is to be more careful with this hand of yours. Try not to use it, or at least not until the wound has healed.”

“Don’t say that,” he begs her. “I need to keep practising. It’s good to do finger exercises, even if it’s only on the table. We could also buy a keyboard. Maestro Emery says they’re not expensive.”

His mother shakes her head, at a loss.

“I don’t understand. Can you tell me why you always take your music theory book with you, wherever you go?” She searches for the right words before adding as gently as she can: “Why are you still studying those scores, my love? Do you really think you’ll be able to play the piano again one day, with that hand of yours?”

“Of course I will. I’ll be a nine-fingered pianist. Why is that so extraordinary?”

Roll up, roll up, ladies and gentlemen. DOMINGO KID, THE GREAT NINE-FINGERED PIANIST. He can already see the posters announcing him in concert halls: HUNGARIAN RHAPSODY NUMBER 2 FOR NINE FINGERS. Why shouldn’t it be a good selling point? He can picture himself on the platform after he has performed his favourite sonata — No.14 by Mozart. The young virtuoso acknowledging the applause, the grand piano open beside him like a gigantic black dahlia, bowing his head over and over again, tousled hair flopping over his face, wild-eyed, almost in a trance, receiving the ovation with the celebrated maimed hand folded across his chest. And who knows whether there might be a sonata especially composed for the left hand?

For now, his mother takes the celebrated hand and rubs the numb fingers with her thumb to help the circulation.

“Victoria Mir taught me this.” She gently massages the four fingers, one by one. After a while, she adds: “Is it true what they say, Son? That she came out of her apartment half-naked and wanted to throw herself under a tram?”

Taken by surprise, he clicks his tongue.

“What tram? There was no tram anywhere near.”

“So she wasn’t serious?”

“Of course not. It was a sham, a joke. But she didn’t fool me. She even dozed off on the rails, and was snoring …”

“You don’t say!” She is pensive for a while. “Poor Victoria, people have always criticised her so … and what did her daughter do? She must have come and helped her.”

“She’d gone to the beach with a friend. Well, that’s what her mother said then. Because some time later, in the bar, I heard her tell Señora Paqui that Violeta was at home that Sunday… in other words, the poor woman can’t get it straight, she’s off her rocker, she’s lost it.”

“You’re the one who’s lost it! And what did people say when they saw her stretched out in the street like that?”

“I don’t really know, I was busy reading,” he replies reluctantly, with no interest in the matter. He sees himself there again, among the crowd of onlookers, but with his thoughts far off, and feeling a cold wind on his face, his favourite book tucked under his arm, a burning question in his mind: what was the leopard looking for up on the mountain top? He senses that this question, raising the enigma of the animal in the distant snows, is somehow much closer and more important to him than the grotesque spectacle of Señora Mir collapsing on the remnants of the tram tracks.

“So it’s not true she fainted,” his mother says.

“Of course not. She knew what she was doing! But there was one odd thing … Mother, did you ever tell Señora Mir that I studied music?”

“I don’t think so. Why?”

“Because that witch knows. She told me so, right there, out of the blue.”

“What’s so odd about that? Aren’t you always dragging those scores around with you?” She is thoughtful once more. “But goodness me, to throw yourself into the street like that … What could have made her do it?”

“Because she’s crazy, Mother. Mad as a hatter.”

“There’s no need to insult anyone, do you hear me? Besides, it’s not true. Poor Victoria, it’s true she hasn’t managed to keep her life her own affair, but who can these days? She’s been through a lot, that’s for sure. Several times she’s been on the verge of leaving her husband and going to live in Badalona with her mother-in-law, who has always taken her side against her own son. And in France she has a brother she’s very close to, who had to leave because they were going to kill him as a Red. Ramiro, he’s called. I knew him, he’s a good sort. But Victoria couldn’t even mention his name in her house. Now she occasionally gets news of him through friends, your father knows him …”

“I knew it!” Ringo glances keenly at his mother. “That Ramiro must be the one who sells Father the French poison, which is better and cheaper than the stuff the brigade has. Isn’t that so?”

Surprised but unconcerned, she shrugs her shoulders.

“I’ve no idea, Son, your father never talks to me about work … What I was going to say is that Victoria’s husband used to treat her very badly. And that, even if she didn’t actually see him waving his pistol outside church the day that brute suffered his terrible attack, I wouldn’t be surprised if it hadn’t unhinged her in some way.”

“That was the day of the snake, wasn’t it? There was a poisonous snake behind the altar that fed on mice—”

“Don’t talk nonsense. There was no snake—”

“Of course there was! That’s why he was there. Why would he have gone, otherwise? He would never have entered a church if there hadn’t been mice and a snake inside.”

Ringo recalls that the day before all this happened his father had come back from Canfranc with the most powerful poison, three bottles of French cognac, several cartons of Virginia tobacco, a bag of lighter flints and a bottle of perfume for Alberta the light of his life. And that when he was called to the Mass, he had told the two of them: it seems that a little snake has scared the nuns.

“Yes, you’re right about that,” his mother concedes. “But we’ll never know what really happened, because your father has his own way of telling things … you know how he likes to make fun of these official ceremonies.”

Imperial absurdities, blue claptrap, ridiculous genuflections and hallelujahs, the bilious barrack-room rites of mindless buffoons in cahoots with the clergy, had been the Rat-catcher’s opening salvo. The masseuse’s husband, the neatest combed Falangist you’ve ever seen, one Sunday last winter took up position at the foot of the church staircase with pistol in hand to wait for the faithful to come out of the twelve o’clock Mass because, apparently, a voice inside his head had ordered him to shoot at them … This was the beginning of a tragic story that the boy had heard twice, ending on both occasions the way his mother was describing: a blasphemous and devious tale shamelessly manipulated by his father deliberately to make his audience laugh and win the support of listeners who shared his views, but also with a secret inner fury that he sometimes found hard to contain. He found it impossible to tell the story without a vengeful, angry disdain that made his voice hoarse.

The first time Ringo heard about Councillor Mir’s tragicomic exploits was in the tavern; the second during a merry supper with Uncle Luis and three other friends from the brigade, invited to a homemade paella that he would not let Alberta the light of my life help with in any way, very nearly burning the rice. That evening, Capitán Rat-catcher told them, in his most sarcastic, high-flown manner — although occasionally behind this mocking tone Ringo thought he could detect a different tone that he recalled with fear and sadness, a confidential voice tinged with bitterness, choked with hatred, despair and misfortune — told them, as he scraped the rice stuck to the bottom of the dish, swearing it was the best part of the paella, that the year before, our neighbourhood councillor, when he still appeared to be in good health, used to attend the twelve o’clock Mass in the San José de la Montaña convent, a little further up than the Travesera de Dalt. He always went alone, decked out in all his Falange finery, with blue shirt and red beret folded at his shoulder, black gloves and shiny leather straps, his service revolver in its holster at his belt. Sewn into his shirt were the German eagle and the badge of the Blue Division. Also hanging from his chest was his old pair of field glasses, as if he had come directly from spotting Bolsheviks on the Russian steppe under the banners of the Third Reich, on the threatened front at Lake Ilmen, between Novgorod and the River Weresha. Have you never seen an ex-Wehrmacht soldier with field glasses slung round his neck and a huge pistol at his belt? Shit, it’s well worth it! said the unrepentant fantasist, smiling as he called for the wine jug. Just like Grandma Tecla back in her village, he sprayed his open mouth with a stream of red wine and then went on, his voice more lubricated and jocular than ever:

In fact, there was no reason for all this paraphernalia, because our volunteer Altamirano never fired a single shot in the entire Russian campaign: he enlisted as a kitchen assistant, and returned in the same capacity. But only his wife and a few others were aware of this. Now let’s see what happened that dark, gloomy late November day during the twelve o’clock Mass at the San José convent. There was black crêpe all round the church, in the sky, and in the eyes of the congregation; the pious flock seemed to be living a month-long Day of the Dead. Our imperial comrade was prostrate in his front-row pew, but as soon as the Mass began he was seen to stand up, genuflect towards the altar and then leave the church, contrite, his eyes moist. This was no great novelty anyway. According various accounts collected in situ by yours truly shortly afterwards — because by chance I was sent to the church by our most excellent city council at the request of the nuns to inspect a side chapel where the day before an old biddy had fainted from shock when she saw an enormous rat, or sleeping serpent, she wasn’t sure which — Comrade Mir had behaved in exactly the same fashion the previous Sunday. Just at the moment of “confectioner God” — is that what they say? When the faithful respond mea culpa, mea máxima and biggest culpa, is that right? The pious ex-combatant left his pew and the Mass, descended one of the two staircases leading down to the promenade, and stood to attention at the bottom, self-absorbed and haughty-looking. Tall, handsome, funereal and dark, with a kind of glowing darkness, singing who knows what Falangist stupidity under his breath until the Mass was over and he could see the congregation emerging. Then the ex-soldier confronted them, muttering confused snatches of prayer, and took out his pistol. He pushed it against his temple, shouted Viva Cristo Rey! and exclaimed bang! bang! smiling as he revealed a mouth full of gold teeth, his upper lip adorned with the pencil moustache of an acting lieutenant and confirmed cadaver. This at least was the sarcastic version of events told by Ringo’s father, aimed at drawing guffaws from his audience, embellishing a story that became well known in the neigh-bourhood. Ringo seemed to remember that in the very first version offered in the Rosales bar as Señor Agustín filled his wine glass for the umpteenth time, there had been no mention of the moustache or gold teeth.

The screams of some of the women in the congregation could be heard as far away as the Tibidabo. There were more than enough reasons to suspect that our friend was losing his marbles, but the good people who had just washed themselves of their sins preferred to look discreetly the other way, and neither the district council nor the local Falangist headquarters, which Señor Mir often visited due to the position he held, seemed to want to know either. He was already a bit strange when he came back from Russia, his wife later declared: after he cut back his moustache still further he launched himself into everything he did with extraordinary vehemence and determination, and yet, the Rat-catcher would argue, we have seen and continue to see every day far more extravagant and extraordinary behaviour from members of that battle-hardened militia, because that is the way they are, my friends, that is how these blue scoundrels behave, that is what these days of infamy and sacristies are like. He even thought it probable that the convent authorities, as well as the congregation, would see this display by the dapper ex-combatant as a manly, martial offering in times of peace, a rite or military custom possibly inspired by a pious vow, a secret desire for expiation. This man is paying for a sin, some of them must have thought. And possibly that was why he shaved his moustache.

Whatever the truth, somebody considered his conduct both inappropriate and offensive, and reported him. So Comrade Ramón Mir Altamirano was summoned to the local Falange delegation in Plaza Lesseps to explain himself to the chief, who was a friend of his. In the Falange office, he merely shrugged his shoulders, clutched the front of his trousers in both hands, and, face to the sun, swore that it was a question of honour, a personal act of homage to a brave female friend who was risking her life for a good cause. Now is no longer the time for epic struggle, comrades, it’s a time for intimate expiation, it is said he said. That was his style and he had no intention of saying sorry and anyway, damn it all, comrades, he was as loyal as ever to the cause, and was not going to add anything more. What damned expiation was he talking about? The devil only knows! He was given a serious reprimand and warned not to go around in public wearing his uniform and scaring people. If he did not comply, the next time he would have to report to the movement’s provincial headquarters, and could be expelled from the party and stripped of his position as neighbourhood councillor.

Despite all this, the spectacular pantomime was repeated the very next Sunday, with an explosive variation that took everyone by surprise. Pale-faced and solemn as before, Altamirano left the church at the start of the collective mea culpa. Once outside, he descended the staircase again, and stood to attention at the bottom. Those who from the porch saw him standing there in his funereal uniform, straight-backed, wild-eyed, his jutting chin raised in defiance like a black, imperturbable herald announcing leaden years devoted to an urgent, inescapable cause, said that he remained motionless for at least half an hour while the Mass was being said. And that for one brief instant — so brief that very few of those present managed to see it — he fell to his knees and prayed so fervently and trembled so violently that he looked like someone kneeling in the snowy wastes of the Russian steppe; they could have sworn that at that moment, as he was entrusting himself to God and the Fatherland, he thought that the snow of Novgorod was crunching beneath his knees. A short while later, somebody asked him if he felt ill. He asked politely: would you mind repeating the question, kyrsji? Then almost at once, seeing the congregation leaving Mass and coming down the stairs, he drew the pistol with his left hand, shouted Viva Cristo Rey! placed the barrel to the side of his head, and pulled the trigger. This time, however, he had no chance to exclaim bang! The word got stuck in his throat as his head jerked violently to one side, because this time the gun fired a real bullet.

The rest of the story is an anti-climax, concludes the Rat-catcher. They sent for his wife, but do you know who came on her behalf to take care of that blue dummy who had blown off his own ear and part of his brains? The fellow she was seeing, that lame guy, a prickly sort. He went with him in the ambulance. Mir’s skin was saved after I don’t know how many operations on his nut, but when he came out of hospital he had less brains than a cockroach. The bullet shot away the left lobe of his brain, and left him gaga. He talked drivel, went round drunk all day, and kept falling down in the street. His mother, a war widow who lives on her own in Badalona and never forgave him for joining the Falange, refused even to see him. Perhaps he himself went in search of that bullet; perhaps it was always in the chamber, waiting for him, even when he used the butt to hammer in the Sacred Heart plaque on his door. Whatever the case, I bet that blue riffraff are asking themselves questions now … Was it his hand that loaded the bullet into the chamber? It’s always said that’s the Devil’s work, but Holy Mother of God! Does he also load the weapons of our heroic crusaders? Does the Evil One also load our guns, blessed by the bishops?

“It wasn’t his service revolver,” adds the Rat-catcher. “It was a 6.35mm Walther he brought back from Germany. But the finger that squeezed the trigger was not his, it was ours.”

“Now you’re talking complete nonsense,” Alberta the light of my life protests as she serves more rice to the youngest member of the brigade. “Just eat and pay him no attention, Manuel.”

“I don’t know, when it comes to comrade Altamirano …”

“The most neatly combed Falangist you’ve ever seen, nano!”

“Uncle Luis says that somebody told him that Altamirano was in Málaga during the war and took part in the reprisals with General Queipo’s Falange troops.”

“Anything is possible where he’s concerned,” says Manuel. He recalls the arrogant figure with his puffed-out chest, black, oiled hair and jutting chin. By now he had shaved off his moustache, but when he spoke, and above all when he shouted, it was as if he still had one. “I haven’t seen that bastard since I ran into him on the street about a year ago. He was with a spectacular-looking woman, a Chinese girl. They were about to go into the police station on Travesera Dalt, and the woman stopped on the pavement to put some lipstick on. That annoyed him so much he grabbed the lipstick from her and almost made her swallow it …”

“That woman you’re talking about,” cut in the Rat-catcher, “is about as Chinese as Columbus. She’s a whore who works with the police. I’ve already told you about her — she’s dangerous.”

“Yes, we know,” says Uncle Luis. Then he adds slyly: “But what about the snake? Didn’t you tell us you went to the church because a snake had slipped in and scared the life out of an old biddy? I seem to remember there are gardens and a pond beside that convent …”

“It was a plaster snake. Just plaster painted green. But it looked real, the son of a bitch. It was behind the confessional. It had fallen off an image of the Immaculate Conception, a relic so old it was falling to pieces. It was only a lump of plaster — you know, the snake curled up beneath the feet of the Virgin. When I saw it on the floor it was just lying there, curled up and still, with the Virgin’s big toe on one of its coils. That’s what the whole fuss was about: a piece of broken plaster on the floor. The nuns thought they might be able to stick it back on, but no chance … Pass me the wine, will you? Don’t you want some dessert? Go on, try this peach. Cut it into slices and put them in your glass. The best desserts are those that allow you to go on drinking, the rest are a load of rubbish. Shit, you really need to learn how to eat properly!”

*

“Now, let’s see. We were talking about poor Victoria.”

“Señora Mir is a bit nuts, Mother, everyone knows that.”

“Why are you so hard on her, Son? She can be a bit extreme sometimes, but she’s a good person. You shouldn’t believe all that’s said about her.”

Not everything, of course, he thinks, because he’s heard some unbelievable things; for example, one Sunday evening a regular in the Rosales bar said she had lost a marble and found a pussy, and this brought loud laughter from all those keen on coarse jokes. He’s not going to tell his mother any of that sort of thing, especially since it seems she and Señora Mir had been good friends. Yet he’s heard sordid stories about her involvement with some disreputable characters, none of them local men, for example a travelling salesman who had no recollection of what he was meant to be selling, a drunken good-for-nothing who liked to think he was a proud, masculine type and theatrically refused (but only for a while) to have her pay for his drink in the Rosales bar. According to a comment he overheard Señora Mir herself make to Paquita, he was a dirty pig who never cleaned his teeth and whose kisses were full of tomato seeds. And there was another one, an old acquaintance, a retired nurse who was diabetic: a poor devil who didn’t last long because he died on her. And there was talk of others, each one more defeated and boastful than the last, men like shadows who seemed to be looking for a bar where they could hide from the world.

It’s not that Ringo pays much attention to the neighbourhood gossip, or takes part in the low banter in the bar, but although the pretence at humour and smuttiness in these slanders might not be in the least bit funny, and be very unfair and rude, he still prefers it to the hypocritical tittle-tattle and the envious whispers going round concerning the risible, moth-eaten romances of the queen of back-rubs, that show-off who is turning into an old wreck and behaves like one, a woman who goes round painted like a doll, behaves like a tart and gives off a whiff of rancid, fleeting and improbable passions: a character that seems to him so stale, so vulgar and so ridiculous it cannot be true. It doesn’t interest him, he doesn’t believe it. He bursts out laughing just to see her crossing the street and stopping to straighten her stocking. She turns on herself so slowly, with a studied air of helplessness and complacency, and takes so long waving her arms about, that as if by magic the seam rights itself before she can even touch the stocking. And when he then sees her walking to the bar swaying her hips on her ridiculous high-heeled shoes, wiggling her backside for all to see, it is almost more than he can take. It is precisely because she is so real, so close and so ordinary, that he grows irritated and perturbed: to him she is too closely linked to the drabness of the neighbourhood, the tiny deceptions, ruses and low tricks that are its unavoidable daily commerce.

What nastiness are they peddling now, what’s the gossip, Son, what are the comments in the Rosales, his mother asks as she examines Ringo’s fingernails. Well, I don’t know, it seems that the fit of madness she had in the street was because a married man, much older than her, someone called Alonso, had broken off his romance with her. Apparently during a massage session she had a terrific argument with that man, who had come to her because he had dreadful pain in his bad leg. There were shouts and slaps, although it’s not clear if it was her or him, and he decided to leave her on the spot. You can keep your silvery hands, your creams and your jealousy, you stuck-up blonde! they say he said: I’m not making anything up. And that now she is waiting for a letter, there isn’t a day goes by when she doesn’t drop into the bar to ask if it has arrived; at least, that’s what Señora Paquita tells anyone who’ll listen. Apart from that, not much is known about her fancy man; they say he didn’t live in the neighbourhood, and that he was or had been a footballer and tram-driver. He used to wear a ring he himself had made from bone, and so Señor Agustín said he was someone who had been in prison …

“Oh my, and you claim you don’t hear anything,” his mother says. I know nothing about this man, but I do know that he has been very kind and considerate with Vicky.”

“Oh yes, of course,” Ringo recalls with a smile. “He used to take her roses.”

“Roses?”

“Yes, paper ones. Blue ones. He could be seen every Sunday in the bar with his blue rose, marking time until he went across to see Señora Mir… I’m not making anything up.”

“Perhaps not, but you’re talking utter rot. How could they have been paper roses? Nobody gives paper roses.”

“They don’t? Have you seen ‘The Thief of Baghdad’, mother? Don’t you know that anyone who smells the Blue Rose of Forgetfulness cannot remember anything about his past life …?”

‘That’s enough of your films. And stay still or I’ll hurt you.” She starts cutting his nails and then bandages his hand again, before adding thoughtfully, as if to herself: “And how can anyone know that Victoria slapped that man — who saw her? And besides, just because he says he’s going to leave her, why does that mean she has to go and sit on those tracks and cause a scandal in the middle of the street? Victoria has always been a bit odd, but to go to such lengths …”

She doesn’t trust appearances. There must be something more, she says, or she wouldn’t have exposed herself to such an absurd situation, one that was bound to make a mockery of her in the neighbourhood. Or perhaps she really did intend to commit suicide, even if the tracks were no longer in use? Familiar as she is with medical terms, she suggests the possibility that her former work colleague might have suffered some kind of psychopathic attack, a temporary personality disorder.

Ringo shows no interest in resolving his mother’s doubts. As far as Señor Alonso was concerned, all he could say was that he was a strange sort who did not say a lot, and no longer came into the bar. Grudgingly, he recalls him: he used to sit at a table in the back with his sports jacket round his shoulders, drink an aperitif or coffee with a slug of aniseed, and sometimes play patience or turn his hostile gaze on the rowdy adolescents who, before deciding whether to go on to dance at the Verdi or La Lealtad, relieved the boredom of a Sunday afternoon round the table football. So what was the gentleman in question really like? Hmm, it would take the smartest regular in the bar a million words to explain something that he could convey with a single glance. Yes, but at first sight he seemed more like a poor fellow, lame in one leg, getting on in years, ugly-looking, tall, thin and slightly knock-kneed. He could add that he had light-coloured eyes, a big, aquiline nose in a wrinkled face, a ridiculous fish mouth and a thick head of white hair combed back off his forehead, but his mother has already had enough.

“My oh my, nobody could say you didn’t pay attention.”

“Well, he was the sort of fellow who drew attention to himself. He was always joking with Señora Paquita … I’m not making anything up.”

He doesn’t want to be more explicit: the lame guy’s stale gallantry with women leaves him cold. But deep inside he saw him as one of those men who are worth listening to when they talk about women. Someone who did not say much but whose eyes spoke volumes, slow in speech and gesture even when he smiled, which was possibly the slowest and most appealing feature he had. He often wore a flower in his buttonhole. He was usually to be seen on Sunday afternoons: he came in fifteen or twenty minutes before six, and always sat at the same table. When it struck six he would get up, hand the pack of cards back at the bar, exchange a few words with Agustín or his sister in a low voice, especially with the sister, who would listen to him with a flustered smile on her face, then pay for his aperitif and head for the blonde’s apartment for her massage of his back, his bad leg, his groin, or who knows what: the rumours abounded. Sometimes he also came in during the week.

This had been the case for almost a year, ever since one rainy Sunday in May when they saw him coming into the bar for the first time, a soaking newspaper over his head, to ask where a nurse or masseuse lived, someone who had been strongly recommended to him, by the name of Doña Victoria López Ayala, originally from a village outside Segovia, married to someone called Ramón Mir, who didn’t have a telephone. He knew all this about her, and seemed to know even more, and from the very first attracted attention. He looked about fifty, but close to it was plain he was considerably older. Even so, there was a youthful, taunting look in his eye. The light-blue jacket he wore was of excellent quality but worn and shapeless, with baggy pockets, and for all his natural elegance and neatness, he had a slightly marginal air about him. I was given that lady’s business card and I haven’t the slightest idea where I put it, I only know she lives on this street, he grunted as he searched his pockets. Señora Paquita came out from behind the bar and pointed out the house, twenty metres further up on the far side of the road, look, you can see it from here, it’s number 117.

The man threw the wet newspaper into a basket where some of the customers left their umbrellas. He went on searching for the card in his pockets, gave up, asked for a coffee and murmured with a smile:

“The name suits it.”

“What’s that?” asked Señora Paquita.

“The street. We’re in the Torrente de las Flores, aren’t we? But the name of the tavern — Rosales, doesn’t fit at all.”

“Oh, because there are no roses, you mean?” she said, flattered. “It’s because our name is Rosales.”

That first day he drank down his coffee scalding hot, his face devoid of expression, then went out again into the rain and crossed the road to number 117. Señora Mir’s card appeared later on, behind the basket with the umbrellas.

His mother keeps an identical one together with an image of the Virgin, in a book by Apel-les Mestres with illustrations of lovely fairies and water nymphs.

VICTORIA MIR

KINESIOLOGIST AND CHIRO-MASSEUSE

Expert in lumbar and back pains.

Treatment of muscular, nervous and emotional neurasthenias.

BY APPOINTMENT ONLY

This is the text on her extravagant card, which she herself designed. It’s a homemade affair, a small piece of cardboard handwritten in green ink in a neat, cramped writing. His mother thinks that the word chiromasseuse is a bit obscure and pretentious, but then again, who doesn’t make exaggerated claims these days just to get by. The good woman claims to have been a pupil of Doctor Ferrándiz, the naturalist who founded the School of Quiropractice; she claims she is a psychologist and practises scraps of what she has learnt of a therapy based on touch. Ringo remembers that even the Rat-catcher, some time earlier, had considered turning to her to alleviate a persistent pain in his neck. His mother comments that she likes to talk while she is pummelling muscles and tendons, and she could swear she dabbles in folk healing, but that does no-one any harm. Apparently in fact she does more than cure a simple backache. They say she can detect tumours before they grow, especially in women. The two women met on night shifts in the Clínica Nuestra Señora del Remedio when Victoria Mir was still working as a nurse. She was awarded her nurse’s certificate thanks to her husband’s Falange connections, but there was no doubt she was very good at dealing with patients.

“Doctor Goday used to say that her back-rubs and herbal treatments were not to be dismissed lightly. One day she gave me a head massage that left me like new,” she says, starting to wind the bandage round his arm. “By the way, didn’t you go out with her daughter?”

“Violeta? You must be joking. She’s a lot older than me.”

“Only two years, I’m sure. She can’t be more than seventeen.”

“O.K., but she’s a real pain.” Closing his eyes, he can see her in the tavern, standing there waiting as if in a daze while her bottle is being filled, or to be given the soda siphon. A long neck, wide gums that flash pink when she smiles, reddish hair, tiny breasts and a pert backside. He will never admit that this apparent lack of harmony, this mismatch between her arse and her tits is precisely what attracts him. “Besides, she’s a bit deaf. A dead loss.”

“Is that so? Just look at Mister Cool. Well, I heard that last summer during the fiesta you asked her to dance more than once.”

“But I don’t like her, Mother. Yuk!”

No, he doesn’t like the girl, of course not. She’s odd, unfriendly, she looks weird, and yet not a day goes by without him thinking of her buttocks swaying as she crosses the street or tautening as she turns behind the counter of the stationer’s shop she works in. Again and again in the hottest depths of his dreams, he conjures up that summer night when she sought refuge in his arms, head lowered and without a word, resigned to the furtive pushing at her thighs and pelvis. She raised her indolent eyes, too close to a nose whose dilating nostrils are the only thing in her face that seem alive, while he, on hearing the opening bars of the orchestra, and merely brushing her wasp waist with his hand, found himself unable to think of anything else but the saucy buttocks that Quique Pegamil had so close to him that day on the crowded tram platform.

“Every Sunday,” Ringo adds unenthusiastically, “winter or summer, and even when it’s raining, her mother goes with her to the dance at the Verdi. Sometimes they go on to the Salón Cibeles or the Cooperativa La Lealtad. They always leave their place arm-in-arm, made up like clowns. You have to laugh when you see them like that in the street, done up to the nines, clinging to one another as if they were cold or afraid of falling down …”

“You’re the one who makes me laugh.”

“Violeta Pricktease. That’s what the lads in the bar call her … Ow!”

He’s rewarded with a slap to the back of his head and a telling-off.

“Don’t let me ever hear you repeating such filthy language. Poor girl.”

No girl is ugly, his mother often insists: when you’re young, you can’t be ugly. How wrong can you be, he thinks, even though he still cannot explain to himself why, whenever he sees Violeta, he feels irresistibly attracted by that combination of ugly face and pretty legs, why he finds that odd mismatch so arousing.

“Can you wind the bandage up to the middle of my arm, please, mother.”

“You don’t need so much, it’s fine as it is.”

“Will you lend me your silk scarf, the one Don Victor gave you? To make the sling, instead of the ordinary scarf. That’s how Bill Barnes, Air Adventurer, would wear it, if his plane had been shot down …”

“Vain as well as silly,” says his mother. She remembers how he wore a sling for days and days when he was only ten, after he had scraped his wrist jumping down from the glass-topped wall at the Clínica del Remedio. “If you want a snack, there’s a tin of condensed milk and some quince left. What are you going to do today? Are you going to read up at Parque Güell, or will you spend the afternoon sitting in that bar?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“If you go up to the park, see if you can find some oregano. And bring me a small branch of bay.”

“I really don’t know yet, Mother. If my finger hurts a lot I feel dizzy, and I prefer to stay in the Rosales, because it’s close by. It’s the finger of fate, you know.”

“What do you do all those hours you spend shut up in that dreadful bar?” she asks for the umpteenth time. “You can’t play table football with your hand in that state.”

“I don’t like table football.”

He watches as his mother struggles to cut off the end of the bandage, having trouble pushing her fingers into the ends of a pair of scissors not designed for left-handed people.

“When I’m older, I’m going to be rich, Mother.”

“Oh, are you? That’s good.”

“I won’t be a goldsmith by then. I probably won’t be able to work with gold or platinum or diamonds or anything like that, but I’ll be rich all the same.”

“Goodness. And how do reckon you’ll become rich?”

“Besides being a pianist, I’ll be a scissors manufacturer.”

“Scissors?”

“I’ll invent scissors for left-handed people. Yes, I’ll sell them and get rich.”

His mother makes him a fresh sling with the light-green silk headscarf she was given by Don Víctor Rahola. She ties it behind his head, leaving the hand high up on Ringo’s chest to lessen the blood pressure.

“You’re done,” she says. “Now make sure you’re careful, or it’ll get infected again. And remember, keep your hand up high and it will hurt less.”

*

And so he is on his own for most of the day, with no obligations or worries apart from his crushed finger and finding enough money to rent novels from the second-hand bookshop on Calle Asturias. He secretly cultivates a nostalgia for the future, and a growing hostility towards his surroundings. He has the time and the freedom to live intensely every word of the books he reads, to come and goes from his home to the tavern or the Parque Güell, his novel tucked under his arm in its sling, with a cool but gloomy look and with romantic lines under his eyes, untidily dressed, his hair tousled, and yet always with an unshakeable inner courtesy, a fervent politeness that before long turns into a feeling of rootlessness and loneliness. No longer a child, he knows that the time of the tall tales has never stood still, never held up the blind onward march of the world, but he feels as though he is living an interval, a parenthesis between the workshop he has left behind for good, and the longed-for piano. By freeing him from work, his longer than expected convalescence leads him to the most idiosyncratic, diverse and uneven choice of books. From Karl May to Balzac and Dostoevsky, from Jules Verne to Edgar Wallace and Papini, Zane Grey, Curzio Malaparte, Stefan Zweig and Knut Hamsun. From the long table of bargains at the Calle Asturias bookshop, from the jumble of dog-eared, battered books his hand (still with five fingers) had begun the year before to dig in search of treasure, and where one afternoon he had by chance come across The Snows of Kilimanjaro — a small, oblong book of short stories with white covers and three fly droppings on the front — he also suddenly discovered A Tale of Two Cities (It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity …) and above all, Hunger.

During the day he wrote with his hands wrapped in rags, he reads avidly, and underlines the paragraph with his pencil. Not so much preoccupied as with a pleasant feeling of relief, for the first time he seriously entertains the possibility that he will be forced to earn his living in some other way, no longer from jewels or precious stones, but still hopeful that his future will be rich in emotions, clinging to the tattered ideal of the tormented, renowned concert pianist who travels the world winning plaudits and having beautiful women fall in love with him, triumphing over adversity. He still occasionally hears the harmonious echo of maestro Emery’s piano as the lid falls shut, a sustained, resonant and mournful sound, as though the panoply of wires and hammers in the depths of the ancient Steinway were also lamenting its forced but temporary distancing from music. However this may be, it’s almost certain he is not going be a salaried craftsman in some dark jeweller’s workshop, resigned forever to the blowtorch and the zinc-lined toolbox on his knees: in fact, his parents are already considering other possibilities for when his hand is better.

Could fate have shown itself in another, less cruel and painful way? It could, he thinks, but perhaps it was better like this, all at once and unannounced.