The Calligraphy of Dreams

6. SPARROW IN THE RAIN

The boy’s life is far from exemplary.

To begin with, when he spends the summer holidays of 1943 with his paternal grandparents in the village of San Jaime de los Domenys in Tarragona province, his favourite pastime, the one to which he devotes most time and enthusiasm (apart from the joyous bathing in the irrigation ponds and escapades with the village children through the wheat fields in the radiant July sunshine), is to shoot at birds with an air rifle in his grandfather’s vegetable garden. He has never managed to kill one, but he doesn’t give up trying. He crouches and spies on the leafy fig tree, waiting for hours for the slightest beating of wings or disturbance in its branches. He fires at any excuse. He is little more than ten years old, and the bangs of the airgun sound to him just as festive as the pop of champagne corks in his father’s hand at the Barcelona flat whenever they celebrate discreet, extra-special anniversaries whose significance he is unaware of, but whose exciting atmosphere of clandestinity and danger he can always sense.

He is also unaware that his very next shot will enter his ear like a tiny poisonous snake and nest there for ever. The sky has been leaden the whole afternoon, and now the first random, fat raindrops have begun to fall. A poor day for hunting, Ringo tells himself. He is on the prowl close to the fig tree with loaded gun when the rain comes on more heavily. Usually he enjoys feeling the rain on his face — it seems like a promise for the future — but today he wants to hunt, and so he seeks shelter beneath the fig tree. Raindrops patter on the rough leaves. A short time later, a sparrow flutters down from the dripping foliage and settles on the ground, dusting off its feathers. Leaning against the tree trunk, Ringo raises the gun. The damp smell of the leaves and the noise of the rain urge him on; the solid feel of the butt on his cheek excites him. A magic blink of the eye and, lying flat on the roof of the stagecoach, Ringo Kid fires his rifle at the Apaches galloping after him across the prairie. He closes one eye and aims, gently squeezing the trigger. Less than two metres from his sights, the sparrow is hopping and pecking at the ground. It stops, raises its head and looks at him, hops again, stops once more, looks at him again. It has a tiny worm in its mouth, which is still wriggling. The sound of rain on the fig tree leaves has always brought joy to his heart, but now Ringo is the hunter, his gaze implacable, his aim unerring, and he has no heart. This coldness and the unexpected resistance of the trigger are things he will not forget for many days. He has to fire a second time, because although the first pellet strikes home, the bird does not fall over, and merely crumples, its feathers fluffing up, and turns its head very slowly in the direction of its executioner. Between the first shot and the second, while the hunter is hurriedly loading another pellet into the air rifle, the sparrow stares at him with its beady little eye, already veiled by death, and drops the worm.

When it is all over, he turns his back on the sparrow, waits until the rain has stopped, and immediately, without once looking back at the dead bird (he knows that the magic blink of the eye will have no effect this time) emerges from under the fig tree with the airgun as heavy as lead in his hands. He heads for the house, chin sunk on his chest. Halfway there he stops and looks up at the sky, where a mass of reddish clouds appear to be swallowing each other up, chasing one another in a compulsive rush to a horizon of fire and emerald. In reality though they are as still as the ones in the outlandish backdrop at the little theatre in Las Ánimas where each Christmas they put on the Nativity play. A strange anxiety keeps him rooted to the spot, unable to take his eyes from the clouds.

A few minutes later, as he is hiding the airgun in the wardrobe where Grandma Tecla stores aromatic quinces, his eyes start to brim with tears. At first he weeps out of a confused feeling of self-pity, but this soon turns to a profound sadness. He is still weeping when he goes back to the vegetable garden, and when he picks up the bird. By now it is nothing more than a bundle of feathers, spongy to the touch. He wraps it in a handkerchief and buries it under the almond tree, placing on the grave a small cross made from pieces of cane, on which he has written the name Gorry. He feels the tears welling up from the deepest, blackest corner of his ruthless, murderous soul, and makes a secret vow. Every year in February when the almond tree is in bloom, I’ll come to visit you. He only calms down two hours later, when he sees Grandma Tecla tickling a white rabbit she is holding by the rear legs, and whispering in its ear in an affectionate, sing-song voice, before breaking its neck with a single, deadly chop of her hand. Wow, that’s some jujitsu blow granny’s learnt! Later on he sees her with that same hand on her backside as she raises the wine jug to take a swig behind his grandfather’s back, and the stream of wine splashing against her teeth impresses him still further. But that night in bed when he closes his eyes, the feelings of remorse return; he peers into the dark corners of his dreams and sinks beneath the garden soil to recover the sparrow’s tiny corpse, which is already being devoured by worms and almond-tree roots. As he imagines the pellets buried in its diminutive body, and above all when he thinks that one of them could have lodged in the bird’s living spirit, however ephemeral and fleeting that might have been at the moment of death, he can again feel the bird’s little head in his hands, flopping from side to side as if it were made of lead, and the image turns into a nightmare.

He will never pick up the gun again except with the intention of getting rid of it, and since then not a single day of his life has gone by when he hasn’t remembered that bird. Its beady eye, staring at him from the threshold of death, will accompany him to the end of his days.

“Today you’ll have to go up to the vines on your own, Mingo,” his grandmother tells him the next day. “Take your cowboy comics and be off with you. You’re not frightened of going on your own, are you?”

“Of course not. And I don’t need my air rifle.”

“Fine, goodbye airguns then. And when you go back to Barcelona, you can take it with you.”

He knows every inch of the old cart track leading from the village to the vines. It twists and turns up beyond the farmhouse with the mysterious name of La Carroña, the place of carrion. He loves to submerge himself in the white dust of this lonely path, deafened by the sound of cicadas. It is a bright, breezy July day. The track is barely three kilometres, but time and dreams expand along it to cover more than forty years. Wherever he goes in the future after this morning as he sets out along the path, all alone but accompanied first by Mowgli and then Winnetou, carrying the lunch basket for his grandfather who is spraying the vines, wherever life takes him in the years to come, his feet will always be treading this track, and the dust smelling of esparto grass, dung, and crushed grapes will always fill his nostrils. Something of this germinal dust will stay with him for ever. Even today he is convinced that there is not and never could be any other track in the world like this one, nor one he has set off along so often in his memory.

Chewing a green almond or a sprig of fennel, he pauses beside the fields to survey the majestic stems of wheat waving in the sunshine, the placid to and fro of the ears in a golden sea stretching from one plot to another as far as the wooded areas at the foot of the distant hills of Castellví de la Marca, beyond the fallow fields, the expanse of vineyards, the gentle slopes of almond and carob trees. Sometimes at evening when he is on his way back to the village, a burst of pink light from the setting sun slowly rides the rippling wheat towards the dark horizon. Beneath a sky streaked with clouds, when he hears the wind whistling in the electric cables and the silence hovering over the ploughed fields, and observes the symmetrical languor and endless rows of furrows in shadow, the fine red dust hanging in the air round the shire horses, he believes he can grasp the fleeting nature of time, and ponders the mystery and certainty of death.

His errand fulfilled and back by now in the village, close to the Sant Pau wood he meets up again with Winnetou and Old Shatterhand. Together they decide to take another route across the endless windswept prairie, until at length they reach the house where his grandmother is waiting, looking very serious, urging him to eat as quickly as possible so that she can take him to the school to meet Señor Benito, the teacher. It’s time to put a stop to your spending the whole day roaming around without doing anything useful, says his grandmother, time to stop the running wild with your friend Ramón Bartra’s gang, bathing naked in the ponds, stealing peaches and watermelons, hiding in the wheat fields with your faces painted and feathers in your hair: all that’s finished.

“For as long as you’re here with me, you’re going to school, like it or not. I’ll feel a lot happier.”

Grandma Tecla is a short, stocky and resolute old woman. She is black-eyed, with thick eyebrows and a snub nose above the faint outline of a moustache like a Mexican bandit’s, a threatening shadow that the boy is fascinated by. Besides the moustache and the black velvet of her eyes, many other things about his grandmother often clamour for his attention, like the slow, stiff way in which she lifts the wine-jug high and keeps the red stream splashing against her small, brilliant white teeth without spilling a drop, her head flung back and the other hand on her backside, as though to prevent the liquid leaking out through there. That’s what she is doing now, standing in front of the big kitchen hearth where the wind is moaning, before she takes the boy by the hand and goes out into the square with him.

It was written that this radiant, windy afternoon, so well-suited to daydreaming and adventures, here in Panadés just as much on the Arizona prairies where Old Shatterhand rides in search of Winnetou, is the one when the best-kept secret is finally revealed, a secret withheld for many years, though he had occasionally seen it surface in his mother’s sad gaze after he had heard her scold her father or somebody else for an indiscreet comment. And the first hint of this secret slips out thanks to a gossipy old peasant woman who suddenly appears like a ghost out of the thick dust cloud the wind is raising as grandmother and grandson are crossing the square hand-in-hand, the boy rubbing his eyes.

“What a good-looking child, Tecla!” the old woman exclaims with a sly smile. “Who does he take after? Because it’s only natural he doesn’t look like Pep or Berta. It’s obvious just seeing him that he isn’t theirs. I mean it’s natural he doesn’t look like them, as it’s natural that, well …”

“Why don’t you scratch your arse rather than gab on so, Domitila?” is his grandmother’s furious retort, as she tugs at the boy’s hand to drag him away.

That name, Domitila, sounds to him so mysterious and funny, as if it came out of a comic with Hipo, Monito and Fifi, although it’s not as resonant as Tecla, the word for the keyboard of the longed-for piano that one day he has no doubt will be his. But for now he has no wish to think of that, or of the even deeper mystery of old Domitila’s arse, but rather her bewildering words.

“What did that lady mean, Grandma? Why did she say … what she said?”

“Because that Domitila is a donkey!”

“But what did she mean?”

“Nothing. She doesn’t know what she’s saying. Don’t listen to her, my love.”

One day, long before this, his grandmother had told him that on his tenth birthday his mother would tell him a great secret. She said it with a smile, although her black eyelashes were moist, and he has never forgotten it, although for some inexplicable reason he has never reminded her or his mother of this promise.

The school is a large, airy building on the outskirts of the village by the main road out to Llorens and El Vendrell. It is closed for the holidays. The teacher, Señor Benito Ruiz y Montalvo, has come in to check whether the carpenter has carried out the work he asked him to do, replacing some boards on the teacher’s platform and repairing a window. Ringo’s grandmother could have gone to find him at the chemist’s any day after lunch, because he and the chemist Granota always play chess at the back of the shop, or after Mass on Sunday, but she doesn’t want anyone else to hear what she has to say to him. Although it’s a long time until the start of term, she wants to ask for the boy to be enrolled as soon as possible — only for three or four months, she tells him, I’ll be looking after him this winter, his parents are having a hard time in Barcelona …

“Who isn’t, my dear Tecla,” the teacher sympathises, testing the platform with his foot. “Who isn’t, at times like these.”

“Please can you seat him with the other children, Señor Benito? It’s not good for him to be out on his own at all hours.”

“No, you’re right, Tecla, it’s not good.” He looks at the boy with mock severity. “We know he’s a fine boy, we’ve been keeping an eye on him. Hmm, a child with a rich interior life, isn’t he?”

His grandmother responds with a grunt. “A rich interior life”, what nonsense this man talks. The boy is staring at the big blackboard, the wood stove with its black, twisted flue, the map of Spain, the ink-stained desks, Señor Benito’s blue shirt with the red spider sewn on its pocket, and on the wall the portraits of the Caudillo and José Antonio flanking a crucifix whose figure of Christ has a foot missing.

“Well, there’s just one problem,” says the teacher. “As far as I am aware, this youngster has not yet been legally adopted. Therefore …”

“It’s been impossible to do it before now,” his grandmother says in a low voice. “The war was to blame.”

“So we will have to enrol him under his real names …”

“Shhh!” his grandmother interrupts him. Señor Benito bites his tongue, but it’s too late. And his immediate excuse, voiced out loud, only makes things worse: he thought the child must have been aware by now of his real family origins. Shhh! the grandmother insists, and orders her grandson to go out and play. He clings to her black skirts and refuses to budge. Why does he have a foot missing? he asks, staring at the crucifix. Then the teacher, jabbing at him with a huge, imperious finger that is ink-stained but has a pink, clean and well-trimmed nail, points to a desk at the back of the room and orders him to go and sit there. He takes the grandmother by the arm and the two move off into a corner, although this does not make much difference. However quietly they speak, their voices echo through the empty classroom, and besides, Winnetou can understand the language of the blue man just by reading his lips. Nothing simpler.

“We’ll tell him everything when he’s ten,” his grandmother whispers. “That’s what his mother wanted. If she were here, she would have explained it to him already, but she wasn’t able to come.”

“What does ‘interior life’ mean, Grandma?” Ringo asks from his back-row desk. “Where’s his other foot?”

“Be quiet, child, don’t cause trouble.”

“So you haven’t told the poor boy anything yet,” Señor Benito grumbles. “A big mistake, Tecla, a big mistake! And, in addition, he’s not yet been legally adopted. For whatever reason, and that is something that does not concern me of course, the proper procedure was not followed at the correct time, and as a result to all effects and purposes this child still has the surnames of his biological parents …”

“What does biological mean, Grandma?”

“Will you be quiet a moment, for pity’s sake!”

“In consequence we will have to enrol him under his real surnames,” the teacher continues. “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing else I can do. And frankly, Tecla, I’m amazed that Pep and Berta haven’t yet told the boy the truth.”

“What are biological parents?”

“Never you mind! Señor Benito is telling me about the books you’re going to need …”

“That’s right,” says the teacher, adopting a professorial tone. “We’re talking about biogenesis, my boy, a difficult subject you’re too young to study as yet, if you follow me.”

Señor Benito has a thin mouth, the delicate jaws of a ruminant, and the vacant gaze of Zampabollos the Glutton. In that second, he falls backwards stiff as a board with his eyes rolled up, while Ringo blows the smoke from the barrel of his revolver and twirls it back into its holster. Crouching in the back row, he clutches the edges of the desk with both hands as if it was about to take off, and studies the school teacher’s wry grimace with the wise eyes of Old Shatterhand. Any moment now and I’ll be off again out on to the plains with the faithful Winnetou and his four braves …

“Are you telling me that to come to your school my grandson has to change surnames?” says his grandmother, her voice deepening. “That when they do the register he’s going to have to hear different family names? Family names he’s never heard before, or his friends …?”

“What I’m telling you, Tecla, is that I, to my great regret, am obliged to enrol him with his real family surnames. That’s the only way I can accept him into the school, it is a sine qua non.”

“But couldn’t you turn a blind eye for three months, Señor Benito? Who’s going to take you to task for it, with all those important Falangist friends of yours?”

“Oh, Tecla, these days we need all the friends we can get! I’d like to help you, but do you realise what you’re asking? I can’t shut my eyes to something so irregular that I bear so much responsibility for. What happens if there’s an inspection? Because it’s a matter of how shall I put it, of a blood anomaly …”

“What on earth are you saying? It’s not as if it’s an illness, or something against the regime!”

“Of course not, woman. I mean that the relationship is not a blood one, and therefore it is anomalous, and that has to be pointed out … Those in charge now keep a very tight control, as you know. Besides, who is to blame for this situation?” He glances out of the corner of his eye at the boy, who is crouching in his desk like a wild beast about to pounce, and lowers his voice still further. “After all this time, how is it that his stepfather still hasn’t officially requested the adoption?”

“What does ‘stepfather’ mean, Grandma?” Ringo demands to know, stamping his feet on the floor.

“His feet are cold,” she says, to excuse his behaviour. “The boy is always going round with cold feet. I have to light a fire for him in mid-afternoon.” She turns and gives him a stern look. “Behave now, or I’ll be seriously angry! Don’t cause trouble or pretend you’re a Red Indian.”

She knows when Winnetou is with her grandson. How does she know? Every time she hears the boy muttering as he walks alongside her, in a world of his own and with his eyes half-closed, coming or going from the vines along the white track, or while he is helping her silently to bring in firewood, collect grass for the rabbits, or has his head down shelling almonds in the kitchen; whenever to escape routine or boredom a strange babble she can’t understand emerges from his lips, she knows he is mouthing the words of Red Indians he has come across in the comics his mother brings him from Barcelona.

“The adoption formalities are very expensive, and his family can’t afford them at the moment, Señor Benito,” his grandmother is saying. “They’ll do it as soon as possible.”

The teacher looks worried, and Ringo does not take his eyes off him. Every so often he sees him take a deep breath, puffing out his chest with fake concern, and whenever he does that, the red spider grows huge and threatens to start moving its legs, as if it were about to climb the blue shirt. He’s never seen anything like it, this spider crawling up the teacher’s shirt! Señor Benito explains wearily that this morning he has had to put on the uniform and attend a Falangist meeting in El Vendrell. The red beret folded on his shoulder looks a little faded and stiff, but apart from that he is dressed extremely carefully, wearing black patent leather shoes, his hair oiled. He is smoking a very thin, bent, aromatic roll-up cigarette.

“It’s a difficult matter,” he concludes. “As long as he has not been formally adopted, here in class he will have to be called — I’m sorry to have to say this, Tecla — but he will have to be called by his biological patronymics …”

“Do you have to use such … ugly, strange words in front of the boy?”

“Let’s see if you understand me. I’m talking about fulfilling a simple bureaucratic formality. And besides, I’m not sure, but I suspect somebody is trying to get away with something here … I’m afraid that from what I’m hearing there’s been a clear breach of the father — son relationship, a dereliction, an abdication of identity, shall we say …”

“You’re just trying to confuse me with your big words! The boy has had no problem with his family names at school in Barcelona!” She snorts, but then controls herself and speaks more softly. “Well, I don’t know, there must be a way … what can we do, Señor?”

“It’s up to you to decide, Tecla. Go home and think it over calmly.”

*

She has made up her mind before she gets home: this child cannot spend three or four months running wild, he has to go to school no matter what, using his real family names or those he’s been given. But how is she going to explain to him that he has four surnames rather than two, and why?

Sitting in a chair by the hearth staring into the flames, the grandmother silently evokes the family demons that have led to so many mishaps: if twelve years earlier her son and Berta hadn’t preferred the city and the reckless joys of the Republic to the peace and tranquillity of this tiny village; if in Barcelona Pep had not got mixed up in politics; if poor Berta had not lost her child at birth, if she had not taken that taxi as she left the La Maternidad hospital in floods of tears, if the doctor had waited another day to tell her she could not have any more children … Chance had intervened at almost every turn, and it was happening again: if she hadn’t been kept in Barcelona because of her job, Berta would now be explaining to the boy, with great tact and sweetness (from the start, waiting to see him reach puberty, she had carefully chosen the moment and exactly what she would say) who it was who brought him into the world ten years earlier, what mysterious design led that taxi to the door of the hospital just as … But Berta is not here, and the boy is asking questions, and the moment to tell him has arrived. A short while before, when she heard him moving about upstairs in his bedroom, helping his grandfather store the winter melons under the bed, she had quickly lit the fire in the hearth despite the heat. This is not just to cook cabbage and potatoes in the blackened pot, but because she knows her grandson likes above all to stare into the flames as dusk falls, in winter or summer. By the time he comes down and sits on the kitchen floor she has already decided what she is going to say to him.

“Today, if you promise not to tell anyone, I’m going to let you into a secret. You were going to be told anyway sooner or later. Don’t be frightened, it’s nothing bad. Now listen.”

Despite the magnetic effect of the Mexican moustache, the words his grandmother speaks in a voice that is now softer, more affectionate, and strangely childlike, are a ghost story that is not in the least bit frightening, a tale full of twists and turns, told with all kinds of hesitations and evasions. For the very first time a confused series of vignettes is paraded in front of his eyes: a taxi roaming the streets of Barcelona in the rain, a doctor and a nun attending a young woman in labour in a ward in La Maternidad, a shack in a Sarriá shanty-town where another young mother is also about to give birth, one boy who comes into the world arse first, and another who leaves it headfirst, the first mother delivering a dead baby, the second mother dying as she brings forth the newborn the wrong way round. Now for a moment we’re going to imagine, adds the grandmother, just for a moment (he can already see it: in an explosion of light and blood, first the feet appear, small and wrinkled as currants, then the legs, and finally the little arse) that the boy who came backwards into the world … is you. Don’t you sometimes imagine you’re a Red Indian with one of your mother’s garters round your head and with your face painted? Well now we’re going to imagine that you are the boy who came arse-first into this world, and that, at the moment you are born, your mother dies, because that is what destiny has ordained … And that taxi which has been going up and down the streets of Barcelona in the rain without anyone hailing it, is that also because destiny has so ordained it? In the entrance to La Maternidad, a nun and a nurse are saying goodbye and giving some final words of advice to the mother who is going home after losing her baby. Her husband, who is shielding her from the rain under an umbrella, sees the taxi going past, and raises his arm to stop it … She has always said he saw it first because even though it was daytime it had its headlights on, and that caught his attention. Well, the long and short of it is that they got into the taxi. And who do you think the driver was? As chance would have it, it was the husband of the lady who had died in childbirth a week earlier. And what happens as he is taking the unhappy couple home, with her weeping in her husband’s arms because not only has she lost her child, but she has been told by the doctors that she cannot have any more? What happens is that the taxi driver, hearing her crying and bemoaning her loss, cannot help but comment on his own misfortune. The sad coincidences of life! she said he said, and then he told her that he too had suffered the loss of a loved one because of a tragic birth, except that in his case the opposite had happened, and it was his wife who died, leaving him with a baby … And as Berta herself has told it a thousand times, she went and asked him: why don’t you take me to see the child? Please, I beg you, and so the driver feels sorry for her and changes his route and takes the couple to see the baby, who is being looked after by some relatives, although they are very sorry and cannot keep him. And once they are there, Berta lifts the baby from the cot and holds him in her arms for the very first time …?

“And that was that, there was no way she would let go of you,” his grandmother concludes. “They agreed that Berta would keep you only for a while. As a wet nurse … Do you know what that means? Well, a year went by, and then another, and another, and the situation dragged on, and that’s how things stand now. So as you can see, the fact is you have two mothers. My word, but you’re a lucky thing, aren’t you? Don’t you know it’s a blessing to have a mother in heaven? You’re a blessed child, that’s what you are, a child who’s been blessed! Because that man could not have raised you, and you would have ended up in the foundlings’ hospital for sure, so the best thing you can do is give thanks to the heavens for being such a blessed child …” She studies his face, and adds: “Or are you still not convinced? How about if tomorrow I sew you a football from a pair of your grandfather’s old corduroy trousers? Come on, let me see your face … It’s alright, if you feel like crying, let it out.”

He doesn’t feel like crying, or anything of the kind. Not even a snivel, even though he doesn’t in any way feel blessed. All that’s going through his mind is a wish to play down everything he’s just heard. He feels the immediate need, in order to guard against any new, unexpected revelations, surreptitiously to convince himself that deep in his heart he always knew what he has just heard. Together with an observation of his grandmother’s, which over the course of time makes him smile: if that taxi with its headlights on had passed by just a minute before, in all likelihood he would not be here now staring at the flames in the hearth, he would never have come to this village or entered this house, there would be no airgun hidden in a wardrobe, nor any bird buried out in the vegetable garden with two pellets in its body … So it was all the result of a stroke of luck, a tremendous stroke of luck, and as a consequence, from this moment on the least stable and questioning part of himself will enjoy frequently venturing into the most incredible part of this story, in which a pair of taxi headlights shine brightly through the lashing rain.

“And be careful with what the schoolteacher is so fond of repeating,” his grandmother admonishes him in conclusion. “About a rich interior life! Interior life! Be very careful. Don’t go looking for trouble.”

“Of course not, Grandma. And listen,” he says, to confuse her and change the subject, “if we stuff the ball with corduroy as well, it will last longer. And it will look real.”

Now that he thinks about it, weren’t even the cloth balls his grandmother sewed for him so skilfully little more than well-intentioned lies? Down the tunnel of time, he sees her face pressed close to his, a cheery gleam in her moist eyes, squinting slightly because she is so near to him and because of the ambiguous itch of a conviction that she would not be able to put into words even if she wanted to: that life can be so unfair, unpredictable and precarious, so profoundly marked by loss and abandonment, that sometimes there is a need for compensation in the form of a stroke of luck or a soothing white lie.

That night he sleeps lulled by the perfume of the yellow winter melons under his bed. In the early hours, Gorry silently lands on one of the melons, grasps the silky rind in its claws, gathers its body and from its arse shoots its tiny machine gun: dark little droppings intended for Ringo as it peers defiantly at him through the slats of the bed and the mattress. It is about to fly off again when Ringo says:

Don’t go yet. Stay a while.

What for? So that you can shoot another pellet in my body?

No, so we can talk as friends.

Me, talk to you? What rubbish, nano! How can anybody imagine I want to talk to you as a friend, when you’re my murderer?

That morning his grandmother makes him another ball with the big needle she uses to sew sacks, one more that ends up with its innards hanging out between the feet of the boys playing in the square. Yet from that day on, Ringo prefers to spend many afternoons alone, reading in the vegetable garden. His grandmother has told him that when his mother comes she’ll tell him the whole story, because there are lots of things not even I know, things they haven’t wanted to tell me yet. But the oft-mentioned “bad patch” the Rat-catcher and Berta are going through down in the city, occasionally relieved by the grandmother’s trips with a basket of eggs, oil, a rabbit or hen, means that it is a long time before his mother reappears, and throughout that winter he spends many hours on his own in the garden, or in the improvised swing under the almond tree, or at school.

When spring arrives, his mother brings him from Barcelona Geneviève de Brabant, Treasure Island and the new adventures of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand, and chooses the right moment to talk to him. Bright-eyed, she delicately and knowingly brings together the random strands of the story until she has constructed a verbal artefact containing, she swears, the truth and nothing but the truth. When the boy insists, she finds herself forced to admit that it was her and not his father who saw the taxi headlights in the distance through the rainstorm.

“Why are you so interested in that anyway?”

“I thought Grandma had invented it. Because taxis don’t have their headlights on during the day, do they?”

“Well, this one did. Perhaps because of the rain, or because the driver had forgotten … You see, there’s an explanation for everything. But that’s not what is important for me. What’s important is that you believe me. You do, don’t you, Son?”

Her face and tender mouth so close to him, the faint aroma from the cherry-red lipstick, the dimples in her cheeks when she smiles, the quick flutter of her rough, reddened hands, the rain and the cab’s headlights, the gift of so eagerly anticipated new books, comics and annuals (better and more numerous than on previous occasions) to be read by the fire in the hearth on rainy days. He gives a silent nod, to avoid shouting it out loud: Yes, I believe you.

Later on, when she sees him lying out under the almond tree with his books and comics, she reminds him what a good idea it is to cover them — that way they’ll always be new, and again mentions how lucky he is.

“Just as well they weren’t burnt with all the rest, isn’t it?” she says, and adds with a smile: “Just in case, because of the flies. Do you remember, Son?”

And the memory of a big bonfire in the middle of the night, with the tallest, fiercest flames he has ever seen, takes him back for an instant to a ghostly scene in his own neighbourhood two years earlier, to a small, shadow-filled private garden where a pile of books, notebooks, photographs and documents splutter and burn, just in case.