‘You are Black Eagle,’ he declared, keeping his hands away from his body in a sign of submission.
The great Arapaho chief of the Lands to the South of Yellow Fish’s Shore of the Washita gave an imperceptible nod from up on his horse, without moving a hair, and then he asked whom he had the honour of receiving, and the man with the black moustache smiled again, made a jocular half bow and said I’m Sheriff Carson, from Rockland, a two-day ride from your lands.
‘I know where you established your town, Rockland,’ the legendary chief responded curtly. ‘In Pawnee territory.’ And he spat on the ground to show his contempt.
‘These are my deputies,’ — not entirely sure who the gob of spit was directed at. ‘We are looking for a criminal on the lam.’ And he, in turn, spat and found it wasn’t half bad.
‘What has he done to be treated as a criminal?’ The Arapaho chief.
‘Do you know him? Have you seen him?’
‘I asked you what he did to be treated as a criminal.’
‘He killed a mare.’
‘And dishonoured two women,’ added the blond.
‘Yes, of course, that too,’ accepted Sheriff Carson.
‘And why are you looking for him here?’
‘He’s an Arapaho.’
‘My people extend several days toward the west, toward the east and toward the cold and the heat. Why have you come to this spot?’
‘You know who he is. We want you to deliver him to justice.’
‘You are mistaken, Sheriff Carson. Your murderer is not an Arapaho.’
‘Oh, no? And how do you know that?’
‘An Arapaho would never kill a mare.’
Then the light turned on and Little Lola waved him off with one hand, ordering him out of the larder. In front of Adrià, Mother, with war paint on her face, without looking at him, without spitting on the ground, said Lola, have him wash his mouth out well. With soap and water. And if necessary, add a few drops of bleach.
Black Eagle withstood the torture bravely, without a single groan. When Little Lola had finished, as he dried himself with a towel, he looked her in the eyes and said Little Lola, do you know what dishonouring a woman means exactly?
When I was seven or eight years old I made some decisions about my life. One was very wise: leaving my education in my mother’s hands. But it seems that things didn’t go that way. And I found out because, that night, I wanted to know how my father would react to my slip and so I set up my espionage device in the dining room. It wasn’t particularly complicated because my room shared a partition wall with the dining room. Officially, I had gone to sleep early, so my father, when he came home, wouldn’t find me awake. It was the best way to save myself the sermon that would have been filled with pitfalls because if I told him, in self-defence, that the whole ffucking life thing was something I’d heard him say, then the topic of the conversation would have shifted from you’ve got a very dirty mouth that I’ll now scrub with Lagarto soap to how the fuck do you know I said that about ffucking life, you bald-faced liar? Huh? Huh? Were you spying on me? And there was no way I was going to reveal my espionage cards, because over time, without even really trying, I was the only one in the house who controlled every corner, every conversation, the arguments and the inexplicable weeping, like that week Little Lola spent crying. When she emerged from her room, she had very skilfully hidden her pain, which much have been immense. It was years before I knew why she was crying, but at the time I learned that there was pain that could last a week and life scared me a little bit.
So I was able to listen in on the conversation between my parents by putting my ear to the bottom of a glass placed against the partition wall. Since Father’s voice was weary, Mother summed up the matter by saying that I was very trying. Father didn’t want to know the details and said it’s already been decided.
‘What’s been decided?’ Mother’s frightened voice.
‘I’ve enrolled him at the Jesuit school on Casp Street.’
‘But, Fèlix … If …’
That day I learned that Father was the only one in charge. And I mentally made note that I had to look up what Jesuits were in the Britannica. Father held Mother’s gaze in silence and she made up her mind to press on, ‘Why the Jesuits? You aren’t a believer and …’
‘Quality education. We have to be efficient; we only have one child and we can’t make a cock-up of it.’
Let’s see: yes, they only had one child. Or no; but that wasn’t the point anyway. So Father brought up the idea of the languages, which I’ll admit I liked.
‘What did you say?’
‘Ten languages.’
‘Our son isn’t a monster.’
‘But he can learn them.’
‘And why ten?’
‘Because Pater Levinski at the Gregorian knew nine. Our son has to do him one better.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he called me inept in front of the other students. Inept because my Aramaic was not progressing after an entire year with Faluba.’
‘Don’t make jokes: we are talking about our son’s education.’
‘I’m not joking: I am talking about my son’s education.’
I know that it bothered my mother a lot that my father referred to me as his son in front of her. But Mother was thinking of other things because she started to say that she didn’t want to turn me into a monster; and, with a skill I didn’t know she had in her, she said do you hear me? I don’t want my son to end up being a carnival monster who has to do Pater Luwowski one better.
‘Levinski.’
‘Levinski the monster.’
‘A great theologian and Biblicist. A monster of erudition.’
‘No: we have to discuss it calmly.’
I didn’t understand that. That was exactly what they were doing: discussing my future calmly. And I was pleased because ffucking life hadn’t come up at all.
‘Catalan, Spanish, French, German, Italian, English, Latin, Greek, Aramaic, and Russian.’
‘What are you listing?’
‘The ten languages he has to know. He already knows the first three.’
‘No, he just makes up the French.’
‘But he does a pretty good job, he makes himself understood. My son can do anything he sets out to. And he has a particular talent for languages. He will learn ten.’
‘He also needs time to play.’
‘He’s already big. But when it’s time to go to university he has to know them.’ And with a weary sigh, ‘We’ll talk about it some other time, OK?’
‘He’s seven years old, for the love of God!’
‘I’m not demanding he learn Aramaic right now.’ He drummed his fingers on the table with a conclusive gesture, ‘He’ll start with German.’
I liked that too, because I could almost figure out the Britannica on my own with a dictionary by my side, no problem: but German, on the other hand, I found pretty opaque. I was very excited about the world of declinations, the world of languages that change their word endings according to their function in the sentence. I didn’t exactly put it that way, but almost: I was very pedantic.