“You’ll have to take the girl somewhere else, it’s no good where she is, there’s no beach,” Julito insists.
“I don’t feel like it.”
“Well then, this crappy story is over. We’ll have to start another one.”
Quique encourages Ringo to carry on, but he is already standing up and dusting his trousers. The circle closes again, leaving him outside.
“Fine, you all stay there then.”
Hands in his pockets and a look of cool disdain on his face, the storyteller quits the group and takes one of the little paths up the hill, though he does not go far. He’ll be back, but first he needs to feel excluded and spurned for a while, he wants to be misunderstood and to see himself as exiled, all alone, savouring an untouchable independence that is a mixture of rage and melancholy as he looks down on his friends without being seen. He is scornful of the show-off heir to “Bayo and Son Make Moving Fun”, who deserves to be taught a lesson and who he would gladly give one to right there and then, but towards the others, these candid, illiterate sons of migrant workers who aren’t afraid of defying the real geography of the world either in his tall stories or in life itself, he feels a secret affinity.
Situated between the leafy Parque Güell and the miserable foothills of Monte Carmelo, this hill they call the Bald Mountain is a gloomy promontory with little vegetation and no trees, dotted here and there with small caves occasionally inhabited by tramps. Its inhospitable, bare slopes make it seem as if it has been swept to one side and punished, as if it was nothing more than a submissive wasteland on the edge of the picturesque and famous outlines of its near neighbour, the Parque Güell. In the month of May its slopes are covered with lavender and broom, and June brings a few clumps of thyme and rosemary, but the rest of the year it’s a dusty expanse shunned even by lizards. The gang doesn’t do it anymore, but as recently as the previous year they searched for seashells and molluscs embedded in the rocks, because Julito Bayo had sworn that his History teacher told him the mountain was littered with fossils, tortoise shells and mammoth remains. Some of the caves really are prehistoric, Julito told them, showing off his knowledge. A soft, warm breeze carries the acrid smell of burning rubber up to Ringo. Most likely it is coming from the cloud of smoke hanging over the cluster of shacks that he can see not far away, below the last bend in the road up to Carmelo. He thinks of youngsters with shaven heads and fierce looks burning lorry tyres and rotten mattresses. He gives a magic blink and the smoke spreads, black as soot, to envelop the circle he has been cast out of.
As he continues to climb, the ground becomes increasingly ashen and bare. There’s no-one in sight. Halfway up the hill, where the incline becomes steeper, on the smooth back of a chalky boulder that is half buried and almost indistinguishable from the ground, are three hand-carved steps. Man-made.
“Hello there, mystery.”
A lavender bush is sprouting next to the topmost step. Perfectly symmetrical, a little more than two handspans wide and worn away by the rains and the gang’s feet, the three steps appear without warning out of nothing and climb the hill towards nothing, for nothing. Every time he comes across them, he stops, sensing he is on the threshold of a labyrinth that could lead to a tomb. Something ceased to exist not far from here, something whose secret lies buried beneath the quiet symmetry of these lonely steps, as stark as headstones. The Cazorla brothers’ father, who is a labourer and years earlier worked in the quarries at the foot of the Carmelo used to say half jokingly that a long time ago he had heard of a young peasant recently arrived from a village in Andalusia to work in the same quarry (disused nowadays) who had suddenly taken it into his head to chisel out the first steps of a staircase meant to lead to the little house he intended one day to build for himself and his family, but that he had been forced to stop to go to war. A couple of Christmases when he was on leave he came back from the front to continue the work in uniform, but just as he had finished the third step, the enemy arrived at the gates of the city, and the young stonemason was shot right there, hammer still in hand.
The whole gang spent an entire afternoon searching for gun cartridges and bloodstains on the three steps and surrounding rocks, but either the stains had been washed away or they were unable to spot them. Another day, as he was pulling up a thyme bush, the elder Cazorla brother dug up the sole of a shoe or a perished boot, and a pair of buttons. They dug around for a long while, but couldn’t find anything more. Some time later the younger Cazorla announced he had found a broken hammer beneath some rocks. Of course, he could be buried somewhere here, Ringo suggested, but Julito protested: Who’s going to believe a story like that, nen? While an excited Quique shouted: Where could the body be, Ringo? Here, underneath my feet? Yes, under your feet, right here!
Now he leaves them behind and goes to sit a little higher up. He clasps his knees and stares down at the boys’ shaven heads and Julito Bayo’s smart, wavy mop. They are listening to him in silence. No doubt Julito has begun his tall tale with some stupidly menacing music from a horror film like “Hold That Ghost”, he thinks. And doubtless it’s a stormy night with thunder and lightning, and a sinister dacoit brandishing a dagger is stealing into Virginia Franch’s bedroom in her villa on Calle de las Camelias, while Quique hides behind a curtain in wait for him. Julito himself climbs the front of the house in pursuit of the Perfidious Oriental, and the Cazorla brothers are also close at hand. Then of course the telephone rings and Virginia wakes up in her bed just as the shadow of the evil Chinaman with the dagger looms behind her. She sits up and screams … and I’ll bet an arm and a leg that Quique asks if the girl is wearing a transparent nightie.
He looks down at the city stretching out to the sea under a slight haze. He grits his teeth: up here he is at war with the world, not just evil dacoits or Apache warriors. For a moment, peering at the blurred line of the horizon rising above the buildings, it appears as though he is viewing an underwater city, more remote and improbable than a beach in Arizona. In the bright blue sky above his head, the red kite with yellow ribbons is losing height and keeps swooping round, its tail fluttering wildly as it threatens to plummet to the ground. Held by an invisible hand that seems unable to control it, the long flying line tautens or slackens following the vagaries of the wind. A young girl’s hands, he decides, and at that very moment he looks down and sees Señora Mir toiling up the path in her tight printed skirt, her black sleeveless blouse with the plunging neckline, and her palm-leaf basket. She is wearing flat shoes, a green headscarf and dark glasses with white frames. She’s making slow progress, and stops every now and then to catch her breath, hands on hips. Two small white butterflies are chasing each other round her thick pink ankles. She passes by Ringo without looking and carries on up the hill.
“Hello there, Señora Mir.”
She either does not hear or does not want to acknowledge his greeting. Near the summit, she disappears, after stopping to cut a branch of broom. When Ringo follows her a short while later, she is nowhere to be seen. She could be on the other side of the hill, where there is oregano and clumps of thyme that has just come into bloom, but she would have had to walk very quickly to reach it, so it’s more likely she is in some cave with the man waiting for her. There is no-one else in sight. From this slope he can see Vallcarca and the suicide bridge; then all at once, to his surprise he also notices that the cord of the kite he saw from down below is not being held by anyone: instead, it is tied to a large boulder at one edge of the small sun-filled bowl at the top of the hill. There is no-one around. Above his head in the sky he can hear the crackling of the paper kite, as if the strong wind had set it on fire. Taking out his penknife, he cuts the line. Freed, the kite turns a somersault and plunges headfirst to earth.