None of this is of any great interest to Ringo. In fact, these days are so full of unexpected events that he has not had the time or the desire to stop and think of that woman’s ridiculous love affairs. Other people’s lives — unless they are in novels or films — scarcely merit a glance over his shoulder, a bored, fleeting consideration. Instead, he has spent a lot of time reflecting on the crushed finger of fate, the finger that was lost. He’s sitting at a table in the Rosales bar, his right arm in a sling and his hand bandaged, head deep in a novel he’s just opened on top of his music book, which is also open. He has ordered a beer, and is drinking it without taking his eyes off the page. At this time of day, three in the afternoon, there’s no-one else in the bar apart from Francis Macomber, Wilson and Margot, who are arguing next to him, throats dry, and sweating profusely as they drink gimlets, their wraith-like voices and unmentionable desires mingling with the sounds of the jungle.
The bar owner’s sister, Señora Paquita, a bustling, middle-aged spinster with a masculine face and lively eyes, is busy behind the counter washing anchovies under the tap. From time to time she lifts her head to study her only customer. A strange boy, she is thinking, not very sociable or polite, possibly quite shy, who never is to be seen with the other lads of his age when they come in during the early evening to play table football or dominoes. Whenever she sees him, aged fifteen and looking so serious, sitting at the table by the window absorbed in a book, she imagines he must be reading because he’s bored or because he feels lonely, and feels obliged to make conversation.
“So, how are things? How’s your mother?”
“Fine,” he replies, burying his head even deeper in his book.
“Working hard, I’ll be bound. What other choice does she have, poor woman? And in the meantime, what’s that rogue of your father doing? What’s that piece of work up to?” she insists brightly, looking askance at him. “Is he at home, or still catching rats and making mischief? He’s a fine one alright! Although I have to admit he’s a likeable rogue.”
Ringo prefers to say nothing, but to push on deeper into the distant, wild plains of Africa.
Thirty-five yards into the grass the big lion lay flattened out along the ground. His ears were back and his only movement was a slight twitching up and down of his long, black-tufted tail. He had turned at bay as soon as he had reached this cover …
The Rosales bar is one of the oldest taverns in the neighbourhood. It has a battered, uneven floor of black and white tiles, and an old brick counter whose edges and top are imitation rough pine trunks made of mortar and painted brown, with very convincing knots and grain. The counter was rebuilt with his own hands by the bar owner Señor Agustín, who had once been a labourer and fancied himself as a decorator. In its day, the counter was highly praised by the regulars because it looked so lifelike, but Señora Paquita detests the trunks because the tree-bark that was so much admired collects dust and dirt, and she is utterly fed up with having to scrub it with bleach. To one side of the bar stand five big barrels of wine, three on the bottom and two on top, and a few kegs of spirits also sold on tap. On the other side are three rectangular marble tables with wrought-iron legs. They are pushed back against a wall decorated up to halfway with tiles, in which a window with a faded old blind opens on to the Calle Torrente de las Flores. At the back, the bar narrows and becomes gloomier near a table football game standing beneath a lamp with a green shade that until two years ago lit a billiard table here. The business is based on sales from the barrel rather than what is served in the bar, and the regular customers who drop in for a drink are few and far between, especially on weekdays. Anyone glancing into the dark tavern from the street would likely as not see the predatory, hunched outline of a silhouette at the bar, the wavering shadow of a solitary, patient drinker with a glass of wine in his hand, and yet apart from the four or five locals addicted to dominoes or card games on weekend afternoons, the same ones who on summer nights take their stools and a cold beer and sit out on the pavement, or the gang of young boys who gather noisily around the table football before moving on to a dance at La Lealtad or the Verdi, the bar is an odorous cave of shadows and silence.
When Señora Mir enters, Ringo buries his head still deeper into his book, and finishes the paragraph about the wounded lion: All of him, pain, sickness, hatred and all of his remaining strength, was tightening into an absolute concentration for a rush.
“Hello there, Vicky, how’s things?” says the woman behind the bar.
“So-so.”
“Good heavens, I haven’t seen you for days! And if you only knew what I have to tell you!”
“This soda siphon you gave my daughter doesn’t work.”
“I’ve got a surprise for you, Vicky. I was waiting for you …”
“You press it but nothing comes out, look!”
“I’m sure it wasn’t me who gave it her. I always test them first.”
“Then it must have been your brother, but what’s the difference?”
“Okay, I’ll give you another one. But listen …”
“And fill this bottle with a litre of white, would you?”
“Of course!” Then, dropping her voice to a syrupy whisper: “But first there’s something I have to tell you, something that’ll interest you, sweetheart, and how!”
Señora Mir does not appear to hear her. All of a sudden she has thrown back her head, arched her back and twisted round in a contrived gesture of coquettish abandon. She is putting on this acrobatic display simply to examine her calf, stick out her tongue, moisten the middle finger and rub off a stain on the firm skin below her knee. She does it with such a fatigued, rehearsed gesture, blinking her eyes as she does so, that Ringo finds it hilarious. A woman like her shouldn’t do these things, he thinks: she’s stumpy, ugly, has folds on the back of her neck, too big a backside and too much hair in her armpits, too much lipstick. Not to mention her impossible eyelashes with all that sticky guck on them, that buxom delight she shows when she is whistled at in the street, and the hint of frustration and disappointment that appears in her eyes the harder she tries to please. A week has gone by since she played dead on tracks dating back to the year dot, and she’s still living in the year dot and making herself look ridiculous.
As she straightens up, she discovers the young lad bent over his book.
“You’re Berta’s son, aren’t you?” A friendly fluttering of her eyelashes precedes a kind of apology. “Well, I mean Berta’s adopted son … you were studying to be a musician and had to abandon the idea, I know.” Her rough voice contrasts strangely with her smiling plump doll’s face. Noticing the sling and the bandage, she adds: “What’s that? What happened to you?”
He closes his eyes and the book, leaving the fate of the wounded lion for a more suitable moment. Disgruntled, he starts playing notes on the marble tabletop with the fingers of his left hand.
“Huh!” he pants. “My finger got caught in a rolling mill.”
“Good gracious! How did it happen? Where?”
A blink of his eyes, not magical this time, and the slow twisting of the plated gold traps his finger once more, then the two steel rollers swallow it.
“At the workshop,” he reluctantly replies.
“Oh, how terrible! I’m really sorry, my lad. But you’re feeling better now, aren’t you?”
This time he says nothing. He intends to make it clear he wants nothing to do with this vulgar, unpleasant kind of thing, still less with the romantic heroine playacting Señora Mir goes in for.