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“Can I ask you a question, dear? Don’t be angry, but I don’t quite get it. Who has to forgive who? You him, or him you?”

“Oh, Paqui, I would have forgiven him, I really would. May God forgive me, but if only he’d given me time … You have to believe me! I made a mistake, one of those great blunders of mine! What I need is for him to know that, and to pardon me for insulting him and slapping him like that!”

“You slapped his face? My, my, that must have been some scene!”

“Oh, yes, it was, it was!”

“That’s such terrible luck, sweetheart! And now it’s all over, what do you think now about what happened, Vicky?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Well, I’ve just told you. I messed up. When I came home that day my back was crucifying me. I’d just had to deal with poor María Terol — you know, with her hundred and ten kilos, her cellulitis, and that bad temper of hers. Anyway, I was exhausted and I lost the plot. And then those damned tram tracks! Why on earth did they leave them there like that to confuse me still further! They should be dug up, and the cobblestones along with them!”

“I’m not talking about that, Vicky.” Señora Paquita hesitates before saying it: “I could swear there’s another woman involved … am I right?”

“There’s always another woman.”

“How did you find out? Did he admit it?”

Señora Mir shakes her head.

“Of course not. But a married woman knows when these things are happening. Especially if she’s well past the forty mark.”

“Ha! You’re not the only one there, sweetheart. But what’s worse would be if it was something serious, I mean … something long-lasting. If it was just a fling …”

“The thing is, apparently there was nothing to it. I’ve already told you, I imagined things … and he took it very badly. Anyway, what can you do? Everyone knows there’s no true love without suffering, don’t they, sweetheart?”

“That’s a load of nonsense, Vicky. Complete nonsense. At your age.”

“Maybe he thought our relationship was going nowhere … It could be, you never know with men … Anyway, I made it easy for him, and he took off!”

“I can’t believe it! You’re lying. You must be lying …”

“No I’m not, Paquita, I swear! I should never have slapped him like that!”

Señora Paquita stared at her, still suspicious.

“Well, that’s your business. But let me tell you one thing: you ought to go and find him as quickly as you can.”

“But where, for heaven’s sake? He never told me where he lived. Did he ever tell you or your brother?”

“He never said a word to me.”

“Well, he didn’t tell me either,” sighs Señora Mir.

“Really? He was a strange fellow, wasn’t he?”

“Stranger than a white blackbird, sweetheart.”

Yes, a strange fellow indeed. Señora Paquita recalls that when he first began to drop in he was very chatty and likeable, as well as being a bit forward. Especially with her, although there was never any way of knowing whether he was being serious or not. One day he told her with a perfectly straight face that he was intrigued by the effect of the passage of time on potatoes. No, he wasn’t from the countryside, he wasn’t interested in the evolution of vegetables: he explained that he had once been the trainer of a youth football team in El Carmelo, and used to massage the boys’ legs with an ointment made from oil and crushed wrinkled potatoes. He was unsure how long it took potatoes to go soft and start to wrinkle, and apparently one day he heard about Señora Mir, a masseuse who was expert in that kind of thing. Someone gave him her card, but he had lost it, which was why he had come into the bar to ask if they knew where she lived.

“And there was another thing yesterday that took me by surprise. Just as he was leaving …” Señora Paquita falls silent as a fat, very flustered-looking man comes in and slumps at the bar, calling urgently for a cold beer from the barrel. Señora Mir takes advantage of the pause to ask for a small glass of brandy from the keg, and another with soda water. The customer is not a local, and so Señora Paquita avoids striking up a conversation with him. She serves the beer in a mug, then pours her friend’s brandy and soda water. She turns on the tap of a barrel of wine and uses a funnel to fill Señora Mir’s bottle. She goes back behind the counter, places the bottle on it, pushes the cork in, and forces it down. The man noisily gulps down the beer, dries the sweat from the back of his neck with a handkerchief, and casts a sideways glance at the plump woman next to him. She is staring at the picture on a calendar hanging from the wall behind the counter. The picture is a reproduction of an old sepia photograph showing a football team from the past posing on a pitch before a game. Shaking her head slightly, Señora Mir says under her breath:

“He would be better on his knees.”

Somewhat bewildered by this, the customer finishes his beer, pays, and goes out.

Crouching at his table, Ringo goes over the instructions for five-finger exercises in the notebook he has just opened on top of his book of stories. The musical stave still attracts him more than fiction, and will go on doing so throughout that summer and well into the autumn. For the moment though he finds it hard to concentrate, because the two women have struck up their conversation again:

“And just as he was leaving,” Señora Paquita resumes without any kind of pre-amble, picking up the beer mug and wiping the counter with a cloth, “I was about to ask him why he didn’t just post the letter rather than bringing it here. I thought it was odd he wanted to entrust it to me …”

“It’s because of the girl,” Señora Mir cuts her short, and her moon face puckers as though she is on the verge of tears. “I’m sure it’s because he was thinking of the girl. Because let me tell you, Paqui, if that man talks about what I’m afraid he might talk about in the letter, there’s no way he would want it to fall into my daughter’s hands. There are some things a young girl shouldn’t know about … That’s why he doesn’t want to send it by post. So when he comes back with the letter, keep it safe and give it to me directly. And not a word to Violeta.”

“Don’t worry.”

Señora Mir downs the brandy, then moistens her lips with a sip of soda. She pays, tucks the wine bottle under her arm, and makes to leave the bar, the soda siphon dangling from one finger.

“Above all, Paqui, whatever you do, if the letter arrives, make sure you don’t give it to Violeta. I’ll come and get it.”

“Of course, darling. Don’t give it another thought.”

*

Exercise One: Place your forearms and your extended fingers on the surface of a table you are sitting at. Then, first with the right hand and then the left, and finally with both together, lift your fingers in the order indicated. Make sure you lower the finger you have raised before lifting the next one, and repeat each sequence several times: 1-2-3. 3-2-1. 1-4-2.1–2.4.2-1-3 …

He practises this for a while with his left hand on the marble tabletop, then stops and stares out of the window. A blink of his eyes, the trick he has often employed to enter the world of desire and fantasy with the rest of his gang, and on the scarred wall on the far side of the street a poster suddenly appears, announcing in red letters the debut concert of the GREAT NINE-FINGERED PIANIST. That would make a good advertisement, wouldn’t it? Who knows what the finger of fate holds in store for you, even when that finger has been tossed into the limbo of unborn pianists? A few men pass by the poster, walking briskly or wearily from their homes to other bars and taverns. Some of them stay close to the walls, and all of a sudden one of them comes to a halt, head down and staring at the ground as if a chasm has suddenly opened beneath his feet. A little higher up the same street, in the middle of the tiny island of melancholy, moss-covered cobbles, the lengths of tram tracks emerging from an abolished yesterday stubbornly abide. Ringo feels a sudden, throbbing pain in the nail that is no longer part of his finger, nor the finger part of his hand. He closes the music lesson and returns to the book of short stories.