The lion is still alive; it will fight to the death. Señora Mir and Señora Paquita are standing in the doorway, chatting away. Ringo leans his elbow on the table and covers his ear with his free hand so that he can escape to the protective undergrowth, the wild fragrance of the tall grasses on the Kenyan savannah, where the wounded lion lies flattened against the ground, ears pinned back, waiting for the chance to pounce.
5. THE FINGER OF FATE
In the summer of 1948 the boy turns fifteen. He has loose change in his pocket, and a phantom finger on his right hand. In the workshop one grey, muggy morning that was weighing heavily on him, he was caught daydreaming at the electric rolling mill, trying to hum the first notes of a simple tune he could not remember properly, when in a flash the machine swallowed his index finger.
The fatal distraction, the unfortunate musical teaser that led to the accident were due above all, he thinks, to the sense of frustration that has been at the back of his mind ever since, three years earlier, he had to give up his classes in music theory and piano (his mother was forced to remind him that they were poor) and to his increasing distaste for the workshop and the jewellery trade, for gold, platinum, diamonds and their sparkle. He remembers that on that fateful morning as he left the apartment very early, his lunch tucked under his arm wrapped in a sheet of newspaper, he felt particularly bitter as he went over, as usual, the questions and answers from his favourite theory book from the Municipal Conservatoire. Half an hour later, standing at the rolling mill and persistently trying to recall the song, something in English that began with the words “Long ago and far away” that he had heard in a Technicolor film two days earlier, annoyed because he couldn’t quite get it, and carelessly not paying attention to what he was doing, he brought disaster on himself. But his musical obsession was only partly to blame. Even though he might not care to admit it, the fatal slip that cost him his finger was mostly due to the fact that he had not the slightest interest in his prospects in the workshop, to a secret abandonment that had long been building up inside him. After spending two years sweeping the floor until he completed his time as apprentice and message boy, he had been working for three months on the craftsmen’s bench using the blowtorch, the files and the saw, and trying hard to do things properly, but his initial enthusiasm for the trade had dimmed. Deep down inside, he had begun to doubt whether he was suited to becoming a goldsmith. To make things worse, all he is given to do now are simple, boring tasks like repairs, soldering little chains, making the occasional plain wedding ring, melting and preparing alloys for welding. He cannot say he hates the job, but something isn’t as it should be. He feels he is capable of creating delicate, highly artistic pieces, and those simple tasks bore him so much he finishes them as quickly as he can without paying them any great attention. Besides, it’s no life having to spend all these hours shut up in the workshop: from nine in the morning to one in the afternoon, and then from three to seven: eight hours a day altogether from Monday to Friday, plus five hours on Saturday morning, five times eight hours makes forty, plus five on a Saturday gives forty-five, and then there are four hours each Saturday afternoon when as an apprentice he had to sweep the floor and clean the workmen’s benches: altogether that comes to forty-nine hours a week. No, dammit, that’s not a life.
He is working standing up at the electric rolling mill, alternating these gloomy thoughts with questions and answers he has learnt by heart from his old theory book …
— What is the musical stave?
A guideline comprising five parallel and equidistant horizontal lines.
— How are the lines of the stave counted?
From the bottom up.
… while at the same time reliving the scene where Gene Kelly sings as he stacks chairs on the tables of his bar, but he can’t get the start of the tune right, it stubbornly slips away from him in the workshop’s busy thrum, the buzz of saws and files, beating hammers, the hiss of welding torches. At the outset, the block of gold he is rolling is the size and shape of a half-used bar of soap. All he has to do is start up the machine and push the gold between the two steel rollers so that it gradually grows thinner and thinner, taking it out on the far side and carefully pushing it back in once more, making sure to keep his fingers well away from the machine, because the thinner the bar becomes, the more dangerous it is. Ringo knows this, he knows the way the gold starts to coil and snake and lash out as it is swallowed by the rollers, but now his mind is elsewhere, and his finger has gone to sleep, as if it is resting on the bottom line of the stave.
Just a few seconds before the drama occurs, Gorry has joined him in his musical daydreaming. For some time now Ringo has had the feeling that the blasted bird he killed years before with an airgun is lurking nearby; first he hears him chirping inside the jukebox of his head and closes his eyes, and then, as he gazes back through the looking-glass of time, still blurred from the rain falling on his grandfather’s vegetable patch, he imagines he can see him beneath the workbench, pecking at the greasy sheet of newspaper in which he wrapped his lunchtime roll of tinned anchovies. After five years buried in the earth, the sparrow’s leaden eye has grown even darker, but the bird is not illuminated by any spotlight, surrounded by any glow or fake shining halo: this is not a hallucination, it is simply there, trotting like a little clockwork bird with a live worm in its mouth. Ringo has his finger on the trigger once more. Isn’t it a relief that it is guzzling a worm? thinks the repentant hunter: the sparrow also hunts and kills, so it’s a case of everyone for themselves … Yes, but you don’t keep your promises, my lad, you swore you’d come and visit me in my humble grave, but I’m still waiting.
“He’s talking to himself,” someone comments behind his back. “He’s always on another planet, that boy. Wake up, nano!”
Too late. For the workmen, the rollers swallow Ringo’s stupid finger because he is always talking to himself at the machine, and because the stupid finger is right where it shouldn’t be, recklessly poised on the gold bar as it slides through the rollers, a bar that has become increasingly bent, twisting uncontrollably up and down on itself, transformed all of a sudden into a lethal snare. Ringo has always preferred to believe it happened because the finger, obeying the secret suicidal impulse of a depressive music-lover, simply did not wish to lift off in time. I’ll be the doh and soh on the ivory keyboard of fame or I’ll be nothing in this life, he imagined the finger whispering to him before it sacrificed itself, a verbal fantasy born of the musical stave, but which he sees as being more real even than the workshop itself, with everything it contains, more real even than his own home and the church and the gang who love to tell their tall tales in the Las Ánimas garden or on the slopes of the Montaña Pelada. The suicidal act occurred far from the keyboard and sheet music, far from the piano and the lesson book — everything that, cursing his fate, he was forced to give up because there was no money to pay for any more classes. Distracted by this feeling of resentment and by his musical daydreaming, he scarcely notices the tug at the metacarpus of his index finger or the subsequent crushing of the three knuckles as they are flattened by the rollers, together with the gold bar.