The blood does not spurt immediately, but starts to flow a few seconds after the finger has been snapped up. No-one in the workshop hears him cry out or moan, partly because, to his surprise, it doesn’t hurt. He switches the machine off, and doesn’t want, or doesn’t dare, look down at his hand yet. Raising it to his eyes, he doesn’t want to see it; when he can finally bring himself to do so, he stares at it as if it were alien to him, a fleshy appendage not part of his body. He turns slowly, hand held aloft, towards the nearest craftsman, who is horrified when he sees the blood gushing. Ringo himself has still not felt anything apart from a slight tickling sensation, but as soon as he realises he has lost a finger, he feels dizzy, his legs give way, and he starts to pour with sweat. Shouts and curses all round him; a race to the first aid box. Wrapped in an improvised bandage, and with his arm held high in the air, he is rushed to the emergency department at the Hospital Clínico, from where he is later discharged.
*
Where do pianists’ dead fingers go? he wonders bitterly. He asks out loud:
“Why is it that the finger I don’t have hurts so much, mother?”
“If you keep still a moment, I’ll explain,” she replies, cutting open the end of the bandage round the wound with her left hand. “Goodness me, just look at this. How did you let it get infected? What have you been doing?”
“I haven’t done anything.”
“But look at it. Hasn’t it been hurting?”
“Well, now you mention it, I do feel a bit feverish.”
“There you go again. It’s almost as if you want to have a fever.”
“What really hurts is my fingernail. Why does that hurt, if I haven’t got one?”
“And look at this scarf, all covered with blood. I’ll have to throw it away.”
“Couldn’t you make me a sling with one of your headscarves? One of those pretty ones you have.”
His hand is a mass of bloody gauze, and his mother changes his bandage as often as she can because the wound is suppurating. But the long hours she works at the old people’s home means she cannot do all her tasks at home, and so she leaves his lunch prepared for him — boiled rice with sweet potato, or an onion or bean tortilla — which her son eats on his own, listening to music on the radio and with a novel open beside his plate. He has finished La peau de chagrin and started Hunger. In the evening he waits for his mother so they can have supper together, and sometimes peels potatoes or sweet potatoes, or shucks beans or peas while he is waiting, even though she tells him off because he could get the wound infected. It is a week since the accident in the workshop, and two since the Cleansing Brigade left to fumigate some warehouses down by the River Oñar, in Gerona. This is what his mother has told him, and that there was so much to be done in the area that it would be some time before his father got back from the trip.
Occasionally, the missing finger is unbelievably painful. Especially the nail, wherever it is now. The loss of his index finger has left Ringo in a permanent state of bemusement and melancholy, often made worse by an anxious concern over what life holds in store for him. He thinks that with his finger amputated, there is very little he will be able to do in the jeweller’s workshop; beyond that, he feels his life has changed decisively. What work could he do after the amputation? How would four fingers cope, for example, with handling a saw in a delicate, complex operation on a pendant with enamel and precious stones? He would no longer be able to hold the file or the pliers properly: he might not even be able to grip a pair of pincers, or a borax brush. Files, pliers, a drill and its bits, anvil, dies, blowtorch, saw, doming block, buff — words that until now had stood for the tools of his trade no longer demanded his attention, and were beginning to settle into the past of his artisan memory, becoming as rusty as the two useless lengths of track half-buried in the old cobblestones of the street.
Then there is the other painful consequence of the accident, one that for him is much more important than work: he imagines his right hand scuttling up and down the piano keyboard like a grotesque, maimed spider, the hand that retains a memory of the very first notes and rhythms, of the five-finger exercises and the beginning of some simple pieces that had taken him so much effort to learn, such as “Für Elise” or the “Vals de las olas”. Dooo-re-me-soh-dooo, ti-doh-re-doh-ti-do-mi-soh-tiii … He had always hoped that one day he would be able to renew his theory and piano lessons, and now, in spite of what has happened, with only nine fingers and all the odds against him, he still clings to this hope. He has no intention of giving up the chords or the rapid two-handed scales he used to play on the old, yellowing keyboard at maestro Emery’s — cigarette burns on the lowest keys, squawking bird sounds from the highest. Emery, a pianist who had played in popular orchestras but satisfied his love of classical music by giving lessons twice a week for twelve pesetas a month in the filthy, gloomy dining-room of a tiny flat on Calle Tres Señoras. Something tells Ringo that the old maestro, with his shiny bald head and tiny grey eyes like slits behind metal-framed glasses, with his seagull’s nose in unshaven cheeks, his quiet, translucent hands spotted with age, his incisive profile above the black outline of the piano and the poverty of his domestic setting, has only vanished temporarily from his life. He has had to bid farewell to the finger swallowed by the rolling mill, but not to the musical stave or the keyboard, which he hopes to recover some day along with the lessons. In the meantime, where do pianists’ dead fingers go? he notes in tiny handwriting in his secret black-backed notebook.
His relationship with music has always been an intuitive one, and is far from being selective. He hums with just as much respect and pleasure a Cole Porter tune or the soundtrack of films he has enjoyed — he knows by heart the stirring music from “Stagecoach” or “The Thief of Baghdad”, or the waltz from “Jezebel” — as he does a few bars from a Mozart sonata. He thinks of the musical scores he has stored away, and the dreams he had invested in them until the day of the accident, and waits for better days. Destiny has decided that the finger to be sacrificed would be his index finger, the fickle finger of fate, the one that also pulled the trigger in his grandfather’s vegetable garden five years earlier, the one that plays the re in the five-finger exercises he misses so badly. He didn’t have time to learn much, it had been barely ten months, one hour each on Mondays and Thursdays caressing the keys and reading music out loud at a three-four rhythm, but he considers what little he did learn as a treasure, a rare privilege. “Raise your head, don’t look down at the keyboard so much,” the maestro’s smoke-filled voice still floats in the air: “The music isn’t in the keys, it’s in the memory of your fingers and in your heart.”
His fingers’ memory. He would find it hard to explain, but he could have sworn that sitting at that battered, nicotine-stained keyboard, he had learnt lessons that would help him to live. It wasn’t that Emery ever gave him explicit advice about anything — except on one occasion, when he had made fun of a companion whom he was way ahead of, and the maestro told him that to be good at the piano you had to be a good person — and yet, simply by the way he stilled Ringo’s hands, obliging him to leave them resting on the keyboard, calm and docile but alert, their tips barely touching the warped ivory and the black varnish of the semitones, refusing to allow him to press down until he had sung the whole score from memory, he had allowed him to absorb a knowledge that went far beyond these rudimentary lessons in music theory and piano, a certain way of understanding and accepting everything that was happening to him. He remembers that it was from this whirlwind of notes dancing on the stave and in his mind that one day he suddenly sniffed the scent of a new and strange discipline that he was more than willing to adopt in the future. Habits as simple as raising his arm as he started a bar, catching the notes in mid-air as if they were butterflies of light dancing in the darkness, or the routine of keeping his hands still but alert on the keys, anticipating the miracle of playing a harmonious chord: as the days went by, these habits somehow tended to turn into tiny moral precepts. As each lesson was ending, after a series of repeated, rapid scales, the maestro would always allow his pupil to close the piano, and every time Ringo, hands still on fire, carefully lowered the heavy lid on to the keyboard, he would let it drop the last few inches, and from the depths of the ancient piano he would be rewarded with an echoing boom that sounded both like a friendly farewell and a future promise. It was as if, during those happy days, music was the only thread in the loom of life, and in among the five lines of the musical stave he could glimpse the secret of the beauty the world had to offer. In his precarious adolescence, memorising a piece of music became something much more than a task to educate his ear; even though he could not know it at the time, the spirit and rhythm hidden in the stave would get into his bloodstream and make the readings of his favourite authors all the more memorable.