“Anything is possible where he’s concerned,” says Manuel. He recalls the arrogant figure with his puffed-out chest, black, oiled hair and jutting chin. By now he had shaved off his moustache, but when he spoke, and above all when he shouted, it was as if he still had one. “I haven’t seen that bastard since I ran into him on the street about a year ago. He was with a spectacular-looking woman, a Chinese girl. They were about to go into the police station on Travesera Dalt, and the woman stopped on the pavement to put some lipstick on. That annoyed him so much he grabbed the lipstick from her and almost made her swallow it …”
“That woman you’re talking about,” cut in the Rat-catcher, “is about as Chinese as Columbus. She’s a whore who works with the police. I’ve already told you about her — she’s dangerous.”
“Yes, we know,” says Uncle Luis. Then he adds slyly: “But what about the snake? Didn’t you tell us you went to the church because a snake had slipped in and scared the life out of an old biddy? I seem to remember there are gardens and a pond beside that convent …”
“It was a plaster snake. Just plaster painted green. But it looked real, the son of a bitch. It was behind the confessional. It had fallen off an image of the Immaculate Conception, a relic so old it was falling to pieces. It was only a lump of plaster — you know, the snake curled up beneath the feet of the Virgin. When I saw it on the floor it was just lying there, curled up and still, with the Virgin’s big toe on one of its coils. That’s what the whole fuss was about: a piece of broken plaster on the floor. The nuns thought they might be able to stick it back on, but no chance … Pass me the wine, will you? Don’t you want some dessert? Go on, try this peach. Cut it into slices and put them in your glass. The best desserts are those that allow you to go on drinking, the rest are a load of rubbish. Shit, you really need to learn how to eat properly!”
*
“Now, let’s see. We were talking about poor Victoria.”
“Señora Mir is a bit nuts, Mother, everyone knows that.”
“Why are you so hard on her, Son? She can be a bit extreme sometimes, but she’s a good person. You shouldn’t believe all that’s said about her.”
Not everything, of course, he thinks, because he’s heard some unbelievable things; for example, one Sunday evening a regular in the Rosales bar said she had lost a marble and found a pussy, and this brought loud laughter from all those keen on coarse jokes. He’s not going to tell his mother any of that sort of thing, especially since it seems she and Señora Mir had been good friends. Yet he’s heard sordid stories about her involvement with some disreputable characters, none of them local men, for example a travelling salesman who had no recollection of what he was meant to be selling, a drunken good-for-nothing who liked to think he was a proud, masculine type and theatrically refused (but only for a while) to have her pay for his drink in the Rosales bar. According to a comment he overheard Señora Mir herself make to Paquita, he was a dirty pig who never cleaned his teeth and whose kisses were full of tomato seeds. And there was another one, an old acquaintance, a retired nurse who was diabetic: a poor devil who didn’t last long because he died on her. And there was talk of others, each one more defeated and boastful than the last, men like shadows who seemed to be looking for a bar where they could hide from the world.
It’s not that Ringo pays much attention to the neighbourhood gossip, or takes part in the low banter in the bar, but although the pretence at humour and smuttiness in these slanders might not be in the least bit funny, and be very unfair and rude, he still prefers it to the hypocritical tittle-tattle and the envious whispers going round concerning the risible, moth-eaten romances of the queen of back-rubs, that show-off who is turning into an old wreck and behaves like one, a woman who goes round painted like a doll, behaves like a tart and gives off a whiff of rancid, fleeting and improbable passions: a character that seems to him so stale, so vulgar and so ridiculous it cannot be true. It doesn’t interest him, he doesn’t believe it. He bursts out laughing just to see her crossing the street and stopping to straighten her stocking. She turns on herself so slowly, with a studied air of helplessness and complacency, and takes so long waving her arms about, that as if by magic the seam rights itself before she can even touch the stocking. And when he then sees her walking to the bar swaying her hips on her ridiculous high-heeled shoes, wiggling her backside for all to see, it is almost more than he can take. It is precisely because she is so real, so close and so ordinary, that he grows irritated and perturbed: to him she is too closely linked to the drabness of the neighbourhood, the tiny deceptions, ruses and low tricks that are its unavoidable daily commerce.
What nastiness are they peddling now, what’s the gossip, Son, what are the comments in the Rosales, his mother asks as she examines Ringo’s fingernails. Well, I don’t know, it seems that the fit of madness she had in the street was because a married man, much older than her, someone called Alonso, had broken off his romance with her. Apparently during a massage session she had a terrific argument with that man, who had come to her because he had dreadful pain in his bad leg. There were shouts and slaps, although it’s not clear if it was her or him, and he decided to leave her on the spot. You can keep your silvery hands, your creams and your jealousy, you stuck-up blonde! they say he said: I’m not making anything up. And that now she is waiting for a letter, there isn’t a day goes by when she doesn’t drop into the bar to ask if it has arrived; at least, that’s what Señora Paquita tells anyone who’ll listen. Apart from that, not much is known about her fancy man; they say he didn’t live in the neighbourhood, and that he was or had been a footballer and tram-driver. He used to wear a ring he himself had made from bone, and so Señor Agustín said he was someone who had been in prison …
“Oh my, and you claim you don’t hear anything,” his mother says. I know nothing about this man, but I do know that he has been very kind and considerate with Vicky.”
“Oh yes, of course,” Ringo recalls with a smile. “He used to take her roses.”
“Roses?”
“Yes, paper ones. Blue ones. He could be seen every Sunday in the bar with his blue rose, marking time until he went across to see Señora Mir… I’m not making anything up.”
“Perhaps not, but you’re talking utter rot. How could they have been paper roses? Nobody gives paper roses.”
“They don’t? Have you seen ‘The Thief of Baghdad’, mother? Don’t you know that anyone who smells the Blue Rose of Forgetfulness cannot remember anything about his past life …?”
‘That’s enough of your films. And stay still or I’ll hurt you.” She starts cutting his nails and then bandages his hand again, before adding thoughtfully, as if to herself: “And how can anyone know that Victoria slapped that man — who saw her? And besides, just because he says he’s going to leave her, why does that mean she has to go and sit on those tracks and cause a scandal in the middle of the street? Victoria has always been a bit odd, but to go to such lengths …”
She doesn’t trust appearances. There must be something more, she says, or she wouldn’t have exposed herself to such an absurd situation, one that was bound to make a mockery of her in the neighbourhood. Or perhaps she really did intend to commit suicide, even if the tracks were no longer in use? Familiar as she is with medical terms, she suggests the possibility that her former work colleague might have suffered some kind of psychopathic attack, a temporary personality disorder.
Ringo shows no interest in resolving his mother’s doubts. As far as Señor Alonso was concerned, all he could say was that he was a strange sort who did not say a lot, and no longer came into the bar. Grudgingly, he recalls him: he used to sit at a table in the back with his sports jacket round his shoulders, drink an aperitif or coffee with a slug of aniseed, and sometimes play patience or turn his hostile gaze on the rowdy adolescents who, before deciding whether to go on to dance at the Verdi or La Lealtad, relieved the boredom of a Sunday afternoon round the table football. So what was the gentleman in question really like? Hmm, it would take the smartest regular in the bar a million words to explain something that he could convey with a single glance. Yes, but at first sight he seemed more like a poor fellow, lame in one leg, getting on in years, ugly-looking, tall, thin and slightly knock-kneed. He could add that he had light-coloured eyes, a big, aquiline nose in a wrinkled face, a ridiculous fish mouth and a thick head of white hair combed back off his forehead, but his mother has already had enough.