“And that was that, there was no way she would let go of you,” his grandmother concludes. “They agreed that Berta would keep you only for a while. As a wet nurse … Do you know what that means? Well, a year went by, and then another, and another, and the situation dragged on, and that’s how things stand now. So as you can see, the fact is you have two mothers. My word, but you’re a lucky thing, aren’t you? Don’t you know it’s a blessing to have a mother in heaven? You’re a blessed child, that’s what you are, a child who’s been blessed! Because that man could not have raised you, and you would have ended up in the foundlings’ hospital for sure, so the best thing you can do is give thanks to the heavens for being such a blessed child …” She studies his face, and adds: “Or are you still not convinced? How about if tomorrow I sew you a football from a pair of your grandfather’s old corduroy trousers? Come on, let me see your face … It’s alright, if you feel like crying, let it out.”
He doesn’t feel like crying, or anything of the kind. Not even a snivel, even though he doesn’t in any way feel blessed. All that’s going through his mind is a wish to play down everything he’s just heard. He feels the immediate need, in order to guard against any new, unexpected revelations, surreptitiously to convince himself that deep in his heart he always knew what he has just heard. Together with an observation of his grandmother’s, which over the course of time makes him smile: if that taxi with its headlights on had passed by just a minute before, in all likelihood he would not be here now staring at the flames in the hearth, he would never have come to this village or entered this house, there would be no airgun hidden in a wardrobe, nor any bird buried out in the vegetable garden with two pellets in its body … So it was all the result of a stroke of luck, a tremendous stroke of luck, and as a consequence, from this moment on the least stable and questioning part of himself will enjoy frequently venturing into the most incredible part of this story, in which a pair of taxi headlights shine brightly through the lashing rain.
“And be careful with what the schoolteacher is so fond of repeating,” his grandmother admonishes him in conclusion. “About a rich interior life! Interior life! Be very careful. Don’t go looking for trouble.”
“Of course not, Grandma. And listen,” he says, to confuse her and change the subject, “if we stuff the ball with corduroy as well, it will last longer. And it will look real.”
Now that he thinks about it, weren’t even the cloth balls his grandmother sewed for him so skilfully little more than well-intentioned lies? Down the tunnel of time, he sees her face pressed close to his, a cheery gleam in her moist eyes, squinting slightly because she is so near to him and because of the ambiguous itch of a conviction that she would not be able to put into words even if she wanted to: that life can be so unfair, unpredictable and precarious, so profoundly marked by loss and abandonment, that sometimes there is a need for compensation in the form of a stroke of luck or a soothing white lie.
That night he sleeps lulled by the perfume of the yellow winter melons under his bed. In the early hours, Gorry silently lands on one of the melons, grasps the silky rind in its claws, gathers its body and from its arse shoots its tiny machine gun: dark little droppings intended for Ringo as it peers defiantly at him through the slats of the bed and the mattress. It is about to fly off again when Ringo says:
Don’t go yet. Stay a while.
What for? So that you can shoot another pellet in my body?
No, so we can talk as friends.
Me, talk to you? What rubbish, nano! How can anybody imagine I want to talk to you as a friend, when you’re my murderer?
That morning his grandmother makes him another ball with the big needle she uses to sew sacks, one more that ends up with its innards hanging out between the feet of the boys playing in the square. Yet from that day on, Ringo prefers to spend many afternoons alone, reading in the vegetable garden. His grandmother has told him that when his mother comes she’ll tell him the whole story, because there are lots of things not even I know, things they haven’t wanted to tell me yet. But the oft-mentioned “bad patch” the Rat-catcher and Berta are going through down in the city, occasionally relieved by the grandmother’s trips with a basket of eggs, oil, a rabbit or hen, means that it is a long time before his mother reappears, and throughout that winter he spends many hours on his own in the garden, or in the improvised swing under the almond tree, or at school.
When spring arrives, his mother brings him from Barcelona Geneviève de Brabant, Treasure Island and the new adventures of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand, and chooses the right moment to talk to him. Bright-eyed, she delicately and knowingly brings together the random strands of the story until she has constructed a verbal artefact containing, she swears, the truth and nothing but the truth. When the boy insists, she finds herself forced to admit that it was her and not his father who saw the taxi headlights in the distance through the rainstorm.
“Why are you so interested in that anyway?”
“I thought Grandma had invented it. Because taxis don’t have their headlights on during the day, do they?”
“Well, this one did. Perhaps because of the rain, or because the driver had forgotten … You see, there’s an explanation for everything. But that’s not what is important for me. What’s important is that you believe me. You do, don’t you, Son?”
Her face and tender mouth so close to him, the faint aroma from the cherry-red lipstick, the dimples in her cheeks when she smiles, the quick flutter of her rough, reddened hands, the rain and the cab’s headlights, the gift of so eagerly anticipated new books, comics and annuals (better and more numerous than on previous occasions) to be read by the fire in the hearth on rainy days. He gives a silent nod, to avoid shouting it out loud: Yes, I believe you.
Later on, when she sees him lying out under the almond tree with his books and comics, she reminds him what a good idea it is to cover them — that way they’ll always be new, and again mentions how lucky he is.
“Just as well they weren’t burnt with all the rest, isn’t it?” she says, and adds with a smile: “Just in case, because of the flies. Do you remember, Son?”
And the memory of a big bonfire in the middle of the night, with the tallest, fiercest flames he has ever seen, takes him back for an instant to a ghostly scene in his own neighbourhood two years earlier, to a small, shadow-filled private garden where a pile of books, notebooks, photographs and documents splutter and burn, just in case.