In his mind’s eye he sees once more his father at the counter of the Rosales bar, slowly turning towards him. He is very stiff and tipsy, clutching the glass of wine against his chest as if afraid somebody might snatch it from him, and muttering as he sees him pushing the door open:
“Here comes my dearly beloved son.” A sly smile. “You like Barcelona don’t you, my boy? You feel very safe in the big city, together with your second mother who saved you from the orphanage, don’t you? Your mother who loves you so much and cares for you. Isn’t that right?”
He ignores the reference to the orphanage and the second mother. He’s still on the threshold, holding the door open but not coming in.
“Mother’s waiting for you.”
“You prefer to live here, don’t you? Here, in this beautiful, damned capital of Catalonia. And all because I happened to see that taxi going by in the rain …”
“Mother says to come home, supper’s ready.”
“Don’t interrupt me! We live in the arsehole of the world, in the furthest, shittiest corner of our Catholic realm, and yet you’re as happy as can be. This is the city that saw you born almost by a miracle, and here you are, alive and kicking, and I’m pleased for you, my boy, but just so you remember, I was the one who spotted that taxi … Yes, this is where you’ll become a useful member of society, a famous pianist admired by all upstanding citizens: that’s what you think, isn’t it? Well, not exactly, pumpkin head! Your fine city is nothing more than a stinking sewer riddled with blue rats! You need to know that, because you grand piano virtuosos tend to be over-sensitive.”
With that he turned back to the counter, holding his glass out for Señora Paquita to fill for the umpteenth time. I’m not keeping count, he says, the tally of the glasses I’ve drunk is being kept by the Judeomasonic conspiracy. Oh yes, the intrepid Rat-catcher often says outrageous things like this, or even worse, while the bartender and the other customers laugh and exchange knowing winks, and the boy wonders why they laugh at the jokes, why they encourage him.
“I’ve never seen a blue rat, father,” he says now in the bedroom. “One day in the sacristy at Las Ánimas I saw a big, fat rat on its hind legs chewing a cassock hanging from a peg. But it was grey, almost black.”
“Yes, rats and cassocks, pests the lot of them!” his father grunts as he puts on his work overall. “But it’s not the same, Son. Have you ever seen a fat, shiny rat writhing with poison? They crawl along squealing like condemned souls, vomiting blood from the mouth and arse. You wouldn’t be able to bear the sight.”
“Yes I would.”
“No, you wouldn’t. You’d wet your pants, I’m sure of it.”
In recent months he has grown exasperated that his father still considers him a child. He peers at the case on the bed, wondering about the mysteries it contains. His father shakes his head violently as though to rid himself of a bad dream. His unruly hair, with a greenish tinge that lends it a furious look, gives off a strong aroma of roasted coffee, and that is another mystery. A secret, he was told, yet another one. Sometimes he comes to the conclusion that the poverty and other ills his family suffer are due to all these secrets in his father’s life.
“Stay home and practise for your music lesson,” his father advises him. “Do-re-mi-fa-sol, that’s what you like best. Aren’t you always saying you want to be a musician when you grow up? Well then, get studying. Besides, your mother will be back soon from the clinic.”
“Oh, shit,” the boy moans to himself, then stretches out his hand to stroke the case with his fingertips, imagining its lethal contents. “Can I at least carry the poison case for you?”
Pulling on his rubber boots, his father snorts impatiently.
“Oh alright, you pain in the neck. But don’t get your hopes up, you’re to wait for me in the street.”
“All the time?”
“All the time. You’re not to come in. So take your music scores with you and do something useful.”
“Can I hold your revolver a moment?”
“What revolver? D’you think we’re in a gangster movie? Take a look at the world-famous pianist!”
*
The cloud-cast shadow slowly climbing the façade of the Selecto cinema appears to him like a theatre curtain rising when, alone and resigned to having to wait, he bends one knee on the pavement to tie his shoelaces. It’s a sunny but windy April afternoon. There’s not much traffic and the people going up or down Calle Salmerón don’t seem to detect the smell of poison he thinks must even now be spreading silently like a deadly green gas beneath the sealed-off entrance to the cinema and out of the projection room. He sees the men from the rat-catching brigade go in one by one through a small side door. They arrive at half-minute intervals; there are three of them, two in work clothes and one in ordinary attire. They walk by quickly without noticing him, although he knows the first two. The one in ordinary clothes is called Luis. He often comes to breakfast with his father when the latter is spending any length of time at home. The other is Manuel, and he arrives on a bike, and the boy includes the third man in the team because he approaches with the same stealthy walk as the other two, hands in the pockets of his faded overall and head sunk on his shoulders as though he were publicly ashamed of his rat-killing abilities. Some years earlier, when he was only a small boy, he had imagined the rat-catchers moving like squat robots, with green flashing eyes and knife-like fingers.
He whiles the time away by singing in his nasal, droning voice: “I’m King Rat the First, and I’m the Second, and I’m the Third”, parodying the zarzuela comic opera tune his music teacher is so fond of and sings whenever he sits at the piano. Before long he’s bored sick, and so devotes himself to obsessively imagining what is going on inside the cinema: he imagines his nose pricking at the smell of the pesticides floating over the stalls, he sees blue rats kicking the bucket, their bellies swollen, vomiting bloody froth from their mouths, crawling around under the seats and at the bottom of the screen, and also in the aisles, the toilets and the artistes’ dressing rooms. He sees his father holding one by the tail, a big, jowly rat with a snow-white lock of hair over its bloodshot eye, driven out of its mind by the poison. He sees all this from out in the street, and lives it intensely without missing a single detail, just as if he were listening to one of Fatty Cazorla’s tall tales.
He is hopping outside the cinema, scrupulously respecting the maze traced by the pavement tiles, aiming for a manhole cover with a worn, blurred maker’s name on it. Once he reaches it he turns round, still on one leg, and repeats his hops time and again. At each new turn he expects to see his father at the cinema entrance beckoning to him to join the hunt and extermination of the blue rats. His father doesn’t appear, but among the multi-coloured billboards announcing the acts of the variety artistes scheduled to appear, his attention is drawn to a poster about two metres high propped against the front of the building that shows a slender, smiling dancer in a figure-hugging black costume.
CHEN-LI, PUSS IN BOOTS
EXOTIC AND ACROBATIC DANCER