After the Christmas festivities are over, one rainy afternoon Violeta and her father set off down the street under an umbrella to Plaza Rovira, where they wait for a taxi to pass by. That day the ex-councillor really does look like a different person: sad and downcast beneath the umbrella his daughter is holding, with the beret over his eyes and staring obsessively at his hands, he lets her adjust his scarf and do up a button on his raincoat. Shortly afterwards they take a taxi and disappear in the rain towards San Andrés. Three days later, suffering from acute liver pains, Señor Mir is rushed to the Hospital del Mar.
More or less around the same date, exactly three days after he has turned sixteen, one 11 January as night is drawing in, Ringo is reading at his table in the Rosales bar when Roger comes in saying that a woman has been killed in the Delicias cinema. But not in the stalls, the toilets or the foyer: in the projection room. A strange story, the intrigue increasing the more they learn about it. The victim is a prostitute, and was found strangled with a tie on a pile of reels in their cans next to the projector. They say the murderer is the projectionist, and that the police found him in the back row of seats even before the film had finished. Nothing further is known for the moment. The cinema was cleared and sealed off by order of the authorities. El Quique and a kid from his street, who had sneaked into the first afternoon performance, say there was a break in the film that lasted longer than usual. They were showing “La calle sin sol” and “Gilda”, which was interrupted during the scene in the casino when she starts to undo the zip on her dress and says I can never get the hang of zips, but if somebody would like to help me … at which an admirer in the audience shouted that he would be delighted. That was when the film went off, El Quique explained, and added he was already expecting it to, because of course they would cut a film like that, with a gorgeous woman about to be shown stark naked …
Over the next few days more details emerge; the streetwalker was a beautiful Chinese woman, an ex-acrobat and variety artiste, who had once been something more than a friend to ex-councillor Mir, and she wasn’t strangled with a tie but a black stocking.
“With a length of film,” Señor Agustín asserts. “The cashier saw her when she was being carried out. They say it was the murderer himself who called the police, but that after that he had nothing to say, he was in a daze.”
“It seems the victim was wearing her coat, but with nothing underneath,” suggests El Quique.
For a while this is the only subject of conversation in the bar, as everyone speculates about who the victim was, and on the murderer’s motive; whether he killed her out of jealousy, if she lived at the top of Calle Verdi and had a son, that she wasn’t a Chinese tart but was from Aragón, and also that she had often been seen entering or leaving the police station on Calle Travesera. Finally the topic is exhausted, and the lively conversation among the customers turns elsewhere. The same occurs with the gossip about Ramón Mir’s recovered mental health, which is put down to his recent enthusiastic addiction to whoring and living it up. Soon enough, everything slides back into the slime of winter that the days seem to slither along, into the uniform grey that the neighbourhood and the city bear like a stigma, so that it seems yet again that the things that really matter in life must be different, and must take place far from here, far from us. For example, lads: Larry Darrell renounces the beautiful Isabel and heads for the Himalayas in search of the fount of wisdom on a razor’s edge; the young Nick Adams stares at the trout’s fins moving as they struggle against the current of the river with two hearts, Jay Gatsby rows eagerly in his small rowing boat out to a gangster’s luxury yacht, towards a dream that will be his downfall, and Ringo installs himself yet again at his table by the tavern window and watches night close in on the street which, the same as every Sunday at this time, appears suddenly inhospitable and abandoned.
Shortly afterwards, Señora Mir and Violeta leave their building and walk arm-in-arm down the centre of the street, fresh from the hair salon and dressed to the nines. They walk quickly and nervously, whispering and leaning against one another. Yet again, the mother is accompanying her daughter to the dance at the Verdi, or possibly the Cooperativa La Lealtad. According to the gang, it is the mother who chooses the venue, and that always depends on the expectations roused the previous Sunday by the attention and behaviour some young man has shown to Violeta; how often he had asked her to dance, if he had offered her a drink or not, if he spoke politely and chatted to her or only wanted to get close and rub himself against her. Her mother’s got eyes in the back of her head, El Quique used to say, before you can try anything she’s spotted you.
As on every Sunday, when the two of them are passing the Rosales bar, Señora Mir relinquishes Violeta’s arm and comes in to say hello to Señora Paquita. Sometimes, after the usual question, she stays talking to her for a few minutes while she has a small glass of brandy. Violeta waits for her in the street, pacing up and down and looking thoughtful, with her hair in surprising tight curls round her pale face, wearing a short grey cloth coat with velvet collar and cuffs, red woollen gloves and lilac medium-heeled shoes. Yet again her mother has said she’ll be right out, that she will only be a minute, but Violeta knows this isn’t the case. She knows that if her mother tosses down the first drink, she’ll ask for another one and sip it slowly, losing all sense of time.
“Pour me another one, Paqui,” says Señora Mir, leaning on the bar. “I’m ruining my liver, but don’t worry, princess, it can take it. And it warms the cockles of my heart. It’s a long walk to Calle Montseny, and it’s really cold out there.”
“Why don’t you go to the Salón Verdi? It’s much closer?”
“Because the Mario Visconti Orchestra is on at La Lealtad. Their singer is fantastic, very melodious … Well, my daughter likes him.”
She coughs as she says this, and looks away. Today she has no wish to see herself reflected in her carping eyes. She is dressed and made up so strikingly she seems to have more on her than can possibly be taken in at first glance. She is spilling out of a short grey woollen coat with a rabbit-fur collar, allowing glimpses of a cherry-red blouse that matches the fierce scarlet of her lips. She appears on edge, suffering from the cold, and vulnerable, her voice hoarse and weak. She has tried to bring everything together with an elaborate toilette that must have taken hours to apply, but has been unable to camouflage the deep lines round her eyes or the sour grimace at the corners of her mouth, or to rekindle the liveliness of her eyes, the cheerful, unexpected glint that has always been her most eloquent response to the world. Her face is no longer capable of that radical transformation that gave rise to all the ribaldry, and beneath the laboriously applied cosmetics there is no disguising the face of a woman worn down by the daily grind and by a broken marriage. The coat smells of wet sheep, and hanging from her shoulder is a big leather bag with a lacy fringe. The heavy bracelets tinkle as she anxiously tugs off her gloves and raises the glass to her lips with trembling fingers, cupping her other hand to conceal it as if she was shielding it from the wind or from prying eyes.