“I know what you’re thinking,” he pants, limping and stifling his groans. “That heaven has punished me by messing up my ankle. That’s right, isn’t it?”
“It was just bad luck, Father.”
“My eye! It was you, jumping off in your sleep. Well anyway, no harm done.” He smiles and ruffles the boy’s hair. “Don’t forget: rats as black as cassocks, cassocks as black as rats.”
“Fine, but let’s see …” his voice fails him. He is reluctant to go on as he stares angrily at the limping figure’s huge, crushing feet. “You know things like that always make Mother cry … Why? Why do you always have to make her cry?”
“Well, you know what our Alberta the light of my life is like. She suffers over everything and everyone. Always. But she understands me … What’s wrong, lad?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on, Mingo, don’t be angry with me …”
“My name is Ringo!”
“Alright. Come here.”
The hand with its greenish-black nails feels for his shoulder, as so often seeking not just support for his physical weakness but also comradeship and complicity. The rough, poisonous hand slides from shoulder to averted cheek to give it a friendly pinch, but he rejects the contact and hurries on several metres, head down and distraught. What he most hates is the fact that his father will not yet treat him as an adult. He walks faster and faster, the case bouncing on his back and the rolled-up music theory notebook and sheet music poking out of his trouser pocket. All of a sudden he cannot contain his tears, and breaks into a run. He does so keeping a tight hold on the case with one hand and the music books with the other, and does not stop running or crying until he reaches home.
“Benedictus Domine, my son,” he hears his father’s tobacco-inflected voice in the distance. “A curse on them.”
— What is music?
The art of sounds.
— How is music written down?
By means of symbols, some of them known as principals, and others as secondaries.
— Which are the principal symbols?
There are four of them: the notes, the clefs, the rests and the accidentals.
— Where are they written?
On the stave.
3. APACHES GALLOPING ACROSS THE BEACHES OF ARIZONA
“You arrive at a gallop and start shooting, still on horseback. You have a revolver in each hand and are clasping the reins between your teeth. You’re a rider from the prairies who’s come from afar to avenge his sister’s honour. Got it? The war is over, but the sun didn’t start to shine again, the spring didn’t bring laughter, or anything of the kind. So you’re galloping across the Arizona desert in search of revenge, you gallop, gallop, gallop … Got it?”
The storyteller points to the smaller of the two Cazorla brothers. He goes on:
“And you are Bill’s co-pilot in his airplane. You look down, and what do you see? A furious, terrible tornado sweeping across the desert, devastating everything in its path, and then suddenly, in the midst of this incredible whirlwind, a piano. The Red Indians from the reservation have stolen it from some Dodge City saloon, or from a pioneer caravan on its way out West, or from an orchestra playing at our neighbourhood fiesta, maybe the Gene Kim Orchestra, who knows … Anyway, the piano is shiny, brand new: it’s a Steinway and Sons, so nice you just want to take it home, but how could you manage that? There’s an arrow bristling in the keyboard. The Apaches’ smoke signals are rising into the sky, bullets and arrows whistle past, and then, all of a sudden, a rain of fire falls on the Valley of Death, on the prairies and the rivers and the creeks and the sea, on everything on the far side of the Black Hills of Dakota.”
“The plane piloted by Bill Barnes, Air Adventurer, swoops over the desert,” adds Ringo after a strategic pause, “and you catch an occasional glimpse of the piano in the midst of the sandstorm, like a shiny black beetle, or better still, like a flashing black star fallen to earth and lashed by the storm …” This improvised and clumsily lyrical addition is not at all to the liking of his audience. One of them asks where Arizona lies on the map, but this question does not seem to interest anyone either. They are sitting in a circle like Red Indian braves on the southern side of the Montaña Pelada, eyes peeled and ears pricked: Chato Morales, Roger, the Cazorla brothers, Quique Pegamil, Julito, and Ringo himself. Apart from Julito Bayo, they’re all much poorer than him: they use bits of rope instead of belts, wear moth-eaten jerseys, short, patched trousers and rubber-tyre sandals. Several of them have shaven heads, a famished colouring, filthy knees and, in winter, raw chilblains on their fingers and ears. Their feet are always freezing, like an icy fever or a crushing Malay boot. Julito is the only one who goes to school, and although they are legally underage, they work whenever they can as errand boys, altar servers, or in grocers’ stores and inns. Today they have splashed each other with water from the Atzavara fountain on Calle Camelias, begged a glass of milk that was their only snack at the nearby social aid office; later, in the Camino de la Legua, they played football against the wall of the San Estanislao Kostka Centre, and finally, climbing up their street and the Carmelo main road from Plaza Sanllehy, covered in dust and kicking a bursting rag ball, they have fetched up on the southern slope of the bald hill, close to the north entrance to the Parque Güell.
“Got it?” He points to Quique. “You gallop and gallop.”
“And what am I doing all this time?” asks Julito impatiently. “I ask Winnetou for help, is that all? Are you going to leave me out again?”
He has been waiting for ages to take the lead in some spectacular action, but the narrator seems to have forgotten him. The distribution of roles is not always to the satisfaction of Ringo’s audience. Julito Bayo has greased wavy hair, is wearing checked socks, and a scapular under his vest; on Sundays and feast days he wears knickerbockers. His mother has a dry cleaner’s on Calle Rabassa, his father does removals in a van with the slogan BAYO AND SON MAKE MOVING FUN in blue lettering on the sides. He is a pupil at the Palacio de la Cultura, a posh school on Traversera de Dalt, which has a garden and a tall, scraggy eucalyptus that rises like a stop sign above the school walclass="underline" five branches that look like a gigantic hand spread to prevent any of the bleary-eyed boys from Carmelo or Guinardó from getting in.
“Your revolver has run out of bullets, so you have to wait for help to arrive,” the narrator explains. He turns to Quique Pegamil: “Where were we? … Oh, yes. We come out of the sandstorm. The Apaches are riding bareback across the beach. Got it? We have to save Violeta. Wungo Lowgha has her bound hand and foot to a stake in the centre of their camp. They paint her face and chest with war paint, then they light a bonfire to burn her alive.”
“Have they scalped her?”
“No, they have to kill her before they do that.”
“What about her dress?” asks Pegamil. “Have they torn her dress off?”
“No, not yet.”
“But they’ve ripped it quite a bit, haven’t they?” Quique insists, with his crooked, gap-toothed smile. “A little, for Chrissake. That means you can see her tits, doesn’t it?”
“And what do I do?” asks Sito, the younger of the Cazorla brothers. “Do I have to guard the piano the whole time? What use is a piano to us if we haven’t got any bullets?”
A tiny, delicate grasshopper, translucent green in colour, has settled on his ring-wormed knee. The narrator shuts his eyes so that he does not have to see it immediately squashed by an equally ring-wormed hand. He carries on speaking from the shadows, pointing to Quique to confirm it’s his turn to take the lead: