“You’re galloping at the foot of the cliff, without taking your eyes off the beach, you’re galloping non-stop. Clip-clop clip-clop.” He repeats his imitation of the horse’s hooves for a while to gain time so he can think how to continue: “You arrive close to the girl, you’re reaching the bonfire … Got it?”
“Yes, but tell me something,” insists Quique Pegamil, “is their prisoner naked?”
“Barefoot. And her ankle is bandaged.”
“Yes, okay, a bandage, but is the girl naked, or not yet?”
“I told you she wasn’t.”
“No? Why haven’t the Red Indian women torn off her dress?”
“Not this time.”
“But listen, they always do it!” Quique protests. “In revenge for Winnetou’s dead sister.”
“Nooo!”
“But now they have ripped her dress, haven’t they? At least the skirt.”
Chato interrupts to explain that the Indian women from the Apache reservation don’t do things like that to white women, they’re not such savages — that’s what the Comanche squaws do. The storyteller doesn’t seem particularly interested, and does not clarify the question; instead, he informs them that Violeta, still tied to the stake, could have a poisoned arrow sticking in her breast. You don’t know this yet, he adds, because you and Roger are in the plane with Bill Barnes. It’s flying high in the sky, so you can’t see the arrow. From up there all you can spot is the black smoke drifting over the Apache camp. Saying goodbye to Bill, you dive into the sea and swim to the shore of Arizona, where you take the best horses and start to gallop. Then as you’re riding, Ringo appears with his saddle slung over his shoulder and twirling his rifle. At this point Rafa Cazorla interrupts him to enquire about something he’s been puzzling over:
“If her ankle’s bandaged, that means the girl’s on her bad week.”
“Nonsense, you dummy,” says Julito. “A girl wearing a bandage round her ankle has nothing to do with her bad week. Donkey.”
“Okay,” Quique cuts in, dragging his backside enthusiastically across the ground to get closer to Ringo. “So the first thing I do when I reach her is pull out the arrow and suck out the poison. And of course, in order to suck it …”
“Come off it! He’s not asking much, is he?” explodes Chato.
“Oh, I see,” Roger protests, “the same old story with the poisoned arrow and Quique dangling from her tit.”
“So what? I’m the one who does it because I’m the first to get there!”
“Listen, who do you think about when you’re tossing off, Ringo?” asks Chato.
“What I want to know,” says sharp-tongued Julito Bayo, “is this. What’s a piano doing in the middle of the desert?”
Ringo was expecting this question and responds at once.
“It’s like a mirage. Have you never seen a mirage?”
“Oh please, of course I have. It’s just that now you’ve got it into your head to learn music, you bring a piano into all your stories. And there’s something else. Why does the prisoner have to be Violeta, when she’s so ugly?”
“You don’t get it, do you? The Red Indians have no idea that she’s ugly.”
“You always put her in your stories because you always imagine her when you’re tossing off, don’t deny it. But she’s really ugly and clumsy. And deaf too.”
“No she’s not,” says Roger. “If you take a good look, the girl has got something.”
“She’s a bit slovenly,” Chato adds.
“What does that mean?”
“Mucky. Her armpits stink.”
“She is a bit deaf,” Roger says. “But I’ve seen her dancing close. And my oh my, kid: she lets them do it!”
“Why don’t the Apaches capture Virginia instead of Violeta?” says Julito. “For Chrissake, have you seen her in that yellow sweater of hers?”
“Why not Jane Parker, Tarzan’s girl?” Chato suggests.
“I’d choose Diana Palmer, the Phantom’s girlfriend,” says the younger of the Cazorlas.
“For me it’d be June Duprez,” says Rafa. “Or Esmeralda the Zingara.”
“I’m happy to stick with Violeta,” says Quique Pegamil, gap-toothed and with his woody woodpecker tuft of hair. “She’s the one we started with, isn’t she? Besides, the person telling the story is the one who decides.”
Quique has always had a soft spot for Señora Mir’s daughter. One Sunday last summer he happened to meet her on the crowded platform of a number 39, and manoeuvred his way round until he was right behind her. With the two of them squashed like sardines and unable to move, as he told it later, he stuck his cock between her buttocks, and she had let him do so for a good while. Later on the beach she hadn’t even looked at him, and from that day on had called him Pegamil or the Glue-stick.
Alright, so Violeta is still tied to the post with the arrow sticking out from her chest, the narrator concedes, but not exactly in the middle of her breast, not in the nipple, because if that happened the poisoned blood could get mixed up with her milk and she would die on the spot. It’s pierced her a bit higher up, almost on her shoulder. We’re lying flat on the stagecoach roof, surrounded by Apaches on horseback. I’m Ringo Kid and I’m firing my rifle at Wungo-Lowgha … He pauses to sum up: We don’t know whether they tore Violeta’s dress when they seized her, nor what they’re going to do to her, we’ll soon see, he says, and refuses to add any more about this vital detail that some of them find so fascinating. All we know for sure is that Geronimo’s Apaches have kidnapped her and nobody could stop them, not Winnetou, or Wild Bill Hickok, or Destry, or Ringo Kid, or you, he says to Chato, nor you two either, he warns the long-suffering Cazorla brothers, and not you either, Julito, he adds, glancing sternly at the pupil from the Palacio de la Cultura. Then he adds in a voice full of mystery:
“Something extraordinary is about to happen. End of Part One.”
“Crap!” Julito exclaims, not at all happy. “You know what I think? I think I’ll punch Winnetou and get out of there.”
“No you don’t! Winnetou is our friend and ally.”
“I could reach the girl and save her!” Pegamil offers.
“No. Your horse has broken a leg.”
“But I can jump off quickly and untie her from the stake. She runs down the beach, tears off her clothes, and plunges into the sea to wash off the war paint, but then a huge wave comes and I save her …”
“No, Quique, no,” Ringo restrains him. “Nothing like that happens. You have to wait.”
He recapitulates once more: thanks to Bill and his plane they have followed the Indians’ tracks and then, once they’ve swum ashore on the Arizona coast, they all ride white horses bareback across the wide beach of the Indian reservation, until all of a sudden Quique gets left behind. Yellow clouds roll down from Gold Mountain, says Ringo, staring at the clumps of yellow broom high above them. This is May, and the bushes ring the hill with gold. In the distance below the haze, beyond Padre Alegre’s Cottolengo, Barcelona stretches out to the sea like a muddy, dirty puddle, while above their heads in the pale whitish sky a heavy red kite with yellow ribbons floats and flaps in the wind with crystalline delight, swooping every so often towards the ground because the line is being held by inexpert hands on the summit of Montaña Pelada.
“Got it?” the storyteller asks again. “As it jumps from the cliff down to the beach, your horse breaks a leg. And as you know, that means you have to kill it. Sooo theeen—”