B0040702LQ EBOK (30 page)

It was a harp that Uncle Reguard had made thirty years
ago, and it was a source of great pride in the family, because (as
Armand's father always said) it showed that carpentry and
instrument-making were not so very different. As far back as
he could remember, Armand had seen the harp in Uncle
Reguard's house, always in the same place: the corner where
the passage way bent round. He found it much more beautiful
than any of the drawings or photographs of other harps that
he cut out of magazines and kept in a blue folder: a harp in the
hands of a mythological god, a Sumerian harp topped with
the carved head of an animal he was unable to identify, a
badge from Ireland, two Norwegian harps (one had a dragon's
head, the other the head of a woman with a blindfold over her
eyes), and one made from a branch of a tree, being played by
Harpo Marx.

His cousin Reguard came into the room tearful and smiling,
surrounded by grown-ups congratulating him. In his right
hand he had a chocolate mint ice cream; his left hand was
wrapped in a bandage. It was a scene that Armand had witnessed over and over again, every time the family got together,
sometimes at his house, sometimes at the house of the real
cousins, occasionally in the houses of the other, distant
cousins, some of whom even lived in different cities. A child
always appeared with his left hand in a bandage. The bandage
was thickest in the area of the ring finger: Armand knew that
there was no longer a finger under the bandage, and that
when the bandage came off there would be nothing there but
a tiny little stump, completely healed. Once again, Armand looked round his relatives' hands. As he had gradually begun
to notice some time ago, everyone over nine years of age was
missing the ring finger of their left hand.

Armand was seven when he first realised that it was no
coincidence that every time there was a party, one of the
children had a finger cut off. Naturally,.he had noticed that
the older children had a finger missing, but it seemed entirely
normal. All his adult relatives had a finger missing, for reasons
which escaped him and to which he was indifferent; so many
things escaped his knowledge, things he knew he would not
understand until he was grown up, that he paid very little
attention to this issue, which was trivial in comparison to
other matters that occupied his mind: the spirit of selfsacrifice of the St Bernard dog, the origins of life or the rules
governing offside in football. So far as he was concerned, in
order to become a teenager, leaving behind the world of the
child, you had to lose the finger of your left hand. It seemed as
acceptable, normal and desirable as losing your milk teeth.

When he had first gone to school, he had been surprised to
see that many grown-ups still had five fingers on each hand,
and they seemed unperturbed by it. This he found remarkable,
odd and rather unpleasant, and he felt proud to belong to
a logical family. As the months passed, contact with other
children led him to think that perhaps it was some sort of
coincidence that all his relatives suffered accidents to their left
hand and the accidents always resulted in the loss of the ring
finger. The boy sitting at the desk next to his explained that
losing a finger was typical of carpenters. The carpenter in his
neighbourhood (he recounted) had lost three fingers. His
mother had told him that the same thing happens to lots of
carpenters, because sooner or later, the blade of the circular
saw lops off a finger or two. Armand knew this was not
exactly the case in his family. They were carpenters, but the
loss of their finger was no fault of the circular saw, and it was
no accident. At nine years of age, the children were not yet
carpenters, and they did not even know if they would be
carpenters when they grew up; although generally speaking,
from time immemorial, all the members of the family had shown a marked preference for that trade and apart from a few
exceptional cases, they all ended up as carpenters.

Armand spent many nights puzzling over the matter. Was
there some professional obligation to have your finger cut off?
He came to a conclusion for which he would have liked
confirmation: the family cut that first finger off so that the
children would begin to get used to the idea. The loss of that
first finger made them lose their fear of losing another. It
made them realise it was not such a big deal; it gave them
courage and helped them to face their work bravely. One
thing still nagged at him: he had met the father of a
schoolfriend from another class, who was also a carpenter, yet
(as he noticed every time the man came to pick up his son
from school) he had no fingers missing from his hand.

As the adults did not make a tragedy out of it and, indeed,
seemed particularly happy at the time the finger was cut off
(especially the parents of the child who was being amputated),
Armand saw nothing tragic about it either. Until that day, two
years earlier, when he had first realised that some time in their
ninth year, all the members of the family had a finger cut off,
and it would happen to him one day: then he felt afraid.
He was in the bedroom with his cousins, playing with the
wooden houses. Eguinard, Gisela and Gimfreu had already
lost a finger. Llopart and he still had five fingers, which meant
that they were still children. At one point, when Eguinard
stopped playing for a minute, Armand went over to him, swallowed hard and asked him what was all this business about
fingers. Llopart, Gisela and Gimfreu looked round, just for a
second, then carried on running in and out of the wooden
houses. Eguinard asked him to repeat his question, perhaps
playing for time while he thought up a reply. Armand amplified it: what was this business of the fingers; they had cut off
his cousin Renguard's finger that day, and they cut off everybody's finger, sooner or later, once they reached nine. Llopart
was looking at him in bewilderment. Eguinard stood up,
tousled Armand's hair and gently drew him out of the room.
Armand continued to insist: how come everybody in the family had the same finger missing from their left hand, and
other people, who were not in the family, did not? Armand
stared at Eguinard's finger, which was cut off at the base.
There was a clean scar, for it had been done very well.

Moreover, why the ring finger of the left hand and not the
little finger on the right hand, or one of the index fingers? Did
it relate to some question of hygiene, the meaning of which
had been lost down the centuries? It was clearly an ancestral
custom, but what was its origin? Had they been doing it for
centuries? Or just decades? The day he turned nine, his father
found him crying in bed.

`I don't want to have my finger cut off.'

`What nonsense!'

`I want to be normal like the other children in school.'

`Being normal has nothing to do with the number of
fingers you have.'

He dried his son's tears, and explained that normality is a
cultural construct, and therefore relative; some people cut
their hair short, others let it grow, some people have a beard
and a moustache, some just a moustache, some just a beard,
some are clean-shaven; there are societies where both men
and women shave their body hair, other societies where only
the women do so. We cut our nails, which differentiates us
from animals and primitive peoples, who let theirs grow long.
Armand did not accept these analogies: nails and hair grow
back again, fingers don't. The sun streamed in the window;
father and son stared at the warm rays as they fell across the
floor.

`There's no need to decide immediately.'

`I have decided, and I don't want it.'

`Why?'

`Because you can't play the harp with a finger missing.'

Even he was surprised by this reply. He had spoken the
words without thinking. However, even if he didn't know it,
even if the thought had never actually crossed his mind, as far
as other people were concerned, including his father, it was
quite possible that he might really want to be a harpist, and so
he clung to the idea. A few months earlier he had seen a programme on television with Nicanor Zabaleta playing the
harp and he was quite sure that you needed all your fingers. A
harpist needs them all. His father looked at him gravely. He
had never seen his father look so stern.

`If you like music, there are all sorts of instruments. It
doesn't necessarily have to be the harp.'

`I like the harp.'

`You've got that idea into your head because of your
uncle's harp. But it's not the only instrument in the world.
There are plenty of others: kettledrum, bass drum, cymbals,
tambourine, bongo drums, the triangle ...' Armand displayed
no great enthusiasm. `I could understand if you weren't too
keen on the maracas, but what about a drum kit? A drum kit is
a really complex set of instruments: the bass drum, the small
tom-tom, the large tom-tom, cymbals, the large cymbal. Or
what would you say to the vibraphone?'

Armand felt uneasy during the next few months. A story
had always been jokingly bandied round the family that, one
day, a child would have his finger cut off and it would grow
again after a couple of months. Some said it would be a sign
of something or other, but they could never agree on what
exactly. Others accepted that, one day, an amputated finger
would grow again, but denied it would be a sign of anything.
For Armand that story raised a new dilemma: what if he
refused to let them cut his finger off, and it turned out that he
was the chosen one whose finger would grow back again?
What an absurd situation! By refusing he was preventing the
possible fulfilment of the prophecy.

He grew obsessed with fingers. He became aware that some
people wore their ring on a particular finger of their left hand.
Since in his family nobody had that ring finger, they wore
their ring on their little finger and when there was a wedding
the priest always looked very serious when the bride and
groom came to exchange rings. Once, in the street, Armand
saw a stranger with his left-hand ring finger missing and he
spent days trying to find out if he was some distant relative,
too far removed for him to know. Did other families follow
the same custom? Or other similar customs: amputating different fingers or other parts of the body, in order to ... ?
What? Where was the sense in it? What did they do with the
amputated fingers? Bury them? Armand imagined them buried upright, like stems of asparagus, in little finger cemeteries.
Maybe they cremated them.

Gradually he began to see his parents, and his other relatives, in a new light. What sort of macabre tradition was this,
and how could they accept it so unfeelingly? Since he could
not trust them, he used to sleep with his left hand under his
pillow, and his head on top. He had worked out that it was
completely impossible for them to get hold of his finger to cut
it off by raising his head, removing the pillow and taking hold
of his hand, without him waking. Sometimes he would dream
that despite these precautions, his parents (wearing beatific
smiles) managed to lift his head and the pillow, grasp his hand,
and with one deft stroke of a butcher's knife lop off his finger.

When he heard that there was to be another family gettogether on the following Sunday, he flew into a panic. For
the first time, he was a candidate for losing a finger. Out of
all the cousins, he and Guitard were the most likely cases.
Both had reached nine years of age. He three months earlier,
Guitard seven. If it went by seniority, then it was Guitard's
turn. However, the amputations were not always done in
order of age, so it might very well- be him.

Sunday came and neither of them lost a finger, instead it
was Teodard, a cousin who wasn't even nine yet (he had a
month to go) and so in theory was not even in the running.
Guitard was furious. It was his finger that should have been
cut off, not his cousin's. It was explained that the event had
been brought forward for a very simple reason: Teodard's
mother was expecting a baby and they wanted to get it over
with, so that when the new baby was born they would not
have to be thinking about the amputation of the older child's
finger. Armand was fascinated by Guitard's indignation. He
asked him if he did not mind his finger being cut off. Why
should he mind? On the contrary, not only could he not see
any problem, he was astonished by Armand's question.

`It's not your head they cut off. Just a finger, and not even
the most important one.'

Guitard was dying to be a grown-up: which is why, at the
next family get-together, he ran into the room where the
other children were playing with a train set, triumphantly
brandishing his bandaged hand.

When the new little cousin was born (they named him
Abelard), there was great agitation, whispered comments,
then sudden silences, whenever a child came into the room.
Naturally, this secretiveness aroused Armand's curiosity. Yet
three days went by before he found out that Abelard had been
born with six fingers on his left hand.

The whole family was alarmed. What were they to do
when Abelard reached nine? If they cut off a finger, he would
have ten, not nine like everyone else. Some took the view that
this might be seen as unfair, and that he would have to lose
two fingers, to be on the same footing as the rest of the family.
However, others felt it was too much to cut off two of his
fingers if the rest of the family lost just one. Only one should
be cut off. That is what had always been done, and there was
no reason to change the custom. The arguments branched
off into other areas, expanded, came back to the point of
departure. Finally they reached the obvious conclusion, that
this was an exceptional case, and, as such, demanded an
exceptional solution. Moreover, there was no need for haste.
There was a long time to go before Abelard would be nine,
when the decision would have to be taken.