Books Burn Badly (12 page)

‘Hercules, son of a whore!’

They really lived in the attic, which had been converted into four rooms with wooden partitioning. The attic was almost too low to walk straight, but had the advantage of being the quietest place in the house. Hercules occupied one of the rooms with his mother, while three women he called aunts lived in the others. As a child, he was very well looked after, being passed from lap to lap. Afterwards, in the street, another Hercules came to life, the one he carried on his shoulders, who only came down to fight. When he was born, they’d put a skylight in the roof, in his room in the attic, and the time came when his head knocked against the glass and opened the window. Before he escaped, this was the only way Hercules had of standing up straight, with his head above the roof. He was a partial inhabitant of the skies. He sometimes stayed still for ages, sharing the condition of seagulls and cats as an architectural plume.

At night, he would open the skylight, stick out his head and not only see the beams from Hercules Lighthouse, but feel them as well. The touch of a lighthouse beam is similar to the turndown of a sheet. The circle of Hercules’ life widened, he only went up to the attic to sleep, but he always had the impression this was where the centre was. He’d bring his mother sea urchins he’d collected in Orzán Creek or barnacles he’d prised off the lighthouse cliffs. These presents also made his mother nervous since she was very afraid of the sea, the sea that had swallowed the father of her son’s best friend, Luís. ‘He’s going to be an artist,’ he says. ‘You should hear him sing. And imitate. Anyone from Charlie Chaplin to Josephine Baker.’
Your attention, distinguished audience. Society note. This city has just received the visit, on a liner of course, of the dancer Josephine Baker, known as the Black Pearl, and the architect Monsieur Le Corbusier, whom we shall affectionately refer to as Corbu. She changed the history of the body. He, the history of the house apparently. So you see, architects will also be famous one day. What happens, people of the sea, if you make a body out of a house? A boat! The talented couple never left their cabin on the
Lutetia,
with the complete understanding of the people of Coruña, ever respectful of humanity’s star-studded moments, meaning no disrespect to yours truly, an expert in dockside activity, who managed to peep through the porthole. The whole day in Josephine and Corbu’s nautical suite. The dance of architecture, the architecture of dance. Oh, I’m dizzy!
He can also do the Man of a Thousand Faces. Though he makes his own mother laugh and cry when he dresses up as Mrs Monte and acts out the Fascinating Widow. He grows thin and fat, like Laurel and Hardy. In order to sing, he sometimes goes to rehearse on the hill by Hercules Lighthouse, with Curtis as sound technician.

‘Sound technician?’

‘You have to say whether you can hear OK when I sing. I’ll gradually go further away. Oh, and work with your right ear. It’s a little bigger.’

‘No, it’s not. They’re the same,’ said Curtis, distrustful for once.

‘A gift from the Universal Architect, Vicente. When I triumph, I shall hire you. You’ll be my ears. You’ll earn a fortune just for listening. You’ll only have to move your hand up and down. Louder, softer. Like this.’

The last time they carried out a sound check was for Carlos Gardel’s
Melodía de Arrabal
.

‘I’ll redo that part,’ said Terranova. ‘Move back a bit.’

‘Listen,’ said Curtis. ‘It’s not “tear drops”. It’s “tear dwops”, got it? Tear dwops.’

‘Got it, “tear dwops”. There it goes! One tear. Goodbye, tear!’

Curtis moves off. With the sea behind him. His silhouette on the ocean’s horizon.

‘Louder, louder!’ shouts Curtis.

‘I haven’t started yet!’ mumbles Terranova. Then he shouts out, ‘Wait a minute, Tough Guy, you dummy.’

‘Louder!’

That night, seated on the roof under the vanes of light.

Quarter silvered by the moon

Milonga murmurs

‘All my fortune. Hear that, Tough Guy? Today, when we were rehearsing, I noticed something. The city has a triangle.’

‘A triangle.’

‘A triangle that’s connected with us, where we’ve always played. If you look to the right, there’s San Amaro Cemetery. The first vertex. If you look to the left, there’s the provincial prison. The second vertex. There’s no future either to the left or to the right. That leaves only one vertex. The lighthouse. The beams from the lighthouse. And what do they say?’

He already has an answer, ‘They say goodbye. Goodbye! The light of emigration. Our light, Hercules!’

‘To me, they don’t say goodbye,’ grumbles Hercules, who doesn’t like to contradict his friend.

‘You don’t understand, Vicente. You just don’t understand when you don’t want to.’

They fell quiet. The intermittent beams moved the emotions like cartoons.

‘You already have a legend, Curtis. You’re Arturo da Silva’s sparring partner. You’re Papagaio’s Hercules. In the first round of your first fight, you knocked your opponent over. Floored him. What was it? A side corridor? People laughing. And when he got up, you did Arturo’s one-two. End of story. That’s what I call creating a legend, Curtis. The tooth stuck in your glove. Which you gave back to him. “Here you go, Manlle, your tooth.” You even wanted to sell him a ticket for the special train! That won’t be forgotten. That’ll go down in history. But as for me, I don’t have a legend.’

‘Yes, you do.’

‘What is it?’

‘That you were born in a fish basket. Among scales.’

‘That’s an embarrassment, not a legend.’

‘I like it,’ said Curtis. ‘My mother too. And Flora. Everyone does.’

His father at sea. His mother, a fishwife. Alone on her rounds, she gave birth down a lane and placed the child on the softest thing she had. Among hake, wrasse, sail-fluke, horse-mackerel, sardines. His mother would leave Muro Fishmarket early to sell cheap fish in the outlying villages. Horse-mackerel is humble, even in its colour. But Luís couldn’t understand how wrasse could be so cheap, having all those colours. It’s rainbow meat. He used to make a pause for the fish basket’s contents and crack jokes like the one in the Academy, ‘I’m just a poor sail-fluke, but don’t think I was lucky!’ Milagres, like everyone else, thought he’d made up the story about being born in a fish basket. He was certainly imaginative enough. Until one day she bumped into his mother, Aurora, the fishwife, who confirmed it was true. She’d been to Cabana and Someso and taken the path that leads to Castro by the River Lagar. There was nobody about. It was some time before anyone saw her.

‘What better place for him than among the fish?’

When Milagres cracked open a sea urchin, it made her life worthwhile. Curtis knew this and at low tide he’d collect sea urchins, since he knew where they hid in the rocks, where there were likely to be lots of them, though he preferred the risk of fishing for barnacles on Gaivoteira. If there was something that worried him about sea urchins, it was getting their spines stuck in his skin. He’d made his best friends there, on the sea’s stormiest coast. You didn’t have to pretend. Next to the stormy sea, you had no enemies. One of those rock friends was Luís, who taught him how to treat the spines. The problem is their thickness. Unlike other prickles, such as a horse chestnut’s, they don’t have a sharp point. When trying to remove them, people become desperate and carve out deep flesh wounds.

‘No craters,’ said Luís. ‘A sea urchin’s spines come out by themselves. They work their way through the flesh together with the tides. Go down to the sea at low tide and they’ll come out on their own.’

This was partly a joke, partly true, as always with Luís. He was almost always playing with something. With the sea as well. He played with the sea most of all. When it was calm, he’d leapfrog Cabalo das Praderías or hang off the side of Robaleira Point and provoke it, ‘Oy you, beardie, Neptune, stupid dummy! Look who’s here! The ghost of Terranova! The son’s father. The father who died on a Portuguese doris.’ ‘It’s a big boat,’ he’d told Curtis, ‘full of small vessels. Each old fisherman boards his own green launch and comes or doesn’t come back.’ Once a pair of Basque cod trawlers called to pick up Galician crewmen and Terranova mounted a bollard with an empty bottle as an aspergillum and in a priestly voice mimicked the words he’d once heard predicated from a pulpit, ‘Work, fisherman, work! Only work dignifies a man. Do not fear the biting wind or rising sea, for death respects the brave. More men die in wine than at sea.’ The crane operator felt sorry for him and moved the hook towards him. Luís hung on and the operator raised him, lowered him, swung him to the left and to the right until he began to laugh. The crane had a wooden cabin with windows and was like a house in the air, with a bed and everything. The operator had painted the name ‘Carmiña’ on the outside. All the cranes were named after women. There was a ‘Belle Otero’, an ‘Eve’ and, on the Wooden Jetty, a ‘Pasionaria’. ‘Carmiña’s’ operator had a shelf of books in the cabin. One section labelled ‘The Day’, with scientific texts, and another labelled ‘The Night’, with novels. The operator didn’t just read. He wanted to be a scientific writer.

‘Not literature. Entertaining, yes, but scientific.’

Apart from reference books, he had a folder where for years he’d stored notes and drawings he’d made and grouped together under the title ‘Intimacy of the Sea’. The work in progress had to be kept a secret. The folder was concealed behind a false leather cover, which said ‘Liverpool Telephone Directory’. One of those things that land up in ports. But Ramón Ponte partook of that special kind of pleasure which comes from sharing things that are supposed to be top secret. And he didn’t stop smiling from the moment he opened the folder, having revealed its contents, to the moment he closed it. It had to do with the sex life of marine creatures. ‘People are always talking about the sea,’ he said, ‘but no one’s noticed the main thing. The sea is the largest nursery on the planet and possibly in the universe. One huge orgiastic bed. The scene of the most unusual acts of copulation. The most surprising arts of insemination.’ He admired Élisée Reclus, his anarchic science, the union of branches of knowledge towards an understanding of natural history. To start with, you’d have to combine zoology and geography. Why do animals live in one place and not another? He was appalled by people’s ignorance, in this case the ignorance of many in Coruña, a maritime city, about the creatures of the sea. He read widely, there were times he spent the whole night in the cabin with an oil lamp, but the questions he returned to inevitably had to do with the reproduction of sea creatures, the same questions he’d asked himself as a child when he went fishing with his father. His fascination for octopuses. The superior intelligence in their eyes, the wisest of all invertebrates, the endless functions provided by their eight tentacles bearing suckers, from propulsion to building stone walls, ink as a defensive weapon, camouflage and mimicry.

‘What you’d really like to know is how octopuses do it, right?’

‘Right.’

The kind of question that, once asked, ends up involving a lot of people. Somebody in Odilo’s Bar on Torre Street brought up the third arm.

‘That’s the octopus’ penis. The third arm. As for the female, well, she has herself a good glove for that arm.’

‘Yeah, but how do you know which the third arm is if there are eight of them?’

The kind of question Terranova and Curtis would end up asking when they visited the cabin on ‘Carmiña’ and Ponte showed them the progress he’d made as a self-taught enthusiast on his treatise entitled ‘Intimacy of the Sea’. Thanks to his contacts in port, he obtained books and international publications that were translated for him at the Rationalist School. He also received illustrations and engravings he endeavoured to reproduce. Of current interest were not the techniques of reproduction, but amatory forms.

‘The ones making love in a cross, at right angles to each other, are lampreys.’

‘And which get the most satisfaction?’ asked Terranova.

‘How should I know, dumbhead? Some people are never satisfied and one day discover the third arm so to speak. I knew a woman who was only ever happy with an ear of maize. Her husband was difficult and clumsy. One thing is satisfaction, another time. As far as I’m aware, cuttlefish have the greatest stamina in the sea. Once they mate, that’s it, they never stop making love. They only part for the female to spawn and then they die.’

Both Luís Terranova and Curtis were listening very carefully because they’d caught cuttlefish in their hands and now they understood why there were times these extraordinary beings with ten jet-propelled arms didn’t try to escape, but gave themselves up so easily. The trouble is the well of knowledge, once opened, is never filled and Luís and Curtis wanted to know how crabs and sea cows do it, with their armour-plated bodies and legs that are pincers. ‘Here’s an interesting detail,’ said Ponte, searching in the folder for the notes he’d made based on the experience of the Sea Club’s divers, whom he called the Phosphorescents.

‘Crustaceans also mate for a long time, the difference being the males carry the females on their back, take them for an amorous walk on the bottom of the bay.’

‘And sea urchins?’ Curtis suddenly remembered. ‘How do they do it?’

‘Sea urchins live together, but love at a distance,’ said Ponte somewhat mysteriously as he closed the folder. ‘I don’t know! At this rate, I’ll have to put the scientific texts under “The Night” with my novels.’ He had
Haunted Shipwrecks
and
Captain Nemo’s Lovers
together with copies of ‘The Ideal Novel’.

All the same, the most precious object in the cabin on ‘Carmiña’, which the operator had set up on a kind of pedestal, was the ball from the
Diligent
. According to legend, which it would be sacrilege to question in the operator’s presence, the first leather football to arrive in Coruña. The
Diligent
was a British ship. Some crewmen started a game up on deck and the ball fell on to the quay. ‘As soon as it bounced off the ship, it was obvious the
Diligent
’s ball wasn’t coming back. It seemed to want to stay on dry land,’ said Ponte ironically. There it was, on the altar of ‘Carmiña’, like the orb of a strange planet.