by Unknown
‘Stop that now!’
‘Stop what? What am I supposed to do? Blasted night and day!’
Again and again. He whipped the floor. The back of the earth.
In front of the chocolate shop, with Harmony sitting down, drinking her chocolate, pretending not to see me, not to know me even, I must look bad, I must have unpaired eyes, a bundle of unpaired thoughts, the taste of that school comes back to me. It was the taste of powdered milk. A yellow taste. I couldn’t say if it was bitter or sweet. It was yellow.
The powdered milk arrived in sacks sent by the Americans. To start with, seeing so many sacks, a few beggars turned up, but they didn’t come back. They didn’t like the taste at all. Or the colour, maybe it was the colour. Which makes me think, sometimes, if you’re poor, it’s almost better to be completely poor, because then you have the freedom to have nothing at all. And to reject what you don’t like. The pale yellow taste included. Nobody forced them back. ‘Even if you don’t like it, you still have to drink it.’ That’s what our teacher said initially though, to tell the truth, she didn’t sound very convinced. They should have sent something else. Coca-Cola, for example. Because people couldn’t understand why the milk was powdered. They were happy to receive things, they opened their arms. But it’s one thing to be polite, quite another to drink powdered milk when you’re surrounded by cows. As the first planes flew over, we’d shout, ‘Sweets, sweets!’ Older people were suspicious of the planes, but we trusted them. We had a lot of faith in aviation. They then told us the potato plague arrived by air, not like a Biblical plague, in an unhealthy cloud, but in light aircraft, brought on purpose. So, according to this, when we were asking for sweets with our arms stretched heavenwards, what in fact came down were beetles. Beetles are pretty, even those of the potato plague, which are golden, with black stripes. They look like tiny toys made of tinfoil. They’re strong enough when they’re chewing. But then they die in that modern way, in heaps, from insecticide. Polka reckons plagues are a business. He says he won’t give a penny to the people who invented DDT. He won’t have anything to do with them. Mama inherited a plot of land, the Field of the Twelve Sisters, as it’s called. When Polka wants to wind her up, he has a go at the name. ‘Twelve Sisters? Is that because it’s long enough for a dozen cabbages?’ She doesn’t like him joking like that. She’s really very fond of her inheritance. The twelve cabbages. Which grow by hand, as it were. Cabbage by cabbage. Each fully grown cabbage is a step upwards. Cabbages. Amazing. Such determination. A piece of land, the only one, that is so remote, so rock hard, beetles don’t make it that far. Or planes for that matter.
Chimpanzee Language
19 August 1957
On the cliff, next to the lighthouse, Antonio Vidal thrust his cane like a quick harpoon. Swish! There, pinned to the ground, still breathing, wagging its tail and beating its navigational wings, was the sheet of newspaper.
The two of them looked in amazement. Grandpa Mayarí still nervous about having caught a living being.
‘What’s it say?’
Gabriel read aloud, ‘Before furnishing your home, visit the Mist.’
‘“Visit the Mist?”’
And he stared down at the rocks, at the sea grottoes belching forth mist.
‘It’s a furniture shop.’
‘Go on. What next?’
Gabriel read slowly, ‘Northwestern Tie Industries. Manufacturer of fine ties and unique underwear with no stitching behind, more comfortable than anything you’ve worn before (American model).’
‘“American model”?’ asked Mayarí in surprise. And after a pause, as if speech had just returned from a reconnaissance mission, he added another unanswerable question, ‘“No stitching behind”?’
‘It’s just an advert, grandpa.’
‘You never trip up when you’re reading. Did you realise?’
He moved the tip of his cane. ‘What’s it say there?’
Gabriel read carefully, ‘Lumumba says he’ll ask “the devil” for help if necessary to get rid of the Belgians.’
The two of them, mesmerised. As if a porthole had opened up in the ground.
‘The first thing you have to know when dealing with the devil,’ said Mayarí, ‘is that it’s best not to call him by his name. If you’re speaking Spanish, you can address him as Sir or Caballero, he rather likes that. He also doesn’t mind Prince. Prince of Darkness, Prince of the Air and so on. And then there’s Your Excellency, Your Eminence, Your Lordship. He’s terribly keen on protocol. If you address him as Don, he’ll even whistle for you. Not that he whistles well. A fault of the devil’s. What to do? I shouldn’t worry if I were you.’
The sheet of newspaper stayed still. Overhead, with an eye on the cane’s prey, the seagulls and their mocking calls.
‘It’s best to talk to him in languages he doesn’t understand,’ added Mayarí.
Gabriel suddenly felt courage, the need to share what’s inside. Only once had he spoken to somebody in chimpanzee language. A lanky girl with long, skinny legs and a flat chest. From a distance, she looked like a cut-out piece of cardboard. On the dunes in Santa Cristina. When the tide came in, the huge beach became like an archipelago. The huts for selling drinks and snacks stood over the flat part, which was now underwater, like wooden palafittes with roofs of straw, palm leaves or broom, supported on stakes driven into the sand. The softly invading waters brought foam trimmings and strips of sun soaked in green shadows. This unreal oil painting surrounded the buildings, cut the adults off in the colonnade of a happy settlement, as if nature obeyed floating Sunday orders. Gabriel had his back to them, looking westwards over a fairly extensive territory, where freedom meant above all not running into other beings who, like him, were digging holes in the sand and excavating wells they then fortified. It was time to talk to himself in the secret language he was fluent in.
‘Kagoda, sord ab?’
‘Kagoda!’
He felt the chill of a wet shadow. He was leaning over and digging. The shadow passed over him and stretched along the dune’s valley. He thought of a Mau Mau. Everyone was talking about the Mau Mau rebels in Africa. Perhaps the Mau Mau, outside their territory, spoke Tarzan’s language.
‘Tand-ramba!’
Should he obey? His survival instinct told him yes, he should stand up. He did so with trepidation, not daring to look back.
‘Tand-unk!’
He obeyed. No, he wasn’t going to move.
‘Tand-utor!’
Followed by a guffaw. The shadow slipped away and turned into a body rolling in the sand, in a fit of laughter. He ran towards her in an unfamiliar rage. But she got up, started running and climbed the other side of the dune with feline agility. Now he’d reached the top and was trying to catch his breath while she was down the bottom. She was very thin and taller than him. Her skin was very white, a little sunburnt on the shoulders, as if she’d been let loose on the beach for the first time, her bones jutting out so much it seemed her skeleton had just been hastily assembled. She had blond, curly hair and freckles. Her big mouth maintained a smile, like a tic to protect her from the sun, which was now right in front of her. But what most disturbed Gabriel was that she wasn’t wearing a swimsuit like all the other girls. Just a pair of knickers. Her chest was practically flat, but her nipples, in Gabriel’s eyes, were circles of confusion in both colour and size. They contained all the imagination he’d stored up on the subject of sex, including Zonzo’s biro. The first day he saw it, he’d have swapped all the items in his cabinet of curiosities for that biro shaped like a transparent tube, full of liquid, except for a bubble of air, which allowed a naked woman to swim up and down. Even were it confiscated in customs, it was almost impossible for such an item to make it into his father’s hands. Something like that would always fall by the wayside. It could only be a present from Manlle, the owner of La Boîte de Pandora. One of Zonzo’s privileges. One of the things everyone envied and he appeared to attach little importance to. Because he had one overr
iding feeling. His hatred towards Manlle.
‘Where are you from?’ Gabriel asked the girl who spoke Tarzan’s language.
‘Dan-do!’ she shouted, very annoyed.
Gabriel obeyed. He stayed rooted to the spot. He’d have liked to go after her, but he didn’t move. And she vanished.
‘Zu-dak-lul!’ shouted Gabriel, encompassing the vastness of the sea with a sweep of his arm.
‘What does that mean?’ asked Mayarí.
‘Ocean. It means ocean.’
‘In what language?’
Gabriel hesitated. The shout had come from deep inside him and now he was afraid of appearing ridiculous. Mayarí said, ‘Don’t you worry. People who stammer are the best singers. There was one in Cuba who was the king of boleros.’
‘In chimpanzee language,’ said Gabriel.
‘It’s good to know languages.’
Mayarí released the sheet of newspaper and covered up the hole in the ground as if closing the indiscretion of an eye into the earth.
The Strategy of Light
On the rocks facing the island was a fisher of wrasse. Gabriel remembers this because the man with the rod emphasised, almost boasted, that what he wanted was to fish for wrasse, ballan wrasse, and treated with contempt any other fish he hooked. Some didn’t even make it into the basket, but were scattered over the rocks. To tell the truth, ballan wrasse were masterpieces with their sudden green and red glint and the added excitement in fisherman and spectators of seeing the extraction of something precious from the sea. Aside from their colour, before they landed in the basket, the trace they left in the air was of fleshy lips. A flash of sensuality. The fisherman with the automatic rod, who was dressed impeccably, like a statue on the rocks, sometimes named the fish he threw away with contempt.
‘Another musician!
‘Here’s a clown!’
Gabriel thought he was making it up and rejected them because of their names, creatures that weren’t to his liking. Gabriel and Mayarí focused primarily on the way they gawped or still convulsed. He didn’t know exactly what his grandpa was thinking. He didn’t say anything. But the fact they stared at the same spot, at these creatures writhing in agony, shaking with mute silence, was something Gabriel would always remember as a moment of confused fraternity.
His father, the judge, was a hunter. This was no passing or temporary hobby. As he himself said, it was a constitutional passion. At home, especially in the large study, an Italian room with a small alcove, and the adjoining part of the main sitting-room, there were several trophies. The biggest was the head of a stag with large antlers. There was also a boar’s head, which his father was particularly proud of, not just because of how he’d caught it, but because of the way the head had been mounted, a work of art in his view that had preserved all the animal’s wildness and spirit, so that when you looked at it up on the wall of the study, in semi-darkness, a glint of black sun in its eyes, you could see the exact moment the end appeared. The judge had a special way of rounding off that story.
‘Forgive the boast, but a large specimen measures up its opponent, chooses a superior,’ he’d maintain. ‘Only he who knows it better than it knows itself can hunt a prey.’
The same could be said of the woodcock. Another prize specimen. Not because of its size, but because of its intelligence.
‘The wood’s guardian. A master at camouflage. Better than the partridge any day. A living detector, a periscope in amidst the bracken and leaves. It hears and sees everything that’s going on in the forest. Even with a good dog, it’s very difficult to flush a woodcock. And we had the best, Eusebio’s pointer. A fine companion, yes indeed. We put a little bell around his neck. When it stopped tinkling, this was the sign he’d found the woodcock. I can still hear that silence now!’
The judge gave pride of place to that specimen. You could see it was of great personal value. But a few years later, in the spring of 1963, a capercaillie became the star attraction. Because it had an illustrious partner. The judge had gone hunting with his friend the Minister in the Ancares. As he said, it was a trophy with history. The Minister had shot one specimen and he’d shot the other.
Both the woodcock and later the capercaillie stood on a shelf, flanked by thick volumes, in the most visible part of the judge’s extensive library, that on the wall of the sitting-room next to his study. All four walls of the study were also covered in shelves full of books. It was what he called, with ironic pride, ‘my Crypt’. Soon this was the name everyone used, just as that part of the sitting-room Chelo used for painting ended up being known as the Chinese Pavilion, a name inspired by a folding screen from Macao (‘exquisitely designed,’ they’d taught Gabriel to say as an oral exercise) which the judge had bought in Portugal, on one of his trips as visiting lecturer to Coimbra University, and which soon became an inevitable border point in the house. The name created the space. A landscape of paintings and plants, which seemed to be constantly on the go. In one corner, an exotic touch: a large pot of bamboos, together with ferns and herbaceous plants such as Aureola. In the eastern part of the house, there was a clear preference for plants. Different species all over, on the floor, on the furniture, all along the gallery of course, there were the begonias responding with conviction, even more in winter, to Chelo’s warmth: its leaves went further than the flowers in intensity of colour.
So the sitting-room had two, almost symmetrical hemispheres, though there was a second dimension, that of the line of shadow from the central pillar, which showed the sun’s daily orbit, so that, mornings, the library side was left in shade and the sun illuminated the so-called Pavilion whose inner circle, the nucleus, contained the painter with her easel and a table like the trough found in rural homes. Her Technicolor Table. Instead of bread, the trough held a mine of tubes, jars, pigments, resins, varnishes, lacquers, bottles and the odd rock with plates of mica and other minerals. On top of the table, aside from bowls, plates, tins and boxes which served as palettes, was a pile of soiled cloths. Which grew and grew. Chelo didn’t need someone to make a quip about this. She herself said it was her finest work. She only got rid of the cloths when they overflowed the trough and started invading the outer circle, which went beyond the bamboos. It was then that O, the washerwoman, stuffed the colour-stained cloths into gunny sacks.
When they reached Lapas Beach, they saw a gamela walking. Out of the water, crossing the sand. With the stubborn air of riverboats, even when they’re sailing. Its upturned bottom had the exact curvature of someone leaning over a balcony. A strange being, the boat, a kind of enormous, comical creature painted the colours of dawn, a product of the sea’s imagination. The boat suddenly turned towards them. Under its large shell of white and coloured planks was a smiling, toothless man. The gaps in his teeth made him look more like Mayarí. When Chelo insisted he use his stay in Coruña to order a set of false teeth, he’d always make excuses and crack one of his favourite jokes, which Gabriel didn’t understand immediately, because he pointed to his eyes, not his mouth, ‘I’m bidentate, you see.’
Except when he was talking to himself, Mayarí was pretty quiet. He seemed to understand his silence as a way of taking up as little space as possible. At the same time, however, when he was asked a question, especially by his son-in-law, the judge, he made every effort to satisfy the other, which in his view meant seasoning seriousness with a pinch of humour, the closest thing to a sweet taste. Their relationship was formal; conversation, if it existed, was restricted to dinnertime. Gabriel, if he was paying attention, couldn’t help noticing the difference between his father’s and grandfather’s teeth. The difference was . . . monumental. His father’s teeth, apart from being perfect, were made of marble. His grandfather’s teeth, the few there were, were made of granite. Stone slabs. Years later, he could be more precise. His father’s teeth were neoclassical, Mayarí’s dolmenic. From the evening before, he remembered part of the conversation, Mayarí’s intervention, which was celebrated with laughter and seemed to him to cont
ain secret information. The judge had asked him why so many people were abandoning work in the countryside. Why they were leaving the villages. Mayarí thought about it for a moment, adopted a more solemn air and said, ‘When it comes to it, your honour, the problem with the countryside is a problem of height.’ Everyone looked at him in bewilderment, especially Chelo, who’d already asked him not to refer to a member of the family, his daughter’s husband, as ‘your honour’. On this occasion, however, she kept quiet since, like everyone else, she was waiting for the answer to the mystery of the countryside’s height.
‘What height do you mean, sir?’ asked the judge very seriously.
‘I mean the countryside is very low,’ said Mayarí, opening his arms as if stating the obvious.
‘Yes, but not that low,’ said the judge, uncertain why he was being so forthright. ‘Things are getting better after all.’
‘The countryside is very low, so you have to bend down,’ Mayarí explained. ‘The earth should be a little higher, the height of this table at least.’
Everyone ended up laughing, though the laughter was slow. It was the kind of laughter Mayarí set in motion. A slow laughter. Put another way, a comical seriousness.
In one of the books Gabriel was reading in the alcove, mostly because he enjoyed the illustrations, there was a full-page photo he’d have liked to rip out and take with him or put in a frame on his bedroom wall, though it had nothing on Zonzo’s biro with the naked woman. It was an image with the title ‘Eskimo Beauty’. The girl’s features were very similar to those of O, the washerwoman. She wore a Greenlander’s festive costume, the most unusual part of which were the trousers, made of leather on the thighs and down to the knees and then, on the calves and over the boots, of a thin, white, embroidered material. The whole was reminiscent of a well-clad, free-spirited harlequin. Mayarí and the sailor carrying the boat seemed to belong to that moment, on Lapas Beach, to a race omitted by Pericot in his inventory. The race of smiling, bidentate men. In his life, Gabriel would come to realise this is one of the most pleasant smiles a human being can give. Mayarí tipped his hat and bowed his head slightly, and the sailor did the same with the boat.