by Unknown
‘Go and fetch it, why don’t you? And bring a record. “Volare” will do.’
He looked at Medusa and made her smile on one side of her face: Nel blu dipinto di blu.
When Gabriel and Zonzo came back with the equipment, he pointed to a space between the stacks of wood, where they’d so often played football. ‘Our very own dance hall. The Seixal, the Moderno, the Monelos Liceo!’ There were frayed, tattered clouds travelling slowly out to sea, as if heading back in search of a loom for some lost fabric.
It was the second to last time he saw them. They danced close together. Zonzo, as a joke, had deliberately chosen a record with opera. A soprano’s quavering voice. He checked the credits. Ach, ich fühl’s. But they didn’t care. They danced cheek to cheek, the song of their life. Medusa twirled on tiptoe, her heels lifting from the boat of her flat shoes, which gave the impression of drunken abandonment. The space created by the planks of wood moved with her. The rest, sea and sky, remained calm. Medusa’s long, shiny black hair fell like a mane over Korea’s pale, shaven head. Gabriel felt a shudder he hadn’t experienced before. To round off the composition, it needed Korea to kiss the woman’s disfigurement.
The last time he saw them was a few days later. It was a kind of anniversary and the crane operator let them play with the ball from the Diligent. At one point, the ball disappeared down a corridor of wood for export. One of them went to get it. Then another. They didn’t come back, so they all went. The operator started to get nervous. It wouldn’t have fallen into the sea? No, no. Impossible. And then Korea and Medusa came out from behind one of the furthest stacks of wood, as if they’d been away on holiday. She was pregnant. Carrying the Diligent’s ball in her belly.
Ramón Ponte laughed as well. The last laughter heard that summer of 1963 on the Western Quay, when Medusa spread her legs and gave birth to the ball, which bounced until coming to rest at the crane operator’s feet.
A police jeep careered around the corner. Ramón Ponte headed for the cabin with the historic football under his arm. The guards ordered the children back home. The port was not a playground any more. They should find somewhere else. The Caudillo’s yacht, the Azor, would be here soon. ‘As for you two, the chump with the ponytail and the disfigured whore, you can come with us. Show us your papers.’
Banana Split
The more impure your thoughts, the longer the cobra that comes out of your mouth. Going to confession as a child, I’d always say I’d had impure thoughts. All the time waiting for impure thoughts. Amalia and I liked to touch our breasts. In the attic, we’d try on clothes, pretend to be designers, copy the way they dressed in fashion magazines. And that was when we started stroking and measuring our breasts. I once had a thought that was sort of impure, fighting Rafa by the stream in Laranxeiro. I liked to fight. Not any old how. You had to provoke it, put a straw on your shoulder and say, ‘Let’s see which of you can get the straw.’ The boys would ignore me, laugh, ‘You’re a brute, don’t be such a brute.’ But sometimes I’d manage it, they were so annoyed I’d got in the way. ‘You’re a fool,’ said Rafa. He was holding me by the wrists, he’d floored me and was sitting on top of me, but I carried on twisting and turning. He was red in the face. ‘Quieten down,’ he’d say, ‘or I’ll have to smack you.’ But all I thought about was winning, getting on top of him and making him ask for mercy. That was the sign of defeat, when they asked for mercy. I don’t know if the thought was impure or not because I wasn’t thinking about anything. Just winning and getting him to ask for mercy. Amalia and I had other thoughts. We’d cup our hands and stroke our breasts and see how they grew. They grew from one minute to the next, one day to the next, one year to the next. They can’t have been impure thoughts, only men and women did that, but something must have happened because one day our tongues became like cobras. Polka said when they got older, cobras grew wings and took to the air, singing, ‘I’m off to Babylon!’ Sometimes, when we’d just been paid, we’d treat ourselves to hot chocolate and doughnuts at Bonilla. Though the ultimate treat, the ultimate luxury, was to have a banana split at Linar. That came later. I think that’s when we grew wings. We couldn’t stop laughing. As if we’d been drugged. ‘I’m going up the staircase,’ Amalia would say after her ice cream. To go to the toilet, Linar had an impressive staircase, of the kind you wanted to go up or down. At a certain height, the staircase divided and in the middle was the cast of a large scallop shell. This trip to the toilet was an artistic outing. Step by step, you grew. ‘With the one I like,’ said Amalia one day, on her return from the staircase, ‘I’ll do everything.’ ‘What’s that? Has the staircase driven you crazy?’ ‘Every single thought. Everything. From in front, from behind. Slowly, at a canter. He can do what he likes ’cos I’ll eat him whole. Banana split.’
Montevideo’s Cabin
He decided to live in exile without having to leave again. He went to bed in the old sailor’s room. Where he wrote western novels signed by John Black Eye and gave shorthand classes using the Martí method. It was all painted for him by Sada, the bateau ivre, the double created by Urbano Lugrís, a man split in two. At the time, Lugrís was painting the inside of Franco’s yacht. The dictator had taken a fancy to his marine paintings and commissioned him to decorate his boat. Like Hitler, he was a frustrated admirer of fine art. Power had enabled him to overcome other frustrations. As a young man, he’d failed to be admitted into the Naval Academy and had taken his revenge by regularly wearing an admiral’s full-dress uniform. But the fact is this Supreme Commander of the Forces of Land, Sea and Air, named Sword of God during the holy year 1937, painted badly. Extremely badly. Above all, he painted the sea badly. Nobody told him this, of course. His flaccid seascapes received unanimous praise. On stage, they disguised his stature using wooden stools and platforms. Positioned the cameras to make him look tall. But he noticed how the sea invariably ran down his brush. One day, he realised he’d never manage to paint a sea urchin. He wanted to paint a bodegón, a still life, but the life was neither still nor moving. He had some fresh urchins brought from Orzán Sea, an intense dark red colour. Before fish, shells and starfish, he’d decided to try an urchin. Which seemed the easiest to do. A prickly sphere. No one would bother to count the prickles. He grew tired of struggling with the shape, each spine. This creature was both charming and deceitful. Rather than from the sea, it looked as if it had landed from space. There came a point he couldn’t tell what colour it was, so he tried a simple solution, to paint it like a child. The result, however, was not a sea urchin. It was an unconvincing splodge. He felt annoyed and impotent. Remembered Lugrís’ paintings. Had him sent for. He would paint all of this on his boat.
Urbano Lugrís was painting Franco’s yacht. At the end of each day, he’d visit Enrique’s and drink Palma del Condado wine accompanied by thin, almost transparent slices of pork loin, which, before eating, he’d raise to the condition of porcine soul. After that, feeling a little tipsy, like an aliped, he’d emerge on to Compostela Street, head home, change his clothes and then, dressed as Sada, take a roundabout route to the Tachygraphic Rose, kiss Catia Ríos, climb the narrow spiral staircase and enter another, twilight world, where he’d paint the old sailor’s room, the refuge where his friend Héctor sailed in bed. The home of an enchanted castaway.
‘Who goes there?’
‘Sada, the drunken boat!’
He’d paint feverishly for periods he alternated with moments of complete absorption, in which he appeared to be gripped by mute silence. During one of these moments, he abruptly broke his silence and said to Héctor, ‘You know? I’m painting the Azor with toxic paints, with lots of emerald green. It might even work.’
‘Will it take long?’
‘What does time matter? Didn’t you hear what Carrero Blanco, his second-in-command, said, “Franco’s mandate is for life!” We need to let the arsenic trioxide do its job.’
‘Don’t torture yourself.’
‘Who ever got me to do magic realism? Shame I’m not
a Cubist. You know what the Capitellum asked me? “Say, Lugrís, how do you paint those urchins?” That’s what he asked me. “First I make room for them, your excellency, and then they grow alone, somewhere between the colour of stone and Patinir’s blue.”
‘“Alone?”
‘“With cobalts and by the grace of God, your excellency.” I projected my voice, like Dalí. You can’t be too careful.’
‘You did well,’ replied Ríos. ‘People like that are susceptible to small insults. It’s the big ones they don’t notice.’
When the painter had finished, Héctor Ríos thought the four walls had disappeared. ‘Here you’ll hold out like Nemo,’ said Sada. Adding, ‘All you need is a waterbed.’
‘Are you sure there is such a bed?’
‘There was one in the Persians’ paradise. Made of goatskin. They filled it daily with solar water.’
‘That’s the direction the science of the future should take in this wretched country,’ commented Ríos, who was always inspired by Sada’s ideographic speech. ‘Technique with style. Mould dryers, boxes of light, waterbeds. Our poetry reveals, to those who can read, a lack of material resources. This permanent invocation of light is nature’s simplest movement. Mystical obsession is the result of an absence of heating, a poor diet and sleeping badly.’
‘Leaving paradise aside,’ said Sada, ‘I’m quite sure the great Verne sailed, so to speak, on one of those waterbeds Dr William Hooper invented during the last century. A belief that goes with the dates. I always thought Hooper was an invention of my father’s. But this phenomenon of floating medicine really existed. As confirmed by the British consulate. Here’s the address. The London Waterbed Company, 99 Crawford Street.’
‘If you can get me a waterbed,’ replied Montevideo, ‘I’ll write you a shortcut to Parnassus, an obituary in life that’ll have necrophiliacs leaping for joy. You’ll be immortal for twenty-five years at least.’
‘Don’t forget to include my sublime nickname, bateau ivre, in your obituary. Even if my first name, Urbano, sounds like a mode of transport.’
‘Now sit down for a bit,’ said Montevideo.
‘Are you going to torment me?’
‘Yep. I’m going to read you a fragment of present recalled.’
The Song of the Birds
He was the man who wanted to say no. Leica went to Rubén Lires, the cellist, for advice. But found someone else who didn’t dare fill in the crossword. There he was, lost in thought, playing a sleepwalker’s tune. The net had reached here also. On San Andrés Street, a group of workmen carried a large carpet from the Jesuits’ church, which had been rolled up and lent for the state banquet. The bow sought a note of pain and fury on the strings, but the arm was disarmed. And fell.
‘I’m going to have to play at the state banquet.’
The time for excuses had passed. Rubén had found protection, an underwater capsule, in music. Now his mastery had made him vulnerable. Visible. He wished he could be a travelling musician, one of those faceless musicians who congregate in Tacita de Plata and wait for village envoys and owners of dance halls. He wished he could be Papagaio’s blind accordionist. He wished he could go back, all the notes return to nothing. Who’d been damn kind enough to think of him? Every year, the local authorities put on a state banquet for the Caudillo. This was followed by a session of classical music with chamber groups and select soloists. At what point, why, how, was his name mentioned? Who dropped it into the conversation? Who loved him so badly to do him such a favour? The praise, the applause, to him was a kind of conspiracy. No, he wouldn’t be able to play. In that world, he considered his art a crime. He should be in prison. Under house arrest. Who was the music-loving provost, the flower-eating swine who thought of him? It was a mark of distinction, an honour, that a local artist would for the first time replace an established maestro at the reception. Rubén Lires spent the night writing anonymous notes about Rubén Lires the cellist. About himself. He ripped them up, they were so precise they were comical, like those pre-communion confessions as a child: ‘I had impure thoughts.’ ‘Did you now?’ ‘Rubén Lires, the cellist, is disaffected. Rubén the Jew. Rubén the Mason. Rubén the Communist.’ He crossed this out, corrected it: ‘Rubén the Trotskyite’. They won’t understand that, better to put ‘Rubén the Anarchist’. They know what that is. ‘Rubén Lires is a degenerate artist.’ That’s it! Denouncing yourself also required a certain style. Then he thought of something more precise that really would set the cat among the pigeons: ‘Despite appearances to the contrary, this man leads a dissolute life. He has no moral stamina, is subject to every vice. He is anti-Spanish, a revolutionary and a freethinker. We were quite surprised to see his name in the programme for this year’s state banquet. Signed: an alert patriot. Long live Franco! Spain for ever!’
‘What do you reckon? Do you think it’ll work?’
He felt Leica’s silence. The reason his photographer friend didn’t say anything was that he was undergoing a similar trial. That of the man who can’t say no. The Judge of Oklahoma talked to the provincial chief, the provincial chief talked to the governor, the governor to the Minister, the Minister to someone in His Excellency’s household. ‘There’ll be photos. A photographic session with the Head of State. And who knows? Perhaps the new Official Portrait. Can you imagine? On all the walls of ministries, thousands of offices, official centres, schools, books. Triumph. Guess who the photographer’s going to be, who’ll have the honour.’
‘I could always say my mother died. They might not ask me when. I’ll say, “Listen, my mother died, I can’t attend the state banquet.” And that’s it. She won’t mind. She is dead, after all. And she always protected me. I can take her flowers. “See, Mum. I should have been playing for all those bigwigs, but I’m here instead, with my own.”’
Rubén was distracted while he spoke. Next to the cello, he looked like a helpless child.
‘I’ll say I’m ill,’ said the cellist suddenly, as if he’d finally hit on the right saving idea. ‘The truth is I don’t feel up to much. They’ll hear the creaking of my bones, the rumbling of my intestines.’
He gazed at the instrument, which was ill as well. Today it resembled a hive that’s been abandoned by the swarm. The cello, through its strings, gave him a bee’s empty look.
‘I’ve arthritis as well,’ he added with a touch of glee. ‘In my left arm. It sends my first and fourth fingers to sleep. These two.’
‘I’m not sure that excuse will work, Rubén,’ said Leica sceptically. He felt he should try to cheer him up, which was a way of addressing his own situation. The dilemma they were in, though Rubén knew nothing about the Great Portrait, wasn’t so bad. They were just two professionals doing their job. Worse, he thought, they were scientists devising increasingly destructive weapons. What was Rubén going to do? Play the cello. That’s all.
So he said, ‘Here, Rubén, think of yourself as a bird that happens by. It’s got nothing to do with the dictator. All the bird does is sing. What does it care if a saint or a criminal is listening?’
Rubén made an effort to imagine the bird. But the image wasn’t so simple. He travelled back in time. There was a story that inspired him. In the palace of Ahmad I al-Muqtadir, king of Zaragoza, member of the Banu Hud dynasty, there was a tapestry showing a tree with eighteen branches, on which birds made of gold and silver threads alighted. The unusual thing about the tapestry was not its luxury, but the hidden mechanism that, when a breeze blew through the palace, caused the birds to move on the branches and sing. Closing his eyes, while he played the cello, Rubén had often entered there in the guise of a breeze. Time was measured by a clepsydra whose hours were represented by doors the water went round closing.
But the water opened the doors as well.
What was Muqtadir like? Was he an assassin listening to birds?
He could always play Pau Casals’ ‘Song of the Birds’.
Leica, from the window, instinctively followed the celestial gully of
Santa Catarina Street. Beyond the massive structure of the Pastor headquarters, past the trees and industrial necks of cranes on the Western Quay, was the tapestry where, in winter, starlings flew in a cloud. This cloud was a cartoon composed of dots that took the shape of a formidable bird. The first time they saw them, arriving from Cuba in 1933, Leica and Chelo thought this aeronautical exhibition of hundreds of starlings was a kind of fado by fate, a one-off. There was no way so many birds could share a single aesthetic will, understand their place in the history of the line. It was Mayarí who told them, ‘They’re joining dots to make a huge bird that will scare off the birds of prey.’
But Coruña’s starlings leave after Carnival, during Lent. Go back north. Someone had said they’re the same birds pecking the crumbs of tourists at Stonehenge.
‘They’re not going to kill me,’ said Rubén. ‘They can hardly beat up the musician. They won’t even know who Casals is.’
They’ll know, thought Leica. Of course they’ll know. But he didn’t say anything. He was studying the starlings’ space. If there’s a history of the line, there’s a history of the void as well. The starlings’ absence in the sky was noticeable, just as the mark of a picture frame stays on the wall.