by Unknown
He didn’t like talking much. He’d been a pilot, he told me one day, a fighter pilot. Then commercial flights.
They’d insisted we shouldn’t leave the dog alone. But I wasn’t going to run after the dog all day long, with Pinche in the role of major-domo.
So there he was, watching TV. Ensconced in the armchair. A roaring fire in every fireplace. Like a lord, talking English to Black Beauty. And I ran downstairs to fetch him because, after all, a man is a man.
‘Where is she?’
‘On the bed.’
‘Which bed?’
‘The lady’s. With six puppies.’
‘What?’
I’d managed the birth. I’d been very nervous to start with because she’d climbed on to the bed. Unthinkable where I come from. That a dog should give birth on the bed, on top of a pink satin bedspread. A water bed, what’s more. Brand name, Zodiac. I didn’t believe the lady when she said it was a water bed. She told me to have a go and wouldn’t let up until I did. She was right. Very strange to begin with. Then it was like lying on a river. How nice the way the water moved! You could close your eyes and just float. But now it was Popsy lying there, giving birth, her eyes on me. What did the bed, the pink satin, matter? I was fully aware everything would have been the same had I not been there, except for one thing. Her look. Which alighted on mine, light on light, shade on shade. Lots of looks meet in life. Your eyes take in what others see. At the end of the day, you might have been credulous, naked, saintly, raped, murdered, beloved, recognised, invisible, a kiss, a thorn, a harpy, an Amazon. One time I took Pinche to see the eye doctor, the doctor explained to me – or rather told me, the way he talked was like a tale – that inside each retina of the eye there are millions of tiny rods which gather the light. Each look we give each other must have its own rod. But the dog’s look as she gave birth was different. A gift that required every single rod. Because it didn’t meet mine, it landed on it. She left me her look. Such a beautiful thing, and she entrusted it to me.
I went down to fetch Pinche because she’d closed her eyes. It was her first delivery. She’d borne six pups and I was afraid she’d expire from the effort. I’ve seen that happen as a child. A dead cat whose kittens are still suckling. Apparently mothers have milk for a day after they die. Popsy was exhausted. But when we came back, she’d recovered some of her strength. There she was, on the pink satin bedspread, licking her puppies.
Pinche was annoyed.
‘Little blighters, trust them to pick the weekend! I’ll have to go for a sack.’
‘A sack? What do you want a sack for?’
‘What do you think? The sooner they go in the river, the better. She shouldn’t grow too fond of them. The sooner, the better.’
I gave him the look Popsy had given me.
‘No, Pinche, no more throwing dogs in the river.’
‘Well, I don’t mind. Or do you think I like drowning dogs? As far as I’m concerned, we can leave them where they are.’
He lit the fire in the bedroom. Got over his bad mood. Went to have a look at the litter and intoned, ‘Boy, boy, girl, boy, boy, girl. How very considerate! You know what we’re going to do? Pop down to the cellar and open one of those vastly expensive bottles of French wine.’
I was about to protest, but recalled something Polka used to say, ‘Matter is neither created nor destroyed, it is simply transformed.’
The Lucky Gambler
It was the first time Alberte Pementa had gambled but, when he sat down, he had the impression that game of cards with Raúl Cotón had been foretold years previously. There was a strange sense of expectation in the bar in Brandariz. Fiz, the waiter, arranged the tablecloth as if for an autopsy and brought the cards with all the care of someone laying down a weapon. Cotón was playing and that spelt only one thing: disaster.
‘These cards have got Morse on the back,’ joked Pementa.
‘I’ve no problem with them,’ said Cotón.
‘Then I haven’t either.’
‘Shut the door. Make yourselves comfortable. Gentlemen, we’re outside the law. And bring us a bird,’ Cotón told Fiz.
‘A bird? Please not.’
‘Don’t grumble. We need to know the time.’
‘There’s a clock on the wall.’
‘Bring us a bird. The bird is time.’
Fiz came back with a starling inside a cage. Placed it on the side of the table.
‘What’s its name?’ Pementa asked.
‘Figaro.’
‘The last one was called Figaro,’ Cotón remarked.
‘Yes. But the last one died. Smoked to death in a cage.’
Cotón stopped shuffling and stared at Pementa. Offered him a cigarette.
‘You’d better smoke. You know the condition?’
‘What condition?’
‘No one leaves till the bird is dead.’
Alberte Pementa was a lucky man. He’d always been lucky. The night he arrived at the bar in Brandariz, he opened the door, looked down at the ground and found a 500-peseta note. A blue note. Lots of money at that time. Some people had never seen a note that colour before. It was a Saturday night and the bar was full of men, almost all of them building labourers letting off steam after a week’s work in the city. The smoke of Celtas gave conversations a structured consistency, though there was also the odd flourish of someone smoking a Tip Top, Portuguese blond. Each to his own, nobody noticed him. Until he bent down and stood up with that note in his hand like an oriflamme. The first look of congratulation gave way to a general feeling of resentment. Why should Pementa have found it soon as he came through the door? Why?
‘Things look at us,’ Pementa attempted a justification. ‘We don’t look at them.’
Pementa’s remark was considered witty, but not without pride. At this late hour, on the back of several rounds, people were highly sensitive to signs. What was so special about Pementa that notes should look at him?
‘It’s just that the man is lucky,’ said Fiz. ‘That’s all.’
Everyone understood that Pementa had been very lucky. But such luck should be shared around. It couldn’t discriminate in this way, pull a fast one on people who’d always lived there. People who were from the place. Where’d Pementa come from? Another village, on horseback. All he’d done was arrive and fill up.
‘Somebody might be missing that note, I dare say.’
The person who made this observation was Raúl Cotón, who egged the others on with his look.
Everybody checked their pockets, their wallets, but no one claimed back the note. They might have been resentful, but they were honest.
‘Well, I say that note’s as much yours as it’s mine,’ insisted Cotón. Pementa understood. His horse was outside, tied to the hitching-rail, and he’d only stopped for a drink to shake off the night dew. It would give him great pleasure to share his luck with those present, in a toast to the parish’s deceased. There was a murmur of approval. Here was a gentleman, a tavern prince. But Cotón broke the accord. What was under discussion was not the note, an accidental factor, but the possession of Luck with a capital letter, which Cotón, in a hoarse, forceful, brandy-laden voice, raised to the rank of virgin or goddess, Our Lady of Luck, whose favour had to be decided here, this night and no other.
Pementa didn’t mind playing for luck. He wasn’t superstitious.
‘You ever been unlucky?’ asked Cotón, who seemed to speak not through his mouth, but through the weal across his cheekbone.
‘I camp out under my own star. Where I do not run, I don’t grow tired.’
‘Well, I cut the air with a sickle. I’m fed up of treading shit and am going to unwalk the wheel. Let’s see those cards! I’m going to get your three, Pementa! Understand?’ growled Cotón in the direction of the Brandariz public.
They played and all Pementa did was lose.
First off, what he had to hand, the money. Then his horse at the door. His belt. His riding boots. Followed by his property. His mother�
��s inheritance. Her jewellery, the toad necklace and filigree earrings, the bedhead made of chestnut wood and carved with roses. Finally the chest. ‘You going to bet the chest?’ ‘I’ve still got something. St Anthony of Padua.’ ‘How can you bet poor little old Anthony? The saint everyone loves, the matchmaker, the one who looks after the herd.’
‘He wants a bullet in his head,’ remarked a parishioner. ‘Betting St Anthony!’
‘Anyone else can shut up or provide tobacco,’ said Cotón.
The lucky gambler lost St Anthony as well. He was ashamed. Not just because of what the living would say, but because of what the dead might think. Enough. He’d lost everything.
‘Your turn in the dance.’
‘What?’
‘You’ve still got your turn in the dance.’
‘It’s not a cow, I can’t bet that.’
‘I want your turn.’
Pementa knew very well what this meant. For months now, he’d been dancing with the same girl in the fixed corner, where you didn’t have to give way in the dance. It was a kind of preserve. In the rest of the room, you had to give way. However content the couple might be, in the rest of the room, a local boy’s request to step in for the slow dance had to be granted without further ado. A round that is not over until the couple formalises their relationship. Makes it clear they’re serious. The fixed corner was the preserve of seriousness. The obligation to make way is an arbitrary rule, often irritating, but it leads to surprises, constant traffic, so that there’s much more hullabaloo, whereas in the territory of those ‘on speaking terms’ there is safety in silence. The most ardent lovers bend and bow, hope to reach the light without getting burnt, like moths around a lamp, and, if we glance in their direction, they’re trying out new symmetries that show a willingness to exchange bodies. There’s a moment at the end of the number when a fiery couple seems to have swapped facial and bodily features to such an extent that, being of a different size, they’ve suddenly acquired the same stature. This interchange is beneficial. They’re both more beautiful after the dance. But there are some who, in the formality of their engagement, suddenly grow cold, like bronze poured into a mould. They dance to each tune with a correctness that makes them all the same, be it a bolero or a paso doble, as if they were in fact doing the housework. Alberte Pementa and his girl belonged not to these, but to the first kind. Being ‘on speaking terms’ should be understood in the widest sense. Because speaking to each other implied carnal knowledge. They were either engaged or on the way to being so. Which was not just a verbal undertaking, but a bodily promise.
‘You going to bet your turn?’
‘Shut it,’ said Cotón. ‘It’s the right to dance.’
‘He wants a kick in the balls,’ said the parishioner.
After that, Pementa had only one thing left. Luck.
Time was running out. The starling in the cage was showing signs of suffocating amid so much smoke. Its death signalled the end of the game. And the bird seemed to know it. Motionless on its perch, it had a grave look, like an animal in a fable.
‘I’ve nothing left,’ said Pementa. ‘Not even a horse. I’ll have to walk.’
‘Yes, you have,’ said Cotón with the same voice, the same desire as in the first game.
‘What’s that?’
‘Luck.’
‘Go to bed, Cotón,’ said a local, hoping to do him a favour. ‘You’ve won everything. Don’t weigh using the devil’s scales.’
‘Calamity, why don’t you go and see if it’s raining.’
They played for luck. Cotón concentrated harder than ever. He’d had a magnificent night. Game after game, he’d beaten Pementa. And now he was going to deprive him of luck.
From the first card, it was obvious the wind had changed. Luck loved Pementa, or it didn’t love Cotón, one way or the other.
Which is why Alberte Pementa decided to leave. Ashamed at having betted love and kept luck. I don’t know what happened that day, what mist got inside his head. But even his friends stayed away from him. He must have been lucky because, just before embarking in Coruña, Santa Catarina, he found a thousand pesetas on the ground. There were lots of people, some whose job it was to do just that, catch anything that might fall out, so to speak, but Pementa found the money as soon as he arrived. Though his head was bowed, his soul in the doldrums. This may have helped him.
Adela, the local soothsayer, with a black bandage over her eyes, said, ‘Don’t let that man embark! No one should leave a city who finds notes on the ground.’ But Alberte Pementa thought differently. He thought the opposite. He thought he should leave at once.
‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ said O.
And Pementa whispered in her ear, ‘It’s true, girl.’
Disguises
He wanted us to know. It was customary to pray, even the rosary’s unending litany. And though we nodded when they asked, yes, we said the rosary at home, the only prayer was that of Polka reading us geography from Élisée’s book, followed by me with an extract from The Invisible Man. He found this book very funny. He’d sometimes cry with laughter. Of the book with burnt edges, Olinda would say, ‘Poor thing never thought it’d be so popular, sad though it is.’ Polka also kept newspaper cuttings with mankind’s chief inventions. The paper was yellowed. So old I thought inventions were the most ancient thing there was. Needless to say, the most important one for Polka, after aspirin, was electricity. He wanted Pinche to become an electrician. Or a painter. Because of the clothes.
In the field of construction, painters are the most stylish. Because of their shirts. They’re the ones who wear the most elegant shirts. They’re the only workers who go and buy them from Camisería Inglesa. Like musicians, they have that courage. Bricklayers and plumbers are the most modest. But a Coruñan painter, at the end of the day, changes on site and struts down the street like Valentino.
When Pinche worked as a sandwich-man for the Sherlock Holmes Museum, we sent Polka a photo so he could see a detective’s style. He looked wonderful in his deerstalker and matching cloak. With a magnifying glass in one hand and calabash pipe in the other. We also sent him a photo of Pinche as a Beefeater, the summer he worked as a Yeoman Warder in the Tower of London. Very smart in his Tudor outfit. He had a go at everything, including executing tourists, but I didn’t want to send Polka a photo of his son with an enormous two-edged axe, pretending to cut off heads.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Pinche. ‘Dad likes Carnival more than anything.’
‘In this photo, you’re an executioner.’
‘Yes, but an English executioner. What an axe! What civilisation!’
What Pinche said was true. I remember, at carnival time, Francisco would completely disappear, change skin, leaving only Polka. It was forbidden back then to wear disguises in the street. Thing is they’d have had to post a policeman at every door. There came a time they did post one at the end of each street especially to stop men dressed as monuments, femmes fatales, reaching the city centre.
I can see them now. The monuments. It’s very early. I’m with Amalia in Torre Street. Suddenly men dressed up as women start to turn the corners. Some of them are impressive. Sailors from San Amaro and Lapas looking like queens of the night. Hairy chests sprouting between pinnacled breasts. They have a taste for rouge, fishnet stockings and stiletto heels. ‘Oh my, don’t look, Amalia, don’t look.’
‘Hey O! Look, look, look, look. The one with a flower in her hair, isn’t that your father?’
She would have to spot him of all people. There are dozens of monumental women, but she goes straight like an arrow to Polka in his print dress, short like a miniskirt, you can see his bulge, lace knickers containing that packet, how horrible, even a tutu would have been better.
‘There, there! The one acting all innocent. He looks great!’
There’s no shutting her up. She turns to me and points out a defect, ‘His legs are like matchsticks.’
Lame, with legs like matchsticks. Sh
e’s even impressed she noticed.
‘Come on, let’s go,’ I say.
‘What’s wrong, O? You’re all red. Hey, you’re blushing! We have to greet him. We can’t leave here without saying hello to your father. Polka, Mr France, Francisco!’
‘Why don’t you shut up?’ I mutter, getting more and more annoyed.
And then he readjusts the padding in his bra and walks towards us. Completely ignores me. Says to Amalia, ‘Miss, what’s all this fuss about? I may not be La Belle Otero, but it’s the first time someone calls me “Mr”. Your desire for a man is making you see things.’
He’d disappear for three days and nights. First on his own, dressed as a monumental woman on Mount Alto, then he’d join the procession that left Castro on Ash Wednesday to bury the Carnival. By then, he was a bishop or cardinal. One year, they threw the dummy into the River Monelos. I didn’t quite understand what was going on, but I know several men were beaten up by the civil guards. Fled cross-country. The guards then came to arrest them. To take their statements in the barracks. And they started with him, with Polka. Because they hadn’t forgotten. Because he was important enough to have a record. As a child, I didn’t know what this meant. I heard at home he couldn’t get a job because he had ‘antecedents’. And I confused ‘antecedents’ with ‘ancestors’. Who were these ancestors that kept causing problems? Were they men dressed as monumental women? Were they carnival priests?
They were kept with the horses. They’d been taken to the stables underneath the barracks. And Polka used the term ‘commander’ to address a corporal, who didn’t object to the sudden promotion, and explain, ‘My commander, there’s no need for us all to be conveniently interrogated.’