Books Burn Badly

Grandpa Mayarí’s Cane

GRANDPA MAYARÍ HUNTED down items of news with the iron tip of his cane. He preferred the yellow ones, dipped in sun and frost, swept along the same paths as the dry leaves, though newspaper stays one step behind, on its own. The leaves of trees and newspapers, freed from the date, move westwards in flocks of crazy melancholy. They sometimes crouch in an abandoned doorway, all mucky, like the hair of a pet which has come back from its nocturnal outing with a dead man’s cold slap and been unable to locate the cat-flap. On Mount Alto, the hill on which Hercules Lighthouse stands, some of these itinerant leaves catch on prickly thickets and turn into dry meat. But a few go into a trance and are carried this way and that, tattooing the wind.

These are the ones sought out by the tip of Antonio Vidal, Grandpa Mayarí’s cane.

Here’s one now. The cane pretends not to see. Suddenly darts through the air and harpoons the piece of news on the sea lane opened by feet in the soft grass. We’re on the high cliffs of Gaivoteiro, in the direction of Fura do Touciño, and there’s something of the sea bird in the piece of paper. A final flapping of navigational wings.

Mayarí vacated his position at Aristotle’s Lantern, grocer’s, and chose the start of summer, the best he could remember, to spend a period of time in Coruña. He came to see the boats. This was no excuse, no figure of speech. It was true. Absolutely true. He’d get up very early to go to Muro Fishmarket, which is where fishing boats, bacas and bous from the Great Sole, unloaded. Although all sales there were by auction and in large quantities, he’d always get some fish, if possible scad and sail-fluke, and sometimes bring one of those large hakes people of the sea call ‘Baby Lola’, perhaps because of their resemblance to baby mermaids, something he accepted because it fell into his hands and he couldn’t say no to the patter of a fishwife, like anyone in the din of a fishmarket who was born a farmer. He never ate it. He liked boats, not fish. In time, I reached the conclusion he bought it for the news, in this case wet and scaly news, since it was usually wrapped in newspaper. He soon got rid of the fish, like someone finally surrendering an infinite, innocent sadness into safe hands, those of Neves, maid and cook, though for a few moments he’d read those sheets of newspaper serving as a shroud. This observation of mine shouldn’t sound strange. What was strange, hence it caught my attention, was that Grandpa Mayarí didn’t read normal, whole newspapers, there being several, including the two that arrived a couple of days late by subscription from Madrid.

From this first visit to the fishmarket, he’d return when dawn was straining at the oars on the other side of the bay, in Mera. He’d come home when the sun was the height of a man in the east. He’d then have breakfast and, happy as a frog in a puddle, take in a view of the port from the gallery. He adored his daughter and maintained a solemn silence in front of her paintings. His daughter, Chelo, respected this silence. I don’t recall her ever asking for his opinion, in search of an adjective, though she could so easily have elicited praise from someone who loved her so much. I’m sure Antonio Vidal liked those paintings, I’m in no doubt, I think I knew him quite well, but I suppose, like almost everyone else, he wondered why Chelo didn’t paint landscapes and, above all, why she didn’t paint seascapes.

I possessed the answer to the question grandpa never asked, but to the one who did ask, I didn’t want to give it.

Chelo painted landscapes on the palm of my hand. Souvenirs, she called them. When she was satisfied, she’d sign them: Souvenir by Corot. So this name was always familiar to me, like someone tickling my hand. A name that went from my hand to my eyes with an easel on its back.

When I couldn’t speak, when I stumbled on a word and she saw that this struggle with language was filling me with icy horror, that of an inner being whose teeth are chattering in the cold, teeth and a cold which got inside, behind my eyes, under my tongue, she’d say, ‘Come.’ And paint a souvenir on my hand. ‘White, blue, grey and silver today.’

The habit of opening and closing my hand.

‘Hey, what’s that?’ Grandpa Mayarí would ask.

In the afternoon, we’d go out to Mount Alto, as far as Hercules Lighthouse. But first we’d stop at the Grapevine bar and sit under the trellis. He’d say to me, ‘You watch her laugh.’ When the woman came, he’d order a fizzy water for me. ‘And for the old man,’ he’d say, meaning himself, ‘an electric Ribeiro.’ And it was true, the woman did laugh.

‘Now let me see what you’ve got in there.’

I opened my hand very, very slowly.

‘A boat, eh? A boat in the mist. Lucky you.’

But there was something else Chelo did to help me with language. Teach me how to read and write as soon as possible. Long before I went to school. Chelo’s idea was that I had to transfer my thoughts to my hand. ‘Your mouth,’ she’d say, ‘will speak through your fingers. And what you do with your fingers will demand sound.’ It was true. A straight line had a sound. A wavy line demanded a sound. A curved line, another. You had to write them down. Play with sounds. Not be afraid of them.

I started writing by drawing. Before letters, forms. Zigzags, spirals, crosses. And it’s true that forms produce a sound, a sound that’s already inside you, lying in wait, in the gorge of your throat. I realised this the first time I drew a large triangle. A large triangle demands the sound of a large triangle. In this way, my voice followed the line drawn by my hand. So that letters, when they arrived, were also forms of nature, as t is the mast of a boat and l a cypress. O can be lots of things. An o can be the sun or moon. We had a washerwoman called O. In the calendar of saints, there was Our Lady of Expectation, Mary of the O. I used to laugh when my mother saw her in the distance and exclaimed, ‘Here comes Our Lady of Expectation!’ She was easy to spot since she carried a huge O on top of her head. An O full of clothes. When she arrived, her face was also a smiley O, with two clear eyes, so that her presence recalled the sun and circles of water.

‘Hello, O.’

O, the washerwoman, was one of the women Chelo painted. A series that seemed unending, and in fact was, which she called Women Carrying Things on Top of Their Heads.