Books Burn Badly

The Burning Books

19 August 1936

THE BOOKS WERE burning badly. One of them stirred in the nearest bonfire and Hercules thought he saw it suddenly fan out its fresh pollack’s red gills. An incandescent piece came off another and rolled like a neon sea urchin down the steps of a fire staircase. Then he thought a trapped hare was moving in the fire, and that a gust of wind, which kindled the flames, was scattering in sparks each and every one of the hairs on its burnt skin. So the hare kept its form in a graph of smoke and stretched its legs to bound off down the glazed diagonal of the Atlantic avenue’s sky.

The first book fires had been built by the docks, on the way to Parrote, on the urban belly so to speak, where the sea gave birth to the city, the first cluster of fishermen. Much grass had grown since then, even on the roofs, whose vocation is to be the brow of a hill, in the area where today the bay’s passenger boats, the city’s trams and national coaches all meet. The other fires are placed alongside, in the main square, which is named after María Pita, the heroine who led the defence of the city during one of the many attacks by sea at the head of a commando of fishing women, and now contains the town hall with its inscription ‘Head, Guard, Key and Antemural of the Kingdom of Galicia’. Curtis had heard of the heroine María Pita at the Dance Academy as if she were still alive, in that undying present that is to be a rumour on people’s lips, not just because she’d stood up to the sea dog/admiral Francis Drake, but because she’d been married four times and the judge had had to warn her that she’d been widowed enough and should see that no more men died in the battle of her bed.

There’s a pauper called Zamorana who lives and sleeps among the tombs and pantheons in the city of the dead, in the seaside cemetery of San Amaro. She once gave Hercules a fright when she stepped out from behind a grave and, holding up a cigarette butt, asked him:

‘Got a light, boy?’

Zamorana is not really a beggar. She has a job paid for by tips that is very important for the city. Coruña’s late departed look out to sea. Near the shore by the cemetery are the Ánimas shoals, the best breeding grounds, with more starfish on the bottom than can be seen in the sky. Though they can also be spotted falling from on high. Seagulls and cormorants fly with starfish in their beaks, so the starfish jettison their captive limb and return to the sea an arm short. The cemetery affords the best view of the mouth of the bay. And this has something to do with Zamorana, who asked Curtis for a light the night he spent by the graveyard. The beggar-woman is a sentinel. When a liner comes into sight, she goes down Torre Street, warning of the boat’s arrival. A liner is full of rich pickings. Zamorana’s voice sounds like a husky conch shell. ‘Boat’s coming, Mr Ferreiro, boat’s coming. . Boat’s coming, Mr Ben, boat’s coming. . Boat’s coming.’

Zamorana emerges with her ditty about a boat’s arrival, and she emerges from the cemetery, not from any old place. Curtis recalls how when he was a boy, Zamorana was already old, already announced boats in her husky voice. He thought she and others like her lasted for ever. María Pita, for example. The procession of country dead remained at the city gates. And the seaside cemetery’s occupants delegated the lighthouse and Zamorana’s husky conch to rouse the city: ‘Boat’s coming.’

The reason Vicente Curtis, otherwise known as Hercules, is thinking about Zamorana is because she’s standing by the Parrote viewpoint. Besides the arsonists, she’s the only discernible presence. She’s unmistakable. She’s wearing all the skirts she owns, the skirts of a lifetime, one on top of the other, so she looks like a female bell. Some ships arrived yesterday. Warships. They’re moored next to the yacht club and are part of the Third Reich’s fleet. She saw them coming, but didn’t go down Torre Street, singing her ditty, ‘Boat’s coming, boat’s coming!’ She watches. She’s seen many things. But not that kind of fire. She’s never read a book. There was a time, perhaps her happiest, when she sold newspapers. She hawked news though she couldn’t read. That’s why she thinks they’re hurting her. Going against her. They’re burning what she never had, what she always needed. There’s something strange about the smoke, it stings, gets behind the eyes. Reminds her of a time she’d rather forget. The day a stranger set fire to the blanket she was sleeping rough under, the day she put out her flaming hair with her hands. And now her hands are scars healed by the sea. That’s why she decided to sleep among the tombs. Where are the readers of books? Why are they taking so long?

‘Oy you, old witch, what you looking at? Get out of here!’ shouts one of the soldiers. ‘Go find yourself a billy-goat on Mount Alto!’

She never kept quiet. This Cain had better listen up. She was going to tell him a thing or two. Put a few things straight. Have it out with him, face to face.

This strange smoke that gets behind the eyes. This itching. The smoky torch. The fire. The smell of fire in her hair. She burnt once already. The skin’s memory. The scars’ itching. She moves off. Better to keep the peace. She returns to her tombs, trailing her bell of cloth. All the skirts of a lifetime.

The book fires are not part of the city’s memory. They’re happening now. So this burning of books isn’t taking place in some distant past or in secret. Nor is it a fictional nightmare thought up by some apocalyptic. It’s not a novel. This is why the fire progresses slowly, because it has to overcome resistance, the arsonists’ incompetence, the unusualness of burning books. The absentees’ incredulity. It’s obvious the city has no memory of this lazy, stubborn smoke moving through the air’s surprise. Even what’s not been written has to burn. Someone arrives from the local tourist office, carrying a pile of leaflets with the programme of festivities, ‘fresh meat’ they call it, possibly in reference to the woman bathing on the front cover under the heading Ideal Climate and the town’s official coat of arms, the lighthouse with an open book on top acting as a lamp giving off beams of light. All this will burn slowly, the design as well, which won’t make it back on to the city’s escutcheon.

‘Plato’s Republic. About time! What’s this? An Encyclopedia of Meat!’ Bam!

It’s a thick volume that sends embers flying and eats away the angles of ruins like the sudden collapse of a seam on lower buildings. The word ‘meat’ was enough to activate the throw. The head imagines a treatise on lust, pictures of orgies, shame not to have had a peek. When the volume reaches the end of its fall, the Falangist gives it a little kick on the corner with the toecap of his boot. As it opens, with a new eruption of smoke and cinders and the first flames, what meets the eyes is a two-page map of the peninsula with the different provinces shown in colours. The effect is too causal, an accidental jerk of the boot, which the eyes hasten to correct. No, they’re not the provinces of Spain. It soon becomes obvious it’s really an illustration of the different parts of a cow. Loin, sirloin, hock, coccyx, rump, rib, brisket. .

‘What you’ve thrown in there is a book of recipes!’ comes a mocking voice from behind.

‘Then it’ll make a nice barbecue.’

The fires are in the most public part of the city, opposite the symbolic seat of civil power. Hercules shouldn’t head in that direction because Hercules is far better known than he thinks. But for now he’s in luck. He approaches the fires and none of the operators, all of them armed and dressed in the Falange’s uniform, pays him any attention, taken up as they are with the problem of books burning badly. One of them likens them to bricks. And then attaches a geometrical clarification even he finds strange:

‘They’re parallelepipeds!’

Next to him, the youngest soldier wishes to repeat the long word, but realises it isn’t easy and tries whispering it. It sounds like the name of a very rare species of bird. More complicated than palmipedes. He doesn’t have any problems with that, with palmipedes, and looks at the pyre without reading the titles, like an abstraction, like the model of an Aztec pyramid.

‘Pa-ra-lle-le-pi-peds! That’s it. Parallelepipeds.’

He finally got it. He feels better now.

‘Parallelepiped!’ says the sergeant, slapping him on the back.

‘Parallelepiped,’ he replies proudly, following the trail of smoke and gazing up at the sky. Encouraged by his success, he tries to remember the names of clouds he studied at school. All he remembers is nimbus. What’s a nimbus? What kind of cloud is made by the smoke rising from the pyres? But he stops thinking about clouds because the one who likened the resistance of the books to bricks and pronounced the word ‘parallelepiped’ with incredible ease is preparing to fan the fire with some sheets of newspaper. One of them slips out of his hands and flies like a palmiped. A strange bird, the beginnings of a collage in the sky. Curtis also follows the sheet through the air. The soldier who lost it runs after it, jumps and traps it in the claw of his hand. Looks smug. Calls the others over. There they are with arms upraised in a photo taken yesterday, when they lit the first fires, which the clerical daily El Ideal Gallego printed today, 19 August 1936: ‘On the seashore, so that the sea can carry off the remains of so much misery and corruption, the Falange is burning heaps of books.’

It’s a strange kind of fire, this, Curtis thinks to himself. Its tongue is invisible. It’s a fire that chews, with canines.

Not long before, at the end of June, huge festive bonfires had been erected in the city to celebrate St John’s Eve. Curtis had been one of a group of boys and young men from Sol Street who collected dried branches, worm-eaten pieces of furniture that held themselves together with the dignity of geometrical spectres and the usual donation of wooden remains, broken planks, disjointed limbs, from the highly active Orzán window factory. The structure they raised around the central post was reminiscent of the large stacks of maize that could be seen in winter, conical formations like those in Indian settlements, in the villages of Mariñas and Bergantiños, the countryside that opened up as soon as you left the city’s isthmus, from San Roque de Afóra, San Cristovo das Viñas, San Vicente de Elviña and Santa María de Oza to the fertile valleys of the River Monelos and Meicende, Eirís, Castro, Mesoiro, Feáns, Cabana, Someso, Agrela, Gramalleira, Silva and Fontenova. But these stacks were never burnt. Once the maize had been husked, it was used as fodder for the cattle during the long, hard winter and for the warp of the land. The image of American Indian settlements belonged to Curtis, who associated tepees with the way the maize stalks were arranged after the harvest. But burning books was new to him. The bonfires this year had burnt well and the fire’s final smell had been of sardine fat soaking maize bread, for such was the fire’s destiny, to cook fish and ward off evil spirits. Which is why you had to leap over it seven times.

But this fire is different. It’s not for leaping over. There aren’t any children around it. This also is a way of distinguishing fires, whether they’re for jumping over or not.

Curtis wasn’t sure he’d jumped over the fire on Sol Street seven times on St John’s Eve. He’d certainly jumped more than once. Now he was sorry he hadn’t counted. He had been in a good mood and felt like talking. Not just because his first fight was coming soon. His opponent was someone called Manlle. He had also informed anyone who wanted to listen of two important pieces of news. The first, that his friend, Arturo da Silva, Galicia’s flamboyant lightweight champion, had found him a job as an apprentice climatic electrician.

‘Climatic?’

‘That’s right, climatic. Heat the cinemas in winter and then cool them in the summer. And install large fridges up and down the country so that there’s always something to eat.’

‘That’s fantastic, Curtis. A real revolution.’

But equally important to Curtis had been the second piece of news. This year, he let it be known, on Sunday 2 August, a special train would depart for the Caneiros festivities. And everyone there, their mouths trimmed with sardine scales, listened intently because a trip upriver, to Caneiros, in the heart of the forest, was the most enthralling excursion for miles around, in a country that knew how to celebrate. Leica said that Curtis had a photographic memory. A shutterless camera. And now he was focusing on life. That’s right, he added, he himself had tickets for the special train, which included the trip by boat and a buffet.

‘A buffet?’ asked someone who’d drawn close to the Sol Street bonfire. ‘What the hell is a buffet?’

Curtis had a photographic memory so, given his role as impromptu spokesperson for the event, he decided to borrow a phrase Holando had used.

‘It’s a sort of Pantagruelian meal.’

‘And what’s in that alien meal?’

Curtis wasn’t entirely sure what Holando had meant. But he’d liked the phrase and understood what he was trying to say not just from his ruddy expression, but because of the word itself, which was fulsome and whose meaning seemed to dance on top of its letters.

‘Pantagruelian is Pantagruelian, as its name indicates.’

‘Lots of it?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Well, why don’t you say so, so that people can understand?’

‘It’s a question of culture, right, Curtis?’

‘That’s right, culture. And there’ll be lectures too.’

‘Lectures? Hmmm. Don’t scare everybody off! A party’s a party.’

‘They’re before the meal. To give you an appetite.’

‘All right then. It’s not just the rich who’ll partake of a bit of culture.’

‘Caneiros is an excursion the dead would go on if they could,’ underlined another.

‘That’s right,’ Curtis agreed, ‘and I can get you tickets. This year, there’s a special train. That’s right, a special train.’ He liked to repeat it because he thought, as he gave the information, he could hear the departing whistle and the engine’s eager optimism as it pulled out. And then they were on the boat, the Atlantic tide returning the river to its sources and the bagpiper Polka playing an aubade on the stern.

Three pesetas each. And he could get them tickets for the special train to Caneiros.

Vicente Curtis realised he’d never wondered where the material books are made of came from. No, he wasn’t thinking about ideas, doctrines and dreams. He knew that books had something to do with trees. There was a relation. It could be said somehow or other — and as he walked towards the pyres, he clarified his thoughts — that’s right, we could say that books come from nature. It might not even be false or exaggerated to say that books are a kind of graft. Though that would be to speak in metaphors. This was one of the things that had impressed him about Arturo da Silva, Galicia’s lightweight champion, that his head was full of metaphors. He wasn’t known for this, he was known for his hook, feared like a cobra, and for how he moved, his tireless dancing during fights. His celebrated jig. At this point in his recollections, as the first gust from the fires reached him, so similar it seemed to the leaves in autumn, a smile flickered across Curtis’ face as he heard Arturo da Silva reply to a journalist’s question in a teasing voice, ‘My jig? Don’t tell me you’re one of those who come to see a boxer’s legs!’ The second wave was the smell of untimely smoke, the mournful, afflicted smell of things that won’t burn, it reminded him of the damp, discordant smoke of green wood or the unwilling smoke of sawdust and the remnants of formwork, a fire that hides, grows cold. He knew it well because it signified bad weather and drowning. But he carried on. He knew how much Arturo da Silva loved those books. The people carrying and throwing them called out the source of their spoils, as if a guarantee of origin would give the flames the stimulus they needed, ‘Germinal Library! Hercules Cultural Association! New Era Libertarian Association! Galician Torch of Free Thinking!’ The soldier who seemed to be in charge of the fires, since he was the one others consulted, who from time to time read out titles and origins with gusto but also with nuances, like someone pronouncing a final judgement or a last word, is a man who is devoted to his mission, focused on the sacrifice, who eagerly accepts a copy a joyfully exultant colleague has run across to give him, holding it open by the flyleaves, open, that’s it, and pinned down like someone who’s just caught a rare lepidopteron and is taking it to the leader of the expedition. Time runs around like a stiff breeze, flaps its wings over the pyres and then stops. Everything now hangs on the decree. Finally the supervisor cries out, ‘My word, it’s a Casaritos!’

He pores over the guarantee of authenticity, the distinguishing mark, the ex-libris that matches the owner’s signature.

‘Yes, well done. It’s a genuine Casaritos!’

Curtis knows who he’s talking about. He knows who the supervisor is referring to by this diminutive he relishes with pleasurable disdain. On one occasion, on Panadeiras Street, next to the Capuchins’ myrtle, his mother pointed out Santiago Casares Quiroga, the Republican leader, to him and then boasted, ‘We’re practically neighbours.’ Then, however, Curtis had paid attention not to Casares, whom he already knew as the Man with the Red Buick and the yacht Mosquito, but to the woman and girl accompanying him. The woman wore her hair down in a mahogany blaze while the girl, unusually for her age, wore a white velvet cap with a hairnet, which covered her dancing curls. The Woman with the Mahogany Hair smiled, adopting a pose Terranova would have termed ‘a natural close-up’, while the Girl with the Hairnet seemed preoccupied, her presence austere and even surly. She kept looking back as if she feared that some of those applauding, since many of the people on the pavement had burst into spontaneous applause, would turn into a mob, snatch her cap and abduct her parents. The rest of the time, she stared at the ground absent-mindedly. Casares’ shoes were black and white like a tap-dancer’s. Curtis was convinced that if he showed the soles for a moment, they’d be as shiny as the rest, polished like an upside-down mirror. It wasn’t long before they became the object of the couple and their daughter’s attention. Curtis’ mother was carrying a rolled-up mattress on her head. The mattress had a red damask cover and Curtis’ mother was content. She smiled at the couple and their daughter. This gesture had the effect of cheering the girl, who was surprised, intrigued by a woman smiling with such a load on top of her head. Curtis was also content. He was carrying a blue damask mattress. But he was used to that. The first thing he’d learnt in the street was that he was the son of a whore.

‘Hercules, son of a whore!’

There was Hercules Lighthouse, Hercules Cinema, Hercules Café, Hercules Transport, Hercules Insurance. The city had a myriad Hercules. Why did he have to be precisely Hercules son of a whore?

No sooner had he emerged into the street than he heard the drone of that nickname. He heard insults and would have liked them to pass on by, to fly far away from him. But the nicknames clustered around him like wasps. And sometimes they stung him. Died, stuck to his skin. So as a small boy Vicente Curtis understood that, just as his mother carried a mattress on her head, he carried another being on his shoulders. His nickname. Hercules, son of a whore. The difference between one Curtis and the other was that Curtis the carrier looked permanently mystified while Hercules, the other Curtis, was indomitable. Years later, when he was a travelling photographer and had a wooden horse, the mystified and indomitable took turns to be cameraman or invisible horseman. Which is why Hercules sometimes didn’t talk or talked to himself. Before the war, when he was a promising boxer, the boy who held the champ of Galicia’s gloves for him, his friends couldn’t understand why he minded being called ‘Hercules’. He would have preferred ‘Maxim’ or ‘The Corner’. Even ‘Tough Guy’ was better, which is what Terranova the singer called him. But not Hercules. He didn’t like it. ‘What do you mean, you don’t like Hercules, you fool?’ they said to him. ‘That’s how you were born. You know nothing about honour. Just imagine the poster: “Today, Saturday, in Coruña Bullring, star combat: Vicente Curtis ‘Hercules’ versus. .”’

‘He has another daughter,’ said Milagres suddenly. ‘He has another daughter studying abroad. He’s a good man.’

He had another daughter and was a good man. Curtis felt as if he were missing part of the story. So he waited for Milagres to catch her breath. When you’re carrying a mattress on top of your head, even if the cover is damask, it’s not easy to go into great detail.

Milagres finally told the story:

‘When he was studying to be a lawyer in Madrid, he had an affair, apparently with his landlady. And the result was a daughter. Do you know what happened? He kept the child. He didn’t just give her his name and some maintenance money. He turned up in Coruña with the child. On his own. The child in his arms on the train. He didn’t give a damn what people might think. Oh, no. How many men in the world would do that?’

Milagres was very discreet. She had a reputation for being tight-lipped. But she asked that question on the pavement of Panadeiras Street as if she were directing it to the whole universe. The answer as well, accompanied by a flourish, ‘I could count them on the fingers of this hand!’

From the skylight, the back of 12 Panadeiras Street looked something like a toy garden surrounded by walls clad in ivy and passion flowers. On holidays, the girl, helped by a maid, would bring out the cages with budgerigars on to the balcony. And conduct the orchestra of birds with a stick. The garden had cats, a numerous family, and Curtis can see the Casares’ daughter telling them to sit down and listen to the concert. Some of the older, more worldly-wise toms pretend to obey and park their bottoms.

‘Hey you, what’s your name?’

The girl had interrupted the concert, pointed towards him with the stick and shouted out her question. At that point in time, Curtis was a sort of alien. A head with a body in the shape of a three-storey house. He replied and asked her the same question.

‘María Vitoria!’

‘You what?’

‘Vitola,’ she said. ‘My name’s Vitola.’

She put down the stick and, with her hands as a speaking-trumpet, shouted out some news that echoed in the backyards, across the border separating the well-to-do from the seedy district of Papagaio, ‘My father’s just come out of prison.’

Of prison? Curtis was shocked. What had Mr Casares been doing in prison? In Madrid as well. In the capital city. It must have been something serious if they’d taken him there. He was an educated man. Rich too! He had a Buick, he had his yacht Mosquito. He wore a tie and shoes that were so polished they reflected the clouds. He was also a lawyer. One of those who got people out of jail. It was even said he’d defended free thinkers and anarchists and stopped them going to jail. He also had tuberculosis. It was difficult to understand what Mr Casares had been doing behind bars in Madrid when he was supposed to keep people out of prison.

Vitola turned up one day dressed as an Indian. With plaits. Somebody had managed to restrain her curls, those waves Curtis liked so much. It wasn’t any old outfit. She looked like a woman. A little woman. She sounded like one too.

‘Curtis!’ she cried. ‘Get down here!’

His head was sticking out of the skylight. What did she mean, get down? Impossible. He’d kill himself.

‘The other way, silly. Come down through the front door.’

Curtis didn’t tell anyone where he was rushing off to, nor could they have imagined. It was the first time he’d set foot in 12 Panadeiras Street. What surprised him most was that the walls of the house were made of books. That and the outfits of Vitola and her friends, who were all wearing exotic costumes.

‘Curtis is the only native,’ said Gloria, the mother who looked like a film star, with those large, daring eyes and mahogany hair. Native, Curtis mused. Another alias. Hmmm. Gloria spent most of the party next to the window, smoking and looking out on to Panadeiras Street. Occasionally she would change the Bakelite record on the electric gramophone. Many years later, whenever he passed that way with his camera and Carirí, his horse, Curtis sought out the window and the glass, like a plate, sent back the image of Vitola’s mother. It was simple. You had to photograph back to front. Instead of capturing images, release them.

He enjoyed that party he could never have dreamt of being invited to. He was the only man. A native, that’s right. He danced with women of all races. The adults may have thought it was only a game. But for them it was something more. He understood the importance for people of getting dressed up. He was older than Vitola, but the Vitola who stared at him while she danced did so from a new face, from make-up. Shortly afterwards, her father was appointed a minister of the Second Republic. At the end of the summer of 1931, the family moved to Madrid. But at Christmas the lights on the tree in 12 Panadeiras Street came on again.

It was midnight already. Too late for Christmas Eve dinner. It was his now inseparable companion Luís Terranova who rang the changes. And Luís Terranova didn’t want to spend that evening at home. He didn’t want to see his mother cry. He didn’t want to eat cod and cauliflower. It was like biting into his father’s memory. The cod so pale and fleshy. The flower-heads like funeral bouquets.

‘You’re lucky,’ he told Curtis. ‘Christmas Eve at the Dance Academy is much more fun. Lots more people crying together around a pile of sweets. I wish I had that many aunts!’

At that point, they watched a carriage arrive, pulled by two horses, and heard a gong sound in 12 Panadeiras Street. The Christmas tree lights were reflected in the ground-floor windows. Father Christmas got out of the carriage with a sack.

The two of them stood on the pavement, their hands in their pockets, a puff of breath around their mouths, like cartoon figures who remain speechless.

Father Christmas looked around.

‘Good evening!’

‘Evening, Mr Casares!’

Father Christmas went inside 12 Panadeiras Street and Terranova gave Curtis a nudge. ‘Casares? That Father Christmas was the minister?’

‘That’s right.’

‘He could have left us a present. Shared the weight out.’

‘I think he was carrying books. Books for the most part. Books are heavy.’

‘Well, he could have given us one!’ exclaimed Terranova. ‘Even if it was a book. To say the least!’

One of Curtis’ part-time jobs had been to cart books for the Faith bookshop. He brought them in a barrow from the railway station. They were kept in boxes. One of them, the biggest, had a label which read Man and the Earth (Reclus). Another big one contained The White Magazine-The Ideal Novel. Smaller ones were marked Mother (Maxim Gorky), The Story of the Heavens (Stawell Ball), Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka), How to Become a Good Electrician (T. Corner). As he pushed the iron-wheeled barrow, he stared at the labels. ‘Maxim’. He liked that name as a possible alias for the day he became a boxer. ‘Kid Kafka’ wasn’t bad either. And ‘The Corner’. That was perfect. But he liked ‘Maxim’ as well. The books were heavy. Tobacco weighs a lot less. As do condoms. Terranova was into the international trade of liners. Whatever he could hide under his coat. He was paid in kind by the crew members he took on a tour of the city. An easy job. Many of them stopped not far from port, in Luisa Fernanda’s cabaret or the Méndez Núñez, charmed by the Garotas variety show. The way they came out half naked, singing with a puppet between their legs, ‘Mummy, buy me a negro, buy me a negro from the bazaar, who dances the Charleston and plays the Jazzman.’ Terranova imitated their performance with a boxing glove between his legs. What a clown he was and how well he did it. As when he pushed the barrow and stopped. Read the labels on the boxes one by one. ‘Man, earth, heavens, mother. . What you doing with all this weight, Curtis? You got the whole world in here.’ ‘I’m going to the Faith bookshop.’ ‘That’s right,’ he replied, ‘always trying to help. To carry all this, you’d need the barrow of faith.’ There were days he spoke like an old man.

‘Maxim’ wasn’t bad, ‘Kid Kafka’ was unsettling, but he liked ‘The Corner’ best.

A gong sounded again inside 12 Panadeiras Street. It was louder this time. Came from deep inside the house. Cut straight through them. Like the cold. Like the moon.

‘A book at least,’ murmured Terranova, ‘would be something.’

‘You want a book?’ Curtis asked him. ‘You really want a book?’

Both of them had their hands in their pockets. Terranova’s feet were half off the kerb and he was leaning forwards. The same game that annoyed Curtis so much when he played it on the edge of the cliffs. His insistence on always walking along the edge, hanging out over the abyss.

He pretended to fall. Did a somersault. ‘Yes, I want a book!’

‘Come on then. I know where we can find some books.’

It was Christmas Eve 1931. They met no one on the way. The sea in Orzán redoubled its efforts when it saw them. Threw foam, drowned in its own roars. They were counting on this. On certain dates, the sea has a tendency to be vainglorious. The more witnesses there are, the more powerful the waves. They advance sideways against the wind. The water runs down their faces. They laugh and curse. In a corner of the Coiraza wall, which acts as a breakwater, the fashioned stone of the quarries is piled up with natural rocks. Kneeling down, with his back to the sea, Curtis moves a stone and puts his hand in the gap. He knows Flora has a store of The Ideal Novel in there. She goes there to sunbathe. And sometimes smokes what she calls an aromatic. These, she says, are her two square metres of paradise. The naked body revives in the open air. Here she reads her short novels. Keeps a stack of them under the stones.

‘The Ideal Novel? These aren’t books, they’re handkerchiefs. Look what’s here: Sister Light in Hell, My Misfortune, Last Love, Decent Prostitutes, The Executioner’s Daughter, Nancy’s Tragedy . .’

‘You can only pick one,’ says Curtis, impervious to his remarks. ‘They’re Flora’s. They’re OK. I like them.’

‘I’m not in the mood for crying. I already have to have dinner with my mother and an empty plate. What’s the son of the orphan’s father going to have for dinner? Cod. Corpus meum.’

‘Why don’t you tell her not to lay three places?’

‘She won’t listen. She goes crazy. You don’t know what she’s like. Poor Mummy Cauliflower! She’d accepted it. What does it matter whether he died in St John’s or here? But someone went and said something, and now she’s got this idea a dead man could have been stored in salt. If cod is stored in salt, why not a salted man? Some cod are as big as a man.’

Curtis stared at him in disbelief. Stretched out his arms to measure an imaginary leaf.

‘I’m not joking,’ said Terranova. ‘Some cod are like men.’

Water was pouring down his face. Not all of it from the sea. He took a sip. Spat it out. ‘I’ll take this one. The Decline of the Gods by Federica Montseny. Judging from the title, it’ll go against the world, be a little funny.’

That’s it. A ‘Casaritos’! The supervisor wouldn’t look at the book in the same way if it didn’t have that signature, the ex-libris of his name in artistic handwriting. He feels the excitement of having captured something of its owner. He feels that somewhere in Madrid, wherever he may be, Casares is aware two claws have just grabbed him by the lapels and are prising apart his weakened ribs. He examines the signature. He’s not an expert in calligraphy, but he can see the portrait of the man in it. His signature is really a drawing. With its angles and curves. The second ‘a’ of ‘Santiago’ and the first ‘a’ of ‘Casares’ are eyes. The most peculiar stroke is that linking the ‘g’ of ‘Santiago’ with the ‘C’ of ‘Casares’, as if the missing letter, the final ‘o’ of ‘Santiago’, had given its skein to join them. In this case, the second surname, ‘Quiroga’, is represented by the digraph ‘Qu’ and a full stop. Like this: ‘Santiagcasares Qu.’ There is a slanting line underneath, which rather than underlining his name, acts as a gently sloping ramp which the signature ascends.

Weren’t there any more?

Santiago Casares was known to have owned the city’s finest private library. 12 Panadeiras Street had two kinds of superimposed walls: the external wall and the internal bookshelves. Having inherited the library from his father, he received new publications from some of the best bookshops in Europe. Many such books arrived by sea. The supervisor remembered having read an interview in which Casares explained how sailors brought his father books by hand that were forbidden or unavailable in Spain. And how one of his happiest childhood memories was opening the packages ‘brought by the sea.’ He remembered that bit perfectly. He also knew something about packages brought by the sea.

‘Brought by the sea,’ he murmured.

‘What?’

‘More, there must be lots more.’

‘There’s a pile of them burning over there, in the main square. And a bunch were arrested and taken to the Palace of Justice. There are also some in the bullpen.’

The supervisor acknowledges his subordinate’s intention with a smile. Books as defendants, under arrest, against the wall. With their backs to people. In a line, squeezed tight, unable to move, in mute silence. They were the lucky ones. Days, months, years will go by and the arrested books will gradually disappear. A slip of the hand. A determined grip. Book by book, the dismantling of the library, what’s not burnt, in the Palace of Justice. And the same thing will happen to the man’s entire credentials. Everything will be the object of pillaging. Possessions great and small. Even little, intimate things. Not just his books, but the carved wooden shelves that hold them. The collections of the amateur scientist, the curious naturalist, have been carried off or destroyed. The lenses, measuring instruments, appliances for seeing what’s invisible. His herbaria and entomological boxes. All his effects, all his fingerprints. Here’s the last of the pillagers, one who was there in the beginning and returned as if to a wreckage. He’d already made off with a stack of books and optical instruments. This time all he found in the hallway, lying on the floor, was one of the entomological boxes containing labelled insects. What he saw were some repugnant bugs that looked like beetles. He kicked it away with disgust. Why weren’t there any large butterflies? He then went to what must have been the girls’ bedroom. There was a china doll. Broken. On the window sill, a dried starfish and some sea urchin skeletons. He decided to shake the skeletons and out fell some jet earrings. That was something at least. From the window, he could see the garden with a large lemon tree in the middle. The garden’s back wall formed a border. On the other side: sin city. The dividing walls of Papagaio. He looked carefully. Something was stuck to the wall, in among the weeds. Something black. Possibly a ball. But balls weren’t usually black. He went downstairs and descended the garden steps. Swore again. The ball was a strange, oval shape, glistening from the rain. A head. But a head that wasn’t a head. He picked it up. Made of wood. It looked like a head. Eyes, mouth, nose barely discernible in thin lines. And a hole as of a bullet. You never know. Perhaps it’s meant to be like this. It could be a sculpture. Something valuable. The Casares were fashionable people. À la mode. He’d take it. It wasn’t bad, the black woman’s head. Something at least. And as he pondered the mysterious value of things, he glanced at the entomological box and read Coleoptera. If they’re Coleoptera, maybe they’re not beetles. Who knows? There are some strange folk around. Someone might even pay for them. This one, for example. What’s it say? Coccinella septempunctata.

Another book fell next to the scaffold. He picks it up by the back. A little higher. By the neck. That’s life. He steps aside and again opens the book. The supervisor, still a young man, turns the page. Starts reading slowly as he paces around the fire. He may have found an unconscious discipline in reading, a comma or a full stop on the bottom of his boot. He suddenly stops, closes the book and holds it to his chest, in his left hand, like someone carrying a missal, while with his right hand he removes his spectacles, rubs his eyes with the back of his hand and blinks like someone emerging from a cinema. He takes the book and places it on a small pile away from the fires. ‘This one’s staying with me,’ he says. ‘Under house arrest!’

‘On the Fertilisation of Orchids . .’

One of them, the youngest, who to start with looked lazy, but gradually grew more enthusiastic, especially when he managed to repeat the impossible word, that abracadabra, to say ‘para-lle-le-pipeds’, which made him feel as happy as if he’d just vaulted a horse, three jumps in the air, after various unsuccessful attempts, is the one having fun reading out the titles. House arrest? He also has a peek at the pile of books the supervisor’s making.

‘On the Fertilisation of Orchids by Insects! By Charles Darwin.’

Parallelepiped sniffs three times as he reads. Fertilisation? Orchids? Insects? Something’s not quite right. Something bothers him. The idea of orchids being fertilised by insects.

‘That’s disgusting!’

He drops the book in the fire, fucking insects, orchid whores, spits and starts to move faster, using his jokes as a kind of manual lever.

‘Quo vadis? Straight for the flames! Another Conquest of Bread! How many Conquests is that?’

He lifts the book and shouts, ‘More bread! Make bread, ye baking women!’ He manages to attract a few sarcastic smiles. He then goes full out in search of a belly laugh, ‘If you’re not up the duff already!’ He chucks the book, which falls not like a parallelepiped, but like a concertina. A flame comes in search of this light being and he feels encouraged, as if there’s an understanding between them and the fire also likes his jokes. Where is everybody? Why isn’t there more of an audience? Has he got to organise the party and let off the fireworks?

‘What a lot of bread! Germinal, come on, Germinal! Spread your germs. Another Germinal in the pot. The Ex-Men by Gorky. You soon will be. L’art et la révolte by Fernand Pe-llou-ti-er. Well, I never, monsieur! Coruña Corsair Library. Corsair? Coarse air, more like. And what have we here? New Bellies on Strike, Sun Library. Bellies on strike? You mean not working! The Numancia Rising as Told by One of Its Protagonists, Coruña Workers Press. I’ve had about all I can take of that. Does God Exist? Aurora Library. No more questions, Aurora, darling! Victor Hugo, Les Misérables. Hell’s not miserable. Madame Bovary. One less ovary! What’s this? O divino sainete . . Boss, what do we do with this one? The Divine Comedy or something.’

‘The Divine Sketch is by Curros!’ said the supervisor without having to look, which impressed his subordinate.

The queries were few and far between. There wasn’t much selection. Books were unloaded in heaps or thrown haphazardly from boxes. When one did emerge from anonymity, like a face emerging from a common grave, the reading aloud of its title conferred on it a dying distinction, the ultimate proof that the title was actually a good one, since there was that cretin, in his own words, Parallelepiped, with certain pomp, asking about it. Here perhaps, unlike with others that gave rise to jokes, the allusion to the divine made his hands itch. Until that moment, he hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to the meaning of the titles, only to the humour in them. He hadn’t discriminated between them. So it was no surprise he should now think there was something strange in his having picked up one that spoke of ‘the divine’ alongside ‘sketch.’ The one that referred to God to ask if he existed shouldn’t be allowed to exist for another second. But this one, The Divine Sketch, suggested the idea of a superior laugh. And he liked to laugh. To laugh at danger as well. He had guts, you might even say he was hardened. Before the military uprising achieved its purpose, he’d been involved with a group of trained gunmen in acts of provocation aimed at destabilising the Republic. On one occasion, they’d broken up a meeting and someone had been shot. It took him some time to believe that he’d done it. And he never really accepted the fact. He’d been shocked. In his view, the amount of blood a wounded man can lose bore no relation to the simple act of pulling a trigger. After a few days, it became less important. Now it wasn’t important at all. Now even winning the war wasn’t enough. The idea of war itself had little to say. Things had advanced to another stage. Beyond war.

‘Manuel Curros Enríquez, that’s right.’

The Falangist, whom everyone now calls Parallelepiped, remembers why the name sounds familiar. The city’s largest sculpture is dedicated to Curros. He must have done something. In the gardens, surrounded by a lake. Very near there. He noticed it because on top of the monument is a naked woman rising triumphantly into the sky. Now that’s a monument. Were it not for the new Post Office, the woman could see the fires. Amazing what you can do with stone. Afterwards he’ll have to go and have another look. At the stone slut.

‘What? What shall I do with this one? Under house arrest?’

Curtis guessed that the authority of the man who decided the destiny of books derived not just from his position in the hierarchy, but from the fact he read a lot and was what is generally termed ‘a man of culture’. In fact, he didn’t stop reading and consulting books, some of them rescued from the flames. While his subordinates carried out the burning, egging each other on with jokes and directing insults at particularly obnoxious titles, their boss circulated. He went from group to group, issuing the same instruction under his breath, ‘Any copies of Scripture, in particular the New Testament, let me know at once.’

Now he frowns.

‘You can throw The Divine Sketch in the fire!’

Parallelepiped moves his arm like a lever, releases his fingers and drops the book without further ado. Then unconsciously, either because his last memory of the sculpture is of water bubbling on stone or because his skin senses rather than feels an itch, what the boy in uniform does is shake his hands and rub them on his trousers. And then he falls quiet.

With the passing of time, the initial funeral procession of mockery turns into a routine, an industrial-scale burning, which must have something to do with the increasingly thick smoke, a tactile, sticky stench that suggests to Curtis one last metaphor. The books had come down from the trees and fallen into the trap of some men with viscous arms. So, from close up, the embers at the bottom of the fire resembled a cluster of birds reduced to ashen silhouettes and glowing yellow or orange beaks. Had Arturo da Silva been here, the books wouldn’t be burning, thought Curtis. Or perhaps they were burning because he wasn’t here. The fact they were burning was further proof of his loss. And Curtis’ mind, which in Arturo’s words was a spiral staircase, ascended, or descended, another step. It was the boxer from Shining Light, the writer of Brazo y Cerebro, who was burning. The books’ last smell was of flesh.

‘Revista de Occidente. Federico García Lorca. New York (Office and Denunciation). What have we here?’

The name sounded familiar to Parallelepiped. He hadn’t read anything by him, but he’d heard lots of jokes about him under the heading ‘red queens’. In a Fascist publication, one of those papers he did read, there was always a stubborn misprint in the second surname: García Loca or ‘madwoman’.

He opened it up. Adopted a humorous tone:

Under the multiplication

is a drop of duck’s blood

Shit! He didn’t read any more. The drop of duck’s blood changed his voice. He looked away and made an effort to shout:

‘Boss! There’s a Lorca here.’

He threw it with obvious hatred into the middle of the volcano, which spewed out black smoke and shiny sparks.

He took another handful. Meanwhile his boss had approached. The first of the new lot was a slim volume, the only illustration a single scallop shell in the centre.

‘Six Galician Poems! Fe-de-ri-co. . What’s this? Can’t they leave each other alone?’

He turned to face his boss with the book held out and a look of disgust.

‘Samos! Did this faggot also write in Galician?’

His boss lingered over the cover, though young Parallelepiped thought there was hardly much to read. Six Galician Poems by Federico García Lorca. Foreword E. B. A. Nós Publishing House. Compostela. Samos may have been investigating those dots after the letters. Deciphering those initials. He leafed through it slowly, page by page. Parallelepiped tossed the other books while watching Samos. What’s he up to? Is he going to read the whole thing?

Locks that go out to sea,

where the clouds their glittering dovecot keep

The book danced in his hands. He looked at the boy observing him steadily, waiting for some informed remark.

‘He spent some time here,’ said the supervisor, ‘with a theatre company, Barraca. Yes, he was right here. I think he made a lot of friends. The book’s recent. Under a year.’

‘That was another age, Comrade Samos,’ declared the young boy.

A year. The phrase Parallelepiped used was of someone measuring an astronomical distance. The look of someone abolishing time. He was right. After all, he knew how to measure what was happening. It was a month to the day since the war had started. The first month of Year I.

The war had changed all concept of time. The war had changed many things, but above all measures of duration. Nós Publishing House. He could have given him a lecture, but it didn’t exist any more. It had no future and it wouldn’t have any past either. That was where Galicianist Republicans hung out, those who had this stupid idea of a federal Spain. The publisher was Ánxel Casal. Mayor of Santiago de Compostela. Or rather ex-mayor. In a dungeon right now. Like Coruña’s mayor, Alfredo Suárez Ferrín. He felt something like vertigo to think that these two figures of the Republic, democratically elected mayors, had been imprisoned as enemies of the nation. But the vertigo was exciting, intoxicating. He’d finally arisen from inaction, from a bland form of Christianity. He could shout as during the Crusades, ‘God wills it!’ And in fact this is how, with a warlike cry, he’d ended a short speech at the local branch of the Falange, which now had a large skull painted on the wall. Yes, he felt the telepathic force of Carl Schmitt, his new, revered master. It was naive to believe in a telepathy of words, but not of ideas. In the thesis he was preparing on Donoso Cortés, concerning the dictatorship, he’d noted down an idea he later discovered in one of Schmitt’s texts: a state of emergency was to law what a miracle was for theology. Since the machinery of conspiracy had been set in motion and above all since he’d felt the itching in his brain that came from holding a weapon in his hand that afternoon when Dez invited him to military training on the beach, since then he’d been accompanied every day by the image of Heidegger, the Nazi Rector of Freiburg University, giving the order to descend to Plato’s cave to requisition the projector of ideas. Yes, he knew them. He knew Casal. Compostela’s mayor had been born in Coruña and founded his publishing house there. His wife, María Miramontes, was a well-known designer. His mother, Pilar, had even ordered her famous dress of black chiffon with black velvet grapes from her. The mother’s final act of daring. Needless to say, Casal and Miramontes were friends with Luís Huici, the artistic tailor, the inventor of incredible double-breasted waistcoats and broad-shouldered jackets which were so popular with Coruña’s Bohemians. Waistcoats, ideas. He’d got the young drunk with his speeches at Germinal. Right now, Huici was probably tasting castor oil in the barracks of the Falange.

He gave the book back to Parallelepiped, ‘You can throw it!’ Parallelepiped might have wondered why he didn’t throw it himself though, given the circumstances, that would have been a strange thought. So he just carried out the order. Should somebody ever write a history of the burning of books in Coruña, they could add a non-gratuitous detail: Ánxel Casal and Federico García Lorca were murdered that same morning. The Galician publisher in a ditch outside Santiago, in Cacheiras, and the Granadine poet in the gully of Víznar, Granada. At about the same time, six hundred miles apart.

The book landed on some copies of Man and the Earth by the geographer Élisée Reclus. It was still there, safe for the moment, on those sort of rocks which formed a mountain range the fire ascended. Samos kept looking at it. He was sometimes superstitious and trusted his instinct. Now he was thinking this little book could one day be a rarity. A work printed in the Galician language might become a relic. A first edition of the Six Poems would be as valuable as a medieval parchment.

‘What? Feeling sorry for it?’ Parallelepiped asked him.

Prattler, thought Samos. But right now he didn’t mind him being so nosy.

‘Not sorry,’ he said. ‘Those initials! I’ve just remembered why they could be useful to me. See if you can fetch it. .’

‘Here it is, boss. Just in time.’

‘In extremis,’ said Samos with a sigh.

‘In extremis,’ whispered Parallelepiped. He was learning lots, he thought, while the books burnt. That’s it, in extremis.

‘Wells, Wells, Wells!’

There’s a flurry of activity.

‘Wells, Wells, Wells!’ shouts the one we already know as Parallelepiped, throwing a book each time he imitates a dog’s bark.

‘More Wells! There’s lots of him. Wells, Wells, Wells!’

For a moment, for the briefest of moments, when he heard that mocking onomatopoeia — ‘Wells, Wells, Wells!’ three books into the fire — there was an acidic reaction somewhere in Samos’ digestive system, which caused him a slight indisposition, a rumbling in the bowels, part of which involved remembering fragments from The War of the Worlds, not as they were, but in Héctor Ríos’ penetrating voice, ‘Does time pass when there are no human hands left to wind the clocks?’ It’s Easter 1931. They’re in the Craftsmen’s Circle, in a group of declamation and amateur theatre directed by Ríos, who is studying already at Santiago University, in the Faculty of Law. Two years older, he’s in front of Samos, but they still work together at weekends on that project that so excited them to begin with. A radio version of The War of the Worlds. ‘The radio’s an extraordinary invention,’ asserts Ríos. ‘It’ll transform communication, culture, everything. It’ll cross borders through the air. Coruña Radio is due to start broadcasting soon.’

‘Wells, Wells, Wells! Out the door, and you’re not coming back.’

Samos felt bad and was about to say something. Pull him up. Why did he have to be so uncouth? He was going to ask him to be a little more polite. A bit of culture, please. You don’t have to bark. But he realised the absurdity of such an order at that time. They’d all burst out laughing. That’s a good one. Some of the older soldiers might recall the impresario Lino’s historic intervention in his Pavilion of Spectacles when, at a charity performance in the presence of some nuns, he attempted to subdue the top gallery, ‘Manners, gentlemen! Manners! There are ladies in the audience, some of whom are even decent. Ho, ho, ho. Your manners, please!’

But he didn’t say anything. The gripes were building like an inner storm. He had to suppress his body’s rebellion. The upset of some scruples. He addressed Parallelepiped in an energetic voice, ‘Throw them all in at once, for fuck’s sake. Without consideration. I’ve had it up to here with Wells!’

And then he seized the moment, sidled up to Parallelepiped, who had a good eye. A bit of culture and he’d make a good hunter of books. He said, ‘Don’t forget the New Testament.’ Went further, ‘It’s not any old book. It’s of great historical value, got it?’

‘How will I know which one it is, Comrade Samos? Scripture, there’s plenty. Even the Masons on Nakens Street had a stack of Bibles, more than in my parish.’

Samos suddenly hesitated whether or not to carry on giving information to that numskull. ‘You have to be discreet,’ he said to him. ‘Find the book, talk to me. Only to me. You’ll get your reward.’

‘Right, but how will I know which one it is?’

‘It’s easy. It’s the only one with. . a dedication.’

Samos bit his lips. There was no going back.

‘What’s the key, boss?’

‘It says: “For Antonio de la Trava, the valiente of Finisterra”.’

‘I like that,’ said Parallelepiped. ‘I’ve got relatives in Finisterre.’

‘Good then. But be discreet. Don’t start shouting. Bring it to me by hand. No noise, no fireworks.’

Parallelepiped was a bit annoyed by Samos’ superior tone. There was a coldness about him. But he replied seriously, ‘Not to worry. I also know how to get on in the world, comrade.’

Next to the first fire, Curtis took another step forwards.

To be more exact, the burning books smell of leather mashed with flesh. Of boxing gloves.

‘Hey you with the cap! You like books? Can’t take your eyes off them!’

‘He probably likes the fire. If he’s here, he must be one of us.’

Curtis pretended not to hear. He’d spotted a living book which the flames were just starting on. A Popular Guide to Electricity. Arturo da Silva wasn’t a professional boxer. You couldn’t live from boxing unless you made the jump to Madrid or Barcelona. And he hadn’t wanted to. He was a plumber by trade. His job, directing the forces of water, had something in common with the way he behaved inside the ring. He’d convinced Curtis his future was in electricity. More specifically, in air conditioning. So Curtis had gradually become the champ’s right hand. ‘You’ll succeed him. Hercules of Shining Light’, Abelenda in the gym had told him. He was sure of it. On the poster for his first fight, he could see the words ‘Hercules of Shining Light versus. .’ But there was no poster for his first fight. There wasn’t time. It would be on 17 July. His debut as an amateur boxer then would be with another youngster called Manlle. There’d been a cancellation and they’d agreed to include them. The typical warm-up fight while the spectators found their seats. But for Curtis it was the most important event of his life. He’d trained hard with Arturo. ‘On one condition.’ ‘What?’ ‘You’ll start as an apprentice in a workshop for climatic installations, soon to be opened by the Chavín factory, which makes Wayne refrigerators. I’ve a friend there. But to get in, you’ll have to know something about electricity. You’ll have to study. What do you think?’ He thought it was great. If he ever had a business card like the ones he’d seen travelling salesmen use at the Dance Academy, he could write: ‘Boxer and Climatic Electrician.’

Arturo da Silva had told him that sometimes the safest place was the middle of the ring. The harpooner had talked to him of the calm at the centre of a hurricane. Maybe it was that instinct which had brought him here, to the city centre, after thirty days in hiding. A whole month stuck in the attic of the Dance Academy, also known as Un-deux-trois, his only company a mannequin the harpooner Mr Lens had given his mother. A headless mannequin. A very tall woman, the mannequin, which the sea had thrown up unharmed among a multitude of cripples, maimed figures, loose heads, broken busts and odd extremities. The ship that lost them when it listed violently in a storm off Rostro wouldn’t come back for castaways like these. Mr Lens scoured the beach, slung the tall woman, the only one who was complete, over his shoulder and also picked up three wooden female legs. These were gratefully received by hosiers across the city. They were long, very slim, and were soon on display in the windows of Crisálida, Gran Corsetería Francesa and Botón de Oro. But he couldn’t place the mannequin. The ebony woman was simply too tall. ‘If the country progresses, if we advance, there may yet be room for such tall women,’ said the clothes manager in the Espuma department store on San Andrés Street, who was considerate enough to offer Mr Lens a blanket to wrap her up a bit since, while it was a liberal city, people had their own views and susceptibilities and Mr Lens didn’t want to run into the procession coming from St Nicholas’, bearing Our Lady of Sorrow, being in possession of this tall, black woman.

‘It must be heavy,’ said the clothes manager. ‘Though beauty weighs less.’

For the first time, Mr Lens took a close look at his discovery. When he’d found it, it had been half buried in the sand. What the sea had made with the scattered bodies and mangled limbs was a horrifying pastiche. He thought that now, not before. On the beach, he’d gone in search of useful items. The sea wasn’t going to surprise him. The tall woman’s head was like a highly polished large wooden egg. As he turned it around, he observed there were no eyes, mouth or nose. So what was there to look at? And yet now, in the shop, before he slung it over his shoulder, he examined the head carefully and noticed some very delicate features, the beginnings of a face. First of all, he saw some cheekbones and then, below the cheeks, the melancholy protrusion of some lips. He stroked the head and decided it wasn’t quite smooth. He could feel a few invisible hairs pushing through. This woman was coming into being. He took a fancy to it. He’d take it to the Dance Academy to see if Milagres would keep it for him. He wouldn’t say anything about the life in the wood. They might think he was bringing them a monster. She’d already been scared the last time, when he showed her a small but ferocious-looking revolver. A Bulldog.

‘Where did you get that?’

‘It arrived in a whale.’

‘You find everything inside a whale.’

‘Almost everything.’

‘Bring it here,’ said Samantha. She gripped the revolver. The madame had turned up unexpectedly, without them realising. She had a cigarette holder in one hand and the revolver in the other. ‘It’s about my size. Today’s my birthday. Will you give it to me? I need a friend I can trust.’

On 20 July, Curtis was with Arturo da Silva and others from Shining Light, helping to erect one of the barricades protecting the Civil Government by the Rosalía de Castro Theatre on the side of the docks. They’d carried sacks of sand from Orzán. As on Saturday and Sunday, to the sound of ships’ sirens and horns, thousands of people had occupied the city centre in support of the Republic. Early in the afternoon, the insurgent troops placed pieces of artillery on Parrote. Curtis recalled where he’d seen a weapon. A small revolver, but at least it was something. He rushed to Papagaio. Pombo only opened the door when he recognised his voice. He was on a mission, to find the Bulldog revolver, and ignored what they were trying to tell him. He started rummaging in Samantha’s room until he heard, ‘Your mother’s ill. The least you could do is go and see her.’

That was the ruse. That was when they barred the door. He shouted. Called his mother a traitor a thousand times.

‘Traitor? You’ll all get killed. Who ever saw a war of fists versus guns? And you’ll be one of the first. Just so they can have a laugh about who killed Papagaio’s Hercules.’

He was left alone. With the mannequin, the tall, black woman the harpooner had brought. Punching the old leather bag Arturo had given him. Thumping the handcrafted sack of sand he himself had hung from the beam. At it all day long. The house’s lament on account of his rage. ‘Stop it!’ shouted Pombo from the other side of the door. ‘You’re making the whole city groan.’

‘Let me out, Pombo!’ he pleaded. ‘On the roofs, they’re shooting to kill.’

‘It’s worse on the ground. Wait until the hunting season’s over.’

He thought the mannequin didn’t have eyes. Or a mouth. The head, an oval sphere. But it’s funny. In the half-light, he begins to discern features. Subtle lines appear on the wooden egg. He opens the skylight and leans out with the Tall Woman. A cat approaches along the edge. Looks towards the Casares’ garden and starts to meow. For a moment, the shots fall silent, as if to respect the night, and other animal sounds are heard. The seagulls’ scandalised calls, the cats’ detailed inventory, the dogs’ distant denunciation. At night, in the beams from the lighthouse, Curtis perceives beauty in the mannequin’s face. The intermittent beams bring it to life. The cat comes and goes, but doesn’t make up its mind to climb down to the Casares’ garden. There are voices. It’s not clear if they’re coming from inside. There’s no light on, but the windows the pillagers have broken disturb the domestic darkness. From time to time, torch beams flicker from the other side, the front of the house on Panadeiras Street. The darkness is also in pieces. Translucent, empty. They must have taken the doors, curtains and lamps as well. Secrets, he thought, have nothing to do with darkness. Secrets belong to the light. What was going on in Madrid, what had happened to the Casares? The darkness of the house was translucent. Dangerous. The cats refused to climb down to the garden. Skirted their old haunt cautiously, warily. Eyeing the crater. What had happened to the girl with the rebellious hair of Orzán waves?

He’d also like to have known what had happened to Flora. During the day in the Academy, he listened to all the voices, interpreted all the noises. He heard what the voices said about others. But he didn’t hear Flora or anything about her. He’d like to have heard her energetic dance, the telegraph of her heels. He thinks about her when the shots start up again. Tries to understand their meaning.

And then single reports, cartridge by cartridge. Someone trying not to waste any ammunition. Each shot sounding like the last.

He remembered Arturo da Silva the day he threw a succession of euphoric punches, which the champ answered one by one, cartridge by cartridge, he said. But now the sound of automatic gunfire silences the handcrafted shots. Showers the sky. And when it grows tired, there is the stubborn response of a fugitive on the tiles, counting his cartridges, one by one, the space between each clap of the bell allowing time to imagine where they’re coming from, where they’re going. The automatic gunfire starts up again with renewed vigour. Bites pieces off the tiles. Silences once and for all the fugitive who was saving his cartridges.

The Tall Woman’s head rolls down into the gutter, where it is stopped by the foxgloves, their tall spikes in flower like carillons of rosy bells. The roofs here are like meadows. The Tall Woman’s head has been hit. In contrast to the hole, now it is possible to imagine some eyes. In the beams of light, he observes the oval beauty he can no longer hold on to. The foxgloves eventually give way. The head rocks in the gutter. Falls down into the Casares’ garden. Everything is quiet. The moon full and astonished on the Mera coast. What a beautiful summer, sewn with bullets.

Among the attractions at the festivities in Recheo Gardens were distorting mirrors and a Travelling Theatre of Live Impalpable Spectres. Luís Terranova had taken him to hear the voice of Mirco, the amazing queen with a glass eye. The German Circus had set up shop on the Western Quay, near the Wooden Jetty. To advertise the fact, a chimpanzee was driving in stakes, tightening ropes and, dressed as a field marshal, appeared to be in charge of erecting the big top. The beaches were crowded. Swimwear this year was more colourful, brilliant hues that enamelled bodies, but also smaller, revealing shoulders, stretches of thigh, hitherto unseen. Ancient and modern wonders filled the gardens on canvases photographers hung like stage sets and completed with wooden or papier mâché props. You could have your portrait taken in front of images from all over the world. The pyramids of Egypt, the skyscrapers of Manhattan, the Eiffel Tower, the Alhambra in Granada, the Statue of Liberty, Gaudí’s Sagrada Família, a winter landscape in Dalecarlia, the Plus Ultra hydroplane in Buenos Aires, riders at the Seville Fair, Machu Picchu, the Taj Mahal, the entrance to the Paris Métro at Porte Dauphine, the Pórtico da Gloria, Hercules Lighthouse, a picture of garlanded boats at Caneiros. Lots of people wanted a portrait in front of the snowy landscape of Dalecarlia in Sweden, with its sleighs and wooden cabins, but the longest queue was for Manhattan. Curtis and Terranova stood staring at the canvas of the river and a model boat with the sign ‘Caneiros’.

‘Do you want one of the Excursion to Caneiros?’ asked the idle photographer.

‘No thanks. We’re going on that universal cruise this year,’ said Terranova. ‘We’ve a ticket and everything.’

‘Nature imitates art,’ said the photographer. ‘Go on, as a kind of advertisement. A free photo. Everyone’s mad about skyscrapers today. That’s it, look this way, pretend you’re rowing, see if anyone wants a boat. Manhattan, they all want Manhattan. How folkloric!’

Apart from the soldiers, the place was empty, but Curtis thought about the attractions at the festivities as a way of protecting his back. Everything he’d experienced had come from behind, on the lookout, cautiously following in his footsteps. The spectres. Mirco’s glass eye. The people and their portraits in front of landscapes from around the world. Some in Swedish Dalecarlia, others queuing up for Manhattan. Luís Terranova imitates Mirco, waves a fig leaf as a loincloth while reciting ‘I am that vast, secret promontory. .’ No. Luís Terranova isn’t there. He knows nothing about him. Feels guilty for letting him down. Because he’s got both their tickets. The tickets for the special train to Caneiros.

From time to time, as a leaf curled up, he saw words that were burning. He tried to reach, to catch them before they turned into smoke. He realised now why there were so few flames. The fire burnt inwards, down the furrows of printed words. Rooted in paper, words can be like heather. It can rain on the book, but the words still give off heat. There are some that take longer to burn than others. Which explains why they end up on their own in the ashes, on the surface of small membranes like those of crickets, cicadas and grasshoppers. He’d heard this from Polka. A mountain fire in summer smells of a mixture of vegetation and cricket and cicada wings, burnt song.

It was night still. He opened the skylight. Clambered over the roofs. At last felt the foxgloves’ rosy touch. His jealousy of cats and seagulls. When he dropped down on to one of the lower roofs and managed to land in Hospital Street, he walked in a daze. Walked in his sleep. This wasn’t a recent state. He’d been like this for quite some time.

He’d spent the days hiding in the Academy’s attic, his only company the headless Tall Woman, deprived of her oval beauty. Anxious to start with, waiting for news, which swept under the door like a cold current, however warm the voice of the one conveying the news. He’d occasionally peep out of the skylight. It was then Curtis discovered the true meaning of fear. Fear is a beach that is deserted on a sunny day. Or almost deserted, which is worse. Figures in black with large, black umbrellas to keep off the sun. Some catalinas, the name given to peasant women who came to bathe in skirts made of matting. They kept watch on the sea like fish caught in a net. They may have been disturbed by the solitary bather who ran up and down, wearing a strange black-and-yellow-striped costume. And passed between them like a gigantic wasp. There was a new, terrifying silence. Each silence conveyed some kind of horror. He looked at the headless Tall Woman and began to feel the same, like someone who’s lost his head. Only at night did the beams from the lighthouse give it back to him. He ended up at dawn on Riazor Beach. He looked around insistently, in case the bather in the black-and-yellow-striped costume appeared, buzzing like a wasp. He didn’t see anyone. He heard the murmur of the sea, which reminded him of the notion of stuttering speech.

He climbed up through Peruleiro and Ventorillo. He sleepwalked to Fontenova and the Shining Light building in the Abyss. He was thinking about the tickets for the special train and the excursion to Caneiros. He had to hand in the money he’d collected. He had to settle accounts. It had become an obsession. What would Arturo and his friends think?

It was he who noticed the fear in things. The discomfort of houses under construction, intimidated by the irritation of their elders. The distrust shown by doorways. The frown of windows. The premises of the libertarian association were in Fontenova. They looked completely dispossessed. Even of their name. The quicksilver glass sign on the front had been smashed. Isolino had made it in the Rubine glassworks, with an emery design reminiscent of a roadside shrine. A sun surrounded by flames. Curtis picked up a stela of sun. It was cold. The confiscators had padlocked the door. Curtis went round the back and broke in through a window. The first thing his eyes sought out was the Ideal typewriter. One of the reasons that had driven him there was the hope no one would have remembered that small centre for social studies in humble premises, in a distant quarter. His most intimate hope was to find the typewriter. He heard the keys like Morse. He blocked his ears to the night’s reports, shut his eyes. And then he felt the keys on the pads of his fingers, Arturo da Silva’s voice as he dictated:

EXTRAORDINARY EXCURSION TO

CANEIROS-BETANZOS BY SPECIAL TRAIN

‘Leave two blank lines. That’s it. Now continue.’

The two of them slowly caressing the keys, making a caravan of letters. The whole night in front of them.

Curtis was in a dark room. He’d forced an entry, opened the windows, but the light seemed reluctant to return. They’d taken everything. Even the electric current. He went to switch on a bulb hanging from interlaced wires in a cloth casing, but they’d cut off the supply, so from the interlaced wires hung the absence of light. If he found the typewriter, he could make the train to Caneiros go. Hear the stationmaster’s whistle. The movement of connecting rods. He’d sold a lot of tickets for that train. He’d heard so much about it, but never been to Caneiros, on that trip upriver to the heart of the forest. After leaving the train, you had to walk a bit and then board some boats. ‘The boats,’ Arturo da Silva had told him, ‘are all decorated with garlands and covered in laurel branches.’ Although he’d never been to Caneiros, he adopted the project as his own. With the titbits of information he picked up along the way, he composed an enthusiastic proclamation, as if the one selling the tickets came from the fairground, had been conceived there and was speaking in the name not of the organisation, but of the river.

Since his childhood, he’d been given errands, odd jobs. Almost always as a carrier or messenger. Pombo had talked of putting a telephone in the Dance Academy.

‘In case of need, Samantha. We have to modernise. What if you receive a call from King Alfonso?’

‘Come on!’

‘Or from a millionaire like Juan March?’

‘Put him through. Start drawing up an estimate.’

While they were waiting for the telephone, which would take some time, there was young Hercules with his nimble legs and telegraphic races. Once, when he was still a little boy, he’d sat down in the Dance Academy’s kitchen and fallen asleep with his head on the table. Flora came in, saw his eyes were open and spoke to him. She got frightened. Shook him. He blinked and woke up. She was on the verge of tears. Embraced him. ‘Are you all right, are you all right?’ ‘Sure I am, I was just asleep.’ ‘But your eyes were open!’ ‘I know, but I was just asleep.’

The Shining Light premises were empty. Huddled in a corner, he fell asleep like the last time. With his eyes open. He’d acted as a messenger for the special train, but the train was unable to arrive. They’d taken everything. The furniture, the posters, the Ideal typewriter. All the books. It was so dark, so empty, it seemed they’d taken the place itself, the painting on the walls, the words that had been spoken there. They’d taken the special train, the garlanded boats, the buffet, the orchestra. The river.

He’d managed to persuade Milagres, who never got out, even of her own self. She’d come with Mr Lens the harpooner. He’d also sold Flora a ticket. Of course they’d all travel in the carriage with Arturo da Silva and Holando. The bagpiper Polka with Olinda, his Spark. And the carriage would attract attention, on the way there and on the way back, because no less a personage than Luís Terranova had a ticket. On 18 July, they’d still been able to go and see Melodía de Arrabal together at Linares Cinema in Catro Camiños. Luís needed Curtis’ company in the films of Carlos Gardel because Curtis had the gift of memory. Three showings were enough for him to learn the lyrics to the songs. And what’s more, sometimes, at the request of the audience, the projectionist would rewind so that they could listen to the song again. Applause.

Old quarter. .

Forgive me if when I evoke you

a tear dwops

‘Let’s see. Try again.’

He tested him on the songs, quips and gibes but in the last department Curtis was so calm you had to wind him up constantly to get a response. Arturo da Silva, Galicia’s lightweight champion, trained with him in the ring. For Terranova, Curtis was a kind of sentimental sparring partner. Luís kept throwing the double meaning of language at him because Curtis, however alert he might be, always believed what they were saying. He paid attention to the smallest things. There were times Terranova couldn’t bear such confidence. He wanted to break this unbreakable friendship. But in the end he loved him like no other. Curtis looked after the best of himself. To start with, he carried the songs, all the songs, in his head. Luís’ memory lived inside his friend’s. And he didn’t hold back on the adjectives. Portentous. Curtis’ memory was truly portentous. He said it in syllables, por-ten-tous, and with his right hand rotated an imaginary bulb in the air. Or, with both hands, his fingers were orbits, a celestial globe. Such gestures were precious gifts to Curtis. He felt his memory. Was aware of carrying it and that it was comfortable. Arturo had taught him always to protect his head. His head worked for his body and so his body should protect his head. Even his legs, dancing in the ring, were taking his head into account. And there was his memory, like a child with wide open eyes, riding on him.

The idea of a child on his back was something that stuck in his mind, an image his memory had of itself after a visit.

Neto, a friend of Arturo da Silva’s, had had a fight the day before in the bullring and the words hurt as they came out. His eyebrow had split open and they’d stitched it up there and then, without anaesthetic. He also had knocks and bruises and bloody ribs at each commissure of the lips and eyelids. And his nose displayed the enormous surprise of prominent things that have survived an unexpected catastrophe.

Curtis and Luís Terranova had come with Arturo and another boy from Shining Light who was a boxing fan, Pepe Boedo. They’d come to see the victor. And now they were feeling a little disappointed. According to local legend, Neto was a kind of gladiator. So they’d been expecting to hear a description of the fight, a glowing account of his exploits, but instead they were shown into a poorly lit room. The boxer had his feet in a bucket of hot water. Around his ankles, the bubbles looked like a flower arrangement, which was the only concession the scene allowed the hero. Even Carmiña, his wife, appeared to be forging the seven swords of Our Lady of Sorrow, though what she was in fact doing was hammering at a slab of ice in the kitchen. She’d bring in handfuls of irregular pieces, some like rocks, others like nails, for him to choose.

A newspaper was lying on the floor. It seemed to have been written there. Printed in that very room. The matrices of the letters scattered by Neto’s broken anatomy.

CHAMPION’S CALVARY

Good headline, thought Curtis. That newspaper was a bit like a mirror. He watched Arturo da Silva pick it up off the floor and casually put it out of sight.

Neto spoke through the cut in his eyebrow. Monosyllables, short sentences that pushed their way through the stitches. The rasping of words. Craters in some sentences where syllables had been punched out. Arturo da Silva administered the necessary dose. They now understood the reason for their visit was to cure, not celebrate, his victory.

‘All I can see are clouds. Your face looks like a storm’s coming.’

‘Every cloud has a silver lining. Who was it told me that rubbish?’

‘Could have been me,’ said Arturo with the same irony.

‘Culture’ll be the end of you, Arturo. Silver lining, my foot! Are you still attending the Rationalist School?’

‘In the evenings. Occasionally.’

‘I liked it, but I’d doze off. Without my knowledge, as I lay snoring on the desk, old Amil would use me to talk of the evolution of species.’

Curtis and Terranova also attend Master Amil’s evening classes. Arturo persuaded them. Curtis’ first teacher had been Flora, the Girl, the Conception Girl. She hated being interrupted when she was teaching him letters and numbers, but then she still held her tongue. Looking back at his life, in front of the pyres, Curtis remembered the last time he’d seen Flora, when she caused an earthquake in the Academy.

‘I’m leaving,’ she said in the dining-room.

No one seemed to have heard anything. They carried on eating. The suspense of spoons striking the bottom of plates.

‘What are you leaving?’ asked Samantha.

‘This. All of this. It’s nothing personal.’

‘Are you not happy? Do you want a bigger share?’

‘It’s not a question of how much. I won’t sell myself any more.’

Samantha exploded, brought her fist down on the table, ‘There isn’t much to sell!’

‘Well, what’s left of me.’ Flora didn’t take her eyes off Samantha and spoke surprisingly calmly, ‘Don’t be daft. I already said it wasn’t personal.’

‘Who converted you? The boxer? You think he’s going to change your life?’

‘Don’t bring him into this. You don’t have to drill holes with your tongue.’

‘Plenty of beach now. What happens when winter comes?’

‘Carry on with your sums,’ Flora would tell Curtis when she was teaching him how to multiply and had to go at the request of a client. ‘Remember how many you’ve counted. I’ll be right back.’ He counted by piles. She’d taught him using beans, chickpeas, grains of rice. Whatever there was. Numbers had colour and value. But now he had nothing to hand, they’d taken Flora and he had to replace real things with downstrokes. Two by four. Two piles of four. He then discovered she’d come back as he was finishing his sums. He thought if I’m quicker at doing the sums or writing out the sentences, she’ll come back sooner, she’ll get rid of that untimely client sticking his nose in where he’s not wanted. And so it was. The power of letters and numbers.

When he laughed, Neto complained most about the space around his eyes. It hurt him to look. So they had to be grateful to him for looking at them, and this is where he made a heroic effort. Curtis learnt that day that winning in questions of merit involves extra work. Had he lost the fight, Neto wouldn’t have been under any obligation to view them with sympathy. He wouldn’t have had to look at anyone and so he could have given his eyes a rest.

He had a white towel around his shoulders, his feet in a zinc bucket, while the upper light slid down the seated man to the foam’s flower arrangement. They’d arrived during the afternoon. It was December. The slats of the blinds began to contain the darkness. Dampness stretched, leapt out of the bar of soap and licked the pale cracks in Neto’s fingers.

Many of the scenes Arturo moved in, like the boxer Neto’s house, shared one characteristic. You could witness the waking and falling quiet of things. The water in the tub was quiet. An example of sad water.

In one of the talks at Shining Light, Curtis had heard a painter called Huici refer to things falling quiet. He was distracted, thinking about the special train and the tickets he hadn’t sold yet, but his memory was alert and reminded him. The falling quiet of things. Things fell quiet and spoke. A thought put simply, but not easily reached. There it was, like a buoy under the water, but you had to pull on it.

Things spoke and things fell quiet. Here were two perceptions that made a picture or a poem special. One, the speaking of things. Capturing the speaking of things, their expansive aura, their meaning, and translating it into the language of light or sounds. The other, the falling quiet of things. Their hiding. Their being absent. Their emptying. Their loss. Relating or reflecting that was another shudder. The first art caused a frontal shudder. The second, a lumbar tremor.

Just a moment. Even when things fall quiet, there are two classes of silence. A friendly silence that keeps us company, where words can be at leisure, and another silence. One that frightens. One that Rosalía de Castro, Huici told them, called ‘mute silence.’

The warm water in the tub was quiet, a friendly silence. Curtis thought about the special train, the boat, the trip to Caneiros. Which would be on 2 August. The procession upriver. The waking of water.

Neto called to his wife and whispered, ‘Bring the child, will you, Carmiña?’

And then they saw it. The head with the same slight lean of a globe and the relief of bruises, the physical geography of nightmares. The girl had emerged from the painful falling quiet of things. Neto took the child in his hands and gently placed her like a live poultice on the cuts and bruises.

‘Her fontanel, her little head, is the most soothing.’

‘Do you feel relief?’

‘Relief? It’s the best cure,’ said Neto. ‘I can’t explain it. Like a skin graft.’

He rocked forwards with the child on his lap. Gestured to say something. Curtis had the feeling he was about to float an original thought, but the boxer held back the words in the reservoir of a half smile. A position his wounds copied.

At Santa Margarida Fountain, Curtis took a sip of water. An obligatory rite. Arturo da Silva said it was the best water in Coruña. There were women with buckets and children with jugs. He only wanted a sip and they let him through so he could use a spout. It seemed to him they also suddenly fell quiet. Not the water, though. The water sang out its tango.

‘Go, go in front.’

He wiped his face on the back of his hand and said thanks. It was then they spoke.

‘I’m not going in today.’

‘Why not?’

‘There’s a fire in the centre. Something’s happening. Can’t you see the smoke?’

‘What can happen that hasn’t happened already?’

‘Now they’re burning books.’

The others’ thoughtful silence next to the water’s bubbling. The boy who brought the news, who’s come to fill a jug for some workmen, blurts out, ‘My mouth’s dry!’ Cups his hands, fills, sips, gurgles and then spits out. Places the jug under the spout.

They all had their reasons for being there. Something to fill. Barrels, buckets, jugs. Curtis had nothing. Only his cap of green rhombuses and dishevelled clothes that mark him out as an erratic person. This may be why the boy who told them books were burning looked at him, then at the spirals of smoke, and announced:

‘They’ve taken the books from Shining Light as well. In a van.’

‘These look good. They’ll go up in no time. Shining Light!’ He was looking at the bookplates, a stamp of the sun in flames. ‘Hey boss! What do you think? Shining Light Centre for Studies in the Abyss.’

‘Those idiots in Fontenova,’ said Samos. ‘That’s what I call a rendezvous with destiny!’

Parallelepiped laughed. He liked it when his boss was more talkative.

‘Into the abyss!’

Hercules listened without looking in their direction. Went right up to the fire, stepping on thin air, ready to jump into the ring. Saw a living book the flames were starting on. A Popular Guide to Electricity.

When he told her, when he explained he was going to train as a climatic electrician, she would burst into tears. Curtis wasn’t sure whether to tell his mother the good news because good news made her very nervous. She wasn’t used to such things. They lived in a garret in the house in Papagaio where she worked. If she works in Papagaio, Coruña’s seediest district, his mother must be a whore. No, he’d learnt to reply with great assurance, my mother’s the one who fluffs up the mattresses. Later on, he learnt from Arturo da Silva there’s a similar response in boxing: opening up side spaces. Throwing off balance. Empty corridors. ‘My mother’s not a whore. She fluffs up the mattresses. Sews the damask covers.’

‘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

Quarter silvered by the moon

Milonga murmurs

Milonga murmurs

All my fortune

‘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.

‘That’s enough science for one day,’ said the operator. ‘Let’s see, Luís, sing us that carnival tango, the one about the Columbine who put smoke from the fire of her heart under her eyes.’

Terranova was at home there. He felt relaxed in the cabin on ‘Carmiña’, the house that moved without ever leaving, which was simultaneously on land, at sea and in the sky. Very rarely, the wind would get up inside his head and he’d battle with the world. He seemed to be collecting all the nicknames pumped out of all the ships’ bilges. You had to let him wander alone, with his hands in his pockets. When Curtis learnt this from Arturo, it was the first thing he passed on to Terranova. A human’s best training is with his shadow. You have to fight with your shadow.

‘Who told you that?’

‘Arturo da Silva. When he was in prison, years ago, he said he spent the time fighting his shadow. It taught him a lot.’

They were on Atocha Alta, on their way to Hercules Cinema. They took up combat positions by the wall next to the entrance. Each of them ready to fight his shadow.

‘But I don’t have a shadow,’ said Terranova in surprise.

It was true. They stood staring at Hercules’ shadow, which was squat and broad-shouldered.

‘Let me fight yours for a bit.’

‘You’re not allowed to kick. Look, like this. One two. One two.’

It was when he moved that Luís Terranova saw his slippery shadow take off from the kerb.

‘There it is, there’s my shadow!’

He ran and danced along the kerb, one two three, one two three, trying to stamp on it.

‘Don’t be stupid. You can’t tread on a shadow. It won’t let you.’

‘With my shadow, I’ll do what I feel like.’

He was also the Man of a Thousand Voices. This voice that expressed irritation, the one he’d just used with Curtis, was what he called his impulsive voice. The one his mother used when discussing price or quality. A fishwife’s voice. Her firm conclusion, which there was no going back on, was that the fish was fresh so long as a woman was carrying it on top of her head.

Luís twisted around, keeping an eye on his shadow, until he saw its profile on the wall, next to the stills.

‘A talented shadow! A film star.’

He picked up whatever he could find in port, most of all information. When he earned a few coins guiding sailors around the city’s lesser known parts, one of his favourite destinations was the Dance Academy. Luís had the nerve Curtis lacked. He’d promised his mother he’d take her to make a dress in the Paris-Coruña-New York style of the designer María Miramontes. He’d been there, spying on the seamstresses, having helped Vicente collect a stack of books for the Faith bookshop. María Miramontes’ husband was the publisher Ánxel Casal. Rumour had it the printing machine kept working thanks largely to her needle. It was true, the day they went, the designer and seamstresses were sewing books. But Luís Terranova was interested in the models. There was one, a rayon dress with a red silk bow around the waist. Imagine wearing that! It’d make anyone look cultured.

Luís had fun in the Dance Academy. The two extremes of a nomadic existence were the cabin on the crane ‘Carmiña’, with Ponte the operator, and the premises in Papagaio. Sometimes, when the madame, Samantha, previously known as Porch, was having a bad day, she would treat him like a mosquito that had come inside, trying to get away from the clouds and attracted by the lights. But other times she was the one who demanded silence and asked him to sing, one of those child prodigies born with the gift of voices, a thousand voices, who could sing like a man, a woman. Or a eunuch.

‘Why don’t you sing The Flea, Samantha? Where’s the flea, Samantha? It must have bred by now!’

A foul-mouthed spectator, reminding her of times that for her had not been better. Distant. Like Chelito after her stint in Lino’s Pavilion. But Samantha knew how to gain respect.

‘Well, now, I haven’t seen the flea for some time. It must have slipped down your mother’s fanny.’

It was like dropping a stone into a well. He wouldn’t be back. The others laughing.

‘Quiet! Manners, gentlemen, you’re like a bunch of Bolsheviks! Allow me to introduce a new Gardel with all the elegance of Miguel de Molina. When he came into the world, he was taking it like an adult. Come on, boy, shut those bores up!’

He was smart as garlic. He’d already found out what a eunuch was, it wasn’t the first time he’d been called one. And then he sang, not the tango Samantha had asked for, but a classic foxtrot in honour of his gracious hostess currently in her second or possibly third youth.

There was a time woman was feminine,

but fashion put paid to that

When Luís had a go at her, making fun of her boyish haircut, Samantha was the first to laugh. A seismic laugh that shook the whole building. Sometimes Luís would stay the night in the attic room Curtis shared with his mother. Curtis had the size and strength of two Luíses. He’d open the skylight and lift Luís up by the elbows.

‘The lighthouse is shining on me! Hey, it’s me, Terranova! Look, Curtis, the great spotlight of the universe is searching for me on the rooftops.’

He was next to the fire, watching the flames close in on A Popular Guide to Electricity. He missed the contact of sea urchins, all the sea urchins he’d ever touched, in his hands. He’d like to have had at least three so that he could juggle, as Arturo did during training.

‘Oy you! Who’s that giant in the cap?’

Some pedestrians who came across the fires on their way from Parrote or the Old City changed direction, though not abruptly, which would have been suspicious, but by walking instinctively sideways towards the arcade. In search of the identity of some shade.

The same thing was happening in María Pita Square. Anyone coming down Porta de Aires and stumbling on the fires had seconds to react in the face of something new, since they never could have imagined the smoke was coming from books. No, the city had no memory of smoke like this. A hasty or fearful walk had implications. Seen from one of the terraces or the balcony of the town hall, pedestrians traced obtuse angles in relation to the fires. A fearful walk had a certain controlled speed that deliberately avoided acceleration. The square was the same, but there’d been a change in the history of walking. In that space taken over by the flames, it was no longer possible to walk curiously or indifferently or, as one might say, normally, having a destination, but with time to spare. Or as the Italians say, andare a zonzo, to go for a stroll. What defines a fearful walk is that it would like to go back, but has to continue. If only there was a line the victors had drawn that could be followed. On one of the terraces is a man who can consider these things while the books are burning because he’s thinking about a newspaper article he’s going to write, which has nothing to do with burning books or fear, but with chironomy, the art of moving the hands melodiously and of elegant body movements in general. He’s going to write about the School of Pages in Vienna, which had a Chair of Walking. And has to come up with a suitable quote. A finishing touch. A classical flourish. Lope perhaps. How was it? ‘Spaniards, sons of the air’. The air of walking. He should include a local reference. Are people distinguished by the way they walk? Of course they are. Classes of walking, walking with class. Sometimes the same person changes the way they walk depending on where they are. Depending on the street. Seamstresses walking on Cantóns! Better not to be too specific. Cantón ladies. Coruña ladies on Cantóns. That is the excellence of walking. A place among the walks of the world, together with the Parisian, etc., etc. If he thinks about it, he’s terrified, but he has to write an article today as if nothing had happened. So he doesn’t think about it. Watching from the terrace, with this bird’s eye view almost, he feels for a moment detached from what’s going on right next to him, as if his legs were removed from such conflicts of walking. But suddenly one of the soldiers burning books looks up and stares at him. The journalist, a cultivated man who’s going to write an article on elegance, has the strange sensation he’s being watched over his shoulder. So he decides to beat a retreat. But he’s not quite sure how to do it. Whether to walk backwards or to turn around.

In the docks on the other side of the square, attention is focused instead on someone who isn’t moving. On that boy wearing a cap with green and white rhombuses, leafing through a book he’s just salvaged from the flames.

Among those who’ve turned their attention to Curtis is one who’s stockier than the rest. His constitution might have been called gymnastic were it not for his sagging belly. Urged on by his physique or the fact he’s also wearing a cap, though his is a bonnet with a Carlist pompon, he decides to take the initiative:

‘Oy you, Chocolate! Are you deaf or something?’

What he cannot know is that the use of this nickname causes a jolt to pass through Curtis, who looks to the side and then backwards. There he sees Marcelino, the black seller of ties, always elegant, always with his samples on his outstretched arm. Huici used to say the town council should pay him a salary for touring the city with that range of colours and his smile. What’s the seller of ties doing by the fires? Chocolate? Chocolate’s dead, one of the first to be murdered. This news had reached Curtis when he was still receiving news the first days he was shut up in the attic. That’s why he looks backwards, in the hope that Antonio Naya, who worked in the Chocolate Factory and was also nicknamed Chocolate, has come to set the record straight.

‘What you looking at? Hey you with the cap! You also at the circus?’

This time, Curtis feels the insults approaching like lassos. His experience from when he was a boy and first set foot in the street tells him the first and second nicknames lead to a third with greater precision.

Two come together. Two orang-utans. A black and a white one. Aaaaoouuuu! Aaou!

The big one begins to imitate the shouts and gestures of a monkey. The pompon swings on his forehead like a loose pendulum. The soldiers around him burst out laughing. Start joining in the fun. Walking on all fours. Beating their chests. Bending and waving their arms with their hands in their armpits. Egging each other on. They look as if they’re dancing.

Flora, the Girl, whom Samantha out of envy rather than spite calls the Curl, even the Conception Curl, is performing an unusual dance in the Academy. On the sign, it says Un-deux-trois, but people still use the old name, the Dance Academy. All of Flora’s body is involved. The stamping of her feet tells a suspense story on the drum of the stage. It seems they only stop to listen. They could be saying what’s happening tonight under the same roof. For some time now, attentive spectators have known Flora’s dance ceased to be part of the entertainment as her body became more refined. Though when she dances, according to Samantha, her hands trace the outline of the bodies she used to have before her body got thinner, when she was more voluptuous. She’s not sickly. It’s not that. When it’s not raining, all day long stuck to the Coiraza wall. In the Orzán sea breeze. Like an eel drying out. In the sun, like a stone animal. And now she’s fallen in with those boxing types, who could at least come and spend some money. She won’t get thin! Not for nothing did the poet call her and Kif ‘the Coiraza sirens, the storm’s hetaeras’.

‘You’re happy, no doubt, but I don’t like the sound of hetaeras,’ said Samantha when she read Orzán Odyssey.

‘Well, the poet, an assumed name of course,’ said Flora, knowing how much Samantha went in for qualifications, ‘is a doctor, no less. A proctologist!’

‘Meaning?’

Flora winked. ‘An arse doctor, Samantha. An expert in humanity’s rarest centimetre.’

‘That must be a gold mine,’ said Samantha, having worked out whether she was pulling her leg or not.

‘Now I knew you’d be interested.’

‘I suppose poetry’s not so bad,’ the madame decided. ‘Storm’s hetaeras. Well, I’ve heard worse.’

The madame doesn’t like Flora being so obvious, dressing up as a flamenco dancer in black and white, wearing trousers, with her hair tied up, trying out a farruca. All her life doing bulerías and now she does this. To stand out. Despite the knowledge in Coruña, where they even understand about jazz.

She’s become interested in art in her old age.

But now she listens. She’s up in the attic, helping Milagres give birth, and she understands the heels’ Morse code.

‘Isn’t that Hercules, Arturo da Silva’s pupil?’

‘If it is, Manlle would know. Isn’t Manlle here?’

‘Not today. He said if it’s books, he wouldn’t even burn them.’

‘Well, I think it is Hercules. So the son of a whore’s still alive.’

‘Milagres? That’s not a serious name for a whore.’

‘I’m not a whore. I’ve come for the mattresses.’

‘The mattresses?’

‘Yes, madam. To wash them and fluff up the wool.’

Samantha almost burst out laughing. Milagres was like a ghost repeating a password. She’d said something similar when she arrived in town. She’d come to fluff up the mattresses as well. She was going to say somebody already did that. Down on Panadeiras Street was a store with a large garden, which in summer transformed into a huge blanket of wool fermenting in the sun, with the joy of wool when it fluffs out all the weight and tiredness. The stiff fatigue of wool. It’s just that Samantha, when she wasn’t Samantha, what she had to fluff up was herself, her body, ferment it and mash it, on a mattress of maize husks or wood chips. Fluff and spread her legs.

‘So it’s Milagres. Well, I’m not exactly the Pope. Call yourself what you like.’

When she arrived, she thought about kicking her out. She seemed more dim-witted than innocent. But soon she realised she was really afraid. Samantha had lost or thought she’d lost the notion of fear some time ago, but Milagres’ arrival made it obvious she hadn’t. A remote, familiar thread linked them. That’s why she’d been sent, with this reference. Which made Samantha furious inside. It was this detail that awoke her fear of the long anaesthesia, as if a ferret had been let loose in the burrow of her mind. There was this girl with a woman’s body. A girl who’d already carried all sorts on top of her head. A girl who’d come from fear of the village to fear of the town. From one form of slavery to another. She needed some time. That was her excuse for not sending her back at the first sign of fear.

‘Yes, madam. I’ve come to fluff up the mattresses.’

‘The mattresses? The mattresses and everything else. You’ll have to work from noon to night. Come on.’

She recalled the attic. Lifted the trap-door and said in the dark, ‘We’ll make a place for you up here. A cave in the sky.’

Here she is, biting a white cloth, exuding a dew that coats the bulb and the candle Pretty Mary, the girl who sometimes sings fados, has put in front of St Raymond Nonnatus with a coloured ribbon. Her fearful eyes are fixed on Samantha’s. Her sweat is cold because she’s giving all her heat to warm the room. Samantha remembers and keeps quiet. Lucky for you you’re here because you’d probably be alone in the village, bleeding to death, while the house blocks its ears, with no one to watch over you, no one to give your body back its heat.

The house beats to Flora’s heels, transmitting a code of dots and lines that echo up the stucco walls, climb the stairs and open the trap-doors. The dance is so close, so intense, it thunders on the roof, as if Flora were dancing in the beams from the lighthouse, which helps Milagres take her mind off the pangs inside, because the body that’s coming, by all that’s holy, is bigger than she is.

Milagres doesn’t know, but Samantha put a key under her pillow to help during the delivery, to help open the door of life, her vagina to be more precise, though she has more faith in the infusion of rue recommended by the midwife. Because that good woman is a midwife today, but three months earlier had come as an abortionist. She couldn’t believe the girl was pregnant. When she found out, when she realised that she wasn’t walking strange, but was pregnant, or both things at once, strange and pregnant, the madame was amazed. Milagres had managed to conceal it under various skirts and a woollen girdle she wrapped around her body several times. Quiet, elusive, working all day, with her back turned, cooking, making the beds and going early to sleep in the attic.

‘Are you cold, girl?’

‘It’s the dampness.’

Samantha made a lavish gesture that incorporated the length of her wardrobe for all seasons: silk dressing gown, necklace, earrings and holder for smoking Egyptians.

‘Find someone who’ll give you a gold necklace. Keeps you very warm.’

No doubt some of the others, those rats, knew about it. If that was so, she didn’t understand the need for secrecy. What favour were they doing her by helping her to hide it? Putting a crown of thorns on her head. Samantha took any kind of disturbance in the house as a personal insult. A conspiracy against her. But she’d grown her nails. This wasn’t the first eye she’d scratched out of a setback. She’d come out on top. She no longer let herself be mounted. She was the one who chose, who did the mounting, for pleasure, for money or for the hell of it. Recently she only did it for all three reasons together. Why had that silly girl done it? Why had Milagres done it?

‘Call the Widow.’

They couldn’t get a word out of her. The Widow, whom in private, only in private, they called the Abortionist, though she was also known as the Good Woman or the Midwife depending on the nature of her errand, well, the Widow said the child was well formed, was at least six months, and the best they could do now was lift the future mother’s spirits, since they were clearly low. One arm longer than the other. By three fingers. And not give her hare to eat, otherwise the child would always sleep with open eyes. She’d said this as a joke. She didn’t often joke. Every remark she addressed to the women was a fathom in length and always meant something it was worth remembering. One day, she told them very seriously that the womb was a ‘sacred chamber’. Infections were the cause of great mortality. So she spoke of hygiene as of a creed.

‘You’ve a surprise coming your way, Samantha.’

‘What surprise?’

‘Ah!’

It was Pombo who said this. He was her confidant, the one who made her laugh, who never engaged in conspiracies and who made a fuss of her, because one thing she could not allow was a drop in her spirits. He also looked after the Academy’s money and kept an eye on things. He liked to say he was their arma mater. He loved crêpe shirts, bracelets and shoes with a raised insole, though his speech was more aesthetic than his dress sense or he dressed his wardrobe up in language, so his shoes always came from the Kingdom of Morocco or the Republic of Dongola, the names he gave the two shoeshops in Orzán. If anyone called him a queen, if it was a friend, he’d correct them by telling them he had both sexes, María Pita’s and Hercules’.

‘You mean you’re a hermaphrodite, like snails?’

‘You don’t know much about snails. Snails are only hermaphrodites when they’re on their own.’

‘Rumpy-Pumpy!’ Samantha said to him in a reproachful tone, a name only she was allowed to use.

Pombo’s eyes and ears were an extension of Samantha’s senses. He swore the same thing had happened to him. He hadn’t known Milagres was pregnant. It was he who then took care of her, following the Widow’s advice. The last days before the delivery, he cooked for her. He went to the Chocolate Factory on San Andrés Street and returned with some bars of Pereiro chocolate and some dried cacao husks for making tea. So he was the one who lifted Milagres’ spirits. Who, on the night of the birth, prepared the concoctions of rue and marshmallow, just when Flora was winding up her clock of intestines, the clack of her heels on the Academy’s stage.

‘You miss out on everything and now you come to me with this nonsense. Tell me, what’s the surprise?’

‘A surprise, Samantha, darling, a surprise.’

She murmured, ‘You exhausted my capacity for surprise.’ And he made off down the corridor, wagging his hips from side to side. ‘They say that tango goes to great lengths, which is why it was forbidden by Pius the Tenth.’

As if the dance enabled her to escape, guided by her chiselling heels, Flora left the stage, crossed the small hall of the Dance Academy and ran up the stairs to the first floor, where the clients’ reception rooms were; then up a narrow staircase to the second floor with Samantha’s suite, Pombo’s room and another two rooms which the eight permanent women shared. At night, when there was a show, Pombo would give way to anyone accompanied by a man and to any on their own whom he called nymphs. Finally up a stepladder. Leading to the attic. The trap-door was open and it reminded Flora of a window into another, more intimate room with the veiled light of lamps and botanical shades, where people confessed to indiscretions, since she could hear laughter and whispers, when what she’d been expecting was torn flesh and fresh lamentation.

Flora goes up to Milagres. She’d tried to help her by dancing. She’s not alone, but her eyes are closed, her eyelids swollen, with bluish rings around them.

The child, in the Widow’s hands, resembles another fragment of solitude. The Widow doesn’t like him being so quiet. Hangs him upside down and slaps him to get him crying.

‘What are you doing?’ asks Pombo, who’s more nervous than the rest.

‘What I have to,’ replies the Widow.

The child cries calmly, at measured intervals, as if he thought about each one. The cries sound distant, in the orbit of the seagulls’ calls and the mew of cats climbing down from the roof. The fauna of the lighthouse beams. For seconds. People aren’t generally prepared to let the onomatopoeias of night fill the void. And there’s lots to say.

‘Is he like that?’ asks Samantha.

‘Like what?’

‘That big. And that ugly.’

‘No. He’ll change with the light,’ answers the midwife ironically.

‘No. It depends on the day. Honestly, Samantha, for a worldly woman you do ask some silly questions,’ says the Widow, holding the child now with a look of satisfaction, as if she’d modelled him with her large, miniaturist’s hands.

‘He’s a chocolate-coloured mark on his back. The cacao husks!’ remarks Pombo, stroking the child with his fingertips. ‘A Coruñan through and through, Samantha.’

‘Give the child to his mother,’ Flora intervenes. ‘You’re like a bunch of parrots.’

‘Popinjays,’ Pombo corrects her.

‘That’s what you get for not bringing her proper chocolate.’

Flora was too late.

‘Proper? Wasn’t the chocolate good, Milagres? Was it or was it not good?’

‘That’s what you get for staring at posters of the Charleston dancer Harry Fleming,’ added Samantha, fishing for information, to see if anyone would say something about the child’s father.

‘You’re not wrong,’ said the Widow with a knowing wink.

‘What was the name of that jazz orchestra?’ Samantha suddenly asked. ‘The one that played with kitchen utensils in Marineda Hall.’

‘What kitchen utensils? You’re still on about Monti’s Cardash.’

‘Csárdás actually,’ Flora pointed out.

‘Don’t spoil my lapsus, Miss Academy,’ said Pombo, who was always at odds with Flora. ‘And forget about who the boogie-woogie was, Samantha. The question now is whether or not to take the child to the orphanage before daybreak.’

‘I do believe I recognise that giant. Isn’t that. .? Didn’t he carry Arturo da Silva’s gloves for him?’

Some of them only hear the crack of a proper name. A name that causes a certain commotion. The Falangists next to their stocky companion, the one who asked the question, copy him and place their hand like a visor against the sun to see better, though they’re not all looking in the same direction, where Curtis has stopped, but are turning, taking in the panorama, the roofs as well, as if that name evoked a vague feeling. Not a person exactly, but something in the air. Curtis knows he mustn’t move. He’s the hare. He’s the one with the wider field of vision. He’s helped by the sun, which has put the others in a blind spot. That’s why he does well not to move. A sudden movement would give him away and hasten events. ‘If you’re going to fight in the open air, with natural light,’ Arturo da Silva had told him, ‘the first thing you have to do is seek the sun’s help. Make sure the sun is on your side.’

Samos comes up and also shields his eyes.

‘What’s that about Da Silva?’

‘No. I’m not talking about Da Silva. I’m talking about that guy over there, next to the first fire. He seemed to me to look a bit like. . Isn’t that Papagaio’s Hercules? The one who floored Manlle. Da Silva’s sparring partner. At least, I thought so.’

‘Fear everything and you’ll believe anything.’ Samos pats his robust colleague, the one who’s permanently on the lookout. ‘Fear everything and you’ll believe anything.’

‘You know what, Samos? Confidence died of old age, but suspicion is still alive.’

One of the places Coruña’s boxers used to train was called the Sunhouse. It was built as a TB clinic and, for a time, also had a small surgery where women working as prostitutes could go for a check-up. The Sunhouse, next to Orzán Sea and very near Germinal Library. On stormy days, foam from the waves would beat against the windows of the gym. The first time Curtis set foot in the Sunhouse, the sea was up, it was a grey day, he had the contradictory sensation he was entering a dark place, a large whale’s belly, where men seemed to lash out at each other blindly. He didn’t think of a cave that day, but of a whale. And what made him think of a whale’s belly were the gloves. Seeing a pair of gloves in the dark, lying on the edge of the ring.

They were calling to him. Calling to his hands. Made of leather-coloured leather. An animal shine. He didn’t make any calculations. He went for them as for a find that belonged to him. He grabbed them and took to his heels. Ran first along Orzán Beach. His legs joined in the fun with his hands, which were carrying something that would be for them and for them alone. They’d get inside the gloves and never let go of them. To start with, all he could hear was the sea, the waves lapping his feet. This helped him to run, it was a familiar sound of encouragement. He chose not to look back. When he reached the cliffs, he’d hide the gloves and act all innocent, as if he were fishing for sea urchins. Which is why he was surprised when he heard, but did not see, someone coming up beside him, on the side that wasn’t the sea. Without breaking into a sweat, without apparent effort, with enough breath left over to ask, ‘Where are you off to with my gloves, boy?’

His hands fizzled out. Now the gloves were heavy, an unbearable weight, and his legs turned to jelly as they sank in the sand. He threw the gloves into his pursuer’s face and jumped over the rocks until he reached the pools left by the sea at low tide.

‘What did you want them for?’ shouted the boxer.

‘To go fishing for sea urchins,’ he replied. And muttered, ‘What a question! The worst of all failures, having to provide explanations.’

The other fell about laughing, ‘That’s the best joke about boxing gloves I’ve heard. Gloves for fishing. Get down from there!’

‘No. I made a fool of myself. That’s punishment enough.’

‘Not to fight. Boxers don’t fight. At least not with sea urchins. What’s your name?’

He was annoyed with himself, ‘Some people call me Hercules.’ And he felt like adding, ‘I’m from Papagaio,’ for the other to see he was of wild stock and not just a turd on the staircase.

‘Hercules? How about trying on the gloves?’

‘No. Not today. Another day perhaps.’

‘Well, if you come, ask for Arturo da Silva.’

Arturo da Silva? Curtis didn’t wait until the following day. He gave Arturo a twenty-yard head start and then followed him to the Sunhouse. When he arrived at the gym, he saw the gloves where they were before, in the corner of the ring. Waiting.

Vicente Curtis had heard lots of stories from sailors. Not just from sailors, but theirs were his favourites. And he was their favourite as well. In time, Curtis learnt to distinguish between the trades and occupations of those visiting the Dance Academy. On Sundays, some stockbreeders came, possibly in the same suit they’d wear to a wedding or funeral. Several details in their appearance soon gave them away. One above all. The rebellious nature of the knots in their ties. Stockbreeders’ ties had a life of their own and they, not their owners’ hands, seemed to decide when to loosen or tighten. Then there were their nails. Their sideburns and moustaches, if they had them, were carefully groomed, yes, but appeared to shy away from precise measurements and leave a gap, like a furrow, between fallow and arable land. As for their nails, they seemed resigned to belonging to themselves and to the earth as well. They were unlike any others and what Curtis found most strange is that they were unlike each other, the nails of one hand, like small stone axes or slates embedded in flesh. They didn’t wear a suit, the suit wore them. Curtis didn’t like these men who came from villages with a false modesty, a grimy shyness. A state that didn’t last long. Alcohol soon transformed them into braggarts and produced a mean, greedy monster. In the case of sailors, speech came before presence. Words hauled them in on threads. People who listen are a blessing for sailors on land. And Hercules was there to listen.

During the afternoon, in the long summer hours, when the Academy’s only client was Monsieur Le Clock, the odd sailor would drop by. Most of the women used the afternoon break to sleep in time’s embrace, under a quilt of shadows. And the sailor would look around in search of someone to listen and light on Hercules’ open eyes. Because while he also was in time’s embrace, even when he slept, his eyes stayed open.

‘Not completely, but a little bit, yes.’

‘That’s good,’ declared Pombo. ‘For someone like him, that’s good. He needs them on both sides, like a hare, all the better to see with.’

‘You’ve got them on both sides,’ said Flora, ‘like a sentry.’

‘Get over it, girl. At a certain age, you become invisible. Transparent. They can’t see you.’

‘Even with raised insoles?’

‘Hey Samantha! Will you go and see if that pussy’s laid an egg?’

‘The orphanage? No one’s leaving here for the orphanage,’ said Samantha and for once her authority and sentiment seemed to coincide. ‘The only thing I’m sorry about is I promised Grande Obra a baby Jesus for their nativity scene.’

‘And what’s wrong with the child?’ asked Flora.

‘You’re impossible to talk to,’ said Samantha. ‘He’s ugly. And that mark on his back. .’

‘It’s no problem,’ said Flora suddenly, looking very serious. ‘He’s been offered to the Union as well.’

‘The Union has a nativity scene?’

‘And an Epiphany parade.’

‘Grande Obra asked first,’ said Samantha. ‘The Bolshies have enough with their revolution.’

‘They’re not Bolsheviks. They’re anarchists.’

‘Like me. From here on down.’

‘You’re a brute the size of a plough.’

‘I’m from the village, like you. And proud of it.’

‘I’m not from the village,’ said Flora. ‘I was washed up by the sea.’

‘Now listen here, you. .’

‘The important thing,’ the Widow intervened, ‘is to have a godfather who can say the Creed. So the child doesn’t stammer.’

‘In Italy, there’s a baby Jesus who’s a girl.’

‘And in Vinhó he’s dressed up as Napoleon.’

‘Aren’t we international!’ Samantha exclaimed, while Pombo started singing a Peruvian carol:

Here comes the Mayor’s child

Here comes the Christ-child

It may have been the effect of having to draw back an entrance curtain, but many of the stories the sailors told Curtis or, to be more precise, told his open, attentive eyes were about things that turned up in whales’ bellies. Some brought not only the stories, but the things as well. Like the harpooner Mr Lens.

There were two big whaling companies in Galicia, the Spanish Whaling Company and the Spanish Crown Society. Behind both of them was the influential industrialist Massó. One of the factories was in Caneliñas, in Cee, with the whaling ships based in Coruña Harbour. Lens of Arou, the harpooner, knew nothing about Massó, but a lot about whales. They were his life. The first time he saw a whale was on top of a rock on Lobeira Beach. He was fishing for octopuses with an ear of maize. The rope, the stone, were an extension of his arm. Despite all their intelligence, and Lens’ father said they were like people, octopuses had a weakness, an irrepressible desire to latch on to an ear of maize. And that ear was part of Lens’ body, a third arm. He once caught an octopus as big as himself. When it saw itself out of the water, betrayed by that alluring, golden ear of maize, the octopus, which was huge on the Lens scale, infuriated by such skulduggery, enveloped the boy’s body, and face as well, with its eight arms. But Lens wouldn’t let himself be dragged out to sea. With the octopus stuck to his head, he ran to where his father was and when he finally got rid of it, little Lens bore the mark of its suckers and had been completely drained. ‘It was the octopus’ revenge,’ he told Hercules. ‘It sucked out everything I had. I didn’t have much education, but what I did know, I lost. I had to start from scratch. Put it all back. The names of people and things. Every single word. The whole lot.’ A whale was his unit of measurement. Especially when talking about emotions. Joy, when great, was of whale-like proportions.

‘How many whales have you killed?’

‘The joy is not in killing them, but in watching them emerge. Seeing a whale emerge. It’s the kind of joy that doesn’t fit inside your body. Pain’s like that as well. The trouble with a great sadness is that it doesn’t fit inside your body.’

Hercules remembered this unit of measurement the harpooner taught him on afternoons in the Academy. Real joy and pain were too big to fit inside your body. It can be very painful to see a giant man cry. He’d seen this. Harpooners collapsing with sadness on the table, smashing glasses and bottles. Their pain was as heavy as a whale. But a weak, scared woman can also carry tons of pain on top of her head. A premonition. A whale.

‘And your mother?’ asked Lens of Arou.

‘My mother? My mother cooks,’ replied Curtis hastily, ‘sews and fluffs up the wool inside the mattresses.’

‘I know that. But where is she?’

‘She went to buy some damask,’ Hercules lied.

‘Some damask?’

‘For the covers. She has a thing about damask.’

Vicente Curtis liked the harpooner. But when it came to his mother, he tried to keep men at a distance. The harpooner was twice the size of Milagres. Even Curtis had been too big for her. When he emerged from her belly, he left an empty space in what the Widow called her ‘sacred chamber’.

‘The birth,’ warned the Widow, ‘will be followed by a melancholy air. An insatiable wind that preys on newly delivered mothers.’

‘What do we have to do?’

‘It’s a crafty, human wind that searches out gaps in people and likes to plant sadness in the space left by the baby. Keep the child always close at hand. What the wind wants is for her to hate the child so that it can take his place. You have to love her. And the child as well.’

‘And who’s going to love me?’ asked Samantha.

‘Some questions in life just don’t have an answer,’ said Flora.

‘That was a good one,’ said the madame. ‘I won’t hold it against you.’

Milagres had the child always with her. Not just tied, grafted on to her body. On her back or front, in a series of girdles. When he started walking and disappeared from view, she let out a whine that was like a cat or seagull mewing. Later, when they made the skylight and Curtis embarked on his existence as a head popping out of the roof, the cats and seagulls were like distant company, suspicious residents. He realised how similar they were at night. A crossbreed of feline gulls and cats about to fly. Sleepwalking fauna for a sleepless city.

Curtis would have liked the roof fauna to come down and sniff around the books’ remains. Something to fill the void. Even the books burning badly, slowly being consumed, seemed to be waiting for somebody. Cats and gulls, rooftop plumes, gull-like cats and cat-like gulls remained still, taxidermic, as in an experiment to dispense with the atmosphere.

If only Milagres was with the harpooner now. Curtis had discovered that Mr Lens’ size was proportional to the stories he stored inside. If anyone could exorcise the void, it was the harpooner. To start with, following his mother’s instructions, Curtis provided a barrier. The harpooner would arrive in the Academy at some sleepy hour of the afternoon, when even Pombo took a break, leaving Curtis in charge, practising his scrawl in the light of a green lamp. He would ask after Milagres, the boy would come out with some excuse, sounding increasingly unconvinced, but the harpooner never kicked against the pricks. He’d deposit part of his store of stories in the boy, leading his body to become normal while Curtis’ grew. There was not a drop of fat in the harpooner’s storytelling, it was all lean meat.

‘Do you know where all the umbrellas the wind takes in Galicia end up? On the same boat.’

‘Always the same one?’

‘That’s right. An old container ship, which acts like a magnet for umbrellas. About two hundred miles out to sea. It’s called the Mara Hope. From here, it goes to Rotterdam and sells them on in bulk.’

He then told him how things from the sea rain on earth and things from the earth rain at sea. In Galicia, in the middle of winter, a shower of pilchards had fallen inland from a cloud of seaweed. The cloud had burst, like someone opening a net in mid-air. Thousands of small, silvery sardines falling on the rye. Which is why the fields of Courel sometimes smell of the sea. While the woods are covered in a moss of seaweed with starfish hanging from the treetops. These are the so-called animate waves which rise in gale-force winds, turning into pregnant clouds. ‘Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of animate waves and pregnant clouds. Isn’t there an old newspaper lying around?’

‘It’s true what he says about umbrellas,’ intervened Pombo, who’d finished his break. ‘The other way round too. Have you never seen a flock of cod heading in the direction of Terra Cha? And in Riazor Stadium the other day it bucketed down caps with the name “Numancia” embroidered on them.’

‘I can only talk about what I’ve seen,’ said Mr Lens a tad suspiciously.

‘Honest to cod,’ insisted Pombo.

Curtis enjoyed this duel. Things to-ing and fro-ing by air and sea. They vied not to tell the truth, but to invent the biggest story. Before working as a harpooner in the North Atlantic, Lens had spent many years in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.

‘Never trust the calm,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘It’s what I’m most afraid of. The calm. You know, when nothing happens, there’s a dead calm, the sea like a plate.’

Curtis shook his head.

‘At the centre of a hurricane! What they call the area of calm. Don’t forget it. In the area of calm, be alert, in a state of emergency.’

Curtis thought he heard Pombo blink. Alert. His tongue tickling.

‘You can be on the boat with nothing moving. Everything completely still. When suddenly, swept offshore by the hurricane, something falls. What you’d least expect. Because it’s one thing,’ he said sarcastically, ‘for it to rain a tin of sardines in the mountains the day Pombo goes for a picnic and quite another for it to rain, as I have seen — I have seen! — a flock of sheep on board a ship, carried along by a hurricane.’

‘Sheep with umbrellas, I suppose,’ commented Pombo ironically.

‘Only when the flock has a shepherd. Then they fall with a large umbrella, of the type called “seven parishes”. In the Caribbean, I’ve seen it rain a whole chapter, a Mexican chapter.’

‘It’s normal for a flock to have a shepherd of souls,’ added Pombo, ‘and fall right on top of a pagan from Death Coast.’

‘What’s frightening is to be in the area of calm and think the worst is over,’ said Lens seriously, ignoring Pombo’s jokes. ‘That’s it, you think the worst is over when in fact it’s just beginning. You think the hurricane’s gone and you’re in the eye of the storm.’

His tone now smacked undeniably of the truth. The ship’s name was right. The Mara Hope.

As they listened, even Pombo’s mocking hemisphere was eclipsed. Whether in suspense or under the force of Lens’ memory, the silence in the Dance Academy had acquired the sound of an electric hum, of sultry heat, around the green lamp, which Pombo’s long eyelashes had been drawn to.

‘It’s terrible what you’ve endured,’ Lens continued. ‘Everything’s in disarray, the boat and your bones. And then you find yourself under the illusion that it’s all over. Because the other boats you thought had foundered in the storm are coming towards you, safe and sound. A horizon of ships. You’re dumbstruck by such a miracle. Merde! Shit! Verdammt und zugenäht!’

The harpooner, like many other maritime residents and guests, practised the art of saying ugly words in foreign languages for them to sound a little distinguished. A kind of crude elegance.

‘What happened?’ asked Pombo on tenterhooks, he who’d heard so much.

‘Not a single ship. It was a decapitated forest. Bits of forest torn to shreds which, after the storm, came together at sea and interlaced roots to hold up trunks and crowns like the masts of sailing ships, with nature’s will for weaving tapestries out of tatters. It’s normal in shipwrecks to find a brotherhood of remains. But this was as big as the horizon itself.’

The harpooner’s enormous hands ordered the geology of earth on the table’s tectonic plates. He took a slice out of the table with the corner of his right hand and lifted up a chunk of Yucatan. ‘It was this wooded territory coming towards us, towards our ship in the area of central calm.’

‘Was that before or after you had cataracts?’ asked Pombo at last, unable to control himself.

‘What?’

‘The wood moving at sea.’

‘I’m talking here to Hercules. Anyone else can shut up or provide tobacco.’

‘Portuguese blond,’ said Pombo in a conciliatory tone, holding out a cigarette.

‘To start with, we thought no,’ Lens continued, ‘they were boats, an entire fleet that had been reunited. Because we could hear shouts as well. Isolated, distant. Unintelligible. Sometimes they sounded like hurrahs of joy carried on the wind, others like cries of agony and anguish filling the sea with fear. We approached with our hearts in our mouths. No, they weren’t boats. This was no vast fleet of salvaged ships. As we got closer, our eyes were forced to accept something even more fantastical. What was coming towards us was the forest. The sea had gathered strips of wood, drifting timbers. The masts we descried in the distance were in fact large trees, huge mahoganies. Then we heard an orchestral guffaw. A spine-chilling peal of laughter. All of that nature was making fun of us. Laughter can be truly terrifying when you don’t know where it’s coming from. Until the mystery was revealed. The trees had their birds in them. A colourful display of parrots, orioles and long-crested cockatoos. Someone shouted, “The birds are warning us!” But it was too late. When we tried to turn around, the boat was surrounded by the forest.’

‘And what happened?’ asked Curtis uneasily.

‘The forest gobbled us up. Swallowed us whole.’

‘That’s more or less what happened to me with the wolf,’ said Pombo after the requisite pause to take a swig.

‘What happened to you if you never left this hole?’

‘I’m from the mountains, and proud of it. Bloody mountains! One freezing winter’s day with a lot of snow, the height of a man at least, I was sent with a message down by the border and bumped into the wolf on my way. It stared at me. I stared at it.’

Everyone remained silent. Pombo marked a bony kind of time by rapping the bar with his knuckles.

‘And what happened?’ asked Lens finally.

‘It ate me.’

Pombo adjusted the knot of his necktie and stared at the harpooner artistically. ‘What did you expect? It ate me! That’s right. The wolf ate me.’ And he waited before delivering the final blow, ‘Just as the forest ate that ship of yours.’

‘You don’t know what the area of calm is,’ replied the harpooner painfully.

Some of the fishing boats still have their festive pennants. The vessels haven’t left port for a month. Haven’t been back out to sea. The sirens sounded on the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. A few days later, with the military coup, they sounded again. A day and a night. Without stopping. In the Academy’s attic, Curtis heard them one after the other. He couldn’t see. He could hear. He heard shots and sirens. Shots against sirens. For a time, the shots stuttered, as if sliding down the sirens’ greasy hair. The shots increased, the sirens diminished. The sound of the sirens was round, slow, fleshy, labial. The shots were straight lines which multiplied, pulling on each other, sieving space. Eventually there was only one siren left. Very clear. In long hoots. The shots fell silent. Seemed to be listening as well, in surprise. Then there was a loud volley. The death throes of the last sound being riddled with bullets. Lots of the pennants are frayed, bitten. The atmosphere around the burning books is full of holes. Perforated.

The smoke was looking for somewhere to hold on to, to clamber up. In the upper part of his body, Curtis felt the tickle of its creepers and suckers. Climbing up his face. Invading his nose. Catching on his eyes. Sealing his mouth.

Another day, the harpooner had told him how a sandstorm had consumed paradise in a single night. A place called Tatajuba in Brazil. Curtis realised he wasn’t making it up, he’d been there as he said, from the way he went into details. He even made a pencil drawing on the marble of the kitchen table. How well the harpooner could draw America! His map of Europe was pretty good too. On the Iberian Peninsula, he took great care over the twists and turns of the Galician coast. But America came out from north to south as if by memory. He put a cross to show where paradise had disappeared overnight, eaten up by the sand. This is Tatajuba. This is Camusin. He’d been walking from Camusin, all along the beach, because he’d heard what a paradise it was. On the way, he slept on the beach and woke up to see a sow with piglets bathing in the sea. Or else they were eating fish. Because the fish there could be caught by hand. Skate, swordfish, mullet and porpoise, all jumping about. A Galician fisherman’s dream. Pigs swimming and fish jumping in the air. When he reached Tatajuba, it really was paradise. The following day, it no longer existed. A sandstorm had swallowed it up overnight. What Curtis remembered best about the sandstorm that buried paradise in one night was how the harpooner told him people stopped talking. The sand set their teeth chattering and drowned out their words. And that’s when the men and women who’d worked so hard, with such devotion, gave up.

Curtis hadn’t read many books. All the burning books had something to do with him. They were books he hadn’t yet read. But this one had clearly belonged to him since he’d set foot on the scene. In the end, he picked up A Popular Guide to Electricity.

‘Hey you, put that back!’ The stocky soldier hadn’t let him out of his sight and this time he really did take out his pistol.

‘Now, now, calm down!’ said Samos. ‘It’s just a clown looking for some Tarzan comics. Which one of them would dare show his face?’

Arturo da Silva used first to write out his texts by hand. He had curious handwriting. It was very neat, as if the act of writing, though it called for action, or perhaps because of this, was incompatible with speed. Given the size of his fingers and the heavy machinery of his hands, it must have been a real effort. And the truth is Dafonte, Holando, Félix Ramón, Varela, Curtis, Terranova, Marconi, Leica, Seoane, all the new group of boys who visited the Shining Light premises, some of whom contributed to Brazo y Cerebro, tried to make room when he was using the table to write, forging a territory with his bulk, his head close to the paper and his whole body focused on moving that caravan of words like beasts of burden forwards against all the odds. To start with, the paper had the texture of rocky ground or was treacherous as a marsh. A few words opened the way, like tracks, sleepers or stepping-stones. They were the eyes and feet of those running behind.

It helped him to hear a voice, a voice like that of Amil, the teacher at the Rationalist School, tugging at his fingers.

Amil, who always talked to them of Heraclitus and Parmenides. Life, the course of the universe, all explained as a river. A river which is never the same, which is always changing. You cannot step into the same river twice. A changeless river, a river which is always the same. Heraclitus and Parmenides are so familiar he’s surprised no one in the city is named after them. They’re in the ring. Heraclitus constantly on the go. Parmenides solid as a rock.

You cannot step into the same river twice, he wrote. It wasn’t highly original, but he was pleased with this beginning. It would allow him to talk of that point in history, of everything that was happening, based on the trip upriver due to take place on 2 August.

Reality is constantly changing. We can say it’s never the same, as Heraclitus said of the river. Heraclitus was right, but Parmenides wasn’t wrong. He maintained the river was always the same. Humanity flows like a river. We think everything’s changing, moving, progress is driving history. But it may be an illusion. Parts of the river are stagnant and lifeless.

He created a circle with his arms. And out of that circle an article slowly took shape. As he typed it up, his body imitated its movements.

‘I’m going to call it “The River of Life and Death”.’

‘What river’s that? The Nile? The Ganges?’

‘No, stupid. The river that passes through my village.’

He typed on the Ideal, using a couple of fingers. Above it, a bare bulb hung from interlaced wires in a cloth casing. As his fingers danced over the keys, Curtis couldn’t help seeing Arturo’s exploratory movements inside the ring. On tiptoe, as if he were skipping. His whole body behind the fingers that were typing. Gradually warming up. Now jumping by themselves. When the metal bars got caught up, he took a deep breath. He lived the construction of each sentence in its literalness. As he sought each letter, his fingers an extension of his eyes, what registered on the paper was for the first time. For example, when he wrote ‘elevation’, what Arturo did as he pressed the key was add everything the word could lift. And so, when he moved on to another sentence, his final flourish, the one he’d thought long and hard about, the one that said ‘The river flows inside of us and life is the art of hydrokinetics’, then he got a little nervous, excited, and pressed down hard with the fingers of a dowser searching for a spring. He found a patch of hard ground, the bars got entangled, the carriage got stuck.

‘It’s no problem,’ said Dafonte, who understood the Ideal best. As he repaired the machine, he looked at what he’d written. ‘What’s hydrokinetics?’

‘Something to do with reading in water. I came across it in The White Magazine. It’s a naturist idea.’

‘You’d better explain it.’

He nodded in time to his index finger pressing the ‘x’ key and deleting what he’d written. At first, he didn’t like to delete things, but then he started to enjoy it. The ‘x’ was a curlew leaving its footprints on the sand. He thought as well about the pleasure of stepping in others’ footprints, filling their mould on the beach. He deleted. X xxxxxxxxxx. Curlews. Sandpipers. Plovers. Redshank. Bunting.

Curtis looks up from the book. He’s already learnt there are different kinds of heat. Sensible heat, latent heat and specific heat. Specific heat is the most important, technically speaking. .

‘Well, blow me down if that isn’t Papagaio’s Hercules. Arturo da Silva’s pupil. Of course it is.’

They move towards him, with diligence, forming a circle.

The silence is broken by the sound of turning wheels. Everything seems to be waiting. The gulls adorning the pinnacles of roofs and masts. The sound increases, turning on the stones. Curtis and the Falangists look towards the Rey building on Porta Real. There are the caryatids with flowers in their hair, supporting the balconies. Women’s heads holding the house up.

Then the horse appears. It was a wooden horse making all that noise. The horse Leica kept in his studio on Nakens Street. His father walks in front, with the travelling photographer’s tripod camera over his left shoulder and his inseparable cane in his other hand. Leica pulls on the pretty piebald horse, which today looks like a natural animal, part of the caryatids’ modernist landscape.

‘When are you taking that horse out?’ Curtis had asked him not long before. He couldn’t understand why he kept it shut up in his studio. It would draw the crowds in Recheo Gardens. The finest photographer’s horse. And Coruña was a city that had lots of wooden and papier-mâché horses. It even had a horse factory at the bottom of the hill of Our Lady of the Rosary. But the horse Carirí, the horse that had come all the way from Cuba, was quite a horse. ‘When are you taking it to Recheo?’

‘I’m not. It was my father who brought it from Cuba. The whole lot came together. Cameras and horse. I think it was the horse he liked most. But I don’t want to be an instant photographer. I want to take artistic photos. Why don’t you have it?’

The page of an illustrated magazine nestled at Antonio Vidal’s feet the day of his departure in July 1933 on the quay in Havana. This lost, flying page, which had reached the end of the pier, along the ground, and was about to fall into the sea, but suddenly gained height, spun in the air and came towards him as if it had found a direction. It landed at his feet, he didn’t have to harpoon it, spear it with the tip of his cane.

Spirals of smoke rising from their coquettish lips

He felt the smoke had nothing to do with tobacco or the picture of a happy life, but was a message in itself, aimed at him, rising from the paper like a swift climbing plant. He could read so well because a large part of the surface was taken up with photos of women’s faces. He couldn’t tell them apart. They were smiling, but each one seemed to contain a mystery. At this distance, for a man who, to walk, had to overcome his legs’ resistance and whom others were beginning to regard as a watch running slow, all the smiles were as one before disappearing into the cone of the paper wrapped around the cane.

Farewell, Havana.

The page searching for him now in Coruña has other concerns. Mayarí shakes the sheet in an effort to get rid of it. While he finds it difficult to resist paper flying in front of him, today he’s on another mission. To reach the coach as soon as possible and save his son. The son pulling on the wooden horse. Ever since he set eyes on that horse, he’s always trusted it.

He tries to shake it off, but now it’s the page that doesn’t want to let go and enfolds him. Antonio Vidal’s attempt to shake it off, the rotatory movement of his arm, a slap in reverse, seems to provoke the large sheet, which sticks to him, holds on with the desperation of someone who doesn’t know how to escape. So he has to stop. Put down the camera.

‘Come here,’ he says to the sheet of paper. ‘Calm down. The world’s such a big place, didn’t you have anywhere else to go?’

A photo. It catches his eye because it’s the only photo and the scene is very real. It looks as if it’s been taken from where he’s standing. And what can be seen in the background of the photo is what he can see as well. The fires. The burning books, but also the Falangists who are burning them, making the Fascist salute. He now understands why the sheet clung to him. It was fleeing from the flames.

‘Hey you, photographer!’

On seeing the cameras and horse, everyone seemed to lose all interest in the boy next to the fire.

Hercules, meanwhile, was focused on something else.

Yes, he’d swear it was him, Terranova, with his hands in his pockets. Now he takes out his hands and puts them to his mouth. For God’s sake, don’t shout, don’t give yourself away. What’s he doing? Whistling with his fingers. Yes, it could only be him. The whistle attracts the Falangists’ attention again, puts them on their guard. They peer through the clouds of smoke to see where it’s coming from. What’s that idiot up to? Now he wears the horn in the artistic style of Lucho, maker of Andalusian costumes. This apparition, whistle, ornamental gesture with the horn, upsets everything. Curtis takes a few steps back and performs an unusual manoeuvre. He takes to the air, jumps over the largest fire and enters the open corridor.

‘Have you got my ticket?’ shouts Terranova.

‘Run! They’re shooting.’

They leg it up Luchana Alley, Rego de Auga, Anxo Alley, Florida Street. If they can reach Ovos Square, they’ll be safe. Curtis has thought of a hiding place. The store on Panadeiras Street. It’s summer. The garden will be covered in fluffy wool.

‘Who are they shooting at?’

‘Us!’

‘These bastards can’t take a joke.’

They didn’t find those two. They disappeared after Ovos Square. What does it matter? All that fuss over a couple of clowns! The stocky soldier likes to boss everyone around and is ready for anything. Trigger-happy. Dagger-happy too. The one who’s going to be a judge is smarter, but he’s a bit soft next to the other, the big guy, always on the lookout. Who knows what he’ll get up to tonight with that vocation? Because tonight, you can tell, is going to be terrible. Apparently they’ve got Huici, the inventor of coloured waistcoats, in the barracks of the Falange. But rumour has it tonight they’re going after the last Republican governor’s wife. The librarian Juana Capdevielle. They shot him on 25 July and they already sent her death flies. She lost a child in her womb. It’s her turn tonight. They’re going with the intention of killing her several times over. It’s something that has to come from the top, from the so-called Invisible Tribunal, the Delegation of Public Order, whose director is Mr González Vallés. This evening, Mr Vallés’ daughter will preside over a friendly football match to be played in Riazor between a team of Falangists and another of crewmen from a Third Reich warship. They’ll go for the librarian early in the morning. It’s not his turn to go out hunting tonight, so Parallelepiped is going to try to slip away, to skip it. He gave the river something to eat from Castellana Bridge. Yep, tonight he’ll skip it. Now, for instance. The others were busy having their photographs taken. Their portraits had already appeared in two newspapers, with them saluting like Romans in front of the fires. Well, now they wanted more photos. The one who’s going to be a judge, Samos, spoke on behalf of the old man in a straw hat and the boy with the wooden horse, ‘Let them go! They’re like family. I might still ask for your daughter’s hand, Mr Vidal!’ He was distracted, had a lot to think about. So Parallelepiped could finally put the book under his blue shirt, very surreptitiously. And leave without saying goodbye, in the shadows, down the corridors of smoke, while they stood tall and proud in front of the pyres. Shame not to have a librarian to hand, someone to consult about the value of this book to the valiente of Finisterra. Better to keep it under wraps for a while. Not tell anybody. Samos said it was very valuable. He might be cultivated, but he wasn’t very observant. You have to dirty your hands if you want to get something. Now it belonged to him. The emotion of nicking something. The emotion of reading ‘For Antonio de la Trava, the valiente of Finisterra’.

Parallelepiped walked along the Western Quay. He lived in Garás. He looked at his hands. They were blackened. He was happy, pleased with his booty. It was about time he found something valuable. Dead men’s pockets don’t even carry air. Judging from Samos’ anxiety, this book must be worth a fortune.

It was then he felt a slap on the back that made him stumble. A paw that had little to do with greeting or friendship. He knew the effect of this surprise impact. Intimidation. He himself was an expert in the surprise blow to the back of the neck, which terrorised poor souls scurrying away, hoping to avoid making the Fascist salute. With his elbow, he held on tightly to the New Testament hidden under his shirt and this immobilised one arm. He turned around. Ren, his robust colleague, grabbed him by the collar. His hands were iron claws. He unarmed him.

‘What you got there, Parallelepiped?’

‘A novel, comrade. A Frenchy to read in the toilet.’

‘I’d better read it myself first. Hand it over.’