Books Burn Badly

Leica and Silvia

‘IT’S THE CAMERA that takes the photos. Decides whether it likes the people. Picks them. Moves them. Makes them foggy. It’s a good camera, sure enough, but most of the photos are pretty bad. When there’s a good one, you could say an image has been born for humanity. It’s down to the camera. The images it’s been through! I’m not surprised it’s a little manic, capricious. There was a time, in its youth, when it took photos with great pleasure. It was very clever. Found light where there wasn’t any. And it’s done a lot of things it didn’t like, just for me. People sometimes do things against their will and end up feeling they like them. I haven’t got that far. My problem is I don’t know how to say no. So it’s the camera that takes most of the decisions. Here, take a look. If you’re that beautiful, blame the camera. It’s the camera’s fault.’

‘Oh, come on!’

‘No, it’s true. There was a time I wanted to be an artist, photographer wasn’t enough. Luís Huici, who was an artist and a tailor, told me one day, “The important thing in life, and in art, is not to bore people. To give or not to give, that’s the measure of a piece of art. Here is a gift.”’

The first time he entered his workshop on Cantóns, Huici handed him the magazine Alfar, a transatlantic undertaking to combat boredom. His workshop was a landing stage for avant-garde movements, its very own port. There were novelties, books or fabrics, you couldn’t find anywhere else. There were people who went just to touch things. Ulysses by James Joyce, for example, that book that had everyone talking and had reached Huici’s workshop by sea. There it was, a real, living being you could open and pluck words from: ‘Those girls, those girls, those lovely seaside girls.’ Packages arrived, containing manifestos and publications: a gift. They’d open them and almost always come across a new species, an image, form or question that hadn’t existed before. When he showed him Alfar, the copies were bound with an animal black ribbon. The artist and tailor was incredibly precise about colours. A jacket the colour of a fox’s tail. A coat the colour of maize bread from Carral. A face as white as a sleepless night. This ribbon he said was animal black. Whenever Huici’s name came into his mind, he saw those fingers untying the ribbon. As well as helping him to make a living, tailoring was, for Huici, a practical way of contributing to the city. People were the most active creators of landscape. They were like walking trees, mutating pieces of architecture. A man or a woman represented a nomadic nation. As they walked through the city, they wrote, drew and painted.

Every once in a while, something would happen to affect the composition. Suddenly the idea of nomadic culture ceased to have a figurative meaning. Lots of people, openly carrying their nomadic symbol, a suitcase, gathered in the port and disappeared from the landscape. This was a question Huici asked himself, ‘When will we stop exporting sadness?’

Even though they accused him of being a snob, he used to talk about popular elegance. Elegance was to be found in the quality of the person, their style, and not necessarily in how much the piece cost. Coruña was a city of seamstresses. The ships that exported sadness also brought novelties. These seamstresses took photos with their imagination, copied or adjusted designs they saw on the first-class gangways of liners. They did haute couture, using humble fabrics. Huici visited popular markets and fairs in a daze. He admired the seamstresses. He once saw a group of them on Cantóns, each with a portable Singer on top of her head. There were lots of people on the city’s busiest thoroughfare, but for a moment it seemed as if a corridor was opened to allow the sewing women through. He made lots of sketches of that image he described as an amusing Biblical interlude. Make way for the seamstresses!

He ties the pure, animal black ribbon. Goodbye, Huici. Looks at Silvia, the seamstress. We have the beauty of the face. Now what we’ve got to do is a session which shows all the beauty. That which exists, but is hidden.

‘This portrait is wonderful, Silvia. Now what we need is a full-length portrait. What do you think?’

But Silvia was not the type to answer every question. She had moments of intriguing silence. Like now. Her eyes did the talking. A look that went from inside out and from outside in. Active melancholy with cinematographic curiosity.

‘The portraits will be good,’ said Leica. ‘The camera loves you. We’ll use the photos to persuade some advertisers. It’s not easy making an advert with models from here. Everything comes from abroad. People believe everything from abroad is better. Everything modern has to come from abroad. I think otherwise. An optical revolution, you see? Publicity is one of the things that’s going to change this country. We’ve been putting up with sad publicity for years. Digestive tonics, anti-dandruff lotions, restorative syrups. But now’s the time for electrical appliances. Housework will no longer be thought of as a punishment. The home will become a paradise. The woman’s smile when she opens the refrigerator. I know I’m exaggerating. But there’s no publicity without exaggeration. No publicity, no art, nothing.’

‘You can take photos of me,’ she said suddenly. ‘But not nude. Not without clothes.’

He gestured as if to protest. Was about to explain something. But, for some reason, decided to stay silent.

‘I’m fragile,’ said Silvia. ‘I know where I am.’

She then surprised him by saying, ‘I don’t want your camera to feel guilty. If I take my clothes off, it’ll be because I’m with you, not for a photo.’

None of the girls he’d taken to his studio had ever spoken to him like that. Some had got angry or cursed him, feeling duped. But they’d never spoken to him like that before.

‘I have to protect myself because, if I don’t, no one will. I know where I am. I prefer not to embarrass myself.’

‘OK. Forget about the nude photos, but don’t say that, that no one will protect you.’

‘It’s true. You might love me one day,’ she said in a mysterious tone, ‘but you’ll never protect me.’

He was crazy about her. Just seeing her drove him crazy. I’m not surprised. As a girl, after she left hospital, she carried a portable sewing machine on top of her head. She went from village to village, over the mountains. With the sun and mists. Having to find shelter from the rains and storms. Easy to say, not so easy to do. That’s what happened with Silvia, thought O. No, I’m not at all surprised Leica, Chelo Vidal’s brother, was so captivated. I said to myself, If he takes a photo of that girl who’s going by, if he takes a photo right now, she’ll stick in his head, in the workshop of his head, and never leave. It seems to me, in the case of beauty, little is more. Perhaps because you have the impression it’s close at hand. That’s what happened to Leica, he lost his head for the little girl with locks sprawling down her back like a shawl.

He went crazy, he did. Some things are understood between women carrying things on top of their heads. And that’s what happened, we knew he was head over heels. He took some photos of her for an advert. It wasn’t like other times, no. This time, he gave himself. Went after her. Loved her more than that boys’ bet he had with himself to bed every girl he used as a model. But one day Silvia left. We don’t know the reason. She was refused papers for being the daughter of who she was, one who died up in the mountains. As a girl, she was taught invisible mending. Apparently there was no one who could do what she did: reconstruct an old garment. She worked with the memory of the clothes. In the folds, nooks, hidden places of vestments, she found threads with which to graft and renew. Thread by thread, she could mend a worn-out elbow or a twist of silk.

She was thin, small, with big eyes. Big eyes and big fingers. Her whole body seemed to be at the disposal of her eyes and fingers. Silvia’s arms were very skinny. Which is why your attention was drawn to her hands, the long, pliant fingers that moved with the memory of movements.

She was given a special assignment. ‘A very special assignment,’ insisted the nuns in Domestic Service. Whoever it was had to be very important if they were being so secretive. The garment was destined for a museum, but there was a certain urgency because someone wanted it ready as soon as possible. Mother Asun gestured with her thumb, pointing very seriously upwards, but without raising her eyes. This meant whoever it was was high up, but not God. It wasn’t God’s stole or the Holy Spirit’s alb that needed invisible mending. Silvia understood Mother Asun well. It might be said they understood each other with the inside of words. It was she who taught the girl her first stitches when she was confined to bed. Worse than that, when she was tied down to the bed with belts so that she couldn’t move or get up during the night and most of the day. When she did get up, it was to eat and learn how to sew. She’d need something to do when she became a normal girl and her spine straightened. Thinking about that, about her backbone, she feels like an icicle. Lying down for years, in Oza, tied with belts, unable to walk. The diagnosis was that the deformed spine had to be controlled to stop a curve or a hump forming. All of which suffering could have been avoided with a simple treatment of penicillin. They also got up — there was a whole room of them, of ‘imprisoned girls’ — to receive communion on Sundays and feast days. With the priest came an acolyte who carried a tray with the wafers. He was the most charming boy Silvia had ever seen. Since she hadn’t seen many, we might say he was the prettiest boy imaginable. What she felt when her body was untied for communion was real hunger, an overriding desire to prolong her mouth’s movement and bite his hand and sew the boy with kisses. She knew they were not a girl’s feelings. But she wasn’t the age she was. Her enforced immobility made her live life so intensely that, when she finally got up, staggered to the window not only to see the sea she’d heard murmuring for months on end, but also to find a support, when she did this, she realised she’d already lived various lives and now had to try to rein them into her body or else go in search of them.

The sea entered her eyes with such force it made her cry. And a howl rose from inside her. Not a human shout, but a sea-howl. She thought at that moment she’d been tied not because of an incorrect diagnosis or the absurd idea of straightening her spine by force, but deliberately to keep her away from the sea. She couldn’t stop crying. She’d spent years with dry eyes. The tears had to come with a swell from her body. Of all the lives she’d lived without moving, she chose one. To be the woman of invisible mending. Asun had taught her this art when she saw the skills of all her other senses were in her fingers. Silvia had long, thin fingers. After time spent in a hospital bed, her body was very skinny. Her arms were like elder branches. But her hands ran wild when sewing and embroidering. Played at shadow puppets, which played with her hands and made them longer.

‘Big hands,’ said Leica one day, interlocking fingers. ‘A miniaturist’s big hands.’

A group of worthies in the city wanted to give the dictator an unusual present. He was Supreme Commander of the Forces of Land, Sea and Air, he was described in the papers as Sword of the Most High, and yet he had a thorn stuck in his pride. The fact he had failed to enter the Naval Academy as a young man. His ambition was to be an admiral. So, when he achieved absolute power, his favourite outfit, which he wore on special days, was the Navy officer’s full-dress uniform, worn by admirals in Ferrol only on Good Friday. It was in this uniform he had an important portrait done of himself wearing the Grand Laurelled Cross of St Ferdinand on his chest, holding some binoculars. The local authorities had already given him the manor of Meirás, which he travelled to Coruña in 1937, at the height of the war, to take possession of. He was then presented with the finest building in the Old City, Cornide House. The city’s richest man, the banker Barrié, sold it to him for the sum of five pesetas. An emotional exchange, not without symbolism. Franco paid with one of those small coins bearing his face and the legend ‘Caudillo of Spain by the grace of God’. The banker would later be named Count of the Electric Forces of the Northwest or Count of Fenosa. No, there was no point competing in new property values. Now that the twenty-fifth anniversary of providential leadership was coming, this new present had to be highly symbolic, something that would both surprise Franco and touch his heart. Why not go beyond the admiralty?

The idea came up at a dinner in the yacht club, hosted by the governor. They’re all agreed. The governor is waiting to hear something so that he can assume the proposal as his own. One of the guests is Máximo Borrell, Franco’s favourite fishing companion, described by him in front of everyone as ‘an intimate friend’, which gives his opinion the rank of placet. The proposal came from the judge Ricardo Samos, with his historical, one might say warlike knowledge, who, because of their parallel lives, is close to the governor, since they go hunting together. Samos has some very important information. A clue. He recalls an old conversation among Navy officers, at which his father was present. Yes, there was something of the stature required by history, which could move Franco, not an easy task.

‘A majestic, royal cape.’

‘Sounds good,’ said the governor. ‘Sounds wonderful.’

The judge explained. A festal cape had once been prepared for King Alfonso XIII to celebrate a planned visit to Galicia, which was meant to protect his royal highness during a naval display to be held in his honour. But such a portentous ceremony never took place. It was cancelled due to bad weather. The king never wore the cape. It wasn’t even collected. As a result of bureaucratic intricacies, no one was willing to take charge of the commission. So the tailor decided he’d use it himself. It was a magnificent cape. And still is. Because that cape exists.

‘And it’s only been worn by the tailor?’

‘That’s right. You could say he was trying it on.’

The judge pulled a note from his inside pocket. Read the following: ‘Festal cape for Alfonso XIII. Sea-blue armure fabric, night-blue velvet collar with golden-threaded soutache, red lining and a fastening of golden braid in cable-stitch. The vestment is in a reasonable state and can be recovered despite the intervening years. The fastening is a little frayed, the velvet soutache completely worn and there’s a tear in the armure on the right shoulder as well as open seams in the fabric and lining. While of good quality, the velvet requires special treatment since it’s been compressed. For the cape to return to its former splendour would need painstaking attention and invisible mending, since the use of new materials is out of the question, which would only detract from the garment’s historical value.’

‘Not exactly a piece of cake, Samos,’ observed the governor with concern.

‘The garment is unique. Historic. Don’t think about the tears, think about the meaning. A royal cape is worn by Franco for the first time in public. “Your excellency, we humbly offer you this cape as Majesty of the Sea.”’

‘With those words! Those very words! Exactly. Write them down.’

‘I won’t forget them,’ said Samos.

‘Yes, but I will,’ said the governor.

‘Darning’s no good. It’s an extremely difficult, delicate task. That requires a surgeon. The only people who can do this,’ the governor is informed, ‘are the nuns in Domestic Service. They’re the ones responsible for handing down the art of invisible mending.’ When Mother Asun is shown the garment, she blinks and contorts her face. ‘You’d have to work with tiny threads, use filaments the size of eyebrows.’ She no longer has the eyes or hands for such a job.

‘Who can do it with certainty?’ asks the governor’s secretary, who doesn’t want to fail in this special mission. ‘They can ask what they like.’

‘Only Silvia can do this.’

‘Silvia? Tell me where to find her.’

‘No. We’ll do it differently,’ said the nun. ‘I’ll get in contact. She also is a special, sensitive case. Who’s it for? It’s important to know who will be using the garment.’

‘It’s an order from the governor, mother. A priority matter. It’s a museum piece for which there’s a special urgency. That’s all I can say.’

Having spoken to Mother Asun, Silvia went for a long walk in the docks. It was midday. She saw the champion of Galicia with the horse Carirí and thought of Leica. This time, she said yes, she’d have her photo taken. Medusa was on the Wooden Jetty, sitting on an oak beam that would be used as a sleeper. She looked like the only inhabitant of a strange, empty city built on stakes behind her. Silvia couldn’t help watching her. Whenever she went that way, the same thing happened. She was bewitched by that woman who only revealed half of her face, as if she were a black-and-white figure. Medusa stood up. The way they walked, they resembled two interlinked people moving as one. One pulling the other. One forward, the other cautious, so that they walked with a mixture of brazenness and shyness. Or rather arrogance and fear.

She came up to her and asked for a cigarette.

‘I haven’t got any,’ replied Silvia. ‘It’s true. I don’t smoke.’

‘I didn’t ask whether you smoked or not,’ said Medusa. ‘What do I care whether you smoke or not? This is a city of chatterboxes. Ask for a cigarette and they start giving you their life story.’

Her hair was smooth, very black, and hung like a jet mane. When she talked, it swayed slightly and the shine created drawings that resembled brocade. Silvia would have paid her to carry on talking like this against the world.

‘Why don’t you give me something?’

She said this when Silvia was already rummaging through her purse.

‘Do you want to see my face? I’ll let you see it all for ten pesetas.’

Silvia paid up. And waited. But Medusa said, ‘If you want to see it, you’ll have to unveil it yourself.’ Silvia held out her arm and stroked the smooth hair with her fingers, but didn’t pull it back to see the hidden face.

‘Go on. I’m not a monster, you know.’

Silvia withdrew her hand, turned around and quickly walked away.

That afternoon, a woman visited her in her rented room, as she and Mother Asun had agreed. A civil servant who carried out her instructions to the letter. She brought the cape with her in a protective covering. It was a garment of great historical value that needed restoring for an important exhibition. She could name her price. And conditions. There wouldn’t be a problem.

Silvia explained that her work was measured by time. When she’d finished, she’d tell them how much it cost.

As she turned to leave, the woman said, ‘Oh, I almost forgot! Greetings from Rocío.’

‘Who’s Rocío?’

‘A colleague. She said she knew you.’

Silvia shrugged her shoulders, ‘Well, say hello then.’

Silvia didn’t want Leica to accompany her home or to visit her. Her rented room, in Gaiteira, was near the old railway station. She tried to avoid having contact with the other tenants or drawing attention. The people there were very silent and those that weren’t old seemed to want to grow old before their time. The house, the solidity of the shadows, the taciturn furniture, the murmuring mattresses, the hysterical indiscretion of the cistern above the only toilet in a tiny, communal bathroom. She was there in passing and did not wish to leave any trace, even of the air that went through her lungs. She wanted to put everything, the air and the light, in a suitcase and take them with her when she left. Poor air, poor light. Her only joy was the sound of the trains as they stopped and pulled off. When she sewed, she tried to work her little Singer in time to the engines. But now she had an urgent task. She devoted all her free time to invisible mending. To that very special undertaking.

There was a ring at the doorbell and her sense of alert told her to go and open the front door but, when she entered the hallway, another tenant, Miss Elisa, had already answered. This woman smelt permanently of spices. Her hands were always stained. Her work, which was endless, was to wrap up pinches of cumin, saffron and paprika in tiny paper envelopes she folded at astonishing speed with her small hands and fat, sausage-like fingers. Silvia’s invisible mending and Miss Elisa’s work wrapping spices took place simultaneously, but belonged to two opposing hemispheres of time.

When she saw Leica in the hallway, politely thanking Miss Elisa for being so kind as to open the front door, Silvia was surprised not to feel bothered. She actually did something she would never have allowed herself to do, especially in that house. She embraced him and let him lift her off the floor. He was radiant.

‘I know I shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t help it. We did it, Silvia! They’re going to use your photo in the advert. In the window of Hexámetro! The first advert for electrical appliances with a local model. And Hercules Lighthouse in the background!’

He moved around the room like a master of ceremonies who opens his arms to turn on the lights. A master of ceremonies who plucks landscapes from the walls. Silvia witnessed her room’s conversion. What had been behind the window came inside. Her room was a railway carriage in the station. She suddenly felt like hearing the sewing machine. A breath of animal and machine filtered through the joins between the floor tiles. The bed didn’t sound embittered as usual. The bed listened to their bodies.

By the time they got up, the station was outside the room, without carriages, and the porter boys, the driver of the hire car, the florist, newsagent and shoeshiner seemed to be frozen. Painted. Only two figures moved up and down the platform. One was wearing a hat, both of them were wearing coats tied with a belt. One was short and fat, the other taller and thinner. They looked to Silvia like a comical, sinister pair. And seemed from time to time to glance over at her window. And perhaps they did.

‘What’s this cape?’ asked Leica. The royal cape suddenly attained the status of a mysterious presence. He said, ‘It looks like a garment with history.’

‘Something the nuns asked me to do,’ she replied. ‘An urgent job for a museum. That’s all I know.’

Silvia explained how the task was almost impossible. She could only use the garment’s own threads. An extremely delicate operation. Rather than finding them, she would have to invent them one by one in order to reconstruct the warp.

‘I’ll be at it day and night.’

‘Now that you’re a publicity star? In this country, history always spoils everything.’

They again fell into an embrace. Something to do with their bodies. It’s not easy to let go of the melancholy of bodies.

He had something to say, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He hadn’t even been able to tell Curtis, whom he trusted so much he’d lent him the horse Carirí so that he could earn a living. Curtis or the cellist. Deep down, he thought no one’s going to realise. I’ll just take Franco’s photograph and that’s it. What about the signature? ‘Sebastián Vidal’ won’t pass unnoticed. He’d better put ‘Sebastián V’. Or ‘V. Photos’ and leave it at that. That should do it. ‘V. Photos’. People will identify Ángel Jalón with portrait photos and Sotomayor with paintings. Who’s going to remember ‘V. Photos’?

He was taken aback when she asked him, ‘Is there anything else you’d like to tell me, Leica?’ But, as always, he was quick to recover himself. He exaggerated his voice and gesture in what he called ‘a Mastroianni moment’.

‘Anything else? Isn’t that enough? Our triumphal entrance into the future. We’re inside the future, Silvia, inside the shop window.’

She can’t actually know anything, he thought. It’s a secret. Nobody, except for my brother-in-law, Judge Samos, and the governor, nobody else knows. Rocío? No. Rocío doesn’t know Silvia exists. Nobody could have told her about Franco’s portrait.

She hadn’t expected him to say anything. She’d have had to force it out of him with a dentist’s pliers. There was no way he was going to confess he’d been married for some time and the woman she’d once met in the studio wasn’t the leaseholder and an old friend. He’d added the last bit with a hint of complicity, as if to say: There is, or there was, something between us, but you’re much more important. What he actually whispered in her ear was, ‘She’s never happy with her portrait. I keep telling her it’s not my problem or the camera’s. Some people are never satisfied and confuse a photographer with a beautician.’

‘He believes everything he says,’ Rocío had told Silvia the day she accosted her. ‘He’s always confusing desires with realities. He lives inside a bubble. You’re hardly the first. Ask him and he’ll deny he’s married. Go ahead and ask him. Go on, be brave. I could show you folders full of photos of all his attempted conquests. Maybe it’s a kind of professional hazard. Maybe he has to fall in love in order to take good photos. I don’t know. Could be. It’s some time since I last looked good in a photo.’

Despite feeling dizzy, her senses on hold due to Rocío’s sudden arrival, Silvia listened to her with interest. A woman who could express the idea that Leica’s camera no longer loved her deserved to be heard.

But Rocío’s tone soon changed, perhaps as a reaction to the surprising calm she observed on the map of Silvia’s face.

‘I want you to know I won’t allow your relationship to continue. I’d crush you first. I can ruin your life, you’ve no idea how far I can go.’

As she said this, she pressed her thumb against the marble table of Delicacies, the café in Catro Camiños, whose display window had until then reflected Leica’s cheerful greeting with one of his Mastroianni smiles.

‘I’ve the means to do it.’

Are you married, Leica? Why didn’t you tell me? No. She wasn’t going to question him. Rocío’s directness made her feel fragile again. Silvia often thought about Medusa’s face. She also felt as if she’d been torn inside. She lived half a life and had noticed since being a girl that living a whole life was forbidden people like her in this patch of world. On days of sadness, she viewed the bay as a pool in which mullets fed on the dreams eyes threw into the sea.

‘I’ve the means to do it. To crush you.’

All Silvia had was her invisible mending. Even feeling love was a problem. She realised one side of her, the enlightened part, had been deceiving the other, which was in shade, since she’d met Leica. And both sides knew it. Though they’d decided to carry on. To live that moment of truth. To go to the lighthouse, make love under the vanes of light, with the music of the sea in the background.

No. She wasn’t going to use a dentist’s pliers to force an unnecessary confession out of him.

When Rocío used words to strike her, in her fragile state, she glimpsed a way out. The day the civil servant came to pick up the cape, she said she hadn’t quite finished yet, but she knew her price. Her papers. The papers she’d been refused a year earlier for being the daughter of who she was. This was her price for the invisible mending. A passport and a permit to work abroad.

‘Are you pregnant?’ asked the woman.

Silvia felt like a character in a radio serial that would never be broadcast. There were thousands of women trying to leave for this reason, because they were pregnant and unmarried or single mothers.

Seeing she remained silent, the civil servant said, ‘You’re not the first woman to be pregnant or the first to want to leave. But in your case,’ she added, ‘it’ll be easy. You’ve Rocío on your side. Permission granted.’

And still he went on about his publicity dream.

When the advert was ready and the great photo had been mounted, they’d go together to look at the window of Hexámetro and to meet Mr Bendai. The shop owner and future sponsor would thus be able to see how much more beautiful she was in person. And he had the vague hope, though he didn’t say this, that he’d give her a present. Possibly even a television.

She agreed, said she wanted to look at the advert, though she’d be embarrassed to be in the shop window for all Coruña to see. She imagined Miss Elisa standing there, proclaiming to all and sundry in a loud voice, ‘But I know that woman! And she doesn’t even have a fridge or a hoover! All she’s got is a little sewing machine you carry on your head.’

They laughed. Imagined being together, holding hands, in front of the shop window. Mr Bendai waving to them from inside with his enterprising smile. This was the adjective Leica used to describe the shopkeeper’s smile. Enterprising. Each smile was different and had to be described differently. The art of the photographer, like the great publicist he was, was to give each smile the correct photographic description.

Silvia’s smile was that of the woman advertising electrical appliances. He liked it. A hidden smile hanging in the shop window. Happiness within reach. The future exists and it’s in the window. Next they’d go to Paris. Live there for a while. Breathe another environment.

‘Your smile is deceptive,’ she said.

‘Deceptive but true.’

She was the one who suggested going again. Making love next to Hercules Lighthouse. In Leica’s car. On short wave, the music came and went. The beams of light from time to time illuminated the sea birds hovering like quavers in the night.

He didn’t realise there wouldn’t be any more nights.

‘When you finish that important assignment, we’ll have to take lessons in French. The foreigner and the florist. Every time I see that record in the studio, I crack up laughing. You were born with a French florist’s accent!’

‘Merde.’

‘Oh!. . et cette petite fleur. . bleue?’

‘La petite fleur. . bleue: “Ne m’oubliez pas.”’

‘C’est merveilleux! On peut dire tout sans parler.’

‘Everything.’

He didn’t even know it was the last night when, the next day, he attended the photographic session to welcome the dictator to Meirás Manor. He followed instructions. Took part in the open session and then waited to be shown inside.

‘Don’t be long,’ said an aide-de-camp. ‘Have everything ready. He’ll stand on that platform.’

‘Yes, I’d already thought about the question of height,’ he replied awkwardly.

But when Franco came in for a photo defined as that of a statesman in civilian clothes, Leica wasn’t entirely ready. On the contrary, he was paralysed, with his head turned. There, on a coat-stand in a corner of the room, was the royal cape, staring at him.