by Unknown
‘That’s a terrible story. I never heard anything like it. What can that inebriated boat, Sada, have been drinking?’
‘A cup of red wine, but he barely touched it. He’d wet his fingers and paint with them on the marble table. As the girls in Two Cities say, it’s a shame these masterpieces only last a day. Though this was a cruel painting. All the wine turned into blood. You should have seen it. He’d come to, stand up and shout, “Ready! Aim! Fire! Destroy the miracle!” That’s right. He’d shout there were no sirens left in Galicia because we’d eaten them all. He claimed one of the first canneries was for siren meat.’
‘That’s horrible. Grotesque. Pure showmanship. He should have stayed in his magical world.’
‘I didn’t believe him either, Mr Aldán. I thought it had to be an invention, all this about a whale in the docks, next to the glass galleries. But I was curious. I sifted through some papers and there it was. There was a strange whale, more albino than white, shot to pieces in the very docks of this city. It happened during the toughest part of the war, on the 6th of September 1938. People applauded when it appeared, causing waves that pushed back the guards. It must have sensed the popular support. Until the soldiers, in spite of the wave of boos, shot at it. It ejected water through its monumental siphon. They shot it again. And again. The docks were stained with cetacean blood. People were shocked, dismayed. I thought we could do a report. Create a legend. That of the whale which came to live in the heart of our city.’
‘And didn’t they say why?’ asked the director of the evening Expreso. ‘Why they killed it in this way.’
He suddenly realised he’d fallen into a trap. ‘Forget I asked. And forget about extraterrestrials, the Beatles . . . and endearing sea monsters riddled with bullets.’
Stringer decided to carry on. ‘No, Mr Aldán. They didn’t say why. But we could bring the story back to life, create a legend. Have our own monster. Almost all civilisations have imagined a colossal creature. The Scandinavians have the Kraken, with its luminous eyes and gigantic tentacles. There’s Bigfoot in North America. The Yeti in the Himalayas. There are even souvenirs with photos of its footprints in the snow. I think they’re made up, like dragons, unicorns or sirens. But ours is real. This mysterious and intelligent sea creature, the size of an enormous whale, actually existed. Paid us a visit. Wanted to stay. People clapped when it arrived.’
‘What’s the point of a myth if we killed it? Maybe if someone else had killed it. Almanzor, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin . . . But like this, that’s some propaganda!’
‘What if it never died?’
‘Did it die or didn’t it?’
‘We could write the story. With their applause, their cheers, the people managed to stop the shooting. A sensible officer, wary of public opinion and himself amazed by the creature, its mythical deportment, revoked the order and granted a pardon. The whale healed. Doctor Rodríguez from the Tobacco Factory came and healed it.’
‘Now we’re out of reality.’
As Stringer told the story, so he began to believe it. He understood Sada’s passionate recreation, the vision in his eyes of Antaruxa, that sea-witch, that stylised cetacean the narwhals escorted to the invisible line drawn by Marola Isle and Hercules Lighthouse. Sada could paint it because he’d seen it. As he talked at the furthest table in the Supply bar, he traced its erotic lines in the ephemeral nobility of red wine on marble:
‘That’s it. The curve, our great contribution to the history of the line, the curve that even stuck to the tongue, as Unamuno said, of Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, who wrote with curves as Don Miguel wrote with frets. This is memory talking and writing in waves, curls, loops, spirals, helicoid, sigmoid literature, the songbooks’ leixapren, the fingers, ah, where are the fingers of the one “sitting at St Simon’s Chapel, caught by the waves, how tall they seem”, Sapphic fingers drawing concentric circles, inward spirals? All rock-carvings are really astrographs. The first writing, the first art, the first topography, the first house: always circles, groups of circles. Hill-forts. Huts. The inner curve, Mogor’s labyrinth, humanity’s first neural incision. The whole monoecious coast, phallic vulva, pornographic nation fertilising shoals underwater . . . When was Galicia fucked? The terrible day of the square, more or less.’
Sada fell quiet. He had bursts of energy and bouts of melancholy, like a speech warrior suffering from cyclothymia. In the way he talked, there was something of a phosphorescent diver’s movements since he’d emerge in a sea of pyrotechnics, then suddenly mist. The curtain falls.
Why not create the legend of a city born from a whale? There were historical data. Evidence, proof, that didn’t exist in the case of the tenant of Loch Ness. And the whale was female.
The director of the evening Expreso stood up to stretch his legs. What did this novice know about monsters and monstrosities? Right here in the docks, where the soldiers shot the whale the people applauded during the toughest part of the war, two years earlier, at the start of a new dictatorship, they’d burnt books from cultural associations and public libraries. He remembered that. The memory was accompanied by the smell of old, bound smoke. A sudden mist had entered his office. The director criticised his secretary for using a ventilator – ‘A ventilator in the city of winds!’ – and continued by attacking the country’s capricious climate, partly to blame, so he believed, for the problems of circulation. On days of rain, sales dropped off dramatically. Culture versus nature. He rapped the table. Suddenly viewed Stringer suspiciously, like someone who’s woken from a nightmare to find the culprit standing there. ‘That’s horrible. Listen to me. Forget about that story. It never happened and can’t appear.’ In a whisper, ‘Have you any idea how the Caudillo catches cetaceans from his yacht? Not with a harpoon exactly. Forget about such battlefields. How are we going to run with a story about a whale that’s been shot at? You have to start to distinguish between what you can and cannot tell. My dear friend, allow me to give you a word of advice, if not as an expert, then as a veteran. There are times a good journalist must separate the grain from the straw, so that he can publish the straw. Don’t make the reader suffer. He knows he’s living in a valley of tears. So cheer us up a little. Here. Tell us about the day the town hall dressed up rugged Coruñan sailors as Venetian gondoliers to welcome the Duke and Duchess of Lancaster. How they sang sweet, rhythmical barcaroles, rowing on their feet without even breaking into a sweat.’
Quickly the boats
surround the whole sea.
He went over to the window. Barcaroles. Atlantic sea-wolves dressed up as gondoliers to welcome royalty. Someone should write a comical history of the city. Lino’s Pavilion packed for the charity concert, the nuns in the front row. The general public trying to hasten the first acts so that they can get to the number they’re waiting for. Chelito, who’s just arrived for the occasion from Barcelona’s Parallel Avenue. Will she or will she not sing The Flea? Part of the public is worried. Views the nuns with suspicion, even if they are Sisters of Charity.
‘The Flea! The Flea!’
The host, Mr Lino, appeals for calm. Reminds them of their manners.
‘Why doesn’t Lino sing The Flea!’
‘Why doesn’t your mother?’
And so on. He only had a photographic memory of the Pavilion with its sensual façade. Shame it burnt. It was one of the temples in that architecture, a peculiar form of Atlantic art nouveau, which spread from the Fishmarket to Recheo Gardens, reclaimed land, and which seemed to have been conceived as a permanent flirt, a joyful plan in which both people and materials took part, the wood’s voluptuousness, the metals’ erotic rebirth, the iron’s sudden vegetal will, the dominant colour of glass everywhere, a second nature of mirrors, spaces to see and be seen, the glass’s second life, at night, somnambulant, electric. The next, splendid wave, which not by chance coincided with Corbu and the Black Pearl’s dockside visit, was of boat-houses. After the war, architectural horror. The violation of modernist carnality. The intimidation of prope
rty. The corrosion of the city’s character. The dictatorship’s main feature was ugliness. An unpublishable conclusion. Everything had got uglier. He himself had. So had handwriting.
Lino also owned a merry-go-round, a form of entertainment for a younger audience, which lasted slightly longer than the Pavilion. It arrived by boat from France. Played the ‘Marseillaise’ on the harmonica. Children sat on horses in time to the hymn of the Revolution. But it happened the other way round too. When the municipal band played the ‘Marseillaise’, a popular piece in their repertoire, children thought the band was paying tribute to Lino’s merry-go-round with its wooden horses. As the years went by, music and machinery got out of sync. César Alvajar called it ‘the twanging harmonica’. Coruña, perched on Atlantic rock, is a windy city. Not just visited, but inhabited by winds. There were days, especially if the roundabout was empty, the horses riderless, the wind, at least the wind in the gardens, would sway on the lonely mounts snorting bits of a nasal ‘Marseillaise’.
He closes his eyes. For him, that sound, that twanging roundabout’s wind, has to cross the walls of time. Some things that have disappeared are remembered by lots of people. But only he remembers the merry-go-round, its childish, nasal ‘Marseillaise’. ‘Are you sure it was the “Marseillaise”?’ asked one of the newspaper’s veterans in the condescending tone used with those who have craters or distortions in their memory. Better not to repeat it. Maybe there are memories that choose only one witness. The whale, Sada. Books, him.
When he recalls the burning of books, it all comes back to him with sensorial precision. He had a complete, aerial view from the terrace in María Pita Square. He thought he was well concealed, the perfect place for a spy. The smell reached him, but not the smoke. This was something that caught his attention. The way the smoke from the books hung about. He was watching how people reacted, this was his main focus. He had to write an article and was planning to write one on the art of walking. So he used the terrace as a vantage point. Paid particular attention to the soldiers’ determined, lineal movements and the different movements of people who’d turned up there by chance. How they quickened their pace or took strange, curved, furtive detours. You could recognise a fearful walk. Invent a chironomy of power and fear. He could tell it all with accuracy, but not write about it. Perhaps the idea of an article on the ways of walking came later. A tactic on the part of his imagination aimed at forgetting. Because now he remembers it differently. With that inflamed accuracy. The resinous smell reached him in slow spirals, but lots of it was thick, stubborn smoke that hung around lazy volumes. He realised now what was happening. Something he’d never thought about. The smoke had forms. Fashioned scenes, characters, backdrops.
There was something vengeful about this melancholy. He couldn’t write about it. The soldiers, the pillagers, were there. In charge of the city. Their leader was the Head of State. When could he explain how Cornide House, the most valuable historic building in Coruña’s Old City, was bought for the dictator’s family for the price of a pack of cigarettes? Never. He’d never be able to publish this headline:
FIVE PESETAS
Now we know what price
the authorities put on our dignity
If he didn’t fight against this melancholy, he’d become mute, agraphic. Wouldn’t be able to write or say another thing.
Stringer picked up the cuttings referring to that great Venetian day of joyful torment. The director of the evening Expreso had something to add:
‘Pass this test, please. I’ve an important mission for you this summer.’
Stringer had an intuition. The future rowed like a merry gondolier.
‘This summer?’
‘How do you feel about taking charge of the festival supplements?’
Stringer was nervous. This was something he would never have dared to dream of. He wasn’t envious of editors who spent their whole day constructing news items from the teleprinters, which almost always came from the same source, the state-owned news agency EFE, so named after Franco’s initial.
‘All of it?’
‘Galán will look after publicity. You’ll write like a tachygraphic lion. Interview beauty queens, mayors, the official chronicler, the most important businessman. You can also throw in the odd social poet or Bohemian artist. Get them to chat a bit about California.’
He tried to stop cynicism ruining his humorous intentions. ‘Real journalism, my boy! And you’ll earn a few pesetas. I don’t want to hear again that you’ve been sleeping at night in the phone box, wrapped in newspapers. You’ll have to invent something for the supplement on Caneiros, the Mandeo festivities. Forget about that novel, Balboa. You’ll get home one day and find it’s finished.’
‘Thank you, sir. I’ll do my best.’
Aldán considered asking Stringer for a favour. To see if anyone knew what had happened to an old roundabout. The twanging roundabout that belonged to Lino of the modernist Pavilion and played the ‘Marseillaise’. But he looked at his watch instead and let out a kind of password in farewell:
‘The Flea!’
The Chemin Creux
They thought he wasn’t going to reply. That he too, Hercules, the travelling photographer, the Galician champ’s old sparring partner, had stopped listening. Was moving the dial. Was possibly tuning in to a radio station from the past. They didn’t realise he was walking towards the flames, clad in smoke that made his eyes itch.
‘His one-two. His one-two was very special, wasn’t it, Curtis?’ said the crane operator ardently, trying to rouse him from his reverie. ‘First, his right would go for the face, give the impression it was serious. But it was the left hook that was serious. As if a cobra had leapt off the ground. The one receiving the blow didn’t know where it had come from.’
He looked at Curtis, waiting for a nod, a nuance. Something.
‘His one-two. That’s what they talk about. And the way his legs moved. My Dad used to say he was a dancer in the ring.’
‘Back then, I suppose he had a good pair of legs,’ commented Korea ironically.
Gabriel, Zonzo and Stringer giggled nervously. They’d heard this conversation before. They knew what Curtis said about the champ of Galicia and what he told a journalist one day, “I thought you’d come to watch me box, not to see my legs!”’
‘He had a good pair of legs,’ said Curtis suddenly, fixing Korea with his gaze. ‘What wouldn’t you give for such a pair of legs?’
When Curtis laughed, he did so with the whole of his body. Which may explain why he didn’t laugh very often. Not because of his character, but because of the weight of moving his whole geography.
‘He was good at making a feint. And at opening a side corridor.’
‘Opening a side corridor?’ asked Korea with a hint of mockery.
‘Don’t you know what it is to open a side corridor? When the other finds himself in a vacuum, punching the air. If you don’t know the difference between equilibrium and disequilibrium, you’ve a long way to go.’
Korea started paying attention. Equilibrium, nice word. He wanted to ask something else. Suddenly looked in the other direction. Who said he had no visual field? Deformed and attractive, her body slightly bent, Medusa entered his wide-angle lens. Carrying a large fish on her head. On top of a cloth that had been so well coiled it resembled a crown. On top of the crown was a bluefin tuna. Equilibrium. Korea remembered seeing her with a dogfish, like a small shark, on her head. But today it was a tuna. A bluefin tuna on top of Medusa, who was wearing red tights. Payment for services rendered. She’d relieved the Chocho Kid of his virginity. And the Chocho Kid had paid her with his share of the catch.
‘It seems to me a boxer doesn’t have to think much,’ said Korea abruptly. ‘Hit as hard, as quickly and as accurately as possible. The rest is chitter-chatter.’
‘You’re right,’ replied Curtis to Korea’s surprise. ‘If boxing were just a fight, you’d be absolutely right.’
He was going to say, ‘Actually it’s t
he opposite. The whole time, your whole body’s thinking. Your hand is thinking about your head. Your eyes are dancing on the tips of your toes.’
He was going to tell them about Neto. He’d never told them before. About Neto’s cure. How to soothe and deaden pain, heal wounds, lower bumps, touch up bruises. Neto, Arturo da Silva’s fighting friend. Then he thought about it. Put the two cherry stones in his mouth. Pulled the cap of green rhombuses over his forehead. And fell silent.
Korea watched Medusa move off with the bluefin tuna on top of her head. The Chocho Kid in the other direction. His shirt was hanging out. He tucked it in and tied his belt, which was a piece of string. He breathed in and filled his chest to bursting. He felt he was being observed. Noticed he’d grown. Which was true. His tattered trousers had shortened and were clinging to his calves, as if he’d raised his head. The length of a bluefin tuna. Korea asked the crane operator, ‘How much is a swordfish?’
