According to reports in our possession, the holocanth then proceeded to Antioch, where it was responsible for a horrific killing with its death-dealing stinger. Scholars maintain that this is the catastrophe referred to by the poet Pontius Mero- pius Paulinus, better known as Paulinus of Nola, when he writes:
Ecce repente mis estrepitum pro postibus audit et pulsas resonare fores, quo territus amens exclamat, rursum sibi fares adfore credens ... ser nullo fine manebat liminibus sonitus ...
It seems that many evil wizards have used the holocanth for abominable ends, for example, committing efficacious murders, sending people berserk, etc. One thing is sure, the holocanth appears only very occasionally, at most in groups of three, and in locations far distant from each other. We know almost nothing about their character, except that they like music and, in modern times, football, for in 1932, the top of a holocanth was seen rising above the stands at the San Siro stadium in Milan during the match between Arsenal and Inter. The police looked everywhere for it, but in vain, and the international press meted out harsh criticism to the fascist authorities, whose lack of foresight and diligence could easily have caused a disaster. No doubt the holocanth disguised itself in a garden or a public park, while the police patrols passed by, along with the firemen, the blackshirts and members of fascist youth groups lustily singing `La giovinezza', until night fell and it could escape into the country.
In addition to certain historic sallies (the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the sack of Rome by Charles V, Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, etc.), a few days ago, the holocanth's presence was felt again in Paris, following the strikes and demonstrations. It made its horrific appearance in the areas of Menilmontant and St Germain des Pres, doubtless prepared for anything. There were no casualties thanks to the joint action of students and police - a rare moment of collaboration - which put the murderous trees to flight. However, one holocanth, apparently of a sensitive, melancholy nature, was found in the foyer of the Boul'Miche cinema staring at the lewd stills from a sexy Japanese film. There was a great commotion during which the holocanth managed to escape disguised as a policeman. Some say it made off with a police van in which it drove through the barricades. If that is true, we have proof that the holocanth is not only dangerous, it is also a creature endowed with an alarming and superior intelligence.
© Joan Perucho 1998
Translated by MargaretJull Costa
Joan Perucho (Barcelona, 1920) writes in both Catalan and Castilian and is one of the few Spanish writers to have written solely in the fantastic vein. His work is erudite, funny and highly imaginative. He has also written poetry, as well as books about art and gastronomy. He published his first book in 1947, but his best-known works are Libro de caballerias (1957), Les histories naturals (1960; Natural History, tr. David H. Rosenthal, Minerva, 1990), Rosas, diablos y sonrisas (1965), Dietario ap6crifo de Octavio de Romeu (1985) and Teoria de Cataluna (1987). This story is taken from Botanica oculta (1969).
All those years inside? ... How on earth did you manage? they ask me. You'll have to sort out your papers. And they look at me and I see the ghost of a smile playing around their lips. Come back, they say, come back. But when I do come back, they get annoyed: call in tomorrow, we still don't know, call in the day after tomorrow. And one of them, the one with the moustache, holds out his hand with the first two fingers close together and makes a gesture as if to turn a key in a lock and he gives me a nasty look and says: If you don't come in to pick up the papers you know what will happen ... He repeats the gesture ... And I'm carrying around with me a sadness that is killing me, but nobody knows that. What happened, happened, and there were no witnesses. And I'm not complaining.
The sea was all groans and gusts and ragged waves and I was trapped and thrown, thrown and trapped, spat out and swallowed up and clinging to my plank. All was dark, the sea and the night, and the Cristina went down, and the cries of those dying in the water could no longer be heard, and all I could think was that there was only one person left alive, and that was me, because I was lucky enough to be just a rating and up on deck when it all started to go wrong. I saw dense clouds, though I had no wish to see them, then, stretched out on top of a furious wave, with all those clouds above, I felt myself sucked in, much further in than the other times. I went down, amidst whirlpools and frightened fish that brushed my cheeks, down and down, dragged by a great torrent of water within the water, down a great cliff, and when the water grew calm and gradually subsided, the tail of a fish larger than the rest hit my leg, and after that, I could not see the clouds, but a darkness deeper than any man born of woman has ever seen, and the plank saved me, for without the plank I would probably have ended up in the same place as all the water that was swallowed. When I tried to stand up and walk on the ground I slipped and, though I thought I knew where I was, I preferred not to think, because I remembered what my mother told me as she lay dying. I was by her side, feeling terribly sad, and my mother, who was gasping for breath, found the strength to sit up, and with her arm, long and dry as a broom handle, she fetched me a tremendous clout and shouted in a voice that could barely be understood: Stop thinking! And with that she died.
I bent down to touch the ground with my fingers. It was slippery and as I touched it, I could hear very close by a sort of trumpeting groan which gradually became a roar. And between roars and groans, which were like the hoarse breath of old, tired lungs, the ground reared up, and I fell down, clinging to my plank. Half-stunned, not quite sure what was happening, all I knew was that I had to cling on for dear life to my plank, because wood is stronger than water. On rough water, a flat plank is stronger than anything else. I was curious to know where I was, exactly, and when one side of my brain began to hurt less I tried to go forward; everything was black as the ink from a frightened octopus, and the groans had stopped and all that could be heard was a glug-glug, glug-glug. The ground under my feet, for I was now standing up again, was of soft rubber, like the sap that flows gently from the tree trunk, rubber that is gathered, shaped and dried and then softened using heat, although in here it was cold and my teeth were chattering. Distracted, I found myself on the ground again gripping the plank between my legs. I stretched out an arm and touched the wall with the palm of my hand and the whole wall was moving like a never-ending wave, like an ageold disquiet. I picked up the plank from between my legs and slammed it into the moving wall, and both plank and I flew through the air and fell once more onto the muddy floor. That's it, I could use the plank! I stuck it in the ground and, when it was steady, I took a step forward, and in this fashion, struggling wearily onward, with many a fall on the way, I finally managed to reach a strange place: dark, and yet full of colours, which were not exactly colours, ghosts of colours, blue and yellow and red flashes that appeared and disappeared, that approached and retreated, colours that did not seem like colours, that were a fire yet not fire, which I can't explain, that were changing and elusive. There was a glimmer of thin, sickly light, and I went towards it and I saw the moon out there through a grille, made of bars, like railings. Clinging to my plank I let many hours pass. I think. Because who knows where time had got to. And when the moon went down the colours grew slightly iridescent, and it was then I realised that I wasn't breathing and that water was coming out of my ears, a little stream running down each side of my neck. And it was not water but blood, because my ears must have burst inside and, as I was running a fingertip over my neck, still warm with the blood, I felt a tremor coming from the depths of the place where I was and with that tremor came a surge of water that stank of half-digested fish. The water came up to my neck, and I was lucky that it stopped and gradually began to go down, but I was left stinking of fish. Blood was no longer running from my ears: air was going in them, for the path my air took had changed. I banged hard on the ground with my plank and nothing happened, not a groan, not a tremor. I walked on, clinging to my plank, amidst coloured lights, whether the same ones I had seen earlier, or different ones, I don't know, b
ut they were slowly fading and between the bars on the grille came the light of the coming dawn and I felt the peace of the calm sea, something I can't explain, as if my world was about to vanish or something ... I stopped and through the air that went in and out of my ears, I felt a mighty breathing amidst the lapping of the water. Then I seemed to be walking over stones, but it was the granules on a tongue, and then, suddenly, both plank and I went flying through the air again, and I felt myself captive in a giant embrace. One of those embraces that leave you breathless. I had nearly been expelled with a jet of water from the blowhole of a whale, and my plank had saved me from shooting out altogether, like a bullet. And I saw things I had seen many times before, but from such a different viewpoint! It was the largest whale on the seven seas, the glossiest, the most ancient. I had spent the whole night inside. Dawn was slowly breaking. I had my jaws trapped in the blowhole, and they were already beginning to ache, and I still hung on to my plank on the other side of the blowhole, my legs dingle-dangling, then I saw two rivers flowing into the sea, each very different from the other. The waters of these rivers were two different colours: the waters of one were crimson from red earth, the waters of the other were green with seaweed. And those two colours danced a slow dance of mingling and separation. Dancing, dancing, the dance of the two colours. I'm red, I'm all green. First, I'm putting in the red, now I'm rinsing out the green. The green penetrates below, then below that hides the red ... And as I watched, the sun rose, the blowhole opened wide and I plummeted downwards like a stone. Then I could see what there was inside. At my feet, rocked by the water and the saliva, was a sailor. Lying on the tongue, not an arm's length from me, his tie knotted with a cord, the anchor on his sleeve, his trousers clinging to his legs, his face purple, his eyes open and empty. Three fish were nibbling at his hand. I shooed them away, and they left, but then obstinately came back. I was hungry myself, but I resolved to put up with it, and still clinging to my plank, I greeted the dead man and sang the national anthem. I spent three days chasing fish and running all over the place and, from time to time, a lash from the whale's tongue would slam me against her cheeks. Until ... I hate to say it ... I spent those three days trying to throw the sailor out. She clenched her baleens, and I clenched my teeth, and tightened my belt to increase my strength. The more I tightened my belt, the hungrier I grew, and I began to nibble bits of the sailor. He was hard and full of gristle. I was glad I was eating a sailor I didn't know, rather than having to eat one I did. Some big fish had emptied him of his insides while he was still floating in the water. He was all there, except for his eyes and his insides. That helped to preserve him, so I was able to make him last longer. I threw the little bones in amongst the ribs, but kept the bigger ones. The ribs on the right side were scraped clean. Those on the left were a jumble of seaweed, seashells and molluscs. Rather than eat sailor all the time, I sometimes ate seafood. The worst thing was the thirst. But there's a solution to everything. One day, miraculously, a saucepan floated in. I immediately thought of rubber trees, and without a moment's hesitation I thrust the handle of the saucepan into the whale's cheek. The next day it was full of juice, and I could drink. Sea water, although salty, makes the flesh of fish sweet. I thrust the saucepan back in. I kept having to make new holes, because the wounds made by the saucepan closed up immediately. From time to time, if my concentration slipped, she would slam me against the roof of her mouth and keep me there for hours and hours. We sailed slowly on. By this time, I had cut seven marks on the ribs with the tip of my knife. Seven days. One morning, I charged the ribs to see if I could force a way through and everything started to whirl, and I was tossed all over the place, sometimes on top of the tongue, sometimes below, sometimes to one side, sometimes right up to the roof of the mouth, but up there I had the sense to shout: Stop, Cristina! I found myself sitting on the ground, with my plank across my chest. So it was then, without noticing it, that I christened her.
Peering out through the baleens I saw seas of every kind. All different kinds of blues, some the colour of wine, you name it, with golden waves and mountains of ice and mists at dawn. And me trembling and suffering. I used to tell myself all the tears on earth flow down to the sea. And my clothes were falling to bits, rotting away. First of all, my trouser bottoms frayed, then my sailor's jacket fell to pieces, all my clothes just fell apart, I don't know how, and all I had left was my leather belt and my knife with its mother-of-pearl handle, thrust into the belt. Soon I had to make new holes in it. Sometimes, if I slept a little, I would dream that I was tightening my belt and inside the belt there was nothing left ... A green coast! When I saw that coastline, I prayed. Again, I risked my life and battered the cheeks with my plank. Cristina dived. We stayed underwater for ages. When we emerged, my ears were popping like mad, but the baleens had opened like the doors of a lock, and I floated off into the blessed sea, which now did not seem to be made of tears, but of the laughter of all the fountains in the world. And my plank and I were sailing on the sea, like this ... rocked by the waves, towards the green land. There were birds screeching by the shoreline and I thought the breeze carried on it a scent of ears of wheat and pine trees. But suddenly I heard her. Before I had time to turn round, her shadow fell across me and she dragged me back inside her again through the baleens. Then the bad times began. Six months, every night spent hitting her from inside with the plank, bashing her on the tongue with the thigh bone of that sailor, God knows where he had got to. With my penknife I cut crosses on the side of her palate and under her tongue. I rammed the handle of the now rusty saucepan into her flesh to start an infection, I pinched her with the buckle of my belt. In the end, she stopped swimming; she just floated aimlessly on the surface of the water, listing a little to one side. I made a mark for every day by thrusting the blade of my knife into her palate, which trembled like jelly, and white blood and red blood gushed from the cuts. When one side of her palate was ripped to pieces I started on the other. One day, I cut open one of the granules on her tongue and I heard a groan like the sound of the organ on the day of the dead. At night, she would let out a scream from deep within her, as though all the bells of all the belltowers in the sea were ringing at the same time, drowned by the weight of the water and the salt. Cristina rocked like a cradle, and she was rocking me to sleep, but I was alert to that. I began to eat her. I would make a cross, then cut out the meat below it and eat it, chewing it thoroughly, as I had done with the sailor. One day, the groans sounded human, and Cristina dived beneath the water and stayed under for a long time. Although I breathed through my ears, when we came back up to the surface, it was like returning from a marine hell. I cut her tonsils, I propped my plank at the entrance to her throat, and slashed crosses on her tongue. Crosses and more crosses, for days and days. Sometimes I would give her a clout with the plank on her palate, just where it had least flesh. I never stopped. Her tongue was too hard; I only ate the palate, and the flesh would grow in again, and I watched it grow like the grass in spring. When I thrust the thigh bone of the dead sailor under her tongue she would jump like a rabbit. But if ever I left her alone, she would sail on again, still listing a bit, and slow, as though the waters of the sea, tired of leaping and shouting, had grown thick and difficult. Time was passing, with its days, its months and its years, and still we carried on because, in the depths of a strange darkness, we felt that somewhere, in a place we never seemed to reach, we would perhaps find the last ray of light in the shadows, or that sliver of memory things leave behind when they vanish for ever. In the end, I grew weary. I sat huddled in a corner of her palate and she kept me there, protected by her tongue and I felt myself growing stiff, and it was her encrusting me with her saliva. And neither she nor I knew which seas we were sailing until one night, she ran aground on a rock and on that rock she died, her insides all covered with cuts. The beach was not far off, scarcely half an hour's row. I tried to open the baleens by hitting them with my plank, but it was no good because the plank was half rotted away at the ends and
had got shorter and thinner. With enormous difficulty I scrambled out through the blowhole and when I was out, I slid down the huge curve of her back into the water, but I didn't feel anything because I must have entered a kind of limbo world. The sea cast me onto the sand and that's where they found me. When I woke up, I was in a hospital and a nun was feeding me milk fresh from the cow, and I couldn't swallow because my tongue and throat were like stone. And another nun, with a little wooden hammer, which she later told me they had had specially made, was tapping at my pearly crust, to free me from it. Initially, the crust began to break up under the hammer blows. Then, a few days later, it began to come away in bits, because the nun kept rinsing it with a bottle of specially prepared water. The nun was resigned to her task and she would say, `Dear Lord, the skin under the crust looks like the skin of an earthworm.' And when she had got nearly all the crust off, and I only had a little left on my cheek and one side of my head, the nun gave me some linen trousers and said I had to go and see about my papers. And I went, and straight away they said all that about how had I managed for all those years, and did I imagine I could fool them ... And the wind and the rain, which sow and ripen, gradually began to give me back a smooth skin, and just as well that they did, for my whole body was stripped of flesh, like the roof of Cristina's mouth. When I had wandered long enough, I went back to the hospital and the nun asked if my skin hurt when I went out, being so thin, and I replied that my skin only hurt, and hurt badly, when she used to tap my crust with the hammer and pour over it that specially prepared water, which burned a bit on contact. Afterwards, I would get into bed, very carefully, and sleep only fitfully. One day, of course, they sent me away from the hospital, saying I was cured. Instead of milk from the cow, they gave me a nice big plate of hot soup and at the first spoonful, I started screaming and running, because my insides were like an open wound, rotted and eaten away because of all the putrid flesh I had taken from Cristina. I ran out into the street still screaming, just as the children were on their way to school, and a boy, half-terrified because I looked at him, pointed his finger and whispered to the others `He's made of pearl'. My hands still sparkled with those little flecks that seashells have on their smooth side. And I could see the children's eyes, a flock of brown and blue eyes that followed me and never left me, that seemed to float in mid-air with nothing around them and were only interested in one thing. I stopped, with my cheek and half my head in their pearly crust, so tightly joined, so wedded to my flesh that the hammer had never been able to budge it. And I stood still until the children got tired of staring at me, and then I went right to the top of the cliffs, outside the town, high up, to the highest point of all, where the sea birds build their nests and where butterflies die in the autumn. And with my heart full of things that trembled like the stars in the night, I stood looking at the sea and at the darkness that was gradually covering it. Where the sun had gone down, a bit of light still lingered, then slowly faded, and when everything was dark, from out of the sea, emerged a calm, wide pathway of light and along that calm, wide pathway came my Cristina, spouting water, and me on her back with my plank, like before, singing the sailor's anthem. And from where I was standing, from the top of the cliffs, I could hear it plainly, down below, sung by me in the middle of that vast expanse of water, advancing along the pathway, with Cristina, who left a trail of blood in her wake. I stopped singing and Cristina stopped, and I could hardly breathe, as if all my strength had drained away with my staring, until gradually Cristina and I made our way, with me atop her, silent, but waving, to the place where the sea turns round and takes off into the distance I sat on the ground with my knees drawn up and I slept with my arms on my knees and my head on my arms. And I must have been very tired, for I was woken by the morning light and the cries of the birds who don't know how to sing. They emerged in a flash of brilliant white from holes in the cliffs, great flocks of them, beating the air with their wings, and plunged headfirst into the sea, then rose again, screeching, with fish in their beaks which they fed to their young, and there were others, who, instead of fish, brought twigs and blades of grass, everything they needed to build their nests. I stood up, giddy from the sound, and the sea was as smooth as a roof, and I began to walk down to the town, and when I got to the first houses, a woman came out of a doorway, all dirty and dishevelled, and she hurled herself at me, and groaned and hammered on my chest with her fists and shouted, You're my husband, you're my husband and you ran away and left me ... And I swear it wasn't true, because I had never been in that town, and if I had ever seen that woman I would have remembered, because her top teeth stuck out over her bottom lip. I brushed her aside and she fell to the ground, and with my foot I moved her carefully out of my way, because a child was watching us from a window. And I went back again to the place where they give you your papers. They were celebrating something, I don't know what. The point is, they were all drinking golden wine from small glasses. They were standing up and the one with the moustache saw me right away and came over with an expression that said he didn't want any trouble and I saw another man, wearing cuff-protectors, and he was whispering to a third man who was as bald as a coot, and from his lip movements I could guess what he was saying: the pearl. And they all looked at me again and the one who had come over said to me once more: tomorrow; and he went with me to the door and practically threw me out into the street, repeating over and over like a song: tomorrow, tomorrow ...
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