Without a beard, his father looks strange. Like another. The reverse of what he is. All the bones on his face appear bereft of bandages.
15
THE RADIO IS broadcasting the Holy Rosary. The litany sounds sometimes when the radio is turned on at dusk, but it never usually gets a response. Not from the mouths. Possibly from the intentional beating of the knitting needles. Fins rereads a piece of headed paper:
LA DIVINA PASTORA
NAVY SOCIAL INSTITUTION
School for Sea Orphans
Sanlúcar de Barrameda (Cádiz)
Is that someone knocking at the door? Fins stirs in discomfort. Stands up. Looks at the radio. The lamp on the dial which gleams with the intensity of a beacon in the open sea. The trembling of the cloth covering the loudspeaker like skin. The memory of his father’s fingers fishing in the short waves, tautening the dial like a fishing line. He’s listening carefully. Turns to him with a smile. ‘Do you know what he said? “No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.”’ Fins glances at his mother.
‘It’s the static,’ says Amparo. ‘Pray with me. It won’t hurt!’
He should go to see her. Her dad is still in hospital. All his skin burned off. Eight hours being beaten by the sea. From rock to rock. He has pneumonia as well. He should go to see her.
‘I should go and see Antonio.’
‘He’s still in the municipal hospital. I’ll go. He’ll get over it. He was saved.’
Her silence finishes the sentence: ‘He was saved, but your father wasn’t.’
‘At least now he may have more luck with her.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Haven’t you seen her? Riding around on the other’s motorbike, in a tight embrace. You have your head in the clouds.’
‘Brinco was given a motorbike. He’s trying it out. What’s wrong with that? The other day he took me for a ride.’
‘But she’s a woman. She’s a woman by now! She has to look after her father. She can’t be a source of gossip.’
Fins has always had the impression that his mother has various voices. Two at least. She keeps the rough one for Nine Moons. She sometimes tries to be polite, but when Leda comes to visit, she always ends up falling silent. It’s too much for her.
‘It’s the last night. Pray a little with me, child.’
Lord, have mercy… Lord, have mercy.
Christ, hear us… Christ, hear us.
Fins resists, moves his lips, but is unable to find his voice. Slowly he notices how the saliva kneads his words. Feels well. The litany wets its feet, steps on the soft sand, closes its eyes. Opens them. He thinks he hears someone knocking at the door again. His look pulls him in that direction. He suddenly stands up. Opens the door. The wind in the fig tree. The screeching of the sea. His mother’s rosary. Outside in, inside out, everything sounds like a single litany. The unmoved hand. Made of metal and green rust. From the Liverpool. He’d like to be able to pull it off. To take it with him. Three and one.
Holy Virgin of virgins, pray for us.
Mother of divine grace, pray for us.
‘Tomorrow you have to get up early. To arrive in time for the train, you have to catch the first bus. Why don’t you go to bed? I’m not sleepy.’
And she gets the expression of her feelings messed up. She wants to cry, but comes out with a twisted smile instead. ‘It’s the night of the widow.’
‘Good night, mother.’
‘Son…’
‘Yes?’
‘Don’t forget to take It.’
It’s funny. His mother never wants to call things, medicines or illnesses, by their name. She doesn’t even call dynamite dynamite. She says ‘the thing that killed him’. In his case, Luminal is ‘the thing for absences’.
‘I’ll send It to you every month. Dr Fonseca promised me. Your father spoke to him. And he gave his word.’
Fins climbs the stairs to the landing where the bedrooms are. Meanwhile his mother takes up her work with the cushion and needles for making lace. She carries on listening to the rosary on the radio, but stops murmuring the litany as her movement with the needles accelerates. The geometry of lace starts to confuse lines. Sound confuses rhythm. In his room, Fins hurries to open the window. The humming and screeching of the sea come in. He feels the itching of salty darkness in his eyes. Closes it again. The fig tree’s resentful shadows slice the window all through the night.
Dawn cannot lift its feet due to the weight of the storm clouds. But the sea is almost calm, its blue so cold it gives the slow curls of foam the texture of ice. Fins walks along the coastal road, following the shoreline. He crosses the bridge at Lavandeira da Noite and sits down to wait at Chafariz Cross, where the bus stops. As he was walking, he watched the women gathering shellfish on the sandbank. The more distant ones looked like amphibian creatures with water around their thighs. From the window of the bus, before leaving, Fins Malpica glances at the beach for the last time, through the filter of condensation. Now rosy-fingered dawn clears a way with daggers of light. All barefoot women are Nine Moons. And he opens the book at the page about Argonauts with empty eyes.
16
‘YOU BELIEVE IN that naive contention that a world in which everybody read and everybody was cultured would be better. Imagine a place like Uz, but where every house had a library and every bar its own circle of readers. Whenever there was a crime, it was carried out with style and criminals were vested with the prosody of a Macbeth or a Meursault.’
‘I think we haven’t done too badly as far as the last point goes. In the history of Spain, people have killed with great eloquence. The greatest poets presented Philip IV with an anthology of poems for killing a bull with a harquebus.’
They were in the Ultramar, in the chiaroscuro of the table in the corner, next to the window. They chatted there almost every day, in the evening, when the old teacher Basilio Barbeito had finished school. He lived at the Ultramar. During the winter season, apart from the odd visitor, he was the only guest. Dr Fonseca had a house in town, near his surgery. For the married couple, Sira in particular, who prepared the food and washed the clothes, the schoolteacher, with the passing of time, was just another member of the family. He didn’t seem to have anywhere else to go. Though he did receive lots of letters in the Ultramar, some of them with the red, white and blue stripes of airmail. He was a poet. Without books. But he scattered his poems across the globe, in minor magazines. And he had been working for some time on a Dictionary of Euphemisms and Dysphemisms in the Latin Languages.
‘Barbeito, I fail to understand, with everything you’ve witnessed, everything that’s happened, how you can continue to scrabble about for sparks of hope.’
‘You’re the one fighting against death. I have no other choice but to write poems in an attempt to divert his attention.’
‘Fighting against death? He always get his sums right,’ murmured Dr Fonseca. ‘Always gets what he wants. If this one isn’t ready, he takes someone he wasn’t supposed to.’
‘You should patent that law.’
‘Oh, it was patented a long time ago. I do what I have to. Something I find increasingly tiresome. You’re the one who has a redeeming vocation. That’s damaging. Your poetry promotes well-being, as heating does.’
The schoolteacher listened to the other man’s observation with a triumphant sneer. ‘And they say that poetry has no uses! When I had lots of energy, I used to write poems of despair. Now that I’m old, I’ve become hymnic, celebratory, pantheistic, fabulous. For me a poem is like stretching out your hand. Fonseca, you know more about the arrow than I do.’