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.