Lucky.
Lucky wind.
Lucky rain. Notes sliding down the windowpane.
‘Lucky you,’ they told me for finding someone like Pementa.
‘Lucky,’ murmured Pementa when he found the mole on my back. Lucky. Rocking like a boat on the water bed, he found the mole on my back, the circle of his lips around it, a sucker, his tongue whispering, writing. Lucky. A murmur I heard through my skin, which resounded in the cavern of my chest, alongside my heart, climbed my throat and emerged like a sloe. The black mole opening, ‘Snowdon’, Kew’s rose, the white rose on the way to Elviña, blue wellies, stiletto heels, with the one I like, everything, tossing and turning, black mole, white rose.
Lucky.
The Medal
HE WAS ABOUT to open the back door of the house by the marina when someone got ahead of him and opened from inside. That nightmare he sometimes had. Gabriel had seen her only once. They could have been the same age. Except he was the father’s son and she was the wife. Her hair in a bob, smooth and coppery, matched her skirt. Golden locks that were like a continuation of the letters printed on the invitation to the wedding he didn’t attend. Gabriel the Odd sent a cold, irreproachable telegram. Katechon came into his mind. The one who holds back the years, though they’re still there, riding an invisible merry-go-round. ‘No, Ricardo’s not at home. He’s too busy. He had a pressing engagement followed by an important lunch with the directors of the Academy of Political and Moral Sciences, who, as you should know but don’t, are visiting, a token of their appreciation, quite unusual really, despite the fact we live in Madrid. The session will be here, during the summer. They’re to pay him a tribute in the provinces. You can imagine the state he’s in, having just received the Raimundo de Peñafort medal.’
‘Yes, apart from the medal, how is he?’
He shouldn’t have asked this question she was waiting to answer with one of those fateful punches you get in a clinch in the ring.
With a youthful spirit. Like an ox. Living a second spring. Any one will do.
‘Unbearable,’ she said with a triumphant smile, as if she meant a little child. ‘He won’t stop.’
Yes, in this meeting, she was giving him a good hiding with the back of her tongue. He’d come in search of sin, the stain of history, but it wasn’t going to be cheap as far as she was concerned.
Another punch.
‘He’s in fine fettle. Gets up early every day, when it’s still dark, does his exercises on the bearskin, as you know, works in the study and then attends first Mass. Won’t hear about a siesta. Before lunch, he has a quick doze, a few minutes, what he calls the ram’s sleep.’
He’s waiting to be asked in. Would you like to come in? But no. She says, ‘I’m sorry not to invite you in, but I was just on my way out. And next time don’t act like a terrorist. Use the front door!’
She raised her index finger, an apparently spontaneous movement that is aimed at poking out the other’s eye. ‘I’m in a hurry! Ricardo and I are due to have lunch with the board of honour of the Academy of Political and Moral Sciences in recognition of a whole life devoted to Law and Justice. Work that has always been solid, discreet, rigorous, never political or biased. The work of an exemplary civil servant. I’ll tell him you called.’
Purple Rain
IN LA BOÎTE de Pandora. People betting around the aquarium. Twin dragons fighting. Small fish, large jaws. Destroyed in seconds. The host introduces new combatants with the seriousness of a croupier dealing out cards. Zonzo offers him the house speciality. A drink called Purple Rain. She’s there, singing fados. The reason he came after so long, at nightfall. The effect of her voice: a brush running over his hand, painting a souvenir, walking on soft grass near the cliff face.
‘So you’re a judge?’ asks Zonzo.
‘Yes. That’s my job.’
‘It’s a good job. Meting out justice and all that. But you have to be stricter. The world’s in a terrible state. No moral principles. No authority.’
‘How did Manlle die?’
‘I don’t know. Don’t know the details. Seems he died in his own way. Slowly.’
‘People don’t usually die because of a harpoon.’
‘Why not? He was by the sea.’
Gabriel Samos thinks the conversation will end there. He remembers Zonzo. He’s capable of closing in on himself like a mollusc. There’s no point insisting.
‘He shouldn’t have gone,’ says Zonzo surprisingly. ‘But then you know what he was like. No, you don’t. How could you? He wanted to be in all places at once, do everything. What was he doing combing the beach for a lost shipment? Someone had got a hold of the bales, OK, and so what? I heard rumours. Remember that Bible full of banknotes I showed you? He went with it to buy a woman in Brussels central station. A woman from the east. Why’d he have to go? He didn’t. He found out later the woman was missing a toe. Wanted to try her out in a small pension. At his age, he still wanted to do everything. And saw she was missing a toe. He should have let it go. It’s a way women for sale are sometimes branded. So he went back to the central station, wanted to reverse the agreement, to get the Bible back with its banknotes. He’d been buying a woman who was whole. He wanted to do everything. Ended up with a harpoon stuck in his chest. I don’t know who it was.’
‘Your mother sings better than ever.’
‘She comes from time to time.’
‘I remember she was always at the window.’
‘Still is. Watching out for boats.’
‘Customs patrol boats?’
‘No.’ Ironically, ‘yachts.’
Coccinella septempunctata
Gennevilliers National Theatre, spring 1994
HE WAS AWAKE the whole night. Couldn’t get the bill out of his head. Read the reviews, which were favourable, some of them enthusiastic. The woman with the hoarse voice was playing King Lear. Three hours on stage, six days a week. He was actually quite grateful not to have got a ticket the first few days. He’d use them to see other things in Paris without the stifling heat. He remembered one August when he’d managed to survive a trip to the Botanic Gardens and Père Lachaise Cemetery. He thought he could still see the acrylic memory of those touristic footsteps sticking to the pavements. But most of all he viewed the delay as a kind of mourning. He took the most sensitive evidence out of his suitcase: the books with burnt edges and a survivor’s vitality. Then a copy of a document with lists of confiscated and imprisoned books. Incomplete lists since disappeared, burnt books, deceased books, had not been included. Several postcards from Durtol Sanatorium. A magnifying glass. The books he’d brought had not been chosen for their literary or bibliographical value. He’d let his hand pick them out. The first books he’d read in the section of charred remains. The start of his secret induction. He planned to tell her how the books from 12 Panadeiras Street had resisted. Lots had fallen. But some had survived the flames, the dampness of the dungeons, the robbers in the Palace of Justice. The books he’d brought had something else in common: Santiago Casares’ stylish signature, an elegant calligraphic portrait. Anthropomorphic.