‘I’m leaving,’ she said in the dining-room.
No one seemed to have heard anything. They carried on eating. The suspense of spoons striking the bottom of plates.
‘What are you leaving?’ asked Samantha.
‘This. All of this. It’s nothing personal.’
‘Are you not happy? Do you want a bigger share?’
‘It’s not a question of how much. I won’t sell myself any more.’
Samantha exploded, brought her fist down on the table, ‘There isn’t much to sell!’
‘Well, what’s left of me.’ Flora didn’t take her eyes off Samantha and spoke surprisingly calmly, ‘Don’t be daft. I already said it wasn’t personal.’
‘Who converted you? The boxer? You think he’s going to change your life?’
‘Don’t bring him into this. You don’t have to drill holes with your tongue.’
‘Plenty of beach now. What happens when winter comes?’
‘Carry on with your sums,’ Flora would tell Curtis when she was teaching him how to multiply and had to go at the request of a client. ‘Remember how many you’ve counted. I’ll be right back.’ He counted by piles. She’d taught him using beans, chickpeas, grains of rice. Whatever there was. Numbers had colour and value. But now he had nothing to hand, they’d taken Flora and he had to replace real things with downstrokes. Two by four. Two piles of four. He then discovered she’d come back as he was finishing his sums. He thought if I’m quicker at doing the sums or writing out the sentences, she’ll come back sooner, she’ll get rid of that untimely client sticking his nose in where he’s not wanted. And so it was. The power of letters and numbers.
When he laughed, Neto complained most about the space around his eyes. It hurt him to look. So they had to be grateful to him for looking at them, and this is where he made a heroic effort. Curtis learnt that day that winning in questions of merit involves extra work. Had he lost the fight, Neto wouldn’t have been under any obligation to view them with sympathy. He wouldn’t have had to look at anyone and so he could have given his eyes a rest.
He had a white towel around his shoulders, his feet in a zinc bucket, while the upper light slid down the seated man to the foam’s flower arrangement. They’d arrived during the afternoon. It was December. The slats of the blinds began to contain the darkness. Dampness stretched, leapt out of the bar of soap and licked the pale cracks in Neto’s fingers.
Many of the scenes Arturo moved in, like the boxer Neto’s house, shared one characteristic. You could witness the waking and falling quiet of things. The water in the tub was quiet. An example of sad water.
In one of the talks at Shining Light, Curtis had heard a painter called Huici refer to things falling quiet. He was distracted, thinking about the special train and the tickets he hadn’t sold yet, but his memory was alert and reminded him. The falling quiet of things. Things fell quiet and spoke. A thought put simply, but not easily reached. There it was, like a buoy under the water, but you had to pull on it.
Things spoke and things fell quiet. Here were two perceptions that made a picture or a poem special. One, the speaking of things. Capturing the speaking of things, their expansive aura, their meaning, and translating it into the language of light or sounds. The other, the falling quiet of things. Their hiding. Their being absent. Their emptying. Their loss. Relating or reflecting that was another shudder. The first art caused a frontal shudder. The second, a lumbar tremor.
Just a moment. Even when things fall quiet, there are two classes of silence. A friendly silence that keeps us company, where words can be at leisure, and another silence. One that frightens. One that Rosalía de Castro, Huici told them, called ‘mute silence.’
The warm water in the tub was quiet, a friendly silence. Curtis thought about the special train, the boat, the trip to Caneiros. Which would be on 2 August. The procession upriver. The waking of water.
Neto called to his wife and whispered, ‘Bring the child, will you, Carmiña?’
And then they saw it. The head with the same slight lean of a globe and the relief of bruises, the physical geography of nightmares. The girl had emerged from the painful falling quiet of things. Neto took the child in his hands and gently placed her like a live poultice on the cuts and bruises.
‘Her fontanel, her little head, is the most soothing.’
‘Do you feel relief?’
‘Relief? It’s the best cure,’ said Neto. ‘I can’t explain it. Like a skin graft.’
He rocked forwards with the child on his lap. Gestured to say something. Curtis had the feeling he was about to float an original thought, but the boxer held back the words in the reservoir of a half smile. A position his wounds copied.
At Santa Margarida Fountain, Curtis took a sip of water. An obligatory rite. Arturo da Silva said it was the best water in Coruña. There were women with buckets and children with jugs. He only wanted a sip and they let him through so he could use a spout. It seemed to him they also suddenly fell quiet. Not the water, though. The water sang out its tango.
‘Go, go in front.’
He wiped his face on the back of his hand and said thanks. It was then they spoke.
‘I’m not going in today.’
‘Why not?’
‘There’s a fire in the centre. Something’s happening. Can’t you see the smoke?’
‘What can happen that hasn’t happened already?’
‘Now they’re burning books.’
The others’ thoughtful silence next to the water’s bubbling. The boy who brought the news, who’s come to fill a jug for some workmen, blurts out, ‘My mouth’s dry!’ Cups his hands, fills, sips, gurgles and then spits out. Places the jug under the spout.
They all had their reasons for being there. Something to fill. Barrels, buckets, jugs. Curtis had nothing. Only his cap of green rhombuses and dishevelled clothes that mark him out as an erratic person. This may be why the boy who told them books were burning looked at him, then at the spirals of smoke, and announced:
‘They’ve taken the books from Shining Light as well. In a van.’
‘These look good. They’ll go up in no time. Shining Light!’ He was looking at the bookplates, a stamp of the sun in flames. ‘Hey boss! What do you think? Shining Light Centre for Studies in the Abyss.’
‘Those idiots in Fontenova,’ said Samos. ‘That’s what I call a rendezvous with destiny!’
Parallelepiped laughed. He liked it when his boss was more talkative.
‘Into the abyss!’
Hercules listened without looking in their direction. Went right up to the fire, stepping on thin air, ready to jump into the ring. Saw a living book the flames were starting on. A Popular Guide to Electricity.
When he told her, when he explained he was going to train as a climatic electrician, she would burst into tears. Curtis wasn’t sure whether to tell his mother the good news because good news made her very nervous. She wasn’t used to such things. They lived in a garret in the house in Papagaio where she worked. If she works in Papagaio, Coruña’s seediest district, his mother must be a whore. No, he’d learnt to reply with great assurance, my mother’s the one who fluffs up the mattresses. Later on, he learnt from Arturo da Silva there’s a similar response in boxing: opening up side spaces. Throwing off balance. Empty corridors. ‘My mother’s not a whore. She fluffs up the mattresses. Sews the damask covers.’
‘Hercules, son of a whore!’
They really lived in the attic, which had been converted into four rooms with wooden partitioning. The attic was almost too low to walk straight, but had the advantage of being the quietest place in the house. Hercules occupied one of the rooms with his mother, while three women he called aunts lived in the others. As a child, he was very well looked after, being passed from lap to lap. Afterwards, in the street, another Hercules came to life, the one he carried on his shoulders, who only came down to fight. When he was born, they’d put a skylight in the roof, in his room in the attic, and the time came when his head knocked against the glass and opened the window. Before he escaped, this was the only way Hercules had of standing up straight, with his head above the roof. He was a partial inhabitant of the skies. He sometimes stayed still for ages, sharing the condition of seagulls and cats as an architectural plume.