At night, he would open the skylight, stick out his head and not only see the beams from Hercules Lighthouse, but feel them as well. The touch of a lighthouse beam is similar to the turndown of a sheet. The circle of Hercules’ life widened, he only went up to the attic to sleep, but he always had the impression this was where the centre was. He’d bring his mother sea urchins he’d collected in Orzán Creek or barnacles he’d prised off the lighthouse cliffs. These presents also made his mother nervous since she was very afraid of the sea, the sea that had swallowed the father of her son’s best friend, Luís. ‘He’s going to be an artist,’ he says. ‘You should hear him sing. And imitate. Anyone from Charlie Chaplin to Josephine Baker.’ Your attention, distinguished audience. Society note. This city has just received the visit, on a liner of course, of the dancer Josephine Baker, known as the Black Pearl, and the architect Monsieur Le Corbusier, whom we shall affectionately refer to as Corbu. She changed the history of the body. He, the history of the house apparently. So you see, architects will also be famous one day. What happens, people of the sea, if you make a body out of a house? A boat! The talented couple never left their cabin on the Lutetia, with the complete understanding of the people of Coruña, ever respectful of humanity’s star-studded moments, meaning no disrespect to yours truly, an expert in dockside activity, who managed to peep through the porthole. The whole day in Josephine and Corbu’s nautical suite. The dance of architecture, the architecture of dance. Oh, I’m dizzy! He can also do the Man of a Thousand Faces. Though he makes his own mother laugh and cry when he dresses up as Mrs Monte and acts out the Fascinating Widow. He grows thin and fat, like Laurel and Hardy. In order to sing, he sometimes goes to rehearse on the hill by Hercules Lighthouse, with Curtis as sound technician.
‘Sound technician?’
‘You have to say whether you can hear OK when I sing. I’ll gradually go further away. Oh, and work with your right ear. It’s a little bigger.’
‘No, it’s not. They’re the same,’ said Curtis, distrustful for once.
‘A gift from the Universal Architect, Vicente. When I triumph, I shall hire you. You’ll be my ears. You’ll earn a fortune just for listening. You’ll only have to move your hand up and down. Louder, softer. Like this.’
The last time they carried out a sound check was for Carlos Gardel’s Melodía de Arrabal.
‘I’ll redo that part,’ said Terranova. ‘Move back a bit.’
‘Listen,’ said Curtis. ‘It’s not “tear drops”. It’s “tear dwops”, got it? Tear dwops.’
‘Got it, “tear dwops”. There it goes! One tear. Goodbye, tear!’
Curtis moves off. With the sea behind him. His silhouette on the ocean’s horizon.
‘Louder, louder!’ shouts Curtis.
‘I haven’t started yet!’ mumbles Terranova. Then he shouts out, ‘Wait a minute, Tough Guy, you dummy.’
‘Louder!’
That night, seated on the roof under the vanes of light.
Quarter silvered by the moon
Quarter silvered by the moon
Milonga murmurs
Milonga murmurs
All my fortune
‘All my fortune. Hear that, Tough Guy? Today, when we were rehearsing, I noticed something. The city has a triangle.’
‘A triangle.’
‘A triangle that’s connected with us, where we’ve always played. If you look to the right, there’s San Amaro Cemetery. The first vertex. If you look to the left, there’s the provincial prison. The second vertex. There’s no future either to the left or to the right. That leaves only one vertex. The lighthouse. The beams from the lighthouse. And what do they say?’
He already has an answer, ‘They say goodbye. Goodbye! The light of emigration. Our light, Hercules!’
‘To me, they don’t say goodbye,’ grumbles Hercules, who doesn’t like to contradict his friend.
‘You don’t understand, Vicente. You just don’t understand when you don’t want to.’
They fell quiet. The intermittent beams moved the emotions like cartoons.
‘You already have a legend, Curtis. You’re Arturo da Silva’s sparring partner. You’re Papagaio’s Hercules. In the first round of your first fight, you knocked your opponent over. Floored him. What was it? A side corridor? People laughing. And when he got up, you did Arturo’s one-two. End of story. That’s what I call creating a legend, Curtis. The tooth stuck in your glove. Which you gave back to him. “Here you go, Manlle, your tooth.” You even wanted to sell him a ticket for the special train! That won’t be forgotten. That’ll go down in history. But as for me, I don’t have a legend.’
‘Yes, you do.’
‘What is it?’
‘That you were born in a fish basket. Among scales.’
‘That’s an embarrassment, not a legend.’
‘I like it,’ said Curtis. ‘My mother too. And Flora. Everyone does.’
His father at sea. His mother, a fishwife. Alone on her rounds, she gave birth down a lane and placed the child on the softest thing she had. Among hake, wrasse, sail-fluke, horse-mackerel, sardines. His mother would leave Muro Fishmarket early to sell cheap fish in the outlying villages. Horse-mackerel is humble, even in its colour. But Luís couldn’t understand how wrasse could be so cheap, having all those colours. It’s rainbow meat. He used to make a pause for the fish basket’s contents and crack jokes like the one in the Academy, ‘I’m just a poor sail-fluke, but don’t think I was lucky!’ Milagres, like everyone else, thought he’d made up the story about being born in a fish basket. He was certainly imaginative enough. Until one day she bumped into his mother, Aurora, the fishwife, who confirmed it was true. She’d been to Cabana and Someso and taken the path that leads to Castro by the River Lagar. There was nobody about. It was some time before anyone saw her.
‘What better place for him than among the fish?’
When Milagres cracked open a sea urchin, it made her life worthwhile. Curtis knew this and at low tide he’d collect sea urchins, since he knew where they hid in the rocks, where there were likely to be lots of them, though he preferred the risk of fishing for barnacles on Gaivoteira. If there was something that worried him about sea urchins, it was getting their spines stuck in his skin. He’d made his best friends there, on the sea’s stormiest coast. You didn’t have to pretend. Next to the stormy sea, you had no enemies. One of those rock friends was Luís, who taught him how to treat the spines. The problem is their thickness. Unlike other prickles, such as a horse chestnut’s, they don’t have a sharp point. When trying to remove them, people become desperate and carve out deep flesh wounds.
‘No craters,’ said Luís. ‘A sea urchin’s spines come out by themselves. They work their way through the flesh together with the tides. Go down to the sea at low tide and they’ll come out on their own.’