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By Root 749 0

by the reins. Picture cards from bars of chocolate, showing aviation heroes and monuments. A few stamps as well. Grandpa Pedro Samos had presented him with a Portuguese stamp from 1898 celebrating the fourth centenary of the discovery of a maritime route to India. A dark blue stamp worth fifty reis. He kept it in an envelope with a description saying it represented ‘a Manueline window with the galleon behind and, above it, the inscription “If there were more world, there I would arrive” and two medallions of Vasco da Gama and Camões’. The judge had insisted it was very valuable and would be much more so when he grew up and the thirty odd years had gone by until the fifth centenary in 1998, with him in possession of this marvel, this stamp that by then would be a secular relic. What would its value be? Who could say? With a grandiose gesture, ‘Incalculable!’

Fernando Sada, his mother’s painter friend, had given him what he claimed to be a mako shark’s tooth. He said, ‘The most perfect, successful predator ever to have lived!’ With the passing of time, as he got to know Sada better, he began to doubt the tooth belonged to a mako shark or to any shark at all. But, if it wasn’t a shark’s, what was it? One day, he met him in the street and Sada asked, ‘Have you still got that tooth belonging to the dog Cerberus?’

‘Let me see,’ said Korea on the Wooden Jetty. Gabriel had started going there with Zonzo occasionally, protracting the journey home from school. Besides, the doctor’s advice to his parents was that Gabriel should get out more. Spend as much time as possible with people his own age. Why go any further? There, next to his home, was the most alluring space in the city, the docks. So Korea played at sticking the shark’s tooth in his mouth like a false canine.

‘Be careful,’ said Gabriel, afraid he might steal it, go off with it in his mouth. ‘It’s very, very . . .’

Korea spat it out on the ground.

‘Yes, you already told us it was very ancient. Well, I don’t like things that are ancient, especially teeth.’

Ren had given him the GNM game and Victorious Wings when he took part in conversations in the Crypt. He also visited the judge on his own sometimes, bringing old books and antiquities. They’d have heated discussions as to their value and the judge would almost always end up buying the items. The visits were more or less spaced out, but Gabriel remembers them from his childhood. For a long time, he thought Ren sold fragments of history and he associated his presence with a leather bag or a sturdy suitcase with metal rivets. On one of these visits, one of the last Gabriel witnessed, when the two men had wrapped up the day’s business, the inspector called him over.

‘How’s your cabinet of curiosities?’

Gabriel shrugged his shoulders. The most recent additions had been a planisphere and a small telescope. But he soon grew tired of observation. At night, if they let him, he preferred to go fishing for squid with Zonzo up by San Antón Castle. Together with his fishing apparatus, Zonzo brought something probably no one in the city had ever seen before. A portable, battery-operated television. A television you carried under your arm. Not any old piece of junk, the genuine article. While they tried to entice squid with a torch and mirror, most of the other night fishermen would take in a gangster movie, the fearless and incorruptible Eliot Ness versus Al Capone. Everybody adjusting the aerial whenever they lost the picture on the only channel. The mini-television was a present Manlle had brought back from Rotterdam. No, there was no competing with Zonzo in the field of curiosities.

‘Well, I understand you like things that have to do with nature. Serious stuff, I mean.’

‘Yes, that’s right. Absolutely.’

Ren, swollen with pride, solemnly extracts an entomological box from the suitcase with metal rivets. ‘For you. They’re Coleoptera. To start with, they all look the same, but then you realise they’re different. I never thought there was so much in them.’

Gabriel read the label: Coccinella septempunctata.

Around the lighthouse,