Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [150]
The Inhabitants of Emptiness
The inexplicable hadn’t changed with the passing of time. Sometimes the crane’s arm wasn’t long enough to reach an object lying on the bottom. But it was long enough to reach the bike. Which became visible at low tide and still seemed, on its own, to be quickly turning its wheels without moving, as if it had acquired the existence of a mechanical echinoderm. The boy with the lazy eye who lost control, Pinche, was saved by one of the Phosphorescents.
‘They killed him. I told you a thousand times,’ the crane operator sighed impotently. ‘So don’t ask me why they killed him if he was champ.’
‘Why’d they kill him if he was champ?’
‘What does it matter if he was champ? Dumb boy. They were out to kill and they got him.’
He had to be discreet. Some people were impenetrable. Memory acts like a mollusc, secretes a protective shell. But sometimes he came across ugly, disgusting scabs that were in denial. With Korea, it was different. He felt strangely obliged to try and explain the inexplicable.
He’d tell him what happened to the Montoyas, the gypsy basket-makers.
There’s a night brigade in the car, the black Opel. September 1936. They’re not out to see what they can get. They’re obeying the orders of the so-called Invisible Tribunal, which is where terror, the decimation of the adult population, is planned. The Falangists are out searching for someone from San Pedro de Nós to ‘give him coffee’. That’s the expression they used. They were sitting in the Union Café, in Pontevedra Square, and the one in charge said, ‘Today we’re giving so-and-so coffee.’ The Delegate of Public Order had agreed, using the same expression, ‘Coffee!’ The radio broadcasts of a nationalist general, Queipo de Llano, had made it fashionable to talk about death in this way. The gypsy basket-makers are in Ponte da Pasaxe, heading west. So they’ve all the pyrotechnics of dusk in front of them. The sun will be sizzling like hot iron in Bens Sea. It’s the end of summer. Nightfall. They can feel it on their backs, almost hear its wickerwork shadows. But what they see are the purple dyes, from reddy blue to clot-like, in the woolly clouds. The Montoyas like colours, prints, wherever they may be, on the landscape or bodies. But today this is also their direction. They’re heading westwards for the simple reason they’re going home, to Gaiteira, next to the railway station. After Ponte da Pasaxe, they’ll turn right along Xubias Road and then dusk won’t be in front of them, but on their left, behind Eirís Mountains. But they haven’t turned yet. The Montoyas are spellbound by the range of purples and one of them bursts into song. As is only natural. He should have started earlier, think the other two. The oldest of the three basket-makers is Manuel, aged forty-five, married to Guadalupe, with whom he has eight children. And then there are his two nephews, Antonio, sixteen, and Manolo, fourteen. It’s Antonio who starts singing. Singing for all of them. Singing a fandango with a grown-up’s voice. Manuel is silent. He thinks when Antonio sings, he’s doing it with his voice, the way he’d sing were he to have the gift of expressing what’s inside. ‘And my sorrow is your sorrow. Your pain is my pain. Your happiness is my joy.’ Merchandise on their backs, purples in the sky, Antonio’s fandango, the smell of sex at low tide. None of the three notices the black Opel coming the other way, from the city. The black Opel’s occupants, however, with the sun behind them, spot the three gypsy basket-makers from far away.
‘Gypsies?’ asks the one who’s co-pilot.
The driver nods.
‘You know something? We still haven’t given it to one of them.’
And adds, ‘That other rabbit can wait.’
No one inside the black Opel says anything else. The third occupant is sitting in the back. Playing with a ring he twiddles around his wedding finger. The ring bears a skull and the inscription ‘Knights of Coruña’. One of the names used by