Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [153]
‘She’s the one who’s in love with me. I don’t give a damn.’
‘Said the cat walking over the coals. Remember this. Water doesn’t mix with oil, Spain doesn’t mix with France. Stay away from that convent school. The further, the better. Or they’ll separate your body from your soul. What’s the name of that other gang?’
‘What other gang?’
‘Don’t act dumb with me. The ones you fight to see who can make it to Charon’s boat first.’
Whose boat? Charon’s? He was definitely self-taught.
‘Those pricks are the Mau Mau.’
‘Then watch out. Think you’re clever and you’ll find the worst Mau Mau is an angel next to a senior official whose daughter is being fucked by a red devil.’
He didn’t wait to be asked.
‘Take a good look,’ he said to the crane operator. ‘You can see everything inside my head. Now is it or is it not empty?’
A shiver. He didn’t like the locks, but right now he missed the boy with long hair. He was tempted to cover it so that Curtis wouldn’t see. Curtis was very sensitive about blows to the head.
‘It looks like a sphere. The terrestrial globe.’
‘And you’re the one who says I’m not self-taught. That champion you keep talking about, no one’s heard of him. There’s no memory of him. At the snooker club or gym. Arturo da Silva? No fucking idea!’
He liked to visit the crane operator’s cabin. You climbed a ladder and were in another country. The crane was on the jetty, but in a floating world. Over there, the crowns of trees with starlings fluttering about like winter leaves. In front, the decks of ships, their masts, the piles or mountains of material waiting to be loaded, stripped of their old reality, as was the case with goods that had been unloaded. There were the red, double-decker buses, which had been pensioned off in London. Korea had also witnessed the landing of studs from Canada whose purpose it was to improve the Galician race. One of the bulls had got hurt on the journey and had to be lowered on the crane, tied in with leather straps. It hung in the air for a time, calm as a totem, with the starlings flying around. Another crane operator, a friend of Ponte’s, had lifted an American plane rescued with its pilot by a Galician fishing boat in the Great Sole, on the Irish Sea. What most amazed him, an operation he watched in silence for hours, was when Ponte loaded a ship with three hundred coffins for export, ‘Made in Galicia’.
‘They’re for a rich country. Chestnut wood. Immortal.’
Korea thought there was a link between things hanging in the air, a kind of sustained vulnerability. The Canadian stud with the broken horns, the plane with the detached wings, the old London buses, the empty coffins.
Inside the cabin, Miguel or Korea could handle a historic jewel. The first football to reach the city. The genuine article. Made of English leather. It had fallen off a ship, the Diligent, and not made it back on board. The crew scoured the port, but of course they didn’t find it. When someone’s looking lost, it’s said they’re searching for the Diligent’s ball. And somehow or other, Ramón Ponte had inherited the ball from his father.
He also had a pair of boxing gloves.
Hercules’ gloves. From his first and only official fight.
‘Look. This is where the tooth was. Back then, they never wore a gumshield. Not on that day. And here’s where the tooth got embedded. Not any old tooth. Manlle’s tooth.’
‘Manlle’s?’
‘You think I’m lying? Do you think he could lie?’
The ‘he’ in question was Vicente Curtis, Hercules. Down below, at the foot of the crane’s ladder, his horse was waiting. Carirí.
‘Because he was a champ. Those who lost against him in the ring added their own bullet, their own bit of torment. One of the shots went through the palm of his left hand. A mark left by the murderers. Lots of corpses turned up with a shot in the left hand. But the thing is he was also left-handed. Apparently they made him box. Crippled, lame and blind. His face smashed in. Who knows what they said to him. “Go on, hit, dance! Let’s see you dance, champ!” Like cowards. It was over there, on the other side