Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [154]
‘I still don’t understand,’ insisted Korea.
‘How could you understand?’ replied the crane operator angrily. ‘Your brain’s in a mess. You spend your whole day getting into fights, like someone who’s playing, and you’re incapable of seeing what real violence is. A dictatorship is permanent war. The whole country has been conquered.’
‘Conquered? Who conquered it?’
‘Cain and the god who made him! You are dumb. You’ve no sense of history. You’ve no . . . no visual angle.’
‘I can see very well, thank you,’ said Korea. And he span around like a crane. ‘History was the only subject I passed. History and Religion. So you see. I know all about conquest, reconquest and Cain.’
‘You spend your whole day in the snooker club and you’ve a brain the size of a snooker ball. Imagine Al Capone was appointed governor to keep order.’
‘I can imagine that, see?’
‘We all have to start somewhere.’
The one called Korea became thoughtful. He wanted to say something about snooker, but couldn’t put his finger on the idea. He knew the other was taking the mickey, as if he’d hung him on the crane’s hook by a nappy. He jumped in and said to the crane operator, ‘I don’t like what you’re insinuating.’ He was subtle in his own way and the bit about the snooker ball sounded humiliating. He wouldn’t have allowed anyone else to treat him like that, but the operator was special. An Autodidact. There were two guys in the world Korea respected, the actor Robert Mitchum and the crane operator. If he was self-taught, then surely the actor was as well. They looked almost identical. Yes. Being an Autodidact was something different from, and more important than, a profession.
It affects your whole being, from top to bottom, head to toe. You can’t be an Autodidact only in part.
‘Aren’t I an Autodidact? Everything I know is self-taught,’ alleged Korea. He glanced at his hands. A tribute to Mitchum, in The Night of the Hunter, who had LOVE tattooed on one hand and HATE on the other.
Stringer, to a certain extent, was also self-taught. Curtis was an Autodidact. So was Mr Gantes. But he wasn’t.
‘Why not?’
‘You could be, but you’ve a branch of madness.’
He said it as if he really did have a vegetal appendix, a climber sprouting out of his head. There were things only a genuine Autodidact could know. And he gave him an example.
‘Where does the word “sport” come from? From “port”, right? When the sailors were at sea, they were at sea. When they were on leave, they were ex portus.’
The operator joined his index fingers and spoke slowly as if describing a graft of universal import, ‘Ex portus. Sport. Sporting. Deportivo Coruña.’
Korea’s real name was Miguel. He was sometimes escorted, like a boss, by a group of other boys from Casas Baratas. They called themselves the Red Devils. Today he was alone. Wearing a black jumper with two yellow horizontal stripes and the trousers with zips for non-existent pockets. He’d arrived there by tracking Curtis, the photographer, and his wooden horse, Carirí. He was, for some reason, intrigued by him and followed him down through the port. Very intrigued.
‘What was that champ’s name?’
‘Arturo da Silva,’ said the crane operator. ‘You know where Silva is, don’t you?’
‘Yeah. The ends of the earth. So what makes him a champ too?’ he asked, looking in the direction of the horse photographer.
‘I told you a thousand times,’ replied Ramón Ponte. ‘That’s Hercules. He’s called the champ of Galicia because he was the one who carried the champ’s gloves for him. They were friends. Went everywhere together. Arturo died without losing. Which means he’s still champ. Isn’t that right, Curtis?’
Curtis nodded without speaking, a forced, polite movement. He had two cherry stones in his mouth, which he moved patiently around like a set of gears, as if he were chewing a clock’s escape mechanism.
‘Arturo da Silva,