• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 733 0

a deliberately obscure meaning, he couldn’t tell whether it was good or bad, ‘What you learn here in a day you won’t learn anywhere else.’ He sat lost in thought, but Stringer knew he was counting to ten with his fingers like beads. An economical way of calming down. He then adopted a confidential tone, ‘The governor called the censor and the censor called me. They’re really upset about this report, as if they’d lost their mind. It seems this lunatic you interviewed has a bag of crossed cables on his back, but also a story inside that can’t be told. Don’t ask me anything else. No extraterrestrials, no boogie-woogie, no Hypernauts of Infinite Space or long-haired musicians, even if they’re English. That’s the final word. So now you know. Stay positive. Don’t go upsetting the boat.’

‘Mr Aldán . . .’

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You don’t have to keep secrets from me. I’ll read you the script. Tell you what there is.’ He added something Stringer didn’t necessarily take as a warning, ‘It’s then up to you to get by.’

‘I was thinking, about the Loch Ness monster, I was thinking we also had a sea monster.’

‘Yeah, right. Leviathan and all that. Where there’s sea . . .’

‘I’m serious, Don Ovidio. You know the painter Sada?’

‘I know him.’

‘He painted it in his own way. More like a serpent than a whale. He calls it Antaruxa. Because of something he experienced as a child. It turned up in Coruña Bay, after a storm during which the waves, to use the popular expression, climbed the clouds of the sky. They say it whizzed up the Gulf Stream, first went round and round Marola Isle like a big wheel and, on the second day, entered the docks. People could touch it. It was very calm. Actually it was more like a whale than a sea serpent. A snow-white whale. Its eyes were two luminous slits, an emerald green. With two large black stains like sickle-shaped leaves on top of them. It never broke anything. It acted as if it had come to visit the city. According to the eye-witness accounts I’ve seen, it spent all its time gazing at the windows. But some considered it a kind of Kronosaurus, with huge canines a metre long, which would mash up the whole Sea Club’s team. Not at all. It was very artistic. Most people applauded the miracle. But those who thought it a monster got their own way. A company of carabineers was dispatched and an officer gave the order to fire. They shot it. Right here, in the heart of the city, they blew our myth to smithereens.’

‘That’s a terrible story. I never heard anything like it. What can that inebriated boat, Sada, have been drinking?’

‘A cup of red wine, but he barely touched it. He’d wet his fingers and paint with them on the marble table. As the girls in Two Cities say, it’s a shame these masterpieces only last a day. Though this was a cruel painting. All the wine turned into blood. You should have seen it. He’d come to, stand up and shout, “Ready! Aim! Fire! Destroy the miracle!” That’s right. He’d shout there were no sirens left in Galicia because we’d eaten them all. He claimed one of the first canneries was for siren meat.’

‘That’s horrible. Grotesque. Pure showmanship. He should have stayed in his magical world.’

‘I didn’t believe him either, Mr Aldán. I thought it had to be an invention, all this about a whale in the docks, next to the glass galleries. But I was curious. I sifted through some papers and there it was. There was a strange whale, more albino than white, shot to pieces in the very docks of this city. It happened during the toughest part of the war, on the 6th of September 1938. People applauded when it appeared, causing waves that pushed back the guards. It must have sensed the popular support. Until the soldiers, in spite of the wave of boos, shot at it. It ejected water through its monumental siphon. They shot it again. And again. The docks were stained with cetacean blood. People were shocked, dismayed. I thought we could do a report. Create a legend. That of the whale which came to live in the heart of our city.’

‘And didn’t they say why?’ asked the director of the evening Expreso.