Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [161]
He suddenly realised he’d fallen into a trap. ‘Forget I asked. And forget about extraterrestrials, the Beatles . . . and endearing sea monsters riddled with bullets.’
Stringer decided to carry on. ‘No, Mr Aldán. They didn’t say why. But we could bring the story back to life, create a legend. Have our own monster. Almost all civilisations have imagined a colossal creature. The Scandinavians have the Kraken, with its luminous eyes and gigantic tentacles. There’s Bigfoot in North America. The Yeti in the Himalayas. There are even souvenirs with photos of its footprints in the snow. I think they’re made up, like dragons, unicorns or sirens. But ours is real. This mysterious and intelligent sea creature, the size of an enormous whale, actually existed. Paid us a visit. Wanted to stay. People clapped when it arrived.’
‘What’s the point of a myth if we killed it? Maybe if someone else had killed it. Almanzor, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin . . . But like this, that’s some propaganda!’
‘What if it never died?’
‘Did it die or didn’t it?’
‘We could write the story. With their applause, their cheers, the people managed to stop the shooting. A sensible officer, wary of public opinion and himself amazed by the creature, its mythical deportment, revoked the order and granted a pardon. The whale healed. Doctor Rodríguez from the Tobacco Factory came and healed it.’
‘Now we’re out of reality.’
As Stringer told the story, so he began to believe it. He understood Sada’s passionate recreation, the vision in his eyes of Antaruxa, that sea-witch, that stylised cetacean the narwhals escorted to the invisible line drawn by Marola Isle and Hercules Lighthouse. Sada could paint it because he’d seen it. As he talked at the furthest table in the Supply bar, he traced its erotic lines in the ephemeral nobility of red wine on marble:
‘That’s it. The curve, our great contribution to the history of the line, the curve that even stuck to the tongue, as Unamuno said, of Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, who wrote with curves as Don Miguel wrote with frets. This is memory talking and writing in waves, curls, loops, spirals, helicoid, sigmoid literature, the songbooks’ leixapren, the fingers, ah, where are the fingers of the one “sitting at St Simon’s Chapel, caught by the waves, how tall they seem”, Sapphic fingers drawing concentric circles, inward spirals? All rock-carvings are really astrographs. The first writing, the first art, the first topography, the first house: always circles, groups of circles. Hill-forts. Huts. The inner curve, Mogor’s labyrinth, humanity’s first neural incision. The whole monoecious coast, phallic vulva, pornographic nation fertilising shoals underwater . . . When was Galicia fucked? The terrible day of the square, more or less.’
Sada fell quiet. He had bursts of energy and bouts of melancholy, like a speech warrior suffering from cyclothymia. In the way he talked, there was something of a phosphorescent diver’s movements since he’d emerge in a sea of pyrotechnics, then suddenly mist. The curtain falls.
Why not create the legend of a city born from a whale? There were historical data. Evidence, proof, that didn’t exist in the case of the tenant of Loch Ness. And the whale was female.
The director of the evening Expreso stood up to stretch his legs. What did this novice know about monsters and monstrosities? Right here in the docks, where the soldiers shot the whale the people applauded during the toughest part of the war, two years earlier, at the start of a new dictatorship, they’d burnt books from cultural associations and public libraries. He remembered that. The memory was accompanied by the smell of old, bound smoke. A sudden mist had entered his office. The director criticised his secretary for using a ventilator – ‘A ventilator in the city of winds!’ – and continued by attacking the country’s capricious climate, partly to blame, so he believed, for the problems of circulation. On days of rain, sales dropped off dramatically. Culture versus nature. He rapped the table. Suddenly viewed