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By Root 709 0

Stringer suspiciously, like someone who’s woken from a nightmare to find the culprit standing there. ‘That’s horrible. Listen to me. Forget about that story. It never happened and can’t appear.’ In a whisper, ‘Have you any idea how the Caudillo catches cetaceans from his yacht? Not with a harpoon exactly. Forget about such battlefields. How are we going to run with a story about a whale that’s been shot at? You have to start to distinguish between what you can and cannot tell. My dear friend, allow me to give you a word of advice, if not as an expert, then as a veteran. There are times a good journalist must separate the grain from the straw, so that he can publish the straw. Don’t make the reader suffer. He knows he’s living in a valley of tears. So cheer us up a little. Here. Tell us about the day the town hall dressed up rugged Coruñan sailors as Venetian gondoliers to welcome the Duke and Duchess of Lancaster. How they sang sweet, rhythmical barcaroles, rowing on their feet without even breaking into a sweat.’

Quickly the boats

surround the whole sea.

He went over to the window. Barcaroles. Atlantic sea-wolves dressed up as gondoliers to welcome royalty. Someone should write a comical history of the city. Lino’s Pavilion packed for the charity concert, the nuns in the front row. The general public trying to hasten the first acts so that they can get to the number they’re waiting for. Chelito, who’s just arrived for the occasion from Barcelona’s Parallel Avenue. Will she or will she not sing The Flea? Part of the public is worried. Views the nuns with suspicion, even if they are Sisters of Charity.

‘The Flea! The Flea!’

The host, Mr Lino, appeals for calm. Reminds them of their manners.

‘Why doesn’t Lino sing The Flea!’

‘Why doesn’t your mother?’

And so on. He only had a photographic memory of the Pavilion with its sensual façade. Shame it burnt. It was one of the temples in that architecture, a peculiar form of Atlantic art nouveau, which spread from the Fishmarket to Recheo Gardens, reclaimed land, and which seemed to have been conceived as a permanent flirt, a joyful plan in which both people and materials took part, the wood’s voluptuousness, the metals’ erotic rebirth, the iron’s sudden vegetal will, the dominant colour of glass everywhere, a second nature of mirrors, spaces to see and be seen, the glass’s second life, at night, somnambulant, electric. The next, splendid wave, which not by chance coincided with Corbu and the Black Pearl’s dockside visit, was of boat-houses. After the war, architectural horror. The violation of modernist carnality. The intimidation of property. The corrosion of the city’s character. The dictatorship’s main feature was ugliness. An unpublishable conclusion. Everything had got uglier. He himself had. So had handwriting.

Lino also owned a merry-go-round, a form of entertainment for a younger audience, which lasted slightly longer than the Pavilion. It arrived by boat from France. Played the ‘Marseillaise’ on the harmonica. Children sat on horses in time to the hymn of the Revolution. But it happened the other way round too. When the municipal band played the ‘Marseillaise’, a popular piece in their repertoire, children thought the band was paying tribute to Lino’s merry-go-round with its wooden horses. As the years went by, music and machinery got out of sync. César Alvajar called it ‘the twanging harmonica’. Coruña, perched on Atlantic rock, is a windy city. Not just visited, but inhabited by winds. There were days, especially if the roundabout was empty, the horses riderless, the wind, at least the wind in the gardens, would sway on the lonely mounts snorting bits of a nasal ‘Marseillaise’.

He closes his eyes. For him, that sound, that twanging roundabout’s wind, has to cross the walls of time. Some things that have disappeared are remembered by lots of people. But only he remembers the merry-go-round, its childish, nasal ‘Marseillaise’. ‘Are you sure it was the “Marseillaise”?’ asked one of the newspaper’s veterans in the condescending tone used with those who have