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By Root 658 0

and her spine straightened. Thinking about that, about her backbone, she feels like an icicle. Lying down for years, in Oza, tied with belts, unable to walk. The diagnosis was that the deformed spine had to be controlled to stop a curve or a hump forming. All of which suffering could have been avoided with a simple treatment of penicillin. They also got up – there was a whole room of them, of ‘imprisoned girls’ – to receive communion on Sundays and feast days. With the priest came an acolyte who carried a tray with the wafers. He was the most charming boy Silvia had ever seen. Since she hadn’t seen many, we might say he was the prettiest boy imaginable. What she felt when her body was untied for communion was real hunger, an overriding desire to prolong her mouth’s movement and bite his hand and sew the boy with kisses. She knew they were not a girl’s feelings. But she wasn’t the age she was. Her enforced immobility made her live life so intensely that, when she finally got up, staggered to the window not only to see the sea she’d heard murmuring for months on end, but also to find a support, when she did this, she realised she’d already lived various lives and now had to try to rein them into her body or else go in search of them.

The sea entered her eyes with such force it made her cry. And a howl rose from inside her. Not a human shout, but a sea-howl. She thought at that moment she’d been tied not because of an incorrect diagnosis or the absurd idea of straightening her spine by force, but deliberately to keep her away from the sea. She couldn’t stop crying. She’d spent years with dry eyes. The tears had to come with a swell from her body. Of all the lives she’d lived without moving, she chose one. To be the woman of invisible mending. Asun had taught her this art when she saw the skills of all her other senses were in her fingers. Silvia had long, thin fingers. After time spent in a hospital bed, her body was very skinny. Her arms were like elder branches. But her hands ran wild when sewing and embroidering. Played at shadow puppets, which played with her hands and made them longer.

‘Big hands,’ said Leica one day, interlocking fingers. ‘A miniaturist’s big hands.’

A group of worthies in the city wanted to give the dictator an unusual present. He was Supreme Commander of the Forces of Land, Sea and Air, he was described in the papers as Sword of the Most High, and yet he had a thorn stuck in his pride. The fact he had failed to enter the Naval Academy as a young man. His ambition was to be an admiral. So, when he achieved absolute power, his favourite outfit, which he wore on special days, was the Navy officer’s full-dress uniform, worn by admirals in Ferrol only on Good Friday. It was in this uniform he had an important portrait done of himself wearing the Grand Laurelled Cross of St Ferdinand on his chest, holding some binoculars. The local authorities had already given him the manor of Meirás, which he travelled to Coruña in 1937, at the height of the war, to take possession of. He was then presented with the finest building in the Old City, Cornide House. The city’s richest man, the banker Barrié, sold it to him for the sum of five pesetas. An emotional exchange, not without symbolism. Franco paid with one of those small coins bearing his face and the legend ‘Caudillo of Spain by the grace of God’. The banker would later be named Count of the Electric Forces of the Northwest or Count of Fenosa. No, there was no point competing in new property values. Now that the twenty-fifth anniversary of providential leadership was coming, this new present had to be highly symbolic, something that would both surprise Franco and touch his heart. Why not go beyond the admiralty?

The idea came up at a dinner in the yacht club, hosted by the governor. They’re all agreed. The governor is waiting to hear something so that he can assume the proposal as his own. One of the guests is Máximo Borrell, Franco’s favourite fishing companion, described by him in front of everyone as ‘an intimate friend’, which gives his opinion the rank