Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [184]
By the time they got up, the station was outside the room, without carriages, and the porter boys, the driver of the hire car, the florist, newsagent and shoeshiner seemed to be frozen. Painted. Only two figures moved up and down the platform. One was wearing a hat, both of them were wearing coats tied with a belt. One was short and fat, the other taller and thinner. They looked to Silvia like a comical, sinister pair. And seemed from time to time to glance over at her window. And perhaps they did.
‘What’s this cape?’ asked Leica. The royal cape suddenly attained the status of a mysterious presence. He said, ‘It looks like a garment with history.’
‘Something the nuns asked me to do,’ she replied. ‘An urgent job for a museum. That’s all I know.’
Silvia explained how the task was almost impossible. She could only use the garment’s own threads. An extremely delicate operation. Rather than finding them, she would have to invent them one by one in order to reconstruct the warp.
‘I’ll be at it day and night.’
‘Now that you’re a publicity star? In this country, history always spoils everything.’
They again fell into an embrace. Something to do with their bodies. It’s not easy to let go of the melancholy of bodies.
He had something to say, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He hadn’t even been able to tell Curtis, whom he trusted so much he’d lent him the horse Carirí so that he could earn a living. Curtis or the cellist. Deep down, he thought no one’s going to realise. I’ll just take Franco’s photograph and that’s it. What about the signature? ‘Sebastián Vidal’ won’t pass unnoticed. He’d better put ‘Sebastián V’. Or ‘V. Photos’ and leave it at that. That should do it. ‘V. Photos’. People will identify Ángel Jalón with portrait photos and Sotomayor with paintings. Who’s going to remember ‘V. Photos’?
He was taken aback when she asked him, ‘Is there anything else you’d like to tell me, Leica?’ But, as always, he was quick to recover himself. He exaggerated his voice and gesture in what he called ‘a Mastroianni moment’.
‘Anything else? Isn’t that enough? Our triumphal entrance into the future. We’re inside the future, Silvia, inside the shop window.’
She can’t actually know anything, he thought. It’s a secret. Nobody, except for my brother-in-law, Judge Samos, and the governor, nobody else knows. Rocío? No. Rocío doesn’t know Silvia exists. Nobody could have told her about Franco’s portrait.
She hadn’t expected him to say anything. She’d have had to force it out of him with a dentist’s pliers. There was no way he was going to confess he’d been married for some time and the woman she’d once met in the studio wasn’t the leaseholder and an old friend. He’d added the last bit with a hint of complicity, as if to say: There is, or there was, something between us, but you’re much more important. What he actually whispered in her ear was, ‘She’s never happy with her portrait. I keep telling her it’s not my problem or the camera’s. Some people are never satisfied and confuse a photographer with a beautician.’
‘He believes everything he says,’ Rocío had told Silvia the day she accosted her. ‘He’s always confusing desires with realities. He lives inside a bubble. You’re hardly the first. Ask him and he’ll deny he’s married. Go ahead and ask him. Go on, be brave. I could show you folders full of photos of all his attempted conquests. Maybe it’s a kind of professional hazard. Maybe he has to fall in love in order to take good photos. I don’t know. Could be. It’s some time since I last looked good in a photo.’
Despite feeling dizzy, her senses on hold due to Rocío’s sudden arrival, Silvia