Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [21]
‘Hercules, son of a whore!’
There was Hercules Lighthouse, Hercules Cinema, Hercules Café, Hercules Transport, Hercules Insurance. The city had a myriad Hercules. Why did he have to be precisely Hercules son of a whore?
No sooner had he emerged into the street than he heard the drone of that nickname. He heard insults and would have liked them to pass on by, to fly far away from him. But the nicknames clustered around him like wasps. And sometimes they stung him. Died, stuck to his skin. So as a small boy Vicente Curtis understood that, just as his mother carried a mattress on her head, he carried another being on his shoulders. His nickname. Hercules, son of a whore. The difference between one Curtis and the other was that Curtis the carrier looked permanently mystified while Hercules, the other Curtis, was indomitable. Years later, when he was a travelling photographer and had a wooden horse, the mystified and indomitable took turns to be cameraman or invisible horseman. Which is why Hercules sometimes didn’t talk or talked to himself. Before the war, when he was a promising boxer, the boy who held the champ of Galicia’s gloves for him, his friends couldn’t understand why he minded being called ‘Hercules’. He would have preferred ‘Maxim’ or ‘The Corner’. Even ‘Tough Guy’ was better, which is what Terranova the singer called him. But not Hercules. He didn’t like it. ‘What do you mean, you don’t like Hercules, you fool?’ they said to him. ‘That’s how you were born. You know nothing about honour. Just imagine the poster: “Today, Saturday, in Coruña Bullring, star combat: Vicente Curtis ‘Hercules’ versus . . .”’
‘He has another daughter,’ said Milagres suddenly. ‘He has another daughter studying abroad. He’s a good man.’
He had another daughter and was a good man. Curtis felt as if he were missing part of the story. So he waited for Milagres to catch her breath. When you’re carrying a mattress on top of your head, even if the cover is damask, it’s not easy to go into great detail.
Milagres finally told the story:
‘When he was studying to be a lawyer in Madrid, he had an affair, apparently with his landlady. And the result was a daughter. Do you know what happened? He kept the child. He didn’t just give her his name and some maintenance money. He turned up in Coruña with the child. On his own. The child in his arms on the train. He didn’t give a damn what people might think. Oh, no. How many men in the world would do that?’
Milagres was very discreet. She had a reputation for being tight-lipped. But she asked that question on the pavement of Panadeiras Street as if she were directing it to the whole universe. The answer as well, accompanied by a flourish, ‘I could count them on the fingers of this hand!’
From the skylight, the back of 12 Panadeiras Street looked something like a toy garden surrounded by walls clad in ivy and passion flowers. On holidays, the girl, helped by a maid, would bring out the cages with budgerigars on to the balcony. And conduct the orchestra of birds with a stick. The garden had cats, a numerous family, and Curtis can see the Casares’ daughter telling them to sit down and listen to the concert. Some of the older, more worldly-wise toms pretend to obey and park their bottoms.
‘Hey you, what’s your name?’
The girl had interrupted the concert, pointed towards him with