• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 791 0

A boat! The talented couple never left their cabin on the Lutetia, with the complete understanding of the people of Coruña, ever respectful of humanity’s star-studded moments, meaning no disrespect to yours truly, an expert in dockside activity, who managed to peep through the porthole. The whole day in Josephine and Corbu’s nautical suite. The dance of architecture, the architecture of dance. Oh, I’m dizzy! He can also do the Man of a Thousand Faces. Though he makes his own mother laugh and cry when he dresses up as Mrs Monte and acts out the Fascinating Widow. He grows thin and fat, like Laurel and Hardy. In order to sing, he sometimes goes to rehearse on the hill by Hercules Lighthouse, with Curtis as sound technician.

‘Sound technician?’

‘You have to say whether you can hear OK when I sing. I’ll gradually go further away. Oh, and work with your right ear. It’s a little bigger.’

‘No, it’s not. They’re the same,’ said Curtis, distrustful for once.

‘A gift from the Universal Architect, Vicente. When I triumph, I shall hire you. You’ll be my ears. You’ll earn a fortune just for listening. You’ll only have to move your hand up and down. Louder, softer. Like this.’

The last time they carried out a sound check was for Carlos Gardel’s Melodía de Arrabal.

‘I’ll redo that part,’ said Terranova. ‘Move back a bit.’

‘Listen,’ said Curtis. ‘It’s not “tear drops”. It’s “tear dwops”, got it? Tear dwops.’

‘Got it, “tear dwops”. There it goes! One tear. Goodbye, tear!’

Curtis moves off. With the sea behind him. His silhouette on the ocean’s horizon.

‘Louder, louder!’ shouts Curtis.

‘I haven’t started yet!’ mumbles Terranova. Then he shouts out, ‘Wait a minute, Tough Guy, you dummy.’

‘Louder!’

That night, seated on the roof under the vanes of light.

Quarter silvered by the moon

Quarter silvered by the moon

Milonga murmurs

Milonga murmurs

All my fortune

‘All my fortune. Hear that, Tough Guy? Today, when we were rehearsing, I noticed something. The city has a triangle.’

‘A triangle.’

‘A triangle that’s connected with us, where we’ve always played. If you look to the right, there’s San Amaro Cemetery. The first vertex. If you look to the left, there’s the provincial prison. The second vertex. There’s no future either to the left or to the right. That leaves only one vertex. The lighthouse. The beams from the lighthouse. And what do they say?’

He already has an answer, ‘They say goodbye. Goodbye! The light of emigration. Our light, Hercules!’

‘To me, they don’t say goodbye,’ grumbles Hercules, who doesn’t like to contradict his friend.

‘You don’t understand, Vicente. You just don’t understand when you don’t want to.’

They fell quiet. The intermittent beams moved the emotions like cartoons.

‘You already have a legend, Curtis. You’re Arturo da Silva’s sparring partner. You’re Papagaio’s Hercules. In the first round of your first fight, you knocked your opponent over. Floored him. What was it? A side corridor? People laughing. And when he got up, you did Arturo’s one-two. End of story. That’s what I call creating a legend, Curtis. The tooth stuck in your glove. Which you gave back to him. “Here you go, Manlle, your tooth.” You even wanted to sell him a ticket for the special train! That won’t be forgotten. That’ll go down in history. But as for me, I don’t have a legend.’

‘Yes, you do.’

‘What is it?’

‘That you were born in a fish basket. Among scales.’

‘That’s an embarrassment, not a legend.’

‘I like it,’ said Curtis. ‘My mother too. And Flora. Everyone does.’

His father at sea. His mother, a fishwife. Alone on her rounds, she gave birth down a lane and placed the child on the softest thing she had. Among hake, wrasse, sail-fluke, horse-mackerel, sardines. His mother would leave Muro Fishmarket early to sell cheap fish in the outlying villages. Horse-mackerel is humble, even in its colour. But Luís couldn’t understand how wrasse could be so cheap, having all those colours. It’s rainbow meat. He used to make a pause for the fish basket’s contents and crack jokes like the one in the Academy, ‘I’m just a poor sail-fluke,