Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [39]
‘What better place for him than among the fish?’
When Milagres cracked open a sea urchin, it made her life worthwhile. Curtis knew this and at low tide he’d collect sea urchins, since he knew where they hid in the rocks, where there were likely to be lots of them, though he preferred the risk of fishing for barnacles on Gaivoteira. If there was something that worried him about sea urchins, it was getting their spines stuck in his skin. He’d made his best friends there, on the sea’s stormiest coast. You didn’t have to pretend. Next to the stormy sea, you had no enemies. One of those rock friends was Luís, who taught him how to treat the spines. The problem is their thickness. Unlike other prickles, such as a horse chestnut’s, they don’t have a sharp point. When trying to remove them, people become desperate and carve out deep flesh wounds.
‘No craters,’ said Luís. ‘A sea urchin’s spines come out by themselves. They work their way through the flesh together with the tides. Go down to the sea at low tide and they’ll come out on their own.’
This was partly a joke, partly true, as always with Luís. He was almost always playing with something. With the sea as well. He played with the sea most of all. When it was calm, he’d leapfrog Cabalo das Praderías or hang off the side of Robaleira Point and provoke it, ‘Oy you, beardie, Neptune, stupid dummy! Look who’s here! The ghost of Terranova! The son’s father. The father who died on a Portuguese doris.’ ‘It’s a big boat,’ he’d told Curtis, ‘full of small vessels. Each old fisherman boards his own green launch and comes or doesn’t come back.’ Once a pair of Basque cod trawlers called to pick up Galician crewmen and Terranova mounted a bollard with an empty bottle as an aspergillum and in a priestly voice mimicked the words he’d once heard predicated from a pulpit, ‘Work, fisherman, work! Only work dignifies a man. Do not fear the biting wind or rising sea, for death respects the brave. More men die in wine than at sea.’ The crane operator felt sorry for him and moved the hook towards him. Luís hung on and the operator raised him, lowered him, swung him to the left and to the right until he began to laugh. The crane had a wooden cabin with windows and was like a house in the air, with a bed and everything. The operator had painted the name ‘Carmiña’ on the outside. All the cranes were named after women. There was a ‘Belle Otero’, an ‘Eve’ and, on the Wooden Jetty, a ‘Pasionaria’. ‘Carmiña’s’ operator had a shelf of books in the cabin. One section labelled ‘The Day’, with scientific texts, and another labelled ‘The Night’, with novels. The operator didn’t just read. He wanted to be a scientific writer.
‘Not literature. Entertaining, yes, but scientific.’
Apart from reference books, he had a folder where for years he’d stored notes and drawings he’d made and grouped together under the title ‘Intimacy of the Sea’. The work in progress had to be kept a secret. The folder was concealed behind a false leather cover, which said ‘Liverpool Telephone Directory’. One of those things that land up in ports. But Ramón Ponte partook of that special kind of pleasure which comes from sharing things that are supposed to be top secret. And he didn’t stop smiling from the moment he opened the folder, having revealed its contents, to the moment he closed it. It had to do with the sex life of marine creatures. ‘People are always talking about the sea,’ he said, ‘but no one’s noticed the main thing. The sea is the largest nursery on the planet and possibly in the universe. One huge orgiastic bed. The scene of the most unusual acts of copulation. The most surprising arts of insemination.’ He admired