Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [43]
In the docks on the other side of the square, attention is focused instead on someone who isn’t moving. On that boy wearing a cap with green and white rhombuses, leafing through a book he’s just salvaged from the flames.
Among those who’ve turned their attention to Curtis is one who’s stockier than the rest. His constitution might have been called gymnastic were it not for his sagging belly. Urged on by his physique or the fact he’s also wearing a cap, though his is a bonnet with a Carlist pompon, he decides to take the initiative:
‘Oy you, Chocolate! Are you deaf or something?’
What he cannot know is that the use of this nickname causes a jolt to pass through Curtis, who looks to the side and then backwards. There he sees Marcelino, the black seller of ties, always elegant, always with his samples on his outstretched arm. Huici used to say the town council should pay him a salary for touring the city with that range of colours and his smile. What’s the seller of ties doing by the fires? Chocolate? Chocolate’s dead, one of the first to be murdered. This news had reached Curtis when he was still receiving news the first days he was shut up in the attic. That’s why he looks backwards, in the hope that Antonio Naya, who worked in the Chocolate Factory and was also nicknamed Chocolate, has come to set the record straight.
‘What you looking at? Hey you with the cap! You also at the circus?’
This time, Curtis feels the insults approaching like lassos. His experience from when he was a boy and first set foot in the street tells him the first and second nicknames lead to a third with greater precision.
Two come together. Two orang-utans. A black and a white one. Aaaaoouuuu! Aaou!
The big one begins to imitate the shouts and gestures of a monkey. The pompon swings on his forehead like a loose pendulum. The soldiers around him burst out laughing. Start joining in the fun. Walking on all fours. Beating their chests. Bending and waving their arms with their hands in their armpits. Egging each other on. They look as if they’re dancing.
Flora, the Girl, whom Samantha out of envy rather than spite calls the Curl, even the Conception Curl, is performing an unusual dance in the Academy. On the sign, it says Un-deux-trois, but people still use the old name, the Dance Academy. All of Flora’s body is involved. The stamping of her feet tells a suspense story on the drum of the stage. It seems they only stop to listen. They could be saying what’s happening tonight under the same roof. For some time now, attentive spectators have known Flora’s dance ceased to be part of the entertainment as her body became more refined. Though when she dances, according to Samantha, her hands trace the outline of the bodies she used to have before her body got thinner, when she was more voluptuous. She’s not sickly. It’s not that. When it’s not raining, all day long stuck to the Coiraza wall. In the Orzán sea breeze. Like an eel drying out. In the sun, like a stone animal. And now she’s fallen in with those boxing types, who could at least come and spend some money. She won’t get thin! Not for nothing did the poet call her and Kif ‘the Coiraza sirens, the storm’s hetaeras’.
‘You’re happy, no doubt, but I don’t like the sound of hetaeras,’ said Samantha when she read Orzán Odyssey.
‘Well, the poet, an assumed name of course,’ said Flora, knowing how much Samantha went in for qualifications, ‘is a doctor, no less. A proctologist!’
‘Meaning?’
Flora winked. ‘An arse doctor, Samantha. An expert in humanity’s rarest centimetre.’
‘That must be a gold mine,’ said Samantha, having worked out whether she was pulling her leg or not.
‘Now I knew you’d be interested.’
‘I suppose poetry’s not so bad,’ the madame decided. ‘Storm’s hetaeras. Well, I’ve