Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [50]
‘Do you know where all the umbrellas the wind takes in Galicia end up? On the same boat.’
‘Always the same one?’
‘That’s right. An old container ship, which acts like a magnet for umbrellas. About two hundred miles out to sea. It’s called the Mara Hope. From here, it goes to Rotterdam and sells them on in bulk.’
He then told him how things from the sea rain on earth and things from the earth rain at sea. In Galicia, in the middle of winter, a shower of pilchards had fallen inland from a cloud of seaweed. The cloud had burst, like someone opening a net in mid-air. Thousands of small, silvery sardines falling on the rye. Which is why the fields of Courel sometimes smell of the sea. While the woods are covered in a moss of seaweed with starfish hanging from the treetops. These are the so-called animate waves which rise in gale-force winds, turning into pregnant clouds. ‘Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of animate waves and pregnant clouds. Isn’t there an old newspaper lying around?’
‘It’s true what he says about umbrellas,’ intervened Pombo, who’d finished his break. ‘The other way round too. Have you never seen a flock of cod heading in the direction of Terra Cha? And in Riazor Stadium the other day it bucketed down caps with the name “Numancia” embroidered on them.’
‘I can only talk about what I’ve seen,’ said Mr Lens a tad suspiciously.
‘Honest to cod,’ insisted Pombo.
Curtis enjoyed this duel. Things to-ing and fro-ing by air and sea. They vied not to tell the truth, but to invent the biggest story. Before working as a harpooner in the North Atlantic, Lens had spent many years in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.
‘Never trust the calm,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘It’s what I’m most afraid of. The calm. You know, when nothing happens, there’s a dead calm, the sea like a plate.’
Curtis shook his head.
‘At the centre of a hurricane! What they call the area of calm. Don’t forget it. In the area of calm, be alert, in a state of emergency.’
Curtis thought he heard Pombo blink. Alert. His tongue tickling.
‘You can be on the boat with nothing moving. Everything completely still. When suddenly, swept offshore by the hurricane, something falls. What you’d least expect. Because it’s one thing,’ he said sarcastically, ‘for it to rain a tin of sardines in the mountains the day Pombo goes for a picnic and quite another for it to rain, as I have seen – I have seen! – a flock of sheep on board a ship, carried along by a hurricane.’
‘Sheep with umbrellas, I suppose,’ commented Pombo ironically.
‘Only when the flock has a shepherd. Then they fall with a large umbrella, of the type called “seven parishes”. In the Caribbean, I’ve seen it rain a whole chapter, a Mexican chapter.’
‘It’s normal for a flock to have a shepherd of souls,’ added Pombo, ‘and fall right on top of a pagan from Death Coast.’
‘What’s frightening is to be in the area of calm and think the worst is over,’ said Lens seriously, ignoring Pombo’s jokes. ‘That’s it, you think the worst is over when in fact it’s just beginning. You think the hurricane’s gone and you’re in the eye of the storm.’
His tone now smacked undeniably of the truth. The ship’s name was right. The Mara Hope.
As they listened, even Pombo’s mocking hemisphere was eclipsed. Whether in suspense or under the force of Lens’ memory, the silence in the Dance Academy had acquired the sound of an electric hum, of