Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [6]
‘What? You collecting stories from the ground?’
A strange apparition with a sunlike halo appeared before him. A woman carrying birds on her head. What in fact she was carrying in her basket were newspapers flapping their wings in the sea breeze. The young girl held out her arm, demanding what was hers, with a magnetism in her fingers. Who could say no, it doesn’t belong to you, to someone carrying the weight of the news? He handed back the newspaper and was about to leave when she set down her basket and arranged all the headlines in an extraordinary fan. He stood there while she hawked the news. He’d heard all kinds of things being sold before, animals and fruit at fairgrounds. He’d heard a blind man sing. But never a girl hawking fresh news.
‘What? You going to take the lot?’
His whole body started. He hadn’t been expecting to run into a newspaper seller who was only a girl, early teens at the most, but who spoke like a fully grown woman. She spoke in a way that guarded her body and was dressed like the local fishwives. She might end up selling fish too. If he could contain his surprise, Antonio Vidal might end up seeing fish in that basket. A basket that could carry strawberries and cherries, sea urchins and sardines, depending on the season. But now she was hawking the news in a singsong voice that made her the city centre. If she changed position, the centre would also move.
‘Is your hand stuck? Don’t you know how to tell the time?’
Her last question brought Antonio Vidal back to reality. Over their heads was a scoffing sky, the seagulls’ mocking calls. He counted on his fingertips in his pocket. He’d spent a large amount buying his uncle ‘Doctor Ayala’s Asian Tonic’ and ‘The Miraculous Zephyr’, inventions that were supposed to stop you going bald. He felt he was being guided with a healthy vengeance by his mother’s ghost because in Sucesores de Villar he also bought ‘Carmela’s Miraculous Waters’, a lotion to prevent your hair going grey and to restore its natural colour. His mother insisted, ‘As a boy, he had a receding hairline.’ And added, ‘A receding conscience as well.’ There she stopped and he never wanted to find out more about Uncle Ernesto’s receding conscience. In Havana, he had helped to set up a modern school in Cruceiro de Airas and from the pulpit it was rumoured the emigrants had turned into ‘Masons, Atheists and Protestants’ and were trying to corrupt children. ‘You can’t be all things at once,’ observed Antonio Vidal. ‘You can’t be what?’ ‘A Mason, an Atheist and a Protestant, you can’t be all three things at once.’ ‘You shut up, what do you know?’ his mother, Matilde, told him. ‘Say hello to Uncle Ernesto and then get on with your work, unless you want to end up with a receding hairline too. And don’t go wasting your money.’
‘Do you need a bullet extractor?’ asked the newspaper seller.
‘What for?’
‘For your coins.’
Antonio Vidal scrabbled in his pocket. What he was really looking for were not coins, but some quick, light-footed, low-denomination words to get him out of a tight situation.
‘I’ll take one today,’ he said. And then thought better, ‘No, two. Give me the one that was flying away.’
‘Lucky me!’ she commented ironically. ‘I found myself a tycoon to support me!’
‘I’m off to Cuba, on the steamer Lafayette.’
‘How I’d love to own a news-stand in Havana’s Central Park.’
‘What do you know about Havana?’
‘Everything. Or almost everything. As if I’d been a rich lady sitting in the colonnade of the Inglaterra Hotel. When you get off the boat, don’t go up Prado Avenue. People will laugh at you. And anyone laughing at your accent and beret is a Galician who arrived before and now has a white suit and a dandy white hat. Don’t go up Prado Avenue at least until you’ve got yourself a white suit.’
The whippersnapper handing out advice. She really seemed like a chatterbox now. Talking nineteen to the dozen, words spilling out of her mouth. All that talking made her look smaller. Vidal decided he’d wasted quite enough time. He forgot about walking to the end of the Iron Quay. He still had to