Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [88]
A slaggish smoke rose from the ashtray.
‘Fight without gloves for an unlimited number of rounds. Few people, but with lots of money. Bets taken along the way. This Saturday night. There’s no address. Someone’ll pick you up and give you the agreed after the fight. Trust me. And I’ll trust you.’
Curtis looked at his hands. He was rubbing them slowly.
‘But none of your Hercules, right? No fateful one-two. You got to keep back the cobra, Curtis, understand? You got to lose. That’s all there is. You fight as if you were going to win, but you got to lose. It’s up to you when you go down, but make it look convincing. Lots of them will be betting for you. We need to see some raw flesh. And if it’s in a pool of blood, so much the better.’
There was a knock at the door of the house on Atocha Baixa. Terranova got up with great difficulty and swore. Someone had locked it from the outside, he couldn’t open.
He heard a voice, ‘Pay attention to what’s coming under the door.’
He then saw an envelope.
‘That’s your ticket,’ said Curtis outside the door.
‘What’s up, Curtis? Why don’t you come in?’
‘It couldn’t be Buenos Aires. It’s for La Guaira. The next ship, got it? I suppose they’ll sing tangos there too.’
‘Where’ve you been, Curtis?’
‘Listen. When you go through customs in Venezuela and they ask you your profession, you have to say you’re an electrical engineer, got it?’
‘Got it, Curtis.’
‘Go on, repeat it.’
‘Electrical engineer, electrical engineer, electrical engineer.’
He went over to the window. It was reinforced. He removed the bar and slid open the bolt. Stuck his head out. There was no one there.
The White Roses
The wild, white roses on the road from Castro to Elviña are small and seem to be putting all their effort not into growth, but into their fragrance. You can miss them, hidden, shy as they are against a backdrop of myrtle, but then they lift their heads and fill the place. Polka says the most envied bees visit those rosebushes.
‘Some bees go in front to look for the flower and then keep quiet about it back in the hive.’
‘That means they’re selfish, not envied.’
‘No. When you and Olinda stop looking for wild roses, there won’t be any.’
In the bundle of clothes and the basket, she’d put white roses, everlastings, fennel, marjoram, rosemary, aromatic herbs for the house of the painter. The knowledge she’d inherited from Olinda. And on her return, Neves, the maid, would hide fashion magazines she liked to read sitting on the toilet.
The Prickles of Words
He didn’t remember when he started getting tongue-tied, but he remembered the day his father noticed. It was the first time he’d received the warning, something inside him had said here comes a word with problems. A word dragging its own skeleton. A spicule without a sponge. A mushroom in the shade. A wounded crab. This warning, this alert, caught him by surprise in front of his father. He couldn’t let the word out, he felt its traction, its attempt to climb, its prickles, but couldn’t let it out because it was crippled, maimed, trembling and possibly beside itself.
‘What is it, Gabriel?’
The way he asked. The way he looked. A catastrophe. Everything was happening not inside him, but on his father’s face. He knew the fear he had of trembling or precipitate words was as nothing compared to the fear his father’s fear gave him. And he sensed his father’s fear was fear of what they’d say in the city. Occasionally, very rarely, he’d heard him say this. ‘What’ll they say, what’ll they think in the city?’ But when he referred to the city, he wasn’t talking about the whole city. Gabriel knew by now what his father meant when he referred to the city.
‘What were you going to say, Gabriel?’
He shook his head.
His father insisted. Rationalised what had happened. His ears tried to remember. Not one, not two, but more. Gabriel was stammering. His son. A child who was . . . perfect. That was the word. In short. He wanted to make sure it wasn’t a nightmare.
‘You were going to say something, Gabriel. Go on. What is it? Are you not well?