Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [89]
‘Lisbon.’
‘That’s good, Gabriel. Another city you go to is Paris. Let’s see if you can say Montevideo, Lisbon, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona. It’s just a joke. A game. I know you can say all of this. But say it to me now.’
‘Montevideo, Lisbon, Paris . . .’
Things always happened somewhere. On the beach this summer, he’d learnt to dive. A little. But for him these first experiences were like underwater journeys. He couldn’t believe it when he opened his eyes and saw Chelo’s feet, enormous under the water, the toes like rock creatures with pearly shells. Now he’d like to dive and go between his father’s legs. He felt the presence of Grand Mother Circa, the grandfather clock, behind him. It had come from Cuba, like the wooden horse Carirí, and been a wedding present from Chelo’s father. He’d always end up there when he started to walk. He’d use it as a support, watch the pendulum. It was a fantastic creature, alive, with its own way of speaking day and night. He used to dream something was happening and this is where he’d hide. The grandfather clock leant against the room’s central pillar. The sunlight coming in from the balcony – it was a winter’s day, but there was a magnificent sun, a ‘Catholic sun’, someone at court had said – drew a dividing line with the pillar’s shadow. So Grand Mother Circa was also, in its own way, a light mechanism. He listened to it up close. He listened to it inside. It calmed the words and ordered them for him. This time, they’d gone on a boat to the Xubias. They’d gone up and down the beach, from the jetty to the estuary channel. On the sandbank, from a neighbouring dune, they could see the two waters fighting it out. Blue and green. They then climbed some rocks to reach a chalet. He tripped several times. Chelo took his hand and helped him up that steep shortcut. The house was closed, except for one of the shutters. How strange. Look. It was a house full of books. Inhabited by books. A house without books must be sad. Even sadder a house of books without people. Brambles and roses intertwined on the pergola. He protested, ‘What are we doing? Why did we come here?’
‘It’s a boat-house. Isn’t it beautiful?’
‘Where did you go, Gabriel?’
‘To Santa Cristina.’
His father’s concern abruptly switched objective. Abandoned him to focus instead on this other place.
‘To Santa Cristina? To that beach in this weather?’
Grandpa Mayarí’s Cane
Grandpa Mayarí hunted down items of news with the iron tip of his cane. He preferred the yellow ones, dipped in sun and frost, swept along the same paths as the dry leaves, though newspaper stays one step behind, on its own. The leaves of trees and newspapers, freed from the date, move westwards in flocks of crazy melancholy. They sometimes crouch in an abandoned doorway, all mucky, like the hair of a pet which has come back from its nocturnal outing with a dead man’s cold slap and been unable to locate the cat-flap. On Mount Alto, the hill on which Hercules Lighthouse stands, some of these itinerant leaves catch on prickly thickets and turn into dry meat. But a few go into a trance and are carried this way and that, tattooing the wind.
These are the ones sought out by the tip of Antonio Vidal, Grandpa Mayarí’s cane.
Here’s one now. The cane pretends not to see. Suddenly darts through the air and harpoons the piece of news on the sea lane opened by feet in the soft grass. We’re on the high cliffs of Gaivoteiro, in the direction of Fura do Touciño, and there’s something of the sea bird in the piece of paper. A final flapping of navigational wings.
Mayarí vacated his position at Aristotle