Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [96]
‘In what language?’
Gabriel hesitated. The shout had come from deep inside him and now he was afraid of appearing ridiculous. Mayarí said, ‘Don’t you worry. People who stammer are the best singers. There was one in Cuba who was the king of boleros.’
‘In chimpanzee language,’ said Gabriel.
‘It’s good to know languages.’
Mayarí released the sheet of newspaper and covered up the hole in the ground as if closing the indiscretion of an eye into the earth.
The Strategy of Light
On the rocks facing the island was a fisher of wrasse. Gabriel remembers this because the man with the rod emphasised, almost boasted, that what he wanted was to fish for wrasse, ballan wrasse, and treated with contempt any other fish he hooked. Some didn’t even make it into the basket, but were scattered over the rocks. To tell the truth, ballan wrasse were masterpieces with their sudden green and red glint and the added excitement in fisherman and spectators of seeing the extraction of something precious from the sea. Aside from their colour, before they landed in the basket, the trace they left in the air was of fleshy lips. A flash of sensuality. The fisherman with the automatic rod, who was dressed impeccably, like a statue on the rocks, sometimes named the fish he threw away with contempt.
‘Another musician!
‘Here’s a clown!’
Gabriel thought he was making it up and rejected them because of their names, creatures that weren’t to his liking. Gabriel and Mayarí focused primarily on the way they gawped or still convulsed. He didn’t know exactly what his grandpa was thinking. He didn’t say anything. But the fact they stared at the same spot, at these creatures writhing in agony, shaking with mute silence, was something Gabriel would always remember as a moment of confused fraternity.
His father, the judge, was a hunter. This was no passing or temporary hobby. As he himself said, it was a constitutional passion. At home, especially in the large study, an Italian room with a small alcove, and the adjoining part of the main sitting-room, there were several trophies. The biggest was the head of a stag with large antlers. There was also a boar’s head, which his father was particularly proud of, not just because of how he’d caught it, but because of the way the head had been mounted, a work of art in his view that had preserved all the animal’s wildness and spirit, so that when you looked at it up on the wall of the study, in semi-darkness, a glint of black sun in its eyes, you could see the exact moment the end appeared. The judge had a special way of rounding off that story.
‘Forgive the boast, but a large specimen measures up its opponent, chooses a superior,’ he’d maintain. ‘Only he who knows it better than it knows itself can hunt a prey.’
The same could be said of the woodcock. Another prize specimen. Not because of its size, but because of its intelligence.
‘The wood’s guardian. A master at camouflage. Better than the partridge any day. A living detector, a periscope in amidst the bracken and leaves. It hears and sees everything that’s going on in the forest. Even with a good dog, it’s very difficult to flush a woodcock. And we had the best, Eusebio’s pointer. A fine companion, yes indeed. We put a little bell around his neck. When it stopped tinkling, this was the sign he’d found the woodcock. I can still hear that silence now!’
The judge gave pride of place to that specimen. You could see it was of great personal value. But a few years later, in the spring of 1963, a capercaillie became the star attraction. Because it had an illustrious partner. The judge had gone hunting with his friend the Minister in the Ancares. As he said, it was a trophy with history. The Minister had shot one specimen and he’d shot the other.
Both the woodcock and later the capercaillie stood on a shelf, flanked by thick volumes, in the most visible part of the judge’s extensive library, that on the wall of the sitting-room next to his study. All four walls of the study were also covered in shelves full of books. It was what he called, with ironic pride,