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By Root 545 0

‘my Crypt’. Soon this was the name everyone used, just as that part of the sitting-room Chelo used for painting ended up being known as the Chinese Pavilion, a name inspired by a folding screen from Macao (‘exquisitely designed,’ they’d taught Gabriel to say as an oral exercise) which the judge had bought in Portugal, on one of his trips as visiting lecturer to Coimbra University, and which soon became an inevitable border point in the house. The name created the space. A landscape of paintings and plants, which seemed to be constantly on the go. In one corner, an exotic touch: a large pot of bamboos, together with ferns and herbaceous plants such as Aureola. In the eastern part of the house, there was a clear preference for plants. Different species all over, on the floor, on the furniture, all along the gallery of course, there were the begonias responding with conviction, even more in winter, to Chelo’s warmth: its leaves went further than the flowers in intensity of colour.

So the sitting-room had two, almost symmetrical hemispheres, though there was a second dimension, that of the line of shadow from the central pillar, which showed the sun’s daily orbit, so that, mornings, the library side was left in shade and the sun illuminated the so-called Pavilion whose inner circle, the nucleus, contained the painter with her easel and a table like the trough found in rural homes. Her Technicolor Table. Instead of bread, the trough held a mine of tubes, jars, pigments, resins, varnishes, lacquers, bottles and the odd rock with plates of mica and other minerals. On top of the table, aside from bowls, plates, tins and boxes which served as palettes, was a pile of soiled cloths. Which grew and grew. Chelo didn’t need someone to make a quip about this. She herself said it was her finest work. She only got rid of the cloths when they overflowed the trough and started invading the outer circle, which went beyond the bamboos. It was then that O, the washerwoman, stuffed the colour-stained cloths into gunny sacks.

When they reached Lapas Beach, they saw a gamela walking. Out of the water, crossing the sand. With the stubborn air of riverboats, even when they’re sailing. Its upturned bottom had the exact curvature of someone leaning over a balcony. A strange being, the boat, a kind of enormous, comical creature painted the colours of dawn, a product of the sea’s imagination. The boat suddenly turned towards them. Under its large shell of white and coloured planks was a smiling, toothless man. The gaps in his teeth made him look more like Mayarí. When Chelo insisted he use his stay in Coruña to order a set of false teeth, he’d always make excuses and crack one of his favourite jokes, which Gabriel didn’t understand immediately, because he pointed to his eyes, not his mouth, ‘I’m bidentate, you see.’

Except when he was talking to himself, Mayarí was pretty quiet. He seemed to understand his silence as a way of taking up as little space as possible. At the same time, however, when he was asked a question, especially by his son-in-law, the judge, he made every effort to satisfy the other, which in his view meant seasoning seriousness with a pinch of humour, the closest thing to a sweet taste. Their relationship was formal; conversation, if it existed, was restricted to dinnertime. Gabriel, if he was paying attention, couldn’t help noticing the difference between his father’s and grandfather’s teeth. The difference was . . . monumental. His father’s teeth, apart from being perfect, were made of marble. His grandfather’s teeth, the few there were, were made of granite. Stone slabs. Years later, he could be more precise. His father’s teeth were neoclassical, Mayarí’s dolmenic. From the evening before, he remembered part of the conversation, Mayarí’s intervention, which was celebrated with laughter and seemed to him to contain secret information. The judge had asked him why so many people were abandoning work in the countryside. Why they were leaving the villages. Mayarí thought about it for a moment, adopted a more solemn air and said,