All Is Silence (2 page)

Back at the procession, he shouted with delight, ‘Dad, Dad!’

And his mother murmured, ‘Don’t call him that, not when he’s holding the cross.’

How well he did it, what conviction he put into his performance.

‘What a Christ, so verisimilar!’ he heard Exile remark to Dr Fonseca. In Noitía, everyone had a second name. Not exactly a nickname. Like having two faces, two identities. Or three. Because Exile was also Lame. And both were the schoolteacher, Basilio Barbeito.

How well he did it, Lucho Malpica. His face contorted with pain, but also dignified, with ‘historic distance’ as Exile would say, the look of one who knows that the flatterers of yesterday will be the deniers of tomorrow. He even stumbled during the procession.

The weight he carried was great. Some of the lashes, owing to the theatrical enthusiasm of his tormentors, ended up really hurting. And then, along the way, that canticle of women: ‘Forgive your people, Lord! Forgive your people, forgive, Lord! Do not be eternally angry.’ Exile pointed out that the celestial scenography helped. There was always a passing storm cloud on hand to eclipse the sun.

‘Verisimilar. All they need now is to actually kill him.’

‘What a horrendous song!’ complained Dr Fonseca. ‘A people on its knees, sick with guilt, pleading with God for a smile. A crumb of happiness.’

‘Yes, but don’t believe it. There’s always a touch of irony in what the people do,’ remarked Exile. ‘Notice it’s only the women who are singing.’

Ecce Homo glanced over at his son and winked his left eye. This image would remain engraved on the boy’s memory. Together with the teacher’s admiring comment. So verisimilar! He sensed what it could mean, but not entirely. It had something to do with the truth, but was somehow superior to the truth. One notch above it. He kept a hold of this word so he could use it to define what most surprised him, amazed him, filled him with desire. Having finally embraced Leda, having finally been able to take that step, leave the islands and advance towards her, that body from the Tenebrous Sea, what he thought was it couldn’t possibly be true. It was all so barbarous, so free, so verisimilar.

WITH THE SWAYING
of the coffin, in that dark, enclosed space, Fins found it difficult to breathe.

The space was a real coffin floating on the sea, not far from the shore where the waves break and foam. Like a barge, it was tethered by a rope which Brinco held on to. He pulled on the rope, bringing the coffin closer and then letting it go with the ebb and flow of the waters. Next to him, on the sand, were caskets, some broken, some intact, strange moribund containers, their red lining on view, perplexed remains of a shipwreck in the beyond.

This game began to unsettle him. To calm down, as he did whenever he felt himself suffocating, Fins timed his agitated breathing to the sound and rhythm of the beating waves.

He counted ten inhalations. And shouted, ‘Brinco, Brinco! Get me out of here, you bastard!’

He waited. He didn’t hear a voice or notice any special movement that might indicate his call was being heeded. Sometimes he’d talk to himself. He thought this was another peculiarity of his, a further derivation of the
petit mal
. But when one discovers a fault, one normally tries to find out to what extent that fault is commonplace. And he’d come to the conclusion that everybody spoke to themselves. His mother. His father. The fishwives. The gatherers of shellfish and seaweed. The washerwomen. The milkmaid. The navvy. Blind Birimbau. The priest. Exile. Dr Fonseca on his solitary walks. The man in charge of the Ultramar, Brinco’s dad, whenever he was polishing the glasses. Mariscal after knocking the ice cubes together in his glass of whisky. Leda with bare feet on the frill of the waves. Everybody seemed to do it.

‘What a bastard. I’m going to tear your soul from your body. All the worms off your head.’

He deliberately banged his forehead against the coffin lid. Started shouting again, at the limit of his strength by now. An international cry for help. ‘Víctor, you son of a bitch!’

He reconsidered. There was another possibility. One that made him really mad, ‘I curse the father who made you, Brinco!’

Well, if that didn’t arouse an immediate response, he would have to give up. He took a deep breath. Dreamed that Nine Moons had come to lend him a hand. And along the seashore, barefoot, playing at walking the high wire with her flip-flops in her hand, Leda arrived. She was balancing a basket on her head, crammed full of sea urchins.

When he saw the girl, Brinco tugged the coffin towards the shore.

‘What are you doing? That brings bad luck.’

Brinco brought his forefinger to his mouth to make her be quiet. Leda deposited her basket on the sand and hurried over to see the remains of futuristic death scattered all over the beach.

‘Stop messing around and help!’ said the boy.

Leda paid attention and helped to pull on the rope until the floating coffin was back on firm ground.

‘Inside is a disgusting insect,’ mocked Brinco. ‘Come and see!’

Leda peered over with curiosity, but also with distrust.

Brinco lifted the lid of the box. Fins remained motionless, pale-faced, holding his breath, his arms tied to his body with a tightly fastened belt, eyes closed, in the posture of the deceased.

Leda stared at him in amazement, unable to speak.

‘Are you getting up or not, Calamity?’ mocked Brinco. ‘Our Lady of the Sea is here to see you.’

Fins opened his eyes. And met Leda’s astonished expression. She kneeled down and stared at him with eyes wide open, glistening slightly, but also suddenly filled with joy. What she came out with was a protest, ‘You’re a couple of idiots. Death is hardly a game.’

Leda touched Fins’ eyelids with her fingertips.

‘A game? He was dead,’ said Brinco. ‘You should have seen him. He went all pale and stiff . . . Blimey, Fins! You looked just like a corpse.’

Leda watched Fins, sounding him with her eyes, as if she wanted to share a secret with his body. ‘It’s nothing. They’re just absences.’

‘Absences?’

‘Yes, absences, that’s what they’re called. Absences. It’s nothing. And don’t go blabbering about it!’

The girl looked up and soon changed her tone. ‘And these coffins?’

‘They have an owner already.’

‘That wouldn’t be your dad by any chance?’

‘What’s wrong with that? He saw them first.’

‘Funny, isn’t it?’ exclaimed Leda ironically. ‘He’s always the first.’

Brinco’s expression turned sour. ‘You have to be awake when others are sleeping.’

Leda glared at him, still mocking, ‘Of course you do. That’s why they say your dad goes around howling at night.’

He’d have liked to fight her. They’d done this once, played at fighting. The three of them. Whenever he sees her, he starts to feel difficulty breathing. Fury rising in his body. The thumping of his heart injecting a burning red neon light into his eyes. She’s prettier when she’s silent. She doesn’t know that the mouth is for keeping quiet.

‘You better be careful what things you howl, Nine Moons.’

‘One day someone will tear your soul from your body,’ she replied. Whenever she got mad, she spoke differently. In a voice with shadow.

‘You’ve plenty of tongue, but you don’t scare me.’

‘They’ll pluck the worms from your head one by one.’

Fins rose from the coffin, suddenly wide awake, and quickly made to change the subject. ‘So is it true you’re going to sell these coffins at the inn?’

‘We sell lots there,’ said Brinco. ‘Anyway, you shut up, you’re dead.’

THE MAIN BEACH
in Noitía was shaped like a half-moon. To the south lay the fishing district of San Telmo, which had grown as a shoot of the village which started it all, A de Meus, with its stone houses and sea-painted doors and windows. Further south were the disused salting places and the last drying place of octopus and eel. There, sheltered from the widows’ wind, the ramp of the first harbour was preserved. After the rocks of Balea Point came Corveiro Bay. In the middle of it all, the town, spilling new buildings like scattered dominoes. Between San Telmo and Noitía, following the coastal road and before reaching the bridge at Lavandeira da Noite, was Chafariz Cross. From there started a smaller road which climbed uphill to the Ultramar inn, bar, shop, cellar, with its adjoining dance hall and cinema Paris-Noitía.

The far north, where the river Mor and its reed bed formed a natural border, was still untouched. This was a zone of dunes, the oldest with abundant vegetation to leeward, with a predominance of the bluey-green patience of sea holly. The front line of dunes was very steep, where the vanguard of the storm hit first. At the top of these dunes, tied down with the long hair of Bermuda grass, rose a crest of marram grass against the wind. Further north, protected by a natural armour of rocks, was another, more isolated beach. But anyone looking for it, after a pine grove to the rear of dead dunes, would find the emblazoned gate and walls of Romance Manor.

Which is why the vans stopped before that, at one end of the half-moon, where there were barely any bathers even in summer, except on a public holiday. Most holidaymakers didn’t make it past the reeds. But people in vans were not holidaymakers. They were something else. Some arrived at other times of the year. Like these two, this couple, who’d left their van in a corner at the end of the track used as a car park, at the start of the dunes. It was a Volkswagen which had been fitted out as a caravan and painted the colours of the rainbow, with curtains on the windows.

Leda didn’t say a word. She was used to doing things like this, of her own free will and on the quiet. What Fins and Brinco did was follow her. They clambered up the inside of a dune until they were confronted by the sea. Hidden by the crest of marram grass, they could see without being seen. There they were, the couple. Rather than swimming, they played at moving away and coming closer with their bodies. In the waves, in foamy whirlpools, attempting not to lose their footing. In the end, both man and woman emerged from the sea. They were holding hands and ran laughing over the sand in the direction of the dunes. They were both tall and slim. She had long, blond hair. It was a luminous day with a young, springy kind of light which glistened on the sea. To the spies, what they were seeing resembled a hypnotic mirage.

‘They’re hippies,’ said Brinco with a certain contempt. ‘I heard about them in the Ultramar.’

And Leda murmured, ‘Well, they look Dutch or something to me.’

‘Ssssssssh!’

Amid laughter, Fins told them to be quiet. The couple, seeking somewhere to hide, came closer to the peeping Toms. The lovers caressed each other with their bodies, but also with the ebb and flow of their breath, their words.

‘Ohouijet’aimejet’aimeaussibeaucouptuestplusbellequelesoleil tu m’embrasses.’

‘Ohouioucefeudetapeautuvienstuvienstumetues tu me fais du bien.’

The accelerated pleasure of bodies on sand, that pleasurable violence, the throbbing of their whispers, unsettled the sentinels. Fins ducked down and leaned against the inner slope of the dune, and the other two copied him.

‘That was French,’ said the red-faced Fins in a whisper.

‘Who cares?’ said Brinco. ‘You can understand everything.’

It was Leda who decided to take one last look. And what she saw was the torso of the woman on top of the man, astride him, copulating, lifting her head to the sky and stopping all the wind, tensing her body, filling the horizon, everything an attentive gaze could take in. At the highest point, the woman closed her eyes, and so did Leda.

Then Leda started rolling downhill. And Fins and Brinco had no choice but to follow her.

‘If they’re hippies, I suppose they’d be talking hippy.’

They’d already passed the bridge by the reeds, but were still a little nervous. Their bodies had yet to settle in their bodies. From time to time a mouth would let out a blast. They didn’t talk about what they’d seen, but what they’d heard.

The other two burst out laughing. Leda didn’t like it.

‘I was only joking!’

‘No you weren’t,’ said Brinco in order to wind her up. And he continued the joke: ‘Hippies speak hippy!’

‘You’re a couple of idiots. You’ve a screw loose.’

‘Don’t get mad,’ said Fins. ‘Nothing’s wrong.’

‘You can go to hell, go write on water,’ shouted Leda. ‘You’re both the same.’

THEY WALKED, DEEP
in thought, along the side of the coastal road. The two boys had their hands in their pockets and were watching Leda’s bare feet on the tarmac. She played with her flip-flops, humming the tune of ‘Lola’ and swinging them in the air like huge dragonflies.

When they reached Chafariz Cross, on the other side of the road leading to the Ultramar, they saw another boy who was younger than them. He was calling to them and waving his arm urgently.

‘It’s Chelín! He must have found something,’ exclaimed Leda.

Brinco cannot avoid being sarcastic whenever he sees Chelín. ‘Sure, he’ll have found something. He doesn’t know how to live without that damn pendulum.’

‘Well, it works sometimes, doesn’t it, Leda?’ said Fins in a conciliatory tone.

‘Only because he’s so damn stubborn,’ replied Brinco.

Leda gazed at them both as if rebuking them for their ignorance. ‘His dad used to unearth springs. He was clairvoyant, a water diviner. He discovered all the wells in this area with a rod or pendulum. There are people like that, who see into what’s hidden. With magnetic powers.’ She learned her trade in the river and sea, washing and collecting shellfish. Her speech had a gurgle that made her stand out. An excess load that acted as defence. And she still had time to murmur with what was left of her open body. ‘Some people are just smoke. They don’t kill or frighten, tie or untie.’

‘Amen,’ replied Brinco.

‘That must be why he’s so good at stopping the ball,’ interjected Fins. ‘Hidden powers!’

‘Maybe. But where the hell is he taking us?’

Leda ran to meet Chelín. She knew where they were going. For a short while the path became deeper, surrounded on either side by clumps of laurel, holly and elder, which bent down as if to form a vault. It finally gave way to a stone staircase. Next to each step, fermenting moss that resembled a curled-up hedgehog. Suddenly, on top of the hill, a house which seemed to be propped up, supported, by nature. One of those ruins that wants to disappear but can’t, which is bound, not cleft, by the ivy on the walls. Behind a tangle of gorse and broom were two hollows. A dislocated wooden door and a distrustful window with a squint. The building was so taken by nature that the visible part of the roof was a field of foxgloves, and at the eaves the thickest branches of ivy intertwined in order to fall back on themselves as gargoyles. On the threshold of the door, the leaves had respected the tiles, perhaps because of their vegetal forms, which were modernist in style, orange and green, and adorned an inscription in letters glazed blue on white: ‘American Union of Sons of Noitía, 1920’.