Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

‘You already have a legend, Curtis. You’re Arturo da Silva’s sparring partner. You’re Papagaio’s Hercules. In the first round of your first fight, you knocked your opponent over. Floored him. What was it? A side corridor? People laughing. And when he got up, you did Arturo’s one-two. End of story. That’s what I call creating a legend, Curtis. The tooth stuck in your glove. Which you gave back to him. “Here you go, Manlle, your tooth.” You even wanted to sell him a ticket for the special train! That won’t be forgotten. That’ll go down in history. But as for me, I don’t have a legend.’

‘Yes, you do.’

‘What is it?’

‘That you were born in a fish basket. Among scales.’

‘That’s an embarrassment, not a legend.’

‘I like it,’ said Curtis. ‘My mother too. And Flora. Everyone does.’

His father at sea. His mother, a fishwife. Alone on her rounds, she gave birth down a lane and placed the child on the softest thing she had. Among hake, wrasse, sail-fluke, horse-mackerel, sardines. His mother would leave Muro Fishmarket early to sell cheap fish in the outlying villages. Horse-mackerel is humble, even in its colour. But Luís couldn’t understand how wrasse could be so cheap, having all those colours. It’s rainbow meat. He used to make a pause for the fish basket’s contents and crack jokes like the one in the Academy, ‘I’m just a poor sail-fluke, but don’t think I was lucky!’ Milagres, like everyone else, thought he’d made up the story about being born in a fish basket. He was certainly imaginative enough. Until one day she bumped into his mother, Aurora, the fishwife, who confirmed it was true. She’d been to Cabana and Someso and taken the path that leads to Castro by the River Lagar. There was nobody about. It was some time before anyone saw her.

‘What better place for him than among the fish?’

When Milagres cracked open a sea urchin, it made her life worthwhile. Curtis knew this and at low tide he’d collect sea urchins, since he knew where they hid in the rocks, where there were likely to be lots of them, though he preferred the risk of fishing for barnacles on Gaivoteira. If there was something that worried him about sea urchins, it was getting their spines stuck in his skin. He’d made his best friends there, on the sea’s stormiest coast. You didn’t have to pretend. Next to the stormy sea, you had no enemies. One of those rock friends was Luís, who taught him how to treat the spines. The problem is their thickness. Unlike other prickles, such as a horse chestnut’s, they don’t have a sharp point. When trying to remove them, people become desperate and carve out deep flesh wounds.

‘No craters,’ said Luís. ‘A sea urchin’s spines come out by themselves. They work their way through the flesh together with the tides. Go down to the sea at low tide and they’ll come out on their own.’

This was partly a joke, partly true, as always with Luís. He was almost always playing with something. With the sea as well. He played with the sea most of all. When it was calm, he’d leapfrog Cabalo das Praderías or hang off the side of Robaleira Point and provoke it, ‘Oy you, beardie, Neptune, stupid dummy! Look who’s here! The ghost of Terranova! The son’s father. The father who died on a Portuguese doris.’ ‘It’s a big boat,’ he’d told Curtis, ‘full of small vessels. Each old fisherman boards his own green launch and comes or doesn’t come back.’ Once a pair of Basque cod trawlers called to pick up Galician crewmen and Terranova mounted a bollard with an empty bottle as an aspergillum and in a priestly voice mimicked the words he’d once heard predicated from a pulpit, ‘Work, fisherman, work! Only work dignifies a man. Do not fear the biting wind or rising sea, for death respects the brave. More men die in wine than at sea.’ The crane operator felt sorry for him and moved the hook towards him. Luís hung on and the operator raised him, lowered him, swung him to the left and to the right until he began to laugh. The crane had a wooden cabin with windows and was like a house in the air, with a bed and everything. The operator had painted the name ‘Carmiña’ on the outside. All the cranes were named after women. There was a ‘Belle Otero’, an ‘Eve’ and, on the Wooden Jetty, a ‘Pasionaria’. ‘Carmiña’s’ operator had a shelf of books in the cabin. One section labelled ‘The Day’, with scientific texts, and another labelled ‘The Night’, with novels. The operator didn’t just read. He wanted to be a scientific writer.

‘Not literature. Entertaining, yes, but scientific.’

Apart from reference books, he had a folder where for years he’d stored notes and drawings he’d made and grouped together under the title ‘Intimacy of the Sea’. The work in progress had to be kept a secret. The folder was concealed behind a false leather cover, which said ‘Liverpool Telephone Directory’. One of those things that land up in ports. But Ramón Ponte partook of that special kind of pleasure which comes from sharing things that are supposed to be top secret. And he didn’t stop smiling from the moment he opened the folder, having revealed its contents, to the moment he closed it. It had to do with the sex life of marine creatures. ‘People are always talking about the sea,’ he said, ‘but no one’s noticed the main thing. The sea is the largest nursery on the planet and possibly in the universe. One huge orgiastic bed. The scene of the most unusual acts of copulation. The most surprising arts of insemination.’ He admired Élisée Reclus, his anarchic science, the union of branches of knowledge towards an understanding of natural history. To start with, you’d have to combine zoology and geography. Why do animals live in one place and not another? He was appalled by people’s ignorance, in this case the ignorance of many in Coruña, a maritime city, about the creatures of the sea. He read widely, there were times he spent the whole night in the cabin with an oil lamp, but the questions he returned to inevitably had to do with the reproduction of sea creatures, the same questions he’d asked himself as a child when he went fishing with his father. His fascination for octopuses. The superior intelligence in their eyes, the wisest of all invertebrates, the endless functions provided by their eight tentacles bearing suckers, from propulsion to building stone walls, ink as a defensive weapon, camouflage and mimicry.

‘What you’d really like to know is how octopuses do it, right?’

‘Right.’

The kind of question that, once asked, ends up involving a lot of people. Somebody in Odilo’s Bar on Torre Street brought up the third arm.

‘That’s the octopus’ penis. The third arm. As for the female, well, she has herself a good glove for that arm.’

‘Yeah, but how do you know which the third arm is if there are eight of them?’

The kind of question Terranova and Curtis would end up asking when they visited the cabin on ‘Carmiña’ and Ponte showed them the progress he’d made as a self-taught enthusiast on his treatise entitled ‘Intimacy of the Sea’. Thanks to his contacts in port, he obtained books and international publications that were translated for him at the Rationalist School. He also received illustrations and engravings he endeavoured to reproduce. Of current interest were not the techniques of reproduction, but amatory forms.

‘The ones making love in a cross, at right angles to each other, are lampreys.’

‘And which get the most satisfaction?’ asked Terranova.

‘How should I know, dumbhead? Some people are never satisfied and one day discover the third arm so to speak. I knew a woman who was only ever happy with an ear of maize. Her husband was difficult and clumsy. One thing is satisfaction, another time. As far as I’m aware, cuttlefish have the greatest stamina in the sea. Once they mate, that’s it, they never stop making love. They only part for the female to spawn and then they die.’