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.’
Both Luís Terranova and Curtis were listening very carefully because they’d caught cuttlefish in their hands and now they understood why there were times these extraordinary beings with ten jet-propelled arms didn’t try to escape, but gave themselves up so easily. The trouble is the well of knowledge, once opened, is never filled and Luís and Curtis wanted to know how crabs and sea cows do it, with their armour-plated bodies and legs that are pincers. ‘Here’s an interesting detail,’ said Ponte, searching in the folder for the notes he’d made based on the experience of the Sea Club’s divers, whom he called the Phosphorescents.
‘Crustaceans also mate for a long time, the difference being the males carry the females on their back, take them for an amorous walk on the bottom of the bay.’
‘And sea urchins?’ Curtis suddenly remembered. ‘How do they do it?’
‘Sea urchins live together, but love at a distance,’ said Ponte somewhat mysteriously as he closed the folder. ‘I don’t know! At this rate, I’ll have to put the scientific texts under “The Night” with my novels.’ He had Haunted Shipwrecks and Captain Nemo’s Lovers together with copies of ‘The Ideal Novel’.
All the same, the most precious object in the cabin on ‘Carmiña’, which the operator had set up on a kind of pedestal, was the ball from the Diligent. According to legend, which it would be sacrilege to question in the operator’s presence, the first leather football to arrive in Coruña. The Diligent was a British ship. Some crewmen started a game up on deck and the ball fell on to the quay. ‘As soon as it bounced off the ship, it was obvious the Diligent’s ball wasn’t coming back. It seemed to want to stay on dry land,’ said Ponte ironically. There it was, on the altar of ‘Carmiña’, like the orb of a strange planet.
‘That’s enough science for one day,’ said the operator. ‘Let’s see, Luís, sing us that carnival tango, the one about the Columbine who put smoke from the fire of her heart under her eyes.’
Terranova was at home there. He felt relaxed in the cabin on ‘Carmiña’, the house that moved without ever leaving, which was simultaneously on land, at sea and in the sky. Very rarely, the wind would get up inside his head and he’d battle with the world. He seemed to be collecting all the nicknames pumped out of all the ships’ bilges. You had to let him wander alone, with his hands in his pockets. When Curtis learnt this from Arturo, it was the first thing he passed on to Terranova. A human’s best training is with his shadow. You have to fight with your shadow.
‘Who told you that?’
‘Arturo da Silva. When he was in prison, years ago, he said he spent the time fighting his shadow. It taught him a lot.’
They were on Atocha Alta, on their way to Hercules Cinema. They took up combat positions by the wall next to the entrance. Each of them ready to fight his shadow.