‘Oy you, Chocolate! Are you deaf or something?’
What he cannot know is that the use of this nickname causes a jolt to pass through Curtis, who looks to the side and then backwards. There he sees Marcelino, the black seller of ties, always elegant, always with his samples on his outstretched arm. Huici used to say the town council should pay him a salary for touring the city with that range of colours and his smile. What’s the seller of ties doing by the fires? Chocolate? Chocolate’s dead, one of the first to be murdered. This news had reached Curtis when he was still receiving news the first days he was shut up in the attic. That’s why he looks backwards, in the hope that Antonio Naya, who worked in the Chocolate Factory and was also nicknamed Chocolate, has come to set the record straight.
‘What you looking at? Hey you with the cap! You also at the circus?’
This time, Curtis feels the insults approaching like lassos. His experience from when he was a boy and first set foot in the street tells him the first and second nicknames lead to a third with greater precision.
Two come together. Two orang-utans. A black and a white one. Aaaaoouuuu! Aaou!
The big one begins to imitate the shouts and gestures of a monkey. The pompon swings on his forehead like a loose pendulum. The soldiers around him burst out laughing. Start joining in the fun. Walking on all fours. Beating their chests. Bending and waving their arms with their hands in their armpits. Egging each other on. They look as if they’re dancing.
Flora, the Girl, whom Samantha out of envy rather than spite calls the Curl, even the Conception Curl, is performing an unusual dance in the Academy. On the sign, it says Un-deux-trois, but people still use the old name, the Dance Academy. All of Flora’s body is involved. The stamping of her feet tells a suspense story on the drum of the stage. It seems they only stop to listen. They could be saying what’s happening tonight under the same roof. For some time now, attentive spectators have known Flora’s dance ceased to be part of the entertainment as her body became more refined. Though when she dances, according to Samantha, her hands trace the outline of the bodies she used to have before her body got thinner, when she was more voluptuous. She’s not sickly. It’s not that. When it’s not raining, all day long stuck to the Coiraza wall. In the Orzán sea breeze. Like an eel drying out. In the sun, like a stone animal. And now she’s fallen in with those boxing types, who could at least come and spend some money. She won’t get thin! Not for nothing did the poet call her and Kif ‘the Coiraza sirens, the storm’s hetaeras’.
‘You’re happy, no doubt, but I don’t like the sound of hetaeras,’ said Samantha when she read Orzán Odyssey.
‘Well, the poet, an assumed name of course,’ said Flora, knowing how much Samantha went in for qualifications, ‘is a doctor, no less. A proctologist!’
‘Meaning?’
Flora winked. ‘An arse doctor, Samantha. An expert in humanity’s rarest centimetre.’
‘That must be a gold mine,’ said Samantha, having worked out whether she was pulling her leg or not.
‘Now I knew you’d be interested.’
‘I suppose poetry’s not so bad,’ the madame decided. ‘Storm’s hetaeras. Well, I’ve heard worse.’
The madame doesn’t like Flora being so obvious, dressing up as a flamenco dancer in black and white, wearing trousers, with her hair tied up, trying out a farruca. All her life doing bulerías and now she does this. To stand out. Despite the knowledge in Coruña, where they even understand about jazz.
She’s become interested in art in her old age.
But now she listens. She’s up in the attic, helping Milagres give birth, and she understands the heels’ Morse code.
‘Isn’t that Hercules, Arturo da Silva’s pupil?’
‘If it is, Manlle would know. Isn’t Manlle here?’
‘Not today. He said if it’s books, he wouldn’t even burn them.’
‘Well, I think it is Hercules. So the son of a whore’s still alive.’
‘Milagres? That’s not a serious name for a whore.’
‘I’m not a whore. I’ve come for the mattresses.’
‘The mattresses?’
‘Yes, madam. To wash them and fluff up the wool.’
Samantha almost burst out laughing. Milagres was like a ghost repeating a password. She’d said something similar when she arrived in town. She’d come to fluff up the mattresses as well. She was going to say somebody already did that. Down on Panadeiras Street was a store with a large garden, which in summer transformed into a huge blanket of wool fermenting in the sun, with the joy of wool when it fluffs out all the weight and tiredness. The stiff fatigue of wool. It’s just that Samantha, when she wasn’t Samantha, what she had to fluff up was herself, her body, ferment it and mash it, on a mattress of maize husks or wood chips. Fluff and spread her legs.
‘So it’s Milagres. Well, I’m not exactly the Pope. Call yourself what you like.’
When she arrived, she thought about kicking her out. She seemed more dim-witted than innocent. But soon she realised she was really afraid. Samantha had lost or thought she’d lost the notion of fear some time ago, but Milagres’ arrival made it obvious she hadn’t. A remote, familiar thread linked them. That’s why she’d been sent, with this reference. Which made Samantha furious inside. It was this detail that awoke her fear of the long anaesthesia, as if a ferret had been let loose in the burrow of her mind. There was this girl with a woman’s body. A girl who’d already carried all sorts on top of her head. A girl who’d come from fear of the village to fear of the town. From one form of slavery to another. She needed some time. That was her excuse for not sending her back at the first sign of fear.
‘Yes, madam. I’ve come to fluff up the mattresses.’
‘The mattresses? The mattresses and everything else. You’ll have to work from noon to night. Come on.’
She recalled the attic. Lifted the trap-door and said in the dark, ‘We’ll make a place for you up here. A cave in the sky.’
Here she is, biting a white cloth, exuding a dew that coats the bulb and the candle Pretty Mary, the girl who sometimes sings fados, has put in front of St Raymond Nonnatus with a coloured ribbon. Her fearful eyes are fixed on Samantha’s. Her sweat is cold because she’s giving all her heat to warm the room. Samantha remembers and keeps quiet. Lucky for you you’re here because you’d probably be alone in the village, bleeding to death, while the house blocks its ears, with no one to watch over you, no one to give your body back its heat.
The house beats to Flora’s heels, transmitting a code of dots and lines that echo up the stucco walls, climb the stairs and open the trap-doors. The dance is so close, so intense, it thunders on the roof, as if Flora were dancing in the beams from the lighthouse, which helps Milagres take her mind off the pangs inside, because the body that’s coming, by all that’s holy, is bigger than she is.
Milagres doesn’t know, but Samantha put a key under her pillow to help during the delivery, to help open the door of life, her vagina to be more precise, though she has more faith in the infusion of rue recommended by the midwife. Because that good woman is a midwife today, but three months earlier had come as an abortionist. She couldn’t believe the girl was pregnant. When she found out, when she realised that she wasn’t walking strange, but was pregnant, or both things at once, strange and pregnant, the madame was amazed. Milagres had managed to conceal it under various skirts and a woollen girdle she wrapped around her body several times. Quiet, elusive, working all day, with her back turned, cooking, making the beds and going early to sleep in the attic.