‘Sheep with umbrellas, I suppose,’ commented Pombo ironically.
‘Only when the flock has a shepherd. Then they fall with a large umbrella, of the type called “seven parishes”. In the Caribbean, I’ve seen it rain a whole chapter, a Mexican chapter.’
‘It’s normal for a flock to have a shepherd of souls,’ added Pombo, ‘and fall right on top of a pagan from Death Coast.’
‘What’s frightening is to be in the area of calm and think the worst is over,’ said Lens seriously, ignoring Pombo’s jokes. ‘That’s it, you think the worst is over when in fact it’s just beginning. You think the hurricane’s gone and you’re in the eye of the storm.’
His tone now smacked undeniably of the truth. The ship’s name was right. The Mara Hope.
As they listened, even Pombo’s mocking hemisphere was eclipsed. Whether in suspense or under the force of Lens’ memory, the silence in the Dance Academy had acquired the sound of an electric hum, of sultry heat, around the green lamp, which Pombo’s long eyelashes had been drawn to.
‘It’s terrible what you’ve endured,’ Lens continued. ‘Everything’s in disarray, the boat and your bones. And then you find yourself under the illusion that it’s all over. Because the other boats you thought had foundered in the storm are coming towards you, safe and sound. A horizon of ships. You’re dumbstruck by such a miracle. Merde! Shit! Verdammt und zugenäht!’
The harpooner, like many other maritime residents and guests, practised the art of saying ugly words in foreign languages for them to sound a little distinguished. A kind of crude elegance.
‘What happened?’ asked Pombo on tenterhooks, he who’d heard so much.
‘Not a single ship. It was a decapitated forest. Bits of forest torn to shreds which, after the storm, came together at sea and interlaced roots to hold up trunks and crowns like the masts of sailing ships, with nature’s will for weaving tapestries out of tatters. It’s normal in shipwrecks to find a brotherhood of remains. But this was as big as the horizon itself.’
The harpooner’s enormous hands ordered the geology of earth on the table’s tectonic plates. He took a slice out of the table with the corner of his right hand and lifted up a chunk of Yucatan. ‘It was this wooded territory coming towards us, towards our ship in the area of central calm.’
‘Was that before or after you had cataracts?’ asked Pombo at last, unable to control himself.
‘What?’
‘The wood moving at sea.’
‘I’m talking here to Hercules. Anyone else can shut up or provide tobacco.’
‘Portuguese blond,’ said Pombo in a conciliatory tone, holding out a cigarette.
‘To start with, we thought no,’ Lens continued, ‘they were boats, an entire fleet that had been reunited. Because we could hear shouts as well. Isolated, distant. Unintelligible. Sometimes they sounded like hurrahs of joy carried on the wind, others like cries of agony and anguish filling the sea with fear. We approached with our hearts in our mouths. No, they weren’t boats. This was no vast fleet of salvaged ships. As we got closer, our eyes were forced to accept something even more fantastical. What was coming towards us was the forest. The sea had gathered strips of wood, drifting timbers. The masts we descried in the distance were in fact large trees, huge mahoganies. Then we heard an orchestral guffaw. A spine-chilling peal of laughter. All of that nature was making fun of us. Laughter can be truly terrifying when you don’t know where it’s coming from. Until the mystery was revealed. The trees had their birds in them. A colourful display of parrots, orioles and long-crested cockatoos. Someone shouted, “The birds are warning us!” But it was too late. When we tried to turn around, the boat was surrounded by the forest.’
‘And what happened?’ asked Curtis uneasily.
‘The forest gobbled us up. Swallowed us whole.’
‘That’s more or less what happened to me with the wolf,’ said Pombo after the requisite pause to take a swig.
‘What happened to you if you never left this hole?’
‘I’m from the mountains, and proud of it. Bloody mountains! One freezing winter’s day with a lot of snow, the height of a man at least, I was sent with a message down by the border and bumped into the wolf on my way. It stared at me. I stared at it.’
Everyone remained silent. Pombo marked a bony kind of time by rapping the bar with his knuckles.
‘And what happened?’ asked Lens finally.
‘It ate me.’
Pombo adjusted the knot of his necktie and stared at the harpooner artistically. ‘What did you expect? It ate me! That’s right. The wolf ate me.’ And he waited before delivering the final blow, ‘Just as the forest ate that ship of yours.’
‘You don’t know what the area of calm is,’ replied the harpooner painfully.
Some of the fishing boats still have their festive pennants. The vessels haven’t left port for a month. Haven’t been back out to sea. The sirens sounded on the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. A few days later, with the military coup, they sounded again. A day and a night. Without stopping. In the Academy’s attic, Curtis heard them one after the other. He couldn’t see. He could hear. He heard shots and sirens. Shots against sirens. For a time, the shots stuttered, as if sliding down the sirens’ greasy hair. The shots increased, the sirens diminished. The sound of the sirens was round, slow, fleshy, labial. The shots were straight lines which multiplied, pulling on each other, sieving space. Eventually there was only one siren left. Very clear. In long hoots. The shots fell silent. Seemed to be listening as well, in surprise. Then there was a loud volley. The death throes of the last sound being riddled with bullets. Lots of the pennants are frayed, bitten. The atmosphere around the burning books is full of holes. Perforated.
The smoke was looking for somewhere to hold on to, to clamber up. In the upper part of his body, Curtis felt the tickle of its creepers and suckers. Climbing up his face. Invading his nose. Catching on his eyes. Sealing his mouth.
Another day, the harpooner had told him how a sandstorm had consumed paradise in a single night. A place called Tatajuba in Brazil. Curtis realised he wasn’t making it up, he’d been there as he said, from the way he went into details. He even made a pencil drawing on the marble of the kitchen table. How well the harpooner could draw America! His map of Europe was pretty good too. On the Iberian Peninsula, he took great care over the twists and turns of the Galician coast. But America came out from north to south as if by memory. He put a cross to show where paradise had disappeared overnight, eaten up by the sand. This is Tatajuba. This is Camusin. He’d been walking from Camusin, all along the beach, because he’d heard what a paradise it was. On the way, he slept on the beach and woke up to see a sow with piglets bathing in the sea. Or else they were eating fish. Because the fish there could be caught by hand. Skate, swordfish, mullet and porpoise, all jumping about. A Galician fisherman’s dream. Pigs swimming and fish jumping in the air. When he reached Tatajuba, it really was paradise. The following day, it no longer existed. A sandstorm had swallowed it up overnight. What Curtis remembered best about the sandstorm that buried paradise in one night was how the harpooner told him people stopped talking. The sand set their teeth chattering and drowned out their words. And that’s when the men and women who’d worked so hard, with such devotion, gave up.
Curtis hadn’t read many books. All the burning books had something to do with him. They were books he hadn’t yet read. But this one had clearly belonged to him since he’d set foot on the scene. In the end, he picked up A Popular Guide to Electricity.