‘Hey you, put that back!’ The stocky soldier hadn’t let him out of his sight and this time he really did take out his pistol.
‘Now, now, calm down!’ said Samos. ‘It’s just a clown looking for some Tarzan comics. Which one of them would dare show his face?’
Arturo da Silva used first to write out his texts by hand. He had curious handwriting. It was very neat, as if the act of writing, though it called for action, or perhaps because of this, was incompatible with speed. Given the size of his fingers and the heavy machinery of his hands, it must have been a real effort. And the truth is Dafonte, Holando, Félix Ramón, Varela, Curtis, Terranova, Marconi, Leica, Seoane, all the new group of boys who visited the Shining Light premises, some of whom contributed to Brazo y Cerebro, tried to make room when he was using the table to write, forging a territory with his bulk, his head close to the paper and his whole body focused on moving that caravan of words like beasts of burden forwards against all the odds. To start with, the paper had the texture of rocky ground or was treacherous as a marsh. A few words opened the way, like tracks, sleepers or stepping-stones. They were the eyes and feet of those running behind.
It helped him to hear a voice, a voice like that of Amil, the teacher at the Rationalist School, tugging at his fingers.
Amil, who always talked to them of Heraclitus and Parmenides. Life, the course of the universe, all explained as a river. A river which is never the same, which is always changing. You cannot step into the same river twice. A changeless river, a river which is always the same. Heraclitus and Parmenides are so familiar he’s surprised no one in the city is named after them. They’re in the ring. Heraclitus constantly on the go. Parmenides solid as a rock.
You cannot step into the same river twice, he wrote. It wasn’t highly original, but he was pleased with this beginning. It would allow him to talk of that point in history, of everything that was happening, based on the trip upriver due to take place on 2 August.
Reality is constantly changing. We can say it’s never the same, as Heraclitus said of the river. Heraclitus was right, but Parmenides wasn’t wrong. He maintained the river was always the same. Humanity flows like a river. We think everything’s changing, moving, progress is driving history. But it may be an illusion. Parts of the river are stagnant and lifeless.
He created a circle with his arms. And out of that circle an article slowly took shape. As he typed it up, his body imitated its movements.
‘I’m going to call it “The River of Life and Death”.’
‘What river’s that? The Nile? The Ganges?’
‘No, stupid. The river that passes through my village.’
He typed on the Ideal, using a couple of fingers. Above it, a bare bulb hung from interlaced wires in a cloth casing. As his fingers danced over the keys, Curtis couldn’t help seeing Arturo’s exploratory movements inside the ring. On tiptoe, as if he were skipping. His whole body behind the fingers that were typing. Gradually warming up. Now jumping by themselves. When the metal bars got caught up, he took a deep breath. He lived the construction of each sentence in its literalness. As he sought each letter, his fingers an extension of his eyes, what registered on the paper was for the first time. For example, when he wrote ‘elevation’, what Arturo did as he pressed the key was add everything the word could lift. And so, when he moved on to another sentence, his final flourish, the one he’d thought long and hard about, the one that said ‘The river flows inside of us and life is the art of hydrokinetics’, then he got a little nervous, excited, and pressed down hard with the fingers of a dowser searching for a spring. He found a patch of hard ground, the bars got entangled, the carriage got stuck.
‘It’s no problem,’ said Dafonte, who understood the Ideal best. As he repaired the machine, he looked at what he’d written. ‘What’s hydrokinetics?’
‘Something to do with reading in water. I came across it in The White Magazine. It’s a naturist idea.’
‘You’d better explain it.’
He nodded in time to his index finger pressing the ‘x’ key and deleting what he’d written. At first, he didn’t like to delete things, but then he started to enjoy it. The ‘x’ was a curlew leaving its footprints on the sand. He thought as well about the pleasure of stepping in others’ footprints, filling their mould on the beach. He deleted. X xxxxxxxxxx. Curlews. Sandpipers. Plovers. Redshank. Bunting.
Curtis looks up from the book. He’s already learnt there are different kinds of heat. Sensible heat, latent heat and specific heat. Specific heat is the most important, technically speaking. .
‘Well, blow me down if that isn’t Papagaio’s Hercules. Arturo da Silva’s pupil. Of course it is.’
They move towards him, with diligence, forming a circle.
The silence is broken by the sound of turning wheels. Everything seems to be waiting. The gulls adorning the pinnacles of roofs and masts. The sound increases, turning on the stones. Curtis and the Falangists look towards the Rey building on Porta Real. There are the caryatids with flowers in their hair, supporting the balconies. Women’s heads holding the house up.
Then the horse appears. It was a wooden horse making all that noise. The horse Leica kept in his studio on Nakens Street. His father walks in front, with the travelling photographer’s tripod camera over his left shoulder and his inseparable cane in his other hand. Leica pulls on the pretty piebald horse, which today looks like a natural animal, part of the caryatids’ modernist landscape.
‘When are you taking that horse out?’ Curtis had asked him not long before. He couldn’t understand why he kept it shut up in his studio. It would draw the crowds in Recheo Gardens. The finest photographer’s horse. And Coruña was a city that had lots of wooden and papier-mâché horses. It even had a horse factory at the bottom of the hill of Our Lady of the Rosary. But the horse Carirí, the horse that had come all the way from Cuba, was quite a horse. ‘When are you taking it to Recheo?’
‘I’m not. It was my father who brought it from Cuba. The whole lot came together. Cameras and horse. I think it was the horse he liked most. But I don’t want to be an instant photographer. I want to take artistic photos. Why don’t you have it?’
The page of an illustrated magazine nestled at Antonio Vidal’s feet the day of his departure in July 1933 on the quay in Havana. This lost, flying page, which had reached the end of the pier, along the ground, and was about to fall into the sea, but suddenly gained height, spun in the air and came towards him as if it had found a direction. It landed at his feet, he didn’t have to harpoon it, spear it with the tip of his cane.
Spirals of smoke rising from their coquettish lips
He felt the smoke had nothing to do with tobacco or the picture of a happy life, but was a message in itself, aimed at him, rising from the paper like a swift climbing plant. He could read so well because a large part of the surface was taken up with photos of women’s faces. He couldn’t tell them apart. They were smiling, but each one seemed to contain a mystery. At this distance, for a man who, to walk, had to overcome his legs’ resistance and whom others were beginning to regard as a watch running slow, all the smiles were as one before disappearing into the cone of the paper wrapped around the cane.
Farewell, Havana.
The page searching for him now in Coruña has other concerns. Mayarí shakes the sheet in an effort to get rid of it. While he finds it difficult to resist paper flying in front of him, today he’s on another mission. To reach the coach as soon as possible and save his son. The son pulling on the wooden horse. Ever since he set eyes on that horse, he’s always trusted it.