She hadn’t expected him to say anything. She’d have had to force it out of him with a dentist’s pliers. There was no way he was going to confess he’d been married for some time and the woman she’d once met in the studio wasn’t the leaseholder and an old friend. He’d added the last bit with a hint of complicity, as if to say: There is, or there was, something between us, but you’re much more important. What he actually whispered in her ear was, ‘She’s never happy with her portrait. I keep telling her it’s not my problem or the camera’s. Some people are never satisfied and confuse a photographer with a beautician.’
‘He believes everything he says,’ Rocío had told Silvia the day she accosted her. ‘He’s always confusing desires with realities. He lives inside a bubble. You’re hardly the first. Ask him and he’ll deny he’s married. Go ahead and ask him. Go on, be brave. I could show you folders full of photos of all his attempted conquests. Maybe it’s a kind of professional hazard. Maybe he has to fall in love in order to take good photos. I don’t know. Could be. It’s some time since I last looked good in a photo.’
Despite feeling dizzy, her senses on hold due to Rocío’s sudden arrival, Silvia listened to her with interest. A woman who could express the idea that Leica’s camera no longer loved her deserved to be heard.
But Rocío’s tone soon changed, perhaps as a reaction to the surprising calm she observed on the map of Silvia’s face.
‘I want you to know I won’t allow your relationship to continue. I’d crush you first. I can ruin your life, you’ve no idea how far I can go.’
As she said this, she pressed her thumb against the marble table of Delicacies, the café in Catro Camiños, whose display window had until then reflected Leica’s cheerful greeting with one of his Mastroianni smiles.
‘I’ve the means to do it.’
Are you married, Leica? Why didn’t you tell me? No. She wasn’t going to question him. Rocío’s directness made her feel fragile again. Silvia often thought about Medusa’s face. She also felt as if she’d been torn inside. She lived half a life and had noticed since being a girl that living a whole life was forbidden people like her in this patch of world. On days of sadness, she viewed the bay as a pool in which mullets fed on the dreams eyes threw into the sea.
‘I’ve the means to do it. To crush you.’
All Silvia had was her invisible mending. Even feeling love was a problem. She realised one side of her, the enlightened part, had been deceiving the other, which was in shade, since she’d met Leica. And both sides knew it. Though they’d decided to carry on. To live that moment of truth. To go to the lighthouse, make love under the vanes of light, with the music of the sea in the background.
No. She wasn’t going to use a dentist’s pliers to force an unnecessary confession out of him.
When Rocío used words to strike her, in her fragile state, she glimpsed a way out. The day the civil servant came to pick up the cape, she said she hadn’t quite finished yet, but she knew her price. Her papers. The papers she’d been refused a year earlier for being the daughter of who she was. This was her price for the invisible mending. A passport and a permit to work abroad.
‘Are you pregnant?’ asked the woman.
Silvia felt like a character in a radio serial that would never be broadcast. There were thousands of women trying to leave for this reason, because they were pregnant and unmarried or single mothers.
Seeing she remained silent, the civil servant said, ‘You’re not the first woman to be pregnant or the first to want to leave. But in your case,’ she added, ‘it’ll be easy. You’ve Rocío on your side. Permission granted.’
And still he went on about his publicity dream.
When the advert was ready and the great photo had been mounted, they’d go together to look at the window of Hexámetro and to meet Mr Bendai. The shop owner and future sponsor would thus be able to see how much more beautiful she was in person. And he had the vague hope, though he didn’t say this, that he’d give her a present. Possibly even a television.
She agreed, said she wanted to look at the advert, though she’d be embarrassed to be in the shop window for all Coruña to see. She imagined Miss Elisa standing there, proclaiming to all and sundry in a loud voice, ‘But I know that woman! And she doesn’t even have a fridge or a hoover! All she’s got is a little sewing machine you carry on your head.’
They laughed. Imagined being together, holding hands, in front of the shop window. Mr Bendai waving to them from inside with his enterprising smile. This was the adjective Leica used to describe the shopkeeper’s smile. Enterprising. Each smile was different and had to be described differently. The art of the photographer, like the great publicist he was, was to give each smile the correct photographic description.
Silvia’s smile was that of the woman advertising electrical appliances. He liked it. A hidden smile hanging in the shop window. Happiness within reach. The future exists and it’s in the window. Next they’d go to Paris. Live there for a while. Breathe another environment.
‘Your smile is deceptive,’ she said.
‘Deceptive but true.’
She was the one who suggested going again. Making love next to Hercules Lighthouse. In Leica’s car. On short wave, the music came and went. The beams of light from time to time illuminated the sea birds hovering like quavers in the night.
He didn’t realise there wouldn’t be any more nights.
‘When you finish that important assignment, we’ll have to take lessons in French. The foreigner and the florist. Every time I see that record in the studio, I crack up laughing. You were born with a French florist’s accent!’
‘Merde.’
‘Oh!. . et cette petite fleur. . bleue?’
‘La petite fleur. . bleue: “Ne m’oubliez pas.”’
‘C’est merveilleux! On peut dire tout sans parler.’
‘Everything.’
He didn’t even know it was the last night when, the next day, he attended the photographic session to welcome the dictator to Meirás Manor. He followed instructions. Took part in the open session and then waited to be shown inside.
‘Don’t be long,’ said an aide-de-camp. ‘Have everything ready. He’ll stand on that platform.’
‘Yes, I’d already thought about the question of height,’ he replied awkwardly.
But when Franco came in for a photo defined as that of a statesman in civilian clothes, Leica wasn’t entirely ready. On the contrary, he was paralysed, with his head turned. There, on a coat-stand in a corner of the room, was the royal cape, staring at him.
A Dramatic History of Culture
GABRIEL SAW HIM come through the door painted green. There was one to go to the lavatory. That was painted white. The green door, however, only opened for students of advanced stenography. It was Stringer who appeared. Said something to Catia. Then approached Gabriel, who was practising his speed. Tito Balboa was in a hurry. He was ecstatic. The director of the evening Expreso had called him into his office to talk about his report on extraterrestrials by Hercules Lighthouse. He was proud to have instigated a new genre in Galician journalism. Sometimes, when they coincided at the academy, he’d wait for him so that they could walk together. Gabriel would accompany him to the offices of the Expreso. Gabriel envied Stringer the geography he moved in, as if he lived in a superimposed city. His room at the International boarding-house, his adult’s place in the dining-room of the Tanagra restaurant, which included the right to cool down his gravy with red wine, his task of scouring the port and heralding the arrival of boats. Balboa would tell him about his literary projects. He was planning a great novel. Had what he needed. A space, a story to tell and a voice. Everything was important, everything had to be well structured. But the essential thing was to find that voice. To decide who’s doing the talking, that’s the main decision. And he’d finally found the voice. A very special voice, since it was both the protagonist and the place where the events took place.