‘I’m getting all muddled. Someone who relates their life, which is a mutation of space, a kind of nomadic home. A place which is a living being that stays the same, but changes every day.’
‘A boat?’ asked Gabriel.
‘Well, almost. It’s possible. It’s not a bad idea. “My name is Aurora and this is my last journey. .” If the trees of Cecebre Wood can talk, then why not a boat? There was once a fishing boat from the Great Sole on Lazareto Beach, waiting to be dismantled. Its last skipper, the one who’d moored it a year before, happened by and climbed up on deck out of curiosity. The boat was in ruins, but once the old skipper was on board, it started to shake furiously. Wouldn’t let him go.’
‘Could he not get off?’
‘No. He was saved with broken bones like the ship’s timbers.’
My name is Santa Cristina and I’m responsible for the transport of passengers in the bay. It’s a summer’s day, in the early evening. I’m crossing the bay. On the way back from the beach, at dusk, I’ll be full of bathers, but now, on the way over, I’m almost empty. Astern, to starboard, leaning on the rail, watching the city we’re leaving, there’s a man in a white suit made of a light fabric that is so loose the wind forms part of his body and clothing. On the other side, to port, looking in the same direction, there’s a woman in a dress of sea-blue silk gauze printed with bows. With her right hand, she’s holding on to the skirt around her thighs, so the wind forms part of her hair. A little further back, sitting down, in shorts and a T-shirt with blue and white horizontal stripes, there’s a boy who must be about eight years old, absorbed by the trembling of a compass needle. He looks up and shouts to the woman, ‘We’re going from West to East!’ He smiles, proud of the information. This is the only time the man and the woman’s eyes meet and they hold their gaze. They also smile. When I moor at the stone quay, the woman and the child disembark first and go past the paved ramp to the line of polychrome beach huts. The man walks at a distance. Carries his jacket folded over his arm. The short-sleeved white shirt, which is unbuttoned, makes his body real. There’s a wooden kiosk with ice creams and refreshments. Here they rent out beach huts. The woman pays, takes the key and retraces her steps. It’s the second time the man and the woman’s eyes meet, while the boy’s attention is still taken up with the compass needle. ‘Now we’re going back West!’ he tells his mother. All the beach huts are painted in vertical stripes. With the colours that are most often used in maritime Galicia. On the hut the woman enters, they’re red and white. On the hut the man’s about to enter, they’re white and green. The tide is low. The woman, in a bathing suit, spreads out two towels, hers and the child’s, on that part of the beach closest to the quay. The man comes out of his hut, looks around, places his folded towel on one of the paving stones and sits down. He’s not the only bather to stay on the ramp. Here the sea is deeper and the water appears to be cleaner, with no suspended sand. It’s also quieter. Almost all those who jump off the quay seem to prefer to dive rather than to swim on the surface. The woman swims and the man jumps off the ramp and disappears under the water. The boy looks at the compass, the trembling of the needle. He doesn’t quite understand why it trembles when it’s still. It’s a good compass, no doubt about it. That’s what everyone said when Laura gave it to him for his cabinet of curiosities. A Stanley London compass. On it is written The Road Not Taken. It must be good, there’s no denying it, but he’d have preferred a compass with a quieter, less lively needle. Even when he puts it on the sand, the needle carries on trembling. He turns the compass from side to side. Half buries it in the sand. Funny how the needle always seeks out the North. He doesn’t touch it for a long time. Now the needle floats gently. The boy looks up. Can’t see his mother. But isn’t afraid. She’s a very good swimmer. He follows the line she was swimming along, her wake. And waits. Finally his mother’s head emerges. At the same time, very close by, another head. His mother returns, swimming breaststroke towards the East. The man, diving every now and then, heads slowly back towards the West. As for me, I have to return to the docks. I’ll come back for them on my last journey.
‘In my case, the voice will be Hercules Lighthouse,’ said Tito Balboa, Stringer. ‘Who better to entrust a voice to? A novel in which the lighthouse will describe the things it’s seen. Can you imagine everything the lighthouse has seen?’
‘Over two thousand years,’ mused Gabriel.
‘Under this lighthouse, there’ll be another. Or what do you think? That there weren’t lighthouses and lighthouse keepers before the Romans?’
‘You can talk about the first fight between Hercules and the giant Geryon, which gave rise to the city.’
‘No, thanks. No mythology. The lighthouse will describe.’ Balboa grins naughtily, ‘I bet it’s always been a good place for a quickie. Now couples do it in the car. Listening to foreign radio stations. Thing about the light house is you can see without being seen.’
‘How about you?’ asked Gabriel. ‘Have you seen that?’
‘No. But the lighthouse has.’
The green door. Dr Montevideo’s students of advanced stenography entered and left through there. In addition to Tito or Stringer, Gabriel paid particular attention to a man who reminded him of the actor Monty Clift. Because of his sunny and afflicted, scrupulous expression, with a curly fringe, and because of the changes in his appearance. He was almost always well dressed, even elegant. But other times he looked terrible, hadn’t shaved, with creases in his clothes as if he’d slept in them. Dr Montevideo was never among those who came and went. Gabriel had never seen him, but knew he couldn’t be one of them. When Catia agreed, said he could try, give it a go, he almost ran towards the green door.
Gabriel opened the green door, walked along a windowless corridor with the light on, and then climbed a spiral staircase which led to a room in the mezzanine. He knocked at a second green door with a pane of frosted glass. Thought he heard a kind of onomatopoeia, a verbal piece of stenography. Pushed open the door. Found himself immersed in a space that was both tiny and infinite. Whose four walls were covered in murals showing marine life. The style was unmistakably Sada’s, and Gabriel remembered what this painter, his mother’s friend, used to say about the sea’s restless paradise, shoals that were now only to be found deep down. In this illusion of anemones, starfish, polyps, spirographs, sponges, gorgonians, sea-lilies, urchins, jellyfish, the bed where this smoky Poseidon was sitting seemed to be afloat. Gabriel noticed a colony of sea urchins in one corner of the room. They looked like a chromatic wheel containing all the passions. Among the lighter, pink violet urchins, he distinguished a scarlet urchin. The colour of Catia’s nails.
Dr Montevideo was sitting up in bed, against some pillows, writing on sheets supported by a wooden book-rest. He was smoking a large cigar held more by his teeth than by his lips — a yellow, uneven, gap-filled set of teeth. To his right, on a night table, was a bottle of whisky and a glass. The rest of the bed was strewn with papers, most of which had been covered in shorthand, though some had been typed and corrected by hand. To one side of the bed was a cardboard box wrapped in silver foil which served as a wastepaper basket. It was full of scrunched-up pieces of paper. Some had fallen to the floor like decomposed spheres.