1

‘So what then, lads, are we off?’ Xoán carried on staring at the telly with sleepy eyes. His eyelids were swollen, the whites of his eyes lined with small, bloody veins of a yellow, pallid colour. He’d barely slept the night before. He hadn’t been to bed in two nights. He would read. Or go out on the town, boozing copiously and breakfasting on coffee and croissants in the Galicia, which opened at five. Now his head hurt. Not overly. It was an angry, superficial pain that didn’t go away: softly, softly… He inhaled deeply and blew the smoke into Guillerme’s face. One leg on top of the other, unenthusiastically, smoking calmly (you have to smoke slowly, see, like this, lazily, bit by bit, with a certain style, blow the smoke out sweetly through your nose or half-open, weary mouth), though he found it difficult to enunciate any words, to speak, to have to say, ‘Come on then, let’s go,’ to have to say, ‘No, leave it, wait,’ to have to say in a whisper, ‘My God, what a state I’m in!’ even though he found it difficult (Nogueira didn’t say a word, Pose neither, he gazed with golden, motionless eyes at the television screen), he managed to reply in a bland, weak voice, ‘So what we going to do then?’

         ‘I don’t fucking know,’ said Guillerme. ‘Go for a wander. Stretch our legs.’

         Xoán used his hand to comb his long, excessively curly locks, which spilled down his forehead (‘Why don’t you get a haircut, son, you look a real sight,’ his mother had said when she left), damp, greasy locks he allowed to grow with pleasure, which twisted a little in the rain, like the down on his skin after a shower.

         He slowly lifted the cup to his lips and unenthusiastically sipped the dark, bitter liquid of cold, acidic coffee that had lost its taste. He didn’t feel exactly extenuated as a result of the lack of sleep over two nights (he’d only slept a couple of hours today, before lunch), or ill either, or even really melancholy.

He made an effort to stand up. He was about to say, ‘Well, lads, I’m off…’ But he kept quiet. What was he going to do on his own? He leaned back into his chair, one leg crossed over the other, his jacket sparse and unbuttoned, showing his black jumper, which was worn and deformed from use. His mother would never understand him, but Xoán liked wearing old, slightly frayed clothes. His mother didn’t understand anything, he thought. What difference was there between his mother’s brain and that of an idiot, for example? Xoán frowned, arched his swarthy eyebrows, wearily shook his head and, with the delight of a scientist coldly confirming some natural phenomenon, came to the conclusion there was none, that was the truth of it.

         Nothing. There was nothing that held the slightest interest for him at that moment. If, for example, Guillerme were to suggest they got up, left the café, left the tedium (that was the word, really) of the café, that blaring television that sent every blessed soul around the bend (‘God, this device is enough to drive you crazy,’ Xoán had muttered tiredly, weakly, overcome by his own effort, feeling annoyed, but without conviction, like a fire burning deplorably, even though it was still a fire), that hellish boredom, prolonged ennui, long, long and sticky – so long, thought Xoán – of a night of desperation that was the café, softly, softly, unending, softly, softly…

         He rubbed the skin of his temples with his fingers. He couldn’t endure such pain, like this, softly, softly…

         He couldn’t bear it.

         But if Guillerme, for example, were to say, ‘Come on, lads, let’s go somewhere else, get a move on, for fuck’s sake,’ he was prepared to pay attention, he had nothing to lose, same as if he chose to stay, to remain there, in the café, next to Pose, next to Nogueira, next to Guillerme himself, restless and impatient that afternoon of an ashen sky and sticky dampness that misted up the glass of windows in which the images of things deposited their confused, blurred reflections… their silhouettes decomposed in the glass, evanescent and inconsistent, like memories, vague recollections that fade, slowly soften in a yawning sea of tedium and laziness.

         Xoán opened his mouth, took a deep breath and narrowed his eyes in a half-yawn he failed to suppress, which provoked tears that had nothing to do with mourning in the meridian apathy of his vaguely blue irises.

         ‘So what, are we going?’ Guillerme insisted in a voice that struggled vainly to sound a little pert and awake in order to do away with the lifeless stagnation that had overcome everything (like an abrasive acid attacking things, dissolving them, eating away at their borders and cases and finally abandoning them to the restfulness of death, in silent, unspasmodic agony), which Guillerme longed to conquer, tense, filled with diffuse anger, of no particular abode, showing itself in some gesture, some look of anxiety, some uneasy expression that, from time to time, flickered across the faces of the assembled company or revealed a deceitful gesture in Xoán, who, bewildered by the black and white luminescence of the television set, acquired a phantom, carnivalesque mask.

         Xoán grabbed a pack on the table, took another cigarette and raised it to his lips while searching for matches in his trouser pockets with his other hand. The pack of Ducados, which he’d bought shortly before lunch, was now, two hours later, almost empty.

         He lit a match and thought of the cancer he would contract if he continued smoking so much, so immoderately. ‘Oh my goodness, how you smoke, you’ll end up poisoning yourself, son, if you carry on like that!’ his mother would say whenever he was at home. And Xoán, instead of distancing himself from tobacco, would experience an obscure, ill-defined pleasure, a cowardly, slightly suicidal glee, which led him, in such moments, to smoke constantly, at every available opportunity, between classes, in bed or in the café.

         Pose had just said something.

         ‘What?’ asked Xoán listlessly, out of inertia.

         ‘Take a look at that… don’t you reckon? Worth a fuck, she isn’t bad.’

         Xoán raised his eyes to the television screen. They were showing a report on the Costa Brava, aimed at promoting tourism. A foreign woman in a bikini was taking part in an interview with the journalist.

         ‘Do you like Spain…? ¿Le gusta España…?’

         ‘Oh, yes, I like it very much.’

         ‘Why? ¿Por qué?’

         ‘There are beautiful beaches here, and sun…’

         ‘Do you like bull-fighting? ¿Le gustan a usted los toros?’

         ‘Yes, very much! I’m a Cordobés fan.’

         She wasn’t bad. She had a slender body and a face like that of an actress. But he wasn’t especially impressed by such women: they were too unreal, too distant, as if they had been fabricated artificially.

         ‘She isn’t bad,’ he said.

         Pose shook his head thoughtfully.

         ‘She’s a goddess,’ he let out.

         ‘Who, the English one?’ asked Nogueira, sprawled in a chair he balanced on its back legs. Before receiving an answer, he exclaimed, ‘Fuck, the girl must have a fanny this big!’

         They burst out laughing. A little over the top, hysterically, falsely, deliberately. Only Xoán traced a mute, inert smile with his lips.

         ‘You’ve seen it, right?’ inserted Guillerme.

         ‘Well,’ said the other, playing along, ‘not exactly seen it. I’ve felt it.’

         The conversation was finally moving, though it did so by dragging itself along the ground. Guillerme, of course, soon availed himself of the opportunity to liven up the atmosphere and get things going.

         ‘Woman who’s tall and thin, cow’s sort of minge,’ he declared shamelessly.

         ‘That’s right,’ affirmed Nogueira, ‘that’s right.’

         And again the conversation died out between the four of them.

         The flame of the match, pale and sallow, almost burned his fingers. Tired and absent, Xoán gestured in pain and threw the match to the ground. The floor of the café was dotted in black stains made by cigarette butts. Stunned, holding the cigarette in his fingers, without moving his hand, Xoán stared at the flaccid body of the match, which quickly blackened before going out in a puff of white, yawning, ephemeral smoke.

         He shouldn’t smoke so much if his head hurt like this. He knew that. It would be better to go for a walk, get a breath of fresh air.

         He looked outside. The listless light of the afternoon was waning and, under the filth of a watery sky, things were beginning to intensify their early shadows. From the warmth of the interior, he glimpsed the discoloured tonalities of the streets, the city, the diffuse glare of headlights or the silhouette of a pedestrian endowed fantastically by the glare of night signs with an aura of sapphiric blue, purple, cold and unreal green.

         Night was descending upon the town and with it, above the flashing nylon of umbrellas, the white lights of shop windows coated the icy faces of sales assistants in a raw, crystallized frost. Next to the Hotel Compostela, a traffic policeman stood beneath the incessant drizzle, like a pallid scarecrow Xoán watched gesticulating behind the window, in the dirty light of the sunset. From time to time, somewhat muffled, the piercing sound of his whistle reached his ears.

         In the café, it was warm, a morbid warmth that flushed the soft skin of Xoán’s cheeks and mercilessly burned his ears.

         ‘Woman who’s tall and thin…’ Guillerme was saying. And it seemed to Xoán he was talking at a distance, with a voice that sounded weak, blurred and indistinct.

         He sighed and filled his lungs with the heavy air of the café. He thought today was Sunday, and this made him feel anxious.

         He sensed his conscience gnawing away at him, as if he were remorseful… Another day, he thought. Another day. And he felt his heart contracting.

         They had just turned on the strip lights, which emitted a clarity that was far too bright and gave no rest to the eyes. He began to feel uncomfortable. Like this, with such clear lighting, the café lost all its intimacy, objects became far too precise, lines became sharp and nitid, profiles acquired excessive hardness. He gazed at the ashtray on the table, filled with Ducados butts. Most of them were half destroyed and bent. You could see the dark threads of tobacco, the small, salivary filaments and cotton pads of the filters squashed and scattered in the ash, like flakes of false, contaminated snow.

         Guillerme sighed for the fifth or sixth time that afternoon. Xoán looked at him, humming softly, imperceptibly moving his lips, which emitted a mute, faint song, without music or syllables, that died absurdly in his mouth.

         Through the window, Nogueira gazed at the sky, that sky that resembled a dirty cloth, a rag stained with burned gas oil, inanimate and inert. He suddenly moved his head with tiredness.

         ‘It’s horrible…’ he muttered. ‘What a day!’

         ‘Unbelievable… This winter’s been so bad!’

         ‘I can’t stand so much fucking rain!’

         ‘There’s absolutely nothing to do.’

         ‘It’s so fucking boring when the weather’s like this.’

         ‘What can you do? Get fucked.’

         ‘That’s it, get fucked.’

         ‘What else is there to do?’

         Xoán listened, sprawled in his chair, absent, experiencing again the sensation he was being spoken to from a distance, the words were reaching him in a weakened state, without consistence, as if pronounced by an indescribably monotonous, impersonal, anonymous voice that belonged to no one. He shook his head vigorously, trying to get rid of the ditty that had stuck in his mind. But he soon realized it was to no avail: the ditty just returned to his brain, again and again, with obsessive insistence.

         He felt himself getting angry and turned his face towards the window in an attempt somehow to distract himself by gazing at the streets. But he was deeply disappointed: the large window, lined by rain on the outside, was a black mirror that reflected the café itself.

         In it, Xoán saw identical strip lights, the same pale faces sitting around the same tables, the faint silhouettes of waiters wearing white jackets and carrying trays: diluted, tenuous, somnambulant next to the counter, which was not reflected whole.

         For a few seconds, he had an oppressive, unsettling sensation: it was as if reality had closed in on itself, thick, without cracks or holes, with raw lines and artificial light that spilled on everything, hysterical, cold, depriving objects of any depth, levelling reliefs, destroying shadows, dusk and perspective.

         The cigarette burned between his fingers. Before throwing it away (letting it fall, like this, lightly, letting it fall), he used it to light the next one.

         His friends looked at him with concern and an enquiring gaze. Xoán didn’t say anything. He got up lazily and headed between the tables towards the toilets. He walked slowly, hesitantly, bending his body, making his way between the cluttered chairs of the establishment.

         On the door was a sign which showed, in black, the silhouette of a hat and a pipe.

         Inside, it stank of disinfectant.

         He needed to do a pee.

         How nice it was to do a pee.

         He felt his head beginning to hurt. A superficial, stubborn pain: softly, softly…

         But he was OK in here: the din of the café was considerably lessened and reached him, sounding weak and muffled. There were things written on the wall: ‘HERE WE SHIT, PEE AND BEAT THE MEAT’ and the like. In capital letters, unequal, a dark, suspicious colour: possibly written with shit, perhaps with blood. One never knows.

         He turned on the tap in the basin.

         With his hands, he wet his face and sprinkled water on the back of his neck. Then he leaned for a while against the basin and scrutinized himself in the mirror. He gazed in amazement and stillness at his own image, which stared curiously back at him from the other side of the glass. His face looked paler than usual, everything in it was lighter and simpler: the apathetic faces of his friends (the mournful, careworn expression of Nogueira with his dark eyes and sad gaze; the ugly, asthenic pride, like a reed, of Pose; the illustrious solemnity of Guillerme, healthy and elegant, with a face covered in a luxuriant red beard, which conferred on him the strange look of a crazed prophet), their busts, the leaden weight of forms, the finished, motionless structure of objects, their tense, rough contours in space, when repeated in the glass, acquired a kind of weightlessness, as if reality had lessened its strident violence, that unequivocal precision, that strength, in order to become soft, phantasmagorical, soporific, definitively ambiguous, babbling and opulent. It was a question of reflections.

         Although neither the headache (an intermittent boom that pressed down on his cerebrum) nor the ditty had ceased, Xoán immediately rejected genuine reality and paid attention to his false appearance in the mirror.

         ‘It’s horrible,’ someone had said (was it Nogueira?).

         He retraced his steps, making his way with difficulty through the café, which was full of customers (around that time, a few bored, married couples had begun to arrive, who ordered their coffees or Fantas and remained silent, with nothing to say, staring at the television with a dumb expression and, from time to time, telling off their troops of restless, naughty children), breathing in the sweet, repugnant aroma given off by heavy winter clothes when they are wet, which, swimming through the liquefying air that held sway, managed to permeate everything.

         Through the glass, he could see the television screen more clearly.

         A man sits peacefully in a foldable canvas chair. He’s wearing a bathrobe with narrow, dark and light stripes. He’s reading the newspaper in a daze, his face concealed behind the open pages. There is now a glimpse of one corner of a swimming pool, where a young, sculptural woman has just thrown herself into the water. The man reading the newspaper slowly stretches out his hand to take a glass of whisky on the rocks, which he raises to his lips without looking. He puts the glass back on the small, round table and continues to be absorbed in the newspaper.

         Great calm. The woman can be heard splashing about in the water.

         Suddenly we catch sight of the dark figure of a man striding towards the television screen until he fills it completely. He stops abruptly and, with an air of normality, directly addresses the man reading the newspaper.

         The woman swims towards the other side of the pool.

         The visitor smiles ironically and declares, ‘I’m sorry to interrupt your reading, my friend.’

         The other puts down the newspaper and stares at the visitor in amazement. A look of terror flashes across his face. ‘H… h… how! Who are you?’

         At that moment, the sun glints on the intruder’s black revolver.

         The visitor’s voice switches tone. ‘Stay calm, Henry. Don’t do anything stupid. I’m warning you this can hurt.’

         The rain became stronger. The drops slid thickly down the glass, and Xoán could hear their sleepy, constant patter which, having grown in a confused crescendo, now reached a critical, violent limit and, seconds later, broke into a slow, weak descent, which sounded mournful, almost sombre, like a train, almost symphonic.

         ‘Oh, how horrible! What a day, darling!’

         ‘I really wish the summer would arrive…’

         ‘Oh, don’t tell me, darling, don’t tell me…’

         This was a snippet of the conversation between two girls on a neighbouring table. They had just arrived, soaked to the skin, and ordered two coffees.

         Xoán glanced at them out of the corner of his eye.

         He wondered how long it had been since he had masturbated. Recently these movements caused him little delight, something he regretted. Because, before that, they had had their merit, like making love with a Phantom Woman, discovering the woman inside oneself.

         He took another cigarette. There were only two left now in the pack of Ducados. He started smoking.

         Tired. I’m tired.

         He let his gaze wander over the café, the small tables covered in heavy, red and white checked cloths, the rigid, cadaverous faces of customers who seemed to be made of wax beneath the white glare of the strip lights.

         He swallowed his saliva now. Again and again. He felt his throat was rough. (‘Gosh, I don’t know how you all smoke so much, you’re going to destroy yourselves.’)

         He looked at his companions. Seeing them made him tremble. They were stiff, with long, apathetic faces, weary, motionless eyes, their gaze fixed on some point in space.

         Horror, horror, horror.

         It was all so fucking boring.

         The girls started talking again, very close by, on the neighbouring table.

         ‘Darling, look at it rain, how terrible!’

         ‘That’s the trouble here, in Santiago, darling, unless you go into a cinema…’

         ‘That’s right.’

         ‘Why don’t we ask the waiter to bring us a Ludo board?’

         ‘Go on then, ask him.’

         ‘OK.’

         So fucking boring.

         My God. Santiago was a. Life… Damn it.

         ‘Did you see how nice it was?’

         My God.

         ‘What?’

         ‘The skirt worn by that girl who just got up. See it?’

         ‘Oh, yeah! Why, do you like it?’

         His head dizzy from the contaminated air of the café (‘Darling, I love it’), one leg on top of the other, Xoán smoked (‘Well, it’s just like the one my sister Chuca bought, exactly the same’), his mind blank, empty of ideas or feelings, expelled the smoke (‘Just the same. Haven’t you seen it?’) of the cigarette (‘Stop right there, Steve, don’t move! Don’t try to escape!’), comes out of his nose (‘Henry, do something, please! They’re going to have a fight!’), out of his half-open, weary mouth.

         Xoán smoked.

         He stopped to look at the window. The glass was all misted up. Objects deposited a few wan reflections on its surface. Seen like this, all the objects in the café lost the unequivocal precision of borders and turned into large stains of pale, soft, long-suffering colours, like the gentle melting of a candle. Everything there was compliant, motley, and any form that fell into the glass was degraded in an almost implausible manner. The counter’s rectangle, the tables’ rotund circumferences, the television’s angles, the chairs’ reckless lines, the customers’ exact profiles… were worn away, eroded, made to vanish, and almost immediately turned into vague, softened shapes that recalled the damp stickiness of slugs.

         He felt terrible, without energy, a little nauseous. He threw away the cigarette and put his hand in his trouser pocket. He was running out of money. He would have to phone home. They hadn’t heard from him in almost a month.

         Xoán thought about home.

         He thought of his mother, old and fat, who struggled in vain to stay beautiful. He recalled his father, hidden in a doctor’s white coat, with round glasses that made him look like an intellectual. In his memory, he heard him getting up at night and opening the large window in the dining room, where he would stay for two or three hours, leaning on the sill, insomniac, smoking cigarette after cigarette with a frown.

         He had nothing to do there.

         He hated his home.

         If only his grandfather were OK…!

         At that point, he remembered his grandfather. He could see him bent over, his face withered, resting on his chest, his long hands trembling, with that beautiful, diffuse, unspecific, permanently lost gaze.

         He remembered his shrivelled body, like a large, airy, weightless skeleton,

         and recalled the cracking of his bones as he walked,

         and imagined him,

                   always old,

         relating something of his adventures,

         or else perhaps telling a story

         – who knows? –

         he had once been told by that black girl called Rosario who drank rum,

         or the story

         of a drunk sailor who was an anarchist

         and once, in New York,

         killed a policeman

         – he had no choice –

         or telling the story of his own life

         (he’d left at the age of fifteen with his brother, who was fourteen, the boat was the Asturias, that’s something you never forget, boy),

         Brazil, Cuba, Canada, the Amazon…

         a story that never ended

         because there was always something missing,

         so pretty it sounded like a lie

         he told himself in a nasal voice, with his incredulous, handsome eyes.

         If only he were OK, thought Xoán. But ‘he’s lost his mind,’ his father would say, and he must have been right because his grandfather would talk to himself for hours on end and it was impossible to make out what he was saying.

         He had nothing to do there.

         However, if Guillerme (was it Guillerme, Xoán?) said, for example (maybe not, I can’t say, his voice is the same as Nogueira’s, similar to Pose’s or mine), said, ‘So what, lads, are we going? Come on, for fuck’s sake, get a move on, you look like stones.

         ‘fuck!

         ‘you look like stone statues,

         ‘marble statues,

         ‘you look old,

         ‘you’re going to put down roots, sitting there for so long, I don’t know, somewhere, down Raíña, go for a walk, for a glass of wine, I don’t know, anything, clear our heads, get a breath of fresh air…’

         Xoán was prepared to pay attention, he had nothing to lose, exactly the same as if he chose to stay, to remain there, in the café, next to Pose, next to Nogueira, next to Guillerme himself, restless and impatient, who kept on repeating his supplication, ‘So what, are we going?’

         Xoán carried on sitting, without replying, tapping his fingers on the table.

         He sighed. In a moment, he would have to get up.

         They would go for a walk. Somewhere.

         Pose was getting out his money to pay.

         He stared at the window for one last time.

         In the glass, which was misty and dull, was reflected the reality of the interior. But the figures were blurred, out of their contours, clammy, covered in a light mist, a volatile veil, as if seen through eyes with leucoma. Xoán brought his mouth closer and let out a breath. The window grew weak, pale, as if it had gone out. The strip lights, the waiters’ emaciated bodies in their white jackets, the tables, the piece of the counter, the customers’ waxen faces, the bottles, mouths, teeth, Coca-Colas, door jambs, a hundred hands set on the tables, smiles, the television screen, the faces of Pose, Guillerme, Nogueira, the two girls, necks, Phantom Woman, lines, circles, beams, skirts, slugs, floorboards, shapes, ashtrays, butts, red and white checked cloths, candle, cups, leucoma, grandfather, Amazon, blackness, suddenly disappeared and were swallowed up. Everything was like a sickly, sumptuous universe, a mythical continent, which suddenly explodes and sinks into an Ocean laden with corpses and standards in the short time it takes for a second to pass.

‘Luísa!’

         ‘What?’

         ‘Wait for a moment! Please don’t go so fast!’

         Encarna was swimming behind, a few feet away. Luísa waited. She remained motionless now, in the middle of the estuary, without going forwards. The beach was far away, diminished by the distance, with its tiny, white sand warmed by the sun. They were swimming next to the women catching oysters: dark, shadowy, motionless, they stood in the water with their mouldy ropes covered in oysters. The sun burned brightly, cast silver trickles on the sea’s illuminated surface. It seemed as if the water had come to a futile halt, fallen asleep in between the tiny rivulets, held between the metallic masses of cliffs bristling with limpets, or between the grey cavities of rocks where the sea emits a mysterious, animal groan. The island could be seen getting more and more distant, crowned with thick green pine trees, their vertical tops swaying gently, facing the abyss, mirrored in the silvery liquid which also reflected the sky. Far away, in between thin wisps of mist, Ons was visible.

         Tambo like this, reflected in the sea, appeared upside down and folded out, surrounded by that booming silence, drowned in a white, violent light, full of glares and subtle, bluish reflections, the island that day exhibiting a deathly beauty. It resembled a piece of ancient paradise that exploded in the beginning, its parts scattered by the force of the explosion, having wandered ever since over the planet’s seas and oceans.

         ‘Listen, we’re getting too far away. My God, you can swim!’

         Encarna came alongside, shaking with cold, her pale blue eyes fixed on Luísa. ‘Aren’t you afraid?’

         Luísa shook her head. Said, ‘Look.’

         ‘It’s amazing… it’s divine… listen, it’s…!’

         The thick branches of the trees, reflected in the water, resembled a green waterfall which seemed to rise from the sea’s sleepy depths and swayed, trembling and lively, under the island. They gave the impression of vegetal locks let loose in the pale silence of the abyss. The sunlight pierced, punished, gleamed on the black rocks of the cliffs with metallic, steel or leaden flashes, and glinted brilliantly on Luísa’s dark, wine-coloured hair.

         They had been like this for some time, swimming in silence, trying not to make any noise, not to beat the water with their feet.

         The sea was a flashing, illuminated plain adorned with white frills of foam that formed here and there, around the rocks.

         ‘We never talk any more like before,’ Encarna was saying.

         Luísa kept quiet.

         ‘Don’t you remember?’

         ‘You know, nothing can be “like before”. Nothing is “like before”.’

         ‘I know, listen.’

         They carefully moved their arms and legs, caressing the water, as if they wished to preserve this affectionate quiet, this rest, this repose that existed in everything.

         Encarna went back to speaking Galician. She switched from one language to another without thinking.

         It was as if she wanted to say something, to share something intimate. She seemed to be burning with a desire to talk, to communicate something important to her old school friend. And since Luísa hadn’t afforded her an opportunity until now, Encarna, with her questions, appeared not to want to resign herself to waiting any longer, as if she wanted to create the opportunity herself.

         ‘I hadn’t heard from you. In Santiago, there’s no way of seeing you. And since we’re in different faculties… I suppose you still think the way you did before, more or less, no?’

         Luísa sighed. On the firm line of her lips, she traced an ironic smile. ‘Something similar,’ she said. ‘And you?’

         Encarna remained quiet. She swam a few strokes, silently, slipping through the water. Suddenly, looking at Luísa, she declared, ‘I’m very happy,’ and her face grew a little red as if out of shame at this sentence, which certainly sounded commonplace. ‘Well,’ she said, trying to smile. ‘I know it sounds like a romantic novel, but it’s true, you know.’

         Luísa listened in silence, her gaze fixed on the sky, the sun perhaps or some indeterminate point. Encarna glanced at her out of the corner of her eye, twisting her head as she swam from time to time. She said, ‘You’ve seen Manolo, what he’s like. Though you knew him before, didn’t you?’

         Luísa gestured that she had. ‘He seems nice,’ she added.

         ‘Oh, he’s nice! And intelligent. I’m not saying that because I’m with him. And he’s so unassuming, doesn’t boast at all. He should almost assume a little more. With all the stuff he knows… my goodness!’

         She stopped talking. There was silence. She looked again at Luísa out of the corner of her eye, more carefully this time, as if she wished to examine her face, the expression she might adopt at what she was saying.

         The result was positive. Everything was OK. She could continue. And she continued, feeling increasingly confident and enthusiastic. ‘Besides that, he has a really good character, he’s fantastic!’ (When it came to sharing secrets, she preferred speaking Spanish.) ‘That’s something I really like about him. He has these amazing details. There’s a friend, I don’t know if you know him, by the name of Jenaro, who, by the way, is a touch cynical and has played some dirty tricks on Manolo. Well, the other day, since he didn’t have any money to do what he wanted, a trip or something he couldn’t get out of his mind, he went around asking his friends for money. Needless to say, you can imagine, nobody wanted to lend him any. Since he never gives it back! Well, you can guess, Manolo goes and gives him everything he has. I was dumbstruck. But as if that wasn’t enough, the other guy goes around afterwards criticizing him… Can you believe it?’ Encarna was talking out of control, unable to contain herself, panting with fatigue, making a real effort to stop the water entering her mouth. ‘You know, I know it’s not that important… but it’s a detail, isn’t it?’

         ‘It is,’ said Luísa.

         Encarna was swimming faster now, noisily beating the water, splashing it everywhere. Luísa followed behind.

         Then, at a certain point, Encarna stopped and, gazing at the sky in rapture, exclaimed, ‘It’s fantastic, you know. It’s amazing!’

         Luísa smiled ironically again. Asked, ‘What is?’

         ‘What? Oh, everything,’ said Encarna. ‘It’s fantastic.’ She was talking quickly, unscrupulously, as if in a daze, as if attacked by some fever that had excited her all over and left her feeling half mystical.

         It was an orgy of communication, an exhibition, something suspicious, strange, one couldn’t entirely trust. Something repulsive. She no longer looked at Luísa out of the corner of her eye. She went closer.

         ‘If you knew… I’ve never loved anybody so much. Not even my parents, believe me. He’s the one I love and have loved the most in my life. Besides… well, you can imagine, we share this amazing trust.’

         It was necessary to look at the sun, to stare at the sun for a minute, that blinding brightness. Apparently this is what eagles do. Luísa was barely listening. She was an eagle spreading herself over the sea. These things happened to her. Plaf, plaf, plaf, plaf. How would she swim if she had wings instead of arms? Probably better.

         ‘So you see, there you are, absolutely naked, and I don’t mind at all. Really, I don’t. You see, I could have said something to you, lent you my costume, or…’

         But then, if you looked away from the sun, you couldn’t see anything. Everything went dark for a few seconds. She knew this. It was always like this.

         ‘And yet, can you imagine, I don’t mind at all that you’re naked.’ (There was a pause.) ‘Not everybody would be like that, eh?’ she added, feigning a smile.

         Luísa nodded. She had to smile as well. She answered, ‘No, they wouldn’t.’

         ‘That would be too much, not being able to swim because you hadn’t brought your costume. On a day like this! Despite the fact… well, you’re more… you know… better formed than I am.’

         Luísa didn’t reply.

         ‘But I don’t mind, you know, I can assure you. Even though Manolo’s here, it doesn’t matter. I’m not jealous. We share this amazing trust. If only you knew how much I love him…! An amazing trust. But anyway, we’re friends, aren’t we? Because, you know, Manolo and I…’

         Tam-tam!

         Tam-tam-tam!

         Tam-tam-tam-tam-tam-tamb

         Tambo, tam-bo, tambo, tam-bo

         tan-tan, tam-bor.

         Tam

         Tamtan-tamatanatamatan

         Tum-Tum

         Tam-bor, tam-bor, tam-tam, Tambo, Tambo, Tambo was a piece of paradise, paradise, paradise, paradise, paradise, paradise broken, burst, paradise lost, lost, lost, paradise broken, squashed, paradise, Paradise, PARADISE…!

         It looked like a coin, a coin, the sun resembled a patacoon sending out rays that died away, white rays, blue rays, silver rays that died away, pale moon rays, death rays.

         (And then, if you looked away from the sun, you couldn’t see anything, everything dark for a time, and the sea turned dark and full of silence…)

         Everything is covered in corpses. Everything. How many dead! You see, there’s no room. Millions of dead, trillions, quadrillions! LOOK! So quiet, you see? they’re floating. And what a smell, huh? they stink. Tell me how I’m supposed to swim now, without bumping into them… You can’t go forward at all. They’re disgusting. Floating with their swollen stomachs, full of gas, you see, that’s why they don’t sink… It’s Decomposition: there are thousands of them, adrift, not speaking. The women face upwards, it’s strange, and the men face downwards in the water. Apparently that’s the position of the drowned. How much silence! Look: rotten lips and the whites of their eyes… Their tongues hang listlessly out of their mouths… They’re bluish and soft. There are thousands of them, this resembles a Resurrection, a mishmash of the dead… From afar, because their mouths are open, it looks as if they’re laughing, can you believe it, their cheeks are all covered in flies… Wow, what a stink! They don’t stop coming. Look: fathers, mothers, grandparents, that couple, that dead couple, all of them dead, dead and even more dead. Hey! they fill everything, take over everything with that smell. Agh! I feel sick, that stink emanating from their bodies. You can’t move, stretch out your arm, your leg, see? God, what pollution! This sea of the dead is the Kingdom of Bacteria… the Dead Sea… ash… embers… all of that. Deep down, they’re a people like any other, a nation, I suppose, a floating necropolis. One of those cities of Death, without sun, with just pale, funereal moons, you know, were it not for that idiotic smile on their faces, it could even be romantic… There’s this enormous silence… and that stink they give off, God! They spoil everything, contaminate the air and are going to infect me with that illness they have, they’re going to give it to me, death, how horrible… They look like a defeated, humiliated army, but everything’s horizontal, unending horizontal battalions… and look, there are flags, see, emblems, ensigns, standards… Abandoned standards being swept away by the sea… And they’re full of silence… There, on their buttocks, ferns and honeysuckle are growing… and, in the sockets of their eyes, poppies have sprouted. Can you imagine how horrible it is, their flesh transfixed by roots, how terrible they must feel!

‘There must have been about twenty people or something, a small group in the night, talking with gestures, in a strange, musical language, from time to time letting out short, violent laughs, crude, indistinct guffaws… sleepy, pot-bellied lorry drivers with a thoughtful gaze, retailers, soothsaying, eternal old women of humiliated pride, their faces decomposed by the scratching of time, long-nosed fishwives, old crocks, skeletons… everybody exchanging opinions from time to time, things I couldn’t make out, they spoke a melodious, sibilant Galician, light and open as a whistle, and occasionally glanced at the red lights of boats drawing closer in the silence, through the nocturnal mist… Fishing vessels, pair trawlers most of them… They appeared suddenly, vague, ghostly forms, black, imprecise bodies with indistinct borders, piercing the mist, acquiring precision only a few feet away… They resembled an unreal, bewitched expedition, slow, spectral frigates in formation returning from a quest for an impossible chimera, some longed-for continent that never existed…

         ‘The water roared in fury, the wind hummed and, in that thick, almost sticky blackness, in the diffuse rays of light coming from the boats, they started unloading. And then I looked around in order to ask my friends a question, and that was when I realized, in confusion, they weren’t there, they’d left me alone!

         ‘I became afraid. I was overcome by a horrible sense of loneliness. I felt abandoned, lost in the night, in that Galician harbour I’d never been to before. And with no reason for being there. It began to strike me as absurd. I didn’t know what to do. I felt foreign, I don’t know if you can understand me, by some strange agent I found myself in the midst of people I didn’t know, in a world that had nothing to do with my own and a life that could have been so different…

         ‘In short, I felt betrayed. I thought about them, about Manolo and Encarna, with rage. With resentment. I became annoyed. I went crazy. I was beside myself with anger, really. I thought the sensation I now had of isolation and loneliness I’d had the whole day I’d spent in their company. I remembered it well. For hours, I’d had to put up with the stifling spectacle of that false, artificial happiness of theirs, which they exhibited to puff themselves up. That fictitious, horrible happiness, a show I took part in by my presence, as a witness, giving it credibility, justifying it, strengthening it from the outside, if you understand me. Which is why I’ve always hated people who pretend to be happy. It’s a shame, but I can’t get on with them, I can’t bear seeing them before me. Precisely because they’re the ones who want to be happy the least. They’re cowards. They’re trying to deceive themselves. They’re not prepared to work harder to be happy, so they pretend they already are, and they need you to believe it too, so they can convince themselves. A farce. A nonsense. I know you CAN’T be happy, not until the whole of reality changes radically. But you have to want to be happy, you know. Want to be fully happy. I realize it’s impossible, but it’s the only thing that keeps me going. The only thing that’s worth the effort. You need courage because you know it’s impossible, but I still think it’s the only thing that’s worth the effort… It’s a kind of obligation we should all have. All of us.

         ‘But anyway, let me tell you the rest of the story. As I said, I felt like a creature coming from a different world. And I soon began to realize it was true. This was a sad world, a kind of cold, ashen planet. The world I came from was sad as well, but it was a different sort of sadness.

         ‘I was standing there, not knowing which way to turn. Nearby, some fishermen were working on the deck of a trawler. I could almost see them. They were distributing fish into different piles, according to the species. But they were doing it at lightning speed. In the white, diffuse light that illuminated the mist, the pomfret and bream emitted lively, steel gleams. I started walking. From other trawlers, they were unloading shellfish: crabs, lobsters, prawns… They weren’t dead yet… They were still moving… I almost felt afraid. The market was a large, oblong building, and it was very cold. I merged with the people, trying to find Encarna and Manolo somewhere. But nothing!

         ‘Neither of them was there.

         ‘I felt afraid, horrified. After all, in spite of all that farce, that semi-conscious ceremony Encarna insisted on performing in front of me at all times, they were the only people in whom I could recognize myself. That’s it: the only references left to me in that filthy, familiar world I belonged to… I stumbled about, going here and there, crossing from side to side of the building, on that smooth, cement pavement, staggering around, full of fear, overcome by a cold, penetrating fear that had me trembling all over,

         ‘insecure,

         ‘drunk,

         ‘I noticed I wasn’t walking well, straight, my foot, for example, wasn’t going exactly where I wanted it to, my legs barely headed in the direction my brain, my will, wanted, ordered them to go in. Everything was difficult, Xoán, you have no idea, they were ridiculous fears, the sort a six-year-old girl would have, I felt everybody was going to turn and fall on me, kill me, rape me or something,

         ‘neither Encarna nor her boyfriend really existed, they were figments of my imagination, my delirium, a cruel, phantom couple,

         ‘and I would never return home, never ever again shout at mother, see my cousin Xandro to pull his leg, go to the cinema, the university, read, talk to Atanís every afternoon in the Maycar, Cortázar, Céline, the atomic bomb, Mao Tse-Tung, J. L. Godard, would never return, never ever, ever, ever again.

         ‘I felt lost, forgotten in that long, long, oozing construction, and it seemed to me no one would ever remember me, no one would ever ask about that girl studying philosophy in the third year, called Luísa.

         ‘I know it sounds comic, but I swear, at the time, it was horrible.’

Xoán smiled. He listened attentively, not daring to interrupt. He thought to himself, You’ll have drunk gin that afternoon, and that will have had something to do with it. An oily light floated in the air, a liquid, ruddy darkness. He kept quiet, staring at the glass of vodka. The light, blue, bottle-green. Then red. The smoke of their cigarettes trembling now, a pink colour. Rigid, bluish faces. Women’s frozen smiles. The two of them sat at a low table, near the dance floor. It was Tuesday, and the disco was almost empty.

‘… and suddenly I was standing in the midst of people, panting, excited, in the middle of a group of prophetic old women dressed in mourning, a group of old witches gazing at me with their mysterious smiles, melted faces, Xoán, their white, cadaverous skin, dead hands, white, knotted hair, they didn’t look human, they were wearing disfigured masks, women removed from the land of the living, of incalculable age, laughing, howling in a piercing voice that sent a shiver down your spine…

         ‘… deceased, aged, shrivelled, withered, old and older still, their bodies deeply disfigured, broken off in the continuous sliding of time.

         ‘There they were, monstrous statues whose profiles had been misshapen by the years and elements, infernal angels, witches, powerful priestesses consecrated to the horrendous cult of death… black, ruined, horribly stylized and schematic like rusty signs of destruction.

         ‘I don’t know if you can understand me, Xoán.

         ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this…

         ‘After that… after that, everything was crazy, mad, no, don’t think I’m making this up, I know what’s in your mind, it can’t have been that bad, she’s exaggerating, come on, that’s what they call “literarizing”, and so on, and so forth…

         ‘I felt bad, as always when these things happen to me, but I remember a scene, an image, a woman reciting a line from the Bible – they were all Protestants – a prophecy of destruction that left me feeling stunned…

         ‘And then the voice, that’s right, it was a voice, a voice coming out with figures, dizzily singing numbers at great speed, without stopping, going down and down, it’s strange, coming out with more and more figures, it was unbearable…

         ‘And then somebody close to me said, “The auction’s over,” and I left the building, feeling shattered.

         ‘I went outside. My friends were in a bar nearby, taking pills dissolved in tonic water.

         ‘I was infinitely pleased to find them.

         ‘Encarna felt ill because of the drink.

         ‘She was waiting for Necho, a friend of theirs with a car.’

‘I don’t feel well, Xoán. I’m not well.’

         ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

         ‘I don’t know… I don’t feel well, I don’t know what the matter is, Xoán. I want to lie down. I want to go home.’

         ‘You must have drunk too much. You’ve had too much, come on, get up. Lean on me. I’ll see you home. That’s it, up you get.’

There was an enormous loneliness, a sticky liquid, like melted honey, embracing the island and spreading everywhere: on top of their heads, in front, behind… Further away, the sea. Luísa listened to the sound of their footsteps as they walked. Manolo was behind her, silent. He didn’t speak.

         ‘I’m very happy.

         ‘Everything. It’s fantastic!

         ‘If you knew… I’ve never loved anybody so much.

         ‘If you knew…’

         The sun. A huge bonfire, a white, violent, radioactive luminescence. The green bodies of the trees waving in front of their eyes. They were soft, the long tops, the thick, green pinnacles. They reached out into the silence like desperate trees. Luísa suddenly stopped, feeling light-headed. Living. They resembled sticky animals, horribly alive vegetables, swaying like serpents towards the sky. She shivered. Thought, This sun is killing me. Turned around. Gazed at Manolo. He stank of sweat. Looked pale a few feet away. He was damp, all his body rigid and shining.

         ‘What’s up?’

         ‘Nothing.’

         He smiled. Panted, his nostrils dilated, his mouth wide open. Gestured in some direction. His voice nervous, fatigued.

         ‘There must be some firewood somewhere around here.’

         His voice sounded strange. He remained like this for a few seconds, his arm outstretched, without moving.

         Luísa smiled ironically again. Asked, ‘What is?’

         ‘What? Oh, everything. It’s fantastic,’ she was talking quickly, unscrupulously, as if in a daze, as if attacked by some fever that had excited her all over and left her feeling half mystical. It was an orgy of communication, an exhibition, something suspicious, strange, one couldn’t entirely trust. Something repulsive. She no longer looked at Luísa out of the corner of her eye. She went closer.

         ‘If you knew… I’ve never loved anybody so much. Not even my parents. Believe me.’

         She greedily sucked in more air. So much sun was making her dizzy. She forcibly filled her lungs, and the air left a taste of hot earth in her mouth. She could hear the thumping of her own heart. They carried on.

         She gazed at the ground. The earth was feverish. Gorse bushes. Red-hot leaves. At any moment now, a lizard would turn up, and then she would scream! The ferns squashed beneath her trainers. Thank God she’d remembered to put them on. The warmth of the ground passing through the rubber, tormenting the soles of her feet. She took a deep breath, started panting. She was afraid she would faint. She felt full, heavy. The earth seemed to shake, everything throbbed in time to her blood, everything. This is hell, she thought. The horizon. A livid sky, almost white, strangely morbid, the blackened silhouettes of hills. Then the sea, exhausting, mineral.

         ‘I’m very happy.

         ‘If you knew…

         ‘I’ve never loved anybody so much.

         ‘If you knew…’

         Closing her eyes. Listening now, just listening… Manolo’s footsteps on the sand, growing closer. Those short, anxious breaths. Stomping along in those boots he had. Like this, without looking, the sun was a red, motionless luminescence over there, in its inner blackness. A burning on the face that made you dizzy.

         She opened her eyes again. Stunned, blind, lost in a white, flaming void. She couldn’t see for a few seconds. She felt distressed and reached out. Found Manolo’s face, mute, sour, visible in the light. I’m naked.

         She realized she was in the nude.

         ‘Stark naked, stark naked,’ she kept on saying to herself, shivering all the time. ‘Without knickers!’

         Her heart started beating faster.

         ‘Besides, well, you can imagine, we share this amazing trust.

         ‘I don’t mind at all, really, I don’t.

         ‘Even though Manolo’s here, it doesn’t matter.’

         Encarna was waiting for them on the beach, ready to make a fire. More fire. They’d gone for firewood. ‘Anything you can find, branches, stuff like that.’ Thinking about it, she’d always been horrified by people who believed they were happy. Sweet. Rich. All love. Bitch…

         She was tired. The sky. Exhausted. The sea. The sky is a burning stone, a blue pebble, on top of us.

         Blank. Her mind was blank. Without concepts.

         The sea was visible. Luísa stared at it out of the corner of her eye. A glossy, strangely motionless, blue surface, merging with the sky. Thinking about it, the body was a night. Bodies. Forgetfulness.

         Manolo always behind: an animal smell, his anxious, interrupted breathing, the noise of his boots on the earth. His presence was reduced to this.

         There was more. To this and something else. There was his look. Luísa knew she was being observed. She felt observed. It was a tingling on her neck.

         I am naked.

         This look of his, fixed on her body. On her buttocks. On her sweaty thighs, which trembled slightly as she walked.

         His look in silence.

         She noticed a sticky, liquid taste in her mouth. Sweat. Her body felt spongy, dilated, all juicy and wet. It smelled of sex.

         A damp squid.

         Spongy. The sea, inert, weary waters, sick of the sun, weary, exhausted in the heat.

         And that taste in her mouth, her stomach, her belly.

         No stopping. No parking. Scheisse!

         Luísa strode forwards, feeling watched, observed by this person whose black gaze covered her entirely.

         She felt like groaning, bursting into tears, stopping, saying something. Enough. Enough. Enough.

         She couldn’t bear it.

It was impossible to get lost. Which is why Xoán walked in isolation in the middle of thousands of invisible circumferences, sailing like an old, nineteenth-century schooner on the very axis of all those circular solitudes, the direction ignored, because it wasn’t something that mattered and also because the end of one street was always the beginning of another and in the end, as if by some miracle, all thoroughfares led to the same place in that bewitching city of shadows talking in silence. No, it wasn’t easy to get lost. One street landed you in another, and this one flung you back to the first like a ping-pong ball, which is how the schooner sailed, in that circle of magical mirrors, rudderless, directionless, through the silent abysses of the Underwater, Eternal Night in which the whole city was buried. The whole city, with its cathedrals, its hoarse phantoms, all the living and the dead, full of churches, confessionals, small, stone sculptures, three or four old-style cinemas with boxes climbing up, plaster garlands and immobilized curtains talking to us of a romantic age agonizing in the midst of nostalgia.

         The whole city drowned in the underwater, eternal night, merging with its glorious legions of saints in painted, worm-infested wood. With its numerous censers, its heaving cemeteries in Santo Domingo and Boisaca, its chalices, altars, illustrious tombs of reclining cardinals, worn inscriptions, enormous archangels, few prostitutes who also accompany the city, every day, in the depths of night. It was impossible to get lost in Santiago. It was nice to walk until dawn, to navigate like this between solitudes, from one silence to the next, to be awake when everything was sleep, wandering aimlessly between the Glorious Stones, umbrella open and trousers wet, feeling alive in that prodigious city she hated and loved so much. Because it was she who was present everywhere with her perfumed hair and sad laughter. It was she, Luísa, who cursed and loved everything, who had christened everything with different names and wanted to live in the city of the dead where ‘everything was terrible’. She was indifferent to nothing, charmed or horrified even by the silence. Only she panted beneath the vast weight of the past, fragile and desperate, able to hear the absent voices of the deceased in throats open to the silence, in that city of shadows, that nocturnal, mineral city.

         I’ve run out of tobacco, thought Xoán as he climbed the steps under the arch of Xelmírez Palace. He carried on aimlessly, remembering so many things people needed to call nice and they had also called nice before it struck them as a lie, a ceremony like any other, meaningless gestures and words, flashing of smiles, so many vain kisses, inert, deceased material with which they had wished to construct a huge lie.

         Atanís believed that love was fundamentally imaginary, a plant incapable of growing in our reality, and had quoted a passage from Gide’s The Counterfeiters with which Xoán was familiar.

         Had they loved each other? Did he love Luísa?

         To start with, there had been a time of surprises and wonders, a bewildered time in which Xoán had learned the gestures of love and the two of them had tried out those elementary gestures and that vocabulary with which they made ready to love each other. And it was nice. It was nice to press their bodies against the other, nice to kiss a woman on the mouth and to feel the sweet touch of Luísa’s tongue, sensitive and desirous. To see her blush, how she closed her eyes, passively, allowed him to stroke her body, rub her all over, panted like a wounded deer or gazelle, her eyes turned inwards, bulging.

         They had kissed on the mouth, joined mouths furiously all the time, with fury, bitten each other’s lips, licked each other’s faces, all over, and been kicked out of cafés, then cleaned each other, stared into each other’s eyes and laughed. She would say, ‘We’re misfits, Xoán, we have to be careful. We’ve turned into a social menace. Ha, ha, ha! Haven’t you noticed? Everybody’s looking at us.’ They were provocative and lustful, returned people’s gazes, were shameless. ‘That’s because we’re alive, Luísa. The two of us alive…’ She played around in bed, naked, and seemed happy, repeating ‘alive’ over and over, repeating ‘alive’, shamelessly naked, beneath the burning lamp, she would say ‘alive’ as if amazed, her eyes round and dazzled in that brazen posture, she would say ‘alive’, her dark eyes brimming with tears, in that wonderfully brazen posture.

         And then Xoán had acquired a deep knowledge of a woman’s body, allowed his hands to explore her body, to linger on Luísa’s warm, fleshy buttocks, her soft skin, firm, sprawling thighs, hard, clenched breasts that yielded under his hands, under his fingers, jumped for joy when she removed her shirt to make love. He would caress her smooth, warm belly, finger her sex, sticky and humid, which went so well with his own.

         That had been the first phase.

         But it had quickly passed.

         A phase that finished one day with a last guffaw of amazement that burst out in some café and left them feeling vulnerable, one step closer to silence.

         That was when those other days started, so different, he remembered now, those nights the two of them spent going from one café to another, reduced to a corner between jukeboxes and cigarette smoke, chatting all the time (a pause could be dangerous) in any part of the city swept by rain. They talked: they heaped up words without resting, in a circular, always inconclusive discourse they pursued cyclically each night. There were moments they looked into each other’s eyes with terror, somewhere between distrustful and hysterical.

         It never stopped raining.

         It seemed it would never clear.

         And then, once again, all the words they’d already said would come back, return once more… Resurface one by one, like the beads of a rosary, set in that hellish, unending discourse, like a ghost’s failed resurrection, a permanently incomplete necrosis.

         Nothing resisted the lethal effects of that rain that seemed eternal, and little by little, throughout the past winter, a green, fatal moss had climbed the walls of the cathedral, making off with the ghastly features of Romanesque gargoyles and puppets. And gold and diamond chalices stored in the inner sancta of temples and museums, the Revered Relics: the black, jet crosses preserved in hidden chambers, the old, shiny silver of a thousand cult objects, were slowly covered in a soft, greenish patina deposited by the juicy sweat of stone.

         Meanwhile, the gestures and signs of love grew monstrously, and they devoted themselves to telling lies. Lies, those senseless stories they fermented daily, they devised each day in a final attempt to meet each other, in a final attempt to live beneath that eternal, unceasing rain. Tales, unravelled stories they told each other furiously, seeking one another in the vast loneliness, in the stifling tedium of the inorganic.

         It had all been useless.

         Luísa had ended up crying that night, and he had said ‘no, don’t cry’ and asked what motives she had for crying.

         It had all been useless because it was as if they loved one another in the mouth of hell.

         ‘Xoán, we love each other on the threshold of hell, really,’ and he had fallen silent, feeling exhausted, enervated, and she was still able to repeat ‘of hell’, and the two of them stared at each other with painful, dried eyes.

         She wasn’t there now.

         And Xoán stopped, hesitating, with a strong desire to retrace his footsteps. On the greyish wall of San Paio Monastery, he glimpsed the vast silhouette of a white, stone cross stretching out its enormous arms to embrace nothing.

         Annoyed, Xoán looked away, because all crosses caused him pain.

         And he carried on walking, wandering, his gaze motionless, feeling dead in that city of the dead the sun had abandoned, oppressed, defeated, wishing he could lose his bearings along the multiple paths of the underwater, starless night.

         The city was… horrendous. The black profiles of Great Constructions cast the inert shadows of all that horrifying beauty on the ground.

         There was nothing he could do.

         She wasn’t there now.

         And as he entered Preguntoiro, ‘A lie,’ he murmured, ‘all of it, a lie.’

         But it was sweet being able to hate now in that intense way he had wanted to hate, so much, so de, so deep, hating everything, things that existed in horror, everything, the city under the sky and that repulsive society all caught up with death…

         And the hours went by. The walk was infinite. Again, once more, the same squares one came across suddenly, anywhere, seemingly amazed before you, terrified, full of fear.

         He had come back down to the Quintana and, as before, scoured the sky and confirmed the crosses hurt him.

         There wasn’t long to go before dawn.

         He descended the square’s stone steps, and that was when he drew up suddenly, amazed and mute because of her a few feet away and coming closer. He noticed it was cold and sleeting, and he had nothing to say. Because she, Luísa, was there. She was there, awake and tired like him, among the thousands of unconscious bodies lying in silence under sweaty covers in the darkened air of all the city’s dormitories. She was there now and coming towards him, and smiling silently, without words, pierced by a thousand sorrows, advancing towards him despite the futility of it all, footsteps and smiles.

         The two of them embraced. Xoán embraced her and realized her face was cold and smelled of the night. And, ‘It looks as if it won’t stop raining, Xoán.’

         It was true, it looked like that, and he said, ‘No, it looks as if it won’t.’

‘We are a heap of accumulated loneliness,’ said Atanís, spitting, drinking wine he then spat on the ground, chewing nervously, restlessly, on his extinguished pipe, gesturing towards us with his slim, white hands, their whiteness unaltered. ‘What’s more… this city is full of history, full… full of ghosts all over the place. And guilt. I can’t bear it. Goodness! Not this. It’s too much, it’s too much, boy, it’s too much. It’s horrible. Luísa, can you imagine? Well, you know something about this. The two of you were doing some work, weren’t you? On the subject of counts…’ Luísa intervened, ‘That’s right.’ The jukebox interrupted our voices with a crazy ditty by Mungo Jerry that swept across the bar. ‘That’s right, the Counts of Santa Furoca do Val. Xoán’s helping me, aren’t you? It’s fun. The last important male in their line died in the fifteenth century, beheaded by the Catholic Monarchs. They were quite an original family.’ ‘They really were,’ said Xoán, ‘they really were. One Furoca, an impoverished nobleman, according to the sources, who got up to all sorts of shenanigans, was present at the Defeat of Fusquenlla. That was where he met his end, precisely. He died, armed with courage, but needless to say, only after giving a short speech to secure his place in history. What I mean is he didn’t want to be forgotten.’ ‘The way I see it, he was like Unamuno, who wanted to exist in style,’ said Atanís. And Luísa continued, ‘But the saddest thing is, despite all the solemn attention he received, the poor, old noble could only come out with a couple of crazy comments, which apparently was due to the ridiculous binge the man had been on the night before the fight to give himself courage, which left him, according to the documents, radically inebriated. The strangest thing is the scribes copied down everything he said with absolute fidelity. That was the start of Dadaism.’ Everybody laughed. ‘But there were consequences,’ Luísa went on, ‘because of this, the Furocas’ fame decreased, and now we only ever talk about the others: the Andrades, the Lemoses and so on. There may still be a Furoca hanging around, a drunk sales assistant ignorant of his family’s heroic past.’

         ‘Maybe,’ said Xoán. We ordered more wine. It was difficult to be heard by the waiter in all that din, even Atanís had almost stopped listening, despite the fact he had great interest in anything to do with Galician history. Luísa had downed several glasses and was sitting happily beside me. Atanís took a swig and quickly spat it on the ground with an expression of contempt and disgust. He looked at us for a few seconds, a sweet smile on his moistened lips. ‘My liver’s fucked,’ he commented. ‘You know, it all comes from drinking too much.’ ‘Like that Furoca,’ said Xoán. ‘A lesser evil. Don’t you worry, we’re all done in.’ ‘That’s right,’ added Luísa, ‘everybody here is going to end up with cirrhosis, aren’t they, Xoán?’ ‘Oh, of course they are. You imagine…’ ‘Who, me?’ ‘Yes, you imagine…’ It was a pleasure listening to Atanís. One never felt empty after a conversation with him. He generally talked as if he was in a hurry and made everything sound urgent. There were times, in the middle of the conversation, when he fell for long periods into a sombre silence and his gaze became lost, as if he was contemplating everything, a thousand secrets we knew nothing about, or perhaps thinking about nothing at all, that could also have been the case. But now he was in a loquacious mood. ‘You imagine, Luísa, just imagine: most inhabitants… how do they feel in front of all of these monuments, this city with its burden of history and a past almost none of them knows or considers their own? Ah! What meaning could such a city have for them? Wouldn’t it seem like a horrible incongruity?

         ‘We are a heap of accumulated loneliness,’ Atanís would say.

         ‘We know nothing about our past or our future. How are we going to glimpse the present? That way, everything takes on an absurd appearance. This city is a kind of monstrous creation full of church spires and medieval palaces. Why was it made? What for?’

         We were dragged from side to side, pushed, crushed, and enjoyed the special taste of being abandoned, absolute passivity, feeling like insignificant pieces in the middle of all that concentrated, anonymous dust.

         ‘Hold on to my hand, hold on tight, like this,’ we could have got lost. We could have got lost among all those people, that crowd pouring down the streets, filling all the streets, walking along with their withered faces and absent gazes beneath the city’s sun-filled sky.

         ‘I’ve just seen Atanís,’ said Luísa. The market was busy today. On the slow earth of the grove of Santa Susana (smell of pats, dung and filth) could be heard the stomping of a thousand feet in the mud that formed and stuck to shoes, covering the rotten leather of the market goers’ galoshes and boots.

         ‘The circle is a symbol of happiness, of immanence. It also serves as a symbol of misfortune, of despair. The Time of Misfortune is not circular, but it feels like that, like a ring, a circumference, with no beginning or end, like a circle.’

         ‘Mother, mother!’

         ‘What is it, child, don’t shout!’

         ‘I want a tuna, I want a tuna, I want…’

         ‘We don’t have enough money. We barely have enough for the octopus.’

         ‘I want a bagpipe, I want a bagpipe, I want…’

         ‘Please stop moaning, otherwise, next time, you can stay at home! What do you need a bagpipe for? Besides, it’s far too big for you. Can’t you see how big it is? How would you play something that big?’

         ‘Where is he? Call out for him.’

         ‘He was here just a moment ago. But now… You go that way, let’s see if we can find him.’

         ‘Are you sure it was Atanís? You could have been mistaken.’

         ‘I think it was.’

         ‘A hundred thousand reales. Nobody here would give you that. Just think about it.’

         ‘A heap of loneliness, we are a heap of accumulated loneliness…’

         ‘A hundred thousand reales, yes or no? Nobody’s going to give you more than that.’

         ‘Her mind is on her boyfriend called Antonio, who works in Germany. He said in his last letter he loved her a lot. But the young woman’s worried because…’

         ‘A hundred thousand reales!’

         ‘Everything in the pack, plus a Genevieve of Brabant, Rin Tin Tin and this beautiful painting of the Sacred Heart you can hang on the wall of your dining room as soon as you get home. How much do I want for the lot? Well, ladies and gentlemen, not a hundred, not fifty, not forty, nor thirty duros. Just twenty duros! Twenty duros! I’ll be ruined! No more than twenty duros! Is anybody interested? Who will give me twenty duros for the lot? This gentleman here. Thank you very much, sir. You’ve got yourself one of the bargains of the day.’

         Everything began in the uncertain hours of daybreak, they were working silently, furtively as shadows, they went to the stables, drank rum, crossed the threshing floor, searching for something, put the hoe back in its place, unknotted ropes, gathered something like grass… and did it all without a noise, quietly, with sleepy gestures, avoiding any useless efforts or movements. And…

         ‘What are you thinking about?’

         ‘Me? Oh, nothing.’

         ‘You’re lying, Luísa, you were thinking about something.’

         They arrived without being seen, on those old, dilapidated buses that ran around the city’s deserted streets. They resembled an invasion of spectral souls, as if all the dead had returned and taken the city. They travelled on dirty buses, abandoned routes, full of slippery shadows pressing against the windows, and emitted trembling gusts of blue and black smoke, a stench of burned gas oil filling the streets, mingled with the smell of frost.

         ‘Xoán.’

         ‘What?’

         ‘What can a woman do who’s fed up of doing what she doesn’t want to?’

         ‘Anything she wants.’

         ‘And men, what would they do if they were not allowed to be what they want to be?’

         ‘You know the answer to that: a revolution.’

         ‘What is necessary for there to be a revolution, Xoán?’

         ‘I don’t know… Reality would have to become like hell. Only in that case, I think, somewhere, would there be a revolution.’

         They came from everywhere, the most isolated villages, outlying parishes. And could be seen stomping along the yawning streets, the hard soles of their clogs beating against the smooth surface of the flagstones, a hoarse, irreverent chatter that profaned the altars’ murmuring silence. Little by little, the city was besieged by a thousand diffuse, whispering shadows that filled everything and left behind the unmistakable odour of mud, green gorse and sawdust. They didn’t seem real. They were not made of flesh and blood, like other men. They brought cows with horns like moons, loaded on to grim lorries, in large, wooden cages. They always appeared silent and dazed, wearing black berets, rags and tatters of misery, surrounded by monstrous sows, lately delivered, and lustful rams with curved horns and lascivious, ticklish looks.

         ‘When you can see no way out, what do you do?’

         ‘You wait. And hope. The time will come when men can be happy. Think about that.’

         ‘And how long does youth last in a woman, Xoán, do you know?’

         ‘A few years.’

         ‘Very few.’

         ‘But History is not individual time. You have to know how to wait, Luísa.’

         ‘You have to know how to despair, Xoán.’

         ‘Know how to despair then, if you like.’

         There weren’t so many of them, and yet they resembled an army. At midday, a lurid, winter sun glared in a sky lined with hazy, swollen, low clouds. The itinerant troops could be seen coming down the busy streets of the centre, towards the market, in variegated, hellish streams. There were numerous examples of every type: absent, inexpressive faces of men who had resigned themselves to the black sentence of destiny and walked with a lack of interest in the midst of terror, like someone who believes that everything is lost and, already dead, waits for the call of meaningless death; dog men, horse men, faces of moles and lizards, bodies of rocks with twisted, heavy members and mineral expressions, octopus women, gelded men of Dionysian vision and phosphoric, infernal pupils, disfigured faces of old witches, arms, expressions, gawkish, cretinous expressions, dancing eyes, idiotic, insecure smiles, necks, waving necks of subtle, immaculate swans, fossilized expressions, insect men with fixed gazes like colourless balloons and mystically transparent faces that made you think of death and the rare beauty of everything that passes.

         ‘That’s what I was thinking about. Didn’t you want to know?’

         ‘About that?’

         ‘About that! Because I’m fed up of nothing ever being possible. Because one always has to sacrifice the present for everything!’

         ‘Because you’re afraid of losing faith in everything, hope, of nothing meaning anything to you. I know. I’ve been there. When nothing means anything any more, it’s as if you’re dead. Anyway… why don’t you try this vodka? It has dynamite in it, you know. It’s good. Though, to tell the truth, I’m getting a little bored of clubs.’

         ‘I sometimes think everything is lost and nothing is worth the effort. It’s horrible. Wanting to love in a reality that makes loving impossible. Where everything that’s good and makes us happy doesn’t have the right to exist “yet”. Where everything is a denied possibility. The only thing I have is this black vision of misfortune. A few books and some discussions with you and Atanís. And, as a result, the realization that everything is lost, cursed, and you have to wait. Life fills me with loathing!’

         It was the Day of Saint Pig, the saintly patron of the oppressed and hungry, a venerated image protecting the poor and humble, giving the energy to live, averting death, rickets and misery, all-powerful and bestower of grace, holy, sacred, more praiseworthy than the archangels, more powerful than Canouro, the spirit of the earth that moans in the woods, more miraculous than Saint George, who killed the Dragon and guards the doors of stables and delivers us from all evil. It was the day of the yellow, holy, pimpernel cow cavorting in the fields, grazing on the cliff-tops and eating at night in the stables. It was Thursday, the fifth day of the week, the day of the disappeared and condemned hiding in their heather- and fern-infested lairs; the cruel apotheosis of moles, of disgusting insects that creep out of their holes when the stones are burning and the sun is glaring and reach the surface to reveal themselves to men; the day of weasels and slugs and fearful worms, of the plagued and crippled and labouring, of every snake that flies and every creature of the Devil that crawls along the ground. It was the Day of Saint Pig, holy, endowed, a thousand times holy and blessed, fading on the cross or in the cruel noose, surrounded by death throes; the Day of the Pure, Venerable Yellow screaming in pain and spitting out blood because everything is over when the sun agonizes among sparks of fire and the sky becomes ashen.

         They carried pitchforks and rakes and implements they held up to the sky, they came down from resounding mountains around the sacred city full of secret treasure, the Land of James bristling with spires and misty castles and hoards of gold.

         They turned up in the city that day with a dreadful sound, preceded by masks and grotesque figures wielding curved, ashen sickles which they used to cleave the air. They drank and giggled and joked and adulated Zarronco and Canouro and commended themselves to the devil and all the spirits nesting in darkness that belong to hell.

         ‘Everything is lost, Xoán.’

         ‘Everything is lost.’

         They were not real. They came from uninhabited villages in mountains where the wind rattles along, breaking the prolonged silence, like a lizard’s tail, of a fundamental dream without return.

         ‘I would like to forget everything, not to remember anything, Xoán.’

         ‘You would like not to feel.’

         ‘Not to feel. To be a stone or something.’

         ‘But you have to live.’

         ‘To live. Even though I don’t know why.’

         ‘I…’

         ‘What?’

         ‘I believe in life, Luísa. You have to love life.’

         ‘Words. They’re just words, you know. I sometimes think there are only two solutions open to us: to burst on the inside, or to explode outwards.’

         ‘And you?’

         ‘Me what?’

         ‘Which do you choose?’

         ‘Neither. I don’t know. Maybe I don’t have a solution.’

         ‘You have to have a little faith, Luísa, a flicker of hope. You have no faith in men.’

         ‘Because there aren’t any. No men or women. Men can’t be like this, Xoán. They must be something that has yet to be made.’

         ‘But that’s just it, the meaning of our lives could well be to create…’

         ‘If you can’t be happy, life has no meaning, Xoán. And history, were we one day allowed to become happy, would have a human meaning. But it’s not possible to interrogate the future. The present couldn’t be more confused. And what’s more, you only find out the meaning at the end. At the end. Before you get to the end, everything is darkness.’

         ‘It has yet to be seen, therefore?’

         ‘It has yet to be seen.’

         ‘And…?’

         ‘Neither you nor I will see it, Xoán. We may have been born too early. It’s funny.’

         ‘That’s desperate.’

         ‘It’s desperate.’

         They travelled through the night and suddenly appeared in the midst of the living, a huge crowd that spilled down unending streets and walked until sunset along tortuous, snaking alleys. The city suffered their dreadful presence once more, they could be seen walking like lost people along sleepy streets, talking in an incomprehensible, dejected language. They were like the unsettling visions of a nightmare that always, inevitably, comes back, every seven days, into someone’s consciousness.

         Atanís was talking about his novel. ‘Everything begins when one leaves behind certain prejudices, reassuring clichés that have been elaborated to varying degrees and preconceived models of the world, and gets ready to see life as a personal matter, so to speak, that affects one individually, right. The world we see here is Galician precisely, rather than anything else. A crazy, meaningless reality… And one experiences a deep distrust of everything, political ideologies as well, and language in general… Language is interpretation, as Nietzsche used to say, I think… It’s an intellectual, sensitive, by which I mean sensual, adventure. A denial, right, an orgiastic destruction of the reality that smothers any possibility of being happy. Because the position from which we judge is that of the right we won’t renounce to be ourselves and to be happy. That’s what my novel is about, more or less.’

         There was a silence. Atanís became quiet, thoughtful.

         ‘You’ll let us read it,’ said Xoán. ‘What page are you on?’

         ‘37, still.’

         ‘And what will the title be?’ asked Luísa.

         ‘I don’t know, I don’t know yet.’

         I don’t know. Nobody knows. Not even Atanís. There were fewer and fewer people. More empty places. Luísa stayed by his side, leaning towards him, her eyes withered. Her eyes were always like this, half-closed, when she was sleepy or wanted to go to bed with him. ‘Luísa,’ he murmured. ‘What?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘Nothing?’ ‘It was nothing, go to sleep.’ At the foot of an oak nearby was a woman and a cow. The cow went ‘moo’ from time to time. It was tied to the tree by a rope. Xoán gazed into its eyes. It had sad eyes. The woman had no expression. Luísa wanted to make love. Her breath smelled of alcohol. It’s a good smell, alcohol, a strong smell. The cow had sad eyes. Sad, green eyes. Luísa opened her eyes and looked at him. ‘What?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘Nothing?’ ‘It was nothing, go to sleep.’ Luísa doesn’t sleep, but looks as if she’s asleep. Her eyes were closed. The dead sleep. But I’m not sleepy. Nor is Atanís. Atanís doesn’t stop. Didn’t stop talking. Never stopped. It was like music, monotonous music pouring out calmly, angrily, ironically, faintly, wearily, hopelessly, decadently, morbidly. Atanís talked, gabbled, bit the unlit pipe in his mouth, without looking at Xoán or Luísa. Atanís talked, talked, but Xoán paid him no attention. At that point, the cow started to urinate. He felt like urinating also. The cow had sad, bluish eyes, large and sad. Luísa asked, ‘And what will the title be?’

         ‘I don’t know, I don’t know yet.’

         Nothing, nobody knows. Not me or Atanís or anyone. The cow’s urine splattered on the ground. Came out in a hot, yellow stream. Atanís’ eyes looked grey. He talked and talked and talked in various tones, in different ways. Atanís talked, criticized everything, destroyed, created only despair. He never gave solutions, only problems. Thought must always be critical, never an apology of existence, the same with literature and art, although literature… Horreur! It was impossible to carry on listening to him. His head would burst. It was true. Everything is true. Enough. He looked at Luísa, who appeared to be asleep. Truths were horrifying. Luísa opened her eyes. ‘What were you saying?’ ‘Me? Nothing, I was talking to myself.’ Luísa stared at him in silence for a moment. He didn’t like being stared at. One never knew what expression to adopt. Anyone who wants to be happy has also to want to be a murderer. We are separated from happiness by seas of blood. The price of happiness is usually destruction. Atanís talked and talked and talked. ‘You said truths are usually horrifying, Xoán.’ ‘That’s right, that’s what I said.’ He didn’t like being stared at for long. Even by her. Destruction, destruction, destruction, the word jumped around, tumbled down the dark crack of his brain. ‘Unam solus salus, nulam sperare salutem,’ said Atanís, and Xoán remained silent. War, murderers, destruction… Nothing, he felt nothing. He had no heart, no feelings. He closed his eyes. Tried to concentrate and murmured, ‘Murderers, war…’ Nothing. They were just worn out words, ‘Blood… death…’ He gazed uneasily at Atanís, who carried on talking. Nothing, I’m finished. I have no feelings. I reason, but do not feel. He felt anguished. Nothing, he felt nothing. Luísa, love… ‘Nothing!’

         ‘Nothing what?’ Luísa stared at him again, in that fixed way.

         ‘Nothing at all,’ he answered. And they both smiled. She closed her eyes again, as if she was asleep. Fortune, destruction, revolution, utopia, love, Luísa, love… Nothing! Nothing. I’m tired, thought Xoán. Words filled him with loathing. Luísa held his hand and squeezed it from time to time, like a caress. He thought, Luísa. He could see a white jug, stained with red wine, on the table in front of him. He closed his eyes, heard the lowing of the cows, Atanís’ faint voice, a lorry’s rumbling engine, all very far away, unsettling sounds that pierced the sticky, viscid darkness covering everything and crawled like worms through the inner darkness of his brain. He squeezed his eyelids shut, so he wouldn’t see anything. There was no light, it was dark. It was one, large darkness without colours, without form, and only those vague sounds he discerned as if from far away gave his mind a deformed notion of space and distance. This is me, he thought, this piece of night in my head. This. There was a large loneliness, a complete loneliness, an enormous loneliness that filled his head like cotton balls. ‘Luísa…!’ He waited for two, four, seconds, expecting something, some feeling, some answer to that word. Silence. Just silence inside him, broken from time to time by the sounds he felt sliding inside him like worms. Silence, nothing, nothing! This is horrible! But why, why, why… ‘Luísa,’ he repeated, ‘Luísa, Luísa, Luísa, Luísa, love, love, love, Luísa…!’ Nothing. She doesn’t love me, he thought. He said it aloud this time, ‘She doesn’t love me.’ Mrs María González Rouco was beside herself that night, materially insane. I’m crazy, my God, where am I going? She braked. She’d left home that night in a flurry, in a rage, and gone down to the garage to get the car, ready to do something stupid. ‘I’m going to my mother’s house right now! You horrible man! Who do you think I am? You don’t know me, Ramón! You don’t know me. But you’re going to get a surprise! You’re going to get a real surprise!’ She remained motionless inside the car, feeling exhausted, her hands on the steering wheel, her eyes damp. ‘I’m old,’ she said to herself. ‘I’m tired.’ Mrs González didn’t smoke and used to shout at her daughter, Luísa, for smoking so much. But now she felt a violent need to light a cigarette. ‘I’m old,’ she said to herself, ‘I’m a wretch.’ Her eyes filled with tears. She opened her handbag. She used to keep a pack of blond tobacco in there. Each pack would last for a month or so. She looked. She had a few Philip Morris cigarettes left. She lit one and started smoking. Her knees were trembling. She felt constant shivers running down her spine. There was silence now, and everything was dark. She’d turned out the lights. Left only the small rear lights on. Mrs González was a little afraid of the beyond, hell, where all suicides end up. She was thinking about suicide right now, pretending to herself she was prepared to take her own life and revelling in the singular pleasure these thoughts gave her. She told herself nobody loved her, everybody had forgotten her, and imagined herself lying half naked on the bed, her hair in a mess, a bottle of barbiturates on the floor. It was horrible and beautiful, like a scene from a film. Actresses took their own lives like that. Only those with a heart of stone would fail to understand someone committing suicide. But I can. And she was determined to do it one day. One day, she thought. And a feeling of panic ran through her body. Ah, were it not for Luísa…! She was a real martyr. If she hadn’t abandoned that man, her husband, it wasn’t because of what they would say, or morals, or… It was because of her, her daughter, Luísa, she didn’t want to cause her such pain. Mrs González felt very sorry for herself. This was a sweet, sticky feeling that pervaded her soul. But she doesn’t care, she thought, Luísa never cared. Her mouth started trembling, and she began to cry. No one seemed to have the slightest affection for her. Her daughter was rough and cruel. And never took her seriously. She made her feel ignorant and stupid and mocked everything she said. The point was she couldn’t say anything to her! She only upset her, that was the truth. And she couldn’t take her anywhere with her because, as if on purpose, her daughter always made her feel small.

Text © Heirs of Anxo Rei Ballesteros

Translation © Jonathan Dunne