CHAPTER ONE

Life was the place where the stars had deposited their tiny body, accompanied by look-alikes and things and artefacts and implements and devilish tubercles, capriciously human, which didn’t let the constant light of the infinite be seen. That was the thought that jolted him before taking the most important decision of his sterile existence, the second significant decision in twenty years. He rushed to jot the words down in his minuscule spiral notebook and arranged a reflection on the apparently absurd nature of his thought.

Devilish tubercles like Beings

Light like Happiness

The Infinite like the Universe

He meant that the rest, the others, the mundane, polymorphous, complex humanities – neighbours, colleagues, people: look-alikes – prevented one from reaching a settled state of equilibrium, the joy of matter and non-matter and landscapes and multi-disciplinary devices – things and artefacts – the good fortune or enjoyment of existing. The others were a cold, glacial air that had frozen his heart, his determination or desire or hope. The others stopped him contemplating life as a jubilant journey on which one could still encounter enthusiasm and new feelings and emotions and encouragement. He was dead because the world denied his life. He had been dead all these years. And he wasn’t going to put up with another minute of that hell of demons and flames and tridents that kept on pricking his weary skin. The constant light of the infinite, the longed-for happiness, seemed like a doable affair. Perhaps a moon within reach of his small, feeble hands, a star he could kiss with the lips of a loser who no longer wanted to lose, ever again.

After this explanation, he grabbed 10,000 pesetas from a purse his wife kept in the wardrobe – just so he could get through the first few days – a change of underwear, which he put in a supermarket bag, and, last of all, a photograph of Margarita Vega, the greatest treasure in his unprodigious heritage, munificence fate had placed in his path as the symptom of an encouraging future full of mulberries and broom and sweet honeywort to relieve the bitterness of his acidic past.

He had to switch destiny, alter the absurd, monotonous, ever-to-be-repeated sense of his existence, not allow tedium to bully his physique and feelings down well-trodden byways. Destiny, he thought, can change, all we need is character and perseverance. “You know that well,” he said to the photograph of Margarita Vega, “you who’ve put up with my most accurate confessions, tears and desperation, who’ve never spoken to me and yet seen the iron lines the blade of days has engraved on my skin, quiet Margarita, muse of my brokenness, companion of so many nights shut up in the bathroom, in silence, so as not to disturb the sleep and roar of the magnificent lady occupying two thirds of a bed that was never nuptial, you, Margarita, invisible romance of my dreams.”

He stopped talking to the photograph. He squeezed his eyes tight in the hope they would swallow, like mouths, the tears that struggled to make it to the surface. He insisted. Again and again. And got what he wanted. Tears were muddy rivers that would sometimes obstinately visit his face, his soul, he thought, the only place the laments and perfidious fits that sometimes gnawed at his wounded heart could resort to. For this reason, he had jotted in his notebook: “Tears can only slide over the soul, that is why soul and skin are one and the same, they are united, indissoluble. A human’s great and perpetual emotions, those emotions that build us up and destroy us, are part soul, part skin.”

After this thought, he wrote those emotions he considered to be fundamental to a human being, the emotions that build him up and destroy him, saving emotions. And after writing them down, he thought of the first of them all, primary and primitive: love. Love, buried deep down, had kept him intact thanks to Margarita Vega, the only woman who for so many years of unhappy marriage had been capable of keeping the flame of the passion in his shipwrecked interior alive and fervent.

It was necessary to exercise oneself in the task of love on a daily basis, not to forget it, to go back to it with obstinate stubbornness. He once thought only the one who loved without future, without hope, the man or woman who placed their anxiety in the impossibility of ever meeting their loved one, could know true enjoyment. He was a living case in point: he may never have come across Margarita. That pain may have been a clear sign that he would, one day, come face to face with such longed-for happiness.

And yet this wasn’t the time to be wandering along the quivering blade of reflection. He needed to activate his interior, his skin, his soul. “Let’s go, let’s go!” he said a couple of times, easing his determination by clenching his fists, whisking the air with his arms, robotically moving his head. He was tired of the impetuous butcher, the one in the basement, who didn’t stop banging cleavers and knives on a solid board of stony or acerric wood, fed up of his refrigerated chambers that were constantly on the hum, the doors and blinds, the lorries unloading tender, bloody calves in front of his polyvalent butcher’s establishment, the pies and meatballs set out in the glass display case on a Saturday morning, forcing him to enter the shop, to ask for one of those golden rectangles that enveloped tasty viands or ampulous spheres of meat in rich sauce his wife never gave him.

He was tired of her, of his wife, Matilde. He thought about the Galician word for “wife”, esposa. Nobody could have come up with such an exact term for his situation, they must have had it in mind when convention and the arbitrariness of speakers gave birth to such a strict and precise syntagma. He had consulted every possible dictionary, and they all gave the same horrific definition for the plural of the word he was thinking. Esposas were handcuffs or manacles, an iron object that served to secure a prisoner’s wrists, to prevent movement. Matilde wasn’t esposa, she was esposas or even alxemas, a pretty word that blurred its rhythmic sound to take on a meaning it should never have had: irons used to tie a human being’s wrists together, to prevent them from moving freely, to deprive them of the possibility of giving nuance to the voice with the movement of the hands, of applauding the joy of a new day announced by an orange sun sprouting in the east, of caressing the skin or hiding the eyes so as not to cry, not to cry. Those two words, esposas and alxemas, had nothing to do with one another. Twenty years of ill-fated marriage that had been consumed in an ignored Tartarus inhabited by alxemas, the glow of prematurely disturbed little eyes.

He was fed up of wasting his talent on machines and computers and greetings and paltry payslips and grey desks and grey chairs and grey men and taciturn words in a vulgar office, as an administrative assistant specializing full-time in managerial matters, with a curriculum replete with various courses of perfection or intensive recycling in his peripatetic profession and with years and years and years of experience, an ample and immaculate track record that probably listed all his multiple merits: honesty, punctuality, docility, acquiescence.

He always had his books and set number of films etched in his memory, that much was true, but he had recently begun to doubt their compensatory power and had reached the conclusion that life cannot settle in the pages of a novel, nor wisdom inside the confused, well-documented borders of a large scientific essay, nor the Seventh Art in the numerous frames printed on lackadaisical celluloid moving at twenty-four images a second. Life had no angels earning their wings by helping the extremely correct – God rest his soul – James Stewart, aka George Bailey, the magnificent citizen who loved his wife and country in It’s a Wonderful Life. He wasn’t George Bailey. And nor did Matilde have anything in common with the kind-hearted Mary of the film. Life found its justification in itself, in the unknown, in the grace of disregarding what will happen moments later, in the good fortune of ignoring the most immediate future or else in the joy of inoculating air by means of the lungs, of opening the window and seeing a new day has slowly begun with the promise of lashings of uncertainties and challenges. That was the one thing he shared with George Bailey: their desire to live out adventures. James Stewart couldn’t do this, he wasn’t allowed. But he had no desire to be James Stewart, to waste his time playing a role invented by some well-paid screenwriter, to wear a cowboy hat so he could finish off the baddies at the end of the film, to serve a liberal, business, capitalist system with a solid structure and dollars, thousands of millions of dollars, thousands of profit. To live out adventures, that was his desire. Life, adventure: neither could exist without the other.

His thoughts delayed his imminent departure. He went on the alert because his wife, Matilde, would be back soon from her meeting with her friends. This get-together consisted of a game of briscola accompanied by coffee with milk and saccharin to digest – not increase – the multiple proteins and carbohydrates of lunch. The game and coffee, however, were just a pretext to veil the real reasons behind such meetings: flaying alive anyone who was not to their taste, insulting, rebuking, cursing, excommunicating and coming up with other, assorted commentaries on various recent events: “The priest spoke well at Mass on Sunday, he wasn’t drunk.” “No, no, he wasn’t drunk, how strange!” “Your neighbour is a shameless hussy!” “Who, the one from the supermarket?” “Yes, her.” “My dumb husband spends the whole day working.” “I love your dress.” “Pretty, isn’t it?” “One coffee with milk, waiter, yes, I don’t know why you adopt that stupid expression, with saccharin.” “What did you want to be when you were a girl, Matilde?” “A tamer.”

They got together in a local bar where Fidel, the owner, would dizzily watch their movements, believing the job of waiter to be the most wonderful occupation on earth. The most wonderful because it allowed him to scrutinize variety, to linger over the prodigy of knowing there are many people, many tastes, diverse preferences, and something as elementary as this made happiness all the more attainable. Fidel would say, “If you’re sad, think of the hundreds and hundreds of individuals suffering the same fate as you, and this will lessen the pain.” Rosa, his partner, did not share his opinion and would whisper in his ear the well-known refrain: “That’s just because misery loves company…” This, however, served only to bolster his enthusiasm, he would say the proverb was right, we humans needed all the tricks we could lay hands on in order to avoid misfortune and, if he were born again, he’d go back to being a waiter so he could observe all the differences, something that constituted the very foundation of western civilization, so decrepit. Having put forward his case, he would drink a glass of red wine, since this helped to increase his perception of variety.

He had to flee. Libardino Romero – for this was his name – had to get out of there. Not think. He’d have plenty of time to ponder what made him up, to gather the objects that had been tossed into the lukewarm water of melancholy, but now was not the time for nostalgia or weakness, now was the time to depart, as ships depart in search of Atlantises and treasures. As Ulysses departed after the Trojan War in search of his Ithaca, in search of Penelope, his beloved. Penelope, Penelope, why did I never meet you, why didn’t I draw your hair in the midst of treacherous, adolescent timidity, why was I blinded by the first feeling that came knocking at the door of my solitude, he had oftentimes thought. Now he wanted to be Ulysses. Ulysses setting off in search of a reason, a minimal reason that sufficed not to perish, to stay alive, alive like all those Ulysses who, poor things, still believed in the power of wooden horses. The power of wooden horses, or fantasy, to win the great battles that lurk behind the door of every hour, the battles of the heart.

Before taking to his heels, he wrote a concise note his wife could read on her return: “I need to live out adventures, I need air, goodbye, energumen.” That should do it. He put “Libardino” – and not “Libar”, as she would have liked, horrible syntagma that echoed in her catalytic throat: “Libar! Make breakfast and go to work!” (not only that, they had to be in pairs!), “Libar! You’re going to be late, say hello to your boss from me!”, “Libar! When you leave, don’t forget to order the bread!”, “Libar! Don’t slam the door on your way out!”, “Libar! I’m falling into a depression on your account!”, “Libar! Books and films don’t put food on the table, you imbecile!”, “Libar, Libar, Libar!!!” Libar was an imbecile, that meant him.

He didn’t want to renounce his name, the one his mother had given him, which the priest, Don Blas, had backed up with infinite enthusiasm: Libardino. Libardino – four glorious syllables that described his belittled state, he would claim forthrightly in the midst of her booming reflections. He believed the destiny of people depended to a large extent on the name they bore and, he would state, a large part of their luck depended on whether they accepted it or not. He wasn’t going to reject his name, but, sensible lad that he was, he thought more sonorous titles such as Igártulo Alcazán, Robert Louis Stevenson or Reverend Heart would have suited his personality better.

The patronymic took its origin from the fervent religious devotion of Señorita Pura, his mother, in favour of Saint Libarda, the protector of difficult or indecisive childbirths and procurer of impossible children. It was, true enough, a strange name which took some getting used to. But only for the first few days – once you were used to it, Libardino seemed like a unique name, pleasant enough to pronounce with sweetness, without emphasizing the accent too much, drawing out the phonemes a little more than usual, taking delight in the modulation of sounds. Libardino, an unfamiliar or infrequent designation, was the fruit of the imagination of Señorita Pura, his mother, very clever at deriving words and in need of a son that would draw people’s attention from the very moment his onomastic data became known. Señorita Pura would celebrate her son’s name day on the same day Ébora celebrated its patron saint – in August.

All the same, it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to start thinking of another denomination in line with his new personality, he pondered while walking down the stairs. An adventurer requires a sonorous, brief name that can easily slot into the memory of those who hear of his heroic twists and turns, a resounding name that carries the meaning of all the possible encounters and disencounters eternity has in store for its chosen ones. And yet, contrary to expectation, he was proud of his name, the way it sounded, its seven magnificent syllables: Libardino Romero. It’s just that it wasn’t quite right for devoting oneself to the pleasure of adventure because it was long, too long, and he ran the risk of going down in history as just Libar, and that would never do in the midst of the inverdant expanse of inane and infulous purgatory.

He stopped for a moment in the hallway, with the bag where he kept his underwear. First he patted his jacket pocket to check the photograph was there. He took it out. Looked at the portrait as never before, with a dumb, absent, beclouded expression, with the aura that love deposits on the faces of boys and girls in granulitic spring. Then he asked himself the necessary, pertinent questions: “Where to go? Right, left, north, south?” He didn’t know. Hoping to divert his hesitation, he headed towards the butcher’s shop and, standing opposite the impetuous, haughty meat merchant, said to him, “I shan’t be denouncing you anymore, you can go on making all the noise you like, you can go on banging on your bloody board until it disappears, you can go on killing innocent calves, you can go on exercising your profession without my presence, goodbye.” The butcher glanced at him out of the corner of his eye, but didn’t answer. From the pavement, Libardino stuck out his tongue at the person in question three times and quickly turned on his heels, as a precaution, he didn’t want said bloke launching a lancet or some other surgical instrument that would spoil his plans of escape. The butcher had ruined his existence with bangs and the humming of fridges, Saturdays, Sundays and feasts, but everything can be amended, well, almost everything, and that was why he leaped in the air and whistled a happy tune, glad to be getting out of there and surveying new horizons.

As he walked, he thought his greatest sufferings had begun twenty years earlier, at the precise moment when he said, “I do,” and a corpulent lady with powerful arms changed the sweet curvature of her forehead for a threatening, surly, rough, brusque, violent expression. The intuition of an unhappy future shook his insides and he was about to say sorry, to shout that he’d been wrong, he would much rather have said, “No, I don’t,” to request repentance, rectification. Out of the question. He thought misfortune was an integral part of his transformation because the first decision of his existence, that of marriage, had been a failure from the outset. There was always the solace of abandonment, but he’d never known how to go into reverse, to repair things, to correct himself, and besides he was incapable of leaving Matilde, of shaking off her protuberant body, she would probably chase him to the ends of the earth, pursue him until she found him and did him in. She had never understood him. “Understanding is something that comes with the years,” she had said, “in fifteen months of going out we can’t possibly purport to perceive each other’s needs to perfection, everything will come.” (Possibly… purport… to perceive… to perfection: atrocious occlusive alliteration, thought Libardino, who knew all about sounds and letters and words thanks to the philological inclinations of Señorita Pura, his mother.) “Everything will come,” Matilde had repeated with a gesture of cruel despotism. But it didn’t. Libardino was of the opinion she didn’t love him. He, however, had a certain fraternal affection for his wife, not too much, just enough, an affection he had always felt for grand objects, grand beings, large bodies. Grande was the surname of Ofelia, Matilde’s mother, such is the way of things.

This propensity for grand things probably derived from his size and exaggerated thinness: one metre sixty, fifty kilos in weight, a hundred pounds, little hair, light in colour, blond once upon a time. A thinness that came about in his strange metabolism, which changed when he turned fifteen, age at which he weighed 110 kilos, without eating too much, without ingesting abundant fat, or starch, or excessive meat. It was a case that drew the attention of the medical community, for which an answer has yet to be found. Doctors came from different latitudes, examined his medical history, carried out analyses and counter-analyses, X-rays, ultrasounds, endoscopies, but all to no avail, nothing was clear. Only a bright Andalusian physician dared to come up with a diagnosis when he discovered that Libardino Romero had been seven kilos when he was born: his soul was heavy. According to him, the soul had a specific weight at birth and, should that amount surpass the average, given as three or three and a half kilos maximum, quite possibly it would grow disproportionately and anachronically. Having reached a certain point, the organism would be unable to put up with such weight and would release the ballast. This moment of expulsion affected Libardino Romero during his adolescence, possibly at the time he first became acquainted with the generous world of sex by means of touching, feeling, hugging and caressing. It was here he began to lose his soulful overdose and go back to what should have been his normal state. Of course, this explanation convinced nobody, especially when said physician was locked up in a mental asylum, having tried to cure various patients by means of a device he himself had fabricated, similar to a mini hoover, which he placed in the mouths of sufferers, hoping to extract their excess soul.

Needless to say, his wife knew nothing of such mysteries casually tied up in Libardino’s life, while he, tired of moving about on the slack cord of doubt and constant uncertainty, was drawn to this girl who sounded so joyful and whom he met thanks to a silly radio show whose strident presenter would bring together a man and a woman on the telephone: Romantic Voice. His affection, however, was too short-lived and stingy for their holy matrimony not to turn into vile hell. Their union, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health – more on the downside than on the up – was a complete disaster, a gumboil filled with pus, all infected, in the midst of his soul, which had weighed so much.

Matilde was harsh and evasive, characteristics that could be seen in her face with its square, geometric features. A prominent nose she had got rid of some time earlier by means of a surgical procedure that cost Libardino more than 600 hours overtime over a period of four years. She wouldn’t stop importuning him: a new nose would bring about a change in her temperament, her taste for bossing about, for unleashing the imperative, was the result of ugliness, the concubirscence – that’s what she said – of her nasal appendage, she promised to stroke him, to make his breakfast, to cook meatballs once a week, the way he liked them, with plenty of ham, a physique that drills holes in self-esteem often leads to defects in the mental health of the one suffering from it, her friends at briscola, over saccharined coffee, didn’t stop making fun of her appearance. With arguments such as these, she managed to persuade Libardino to save up the necessary money so he could send her to Barcelona in the company of her voluminous parents, where a renowned specialist would diminish the hyperbolical size of her exacerbated respiratory organ. These features, the disappeared and disproportionate nose and square face, cubic head, were what really defined Matilde’s outer appearance and, according to Libardino Romero, they exactly reflected his wife’s impudent and mathematical soul. There it was, the soul again. Matilde would never write poems, she would never write novels, not even a couple of lines to express a tiny amount of emotion or beauty: only women who are capable of dreaming can do this. And she didn’t dream. She didn’t know how.

Impudent and mathematical. Impudent because she lacked the necessary modesty that is demanded by generosity, and mathematical, calculating, because it was obvious to Libardino he had coincided with her adolescent desire to come across a simpleton and marry him, entrap him, train him, lacerate him. As a girl, Matilde had wanted to be a tamer. To domesticate, to tame, to soften, verbs she used with unpleasant frequency. Horrible verbs. But she didn’t care, she wanted to be a tamer. All she needed was a puppy to curtail with her hurtful, soulless, concubirscent, cubic, invasive, fatal whip.

Libardino Romero managed to abandon her, to run away, to take to his heels like a bolt of lightning in the midst of a black, stormy sky, to inch his body through the crack of felicity, and for the first time, like a holm oak in the green clearing of April, he felt free. It was a relief to be able to walk without thinking about oily, tinned food, his boss spitting out curses every time something held up the monotonous, vulgar grind of office life, the blows that pulverized his brain and prevented him from sleeping past seven in the morning, when the meat industry located in the basement of his building started business. He could have lived in the attic, but she said no, climbing stairs was not a good thing, with the years cardiac complaints would require less brusque movements and minimum effort, her triglyceride and cholesterol count was already alarming enough, she had both lipids, something like that, a genetic inheritance, she could barely eat, drink or do anything to excess. “1B, Camellia Square, Matilde Sánchez Grande, Libardino Romero,” said a pale white card, as if what mattered was the apartment, the address, the place, not them. Camellia Square, of the Theaceae family. 1B was a far cry from paradise.

He was now a free man. Libardino the Free. Hence he greeted everybody he met, drawing a clear smile across his lips, content, joyful, happy. But he needed to decide on a direction. In life, he thought, it is essential to have a fixed direction: Beethoven wanted to be a musician from the age of three and used a spoon to accompany the words of his mother, a very refined woman who told him stories every night; Quevedo wrote verses on the walls with burnt sticks; Castelao portrayed the faces of his teachers with skill and immeasurable talent, accompanying the caricatures with pristine and convincing, poetic, sentences, and he, Libardino Romero, also needed a direction that would show him the way to adventure. In order to choose one, he decided to take up position at a set of traffic lights, next to a road that went four different ways, by the main square in the city. He would wait for twenty-six vehicles to go past and, without fear, would go in the direction taken by vehicle twenty-seven. There wasn’t much traffic, so he began to grow impatient. He was just lucky Matilde wouldn’t be passing that way: Fidel’s café, where she played her fascinating game of briscola accompanied by a cup of coffee with saccharined milk and several spitting bustards in make-up, great friends, was on the other side of town. Playing games, chatting away, passing comment, murmuring, taming him: her life held no other meaning.

Vehicle number ten was just going by when an image upset his countable delirium: a man sitting on top of a red suitcase, in the middle of the square, like an apparition. It was the first time he’d seen this individual. He stopped for a moment to observe said person, who appeared unkempt, lean, unshaven, whose bones were more obvious than his flesh, dressed in a white shirt and black trousers, oblivious to the cold of early December, out in the open, his hair standing on end and with a look that was harassed by some inner demon.

“Place your coins in my hands, I am the reason you exist, sons of greed and envy, heirs of ignominy, fans of immaterial evil,” he kept saying. Libardino left off counting vehicles and approached the man with the suitcase. “What are you looking at?” “Nothing, I just happened to be passing, I’m an adventurer.” “You’re an adventurer if I want you to be.” “No, I’m an adventurer because I want to be, and nothing you say is going to influence my profession.” “You don’t understand, sir, you don’t understand a thing.” “Explain it to me.” “I am he who dreams everything humans can see, what will happen and what is happening, present and future, things, buildings, earth, sky, poems, feeling, bitterness, solitude, love and death, hail, ivy and goldfinches, without me nothing exists, nothing happens, nothing is.” “Well, you might think about dreaming up a novel whose main character is Libardino Romero – that’s me – adventurer with a dilated past and a Herculean future.” “I will, don’t worry.” “Or heaps of 5,000-peseta notes, that way you wouldn’t have to beg for money.” “I’m not begging for money, kind sir, I am demanding the tax owed to me by humans for allowing them to exist and, as for that other matter, the one about dreaming up legal tender, it strikes me as immoral, such trivial desires don’t deserve to be dreamed.”

An interesting character, that much was sure. Libardino fell silent and congratulated himself: not a bad start to his new life. The man, melodically accompanying his companion’s silence, spoke, “Don’t think it’s a joke, I was sent to earth, when this was just a limy and sandy desert, by the great Mephistopheles, lord of the abyss and all cupolas, unknown by the majority of beings that inhabit the universe, who are unworthily informed by sayings found in books that Mephistopheles is the devil, Mephistopheles is the one who keeps Faust company, Mephistopheles will grant this or that other desire, nonsense, all nonsense, Mephistopheles is my dear father and he sent me to put a bit of order in this galactic chaos, he ordered me to draw the visible and the invisible, to create objects and subjects that will fill this planet.” He paused. Then continued, “My principal function was to dream the appearance of protozoans and microzoans, the coming together of chemistries and elements, the arrival of civilization, I’ve been dreaming for 4,600 years and I begin to feel a bit tired, I need someone to take my place so the Last Judgement doesn’t happen, so the party can go on, humanity and all its reverses, you look like a dreamer, you could take my place for a while.”

Libardino couldn’t believe the sounds penetrating his wax-filled ears. He had forgotten, in the haste of flight, to pack some sticks with cotton on the tip for the cleaning of the sinuous auricular orifice. It would no doubt be advantageous if his intelligence were capable of making the most of this imponderable question of hygiene: perhaps he could make a candle or save up a kilo of earwax that would help to banish the cold of winter nights that could be felt, grey, on the horizon. He stuck his little finger in his ear and then, with a cloth, gently wiped off the brown matter. He picked up a cigarette box lying on the ground and quickly put the wax he’d taken out of his ear on it. He then stuck the cigarette box in the bag with his underwear. He thought with satisfaction, You never know what the future holds, ergo all inventions and devices are insufficient if the forces that control our destinies conspire against us, I must pay attention to everything around me, paper that will serve to light a fire, clothes abandoned in rubbish containers, food, plastic to keep off the rain and broomsticks that will help to lessen the distance and harshness of the road, it would be easy to pop back home and take some more money, or to rob a local bank, that way I wouldn’t have any problems, but no, I’m an adventurer and adventurers are meant to be beset by pressing needs.

To conclude his meditation, with his eyes closed, he wrote in ink on the walls of his noggin, “An adventurer requires all sorts of resources to confront the difficult task of survival.”

He would often indulge in this kind of introspective pondering, it was as if he were jotting down letters on an immense board located in the middle of his forehead. This exercise gave him solace in multiple moments of anguish. And there was no doubt this was a transcendental moment of obligatory concern. After his meditatio, having seen straight through its significance, he would occasionally write the thought down in a notebook he always had with him. For example, “Satisfaction has no part in an adventure, rather constant searching, doubt, uncertainty, chaos.” Or, “Life always disappoints.” Or, “Books would make great Presidents.” Or, “We can change our destiny if we keep on plugging away, if we keep on knocking at the door of fate.” Or, “Igártulo Alcazán, Robert Louis Stevenson, Reverend Heart, suitable names for adventurers who desire to cross seas and lands and landscapes, who are eager to install justice where inequality reigns, hope where no future exists, water where thirst has paralyzed glottises and tongues, light in the darkness, life in death.” There was then an arrow indicating a direction across the page; in the background, in capital letters, a name: “LIBARDINO ROMERO”. The notebook was undoubtedly the only intelligent sign of his life in the office, or in apartment 1B, Camellia Square, or in the city, or amidst the noise of the impetuous butcher, or in the monotonous hum of his former existence.

In the short time he had kept company with Mephistopheles’s self-confessed envoy, he had learned to his amazement that man had inhabited the earth for 4,600 years and all discoveries by researchers in the field – age of the planet, theories about sudden explosions, hominids and Neanderthals, gnats, ice ages, Pithecanthropus, Sinanthropus, Pleistocene and Holocene, sapiens, erectus, habilis, antecessor – all these were false clues he had dreamed to keep archaeologists, palynologists, anthropologists, infulous prehistorians and various scientists entertained, such families had to live somehow and early history, needless to say, has much to offer. “This,” Mephistopheles’s son proclaimed in oratory enthusiasm, “is a good way of contributing altruistically to the consolidation of bases for a better future for all, where the encouragement of solidarity and inalienable rights is above individual interests and corrupt practices.” Then, forgetting his earlier emphasis and solemnity, he affirmed in a more natural, relaxed manner, “It is necessary to keep people occupied with trivial matters – for example, a dogfish that lived 700,000 years ago and offers definitive data about the fauna and flora that previously immersed the face of the earth in an aura of purity and virginal fascination.”

This taciturn individual could make the night arrive just by thinking about it, he could turn mountains and prairies into white marble with obscene inscriptions, he could make it rain golden crystals. All he had to do was dream. Convinced that all madmen possess an iota of reason in their judgements, Libardino pressed him to dream for him a life full of adventures and dangers and emotions and sentiments, to dream for him an unforgettable, enduring, constant novel. “I will,” he said, “if you expiate your past woes with vile metal.” “I’m not sure I understand you.” “I need to be paid, I don’t work for nothing, such experiences can prove fatal, even contrary to good intentions, unless they are backed up by hard cash as a sign of commercial interest, there being no affection or lack of affection between the parties.” “What parties?” “The seeker of help and the expert, the client and the professional.” “You sound like a fraud, you just said dreaming up notes struck you as immoral.” “It is immoral, but immorality is necessary for humans not to despair amid the ashes of a monotonous, afflicted world, hence the dilemma: either you pay me, or I won’t dream you as an adventurer, it’s your choice.” In a heartbeat of surrender, Libardino Romero took out of his pocket two 5,000-peseta notes he had stolen from a purse Matilde hid among the sheets of a cheap, chipboard wardrobe. “Here you go, consider yourself paid.” “You shall be the greatest and the best adventurer in history, the Ulysses of the twentieth century, Achilles who feels the foundations of future fields.” “Thank you, Mephistopheles.” “Son of Mephistopheles, don’t forget, Jabato.” When he heard “Jabato”, Libardino recalled his childhood reading, but was reluctant to exploit vile nostalgia, he was an adventurer, there was no point lingering over matters that would delay his Odyssean vocation, he shrugged off such memories, raised his spirits and asked, “Can I call you Mephisto then?” “Of course you can, errant knight, leather shield, racing greyhound, Mephisto is just the sort of nickname my father would want for me, hypocoristic gloricardian, alleluia!”

Without money, Libardino felt a little freer, relieved of baggage, as the poet would say, just the one bag with a cigarette box coated in wax and a change of underwear. Who knows, perhaps those 10,000 pesetas had certified his change of state: from catatonia to movement, from death to life, from aphasia to ductile conversation. But before going back to searching for a direction, before starting to count cars at the crossroads again, he was assailed by urgent curiosity: what did Mephisto have in his suitcase? He returned to the middle of the square, where the man was resting on top of his valise, in silence. “What’s up, Ulysses, fighting Jabato, Arthur Gordon Pym of celestial Anglican bearing, Sandokan of the urbs and sea, improbious man of the race of the chosen, what is it?”

Libardino was taken aback by this ostentatious, bombastic reception, but not too much. As a child, he’d been accustomed to hearing in the mouths of Ébora personages such as Tintoreto and his mother the most unusual linguistic brokerages, unconscious additives or suffixes stretching out words, insistences on a form of rarefied speech, typical of the insanity in which Ébora levitated perpetually and insurmountably. He thought in his new life as an adventurer he would meet folk that talked like this, and others, men and women, who wouldn’t be able to bestow on words the love and honour that Señorita Pura gave them. These would distance Libardino Romero from his road, but the others, those close to him, would sail on his boat, the very one that carried Homer, Virgil, Dante, Meendinho, all those men and women who knew, poor things, that words and harmonies help one to live.

Libardino believed, therefore, in happy affinities, he believed that in the world similar beings tend to come together, to join and merge, to amalgamate and combine in a single life, and he also believed that people who were different flowed together in an infinite, irrevocable distance. He believed when he was an office worker without horizons he necessarily had to be surrounded by office workers without horizons, like him, and now, having decided on his future, he would necessarily bump into beings that were destined for the endless orchard of hope whose horizon licks the happiest, most prosperous hours with its pearly tongue. This belief led him not to hide the enjoyment he felt before Mephisto, the man with the red suitcase who claimed to dream up everything that was, and would be, lived.

“I wanted to know what you keep in your suitcase,” he said, staring straight into his eyes. “I can’t tell you, it’s my great secret, my father confided it to me on the day he sent me to earth, making me solemnly swear only to reveal this mystery to the one who would take my place in the task of dreaming.” “But couldn’t you just do me the favour of showing me what’s inside the suitcase? It would get my new life off to a great start.” “Excuse me, sir, but you are talking to the son of Mephistopheles, in such a matter as this I am unbribable, my criteria are unchangeable, I’m very sorry.” “I wasn’t intending to bribe you, I just wanted you to show me what’s inside the suitcase.”

The man paused, wiped his hand over his face, lingering over his neck, slowly. He rubbed his eyes and said, “Secrets belong to the world of the unconfessable, that’s why they’re secrets, if my father, Mephistopheles, wanted my suitcase to be open to just anybody, I don’t think he would have wasted his time keeping me for exactly 4,600 years alive on the face of this planet, coming up with dreams so you lot could exist together with your hopes and futures and sons and daughters, do you understand, kind sir? Truly important things cannot be known by everybody, it’s necessary to keep them inside the trunk of rites, of liturgies, and the rite stipulates that only he or she may know what is inside the suitcase who relieves me in the terrible task of dreaming, of continuing to dream, because dreams are the sustenance and immovable column on which human beings and their causes are raised, understand, understand, kind sir?”

Libardino, understanding his explanations, lowered his head and headed back to the crossroads to see if vehicle number twenty-seven was capable of showing him the way, so he, being rocked in the Herculean arms of fate, could embark on the fertile path of adventure.

CHAPTER TWO

Señorita Pura was forty years old when she gave the fertile adventure of giving birth a pinch. Forty years as robust as the sticky substance of olive trees. She carried them well, they would hardly have been suspected by anyone who didn’t know the truth about her birth, back in 1909, which is when the medication that brought an end to centuries of the “French disease”, of syphilis, was discovered. Years later, she would say her birth and the discovery of Salvarsan, the medicine that cured that hateful disease, had a lot in common. She would argue it was thanks to her that humanity was delivered from the worst possible epidemic – that brought by the Spanish conquistadores of America and sown throughout Italy by the troops of the French king Charles VIII. The bug that assassinated without aforethought but with complete efficacy whoever fell between its crystal teeth.

Señorita Pura had it that Paul Ehrlich, the scientist who discovered a cure for syphilis that year, had visited Ébora when her mother was several months pregnant. He tried out on her a product that would later give rise to Salvarsan. She got better. She recovered from a case of syphilis she had contracted thanks to the father, a disappeared Frenchman. A protracted love story known only by the oldest in that place, those who maintained in their memories the unthinkable things that made Ébora such a fruitful and strange place. Señorita Pura had been born a strong and vigorous child, contributing, by such a healthy birth, to the advance of modern science, its definitive escape from the abysmal pits of obscurantism and superstition, its flight from the unsuitable forms that wouldn’t permit the full development of methods and deductive techniques whose core and immaterial essence resided in the elaboration of hypotheses and empirical verifications.

At the age of forty, nobody would have said she was more than thirty, and they certainly wouldn’t have thought she was the daughter of a woman who had suffered the French disease: well combed, with shiny, soft skin, upright, without a hint of tiredness, agile, energetic, disposed, restless. Some say only a woman such as this could have withstood the expulsion of the creature in her entrails: large, enormous, as voluminous as a wicker basket. The child, Libardino, sticky and plump, weighed almost seven kilos. The neighbouring women who assisted at the famous childbirth claimed never to have seen anything like it: round as a loaf of wheat bread, large, rotund as the curved figures of early Romanesque, without a drop of fat and with plenty of hair, blond, blond as the rays of the ruddy, ferocious midday sun. That was what caused a rumour to course through the town concerning the child’s paternity: one of the few blonds to inhabit that place was the priest, Don Blas, about whom no lack or neglect was known in the precept of carnal abstinence that priests must assume on account of their condition of indissoluble and everlasting marriage to the lofty and underappreciated divine spheres we humans imagine so we can illumine the many shadows that surround us and do us down. What was more, one of Don Blas’s favourite themes in conversations with the young lads and lasses of Ébora centred precisely on decorum and the total absence of practices that might be conceived to transgress norms prescribed by the Sixth Commandment, the definitive commandment for distinguishing good from evil, correct from incorrect behaviour, those in life renting perennial rooms in heaven from those buying tickets for an extended stay in hell, that space governed excessively and imprudently, cruelly, by Beelzebub.

To back up his statements, the priest would have recourse to a little book entitled A Catechism of Christian Doctrine by one P.M. Jerónimo de Ripalda, he would read it aloud with dogmatic, majestatic and solemn emphasis: “How can the flesh be subdued?” And he himself would reply, “By deprivation and fasting.” Two seconds later, almost in unison, the children would repeat, “By deprivation and fasting,” though none of them knew what was meant by “deprivation”, let alone “fasting”, Ébora had always been a town overflowing, even in periods of scarcity, and nobody there went without sampling the nutritious meat Ripalda held in such contempt.

The priest would say that touching and feeling “pubic or adjacent zones” had terribly grave secondary effects, which could not be hidden from a man of the cloth, however hard the children might wish to conceal their touchy-feely behaviour, it would be impossible, the priest would quickly sort out the abstinent from sinners, the feelers from those who were pure and clean. So it would have been unkind to think that Don Blas could be Libardino Romero’s father and yet, despite everything, Señorita Pura’s continued and frequent visits to the church, the aforesaid capillary feature, so notorious by now, decreed an immoral and sinful relationship between the priest and one of his favourite daughters, so religious, attentive and helpful. Energetic as well, capable of stamping on the face of the man or woman who might question her integrity and modesty.

Suspicions regarding clerical paternity were only increased by the inconsistent explanations Señorita Pura gave concerning her son’s origins – explanations she gave on only one occasion, one midday in August, in the mist of the eve of the Assumption.

That day, Ébora celebrated its patron saint and a hellish, raging fire settled on the hot leaves of thirsty alders. The wind carried in its embrace all the sun’s flames, seemingly increased by the ardour of a pot of oil burning in the heavens, blown on by nonconformist saints who thus expressed their rejection of the means of celestial government, tyrannical and authoritarian. It is well known that on days of such intense heat, heat that causes moisture, people’s minds cease to function normally and uncontrollable situations arise: murders, passionate amatory encounters in public places, exhibitionisms of varying intensity, visions of shadows that upset the heart’s rhythm. Señorita Pura, under the influence of such torrid temperatures, had heard ill-intentioned remarks aimed at wounding her unscathed grace. She repressed her anger. She didn’t go straight out to slap the originators of such insults in the face. She contained her rage because otherwise she and her unruly energy would have slapped the whole of Ébora in the face, including those ghosts and the Holy Company that walk on winter nights between the trees and the sickle-like moon, so tiny, that peeps over hills touched by cold and solitude.

Word had it that, five months before giving birth, she had travelled south in order to spill the contents of her stomach and, regretting her decision at the last moment, she had returned to Ébora to bring Don Blas’s child into this world of trouble and woe. That was what was said, and Señorita Pura, who wasn’t stupid, found out, indirectly, thanks to the neighbouring women who accused each other mutually. “Do you know what so-and-so said?” And so-and-so would say, “No, Pura, no, it was her and that other,” and that other would rejoin, “No, Pura, no, it was that one,” and that one would add, “I’m surprised, Pura, you should think that of me, it was those ones over there…” and so on and so forth until reaching the infinite, irreversible curse that arises from and leads nowhere.

Tired of all these outrages, and so as not to slap the whole of Ébora in the face, Señorita Pura took a decision. On leaving High Mass, the one that starts at twelve, she shouted out in the churchyard, “Come here, you neighbours, men and women, I’ve some interesting news you can use to spur the cords of your tongues.” She had always been an energetic woman, pious but energetic, and, according to those who heard her words that summer’s midday, her voice didn’t tremble when she affirmed, “My Libardino is the son of the deceased husband of the one talking to you.” “You’re not married!” shouted one of the old, blessed bees that inhabit Ébora, with her head down. Señorita Pura dissembled the aggression that ran through her bones and, with all the pomp and ostentation her clear tongue could occasionally summon, replied, “I got married in Granada, at five in the Lorcan and Federican afternoon of a Monday in August, to a pendular bullfighter who was in love with me.”

On such afternoons of heat, anything can happen, including the rapid transformation of truth into falsehood, or vice versa, and of reality into fiction, unreality into observable certainty, perhaps that was why the people listening to Señorita Pura’s slow, serene voice remained motionless in their places and, enduring a Saharan sun, heeded the lady’s words. “I went for a rest in the south, on medical advice (when she gave birth, Dr González, who turned up several days after the first television was installed in the mayor’s house, had yet to settle in the town), because it’s a well-known fact that the humidity we generally suffer in Ébora is not very beneficial for those of us who are afflicted with bone diseases, I can show you a certificate from the doctors who examined me at the time, a little worse for wear, many years have gone by, but here it is, take a look.” And it seems the men and women listening to her opened their eyes a little wider to take in a crumpled piece of paper Señorita Pura was holding in her hands. Panting, finding it difficult to breathe, she asked for a little water in order to continue with her account. She went on, “It was a spring day, and the first thing I saw on arriving in the city was a poster announcing a bullfight that very afternoon; among the bullfighters was the name of the one who would later become my husband: Tomás Romero Small Tail. It was some kind of intuition that made me head in the direction of the bullring, pay for a seat in the shade, endure that atrocious spectacle: blood, pursued animals, obscene postures. And yet when I caught sight of Tomás, all my impressions changed, I felt renewed, possessed of a sensation I had never experienced before, something akin to those moments when you enter into direct contact with the supernatural, something you just can’t understand. It was love. The feeling I had never known before. Love. The love that went hand in hand with his bull-like gait embellished with lyrical gestures, pendular, as I said before and now reaffirm rotundly and without fissures.”

There was heard the odd sob in the audience, intense groans that pointed to a favourable predisposition among the public. Señorita Pura, possessed of great psychology or animistic knowledge of human beings, was encouraged by their response and thought she would do well to adorn her speech with even greater grace. She drank a little more water, took a deep breath and, moving her hands in time to her words, continued her account. “He looked at me, I looked at him, he took off the black cap he was wearing and said, ‘This one’s for you, pretty lady.’ The strangest thing enveloped my chest, something like an ardour I couldn’t suppress. I went red, trembled, a shiver coursed down my vertebral column.” “Your what?” shouted somebody who hadn’t understood the expression. “My spine,” she added with an air of authority, feeling grateful for the books Don Blas had given her to read through the years, for the prodigality of words, their significances and signifiers, always attentive to the needs life puts forward with urgency and without warning. The lack of culture, she thought during this interlude, was a fundamental element in the domination of the masses, as claimed by those two gentlemen, Ortega and Gasset, a pair of old sages she read with devotion and commitment, albeit her preferences were always aimed at the reading of dictionaries, a pleasure that provided her with gloriously relaxed afternoons. But she diverted her thoughts from such nonsense and centred on her discourse. “At the end of the bullfight, I was met by a man who had been sent by the bullfighter, a man with a bouquet of flowers who asked me to accompany him. I couldn’t resist the temptation and accepted both his proposal and the bunch of roses. He took me to the exit of the bullring and an enormous, red car, a front-line Mercedes, all luxury, especially designed for the finest bullfighter in all Iberia, with an enormous, multi-pointed star on its bonnet. It didn’t take Tomás long to arrive, and he suddenly spoke to whisper in my ear, without getting too close, the most fervent, ardent declaration of love I could ever have imagined. The tears ran down my cheeks. And without my expecting it, he asked for my hand in marriage. I accepted.”

The public didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, whether to fall silent or to insist with questions that might confirm the fiction or reality of Señorita Pura’s account.

“What’d he say?” asked a courageous lady who’d been listening, wrapped in the gracious shawl of Señorita Pura’s words. “Such things are intimate and private, nothing in the world would make me reveal this secret I keep in the quiet lean-to of my memory.” “I don’t think it’s possible to fall in love just with words, you need other kinds of things,” countered the other woman. “Words are the foundation of love, signs form the base of all feelings.” “And the body,” added the selfsame woman. “The body is just a receptor of language, you yourself should know there are many, manifold types of language and, when I talk of words, I mean looks, caresses, gestures, expulsions of air that push life towards your face, lips that don’t touch, sounds of music, intuitions, essences without presence, form or manner, almost imperceptible vibrations, all that.” “But those aren’t words.” “Oh yes, they are.”

The public, a little tired of this conversation, protested by pointing out that they didn’t care about the argument Señorita Pura and this lady were having, they could sort out their problems at a later date, the discourse should not be interrupted, they were dying to know how the story would end, words have their place and location at other times and in other moments. Señorita Pura, feeling victorious, straightened her blouse, pushed back her hair, lifted her face and resumed her account. “That night, he took me to his hotel, but careful, please,” she shouted, “we slept in different rooms, he in room 113 and me in 115. I do not wish to be superstitious, God save me, but the thirteen in his room must have had a very negative influence on his terrible misfortune, as you will soon find out.” The audience nodded. She continued, “That Monday morning, we hied ourselves to the nearest church and got married.

“We had to travel to Seville and there, embodied in the honeymoon of its sky, we loved each other for the first and last time.” An “ooh!” escaped from the ardent public. “The following day, there was a bullfight at La Maestranza, Tomás Small Tail was wearing a beautiful, green outfit. But he was unlucky. The bull gored him in the groin, right in the groin, the place transited by famous arteries and solid veins containing the liquids that nourish and sustain us, as asserted in many of the manuals I have been able to read all these years thanks to the help of Don Blas. The bull finished him off.” “Finished who off?” shouted someone who hadn’t been paying attention. “Tomás Small Tail, a gentleman and a bullfighter of incomparable grace and a soul as large as time.” “Is time large, Señorita Pura?” asked the selfsame individual. “Time is infinite, my friend, it lasts as long as death.”

“But you still haven’t explained about Libardino!” remarked another. “You don’t have to be very intelligent to work out what happened,” said the lady who had argued with her about the essence and presence of words, “Señorita Pura got pregnant that night, the only night she spent in the enchanting arms of Tomás Romero.” The woman ran and embraced Señorita Pura’s body. The others, aware that they were witnessing a major spectacle, applauded generously.

The child was born five months after her visit to the south, which made a few of the spectators suspicious. They hadn’t heard the whole truth. The same man who had earlier inquired as to the largeness of time put this question forward so that Señorita Pura could answer it, and she replied with resolve and vigour, “The child was born premature because he was exceptionally big, you may remember he weighed seven kilos; if I’d waited another four months for him to come out, I’d have exploded when giving birth.” “Your child is as large as time,” said the selfsame individual in an unsuccessful attempt to be funny. “Libardino is larger than time,” she rejoined curtly and circumspectly.

This response settled the curiosity of some and softened the disdain of others, who, going over events in a low voice, headed for the bar, home, their morning walk, Ébora’s repeated solitude in the asphyxiating heat of August. No more insults were heard, at least this is what Señorita Pura claims. She didn’t hear them because the ghosts and Holy Company that circumnavigate Ébora’s sky continue foolishly to discuss the origins of Libardino Romero, the boy born with excess soul.

At that time, the town cannot have had more than 2,000 inhabitants, most of whom were involved in the black market owing to Ébora’s privileged position six miles away from the border with Portugal. Ébora – with “b” and not “v”, to distinguish it from the Portuguese toponym Évora, a city in Alto Alentejo, prosperous, fine, 15,000 inhabitants at the time, a farmers’ market, textile and food industries, Roman fortifications, Monastery of St Francis, Loios convent, old mansions, as Libardino found out from a basic encyclopedia his mother bought him for one of his birthdays. Ébora, meanwhile, lacked monuments, lacked a sonorous past, lacked even ancestors and heroes that might have glorified its creation with their mighty deeds. All that was found was a stone inscription back in 1970, when there were plans for a lake that desired to be the sea. A lake that would occupy part of a beautiful valley surrounded by mountains, heather and scrub. A lake that desired to be the sea… if we were talking about any other territory, it would sound incredible, but Ébora is infected by the most elusive, unlikely intentions: an epidemic for which no viable therapy has yet been discovered.

Seven letters stood out on the inscription, forming a curious sound, a word that remains in the house of a town inhabitant and, for many reasons, forms part of the collection of extravagances and ravings amassed by Ébora. A word: Dalmara. Dalmara – when pronounced, it’s as if the moon has placed on the speaker’s lips the glow of the entire night, its clarity, its unlimited, happy candour.

Ébora lacked a past, but was inhabited by the strangest beings one could imagine. Don Blas would say the abundance of madmen in that place was due to the telluric currents that set out on their journey from a local spring: the Fountain of Enchantment. He may have been right. In the early evening, the most eccentric people from town would gather there to heal ailments doctors from the capital considered chronic and for which no solution could be found: rheumatism, arthritis, ulcers, impotence, mood swings. When Dr González arrived, days after the first television was installed in the mayor’s house, things changed: she prescribed drinking water from the fountain, a ferment that served to relieve all ills and charms, but that’s a story from another time, not these early postwar years, when the priest, Don Blas, had just arrived in Ébora.

Don Blas would sometimes join those gatherings at the fountain in hopes of befriending the locals and learning about their “woes and disturbances”, a happy, habitual expression on the lips of the priest, who turned up on the back of a greyish, ponderous mule after the war of 1936, fresh out of the seminary. His beatinic, Bethlehemian, angelic face contrasted with the period of scarcity and withdrawal the country was going through. “He was a gift from heaven to mitigate our suffering,” said the women of Ébora, who, either to forget their afflictions or just to enjoy the priest’s singular beauty, turned the church into the town’s de facto social centre, a status it disputed with the Fountain of Enchantment, to which recently only desperadoes would go to seek solace, mostly those of the masculine gender.

From eight in the morning, a large part of Ébora’s inhabitants would go there in procession, mainly children and women – the men could find in Don Blas’s words and face no argument that would occasionally purge their slight hunger or diminish their heavy fate. The priest was obliged to increase the liturgical services and went from three Masses a day to six, coinciding with the hours, three in the morning and three in the afternoon. Don Blas had always been of the opinion that, in order to banish demons and witches and imps and devils that endeavour to sink into the souls of human beings, you had to have three Masses a day; whichever way you looked at it, and despite his fondness of sermons, half a dozen seemed a trifle excessive. And yet he was the shepherd. He mustn’t abandon his flock. If the sheep demanded six Masses, then six there would be and, were it necessary to up the number to twelve, he wouldn’t be the one to block such a sublime decision, the people are wise and rarely wrong about matters concerning their religiosity or need of divine aid, something that was so necessary in this time of emptiness and hate, lack and outings in the light of the impalid moon that announced shots amid the quiet pebbles of night.

It was this, the arrival of this priest weighed down with good intentions, his Masses, his conversation with the mentally unstable inhabitants of magical Ébora, this and no other, the most remarkable event the cruel postwar brought to this place. Don Blas didn’t stop visiting the Fountain of Enchantment, talking to those present about the New Testament, and the Old, and the need to have the hope of eternal life for after this life of conflict and suffering. The men didn’t pay him much attention. Some, weighed down with uric acid, carried on drinking. Others, their stomachs on fire, burped loftily and said, “Excuse me, father,” after such digestive outbursts. The rest listened to the priest’s words, wide-eyed with incredulity. They never took him all that seriously. Perhaps they suspected a triple share of the “woes and disturbances” he liked to talk about would soon land on this precocious seminarian’s head.

To start with, Don Blas, as yet unskilled in the handling of ars oratoria, repeated his sermons, but, following a meaningful event that changed his life and that of Ébora’s inhabitants, he altered his discourse at each and every celebration, a gesture that was much appreciated by his audience, who saw their evangelical knowledge increase and, above all, learned thousands of extremely important things for their academic formation, because Don Blas, with all his resolve, did not limit himself to commenting on Biblical passages, he went much further than that: Arithmetic, History, Literature, Geography, Orthography, Latin and other disciplines. He decided on this plan of action a few weeks after taking possession of the parish, one night in front of the life-size figure of St Benedict, much venerated in Ébora owing to its reputation for curing all types of swellings or wounds, be they blisters, lumps, boils or any other kind of tumefaction, as well as certain spiritual ills. The people would wet a cloth in the font and then touch the saint with it. At night, they would rub their lesions with the cloth and in seven days, more or less, the ailments would vanish. It even cured epilepsy, known then as the “devil’s disease”, for a month the sick person being required to drink only holy water filtered through a white cloth that moments earlier had been passed over St Benedict’s body. A miracle. Don Blas, who at the time didn’t believe much in such things, thought the water in contact with the wooden surface must have produced a curative substance, and yet he never dared mention this argument to any of the locals, it was better to foment faith and hope, charity not being an abundant virtue in that time of hunger, less so in Ébora, and outings that went unconfessed by assassins. Horror lingering in dawn shots and screams, once the war was over and absence hovered above each house in the country. Ébora, hidden among the mountains, was barely touched by misfortune and was left to grow, on its own, accompanied by a kind of madness that kissed its cracks of melancholy future.

The night the priest decided to accompany his Masses with Arithmetic, Latin and other such knowledge occurred in the early forties of the century that had 1900 as its outset. After dinner, Don Blas perceived a strange noise, something like a voice echoing in the church. He left his room, which was just above the altar, went downstairs, looked hither and thither, gazed around, peered this way and that, but didn’t see anybody. The voice came again. He hurried towards it. It was a moan coming from the niche that contained the figure of St Benedict. He drew near. Gazed into the image’s eyes. “Impossible,” he murmured a couple of times. He turned his back on the saint and then heard, “Blas, Blas, take the rose.” There could be no doubt, the statue was talking to him.

The priest rubbed his eyes, pinched his arm to see if he was sleeping, jumped up and down, waggled his head about, slapped his face with his soft, seminarian’s hands that were more used to books than to prodigies, jumped up and down again. The voice continued, “Blas, Blas, take the rose.” “What is it, Lord?” “This isn’t the Lord, this is Benedict, the saint who cures all kinds of blisters, I have to give you an important message for your future and that of this community of lunatics, madmen, this barmy army, unhinged, unstable troop anchored in perpetual insanity and unreason.”

Before saying another word, the priest peered into every corner of the church, under the pews, among the candles, behind the altar, at the figure of Christ, in the confessionals. There was nobody there, he was all alone. Reality, no doubt, always surpassed fiction, at least the fiction he had read as a child in books by Stevenson or Verne. It seemed astonishing to him that a sensible man like himself, who had studied in a seminary and could discern fantasies and other such impossibilities, should be talking to a statue, a wooden statue that was famous for curing all kinds of ailments, including the “devil’s disease”. When he thought about this illness, the devil popped into his mind: was it the devil talking to him right now? He certainly believed in Satan, in Lucifer. That was a lesson of obligatory interest in any priest’s career: during the first few centuries of the Church, the name of Lucifer had been applied to Christ, the true light, then applied to Satan as a proper noun, to whom was attributed the passage from Isaiah concerning the fall of the Babylonian king. He tried to remember the passage, and remembered it: Quomodo cecidisti de caelo, Lucifer, qui mane oriebaris, or something like that, memory was not his greatest attribute. He believed in the devil: to get to priest, certain inevitable dogmas or axioms are required. But he wasn’t sure how to address him. A cold sweat began to stream down his angelic face, he started trembling, puffing in and out, very nervously.

This, he thought, is a divine punishment for suppressing a supernatural gift in my insides, for denying the great mysteries of Christianity, for thinking Jesus didn’t resurrect Lazarus, for believing that business about the loaves and the fish was just a story invented by people who were fond of hyperbole and excess, perhaps those were the first symptoms the telluric currents of Ébora, arising in the Fountain of Enchantment, were depositing in his body. He knelt down in front of the cross hanging on the far wall. “Forgive me, Lord, forgive me because I also didn’t know what I was doing. Show me the path I should follow, with faith no demon can have power over me, faith, give me faith, Lord.”

Wrapped in tears, all sorrowful, he again heard the selfsame voice: “Blas, Blas, stop all this moaning and listen to me, take the rose!” He calmed down, there was no way the devil could talk so benevolently. He calmed down and ran, ran towards the saint, held out his arm to grab the red rose being proffered. He looked at him and said, “What is it, St Benedict, primordial saint, healer and miracle-worker, legend of the celestial Parnassus?” “Culture, Blas, humanity is in need of culture, lots of culture, that is the source of all good or luck or pleasure or gladness, the only stimulus capable of turning the soul’s indigence into plenty, the cause of joy or happiness, the reason for gladness and the path that enlightens doubt and darkness, culture leads to faith, men and women need culture. Blas, listen to me.”

Emotion got the better of him, and he accidentally dropped the rose. The saint became annoyed. “Pick it up, anyone would think you had butter fingers.” He quickly picked it up. St Benedict continued with his discourse: “Don’t enclose yourself in mystical arguments nobody can understand, you have to be useful to the inhabitants of Ébora, to show them the wonders of the world, the bottomless well of knowledge, they’re going through a difficult patch, the future lies in your inquisitiveness, you can’t go anywhere without culture, culture, Blas, culture, that is the rose you’re holding in your hand, it needs care, attention, to be put on show so those who look at it feel a fragment of paradise has been installed in their breasts, a moment of joy, remember man does not live from bread alone – or woman either – remember the soul’s nourishment is not matter, but ether, and ether, my dear Blas, is composed of letters and numbers, numbers and letters, agglutinations of different types and forms that, together or alone, lay down the future’s foundations, the wealth of all civilizations, don’t ever forget this, go back to ether, an untouchable, invaluable element that fills and inhabits the interior of transparent or opaque bodies, an invisible substance born in every space, in the soul, our soul that is damned if we don’t do enough to earn a patch of land in paradise, as I did when alive, and still do now in death, day after day healing blisters and botches, day after day looking after this Ébora full of unstable, strange men and women, looking after you, ever since you were a student at the seminary, ever since you were born, so you would grow in precepts of the faith, so you would walk in the way of the Lord, and I succeeded, here you are, don’t throw away this opportunity to add to your possessions in paradise, ether, ether, letters and numbers filling empty spaces.” How much St Benedict knew, thought Don Blas. He also thought about the devil, culture, faith, miracles… and ether, of course.

The truth is, when the cock crowed very shrilly the next morning, the priest had a terrible headache, as if a crystal beam had tried to penetrate his shattered brain. A headache that went from the back of his neck to his eye sockets, passing through him, irritating him, embittering his happy awakening of cocks and goldfinches and winds. A nightmare, he thought. “A nightmare because of last night’s dinner, I can’t go drinking wine before going to bed, or putting so much bread inside my body, heavy starch that blocks my intestines, no, no, wine has never sat well with me,” he affirmed, perched on the edge of his bed. He examined himself in the mirror, gently slapped his face, told himself off: “Don’t drink, responsibility, you’re the shepherd who should guide his flock, direct the sheep along the path of wisdom and justice, amend their mistakes, correct their sins, don’t drink, Ébora is full of woes and disturbances, don’t drink, shepherd, don’t drink.” He put on his cassock, washed his face, breakfasted on black coffee and a few crumbs of cornbread left over from the previous night’s dinner, an agape he had accompanied with a couple of bowls of wine and potatoes, no lack of those, my goodness, in this land, its rich and fertile surroundings, at a time of hunger and misery and scarcity. He was glad about the first posting his bishop had given him, these people seemed to be crying out for his words. That day, in all six sermons, he would talk about the Road to Santiago, St John the Baptist, the Good Samaritan, honesty, the seven deadly sins, the Last Judgement; he would keep a few other matters in reserve in case his audience silently asked for further interventions: the need for forgiveness, Mary Magdalene, the prophets and last of all, should the previous night’s dream be of any use, culture. It was ten to eight and at that precise moment, as he opened the door, a sudden episode made Don Blas’s satisfied face grow pale: on the floor, all forgotten, gazing timidly at his locks that were as blond as the rays of the ruddy, ferocious midday sun, was a rose.

CHAPTER THREE

“Knowledge is the midday of imbalance, its centre and cause. The origin of unease, anxiety, lack of love, the soul’s pallid face, semi-colon, to know is to suffer.” This is exactly what Libardino Romero jotted down in his notebook, the continuation of his reflection on devilish tubercles, light and the infinite. He sometimes wrote orthographic signs with his own name – he said this afforded the sentences a nice rhythm, an unequalled elegance, an unrivalled freshness, full stop. He also liked to walk, in the early evening, feeling freedom on his skin like a kiss. To walk unhurriedly, with no need to quicken his pace so he could get to Camellia Square, say, “I’m home already!” and hear a roar coming from the sitting room that commanded, “Start getting dinner ready, Libar, I’m starving.” He could have murdered Matilde. He’d thought about it on more than one occasion, but had never been able. Two motives influenced this behaviour: the first was his lack of enthusiasm for combat or a disposition that might push him to devise a homicidal method (poison, gunshot, blow, knives, cutlery, scissors); the second, and more important, the ample, abundant, muscular body of Matilde, who, when faced by immediate danger, could have crushed Libardino Romero’s short, stunted physique in a matter of minutes. Better then to forget about the road of murder.

That was the way of things, the only path open to him was to resist: to hear his shortened name each morning, to carry out household tasks with excessive commitment and sweat and asphyxiation, to attend to her needs and please her in every way possible and impossible, to hand over his entire wage packet, to beg for 500 pesetas so he could drink a coffee or buy a newspaper, to do overtime so a distinguished surgeon could operate on her nose. That was destiny, the beast that traps us like a cephalopod, doesn’t let us go, drowns our breaths, our ambitions and freedom. He accepted it like a penance, agreeing to suffer as a way of paying off some dark, forgotten debt of his ancestors. But patience has its limits, and he couldn’t surpass them.

Perhaps the final reason, what impelled him to take flight, the second momentous decision of his entire existence, has to be sought in the previous night, at dinnertime. Matilde was obsessed with cleaning, which Libardino had to perform every weekday before going to the office, on coming back, before going to bed and, most of all, after preparing Matilde’s lunch, a habit that worsened his already vulnerable stomach. Almost every day, he was forced to gulp down an indelicate mortadella or something else sandwich while beating with his arm, cloth in hand, polishing up numerous figures, walls, tiles, and so on. The indelicate mortadella or whatever sandwich ended up gnashing his entrails, duodenum, oesophagus, pylorus and intestines.

Saturdays and Sundays were reserved for washing and ironing clothes, doing odd jobs and the shopping, hoovering, mopping and waxing the floor, preparing frozen dishes that could be kept in storage in case of need, lack of appetite in front of the day’s dish, the visit of friends in make-up, the unexpected appearance of Ofelia Grande and Belisario Sánchez, Matilde’s progenitors, or other such unforeseen circumstances. His wife would use cotton wool to see if the objects, rooms, walls and frames Libardino wiped with his cloths and other utensils really were immaculate. When the result was not to her liking, she would rebuke her husband’s behaviour and make him do it again. The previous night, however, Libardino had not shown his customary submission. It was on account of a painting he despised, a present from Matilde’s parents, a canvas that depicted his wife’s profile with the newly operated nose. Don Belisario had commissioned the painting from a workshop in Barcelona, days after his daughter’s operation. Libardino had paid, needless to say. And he’d paid far too much for a poor imitation of Modigliani’s magical brushstrokes – had he lifted his head and seen the imitative outrage, he would have burned the Barcelona workshop, the author of the painting, the model that served as its inspiration, the oil manufacturers and probably Belisario Sánchez himself, promoter of such an ignominious initiative.

Matilde had said the previous evening, “Libar, my portrait is not absolutely clean, you haven’t fulfilled your duty today.” “Matilde, my love, you are wrong, the painting is like the streams of the Douro.” (Lying was his way of taking revenge.) “Like streams of gold, I imagine you mean.” “No, no, my love, like the streams of the Douro, which are waters of a bright white colour, like milk, that emerge from the subsoil next to this river, waters that enable the Germans to produce a cottage cheese of worldwide renown.” “The Douro flows through Germany?” “The Douro rises in Burgos, crosses the whole of France and flows into the Mediterranean on the German coast.” “Well, it doesn’t matter now, the point is you must clean the painting again.” “I won’t.” “What was that?” “I won’t do it.” She then raised her right hand. He then ducked his head. She then said, “Do it, or I’ll smash you to pieces!” He then took the cloth and, blowing softly on the glass that covered said anasalic painting, rubbed again and again so not the slightest amount of dirt or dust would remain to detract from its scintillating splendour. Destiny, what a dog.

Text © Xosé Carlos Caneiro

Translation © Jonathan Dunne