At that precise moment, in that place in a corner, unknown forces coincided. Adolescent X is sitting at the beginning of it all. Of course she doesn’t know it’s the beginning of anything, she’s actually convinced she’s been caught up in it for some time. And she’s tired of it.

   “Tired,” she says, letting the words come out of her mouth like marbles. She spits out marbles that fall in front of her, at her feet. Yesterday, in one of the vintage shops near San Andrés fountain, she’d bought a dress with acrylic flowers that she thinks is so punk. She has it on her bed, spread out, next to some low, pointy-toed boots, and studies it with something akin to desire.

   But today a kind of sadness makes her understand it’s not worth bothering about anything.

   What is it she’s trying to do? Well, she’s trying to enjoy herself. Later on, she’ll be forced to look for other things, ones she hasn’t thought of yet, unavoidable, even dreadful things: earning money, paying the rent, being happy. Not now, now she doesn’t want to do anything but have a good time.

   Seated on the floor, above her, a poster of the Pogues glows. She’s just decided not to go out. It’s a firm decision, she tells herself again as she closes her childish diary where she writes about the moods that produce a certain shame in her sometimes. She smiles, thinking this is going to annoy a lot of people.

   She doesn’t know she’s on the brink of something, on the edge of an embankment, a precipice. She could look out over the edge if she wanted to, but she doesn’t want anything.

   She’s in the front row and doesn’t even realize it.

   The world was starting to come into existence then, the secondary characters were buzzing, milling about everywhere. So it was possible to imagine how one could become what others predicted: stories of triumph or failure, broken hearts, the awful forgetting, families, and financial changes, growth, collapse, the coldness of unfettered bodies, their debris, the disappearance of everything, and the survival of something impermanent as well: a pilgrim’s staff, a refrain.

   A June day. A period of exams that perhaps were over. The beginning of everything is coming or maybe it isn’t. And if that weren’t the beginning of anything? To be honest, something similar to an illness or a mood had been brewing, very slowly.

   A city where privileges and cushy living, eccentricities, a city constructed atop the buried head of a giant. In the morning of a normal day, Coruña, the second capital of Francoism, with its yachts, its ass-kissers, its high-ranking officials, its men in loden overcoats, weaves and undoes its mask.

   But the night – oh, the fragrant night – had always been the territory of freedom. For a long time there had been no pubs and the bars closed early, but beside the streets of Orzán beach the sea roared continuously, potent, powerful, not like in Vigo, where the sea can’t be heard anywhere, no matter what the people from Vigo say.

   And then that little bar appeared by surprise with its marquee and glasses recovered from old taverns, and it began to fill up with odd objects and postcards. Jazz had arrived earlier, in an educational form: they didn’t even think about playing jazz to scare off the bad crowd, the ones that came down from the popular neighborhoods to create a stir, there was no need to run them off, they left on their own because of that music they didn’t understand. There, in the Patacón, the protosurfers, the office workers, the punks gathered, and Vari – who was already beginning to take photographs – from behind the bar, mixed liqueurs of different colors and made carajillos. And so poets began to proliferate and sometimes one went to recite something, displays of mail art were organized, and smudged postcards of all sizes were displayed, having arrived from the four corners of the known world. Then someone else began to look at the sea as if it were a body and recited a sonnet or an elegy and the idiots of Praza de Vigo with their pink Mohawks came to smoke joints after eight o’clock mass and snack time with rolls and crackers.

   And then everything started changing. At night people rubbed against one another, overlapping, and when they touched, they created sparks, like flint. That was a microcosm set apart from everything, more pop than punk, said Vari. Not as dark as they say now, but in fact rather luminous and entertaining. And it so happened that surrealists and petty delinquents, like in the tangos, ended up together in the bars of the port, their backpacks full of darkness and fish and contraband tobacco. It was the era of El Vaquilla. And dogs without owners became the order of the day, and the bards and delinquents admired each other and became friends. And then the dance began.

   I remember it well, Vari cut his hand with a knife when he was opening an oyster and I took his place, Nikopol explains. I had come from Ítaca and then from Cava da Poesía with my red Mohawk, and after that, from the first Mar Adentro and Porlier, and then I went from bar to bar until I ended up here, forty years later, in the Gaiteira. I remember Xornes, across from San Agustín, near what would later be Punto Tres, lined with mirrors. Xabier Correa and Xaime Cabanas changed its decor every week, we’d open a couple of bottles of whisky and they represented our pain. That’s where Cacahué played the first time. I was the coolest guy in the world, I DJ’d in the cabin with mirror-lensed glasses and always ended the night by playing Goldfinger. Then Marqués asked all the girls that were still there to dance. All of them except Jozé, of course.

   I’ve been doing this for forty years and I’ve seen and heard everything and, if you want to know the truth, I don’t know that what I saw and heard means anything more than what it did back then. Destruction is a youthful, happy impulse, it’s not a terrible thing, that’d probably be my conclusion. It was a natural, fitting movement. If we hadn’t taken the lead, nature would have headed on its own accord to its destruction, so it’s better to win the first round, and if you insist, the second round, too.

* * *

   There, night-time and the little tricks that spread their wings like a delicate butterfly, its broad, brightly-colored wings that tried to cover all of heaven. And the painter Cabanas, in a bar on Campo de Marte, then after in Patacón. Cabanas, with his cape of a crazy gentleman stared with wide-open eyes from the bar at a girl sitting there in a spaghetti-strap top, then without a peep circled around her and took hold of her hand so he could lick her arm from her shoulder blade down to her long, extended index finger. And the woman was startled, she moved away from him, and the waiter intervened and then Cabanas, with no explanation whatsoever, said to the girl with the long arms: “Thank heaven you don’t exist,” and then he did an about-face and started drawing, putting his fat fingers in the coffee cup, a tiny little sea, brown, in miniature.

   Did Cabanas exist? Did the girl? Was one of the two real?

   “Yes,” Xurxo says, “I remember too that sometimes Xaime Cabanas took out his teeth and set them on the bar and the dirty dentures started talking on their own and reciting litanies or sailors’ songs.”

   “You can’t possibly remember that, Xurxo, you’re just making it up. I, on the other hand, do remember my mother with her kid leather gloves buying buttons in the haberdashery Los Juanitos and I remember the brevas just out of the oven in Jijonenca at mid-morning and I remember Paseante elegantly greeting my mother and Perchas hovering around her and me holding onto her arm. I was eight, near Praza de Mina or San Andrés.”

   “Look,” says Pedro, “if Franco hadn’t died when he did, I don’t know what would have happened to our generation, to mine, to the one of your two older brothers, because we were all confused. We were lucky. Spain was about to become a Chile full of disappeared persons. Because we’d already tasted the fruit of good and evil and we couldn’t go back, we couldn’t forget the road we’d traveled, feeling, as if nothing had happened, that we were a part of the bittersweet life of our parents. When I was in the Marist school, I was already playing at spitting in the Holy Sanctuary with my friends.”

   Things happen like that; once you come and look, you can’t close your eyes and go back to the place you came from.

   “I remember perfectly the day heroin arrived in the city; it was in 78 in the Palacio dos Deportes, during a Uriah Heep concert, and I remember now the drug bus always parked in Lagoas because that whole neighborhood was a shantytown. And of course I remember the name and age of all the ones who died from that, one by one. The first time. I listened to Dylan, Frank Zappa, Brian Eno. Afterward, in 83, I left for Palma de Mallorca to serve in the military. There everybody was crying over Velvet Underground. Back then many, almost all of them, ended up dead because of the three S’s: sobredose, sida, suicidio [overdose, AIDS, suicide]. I could have too, for sure, but I had the experience of losing someone I loved to the Black Death.”

   “Bah!” Nikopol exclaims, “in seventy-something, as far as I can recall, there was Tropos e Metáfora across from Moreta. There was a rumor that they put drugs in the Coca-Cola there; I laughed and told them: ‘Sure, why not, as if drugs didn’t cost money. Do you think they’re going to give it away for free?’ But in those days what there was a lot of were reefers. In the QR, in Praza de Vigo, amphetamines and some ‘snow’ circulated. Who didn’t use amphetamines? They gave them out with prescriptions at the pharmacy in the Praza de Pontevedra. Mothers bought them for their children so they could study. As far as bars, I can recall A la Lámpara, Ítaca, and A 100, where they played seventies music: Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, all of them. Almost all the bars were in the old part of the city, I think it was because of rent costs. When they closed the barracks, there were a number of available spaces with very low rent available and the various tribes were distributed according to places: Studio 1 was for punks, Marilyn for rockers, Rúa 42 for the moderns, Ítaca for normal people, Mar Adentro for psychedelics. After them came O Filloa, the jazz dive. All the bars closed at 1:30 and after that the people of various sorts got together in the Rigbabá or the Casselly. When the discos closed, since there was nothing open any more, the night owls ended up in the bar off the highway, Burgo. It was quite the sight. With their Mohawks, jackets, fancy duds.”

   It so happened that in 86 Viuda played at the Club Náutico, with the coffered ceilings, fine woods and cretonnes, in the hall where your mother danced at her first dance, where the daughter of Amancio celebrated her second marriage. Imagine the impact that Viuda had on the parish. “I was in the audience that day,” says Pedro. “Tinín took me and I can tell you that everything was rocking, the glasses on the tables set for supper, the chandeliers ready to fall. That night I had a feeling of being profoundly out of place. I remember the audience of elderly people very well, some looking at each other, scandalized by the remarks of those students of the priests, children of that member, grandchildren of another, rich children who had become bad-asses.

   “I had already,” says Pedro, “been obsessed for some time with the numbers that were after me. I added, subtracted, multiplied every number I saw on license plates, on posters, the images of everyday life. My mother had wanted me to study medicine, not economics like I ended up studying. I was fearful of numbers, which was odd, or at least my obsession with not thinking about anything but numbers was. And then I realized that mathematics and music were closely linked, they create maps and provide us with keys.”

   In the end, that’s what it’s all about, finding and interpreting what the world spreads over the surface of things. One can only see them afterward and from above, the signs, the figures, diagrams that function like those circles drawn over fields, the Nazca lines in Peru, what they call geoglyphs. I always thought that events, which seem random, create a fancy calligraphy, in repetition, and in motives.

   Definitely the musicians in Viuda were great. Or so it seemed to us. They imitated Dead Kennedys or the Ramones with those fast, noisy songs. But time passed quickly for them as well, as if the sewer were calling to all of us. There are urban legends about it. Some say there were differences, fights at Casa Estrella, at the Terraza, rivalries, madness. That was in 92, when Viuda performed on Galician TV; after that, the decline started. Apparently they stole a microphone, cheated in a tax declaration, and I don’t know what else, the rumors are flying in the gossip in the Ensanche, and apparently it was then that they had to disappear, so they ran off to hide under the carpet.

   A city that was prisoner of melancholy, I think, but also of nausea, with its sad, middle-aged marica who walked along the Cantónswith his face covered in makeup, greeting ladies very courteously. The man was in love with a sergeant of the Civil Guard, who wasn’t all that young, or maybe with an anarchist worker from Marola Street, who went to the house occasionally to do a job.

   The city also had an Andadeiro, a tireless road runner with a beard and mustache, who went back and forth along the downtown streets at a frenetic pace, like that Mr. Sommer who thought that if he sat down he’d die; or his girl with braids, that old woman dressed like a girl on the bench of Carreira Street, as Luísa Villalta remembered; Mencer, the poetic brotherhood, alcoholic, unfortunate but respectful bards, churches full of aged worshipers, widowers with scrawny, ascetic priests and others, more modern ones, who sang.

   And meanwhile, men of good families got worked up over games of bridge, golf, their investments; all the doctors had dark faces covered with moles, smoked constantly, drank beer and ate squid in Otero, the Cantón Bar, Venus or Marte and were convinced that the world was eternal and melodious. Was it?

   In the decade of the thirties, in an article in El Mundo newspaper, Roberto Arlt described those bars with surprise, full until late with women who smoked, a sophisticated city that was nothing like the rest of Galicia. In my house too, at another point in time, on any given night, mother fills the wide glasses with ice and serves herself a whisky while I, just a girl, play with some old eyeglasses in front of a Parcheesi board. Sinda the cook, who was from Baio, where years ago she’d been seduced by a Portuguese fellow and gotten pregnant and who would be terrified of communists her whole life, she who doesn’t know how to read and will live her entire life in rooms without a view, Sinda, my Sinda, prays in her room or is peeling potatoes in the kitchen, listening to Radio Popular.

   But the girl, who in 76 was only six years old, the first thing she remembers about that time are certain terrifying domestic presences. She knows those presences are there, that they’re all conscious, but she also knows multiple ways of ignoring them. At night, they all turn on the light before entering the kitchen. That way it gives them some time and they can disperse like wine, leaving silent trails behind them.

   The little girl in the bed counts the stars that twinkle on the heaven of the ceiling. In the room next door, when the others begin to awaken, it produces a pleasure in her that’s a mixture of disgust and impotence. Could they be cockroaches? She moves between the warm sheets for quite a while, sticking her feet out at the end of the coverlet, seeking cool air, and then she tries to imagine the greenest of meadows and a herd of sheep.

   In a room in the house next door, in the semi-dark of the coming evening, the student immerses himself in the manual of civil law while the lamp sputters. In the living room of that house a woman watches television and enjoys the disgust she feels at that presence they all intuit and that spreads out behind her. The woman, in a percale bathrobe, lifts her thick feet that she has shoved into slippers, rests them on the table, then changes the channel. The feet on the table look like clumsy objects, tender, impotent.

   At the end of the street, in the little neighborhood church, a rather sad man had just officiated at the last mass and was leaving, was moving off. In the sacristy, he carefully takes off his chasuble and cincture, his shoes ending up only in jacket and slippers. For him, dressing and undressing is all a ritual. On the table, a photo of Paul VI watches him with an ironic expression.

   In the temple with its dim light, a few faithful, late, take their time praying to some saints. The presbyter clinks the keys together and heads toward the entryway. The priest, dressed now as a civilian, and almost pleased, heads for the kitchen: he knows that the presences will be there waiting for him.

   In the other house, beyond the street, the girl in her bed hears the steps that are advancing, soft ones, lazy ones, that rub on the floor and leave marks. They’re consoling steps, terrible ones.

   She turns around and clenches her fists. It’s better to close her eyes and wait. No matter how much she calls to her, she knows full well her mother won’t come.

* * *

   A city built not on top of a volcano but over a sinkhole. They filled in part of the isthmus with cement blocks and called it the Recheo, then they built modernist houses and obelisks on top of it and planted exotic trees, in gardens with statues of women writers and illustrious forbears.

   But the sewer moves and pulls on the people walking over it, it works like a plunger and while the city lives, the sewer moans and yawns. The wind blows, it’s pouring rain and all around the sea roils, with threatening blackness.

   They all live with their backs to the water on top of which the streets run and buildings with caryatids stand. Few know about that, or at least few act like they know. I only heard it mentioned this year, at El Siglo bar, when Alberto Ramos spoke of something that sounded like bilge. There was a sewer that called to people, shouting, he said. Nowadays they don’t understand the concept of loss, the idea of getting lost. From childhood I especially remembered the leafy, voracious depths, the black fangs. Those tangled and imposing abysses that encircled everything and gave off vapors and rivers and stammering, mismatched beings.

   That’s why, when I tried to think back to the time when the whole shebang was revealed, when the world began to turn, I was missing the images. I went around imploring them like a beggar. Don’t give me facts, give me images, figures, don’t explain how, tell me why. But, just like always happens, nobody remembered anything, everything is diluted, the world set on shelling the kernels of anecdotes piled up like one shoe of a pair, all useless. I was walking around near Fórum without daring to enter, there was the fabulous collection of Toñito comics and I was dying to leaf through one, but a reverential fear stopped me and I always ended up like that in Nikopol’s bar drinking beer. Nikopol, surrounded by gigantic dogs, had Fela Kuti playing, and only paid attention to my friends and then, another day, in front of Mar Club, I spied the traces of Marimba, the phantom bar.

   Another time, not long ago, I saw a shaft of light in front of Adormideras and pointed upward. Miranda reminded me of the races we held just to run drunkenly up the steps of the old city. She talked about Casa Andrés, Ría de Viveiro. Another day Padín brought the catalogue of madmen his father had made, where Alfonso Molina appeared, fat and drunk, returning from a drunken spree. In the catalogue, a black man was selling ties, Barrié de la Maza chatted with beggars, and in Siroco and Kirs, Carlos Martínez Barbeito had his regular gathering. Today, too, near my mother’s house, I discovered that the long, big steps of Rafael del Río were turning into dripping green lichen, on the loneliest street in the world.

   Sewer, said Alberto Ramos, and I wrote it down on a tablecloth with cramped, illegible writing. It was an early fall morning, I also noted: Big budget. Cannibalism. Park. Then somebody came that night and spoke to us about the procession, seeing the Virgin of A Pastoriza, that takes place while it is still summer, on the edge of a highway with a lot of traffic, under viaducts, next to malls, Leroy Merlins, sheds and McDonald’s, and that always brought sailors and heavies together as they were returning from carousing, because the Virgin was quite the miracle worker and protected her devotees. I imagined that my history would be something like that, a procession that advanced against hell and high water, with beautiful beings riding in cars. You looked around, under the bridge, and the rosquilla venders on the sidewalks, and the tambourine players, and the ex-voto venders, and the punks with their mothers, they were heading for a kind of collective expiation that nobody could interpret, far from the warehouses and hangars of the outskirts, where cute children who were lost are now bodyguards with a pistol and a dull gaze.

   And Alberto insisted: sewer, don’t get distracted, there was a river here and the river reared its head all the time, it was a big river, the Monelos, which ran through A Grela, near Martinete, and came out near Gaiteira, a real river, where women did the washing, and where families strolled on Sundays, and on whose bank feverish lovers ate and bit. Then they took pictures and the pictures would end up in closets or shoeboxes with stale candy in houses that are for sale.

   I came back along the streets darkened by the rain. I was alone and clutched this book like a shipwrecked person grips a board full of nails. I went up in the elevator with piped-in music, avoiding my reflection, and opened the door of the enormous apartment, adorned with doors, half empty, with towers of mismatched books here and there, in the corners. I removed my makeup in a bathroom mirror: first my eyes, one and then the other, trying to ignore the dull pain that had been rising up from my belly and burning in my breast for some months now, a sharp pain like from an ulcer, that carpeted my stomach lining and was as physical as an illness, even though it was just the loss of love.

   I lay down slowly, without reading, and turned out the light. The ceiling throbbed blackly above me. Floating thoughts moved through my mind, memories, bitter images, nostalgias, impossible anxieties. I tried to turn it all into an empty space; there are technologies for that. And for a few moments I held my breath and returned to that period of time.

   But thought cannot be controlled; it changes shape as if it were rubber, it escapes, jumps, rebels. I held my breath again and, stretching my toes out beneath the sheets, I remembered something that had been buried in the attic of my mind along with other scraps of history. When I was a girl, I noticed that my parents lowered their voices when I came into the living room and surprised them talking about underground rivers; another time they also stole a copy of the Decameron and another of Justine that ended up disappearing, but this was later on.

   They often were silent and then I heard them talk about sewage, detritus, estuaries as dark as the night. Back then, in the local newspaper there was talk of maquis bandits, the rippers of the mountains, but also of adolescents and men who committed suicide, almost always by throwing themselves out windows; there were stories of flooding and mudslides, and afterward, efforts to create drains that could contain the run-off. Then my father would pick the newspaper up from the breakfast table and take it away, silently, as if in a hurry. I remembered that at some point in the past, the burial of the unfortunate Monelos River, that bed of the discarded, changed the appearance of the city forever, trying to solve a problem that was never defined.

   Because there are problems but almost nobody talks about them openly, as if talking about the breakage affirmed its existence: one is sucked in by it, it becomes something unfixable. Bernardo would say: an empty space tends to be filled by matter that’s in a hurry, disappearing and running off without our knowing where it’s going. Like us.

   What pain covers you? Where does it come from? Is it justified? What is it good for?

   My nephew Javier says you have to let everything flow, that when you block something off, it breaks the current and paralyzes and compromises its own sanity. Why was the river buried? In Ángeles Huerta’s documentary, the answers are suggested: development, speculation, the desire for change. But also sewage, detritus, filth, streams of vermin, voices from beyond. Certainly none of the pieces fit together. What was happening? Galicia is a land of rain, that’s clear. But I also remembered that one afternoon when I was thirteen, in my father’s study, I found, besides a couple of novels by Sade that were well used, strange texts by Pardo Bazán and Wenceslao, along with a pair of texts by Cunqueiro, that dealt very vaguely with the idea of a drainage area and a sewer line that was spreading through Marineda (that was what Dona Emilia said; Wenceslao referred to Coruñiña, Cunqueiro to Florentia, Vidal Bolaño to Acedía) and conquering the surrounding area, devouring the Mariña in Lugo along with every living thing. Back then it seemed like a good thing to me, a very good thing in fact, I would prefer to live in a horror story rather than a kitsch postcard, I preferred the city as a reservoir over the city where nobody is a foreigner.

   Assigning names to things means not only calling them “chair” or “table”, it’s holding them, understanding them, giving them a voice. The water was everywhere, but we lived with our backs to the sea, looking inland. Each person in their corner of the city went to bed with its damp melancholy, its port city alcohol. Children also had their own damp illness, because underneath, submerged cities and sea specters created whirlpools.

   “This is not land’s end,” said Saint Brendan, who left Ireland accompanied by ten monks, “no, it’s not land’s end, it’s the middle of the ocean.” That was clear.

   Yesterday I was taking photos of sewer outlets around the city. Maybe I expected to find hands clutching the grates, splayed fingers, traces of the beyond, but I only found pieces of steel covered with mold, rotting garbage in the squares and streets of the downtown area. The storm was growing and I was trying, by slapping at them, to catch hold of the ideas swirling around me at a hundred miles an hour, spinning, like a gusty wind, and strong.

* * *

   On Wednesday or Thursday morning, when I was still a girl, while children waited for the school bus, some workers came and opened one of the sewer drains on the street. At that time I lived nearby, on Primo de Rivera, facing the port, not far from the steps on Rafael del Río. Near the stop, they came and installed a metal fence and a danger sign.

   The children, who weren’t many, fearful and weak, came timidly to look through the hole. I didn’t, but they went one by one, with their satchels closed and their jackets hanging. They didn’t see anything, only the first worker entering the hole with a helmet and lantern. Before entering the darkness, the man with a reflector vest turned to them and smiled.

   It was no more than a moment, but time stopped. For me, for everyone. It seemed to them, they told me later, that the man was bidding them farewell. His companion, who remained outside, peering into the blackness, was holding a kind of hose and an instrument for measuring.

   He kept looking as if he couldn’t see. That’s what they said afterward, on the bus. They spent a lot of time pondering what the workers could be measuring. Carlos said gas. Someone in the back seat mentioned coal and cockroaches.

   Ah, time and mystery. Did it happen like that? What happened, then? I still see little Carlos sometimes, he’s aged, along the same street, like a ghost, perhaps stuck in that far-off day of his childhood.

   When they returned from school, their hands stained with ink, their breath both sweet and sour, they went to see what had happened with the hole. I remember, or think I remember, that it was uncovered and empty. They looked. The grating was in its place, in the middle of the street.

   I was on my way home, but when I turned around in the doorway to look, I saw it was quite easy to lift the cover and enter.

   They entered and I didn’t see them afterward for some time. Maybe for years.

* * *

   Let’s make a sweep. It’s easy to walk the whole city. At a certain time, while Paco Vázquez combs his crow-black locks and thinks he’s good-looking and thinks his profile would look nice on a statue, a fishing boat enters the dark bay. It’s night-time on the bridge; Manolo and Miro smoke a cigarette and contemplate the glowing city. They know they have a certain power over the night, as if the entire night and its choreography were waiting for its ship to sink.

   They say Coruña is built on the head of Hercules, that Saint Brendan and Saint Amaro searched by sea for the island of paradise until they found it. The cigarette circles and sparks. Manolo and Miro no longer notice the strong perfume of freshly-caught fish, but they continue to enjoy the coolness coming from the sea when one enters the port as night is falling. They unload the fish that goes afterward to the market by the wall, and it’s as if the chore were taking them, transporting them. Then each goes his own way, to a bar or home, who knows, and they feel free, tired, powerful.

   At that hour, in his bourgeois house full of cretonne, Paco Vázquez, who’s already a councilor who is prosperous, nice, collector of comics and friend of flattery, combs his hair over and over in front of a mirror, serves himself a whisky. His wife prepares daiquiris for the guests – persons in local industry, prosperous, who enjoy listening to Julio Iglesias. In the house of PV, as he is known everywhere, there’s a lot of talk about Alfonso Guerra, the loss of capital city status, and a possible independent statute in which the city would refuse to form part of any entity that did not recognize its grandeur. It will certainly be a city-state. Intellectual center, administrative hub, city of judges. They talk about that and drink. They’re happy. It’s marvelous living on a bit of transcended land, in a polis, a city that floats through the air.

   That night, or another like it, in Lionardo, near the port, the poet Novoneyra baptizes the poet Avilés, who is originally from Noia and studies nautical science, baptizing him with the name of his village and says to him: “From this day forward you shall be known as Avilés de Taramancos and you will be a singular man, sparse in words but using just ones.” Crossing the street, descending the damp, gloomy steps where years later I will kiss someone who doesn’t love me, closing his eyes right in front of me, so if you go down those stairs, holding onto the railing without looking at the windows with gratings, the stone slabs with flowering plants, spit and puddles, ignoring the long heads of cranes, there, not far, in our building with infinite apartments, in the Golpes’ house that faces the inlet, on the eleventh floor, my father turns on the TV and with a Montecristo cigar between his teeth, in the living room, is watching the beginning of Hill Street Blues.

   Then he says: “It’s impossible that we’re going to die, Unamuno has said so, that the resurrection of the flesh is impossible,” then he tosses back his whisky and, in the room in back, the maid Sinda remembers the festivities of Baio and prays to Our Lady of Fátima and rubs her feet with their bunions before putting on her nightgown. Just a girl, I pass anxiously, fervently, worked up from reading, through a universe of boarding schools, of clues and adventures, of French professors named Deirdre.

   That night or any other, in the same building, the neighbor woman on the fourth floor puts on a fancy dressing gown, ostrich slippers, and slowly brushes the fur of her fat white cat. Through the window of the living room the bay opens like a painting in a dentist’s office, blinding, detailed, obvious. The neighbor on the twelfth floor looks at the moon that shows its round face and contemplates the paths on the sea with apprehension. A boy in the room in back struggles to solve the Rubik’s Cube with a flashlight under the sheets. The Geypermen, the Cinexin, the collective set of Geyper games wait for him to close his eyes in order to start fooling around.

   Let’s go down to the Ensanche and then to Peixaría. In the criss-cross of cobblestone streets two drunks of uncertain age are reluctant to go home and are belting out ailalelos in the taverns and it seems as if returning meant giving in or throwing in the towel, as if it were imperative to stay out forever, out in the elements, drinking the night. They lift their gaze and in the sky the moon is hiding among the clouds and the fragrance of the sea becomes irresistible.

   I’m not going back, I’m not.

* * *

   We grew up, and there went the years with their windy, carnal seasons, and seamstresses let down skirt hems and we pulled our blue stockings up to our knees.

   It was the month of March, one like no other, a wild and ruddy March, with little wind and patches of sun that scaled the cement walls like lizards. Oh, the average Coruña resident doesn’t know what to do, oh, the sun and heat seem so unpleasant that they don’t know what to do.

   In school patios, the roller skating, football, dodgeball, end up with stones being thrown, girls shut themselves for hours in the bathrooms of cafeterias and emerge exhausted and melancholy. I said then to my friend Helena: “Let’s meet today in the field behind Miramar. At that time, we were still in primary. Years later, by Miramar, they would build a discotheque in that lot and then, while I was little, Miramar was full of brambles and there were needlesthat the nuns picked up with gloves and placed one by one in big containers as if they were lovely insects. My friend Helena and I positioned ourselves near the end of the wall and studied the sea of Zalaeta and the stadium offered us its cement shadow and, from time to time the ruckus of games could be heard along with music on a loudspeaker, indicating the end of classes with the rhythm of Mozart and military airs.

* * *

   You don’t know where to begin, you think a person always has to begin with the present and themselves. You, in the Czech embassy of Delhi, thirty years later, in a room that looks like it’s from the Cold War with brown wooden paneling and beige colored quilts, listening to Nick Cave and later Cat Power, not knowing very well what to do with your time and your life.

   You, in a taxi, on the long streets of Delhi where people sleep deep in groups of dark green trees and an insistent sensation of solitude. You have just gotten divorced, you’re still young, your life is ahead of you, and you don’t know what to do with it. You don’t think you’ll find anybody and at that moment you don’t see that’ll be necessary either. But it’s true, it’s not likely you’ll meet anyone, not in Coruña. Maybe somewhere else. Perhaps in another place.

   Lalo is in Coru, but you don’t know what to do with him because he’s slippery as an eel and doesn’t seem to need you. You lie on the Czech bed and look at the ceiling, put bossa nova on your cell phone, while you wait for it to be time to shower and go out, and you get out your notebook and you think how hard it is to write and how hard everything is. You look at your naked legs and your toenails painted blue and you think. Sometimes it seems to you that your thoughts are getting tangled up like smoke over your head, you can see how they all topsy-turvy and some fade off into others.

   In the afternoon you were with the Austrian writer in the kitchen, you were in a nightgown and he was in slippers and you had tea talking about silly things. There Delhi spread out, hot and mysterious. For some reason that you didn’t understand then and don’t understand now, you were bothered by his friendly expression and his jokes about women, there was something about him, a mixture of self-confidence and insolence, that you disliked, you think how men lose their dignity when they age, it’s as if they become caricatures of themselves.

   In bed, you study the fan and listen to the dull noise. It’s mid-afternoon. To find a way to say it in terms that enlighten you and make you understand. You admire those who are able to see their own life like it’s a novel, but something like modesty keeps you from insisting and seeing what doesn’t exist. Your own shame lowers you in your own eyes and in those of the world.

   But at the same time it’s so difficult to see whatever there is to see, without pulling on the ego: we all need a point of departure.

* * *

   Back then your father had a mutt called Pipa. That dog was just a puppy living in a makeshift cage in his office, howling and whimpering all day long, to the horror of her mother, who hated all animals. Then Pipa grew up all by herself, in the field in Zapateira, and your father went there and she looked at him with sweet little reproachful eyes. He suffered because he couldn’t do anything more than feed her and pet her a little when he went to visit. Pipa died young, from loneliness and lack of care.

   Perhaps that March day you’re returning to, Pipa is still protesting in the office full of volumes of civil code. And you, a girl, are sitting on the floor in the hall, head against the door, saying Our Fathers in a low voice. I see you there, sitting for a few minutes that seem like hours, you don’t want to get up and stop hearing the dog’s cries and there’s a moment when its sound becomes the music of the world, the superhuman moan of the planets that goes through you and goes with you to live forever, that will grow up with you, give you clues, provide the soundtrack for discoveries, passions, and misfortunes and form a fretwork that runs through everything, giving a certain meaning, a cloudy unity, to the weeping of the known world.

   Kind characters came to your house, seamstresses, cooks, milkmaids, doormen who said pois [yes] and indefinable subordinates, the house always full of people, moving about, and your mother always taking a bath in perfumed salts before going out to window-shop along the Rúa Real dressed in tweed and silk corduroy. In the same period an employee of your father, Juan Becerra, brought you an eraser that you kept like a treasure. It didn’t really erase but it was fat and impressive. You didn’t know anything. That eraser made you happy for many years, not like any old eraser, but like a magical object, like an illuminated monolith.

   You looked out the window of the bus on the way to school and dreamed about those bawdy, bold streets. On the periphery, life was more modest, there was clothing on lines and gusts of wind made it flutter and gypsies smoked joints, smiling, on a bench. And often a lady in a dressing gown entered the vestibule of her house and picked up a pot with a ficus plant, looking at it affectionately and taking it back inside her house that smelled like cabbage. And you looked at all that mysterious life from your bus to school with the nuns, your mouth pressed on the steam-covered glass, and you tried to capture it.

   But it was to no avail, your life galloped on, it seemed like there was nothing more than that present full of strikes and the bus stuck on side roads while workers built the first highway in Galicia and the nationalists conducted rituals of atonement in the bowels of a wounded Galicia. Ah, Galicia. People talked about Galicia as if it were a naked woman, lying atop a fountain like the Japanese have, where they eat sushi with chopsticks without a problem.

   We children went to bed with that parade of burning buses in our heads, and to us that seemed like something happy, a witches’ coven celebrating the beginning and the end of something. It was then when, before the approval of the Statute of Autonomy, the whole city came out in favor of being the capital, and right wing and left wing spontaneously joined together in the Pazo de Congresos, proclaiming the city a free zone; never before had such crowds been seen, so many that they say when the head of the demonstration reached María Pita people were still leaving Praza da Palloza. Our mayor gave triumphant speeches and old women made the sign of the cross while they planned to remodel and the nuns with warts even seemed like messengers coming to us from subterranean worlds.

   That way Pacoché captained masses desirous of exceptionality, of favorable treatment, along avenues, among the rhododendrons. The long processions of notaries, shop owners, retired judges, Rodier venders, writers of food articles, were a sight to behold. That was the world. They all had, from time to time, very clear ideas that looked to the future and justified a hypothetical structure for the world. They were very sure, with their straight-legged pants, Burberry jackets and sweaters bought in Pote, Staro or Pascual.

   Then afterward there was a turn-around or we simply grew up. It often happens like that, reality advances along parallel paths, along oblique streets, and curious children no longer peered into the depths of sewers, instead they grew up to put on black shirts and listen to Dead Kennedys. These children were no longer children of workers, but of lawyers, doctors, bankers, and they felt a sort of infinite disgust that was born in them and made them unique and vengeful. Nausea, says Pereiro, looking at me sideways from across the table in Alfaiate on San Xoán Street.

   Nausea, potent as something obvious that was beginning to flood everything.

   They say that Pereiro, Lois, and Manuel Rivas studied in Madrid then, surrounded by gigantic dogs, in a flat on the Paseo de Extremadura. There they wrote odes to the mists of Monforte, went to El Sol Club and listened to the Sex Pistols. The Pereiro brothers came from the interior capital of drugs and rock and roll and vindicated a new pride, rural and brutish, even a bit Central European.

   Then one day, Rossmero had a flash, a vision, and on a shelf in El Rincón de Jerez the Virgin of El Rocío appeared to him and said: “Your mission will be to tear down the old world.” Because the instructions were, at best, ambiguous, the four of them spent the evenings trying to decipher them. They made long lists and drank, and time with its unthinkable things was passing by the window, slowly, dragged by the burning yellow air in the summer of Madrid.

   And Lois, thin and spiritual, with a certain weakness for Handke, said: “We have to write Galician Lusiads”; and Manolo: “No, the Virgin speaks of love, that is clear”; and Pereiro: “We have to canonize Don Manuel and protect the wise pig.”

   But Rossmero knew and spoke with great conviction that what they needed to do was organize a band.

Text © Blanca Riestra

Translation © Kathleen March