Dull Fire and Living Tide

By the age of seven he already knew his grandfather didn't use a watch. What for, he used to say, if the tide pays no heed to brass numbers. The old man would watch the stewpot boil, dip his thumb into the warm water to test the salt, and knew precisely when the motorboats were rounding the cape toward the fish market without ever lifting his head from the stove.

Now the wall clock in the tavern, a bulky oak fixture with a rusted pendulum, marked a quarter past eleven.

The paper was still on the counter, weighed down beneath the white ceramic ashtray.

"A raya pide lume manso e compaña de quen non fuxa", it read in blue ink faded by three decades of grease and pine drawers. The spiky handwriting, broken at the esses, unmistakable.

Roi rubbed the white burn on his left forearm with his index finger, a rugged map that pulled tight whenever the wind veered northeast. He closed the kitchen hatch. The iron bolt grated against the chestnut frame.

Three sharp knocks rattled the entrance glass.

It wasn't Lidia.

Antón pushed the door open before Roi could finish sliding the bolt. He was wearing a yellow raincoat soaked with night mist, dripping dark puddles onto the granite flagstones, and holding four small green beer bottles by the neck with a hand that smelled of rotting bait.

"Rosa is still at the novena praying for the deceased's soul," Antón said, barging toward the bar without asking permission. "And my throat feels like a goat track."

"I was closing up, Antón."

"Close whatever the hell you want, but give me an opener."

Crown cap against metal. The bottle cap rolled until it stopped beside the kitchen rag stiffened by hand-washing bleach.

The low-tide wind blew from the southwest, shaking the large windows with a dry violence, the kind that kicks up the dirty sand from the bottom of the estuary and hurls it against the glass until it turns opaque. It smelled of exposed mud, of seaweed rotting in the cold air, and of the stale smoke of the engines sleeping in the harbor.

Antón took a long swig from the bottle, leaving half at the bottom with a smack of his tongue.

"You saw her," the sailor blurted out.

"She ate. She went to the guesthouse."

"She's coming back tomorrow."

"She said at noon."

Silence.

Roi picked up a coarse thread dishcloth, rough as old sandpaper, and began to scrub at a wine ring that had been dry on the counter since Tuesday. It wouldn't come out. He scrubbed harder, making the wood squeak.

"Leave the bar alone, dammit, you're going to drill a hole right through it," Antón grumbled, shoving the empty bottle aside to open the second one against the edge of the counter. "You spend your whole life scraping things that won't come off."

"We have to light the fire at eight tomorrow."

"Then don't light it."

Roi stopped. He looked at Antón. The sailor's eyelids were swollen from salt and lack of sleep, and he had that ash-gray shadow on his cheeks that seafaring men get when they've been drinking too many days straight to keep from thinking about the nets.

"What do you want, Antón?"

"To tell you not to blame her."

Outside, a gust slammed against the panes with the force of a punch, making the empty bottles lined up on the upper shelf vibrate.

"Blame her for what? She came to write about sunken ships. She gets paid by a Madrid newspaper."

"She didn't come for the ships, Roi."

Antón lowered his gaze to his own knuckles, calloused, stained with tar that had already become part of his skin. He wiped the back of his sleeve across his dripping nose and shoved the second empty bottle against the first.

"It was me."

A pause settled into the air, dense as the steam from an uncovered pot lifted too soon.

"You what?"

"The letter. Three months ago, when they returned your bank statement and the brine truck refused to unload unless you paid cash. Damned pride of yours. You weren't going to ask a single soul in the harbor for a cent. I've known you since you wore short pants and burned your fingers on your grandfather's embers."

Roi lost his breath for a second. He said nothing.

"What letter, Antón?"

"The one I sent to the editorial office of that magazine of hers. I asked the schoolteacher to type it up for me so it would look serious. I told her that Taberna Fontán held the last memory of the Sisargas, that if this place closed down there wouldn't be anyone left in the entire estuary capable of understanding the bottom of the water. That we were broke. That you had two tides left before the court slapped a seal on your door."

Roi gripped the wet rag between his fingers until his knuckles turned white. The dirty water drained down the wood.

"You had no right."

"You were going to sink with the shutters down, Roi. Just like the old man. Exactly like the old man, without saying a word to a living soul."

"It was my business."

"It was everyone's home, you idiot!" Antón spat, striking the wood with the base of the third bottle without even opening it. "Rosa doesn't sleep worrying about the bills. I don't sleep. Do you think you're the only one who's hungry here?"

Hungry.

Roi didn't answer. He looked at the yellowish paper with his grandfather's handwriting, still beneath the ashtray. Lidia hadn't come by chance or out of nostalgia. She had come to appraise a ruin that Antón had served up to her on a silver platter.

"Get out," Roi said in a thread of voice. "Go find Rosa."

Antón stared at the unopened beer for several long seconds. Then he sighed, shoved his hands into his raincoat pockets, and turned on his heel, dragging his boots across the floor.

The door clicked shut behind him with a damp snap.

At twelve in the morning the wind had dropped just enough to leave a fine, sticky drizzle that turned the port asphalt into a slick of grease and fish scales.

The kitchen smelled of slow-cooked sofrito. Finely minced pancetta sweating in the cast-iron skillet, the transparent fat melting slowly into the red onion that Roi stirred with a worn wooden spoon. There was no rush. If you rush the onion, it turns bitter; if you leave it alone, it yields. A handful of minced garlic dropped into the center, crackling with a dull sizzle as it released its garden water into the hot bottom.

The extractor hood hummed like a diesel engine idling in neutral.

The door bell chimed.

Lidia entered without shaking the water from her gray coat. Her hair was pulled back with a tortoiseshell clip and she had deep dark circles from spending the night listening to the freight trains that make the station guesthouse tremble.

"It smells like paprika," she said, leaning her closed umbrella into the zinc stand.

"From La Vera. The sweet kind," Roi replied from the kitchen doorway, without letting go of the spoon. "The hot kind overpowers the fish and I don't like to cheat."

"Your grandfather used to toss in a pinch of chili pepper when the weather turned foul."

"My grandfather did whatever he damn well pleased because this floor was his."

Lidia walked slowly to table number six. She pulled back the chestnut chair, which protested with a sharp groan against the floor, and sat down without taking off her coat. She crossed her legs with that calculated naturalness of someone who has learned to take up space in newsrooms full of shouting men.

She pulled a small notebook from her bag, bound in maroon leather with corners worn by travel, and a silver fountain pen.

Roi came out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on his linen apron. He stopped two steps from the table.

"Antón was here last night."

Lidia didn't blink. She didn't even raise an eyebrow.

"I figured as much. When I got off the bus, he was on the dock staring at me like he'd seen a ghost."

"He wrote to you."

"I know, Roi. With spelling mistakes corrected with liquid paper. A pathetic and beautiful letter. One of those that managing editors toss in the trash before lunch."

"But you came."

"I came because I wanted to come."

From the kitchen came the sound of the sofrito beginning to cry out for broth, a low and threatening sizzle that demanded immediate attention. Roi didn't move.

"I don't need charity from a banquet magazine, Lidia. If I have to shut the grate, I'll shut it all by myself."

"Such an obsession with closing things," she said, passing the pad of her thumb along the spine of the notebook. "You don't even have money to renew the terrace license and you still talk like you're the king of the estuary. Orgulho estúpido, they say in Lisbon. Here you call it tradition so you don't have to admit you're scared."

"Here we call it not selling out the dead."

Lidia smiled slightly, a bitter grimace that dissolved instantly at the corners of her lips. She opened the notebook to a blank page.

Lidia placed the leather notebook on the stained wood and uncapped the fountain pen without looking at him.

"If I put it on the front page tomorrow that this stove is the only one still respecting the Sisargas... are you going to be able to light it without hating me for saving you?"