Bones of an impressive romance
Scattered all across the sands
A secret safe with all the world
Too vain to seem so capable.
—Ian George Brown and John Squire, “All Across the Sands”
December 1920
In the chilly winter of 1920–1921 when visitors to the area were scarce, Cicero began cleaning the vast, pebbleless, fine sand beaches around Sagres. The project was to last for many years, and to bring him much joy. He did this not from a sense of neatness, but from a desire to see the contents of the ocean’s guts, to nosily sieve through her sputum. (The psychologist in Bill Cartwright would have loved an hour or so with this thoroughly intriguing young man.) Cicero marveled at the briny debris. He would chat to Alfredo while he worked, explaining that jetsam had come from a ship; flotsam was simply stuff that floated, while, like that damned forgotten Musketeer, the most fascinating of the three was lagan—the relieved scrapings of the ocean floor itself, which he suspected by law belonged to the King but which in practice was the sole property of the Emperor of Rome and his dog. Despite everything (or perhaps because of everything), it was rare for Cicero to be found without the makings of a smile on his young face, which, at sixteen, was developing signs of being quite handsome.
Johan preferred to stay up on the hill while Cicero was busy. The boy gathered the more interesting finds of detritus onto the grass banks sloping high above the sand, and after months, these became museums of oceanographic wonder. As he laid out each new salty and slimy discovery, he explained to Alfredo its recent history, rehearsing and honing it to relay later to Johan over soup. He giggled a lot to himself, often for Alfredo’s benefit, for the dog possessed a sensitive barometer to the lads’ moods.
Some days, when there was little to report from the ocean, Cicero told Johan fanciful tales of the dragoons of mermaids whom he had met that day. He brought home a trunk, which he said his favorite mermaid, called Pandora, had brought to him from the ocean floor. It had a large letter P painted on the side in lilac, and it was the type in which you’d expect to find, or to hide, a fortune in Spanish gold. There were indeed fish scales around the seams, and when he ran one through his thumb and forefinger, Johan was sure that he smelled instead warm butter. Cicero enthusiastically went into great detail about the mermaids’ affairs with fishermen, sailors, and other nautical types. Ten of our years, he explained, make up a single mermaid year, and so their stories of their mothers and their aunts were rich and wondrous, and trawled from recent centuries. Apparently, Walter Raleigh had gained a reputation for only ever talking about himself; Drake had been a dreadful gossip, desperate to discover which of his contemporaries had made a pass at the creatures in a lonely moment; and Lord Nelson had missed his mother awfully. Columbus, they insisted, had only been trying to find a cure for seasickness, but instead, by marvelous misfortune, had found one for homesickness, and called it the Americas.
“Oh, boss! You should come tomorrow to see what I have to catalog. That big angry sea is keeping me a busy boy. A rocking horse. An aircraft propeller. A herd of sea horses. Last week, ten thousand toy soldiers and a harpsichord, an Egyptian galley and an octopus with a monocle. But our most beautiful piece is a small horse in a glass case, with a fine ivory horn on its nose. I’ve found a skull ten times the size of yours, and counted one hundred and twenty-eight perfect teeth. He’s a giant. The boys and I, we call him Ignatius. If Cicero cannot make or change history, at least Cicero may record it.”
He immediately realized that this final statement had been quite a thing to say in the company of Johan Thoms, but Johan waved away his apology and thought instead that in all his twenty-seven years, he had never witnessed (nor could he imagine witnessing) anyone so successfully refer to themselves from time to time in the third person. (Cicero had indeed mastered this, as was the stubborn and determined nature of this Roman hero.)
Cicero told of three viciously carnivorous, venomous, deviously conspiratorial sea anemones, Aztec gold, electric blue, and poppy red, who had been marooned in the breakers after they had pursued a deep-sea crab with a horrendous sense of direction. This, too, had been quite a thing to say in the company of Johan Thoms. The deep-sea crab with a shell of Ascot turquoise had fallen in love with a Henslow9 swimming crab. They had chased her through the warm Atlantic waters to the vast open sands of Zavial Beach. The crabs had sensed they were being followed, but each time they had spun around, they had been met with a plantlike stillness. The resplendent predators were soon wilting in the Portuguese sunshine, just yards from their intended prey, who happily nuzzled each other and chuckled at the dying trio.
Cicero told Johan that an elderly, beached blue whale had told him her life story, which had made him weep. Her eyelid had thudded as she had died, and the ground had trembled. I imagine her frame may now take up a large portion of the old Museu de Cicero, which back then was rapidly becoming a wonder of the age, and yet was a very well-kept secret.
The boys from the villages would come and visit Cicero to see what he had found from the Atlantic, though oddly they were not able to see many of the marvels described later to Johan, often in front of them. This made them suspect that Cicero was exaggerating the truth to his pal, but they also believed he was doing this to aid the older man’s mood. Cicero would referee soccer matches for the boys on the beach, and as he guided them all home afterward, he spoke to them of the preciseness of social etiquette, all of which he had extracted from Johan. Johan was always happy to continue these lessons from the wall at the front of the hut. The boys giggled and grinned initially but, each time, were soon captivated. The sharing of this knowledge (and what he saw as love) soothed Johan, and he would remind himself to constantly remind himself of this. He started to teach them how to play chess, too, convinced that the lessons of the board contained strategy and skill, but he maintained that it was a game for gentlemen. He urged his pupils to take the decorum learned from the boundaries of the board into the very soul of their beings.
“Of course, chess is about war, but it is more about living by the rules, striving for success through thinking, and shaking your opponent’s hand, should one win or lose. Etiquette, decency, chin up, shoulders back, boys!”
He delighted in dredging up many tips which he promised would give the young scamps a romantic advantage in years to come. The boys would blush, though they knew not why. The impromptu classes in front of the hut became more frequent, until, one sweet-aroma’d evening in May of 1926, when the aiding and abetting air held captive the whiff of jasmine, Johan officially founded the Young Hooligans’ Chess Club.
Johan took enormous pride in this distraction, and was soon holding court in the dusty classroom of the village school, thanks to Ismerelda’s generosity and a spare set of keys. This allowed the chessboards to be left overnight if necessary, for many of the boys were becoming quite proficient, prompting memories for Johan of a night two decades previous when the scent of an unlikely victory had briefly filled his eager nostrils.
Johan designed a coat of arms for the club. A field of calendula sat below a neo-Moorish garlic-headed domed palace, reminiscent of the fine architecture in Bascarsija, at Kaunitz’s ancestral castle and the Old Sultan’s. The marigold lurked behind a portcullis, half open, half closed. The stately grille was flanked to the right by a fourteen-blade antler and a butterfly, and to the left by a figure pulling down on a rope, guided by a pulley above, suggesting that the barrier might actually be lifting. One word in a scroll underlined the images: Deslizar. In English, “to glide.”