Manuel's Beach Prose Poem

It is hard to walk in the sand especially with boots and a heavy rifle. Manuel and I would sit on a rock and watch the moon give birth to a distant blue Africa. Franco's Guardia Civil were not all thugs. A few were poets. Manuel's father had worshiped the general and had blessed the day Guernica 'that Marxist nest' had been flattened. That was decades before he was born, yet Manuel still patrolled the beach, weaving between sunbathing tourist seeking nonexistent saboteurs. On his rounds the young conscript fell in love - often, but in winter (when his sneering corporal was away), he would sit in the bar, tongue curled like a snail shell, dedicating lurid hyperbole to every female foreigner that had smiled at him, and to all the Catalan girls that never did. That night the moon seemed to translate for us. He asked me earnestly: if I thought Franco would ever lift the ban on bikini's? "Never!" I replied, "The Pope and the Rightists are against it." Manuel rose and shuffled sadly away, his rifle dragging on the sand. That night the moon came close, to bask on Manuel’s beach, and she without a stitch of cloud-cover over her matronly form.