Books Burn Badly (17 page)

Parallelepiped walked along the Western Quay. He lived in Garás. He looked at his hands. They were blackened. He was happy, pleased with his booty. It was about time he found something valuable. Dead men’s pockets don’t even carry air. Judging from Samos’ anxiety, this book must be worth a fortune.

It was then he felt a slap on the back that made him stumble. A paw that had little to do with greeting or friendship. He knew the effect of this surprise impact. Intimidation. He himself was an expert in the surprise blow to the back of the neck, which terrorised poor souls scurrying away, hoping to avoid making the Fascist salute. With his elbow, he held on tightly to the New Testament hidden under his shirt and this immobilised one arm. He turned around. Ren, his robust colleague, grabbed him by the collar. His hands were iron claws. He unarmed him.

‘What you got there, Parallelepiped?’

‘A novel, comrade. A Frenchy to read in the toilet.’

‘I’d better read it myself first. Hand it over.’

The Books’ Burial

‘You.’ ‘Me?’ ‘You too.’ Ten men he pointed to. With rakes and shovels. Rakes? It was August, but I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn the leaves were falling off the trees. That was the first thing I did. As soon as we entered Cantóns, I looked to the right to see if the beech still had leaves. It was beautiful, in season, like the bust underneath belonging to
Mr
Pondal. I mean the bust was also in season, with the dark age of bearded men in white marble. If we have to collect leaves, then I hope they’re the beech’s. That beech’s. But the lorry went straight past at an improper speed. Even if all the men in the back of the lorry were disaffected, the speed was still improper. We’d heard the order. To pick men who were disaffected. There we were, park and garden employees, and the new manager pointed to ten men. ‘You, you, you,’ and so on, up to ten. That finger stung like a horse-fly. It doesn’t matter what it’s for, who likes suddenly to be called ‘disaffected’? Because just now, a few days ago, there weren’t any disaffected. I mean I was unfamiliar with that label. Had I had to introduce myself to the world, I wouldn’t have started: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, my name’s Francisco Crecente, Polka to my friends, municipal gardener, specialist in pruning palms, oh and by the way I’m disaffected.’ It was like an oedema appearing that hadn’t been there before. Or a tic. He pointed with his index finger, ‘You! You! You!’ And with the same reflex action of pointing to ourselves, we replied, ‘Me? Me? Me?’ Like that. As if we all had tics, which we didn’t. On the lorry, swaying from side to side, the disaffected, clinging to the rakes, more than that, physically attached to the rakes, which have the solid shape of tools that put down roots even on a violently unstable lorry. The lorry had acquired the arrogant attitude, the cheek of heavy machinery that’s been relieved of its scruples. The soldier who gave the order and the new manager who carried it out travelled in the motorcycle and sidecar combination behind. We disaffected, with tics, dancing around for them. Stuck to our rakes. Estremil looked to see which way we were going and then tried to explain something, something important, but couldn’t make himself understood because it was like riding a horse, your teeth cut the words short.

‘What?’

The lorry turned sharply. The wheels creaked. It braked suddenly.

We were next to the port in a kind of low, grimy mist. I now understood the reckless driving and the hollow feeling in the stomach. We hadn’t travelled horizontally, we’d fallen. Now I could hear Estremil, the echo of what Estremil had been trying to say. He was cursing. ‘Blasted mouth of hell!’

‘Out!’

The ground was giving off a thick, sticky smoke that, rather than leaving, seemed to return. Sniffed around the embers. A smoke that, instead of disappearing, came back to the trail left by the rakes’ teeth. It wasn’t until we were down by the docks that we realised why we were there. To rake up the ashes and smoking remains of books. Some of those who’d burnt them hung about, sifting through the pyres, kicking at the bones of books. This gesture reminded me of the first image I had of death. Not the first time I saw a dead person, when I was small, which didn’t frighten me since it was my grandfather, who looked very peaceful, cradled by women’s prayers, his arms over the sheet, one hand on top of the other as if he’d caught death with his fingers, but the first time I saw death out of a box, another image. There’d been a fight between two men after a party. They got on badly, but that night, strangely enough, they’d been drinking together like lifelong friends. I remember my father interpreted it as a bad sign. Afterwards he was annoyed with himself for getting it right, ‘If it’s a bad sign, son, don’t say so, because words hanker after what they’ve said.’ Someone woke us early the next morning with the news. One of them was badly wounded, the other dead. They’d come to blows at the crossroads. We children ran to have a look. The corpse had been piously draped in a sheet, awaiting the magistrate’s arrival. All we could see was the outline. A woman told us to go away. She called us ‘death flies’. ‘You’re like flies that won’t leave. I should drive you off like flies.’ This also impressed me. There was something about the label that was right. So I was about to leave, but then one of the deceased’s brothers appeared on horseback. He got down and, without letting go of the reins, approached the body. He was wearing boots with spurs and had a thick, blond moustache like a covering of hay on his upper lip. He didn’t pay us any attention. With the toe of his boot, he pulled back the sheet to reveal the dead man’s face. That was the first time I saw the horror of death, a pointless, ugly death. This may have had something to do with what the brother said. ‘That’s it,’ he spoke to him reproachfully. ‘The time has come for you to sleep out in the open.’

The one stirring the badly burnt books with the toe of his boot had a resinous voice. Part of the smoke had got inside his throat. The action of his toecap lifted layers of ash. He flicked out orders in an effort to speed things up. And warned us, ‘If you see a book which says New Testament or Holy Scripture or something like that, give it to me, understood? It doesn’t matter if it’s damaged or charred. I want it!’ The bitterness with which he spoke made our work even more irksome, as if we were partly to blame. I wish he hadn’t said anything at all. Now everything had a sacred feel. Even the smoke weighed down on our shovels. If those who wore the Sacred Heart as a symbol went so far as to burn Holy Scripture, then my father was absolutely right, ‘Better not to predict what’s coming next’. Everything that had burnt was in that sleepwalking smoke. I thought about the governor’s wife, the librarian. She’d turned up dead yesterday in a field next to the road to Lugo, having been raped and riddled with bullets. She was walking barefoot on the coals, her skin entirely blackened, naked and sleepless among the piles of night.

There was lots of cleaning to do. Here and in María Pita Square. Lots of burnt books. We’d heard they were burning books by the sea. There’d been fires before, when the coup started. But this was something else. Whole libraries going up in flames. Apart from the resinous voice of the one in charge, echoed by the new manager, the only sound was of rakes scratching the ground and shovels loading the lorry.

The one in charge wanted us to go faster. But this wasn’t something you could do any old how. All jobs follow certain rules and none of us could remember how to load the remains of burnt books. Nor could the tools. We were both used to collecting fallen leaves, to the scent of autumn bonfires, which lent the city a medicinal aroma. More than smoke, it was that, an aroma. Nature whose time had come. What was burning today, however, was time itself. I realised that. I didn’t say anything, but I thought it. Estremil, my friend, time is burning. Not hours or days or years. Time. All the books I never read, Estremil, are burning. He was a good reader. One of those who stopped to read, and did so conscientiously. Estremil did everything conscientiously. I bet some of the books he’d read were there, in the ashes being raked up, in the shovel-loads filling the lorry.

I picked up a spadeful. There were plates of ash retaining the form of pages and the ‘black shadow’ of printed lines. Some of those plates hadn’t burnt completely. The flames had gone in a circle and left bits of paper intact. My fingers reached out to one of those wafers quivering on the surface.

‘Look, Estremil, “a drop of duck’s blood”.’

‘What’s that? You’re crazy. You treat everything as a joke.’

I wanted to give it to him. Gave it. As the plate fell apart, the piece of paper was no bigger than a samara wing.

When he trained me, Estremil used to say of autumn leaves, ‘Don’t kill yourself running after them, they’ll come to you. It looks as if they’re falling haphazardly, but they have a direction. See? The flurry bends a certain way. Build a good bonfire, find a good place, and then wait. They’ll soon come.’ He was pulling my leg, testing me, I could tell from the glint in his eyes, but there was meaning in what he said. That was some time ago. Now Estremil was quiet, uneasy. Gritting his teeth. Like me. To stop them banging together. That day, something happened to me that had never happened before. The sway of the lorry stayed in my body. Wouldn’t leave. I couldn’t stop my teeth chattering. I listened to them resounding inside, behind my eyes. Maybe the same thing was happening to Estremil. If he gritted his teeth, he could hold his body together better and concentrate on his pulse to keep the spade steady and not spill the ash, the folds and tips of toasted skin, the nervous resistance of gut-string, the bony splinters of shrivelled paper. The books’ remains.

The Invisible Man

On Cantóns, Curtis can clearly see the thick, ashen, earthy clouds, the breath of ruminant fire, coming from the docks. The sky above María Pita Square is also overcast. He knows he can’t turn back. Has to continue to see it with his own eyes.

He looks at the clock on top of the Obelisk. Remembers, ‘His lordship, Time!’ It looks as if it’s always been there, marking centuries, as if the hands had yet to make a circuit. Sada was right. A cuckoo clock would have been better. If a cuckoo were to come out now, thought Curtis, maybe everything would be different. It’d raise the heads of those walking uneasily, counting questions on the slabs of stone like someone stepping on the squares of a chessboard. It might alter the march of those following a straight line. The cuckoo might hinder that soldier in the bonnet galloping astride a straight line.

He thought he saw him, Sada, on his way through Pontevedra Square, where troops were starting to enlist. The rebel army had taken over the city and had control of Galicia, which would be a rearguard territory for what the insurgents called the ‘new reconquest of Spain’. Yes, he thought it was Sada. So tall and burly, he was difficult to miss. He thought he recognised other faces, though recently not only had people’s mood changed, but their faces, presence, physical features as well. This was one of the things that had most surprised him on his walk. A kind of winter had suppressed the summer season. From the skylight, he’d seen the desolation of Riazor Beach. It was the sight of an urban beach deserted in summer, on a beautiful sunny day, that made him afraid. Unfamiliar fear caught up with him. There were days only the Headless Man seemed to emerge from the city’s shell, sitting on the breakwater with a book in his lap. When he decided to escape through the skylight, when he tricked his mother and aunts in the Dance Academy, he discovered years had gone by in days. Hairdos had disappeared, colours had darkened, skirts and dresses lengthened. People had changed their way of looking. Of walking.

He realised there were people and things asking not to be named. To be spared words. Which is why he stopped scrutinising the soldiers. He knew he shouldn’t do it. For his own good and for theirs.

If they asked him who Sada was, he’d say, ‘I don’t know, I can’t see him.’ And Sada would call him to one side, ‘Can you really not see me, Curtis? Praise be to God, long live the Umbrella Maker of the Universe!’

‘If you want to stay safe, become invisible.’

He was told this plainly by a well-informed man. A Navy legal officer who admired his painting and had a certain sense of humour. ‘I like most of all the way you paint echinoderms and gastropods.’ ‘Now listen here, you,’ replied Sada, ‘there’s no need to insult them.’ The officer was kind enough to warn him. He wasn’t interested in war. His hobby was studying the first world circumnavigation. By Magellan, Elcano and what he called the enigma of the third name. Sada would have liked to return the favour at once and become immediately invisible.

But although he was up to date with Franz Roh’s theory about magic realism in art, Sada didn’t know how to become invisible. He was just too big for escapism. He had magician friends he was unable to help in rehearsals or performances because all the swords wounded him, all the saws sawed him and, in the disappearing act, when the magician announced he’d vanished and was no longer there, he’d appear, ruining the spectacle, like a heavy load that doesn’t know how to transform into spirit.

His informant was clear. He was on the list. Sooner or later, they’d kill him. To be invisible was to become a soldier, to join the conquering army and go to war.

No sooner did Sada’s enormous bulk reach the front in Asturias, no sooner did it slowly stand up in the trench, than he was shot three times. You’d have thought this is what he wanted. But his fellow soldiers told their bosses he’d been talking all the time about being invisible. He considered himself an invisible man. And this is what they called him: The Invisible. One soldier kept quiet. The one whom he’d told about the child and the matador the night before.

In metaphysical art or in magic realism, there as well, the lame matador pursued him. Pointed with his stick, ‘That’s him, that’s the one, the Invisible.’

I’ll Just Go and See Who It Is

They’re killing all his friends. One by one. He has to send them to a safe place.