Books Burn Badly (2 page)

But this time I don’t. This time, I let it be.

A baby-faced soldier with a man’s look. A smooth-faced soldier. In a trenchcoat with big buttons and a stiff collar. Framed by a circle of water. His arms are crossed and he wears a badge on his left sleeve. A man’s look, that’s right. He looks at me without pride, but also without pity. It’s what they do, the water figures, they come and see, look when you look.

I asked Mum about him.

I asked her about the young soldier.

She pretends not to hear me.

Slap, slap! Cloth on stone.

I think Mum would prefer not to know about my figures. Maybe she has enough with her own. I notice she avoids shaking the clothes out by the river when she sees me gazing into the water. I think they also move, change looks along the river, because they’re extremely restless. When one disappears for a while, it’s probably off somewhere in her circles. That’s what happened to the boxer. The boxer hung around here for a while, on my part of the river, and then left. I reckon he went to where she washes since Polka told me the boxer liked women who worked in the local factories.

But she pretends not to see my figures, and I pretend not to see hers.

‘What’s that?’

‘A soldier, a baby-faced soldier.’

‘There’s been more than one soldier,’ she said. Slap, slap!

‘Right. The one I’m talking about is smooth-faced and blond. And smiles. Or sort of, anyway.’

‘You mean Domingos,’ she finally replied, ‘who died at Annual in 1921. The one with the tubes of laughter.’

The figure smiled. It was him, the one with the tubes of laughter.

‘He always smiled,’ said Olinda. ‘Smart as garlic, but weak. Sickly. Our mother, Grandma Dansa, accompanied him to the recruiting office.

‘“This lad’s no good for war,” she told them.

‘And one of them replied, “Everyone’s good for war, if not for killing, then for dying.”

‘One day he wrote a letter, saying he had responsibility for the tubes of laughter, the name they gave the radio operators’ poles. He’d carry the radios on the back of a mule. And he learnt things. Said he could now understand the language of birds. All of his letters were a kind of joke. They seemed to have come not from a war, but from a comedy. They were such a joke grandma cried when we read them to her. At the end, he always put
IKTH
, which meant
I Kiss The Hand Of My Mother
. And grandma couldn’t stop crying because of what he’d learnt at war.’

And then Olinda opened up. She talked about something she always avoided, about the soldiers in our family and our locality. The Philippines. Cuba. Morocco. ‘Go forth and multiply as cannon fodder. An empire of bones, piled up year after year. Followed by those who died in the Civil War. What the army lost abroad they tried to reconquer at home.’ That’s what Olinda said. Slap, slap! The wet cloth striking against the stone seemed, in someone so taciturn, to be a way of expanding the story. Words with a layer of dusty sweat, iodine and blood, suddenly soaked, twisted, slapped, soaped, twisted, wrung out. Left in the sun. Clean. A white shirt drying. Some trousers. The wind filling the vacant clothing. At the washing place, in a crack in the wall that stops the north-easterly, there is always a robin. When the women fall silent, the robin sings. A tube of laughter. The old burying the young, according to Olinda. That’s what war is.

Now there’s something funny, and I don’t know if it’s normal or not, but I can’t see myself in the water. I can see Olinda. I look sideways and see my mother both in and out of the water. She’s on her knees, her body next to the washing stone. An angular woman’s body. The stone seems to have been gradually worn down by the stroke of bellies. The axis in our bellies and the shape of the stone are what link the sky, the earth and the water. As she applies soap, I look sideways, first at her reflection in the water and then at her. The sun’s behind her, her hair is gathered by a headscarf tied at the back of her neck, she again adopts an expression of hardness. She’s hard on the inside. Her eyes give nothing away. You can see that better in the water.

The Night of the Moths

‘I asked the steersman if there was any hope of saving the vessel, or our lives.

‘“None of us will see the morning,” he replied.’

For the second night running, old Borrow recounted the storm off Cape Finisterre. Henrietta MacOubrey, his stepdaughter, decided that this time she’d listen for as long as it took a white moth to collide with the lamp. Two white moths if the first arrived too quickly. It seemed fair enough. He was a good narrator. When he told stories, his whole body became calligraphy in motion, from the flexing of his fingers to the dilatation of his pupils. Having been a Biblical propagandist, he knew the rules of suspense. And that’s why he advanced in stages, subtly, without committing excesses, because he loved to invent, but he despised anything that smacked of implausibility as much as fanatical truth. So he wasn’t telling the story for the second time, but getting a little closer, with inflamed accuracy, to that storm with hurricane winds on the night of 11 November 1836, off Cape Finisterre, the world’s rockiest coastline.

He’d been excitable of late. Spring had been delayed, so summer came to Oulton Cottage like a frenzied agitator. The dwelling was festooned with the modest exuberance of fuchsias, gypsy flowers he called them, poking through the windows like prodigious Lepidoptera. An ardent atmosphere of drones and pollen made use of each crack and charged in, ready to deliver its message. Inside, everything seemed to hang on his renewed magnetism and to breathe a sigh of relief after the winter episode of a grumpy, prostrate Borrow in the grip of a repulsive current he himself didn’t recognise. Now things were different. He received a few visitors, the occasional gypsy friend who couldn’t tell the time, a virtue Henrietta found annoying. But the old gypsies behaved as if Borrow, the tireless traveller, the polyglot, the youth who could cover a hundred and twenty miles in a day on a pint of beer and two apples, had come back to look after them. Lavengro they called him, which meant
wordsmith
. Spirited Lavengro never failed to return.

‘Lavengro,’ he whispered.

Henrietta glanced at the window in case something was moving beyond the fuchsias.

‘There’s no one there.’

‘A terrible winter,’ he said. ‘Forgive my hedgehog’s tenderness.’

Henrietta thought nothing is quite so tiring as an old person’s excitability. More tiring than tiredness itself. Borrow bravely resisted the temptation to go to bed and spent most of the time tied to his desk, like a helmsman at the wheel, he said. He would read Scripture with the severity of someone threading the needle of eternity or start writing feverishly. But from time to time, which upset his stepdaughter, who suffered from what is sometimes termed caretaker’s syndrome, Borrow would leap up in a fit of madness and take to the road, calling out for his gypsy friends, offering to let them camp in the garden, or begin to recite the poems of Iolo Goch and Dafydd ab Gwilym in the rain, natural prayers he himself had translated from the Welsh.

For the second night running, he went back to Finisterre. Henrietta had had a long day, but she still wanted to listen to the old man, who drew strength and a Biblical voice from the night. She didn’t find such a description irreverent, something must have stuck after so many years travelling on the road with the Word of God. Though Borrow still joked about himself when he appeared to adopt too missionary a tone. ‘Heavens above, I sound like a prophet of doom. Or a St Lupus!’

Henrietta could see the storm at Finisterre in the camera obscura of Borrow’s eyes thanks to the light and shade in his voice. She saw herself as a moth attracted by the thunder and lightning of the story. The first moth.

George Borrow was convinced that the description of the storm, included in his book
The Bible in Spain
, was one of his finest literary achievements. The act of writing it had been like a second storm with gusts of wind and immense waves. He dipped his pen in the chaos of the inkpot, scratching the words in the belief that writing fast would create an inflammatory style. But now it was his translations, the murmur of youthful verses, that stirred his memory:

The sickly steamer left London along the Thames, put in at Falmouth and finally departed with a crowd of passengers suffering from tuberculosis, fleeing from the cold blasts of England’s winter in search of some sun further south. This time he gave the story an ironic twist Henrietta hadn’t heard before, which referred to the state of the ship’s engine: the boat was consumptive as well. This became obvious right from the start. Henrietta knew all the details, she’d heard the story before, but she still liked it when Borrow used the image of cathedrals to describe the clouds of spray and foam. ‘The right ship for the time and place,’ said Borrow ironically. And he added, ‘With the ideal steersman.’ The day before, he’d made mention of the captain, a person picked up in a hurry, who took the vessel too close to the shore, but to whom he attributed the utmost coolness and intrepidity, as he did to the rest of the crew. However, the only voice that speaks for itself in the story is that of the steersman. ‘In less than an hour,’ he says, ‘the ship will have her broadside on Finisterre, where the strongest man-of-war ever built must go to shivers instantly.’

He had written, and was about to repeat, how a horrid convulsion of the elements took place and the dregs of the ocean seemed to be cast up, but in the end he said, ‘Thank God for lightning. It’s good for swearing!’

In a flash of lightning, he saw Cape Finisterre and swore he’d come back with a book of Holy Scripture in thanksgiving. Had the darkness been complete, there’d have been no way of reacting, of putting up resistance. Had the lightning not intervened, with the engine dead and the ship being tossed like a feather, the crew might not have committed the apparently absurd act of hoisting the sails in the face of impending destruction, just as the wind, without the slightest intimation, veered right about.

‘I went back. I kept my promise. And there I met Antonio de la Trava, to whom I gave a copy of the New Testament, the only one I ever dedicated.’

The first moth collided with the lampshade. It had a white, hairy head and the uncannily human features of some moths. The savage, stubborn, suicidal collision gave Henrietta a start and she resolved not to stay beyond the second.

‘Spain is not a fanatic country, but life there can hang on a single word.’

Henrietta forgot the moth and smiled. She loved this episode in which Borrow, being mistaken for the leader of the Spanish fanatics, Don Carlos himself, and on the verge of being shot by the liberals or
negros
of the Atlantic coast, was saved
in extremis
during questioning, when proof of his innocence was the way he pronounced the word ‘knife’. ‘“Knife”? Did he say “knife”? The man’s innocent,’ declared Antonio de la Trava, the valiente of Finisterra, knife in hand. As Borrow went into details, Henrietta laughed so much she had to rub her eyes.

‘In Madrid, we printed five thousand copies of the New Testament. Soon after I arrived, in May 1837. I distributed a large number myself through Spain by hand. Otherwise they’d have rotted in some dungeon, as some of them did a year later, when I was arrested and it was forbidden to sell or circulate the New Testament. The Papists didn’t want the people reading the Gospel! The Vatican assigned Spain the role of butcher and always kept the people apart from the Word of God. A scandal that was never talked about. In the most Catholic country in the world, people were afraid to buy the Holy Scriptures. You could see their nostrils quivering when I put a book in their hands. They could smell the flames of the Inquisition.’

‘There’s one thing I didn’t understand today or yesterday,’ said Henrietta. ‘Did you actually sign the Holy Scriptures?’

‘Not sign. It was an act of thanksgiving, a bold step I never repeated. I wrote a dedication: “For Antonio de la Trava, the valiente of Finisterra”. And then my signature. The man saved my life. And there’s no denying that whoever saves a life saves mankind. You’re inclined to agree with the Talmud, especially when it’s you being saved. I presented him with the book on a night like this. He’d escorted me to the town of Corcuvion, to the house of the head alcalde, a conceited man who laughed at me for travelling with the New Testament. Antonio, however, was moved. He told me he would read the Word of God when the winds blew from the north-west, preventing their launches from putting to sea. I think he was a little merry. He’d been drinking brandy during my interview with the alcalde. He addressed me as captain and told me, when I next came to Finisterre, to come in a valiant English bark, with plenty of contrabando on board. He was clearly a liberal through and through.’

A second moth crashed into the lamp. A huge, white-haired saturniid. The moths first banged against the window and then found their way in with the breeze, together with the scent of lavender.

‘I’m going to bed,’ said Henrietta. ‘You should do the same.’

It was the month of July 1881. Summer had irrupted into the old man’s body. Now, having told the story of the storm at Finisterre, he seemed to have calmed down. He took a few unsteady steps towards his desk, wanting to translate some Armenian poems.

‘Good night,’ said Henrietta.

‘Knife!’ he answered.

The Newspaper Seller

His. He thought it was his. Just as a new swarm, when it leaves the hive and takes to the air with the queen, belongs to whoever catches it. He’d caught a newspaper dated 16 June 1904. Today’s newspaper. He was in the docks, on his way to the far end of the Iron Quay, it being about time he embarked, when the newspaper flew in front of him. The sluggish flight of newspapers that haven’t been read yet, pursued by the seagulls’ mocking calls. Not since his childhood had he been able to let a printed piece of paper take off like that. Others went after bird nests or bats, but he, Antonio Vidal, went after printed matter. Anything would do so long as it had writing on it. Even toilet paper, strips cut up with no respect for the columns’ order, so he’d soon learnt not only to read, but to put the pieces back together. Which helped him to see the world. To spot what was missing.