Books Burn Badly (37 page)

‘Is it possible to make a ball of brambles?’

‘Why not? You just have to scrape off the prickles and weave the stems together.’

‘No, I mean without leaves, but with prickles.’

The ball of brambles resembles an armillary sphere. The woman in the portrait, like many others who carry weights, has a cloth crown to support the weight, but in her case the cloth is a silvery grey and really does look like a crown, perhaps because what it supports is more overtly symbolical. From a distance, it resembles a sphere. From close up, the coarse skein is like a labyrinth, made more dramatic by the prickles. The portrait would be very severe were it not for the gesture of the woman looking to her left, slightly foreshortened, half smiling, thought Chelo, and unaware of the weight she’s carrying, as if it were an extravagant hat. Why’s she smiling?

‘What’s so funny?’ asked Chelo.

‘It’ll sound strange to you, but I was thinking about the day of my first communion. We were all dressed up, looking very smart. The best we could do, by borrowing things or whatever, but smart. The boys in a suit and tie, like little men, and us in white. An aunt of mine worked as a maid in a house in Sigrás and the lady of the house lent me a tiara with a tulle veil. So there we were, kneeling in front of the altar, at the most solemn moment, waiting for the Sacred Form, when I went and glanced at Daniel. He was like a squirrel, never stayed still. It was funny seeing him looking so formal, with cropped hair and hands held together in prayer. He suddenly looked back, without losing his composure, and . . .’

The Woman with Bramble Sphere pursed her lips. Blinked. Tears of laughter were bubbling up in her eyes. It was Chelo’s turn to smile in the face of mystery.

‘What happened with Daniel?’

‘He moved his ears!’

‘His ears?’

‘Yes, madam. He moved them as if they were wings. He could do that, move them without having to touch them. What he called “doing the ding-dong”. But only I saw him do it that day. The day of our First Communion. In church. That day, he did it just for me.’

This is the secret of why the Woman with Bramble Sphere is smiling in Chelo Vidal’s painting. Because she can see Daniel beating his pointed ears like wings.

Nothing more disturbing than the following painting.

That of the Woman Carrying a Secret. It was not known what was in that basket covered with a cloth. The cloth’s contours suggested small, irregular spheres. But the strange thing was the cloth itself. A black cloth. Nobody covered their merchandise in Santo Agostiño or Leña Field with a black cloth. Their head, OK. But never their merchandise.

‘You’ve painted me with a bad look,’ said the Woman Carrying a Secret.

‘No, it’s not bad. That’s the way you look. It’s fine. Adds a touch of mystery.’

‘Not like that, it doesn’t. I may be a bit cross-eyed, but not that much. And it’s one thing to be like that for a moment, another to be like that for the rest of your life. Paintings are for life. I don’t know why you want to make me look cross-eyed.’

‘That is your look. That is beauty. The real thing, emotion.’

‘Well, it looks to me as if those eyes you painted aren’t working properly when they should be beautiful.’

‘In those eyes can be seen all that you contain inside,’ responded Chelo passionately.

‘I’d rather nothing could be seen.’

She’s now the Woman with Lowered Eyelids.

‘Is that better?’

‘Much better.’

Gabriel remembers passing her on the back staircase. He’d often use it to reach the kitchen more quickly. Neves always had a surprise for him. A little beakful, as she called it. He bumped into the Woman in Mourning, whose head-cloth matched the cloth on her basket. She seemed very pleased. When she saw him, she pulled back the cloth and gave him a handful of her secrets.

The Unfalling Leaves

His name’s Antón, I think, but what stuck in my mind was what Mr Sada said: this country doesn’t deserve its poets, look how it treats them, working as building labourers, carrying sacks of Portland cement. Every time I see a man with a sack on his back, I think of him. Of my poet. My Portland.

That day, her wish to find him in the painter’s house was fulfilled. She was taking their clothes. On the way from Castro to Elviña, she plucked a few white roses and sprigs of mint and fennel. To give the clothes a nice smell.

Neves received her in the hallway. She heard voices coming from the more open side of the sitting-room, what they called the Chinese Pavilion, and, being on good terms with the maid, she let herself go a little, just enough to see the group of people. All of them deep in thought. Each looking in a different direction. Listening. To him recite. And she still had time to hear about the leaves that don’t fall in San Carlos Gardens, they burn, that’s what he said, on a low heat, at the top of the elms. And he said something about the hanging clusters’ spectral elegance. But she wasn’t quite sure about this.

She went there that afternoon. And others.

In San Carlos Gardens, at the top of the elms, she did indeed see a few coppery leaves that hadn’t fallen. She knew there were some trees that didn’t shed their old leaves until they’d grown new ones. But this was very different. In the whole remarkable plantation, the branches’ austere elevation, fat charcoal markings in the sky, ending in a filigree of twigs, shoots and buds, pure, unsullied lines, well, up there were these copper-coloured leaves on a low heat, burning at dusk without being consumed.

It was one of the happiest moments in her visits to the city. It was unthinkable that she, of all people, should be able to see the black elms’ unfalling winter leaves in the so-called Romantic Garden. Not only did they not fall, they burnt in the plantation’s sober lattice. The more you looked at them, the more they burnt. She was far away, but she could feel the heat on her cheeks.

So when she came back, many years later, one of the first things O did was go and see the unfalling leaves in San Carlos Gardens.

But O’s here right now. She’s twelve years old and is starting to go to the river to wash. She likes the river, but not washing so much. At the crossroads, one road leads to school, another to the river. If she didn’t have to wash, she’d always choose to go to the river. Which is where she’s in the process of discovering the water figures.

Polka suffers as a result of ignorance. Yesterday he was very hurt because he rode side-saddle on Grumpy, the donkey that carries the clothes Olinda and I wash, and some people had a go at him for not riding normally, like a man. All because of ignorance. The animal suffers less if you sit like a woman. Everything that itches is because of ignorance. Ignorance itches. That’s what Polka thinks. He used to have a lot of friends he could talk to against ignorance. One of them was Arturo, Galicia’s lightweight champion. I know there are rumours, some say Arturo could be my Dad. He was killed before I was born, but if he’s in the water, if the river brought him to me, maybe there’s something in it. They loved him a lot. He always had his gloves and books.

‘But if he was a boxer, didn’t he have to hit people?’

‘Yes,’ said Polka. ‘But boxing isn’t quite the same as hitting. With his boxer’s hands, he would write in a magazine called
Brazo y Cerebro
. In Fontenova, he and others founded a cultural association with a library called Shining Light in the Abyss. It had a glass sign showing a sun. It’s so cold in Fontenova it must have helped having a sign like that.’

‘And what happened?’

‘They killed him like Christ. There was no war here, girl, what they call a war was a hunt and they hunted him down. Before he died, he managed to write on a piece of paper, “The worshippers of Christ make a new Christ every day.”’

‘What happened to the sign with the sun?’

‘They smashed it.’

‘And the cultural association, the books?’

‘They burnt them.’

‘Burnt books?’

‘That’s right.’

Polka talks of him as a hero, a champ the world forgot.

‘The future’s uncertain,’ said Polka. ‘Who can say what will happen? There may come a time, girl, only you know who Arturo da Silva was and that Shining Light existed in a place that is now so gloomy. Hold on to this word as well. Arturo da Silva was an anarchist.’

‘An anarchist? But . . .’

‘Yes, I know. I’ve said it now. It’s a frightening word. Just let it be. It can look after itself. It’s all I ask. Hold on to it. Find a little space for it, you don’t have to go back. It won’t bother you.’

He muttered something about invincible resignation. Talking to himself. Polka, Polka. Papa. Olinda says nothing. Almost nothing about her life. She likes radio novels, she becomes absorbed, unaware of time. I know this because, at Amparo the fashion designer’s, there’s a radio in the workshop and when they listen to the novel, read by Pedro Pablo Ayuso and Matilde Conesa, it’s as if the machines are making tears and the pedal is pushing them up the nerves of their legs to their eyes, well, once my mother became absorbed, lost in her friendly silence. Which can happen to anyone. There’s a young lady, Ana told me, who writes poetry and claims to have received this gift from the spirit of Bécquer, we learnt about him at school, ‘the dark swallows will return’, I liked him a lot, she must have done so too, they met in Bárbaras Square, the spirit possessed her and apparently she got pregnant. Pregnant with poetry. Ana and Amalia laughing about it, the spirit’s spunk, ooh, spirit, ooh!

‘Will we go to Bárbaras, O, see if we can find the spirit of that no-good Gustavo Adolfo?’

‘I’ve already been,’ I told them. They were speechless, unable to laugh, I was so quick.

‘You what?’

‘I rather prefer another in San Carlos Gardens. He doesn’t get you pregnant.’

Amalia, pretending to be shocked, ‘Oh, my girl! You’ve turned into a spiritual slut now, haven’t you?’

And there I was, pulling at Olinda, who’d got into the novel and wouldn’t come out. She only came out when the sewing machines stopped. When they’re all going together, they’re like a special train. But when they all stop at once . . . ‘What happened?’ asked Olinda in surprise, when they all stopped at the same time.

The Star and
Romantic the Horse

He thought of a joke of destiny. Mislaid poems with wings. Moved by a spiritual medium. What were they doing there, among the originals for the first issue of
Oeste
waiting for the censor’s approval? What were those snippets from
I Was Forsook
doing there? The inclusion of the medieval poem by Guterres at the start could have been a coincidence, some coincidence, but where had three poems by Aurelio Anceis come from? He went back. Annoyed and upset.

There they were, in the table of contents. Three unpublished poems from the anonymous collection
I Was Forsook
: ‘Zero’, ‘Infinite’ and ‘Standard Vivas’.

He returned to the texts. There was a noticeable detail. The triumphal dates had disappeared. Aurelio Anceis’ game with the regime’s calendar of celebrations. He, Tomás Dez, had also made a change in the book that was now being printed. But a different one. He’d replaced the Fascist anniversaries with others that were either neutral or delicately dressed up as cultural obsequies. Whoever was responsible for including Anceis’ poems in
Oeste
had simply eliminated the dates and left only the final irony in the poem
Zero
:

His fingers like claws grasping their prey. He raked through the pages. In ‘Standard Vivas’, he’d removed the pagan calendar of saints that made reference to Apache, Half-tit, Syra, Samantha Galatea and other renowned hetaeras who would never appear in the city’s chronicles. However, he’d left other, more enigmatic names to give critics a headache that not improbable day the work turned into a classic. International names of an ocean-going cosmos. Cape Town’s Storm in a Chinese, or Starry Simona from St Pierre and Miquelon. That’s right, Simona, Pouting, Snubnose, Hunchie. He’d asked Anceis who he was referring to and he’d replied, ‘Sirens. It’s always said there are no more ancient sea myths in Galicia. It’s not true. At least as far as sirens go. Sirens are sirens.’

‘Do you mean whores?’

‘I mean sirens. For that, I turn to Mr Thomas Stearns Eliot and his idea about heights of sensibility. It depends on the height.’

‘What height?’

‘The height you’re writing and reading at. Or depth, if you like. Your vision is only partial. Think of men breaking up ice on deck. Not blocks of ice, ice covering the whole ship, every nook and cranny. And imagine then the skipper decides to head for St Pierre. They haven’t seen or stepped on land for months. Going to St Pierre, which is only a small harbour with a slope of wooden houses, is like a trip to paradise. They’re so happy lots of them start drinking in order to celebrate and, by the time they reach St Pierre, they can’t disembark. They can barely walk. For them, without the need to cite Mr Eliot, the simple fact of saying St Pierre, the decision to go, meant already being there. In paradise. That’s the power of simply saying words, they make a place, change bodies. But let me tell you about those who disembark. Lots of them queue up outside L’Étoile, which is soon Anglicised as the Star, the dance hall owned by St Pierre’s only professional diver, also known as the Communist, and they queue up, do you know why? No, it’s not what you’re thinking. Dozens of men waiting in a line, in the snow, to dance, just to dance with the one they call Hunchie, La Bossue, Miss Hunchback. To put their hand on her hump while they dance. Skippers will pay her up to a thousand francs to go on board ship and pee on the nets. A kind of magic charm. Dancing, washerwomen, lucky sirens.’

The censor Dez couldn’t help cracking his fingers in a sign of sudden discomfort.

‘Well, I’m glad, Anceis, you met Eliot and whoever else out at sea.’