Books Burn Badly (42 page)

The Photos

He had a mental image of Schmitt before their visit to Casalonga on the outskirts of Compostela. He appeared in two photos which occupied a preferential place on his father’s bookshelves. It was a beautiful summer’s day. His father told him, ‘Say good morning, “Good morning, Mr Schmitt,” and nothing else. Wait to see if he says or asks you something and then clear off. Go with people your own age.’ Several times, he’d heard the judge use the expression ‘power of presence’ to describe someone he regarded as a master. So, having got out of the car, he was a little flustered as he crossed the lawn. He was helped, as almost always, by the calm temperament of Chelo, who took him by the arm. She was wearing a white dress with lace. Mr Schmitt was sitting in the garden and the guests went up to greet him with an attitude of reverence.

‘What are you going to be when you grow up?’

‘An archaeologist,’ he replied. Perhaps. He’d been toying with the idea for some time. He’d read an article and been attracted not so much by the purpose of finding something as by the method. It was silent work, where first you had to divide an area into squares and carry out the excavation. A method that was valid for all time. Not just for the ruins of the past.

‘Good! Another Schliemann in search of Troy!’ exclaimed Schmitt. He looked not at him, but at Chelo Vidal. In the luminosity of that summer’s morning in 1962, she was the one who had ‘power of presence’.

Of Schmitt, all he particularly remembers is when, in the evening, he raised a glass of red wine and said by way of a toast, ‘May the fat . . . never dance on my grave!’ After ‘fat’, he spat out a name. The judge didn’t usually drink, but this time he accompanied his revered master. Back home, Gabriel asked his father who the fat man was who would never dance on Mr Schmitt’s grave. His father laughed and replied, ‘Don’t worry, it’s not Oliver Hardy. He was talking about the German chancellor, Adenauer.’

‘I don’t think anyone will dance on his grave,’ said Chelo on the return journey. ‘He’s in a good state. He looks after himself. By the way, it was almost impossible to take a photograph of him.’

‘That’s right, he’s not a fan of photos,’ replied the judge.

‘Who was that Barry Goldwater he likes so much?’

‘A senator from Arizona. Supposedly from McCarthy’s school, but a lot cleverer. A thorn in the side of the Kennedys. A good, strong conservative, he called him. Funny. It’s the first time he’s been nice about an American politician.’

It would take Gabriel longer to see a portrait of Santiago Casares. He had a look in Espasa, an extensive encyclopedia that joined forces on the walls with the volumes of Aranzadi. It didn’t even give his name, despite the fact he’d been Prime Minister. A pamphlet his father kept had a caricature signed by Rogelio Rivero. A terrible drawing which said something about the quality of the text. The portrait was followed by a kind of introduction in rhyme:
Even knowing God’s might, / I still don’t understand / how it is he might / turn into such a blight / such a miserable man.
There it was, at the bottom of the large drawer in his desk. The folder for Santiago Casares, underneath the marked, underlined novels by John Black Eye.

The comments in the Crypt were few and far between, and always along the same lines. A general condemnation expressed with utter rage, a contempt that took in all the letters of that name with which Gabriel maintained a hidden relationship. Because the man himself did not exist. The link was with his name. Santiagcasares Qu. What he heard, when he heard something, was talk of a Dandy, Señorito, Mason, Hyena, Murderer, Consumptive Nuisance. A strange mix, words that made it difficult to compose an image. Then there were snippets of information that complicated it all. The yacht Mosquito. The red Buick. The Atlantic Hotel. The villa in Montrove. His mother-in-law, who worked in a factory. His wife, a fashion designer. At this point, the cryptic comments became transparent, jovial, regarding the love affairs of his attractive wife. ‘Attractive? She’s a bitch on heat,’ was all they would say. He had two daughters. One, Esther, was in prison and then under constant surveillance until she managed to escape to Mexico. The other, María, had a triumphant career in the Comédie-Française. Given how reviled he was, it was amazing the number of followers that were attributed to him in the Crypt. Artists, teachers, the guy from the shoe factory, the foundry, the glassworks . . . traders, most of those who were discussed in the past tense, that sunken city, almost all of whom were branded Republican supporters of Casares, who was stuck with an adjective that accompanied him, even after his death in exile, like another first surname: Pernicious Casares.

Gabriel heard everything in the alcove as if he’d been, like it or not, in a room in Durtol Sanatorium. He’d come across postcards, letters. He aimed to go through all the books in the zone of charred remains. There were almost always surprises, notes, quotations, verses, postcards from Durtol. They weren’t all like this, but those that were burnt acted as bookmarks. He identified with what the signature said, what this young man wrote. The way he addressed his parents with affectionate openness, the references to literary works and scientific discoveries, the observations on meteorological changes and their effects on the landscape and his body, the way he linked his physical condition with what was going on around him in nature. Most of all, however, he was impressed by his sense of humour when he talked about his illness, his habit of watching and noting his ailments and the state of his health.

He felt archaeological joy the day he found a photo inside an English edition of a book by Wells,
The Time Machine
, dated 1895. It was a photo from his youth. On the back was written ‘Winter 1900’ followed by ‘Panadeiras, Coruña’. Gabriel was sitting on a stool, reading. He quickly put it in his cabinet of curiosities, the small, wooden box which contained, among other things, his family’s most valuable donations. The tin Lisbon tram that goes to Prazeres, number 28. The postcard from Mozambique. Grandpa Mayarí’s cigar bands, which he called little brands: Flower of Havana Cigars, St Damiana, The Imperious, Havana Eden, all with beautiful drawings, especially the Alhambra, which showed two women, one white and one black, the only curiosity that stood a chance of competing with Zonzo’s Swedish swimmer. Grandpa Mayarí had also given him a ten-peso note from the Spanish Bank of Cuba, dated Havana, 1918, showing a yoke of oxen with sugarcane. Among the coins, his favourite was a sol from Peru which, on the palm of his hand, resembled a solar nugget. A share in the Spanish Hydroelectric Society, a present from his father, showing three horses in a waterfall, which Archangel Gabriel held by the reins. Picture cards from bars of chocolate, showing aviation heroes and monuments. A few stamps as well. Grandpa Pedro Samos had presented him with a Portuguese stamp from 1898 celebrating the fourth centenary of the discovery of a maritime route to India. A dark blue stamp worth fifty reis. He kept it in an envelope with a description saying it represented ‘a Manueline window with the galleon behind and, above it, the inscription “If there were more world, there I would arrive” and two medallions of Vasco da Gama and Camões’. The judge had insisted it was very valuable and would be much more so when he grew up and the thirty odd years had gone by until the fifth centenary in 1998, with him in possession of this marvel, this stamp that by then would be a secular relic. What would its value be? Who could say? With a grandiose gesture, ‘Incalculable!’

Fernando Sada, his mother’s painter friend, had given him what he claimed to be a mako shark’s tooth. He said, ‘The most perfect, successful predator ever to have lived!’ With the passing of time, as he got to know Sada better, he began to doubt the tooth belonged to a mako shark or to any shark at all. But, if it wasn’t a shark’s, what was it? One day, he met him in the street and Sada asked, ‘Have you still got that tooth belonging to the dog Cerberus?’

‘Let me see,’ said Korea on the Wooden Jetty. Gabriel had started going there with Zonzo occasionally, protracting the journey home from school. Besides, the doctor’s advice to his parents was that Gabriel should get out more. Spend as much time as possible with people his own age. Why go any further? There, next to his home, was the most alluring space in the city, the docks. So Korea played at sticking the shark’s tooth in his mouth like a false canine.

‘Be careful,’ said Gabriel, afraid he might steal it, go off with it in his mouth. ‘It’s very, very . . .’

Korea spat it out on the ground.

‘Yes, you already told us it was very ancient. Well, I don’t like things that are ancient, especially teeth.’

Ren had given him the GNM game and
Victorious Wings
when he took part in conversations in the Crypt. He also visited the judge on his own sometimes, bringing old books and antiquities. They’d have heated discussions as to their value and the judge would almost always end up buying the items. The visits were more or less spaced out, but Gabriel remembers them from his childhood. For a long time, he thought Ren sold fragments of history and he associated his presence with a leather bag or a sturdy suitcase with metal rivets. On one of these visits, one of the last Gabriel witnessed, when the two men had wrapped up the day’s business, the inspector called him over.

‘How’s your cabinet of curiosities?’

Gabriel shrugged his shoulders. The most recent additions had been a planisphere and a small telescope. But he soon grew tired of observation. At night, if they let him, he preferred to go fishing for squid with Zonzo up by San Antón Castle. Together with his fishing apparatus, Zonzo brought something probably no one in the city had ever seen before. A portable, battery-operated television. A television you carried under your arm. Not any old piece of junk, the genuine article. While they tried to entice squid with a torch and mirror, most of the other night fishermen would take in a gangster movie, the fearless and incorruptible Eliot Ness versus Al Capone. Everybody adjusting the aerial whenever they lost the picture on the only channel. The mini-television was a present Manlle had brought back from Rotterdam. No, there was no competing with Zonzo in the field of curiosities.

‘Well, I understand you like things that have to do with nature. Serious stuff, I mean.’

‘Yes, that’s right. Absolutely.’

Ren, swollen with pride, solemnly extracts an entomological box from the suitcase with metal rivets. ‘For you. They’re Coleoptera. To start with, they all look the same, but then you realise they’re different. I never thought there was so much in them.’

Gabriel read the label:
Coccinella septempunctata
.

Around the lighthouse, in his memory, the tip of Grandpa Mayarí’s cane starts moving, calling out names: little Maria, little Joanna, little Teresa, king-king, sunsucker, seamstress, blond cow, little reed, God’s bug.

Coccinella septempunctata
came into the house shortly after Santiago Casares’ photo turned up inside
The Time Machine
. Now he knew what the young man from Durtol and 12 Panadeiras Street looked like, he could imagine him growing up.

As for Mr Schmitt, he was there, on one of the main bookshelves, behind his father’s chair, sharing the stage, so to speak, with other notables the judge admired. He was there for ages. Gabriel couldn’t say when Mr Schmitt, Don Carlos, vanished from between the tomes of Aranzadi. It was in 1994, on one of his furtive visits just before the trip to Paris, he noticed he was no longer in the portrait gallery. The two photos of the judge with Schmitt had disappeared. The ones he’s looking at now, because there they are for all to see, in the inner sanctuary, a motive of pride, an honour for the judge to be portrayed next to his revered master, both photographs having been dedicated and signed:
Katechon
. There’s a symmetry in the dates. The first photograph flanked by juridical volumes is dated 1942 in Madrid. The more recent of the two was taken twenty years later, in 1962. It’s strange, despite the time that’s gone by, there’s not much difference, perhaps because the latter’s quality is no better than the first. There’s a certain imperative urgency in Schmitt’s eyes. Gabriel recalls the judge saying it was unusual since his master generally tried to avoid having his photograph taken. On both occasions, the two of them look serious. The second portrait is dated in Madrid and gives the day and month as well. 21 March 1962. Which is when Carl Schmitt received his decoration. Showing the photograph allowed the judge to describe this great event, to which he had the good fortune to be invited by the master of ceremonies, who would later, in July, be appointed Minister of Information. And there was another signed photograph. From the Minister himself. His father knew him, they even went hunting together, but, after the appointment, he simply referred to him as the Minister. There are the two of them. The Minister and he. Smiling at the camera.

The Paúl Santos Smile

‘Paúl Santos Unknown. But you can call me Unknown.’

He said it as if he’d read his name on a poster. An exercise in esteem, control, but also in fathoming out his interlocutor. Simply saying his full name provoked a reaction he measured according to what he ironically termed ‘the Unknown scale’. It immediately helped him to discover if the person he was introducing himself or being introduced to knew something about life, the existence of a very special door in the city, the wheel, a kind of turnstile, where almost every night newborn babies were left, who knows how many, thousands since Charity Hospital opened back in 1791, before which date all Galicia’s unknowns, if they went somewhere, ended up in Santiago’s Royal Hospital.

This is what a priest had written on the baptism certificate. ‘Father’s name: unknown. Mother’s name: not given.’

When Catherine Laboure finally agreed to go with him and show him the document, he read it with care and serenity. Had he been asked, he’d have said he felt well, really well. His only reaction was to gaze at Mother Laboure and smile. This smile that was as slow to form as it was to leave. One of the features that made him so popular inside the grounds of Charity Hospital. The Paúl Santos smile. In short, Paúl Santos smiled when least expected. For example, when something went wrong. When he dropped a plate in the middle of the dining-hall and it smashed into pieces. When . . . Some older children conducted a secret experiment. They inflicted small tortures on him, which increased the more he smiled. He knew they weren’t bad, not especially wicked, they just wanted to see how long his smile would last. And there was nothing he could do. He didn’t know how to erase it.