Books Burn Badly (16 page)

‘And what happened?’ asked Curtis uneasily.

‘The forest gobbled us up. Swallowed us whole.’

‘That’s more or less what happened to me with the wolf,’ said Pombo after the requisite pause to take a swig.

‘What happened to you if you never left this hole?’

‘I’m from the mountains, and proud of it. Bloody mountains! One freezing winter’s day with a lot of snow, the height of a man at least, I was sent with a message down by the border and bumped into the wolf on my way. It stared at me. I stared at it.’

Everyone remained silent. Pombo marked a bony kind of time by rapping the bar with his knuckles.

‘And what happened?’ asked Lens finally.

‘It ate me.’

Pombo adjusted the knot of his necktie and stared at the harpooner artistically. ‘What did you expect? It ate me! That’s right. The wolf ate me.’ And he waited before delivering the final blow, ‘Just as the forest ate that ship of yours.’

‘You don’t know what the area of calm is,’ replied the harpooner painfully.

Some of the fishing boats still have their festive pennants. The vessels haven’t left port for a month. Haven’t been back out to sea. The sirens sounded on the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. A few days later, with the military coup, they sounded again. A day and a night. Without stopping. In the Academy’s attic, Curtis heard them one after the other. He couldn’t see. He could hear. He heard shots and sirens. Shots against sirens. For a time, the shots stuttered, as if sliding down the sirens’ greasy hair. The shots increased, the sirens diminished. The sound of the sirens was round, slow, fleshy, labial. The shots were straight lines which multiplied, pulling on each other, sieving space. Eventually there was only one siren left. Very clear. In long hoots. The shots fell silent. Seemed to be listening as well, in surprise. Then there was a loud volley. The death throes of the last sound being riddled with bullets. Lots of the pennants are frayed, bitten. The atmosphere around the burning books is full of holes. Perforated.

The smoke was looking for somewhere to hold on to, to clamber up. In the upper part of his body, Curtis felt the tickle of its creepers and suckers. Climbing up his face. Invading his nose. Catching on his eyes. Sealing his mouth.

Another day, the harpooner had told him how a sandstorm had consumed paradise in a single night. A place called Tatajuba in Brazil. Curtis realised he wasn’t making it up, he’d been there as he said, from the way he went into details. He even made a pencil drawing on the marble of the kitchen table. How well the harpooner could draw America! His map of Europe was pretty good too. On the Iberian Peninsula, he took great care over the twists and turns of the Galician coast. But America came out from north to south as if by memory. He put a cross to show where paradise had disappeared overnight, eaten up by the sand. This is Tatajuba. This is Camusin. He’d been walking from Camusin, all along the beach, because he’d heard what a paradise it was. On the way, he slept on the beach and woke up to see a sow with piglets bathing in the sea. Or else they were eating fish. Because the fish there could be caught by hand. Skate, swordfish, mullet and porpoise, all jumping about. A Galician fisherman’s dream. Pigs swimming and fish jumping in the air. When he reached Tatajuba, it really was paradise. The following day, it no longer existed. A sandstorm had swallowed it up overnight. What Curtis remembered best about the sandstorm that buried paradise in one night was how the harpooner told him people stopped talking. The sand set their teeth chattering and drowned out their words. And that’s when the men and women who’d worked so hard, with such devotion, gave up.

Curtis hadn’t read many books. All the burning books had something to do with him. They were books he hadn’t yet read. But this one had clearly belonged to him since he’d set foot on the scene. In the end, he picked up
A Popular Guide to Electricity
.

‘Hey you, put that back!’ The stocky soldier hadn’t let him out of his sight and this time he really did take out his pistol.

‘Now, now, calm down!’ said Samos. ‘It’s just a clown looking for some Tarzan comics. Which one of them would dare show his face?’

Arturo da Silva used first to write out his texts by hand. He had curious handwriting. It was very neat, as if the act of writing, though it called for action, or perhaps because of this, was incompatible with speed. Given the size of his fingers and the heavy machinery of his hands, it must have been a real effort. And the truth is Dafonte, Holando, Félix Ramón, Varela, Curtis, Terranova, Marconi, Leica, Seoane, all the new group of boys who visited the Shining Light premises, some of whom contributed to
Brazo y Cerebro
, tried to make room when he was using the table to write, forging a territory with his bulk, his head close to the paper and his whole body focused on moving that caravan of words like beasts of burden forwards against all the odds. To start with, the paper had the texture of rocky ground or was treacherous as a marsh. A few words opened the way, like tracks, sleepers or stepping-stones. They were the eyes and feet of those running behind.

It helped him to hear a voice, a voice like that of Amil, the teacher at the Rationalist School, tugging at his fingers.

Amil, who always talked to them of Heraclitus and Parmenides. Life, the course of the universe, all explained as a river. A river which is never the same, which is always changing. You cannot step into the same river twice. A changeless river, a river which is always the same. Heraclitus and Parmenides are so familiar he’s surprised no one in the city is named after them. They’re in the ring. Heraclitus constantly on the go. Parmenides solid as a rock.

You cannot step into the same river twice, he wrote. It wasn’t highly original, but he was pleased with this beginning. It would allow him to talk of that point in history, of everything that was happening, based on the trip upriver due to take place on 2 August.

Reality is constantly changing. We can say it’s never the same, as Heraclitus said of the river. Heraclitus was right, but Parmenides wasn’t wrong. He maintained the river was always the same. Humanity flows like a river. We think everything’s changing, moving, progress is driving history. But it may be an illusion. Parts of the river are stagnant and lifeless.

He created a circle with his arms. And out of that circle an article slowly took shape. As he typed it up, his body imitated its movements.

‘I’m going to call it “The River of Life and Death”.’

‘What river’s that? The Nile? The Ganges?’

‘No, stupid. The river that passes through my village.’

He typed on the Ideal, using a couple of fingers. Above it, a bare bulb hung from interlaced wires in a cloth casing. As his fingers danced over the keys, Curtis couldn’t help seeing Arturo’s exploratory movements inside the ring. On tiptoe, as if he were skipping. His whole body behind the fingers that were typing. Gradually warming up. Now jumping by themselves. When the metal bars got caught up, he took a deep breath. He lived the construction of each sentence in its literalness. As he sought each letter, his fingers an extension of his eyes, what registered on the paper was for the first time. For example, when he wrote ‘elevation’, what Arturo did as he pressed the key was add everything the word could lift. And so, when he moved on to another sentence, his final flourish, the one he’d thought long and hard about, the one that said ‘The river flows inside of us and life is the art of hydrokinetics’, then he got a little nervous, excited, and pressed down hard with the fingers of a dowser searching for a spring. He found a patch of hard ground, the bars got entangled, the carriage got stuck.

‘It’s no problem,’ said Dafonte, who understood the Ideal best. As he repaired the machine, he looked at what he’d written. ‘What’s hydrokinetics?’

‘Something to do with reading in water. I came across it in
The White Magazine
. It’s a naturist idea.’

‘You’d better explain it.’

He nodded in time to his index finger pressing the ‘x’ key and deleting what he’d written. At first, he didn’t like to delete things, but then he started to enjoy it. The ‘x’ was a curlew leaving its footprints on the sand. He thought as well about the pleasure of stepping in others’ footprints, filling their mould on the beach. He deleted. X xxxxxxxxxx. Curlews. Sandpipers. Plovers. Redshank. Bunting.

Curtis looks up from the book. He’s already learnt there are different kinds of heat. Sensible heat, latent heat and specific heat. Specific heat is the most important, technically speaking . . .

‘Well, blow me down if that isn’t Papagaio’s Hercules. Arturo da Silva’s pupil. Of course it is.’

They move towards him, with diligence, forming a circle.

The silence is broken by the sound of turning wheels. Everything seems to be waiting. The gulls adorning the pinnacles of roofs and masts. The sound increases, turning on the stones. Curtis and the Falangists look towards the Rey building on Porta Real. There are the caryatids with flowers in their hair, supporting the balconies. Women’s heads holding the house up.

Then the horse appears. It was a wooden horse making all that noise. The horse Leica kept in his studio on Nakens Street. His father walks in front, with the travelling photographer’s tripod camera over his left shoulder and his inseparable cane in his other hand. Leica pulls on the pretty piebald horse, which today looks like a natural animal, part of the caryatids’ modernist landscape.

‘When are you taking that horse out?’ Curtis had asked him not long before. He couldn’t understand why he kept it shut up in his studio. It would draw the crowds in Recheo Gardens. The finest photographer’s horse. And Coruña was a city that had lots of wooden and papier-mâché horses. It even had a horse factory at the bottom of the hill of Our Lady of the Rosary. But the horse Carirí, the horse that had come all the way from Cuba, was quite a horse. ‘When are you taking it to Recheo?’

‘I’m not. It was my father who brought it from Cuba. The whole lot came together. Cameras and horse. I think it was the horse he liked most. But I don’t want to be an instant photographer. I want to take artistic photos. Why don’t you have it?’

The page of an illustrated magazine nestled at Antonio Vidal’s feet the day of his departure in July 1933 on the quay in Havana. This lost, flying page, which had reached the end of the pier, along the ground, and was about to fall into the sea, but suddenly gained height, spun in the air and came towards him as if it had found a direction. It landed at his feet, he didn’t have to harpoon it, spear it with the tip of his cane.

He felt the smoke had nothing to do with tobacco or the picture of a happy life, but was a message in itself, aimed at him, rising from the paper like a swift climbing plant. He could read so well because a large part of the surface was taken up with photos of women’s faces. He couldn’t tell them apart. They were smiling, but each one seemed to contain a mystery. At this distance, for a man who, to walk, had to overcome his legs’ resistance and whom others were beginning to regard as a watch running slow, all the smiles were as one before disappearing into the cone of the paper wrapped around the cane.

Farewell, Havana.

The page searching for him now in Coruña has other concerns. Mayarí shakes the sheet in an effort to get rid of it. While he finds it difficult to resist paper flying in front of him, today he’s on another mission. To reach the coach as soon as possible and save his son. The son pulling on the wooden horse. Ever since he set eyes on that horse, he’s always trusted it.

He tries to shake it off, but now it’s the page that doesn’t want to let go and enfolds him. Antonio Vidal’s attempt to shake it off, the rotatory movement of his arm, a slap in reverse, seems to provoke the large sheet, which sticks to him, holds on with the desperation of someone who doesn’t know how to escape. So he has to stop. Put down the camera.

‘Come here,’ he says to the sheet of paper. ‘Calm down. The world’s such a big place, didn’t you have anywhere else to go?’

A photo. It catches his eye because it’s the only photo and the scene is very real. It looks as if it’s been taken from where he’s standing. And what can be seen in the background of the photo is what he can see as well. The fires. The burning books, but also the Falangists who are burning them, making the Fascist salute. He now understands why the sheet clung to him. It was fleeing from the flames.

‘Hey you, photographer!’

On seeing the cameras and horse, everyone seemed to lose all interest in the boy next to the fire.

Hercules, meanwhile, was focused on something else.

Yes, he’d swear it was him, Terranova, with his hands in his pockets. Now he takes out his hands and puts them to his mouth. For God’s sake, don’t shout, don’t give yourself away. What’s he doing? Whistling with his fingers. Yes, it could only be him. The whistle attracts the Falangists’ attention again, puts them on their guard. They peer through the clouds of smoke to see where it’s coming from. What’s that idiot up to? Now he wears the horn in the artistic style of Lucho, maker of Andalusian costumes. This apparition, whistle, ornamental gesture with the horn, upsets everything. Curtis takes a few steps back and performs an unusual manoeuvre. He takes to the air, jumps over the largest fire and enters the open corridor.

‘Have you got my ticket?’ shouts Terranova.

‘Run! They’re shooting.’

They leg it up Luchana Alley, Rego de Auga, Anxo Alley, Florida Street. If they can reach Ovos Square, they’ll be safe. Curtis has thought of a hiding place. The store on Panadeiras Street. It’s summer. The garden will be covered in fluffy wool.

‘Who are they shooting at?’

‘Us!’

‘These bastards can’t take a joke.’

They didn’t find those two. They disappeared after Ovos Square. What does it matter? All that fuss over a couple of clowns! The stocky soldier likes to boss everyone around and is ready for anything. Trigger-happy. Dagger-happy too. The one who’s going to be a judge is smarter, but he’s a bit soft next to the other, the big guy, always on the lookout. Who knows what he’ll get up to tonight with that vocation? Because tonight, you can tell, is going to be terrible. Apparently they’ve got Huici, the inventor of coloured waistcoats, in the barracks of the Falange. But rumour has it tonight they’re going after the last Republican governor’s wife. The librarian Juana Capdevielle. They shot him on 25 July and they already sent her death flies. She lost a child in her womb. It’s her turn tonight. They’re going with the intention of killing her several times over. It’s something that has to come from the top, from the so-called Invisible Tribunal, the Delegation of Public Order, whose director is Mr González Vallés. This evening, Mr Vallés’ daughter will preside over a friendly football match to be played in Riazor between a team of Falangists and another of crewmen from a Third Reich warship. They’ll go for the librarian early in the morning. It’s not his turn to go out hunting tonight, so Parallelepiped is going to try to slip away, to skip it. He gave the river something to eat from Castellana Bridge. Yep, tonight he’ll skip it. Now, for instance. The others were busy having their photographs taken. Their portraits had already appeared in two newspapers, with them saluting like Romans in front of the fires. Well, now they wanted more photos. The one who’s going to be a judge, Samos, spoke on behalf of the old man in a straw hat and the boy with the wooden horse, ‘Let them go! They’re like family. I might still ask for your daughter’s hand, Mr Vidal!’ He was distracted, had a lot to think about. So Parallelepiped could finally put the book under his blue shirt, very surreptitiously. And leave without saying goodbye, in the shadows, down the corridors of smoke, while they stood tall and proud in front of the pyres. Shame not to have a librarian to hand, someone to consult about the value of this book to the valiente of Finisterra. Better to keep it under wraps for a while. Not tell anybody. Samos said it was very valuable. He might be cultivated, but he wasn’t very observant. You have to dirty your hands if you want to get something. Now it belonged to him. The emotion of nicking something. The emotion of reading ‘For Antonio de la Trava, the valiente of Finisterra’.