Books Burn Badly (50 page)

‘Don’t lose your sense of humour now, Polka,’ said Arturo da Silva. ‘Without weapons, what’ll we do if you’re out of sorts? Come on, pray for us in Latin, it’s quicker.’

It was nothing to do with his mood. Or fear at what was happening. How to explain to Arturo the burden of guilt? Guilt for Man and guilt for the Earth. Guilty guilt. He couldn’t tell him. In the middle of a military coup, at a time of life and death, he couldn’t say he’d kept a book by Élisée Reclus. It was a trifle, but the guilt was enormous and weighed on him.

He opened Volume I and saw the terrestrial globe held by two hands: ‘Man is Nature achieving self-consciousness’.

‘Would you believe it? That was how the first volume of
Man and the Earth
escaped the flames. The rest burnt. The guy in charge was desperate to lay his hands on a New Testament. Kept asking us. First he burnt the books, then he wanted to act as firefighter for Christ. But there was nothing he could do. What he didn’t know was the pain I felt as I turned over the ashes to see if anything remained of Élisée Reclus. Even Olinda didn’t know how I got this book. That’s war for you. You’re left with an encyclopedic volume whose brothers are missing. I sometimes dream the library’s open. I go to return the book and Minerva says, “Now, as a punishment, you’ll have to read all the volumes.” So I have to read all the volumes and I can because we’re not at war.’

‘You were going to read me something, Papa.’

‘That’s right. Just a moment.’

Polka was unsure whether it was better to look at the globe through his presbyopics or to see it blurred. He now had problems with the sight of his hands. When the globe became well, sort of global, they trembled.

Korea disappeared for a year from the Western Quay. He came back shaven, without that showy hair he wore like a mane. Very serious. Having lost weight. Everything in him had got smaller, except for his eyebrows, which cast a shadow on the gullies of his face, as if time had rushed past, carrying with it the vegetation, the flesh on the terraces, the laughter mechanism. Not his teeth. But it looked as if they’d grown like unearthed dolmens. He was holding hands with María Medusa.

He remembered the last time he’d seen them, between planks of wood, with sacks of salt for a bed. She’d been sitting, caressing Korea’s crown, while he’d been lying with his head in the girl’s lap. They’d seemed to him very beautiful. He’d never felt the desire to paint a scene before and that’s what he’d thought he was doing when he looked at them. The stacks of wood framed the couple and at the same time filtered the light in slats like a large blind.

Close up, he’s able to appreciate the patches on his face better. Has the feeling he’s painted them before. Is familiar with the shades of flesh.

‘Hello, your honour,’ said Korea.

There was nothing threatening about him. His frank look was not one of revenge. Chelo would sometimes mark squares so that she could draw the oval of a face. Korea’s was like this. A serenity marked off by scars. Medusa stroked his ponytail with her smooth, white hand. A fibrous hand with long fingers and prominent veins, which caressed slowly, as if it was going to stay.

‘You had a record player, right?’

Gabriel was about to come out with a list of excuses. It wasn’t his. It belonged to his mother. It was portable, but very heavy. If he was caught bringing it down, he wouldn’t know what to say. And the judge. The judge can hurt you, Korea, don’t you realise? Wasn’t it enough? But he didn’t say anything. He nodded. Yes, they had a record player. In the Chinese Pavilion, Chelo used the radiogram, a piece of furniture that in Gabriel’s mind, he wasn’t sure why, went with the grandfather clock Grand Mother Circa. The record player had been a present from Leica for his sister. The result of one of his futuristic deals with the Wizard of Oz, as he called the owner of Hexámetro, in the field of publicity and window dressing. He’d heard his father comment that Leica was made of mercury. He thought he was referring to his ups and downs, but on this occasion he meant his ideas, as slippery as beads of mercury on a fork. It seemed the judge had forever been studying Leica and still wouldn’t be able to pick him out at an identity parade. He was a mutant, capricious creature, in his opinion, who gave the lie to his idea of a catalogue of personalities and behaviours. At court, he could tell who somebody was at the first
coup d’œil
, the first
olhadela
 . . . Leica had for some time been carried away by what he called the window revolution, which would transform the face of the city, create a new landscape, a second nature. The way had been prepared by a pioneer, Armando Liñeira, who’d had the sensational idea of parading models inside the shop window of La Palma. This was how things stood at the start of summer 1963, when Korea reappeared on the Western Quay and asked Gabriel to bring down the record player which Leica had given Chelo and he’d acquired. It worked on batteries. Why not? Why not bring it down? Why not give this hero of the Western Quay that pleasure? He’d even taken it the first Sunday they went to the beach in Santa Cristina. The day he waited for the girl to arrive who spoke chimpanzee language with a strange accent, had fair skin, greenish-brown freckles, was tall and lanky, but with hardly any breasts, despite the large, pink nipples.

‘Go and fetch it, why don’t you? And bring a record. “Volare” will do.’

He looked at Medusa and made her smile on one side of her face:
Nel blu dipinto di blu
.

When Gabriel and Zonzo came back with the equipment, he pointed to a space between the stacks of wood, where they’d so often played football. ‘Our very own dance hall. The Seixal, the Moderno, the Monelos Liceo!’ There were frayed, tattered clouds travelling slowly out to sea, as if heading back in search of a loom for some lost fabric.

It was the second to last time he saw them. They danced close together. Zonzo, as a joke, had deliberately chosen a record with opera. A soprano’s quavering voice. He checked the credits.
Ach, ich fühl’s.
But they didn’t care. They danced cheek to cheek, the song of their life. Medusa twirled on tiptoe, her heels lifting from the boat of her flat shoes, which gave the impression of drunken abandonment. The space created by the planks of wood moved with her. The rest, sea and sky, remained calm. Medusa’s long, shiny black hair fell like a mane over Korea’s pale, shaven head. Gabriel felt a shudder he hadn’t experienced before. To round off the composition, it needed Korea to kiss the woman’s disfigurement.

The last time he saw them was a few days later. It was a kind of anniversary and the crane operator let them play with the ball from the
Diligent
. At one point, the ball disappeared down a corridor of wood for export. One of them went to get it. Then another. They didn’t come back, so they all went. The operator started to get nervous. It wouldn’t have fallen into the sea? No, no. Impossible. And then Korea and Medusa came out from behind one of the furthest stacks of wood, as if they’d been away on holiday. She was pregnant. Carrying the
Diligent
’s ball in her belly.

Ramón Ponte laughed as well. The last laughter heard that summer of 1963 on the Western Quay, when Medusa spread her legs and gave birth to the ball, which bounced until coming to rest at the crane operator’s feet.

A police jeep careered around the corner. Ramón Ponte headed for the cabin with the historic football under his arm. The guards ordered the children back home. The port was not a playground any more. They should find somewhere else. The Caudillo’s yacht, the
Azor
, would be here soon. ‘As for you two, the chump with the ponytail and the disfigured whore, you can come with us. Show us your papers.’

Banana Split

The more impure your thoughts, the longer the cobra that comes out of your mouth. Going to confession as a child, I’d always say I’d had impure thoughts. All the time waiting for impure thoughts. Amalia and I liked to touch our breasts. In the attic, we’d try on clothes, pretend to be designers, copy the way they dressed in fashion magazines. And that was when we started stroking and measuring our breasts. I once had a thought that was sort of impure, fighting Rafa by the stream in Laranxeiro. I liked to fight. Not any old how. You had to provoke it, put a straw on your shoulder and say, ‘Let’s see which of you can get the straw.’ The boys would ignore me, laugh, ‘You’re a brute, don’t be such a brute.’ But sometimes I’d manage it, they were so annoyed I’d got in the way. ‘You’re a fool,’ said Rafa. He was holding me by the wrists, he’d floored me and was sitting on top of me, but I carried on twisting and turning. He was red in the face. ‘Quieten down,’ he’d say, ‘or I’ll have to smack you.’ But all I thought about was winning, getting on top of him and making him ask for mercy. That was the sign of defeat, when they asked for mercy. I don’t know if the thought was impure or not because I wasn’t thinking about anything. Just winning and getting him to ask for mercy. Amalia and I had other thoughts. We’d cup our hands and stroke our breasts and see how they grew. They grew from one minute to the next, one day to the next, one year to the next. They can’t have been impure thoughts, only men and women did that, but something must have happened because one day our tongues became like cobras. Polka said when they got older, cobras grew wings and took to the air, singing, ‘I’m off to Babylon!’ Sometimes, when we’d just been paid, we’d treat ourselves to hot chocolate and doughnuts at Bonilla. Though the ultimate treat, the ultimate luxury, was to have a banana split at Linar. That came later. I think that’s when we grew wings. We couldn’t stop laughing. As if we’d been drugged. ‘I’m going up the staircase,’ Amalia would say after her ice cream. To go to the toilet, Linar had an impressive staircase, of the kind you wanted to go up or down. At a certain height, the staircase divided and in the middle was the cast of a large scallop shell. This trip to the toilet was an artistic outing. Step by step, you grew. ‘With the one I like,’ said Amalia one day, on her return from the staircase, ‘I’ll do everything.’ ‘What’s that? Has the staircase driven you crazy?’ ‘Every single thought. Everything. From in front, from behind. Slowly, at a canter. He can do what he likes ’cos I’ll eat him whole. Banana split.’

Montevideo’s Cabin

He decided to live in exile without having to leave again. He went to bed in the old sailor’s room. Where he wrote western novels signed by John Black Eye and gave shorthand classes using the Martí method. It was all painted for him by Sada, the
bateau ivre
, the double created by Urbano Lugrís, a man split in two. At the time, Lugrís was painting the inside of Franco’s yacht. The dictator had taken a fancy to his marine paintings and commissioned him to decorate his boat. Like Hitler, he was a frustrated admirer of fine art. Power had enabled him to overcome other frustrations. As a young man, he’d failed to be admitted into the Naval Academy and had taken his revenge by regularly wearing an admiral’s full-dress uniform. But the fact is this Supreme Commander of the Forces of Land, Sea and Air, named Sword of God during the holy year 1937, painted badly. Extremely badly. Above all, he painted the sea badly. Nobody told him this, of course. His flaccid seascapes received unanimous praise. On stage, they disguised his stature using wooden stools and platforms. Positioned the cameras to make him look tall. But he noticed how the sea invariably ran down his brush. One day, he realised he’d never manage to paint a sea urchin. He wanted to paint a
bodegón
, a still life, but the life was neither still nor moving. He had some fresh urchins brought from Orzán Sea, an intense dark red colour. Before fish, shells and starfish, he’d decided to try an urchin. Which seemed the easiest to do. A prickly sphere. No one would bother to count the prickles. He grew tired of struggling with the shape, each spine. This creature was both charming and deceitful. Rather than from the sea, it looked as if it had landed from space. There came a point he couldn’t tell what colour it was, so he tried a simple solution, to paint it like a child. The result, however, was not a sea urchin. It was an unconvincing splodge. He felt annoyed and impotent. Remembered Lugrís’ paintings. Had him sent for. He would paint all of this on his boat.

Urbano Lugrís was painting Franco’s yacht. At the end of each day, he’d visit Enrique’s and drink Palma del Condado wine accompanied by thin, almost transparent slices of pork loin, which, before eating, he’d raise to the condition of porcine soul. After that, feeling a little tipsy, like an aliped, he’d emerge on to Compostela Street, head home, change his clothes and then, dressed as Sada, take a roundabout route to the Tachygraphic Rose, kiss Catia Ríos, climb the narrow spiral staircase and enter another, twilight world, where he’d paint the old sailor’s room, the refuge where his friend Héctor sailed in bed. The home of an enchanted castaway.

‘Who goes there?’

‘Sada, the drunken boat!’

He’d paint feverishly for periods he alternated with moments of complete absorption, in which he appeared to be gripped by mute silence. During one of these moments, he abruptly broke his silence and said to Héctor, ‘You know? I’m painting the
Azor
with toxic paints, with lots of emerald green. It might even work.’

‘Will it take long?’

‘What does time matter? Didn’t you hear what Carrero Blanco, his second-in-command, said, “Franco’s mandate is for life!” We need to let the arsenic trioxide do its job.’

‘Don’t torture yourself.’

‘Who ever got me to do magic realism? Shame I’m not a Cubist. You know what the Capitellum asked me? “Say, Lugrís, how do you paint those urchins?” That’s what he asked me. “First I make room for them, your excellency, and then they grow alone, somewhere between the colour of stone and Patinir’s blue.”

‘“Alone?”

‘“With cobalts and by the grace of God, your excellency.” I projected my voice, like Dalí. You can’t be too careful.’

‘You did well,’ replied Ríos. ‘People like that are susceptible to small insults. It’s the big ones they don’t notice.’