Books Burn Badly (51 page)

When the painter had finished, Héctor Ríos thought the four walls had disappeared. ‘Here you’ll hold out like Nemo,’ said Sada. Adding, ‘All you need is a waterbed.’

‘Are you sure there is such a bed?’

‘There was one in the Persians’ paradise. Made of goatskin. They filled it daily with solar water.’

‘That’s the direction the science of the future should take in this wretched country,’ commented Ríos, who was always inspired by Sada’s ideographic speech. ‘Technique with style. Mould dryers, boxes of light, waterbeds. Our poetry reveals, to those who can read, a lack of material resources. This permanent invocation of light is nature’s simplest movement. Mystical obsession is the result of an absence of heating, a poor diet and sleeping badly.’

‘Leaving paradise aside,’ said Sada, ‘I’m quite sure the great Verne sailed, so to speak, on one of those waterbeds Dr William Hooper invented during the last century. A belief that goes with the dates. I always thought Hooper was an invention of my father’s. But this phenomenon of floating medicine really existed. As confirmed by the British consulate. Here’s the address. The London Waterbed Company, 99 Crawford Street.’

‘If you can get me a waterbed,’ replied Montevideo, ‘I’ll write you a shortcut to Parnassus, an obituary in life that’ll have necrophiliacs leaping for joy. You’ll be immortal for twenty-five years at least.’

‘Don’t forget to include my sublime nickname,
bateau ivre
, in your obituary. Even if my first name, Urbano, sounds like a mode of transport.’

‘Now sit down for a bit,’ said Montevideo.

‘Are you going to torment me?’

‘Yep. I’m going to read you a fragment of present recalled.’

He was the man who wanted to say no. Leica went to Rubén Lires, the cellist, for advice. But found someone else who didn’t dare fill in the crossword. There he was, lost in thought, playing a sleepwalker’s tune. The net had reached here also. On San Andrés Street, a group of workmen carried a large carpet from the Jesuits’ church, which had been rolled up and lent for the state banquet. The bow sought a note of pain and fury on the strings, but the arm was disarmed. And fell.

‘I’m going to have to play at the state banquet.’

The time for excuses had passed. Rubén had found protection, an underwater capsule, in music. Now his mastery had made him vulnerable. Visible. He wished he could be a travelling musician, one of those faceless musicians who congregate in Tacita de Plata and wait for village envoys and owners of dance halls. He wished he could be Papagaio’s blind accordionist. He wished he could go back, all the notes return to nothing. Who’d been damn kind enough to think of him? Every year, the local authorities put on a state banquet for the Caudillo. This was followed by a session of classical music with chamber groups and select soloists. At what point, why, how, was his name mentioned? Who dropped it into the conversation? Who loved him so badly to do him such a favour? The praise, the applause, to him was a kind of conspiracy. No, he wouldn’t be able to play. In that world, he considered his art a crime. He should be in prison. Under house arrest. Who was the music-loving provost, the flower-eating swine who thought of him? It was a mark of distinction, an honour, that a local artist would for the first time replace an established maestro at the reception. Rubén Lires spent the night writing anonymous notes about Rubén Lires the cellist. About himself. He ripped them up, they were so precise they were comical, like those pre-communion confessions as a child: ‘I had impure thoughts.’ ‘Did you now?’ ‘Rubén Lires, the cellist, is disaffected. Rubén the Jew. Rubén the Mason. Rubén the Communist.’ He crossed this out, corrected it: ‘Rubén the Trotskyite’. They won’t understand that, better to put ‘Rubén the Anarchist’. They know what that is. ‘Rubén Lires is a degenerate artist.’ That’s it! Denouncing yourself also required a certain style. Then he thought of something more precise that really would set the cat among the pigeons: ‘Despite appearances to the contrary, this man leads a dissolute life. He has no moral stamina, is subject to every vice. He is anti-Spanish, a revolutionary and a freethinker. We were quite surprised to see his name in the programme for this year’s state banquet. Signed: an alert patriot. Long live Franco! Spain for ever!’

‘What do you reckon? Do you think it’ll work?’

He felt Leica’s silence. The reason his photographer friend didn’t say anything was that he was undergoing a similar trial. That of the man who can’t say no. The Judge of Oklahoma talked to the provincial chief, the provincial chief talked to the governor, the governor to the Minister, the Minister to someone in His Excellency’s household. ‘There’ll be photos. A photographic session with the Head of State. And who knows? Perhaps the new Official Portrait. Can you imagine? On all the walls of ministries, thousands of offices, official centres, schools, books. Triumph. Guess who the photographer’s going to be, who’ll have the honour.’

‘I could always say my mother died. They might not ask me when. I’ll say, “Listen, my mother died, I can’t attend the state banquet.” And that’s it. She won’t mind. She is dead, after all. And she always protected me. I can take her flowers. “See, Mum. I should have been playing for all those bigwigs, but I’m here instead, with my own.”’

Rubén was distracted while he spoke. Next to the cello, he looked like a helpless child.

‘I’ll say I’m ill,’ said the cellist suddenly, as if he’d finally hit on the right saving idea. ‘The truth is I don’t feel up to much. They’ll hear the creaking of my bones, the rumbling of my intestines.’

He gazed at the instrument, which was ill as well. Today it resembled a hive that’s been abandoned by the swarm. The cello, through its strings, gave him a bee’s empty look.

‘I’ve arthritis as well,’ he added with a touch of glee. ‘In my left arm. It sends my first and fourth fingers to sleep. These two.’

‘I’m not sure that excuse will work, Rubén,’ said Leica sceptically. He felt he should try to cheer him up, which was a way of addressing his own situation. The dilemma they were in, though Rubén knew nothing about the Great Portrait, wasn’t so bad. They were just two professionals doing their job. Worse, he thought, they were scientists devising increasingly destructive weapons. What was Rubén going to do? Play the cello. That’s all.

So he said, ‘Here, Rubén, think of yourself as a bird that happens by. It’s got nothing to do with the dictator. All the bird does is sing. What does it care if a saint or a criminal is listening?’

Rubén made an effort to imagine the bird. But the image wasn’t so simple. He travelled back in time. There was a story that inspired him. In the palace of Ahmad I al-Muqtadir, king of Zaragoza, member of the Banu Hud dynasty, there was a tapestry showing a tree with eighteen branches, on which birds made of gold and silver threads alighted. The unusual thing about the tapestry was not its luxury, but the hidden mechanism that, when a breeze blew through the palace, caused the birds to move on the branches and sing. Closing his eyes, while he played the cello, Rubén had often entered there in the guise of a breeze. Time was measured by a clepsydra whose hours were represented by doors the water went round closing.

But the water opened the doors as well.

What was Muqtadir like? Was he an assassin listening to birds?

He could always play Pau Casals’ ‘Song of the Birds’.

Leica, from the window, instinctively followed the celestial gully of Santa Catarina Street. Beyond the massive structure of the Pastor headquarters, past the trees and industrial necks of cranes on the Western Quay, was the tapestry where, in winter, starlings flew in a cloud. This cloud was a cartoon composed of dots that took the shape of a formidable bird. The first time they saw them, arriving from Cuba in 1933, Leica and Chelo thought this aeronautical exhibition of hundreds of starlings was a kind of fado by fate, a one-off. There was no way so many birds could share a single aesthetic will, understand their place in the history of the line. It was Mayarí who told them, ‘They’re joining dots to make a huge bird that will scare off the birds of prey.’

But Coruña’s starlings leave after Carnival, during Lent. Go back north. Someone had said they’re the same birds pecking the crumbs of tourists at Stonehenge.

‘They’re not going to kill me,’ said Rubén. ‘They can hardly beat up the musician. They won’t even know who Casals is.’

They’ll know, thought Leica. Of course they’ll know. But he didn’t say anything. He was studying the starlings’ space. If there’s a history of the line, there’s a history of the void as well. The starlings’ absence in the sky was noticeable, just as the mark of a picture frame stays on the wall.

‘Better not to say who it’s by,’ continued Rubén. ‘These days, I can’t get Manuel Seoane out of my head. I had a nightmare. I opened my instrument case and there he was. “What are you doing?” I asked him in horror. “Ssssssh!” he told me to be quiet. “I’m on the run. Protect me. I can’t fit in the violin case.” You could see the bullet holes, which were clean, as if a drill had made them. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t tell him he was dead. “Is there something you’d like to tell me?” he asked. I nodded. “Something important?” I nodded again. But couldn’t get the words out. So he passed me a piece of ruled paper and said, “Write it down on this.”’

Leica knew Manuel Seoane, the violinist, well. He could see him through the viewfinder. He was taking his photo with a cravat tucked into his jacket like the swelling of an artist. His hair was slicked back, but staves rose up in an
allegro molto vivace
. He’d been shot in Rata Field with other young soldiers loyal to the Republic. An execution, that of eight soldiers, carried out in the light of day. They were accused of plotting a rebellion in Atocha Barracks. The whole city had been summoned to witness the execution. People were supposed to boo them. It would be a large public spectacle and final warning so that those who still hadn’t come round would finally ‘bite the dust’. But they weren’t going out with a whimper. All the time, shouting, ‘Long live the Republic! Freedom for ever!’ The crowd falls quiet. This silence was the last great act of resistance.

In the studio, Leica lifted the needle without stopping the record. This way, he felt he could hear that piece he’d read and reread in the French cinema magazine: ‘Following the release of
The Testament of Dr Mabuse,
Fritz Lang was summoned to the Ministry to take charge of German film-making. That same night, he took a train and fled to Paris.’ Every evening, a train left Coruña for Irún, with a connection to Hendaye on the French border. It was full of Galician emigrants going to work in France. Rubén paid him attention. He’d leave on that train tonight.

‘You have to leave right now,’ Leica had told him suddenly. ‘Don’t think about it. Take your instrument and go on that train.’

How nice to hear that. To hear himself, albeit telling someone else. He gazed at the camera. He knew what the camera was thinking. It was jealous of the cello leaving on the train, with a seat all to itself.

Leica and Silvia

‘It’s the camera that takes the photos. Decides whether it likes the people. Picks them. Moves them. Makes them foggy. It’s a good camera, sure enough, but most of the photos are pretty bad. When there’s a good one, you could say an image has been born for humanity. It’s down to the camera. The images it’s been through! I’m not surprised it’s a little manic, capricious. There was a time, in its youth, when it took photos with great pleasure. It was very clever. Found light where there wasn’t any. And it’s done a lot of things it didn’t like, just for me. People sometimes do things against their will and end up feeling they like them. I haven’t got that far. My problem is I don’t know how to say no. So it’s the camera that takes most of the decisions. Here, take a look. If you’re that beautiful, blame the camera. It’s the camera’s fault.’

‘Oh, come on!’

‘No, it’s true. There was a time I wanted to be an artist, photographer wasn’t enough. Luís Huici, who was an artist and a tailor, told me one day, “The important thing in life, and in art, is not to bore people. To give or not to give, that’s the measure of a piece of art. Here is a gift.”’

The first time he entered his workshop on Cantóns, Huici handed him the magazine
Alfar
, a transatlantic undertaking to combat boredom. His workshop was a landing stage for avant-garde movements, its very own port. There were novelties, books or fabrics, you couldn’t find anywhere else. There were people who went just to touch things.
Ulysses
by James Joyce, for example, that book that had everyone talking and had reached Huici’s workshop by sea. There it was, a real, living being you could open and pluck words from: ‘Those girls, those girls, those lovely seaside girls.’ Packages arrived, containing manifestos and publications: a gift. They’d open them and almost always come across a new species, an image, form or question that hadn’t existed before. When he showed him
Alfar
, the copies were bound with an animal black ribbon. The artist and tailor was incredibly precise about colours. A jacket the colour of a fox’s tail. A coat the colour of maize bread from Carral. A face as white as a sleepless night. This ribbon he said was animal black. Whenever Huici’s name came into his mind, he saw those fingers untying the ribbon. As well as helping him to make a living, tailoring was, for Huici, a practical way of contributing to the city. People were the most active creators of landscape. They were like walking trees, mutating pieces of architecture. A man or a woman represented a nomadic nation. As they walked through the city, they wrote, drew and painted.

Every once in a while, something would happen to affect the composition. Suddenly the idea of nomadic culture ceased to have a figurative meaning. Lots of people, openly carrying their nomadic symbol, a suitcase, gathered in the port and disappeared from the landscape. This was a question Huici asked himself, ‘When will we stop exporting sadness?’