Books Burn Badly (6 page)

‘Now I’m going to paint windows,’ said Sada. ‘Never sleep with the windows closed, Widows’ Wind permitting. And if there aren’t any windows, paint them. Invite the sea in!’

‘That’s a good one,’ said Arturo da Silva. ‘The window revolution.’

‘I’m into the naturist revolution. Another commandment is to bathe every day in the sea. I wouldn’t mind having your determination, Arturo, swimming in the sea in winter and summer. Galicia will discover her karma the day this custom spreads. I’m waiting for my own personal bathyscaphe and for when Scandinavian diving suits go on sale in Espuma. Or better still, one of those waterbeds invented by the glorious William Hooper. If this were a practical country, we’d develop an industry of waterbeds. I have to talk to Mr Senra from the shoe factory. Why can’t I be an industrial artist?’

‘I only wish I could paint a starfish the way you do,’ said Arturo. ‘A single starfish is enough to justify a life.’

‘Why paint them if you can go down and collect them in fistfuls from the bottom of Ánimas? I paint the sea because I can’t dive. I have to make do with the starfish that fall from the sky. They escape from the seagull’s beak by amputating the arm it’s holding them by. Did that never happen to you?’

‘It did once. It fell on my head. I was petrified. I thought the Universal Architect had got hold of me.’

‘A mythological sign, Arturo!’

‘It’s Hercules here who needs one of those,’ Arturo says for Curtis. ‘He’s got his first boxing match tonight.’

The Burning Books

The books were burning badly. One of them stirred in the nearest bonfire and Hercules thought he saw it suddenly fan out its fresh pollack’s red gills. An incandescent piece came off another and rolled like a neon sea urchin down the steps of a fire staircase. Then he thought a trapped hare was moving in the fire, and that a gust of wind, which kindled the flames, was scattering in sparks each and every one of the hairs on its burnt skin. So the hare kept its form in a graph of smoke and stretched its legs to bound off down the glazed diagonal of the Atlantic avenue’s sky.

The first book fires had been built by the docks, on the way to Parrote, on the urban belly so to speak, where the sea gave birth to the city, the first cluster of fishermen. Much grass had grown since then, even on the roofs, whose vocation is to be the brow of a hill, in the area where today the bay’s passenger boats, the city’s trams and national coaches all meet. The other fires are placed alongside, in the main square, which is named after María Pita, the heroine who led the defence of the city during one of the many attacks by sea at the head of a commando of fishing women, and now contains the town hall with its inscription ‘Head, Guard, Key and Antemural of the Kingdom of Galicia’. Curtis had heard of the heroine María Pita at the Dance Academy as if she were still alive, in that undying present that is to be a rumour on people’s lips, not just because she’d stood up to the sea dog/admiral Francis Drake, but because she’d been married four times and the judge had had to warn her that she’d been widowed enough and should see that no more men died in the battle of her bed.

There’s a pauper called Zamorana who lives and sleeps among the tombs and pantheons in the city of the dead, in the seaside cemetery of San Amaro. She once gave Hercules a fright when she stepped out from behind a grave and, holding up a cigarette butt, asked him:

‘Got a light, boy?’

Zamorana is not really a beggar. She has a job paid for by tips that is very important for the city. Coruña’s late departed look out to sea. Near the shore by the cemetery are the Ánimas shoals, the best breeding grounds, with more starfish on the bottom than can be seen in the sky. Though they can also be spotted falling from on high. Seagulls and cormorants fly with starfish in their beaks, so the starfish jettison their captive limb and return to the sea an arm short. The cemetery affords the best view of the mouth of the bay. And this has something to do with Zamorana, who asked Curtis for a light the night he spent by the graveyard. The beggarwoman is a sentinel. When a liner comes into sight, she goes down Torre Street, warning of the boat’s arrival. A liner is full of rich pickings. Zamorana’s voice sounds like a husky conch shell. ‘Boat’s coming, Mr Ferreiro, boat’s coming . . . Boat’s coming, Mr Ben, boat’s coming . . . Boat’s coming.’

Zamorana emerges with her ditty about a boat’s arrival, and she emerges from the cemetery, not from any old place. Curtis recalls how when he was a boy, Zamorana was already old, already announced boats in her husky voice. He thought she and others like her lasted for ever. María Pita, for example. The procession of country dead remained at the city gates. And the seaside cemetery’s occupants delegated the lighthouse and Zamorana’s husky conch to rouse the city: ‘Boat’s coming.’

The reason Vicente Curtis, otherwise known as Hercules, is thinking about Zamorana is because she’s standing by the Parrote viewpoint. Besides the arsonists, she’s the only discernible presence. She’s unmistakable. She’s wearing all the skirts she owns, the skirts of a lifetime, one on top of the other, so she looks like a female bell. Some ships arrived yesterday. Warships. They’re moored next to the yacht club and are part of the Third Reich’s fleet. She saw them coming, but didn’t go down Torre Street, singing her ditty, ‘Boat’s coming, boat’s coming!’ She watches. She’s seen many things. But not that kind of fire. She’s never read a book. There was a time, perhaps her happiest, when she sold newspapers. She hawked news though she couldn’t read. That’s why she thinks they’re hurting her. Going against her. They’re burning what she never had, what she always needed. There’s something strange about the smoke, it stings, gets behind the eyes. Reminds her of a time she’d rather forget. The day a stranger set fire to the blanket she was sleeping rough under, the day she put out her flaming hair with her hands. And now her hands are scars healed by the sea. That’s why she decided to sleep among the tombs. Where are the readers of books? Why are they taking so long?

‘Oy you, old witch, what you looking at? Get out of here!’ shouts one of the soldiers. ‘Go find yourself a billy-goat on Mount Alto!’

She never kept quiet. This Cain had better listen up. She was going to tell him a thing or two. Put a few things straight. Have it out with him, face to face.

This strange smoke that gets behind the eyes. This itching. The smoky torch. The fire. The smell of fire in her hair. She burnt once already. The skin’s memory. The scars’ itching. She moves off. Better to keep the peace. She returns to her tombs, trailing her bell of cloth. All the skirts of a lifetime.

The book fires are not part of the city’s memory. They’re happening now. So this burning of books isn’t taking place in some distant past or in secret. Nor is it a fictional nightmare thought up by some apocalyptic. It’s not a novel. This is why the fire progresses slowly, because it has to overcome resistance, the arsonists’ incompetence, the unusualness of burning books. The absentees’ incredulity. It’s obvious the city has no memory of this lazy, stubborn smoke moving through the air’s surprise. Even what’s not been written has to burn. Someone arrives from the local tourist office, carrying a pile of leaflets with the programme of festivities, ‘fresh meat’ they call it, possibly in reference to the woman bathing on the front cover under the heading
Ideal Climate
and the town’s official coat of arms, the lighthouse with an open book on top acting as a lamp giving off beams of light. All this will burn slowly, the design as well, which won’t make it back on to the city’s escutcheon.

‘Plato’s
Republic
. About time! What’s this?
An Encyclopedia of Meat!
’ Bam!

It’s a thick volume that sends embers flying and eats away the angles of ruins like the sudden collapse of a seam on lower buildings. The word ‘meat’ was enough to activate the throw. The head imagines a treatise on lust, pictures of orgies, shame not to have had a peek. When the volume reaches the end of its fall, the Falangist gives it a little kick on the corner with the toecap of his boot. As it opens, with a new eruption of smoke and cinders and the first flames, what meets the eyes is a two-page map of the peninsula with the different provinces shown in colours. The effect is too causal, an accidental jerk of the boot, which the eyes hasten to correct. No, they’re not the provinces of Spain. It soon becomes obvious it’s really an illustration of the different parts of a cow. Loin, sirloin, hock, coccyx, rump, rib, brisket . . .

‘What you’ve thrown in there is a book of recipes!’ comes a mocking voice from behind.

‘Then it’ll make a nice barbecue.’

The fires are in the most public part of the city, opposite the symbolic seat of civil power. Hercules shouldn’t head in that direction because Hercules is far better known than he thinks. But for now he’s in luck. He approaches the fires and none of the operators, all of them armed and dressed in the Falange’s uniform, pays him any attention, taken up as they are with the problem of books burning badly. One of them likens them to bricks. And then attaches a geometrical clarification even he finds strange:

‘They’re parallelepipeds!’

Next to him, the youngest soldier wishes to repeat the long word, but realises it isn’t easy and tries whispering it. It sounds like the name of a very rare species of bird. More complicated than palmipedes. He doesn’t have any problems with that, with palmipedes, and looks at the pyre without reading the titles, like an abstraction, like the model of an Aztec pyramid.

‘Pa-ra-lle-le-pi-peds! That’s it. Parallelepipeds.’

He finally got it. He feels better now.

‘Parallelepiped!’ says the sergeant, slapping him on the back.

‘Parallelepiped,’ he replies proudly, following the trail of smoke and gazing up at the sky. Encouraged by his success, he tries to remember the names of clouds he studied at school. All he remembers is nimbus. What’s a nimbus? What kind of cloud is made by the smoke rising from the pyres? But he stops thinking about clouds because the one who likened the resistance of the books to bricks and pronounced the word ‘parallelepiped’ with incredible ease is preparing to fan the fire with some sheets of newspaper. One of them slips out of his hands and flies like a palmiped. A strange bird, the beginnings of a collage in the sky. Curtis also follows the sheet through the air. The soldier who lost it runs after it, jumps and traps it in the claw of his hand. Looks smug. Calls the others over. There they are with arms upraised in a photo taken yesterday, when they lit the first fires, which the clerical daily
El Ideal Gallego
printed today, 19 August 1936: ‘On the seashore, so that the sea can carry off the remains of so much misery and corruption, the Falange is burning heaps of books.’

It’s a strange kind of fire, this, Curtis thinks to himself. Its tongue is invisible. It’s a fire that chews, with canines.

Not long before, at the end of June, huge festive bonfires had been erected in the city to celebrate St John’s Eve. Curtis had been one of a group of boys and young men from Sol Street who collected dried branches, worm-eaten pieces of furniture that held themselves together with the dignity of geometrical spectres and the usual donation of wooden remains, broken planks, disjointed limbs, from the highly active Orzán window factory. The structure they raised around the central post was reminiscent of the large stacks of maize that could be seen in winter, conical formations like those in Indian settlements, in the villages of Mariñas and Bergantiños, the countryside that opened up as soon as you left the city’s isthmus, from San Roque de Afóra, San Cristovo das Viñas, San Vicente de Elviña and Santa María de Oza to the fertile valleys of the River Monelos and Meicende, Eirís, Castro, Mesoiro, Feáns, Cabana, Someso, Agrela, Gramalleira, Silva and Fontenova. But these stacks were never burnt. Once the maize had been husked, it was used as fodder for the cattle during the long, hard winter and for the warp of the land. The image of American Indian settlements belonged to Curtis, who associated tepees with the way the maize stalks were arranged after the harvest. But burning books was new to him. The bonfires this year had burnt well and the fire’s final smell had been of sardine fat soaking maize bread, for such was the fire’s destiny, to cook fish and ward off evil spirits. Which is why you had to leap over it seven times.

But this fire is different. It’s not for leaping over. There aren’t any children around it. This also is a way of distinguishing fires, whether they’re for jumping over or not.

Curtis wasn’t sure he’d jumped over the fire on Sol Street seven times on St John’s Eve. He’d certainly jumped more than once. Now he was sorry he hadn’t counted. He had been in a good mood and felt like talking. Not just because his first fight was coming soon. His opponent was someone called Manlle. He had also informed anyone who wanted to listen of two important pieces of news. The first, that his friend, Arturo da Silva, Galicia’s flamboyant lightweight champion, had found him a job as an apprentice climatic electrician.

‘Climatic?’

‘That’s right, climatic. Heat the cinemas in winter and then cool them in the summer. And install large fridges up and down the country so that there’s always something to eat.’

‘That’s fantastic, Curtis. A real revolution.’

But equally important to Curtis had been the second piece of news. This year, he let it be known, on Sunday 2 August, a special train would depart for the Caneiros festivities. And everyone there, their mouths trimmed with sardine scales, listened intently because a trip upriver, to Caneiros, in the heart of the forest, was the most enthralling excursion for miles around, in a country that knew how to celebrate. Leica said that Curtis had a photographic memory. A shutterless camera. And now he was focusing on life. That’s right, he added, he himself had tickets for the special train, which included the trip by boat and a buffet.

‘A buffet?’ asked someone who’d drawn close to the Sol Street bonfire. ‘What the hell is a buffet?’