Books Burn Badly (66 page)

The chase is on.

The car with Ren and Mancorvo, which has left the judge behind, approaches. Santos puts his weapon away and prepares to climb in. He won’t be able. As they’re passing, Mancorvo lowers the window. Says, ‘It’s our turn now, Mr Scientist!’ Accelerates. He’s grounded. Surrounded by blue mist.

His office is open. He’s dozing with his head on the table. The night’s dozing as well, on the blinds, the indirect sea, the collage of shadows in the city on the other side of the window. Finally he hears them arrive. They’re greeted by the duty officers. Ask for a cigarette. It’s as if he can hear everything. Including the sound of the smoke. Which is why, when Mancorvo starts typing and discussing the terms of the report with Ren, their voices and the sound of the keys reverberate inside his head.

So it was he learnt:

And then:

He could hear everything. Drying sweat, Mancorvo’s handkerchief sounded like a paper blade, Ren’s like the crackling of elytra in a light trap for insects.

‘Where’s Mr Scientist?’

‘He’ll be here somewhere. His door’s open.’

‘Give him time,’ said Ren. ‘He’ll soon find out birds don’t suck and pigs don’t fly.’

The Arrest

It’s a hot morning. Santos, the policeman, heads for the Tachygraphic Rose academy and finds it closed. A few pupils are standing around in confusion. It’s the first time this has happened. ‘Closed Owing to Bereavement’. They expect some such sign. But suddenly the door opens and Dr Montevideo comes out. It was he who opened. The one who was bedridden. Something extraordinary must have happened, something terrible or supernatural. The man exiled in his own room since he returned from his other exile ten or so years previously. They gaze at the ghost. Perhaps it’s only a shell, empty on the inside. They’ll soon find out when he turns around to lock the door. But no. On the contrary, he’s very robust, not astral at all. A body, the memory of a body, wearing a coat and the coat’s memory. When he entered the house, intending not to reappear, it was winter. This helped him. He entered like a shepherd driving a flock of dry leaves. Now the sea-blue coat gives him the air of a sailor emerging from a boat-house in another hemisphere, another season. He looks at the plaque: ‘The Tachygraphic Rose, 2nd Floor’. Wipes the brass with his sleeve. ‘The best polish for cleaning metals is and always will be Love. Love Polish.’ An advertisement he remembers from his childhood. Another one, important for a reason that’s become obscured, is the definition of Portland cement. The relationship between poetry and publicity is paradoxical. A verse quickly grows old when it takes the form of an advert, but a slogan that’s presented as a poem lives on. For example . . . No, now is not the time to institute such proceedings. He wipes the plaque with his sleeve, a sea cloth. Says, ‘Go back to the jungle, children. Classes are suspended.’

‘Why, Mr Montevideo?’

The doctor looks back. His eyes rest on the policeman Paúl Santos. Speechless, shocked, suddenly fully aware of the outcome.

‘What is it, Mr Montevideo?’ asks Stringer.

‘Nothing you can publish,’ replies Héctor Ríos. ‘A man descended into hell.’

Having said this, he heads quickly towards the pedestrian crossing. The road is flat, but he views each step as if it’s an uphill climb.

‘Has something happened to Miss Catia?’ Stringer manages to ask out loud. He’s conscious by now that the fact of asking could not only reveal a truth, but worsen it.

‘She was arrested last night. They’ve taken her, Balboa.’

Stringer reiterates a long forgotten question, ‘Why?’

‘They say they arrested someone who had a photo of her. They searched his house and apparently found a photo of Catia with the name ‘Judith’ on the back. Nonsense. They then came here and turned everything upside down. They even tore my mattress and confiscated my papers.
A Dramatic History of Culture
. To see what it said. I told them I’d written it. They wouldn’t listen. I was of no interest. They didn’t want to arrest me, I think they thought I was too old. One kept looking at my teeth. I told him I had a new set which I’d lent to a friend working as a second-hand car salesman.’

He points across the road. ‘For further information, ask the . . . lawyer.’ Stringer turns to look at Paúl Santos, who’s typing inside, has a problem, he’s hit two different keys and the bars are entangled.

Popsy’s Delivery

Pinche was watching TV. The owners had gone on holiday, so he was living like a king. All he had to do was keep the house warm. Those were his orders. He’d light the fires and then sit back to watch TV. That horse that could speak. Black Beauty. He understood everything after a few months. Spoke perfect English, like the horse. Who wouldn’t? But as for me, I had to do the rest. The dogs. Look after the dogs. Besides watching that horse on TV, he could have taken care of the dogs. He said he would but, when it comes to dogs, who’d believe him? The only animal deserving of his attention was Black Beauty. So better to forget about Pinche. I like animals. When I told the lady of the house my mother had a donkey to carry the clothes called Grumpy, she almost cried with emotion.

‘Grumpy!’

‘That’s right, madam. Grumpy.’

What I wanted was for her to talk to me in English, since I wasn’t around for Black Beauty to teach me, but what she wanted was for me to talk to her in Spanish. She was an actress and had always dreamed of one day speaking Spanish. Sometimes, when Pinche and I spoke Galician, she’d listen in to our conversation. She obviously thought something funny was going on and we were trying to wind her up with a secret language we’d invented. She didn’t know this language existed. She knew about Catalan and Basque. I explained it was a poor person’s language, how could she know? But it wasn’t something we’d come up with to annoy her. Thing is I couldn’t talk Spanish to Pinche, it made me laugh. What, Spanish? No, Spanish didn’t make me laugh, what made me laugh was talking it to Pinche and Pinche talking it to me. To her? No. Talking it to her didn’t make me laugh. Why should it? ‘All right, madam, you talk English to me in the mornings and in the afternoons I’ll talk Spanish.’ It seemed a good deal. She was almost always out in the afternoons. But, after that, she stopped going out. When the weather was good, we’d sit outside, chatting away. If I got paid for talking, I’d be rich by now. In the mornings, however, when she was due to speak to me in English, she’d fall silent. I’m not saying she wanted to save her words, keep them to herself. Though it would have been better for her if I spoke English well, then we wouldn’t have had a problem when she asked me to ‘clean the corner’ and I understood
cona
or ‘fanny’, went all red, somehow managed to stop myself saying, ‘Clean your own!’ And she came up to me, what was wrong, was I offended? We laughed a lot after that, when I explained. Same thing happened when she asked me to ‘collect the gateau’. What did she mean, collect the
gato
, the ‘cat’? Ah, nonsense. After a while, you joke about it. Words like to play with us. The more serious we look to them, the more they play. I knew very well if she didn’t speak much, it wasn’t to save her words. No doubt she was outgoing enough in her time. She’d been an actress. They once showed a film on TV she’d worked on. A film a dozen or so years old. There we were, the four of us – her husband and her, Pinche and me – and it was all very funny to start with. She was good. But it faded after a while, as if the light on the screen had dwindled. No, she wouldn’t talk much in the mornings. She’d hang anxiously around the phones and, if one rang, it was as if the cuckoo had sung after a long winter. She could be on the phone for hours.

He didn’t like talking much. He’d been a pilot, he told me one day, a fighter pilot. Then commercial flights.

They’d insisted we shouldn’t leave the dog alone. But I wasn’t going to run after the dog all day long, with Pinche in the role of major-domo.

So there he was, watching TV. Ensconced in the armchair. A roaring fire in every fireplace. Like a lord, talking English to Black Beauty. And I ran downstairs to fetch him because, after all, a man is a man.

‘Where is she?’

‘On the bed.’

‘Which bed?’

‘The lady’s. With six puppies.’

‘What?’

I’d managed the birth. I’d been very nervous to start with because she’d climbed on to the bed. Unthinkable where I come from. That a dog should give birth on the bed, on top of a pink satin bedspread. A water bed, what’s more. Brand name, Zodiac. I didn’t believe the lady when she said it was a water bed. She told me to have a go and wouldn’t let up until I did. She was right. Very strange to begin with. Then it was like lying on a river. How nice the way the water moved! You could close your eyes and just float. But now it was Popsy lying there, giving birth, her eyes on me. What did the bed, the pink satin, matter? I was fully aware everything would have been the same had I not been there, except for one thing. Her look. Which alighted on mine, light on light, shade on shade. Lots of looks meet in life. Your eyes take in what others see. At the end of the day, you might have been credulous, naked, saintly, raped, murdered, beloved, recognised, invisible, a kiss, a thorn, a harpy, an Amazon. One time I took Pinche to see the eye doctor, the doctor explained to me – or rather told me, the way he talked was like a tale – that inside each retina of the eye there are millions of tiny rods which gather the light. Each look we give each other must have its own rod. But the dog’s look as she gave birth was different. A gift that required every single rod. Because it didn’t meet mine, it landed on it. She left me her look. Such a beautiful thing, and she entrusted it to me.

I went down to fetch Pinche because she’d closed her eyes. It was her first delivery. She’d borne six pups and I was afraid she’d expire from the effort. I’ve seen that happen as a child. A dead cat whose kittens are still suckling. Apparently mothers have milk for a day after they die. Popsy was exhausted. But when we came back, she’d recovered some of her strength. There she was, on the pink satin bedspread, licking her puppies.

Pinche was annoyed.

‘Little blighters, trust them to pick the weekend! I’ll have to go for a sack.’

‘A sack? What do you want a sack for?’

‘What do you think? The sooner they go in the river, the better. She shouldn’t grow too fond of them. The sooner, the better.’

I gave him the look Popsy had given me.

‘No, Pinche, no more throwing dogs in the river.’

‘Well, I don’t mind. Or do you think I like drowning dogs? As far as I’m concerned, we can leave them where they are.’

He lit the fire in the bedroom. Got over his bad mood. Went to have a look at the litter and intoned, ‘Boy, boy, girl, boy, boy, girl. How very considerate! You know what we’re going to do? Pop down to the cellar and open one of those vastly expensive bottles of French wine.’

I was about to protest, but recalled something Polka used to say, ‘Matter is neither created nor destroyed, it is simply transformed.’

The Lucky Gambler

It was the first time Alberte Pementa had gambled but, when he sat down, he had the impression that game of cards with Raúl Cotón had been foretold years previously. There was a strange sense of expectation in the bar in Brandariz. Fiz, the waiter, arranged the tablecloth as if for an autopsy and brought the cards with all the care of someone laying down a weapon. Cotón was playing and that spelt only one thing: disaster.

‘These cards have got Morse on the back,’ joked Pementa.

‘I’ve no problem with them,’ said Cotón.

‘Then I haven’t either.’

‘Shut the door. Make yourselves comfortable. Gentlemen, we’re outside the law. And bring us a bird,’ Cotón told Fiz.

‘A bird? Please not.’

‘Don’t grumble. We need to know the time.’

‘There’s a clock on the wall.’

‘Bring us a bird. The bird is time.’

Fiz came back with a starling inside a cage. Placed it on the side of the table.

‘What’s its name?’ Pementa asked.

‘Figaro.’

‘The last one was called Figaro,’ Cotón remarked.

‘Yes. But the last one died. Smoked to death in a cage.’

Cotón stopped shuffling and stared at Pementa. Offered him a cigarette.

‘You’d better smoke. You know the condition?’

‘What condition?’

‘No one leaves till the bird is dead.’

Alberte Pementa was a lucky man. He’d always been lucky. The night he arrived at the bar in Brandariz, he opened the door, looked down at the ground and found a 500-peseta note. A blue note. Lots of money at that time. Some people had never seen a note that colour before. It was a Saturday night and the bar was full of men, almost all of them building labourers letting off steam after a week’s work in the city. The smoke of Celtas gave conversations a structured consistency, though there was also the odd flourish of someone smoking a Tip Top, Portuguese blond. Each to his own, nobody noticed him. Until he bent down and stood up with that note in his hand like an oriflamme. The first look of congratulation gave way to a general feeling of resentment. Why should Pementa have found it soon as he came through the door? Why?

‘Things look at us,’ Pementa attempted a justification. ‘We don’t look at them.’

Pementa’s remark was considered witty, but not without pride. At this late hour, on the back of several rounds, people were highly sensitive to signs. What was so special about Pementa that notes should look at him?