Books Burn Badly (69 page)

‘So you’re a judge?’ asks Zonzo.

‘Yes. That’s my job.’

‘It’s a good job. Meting out justice and all that. But you have to be stricter. The world’s in a terrible state. No moral principles. No authority.’

‘How did Manlle die?’

‘I don’t know. Don’t know the details. Seems he died in his own way. Slowly.’

‘People don’t usually die because of a harpoon.’

‘Why not? He was by the sea.’

Gabriel Samos thinks the conversation will end there. He remembers Zonzo. He’s capable of closing in on himself like a mollusc. There’s no point insisting.

‘He shouldn’t have gone,’ says Zonzo surprisingly. ‘But then you know what he was like. No, you don’t. How could you? He wanted to be in all places at once, do everything. What was he doing combing the beach for a lost shipment? Someone had got a hold of the bales, OK, and so what? I heard rumours. Remember that Bible full of banknotes I showed you? He went with it to buy a woman in Brussels central station. A woman from the east. Why’d he have to go? He didn’t. He found out later the woman was missing a toe. Wanted to try her out in a small
pension
. At his age, he still wanted to do everything. And saw she was missing a toe. He should have let it go. It’s a way women for sale are sometimes branded. So he went back to the central station, wanted to reverse the agreement, to get the Bible back with its banknotes. He’d been buying a woman who was whole. He wanted to do everything. Ended up with a harpoon stuck in his chest. I don’t know who it was.’

‘Your mother sings better than ever.’

‘She comes from time to time.’

‘I remember she was always at the window.’

‘Still is. Watching out for boats.’

‘Customs patrol boats?’

‘No.’ Ironically, ‘yachts.’

He was awake the whole night. Couldn’t get the bill out of his head. Read the reviews, which were favourable, some of them enthusiastic. The woman with the hoarse voice was playing King Lear. Three hours on stage, six days a week. He was actually quite grateful not to have got a ticket the first few days. He’d use them to see other things in Paris without the stifling heat. He remembered one August when he’d managed to survive a trip to the Botanic Gardens and Père Lachaise Cemetery. He thought he could still see the acrylic memory of those touristic footsteps sticking to the pavements. But most of all he viewed the delay as a kind of mourning. He took the most sensitive evidence out of his suitcase: the books with burnt edges and a survivor’s vitality. Then a copy of a document with lists of confiscated and imprisoned books. Incomplete lists since disappeared, burnt books, deceased books, had not been included. Several postcards from Durtol Sanatorium. A magnifying glass. The books he’d brought had not been chosen for their literary or bibliographical value. He’d let his hand pick them out. The first books he’d read in the section of charred remains. The start of his secret induction. He planned to tell her how the books from 12 Panadeiras Street had resisted. Lots had fallen. But some had survived the flames, the dampness of the dungeons, the robbers in the Palace of Justice. The books he’d brought had something else in common: Santiago Casares’ stylish signature, an elegant calligraphic portrait. Anthropomorphic.

He went to 168 Rue de Vaugirard and tried to glimpse the sixth floor. He was tempted to climb the stairs and ask who was living in the dovecot, the garret that was their first home in exile. But he checked his detective’s instinct. Then, at midday, took a taxi and decided to visit the Rue Asseline.

He made a mistake.

He passed in front of her house. Thought he heard the sound of the news on television. But couldn’t see anything from the street. There was a window with a net curtain and a thicker cloth curtain behind. He could ring the doorbell, but he didn’t have the books with him. It’d been a furtive incursion, a strong wish to visit the Rue Asseline and see where 12 Panadeiras Street had got to, where the dramatic corridor of history led to. He’d left everything back in the hotel. It’d be ridiculous to turn up now and stammer out a story with nothing to support it. What would she think? She’d be suspicious of someone arriving out of the blue, stirring up the embers. A judge, son of a Francoist judge, who’d come to talk about extant books. Maybe not. Maybe she’d have a taste for such surprises. Someone who in her twenties had played Death in Jean Cocteau’s
Orpheus
and in her seventies still had it in her to play King Lear had to be brave.

He entered a Portuguese eating-house on the corner. Most of the customers were building labourers or mechanics, depending on their work clothes. He fancied eating in a place like this, wine served in a jug, not in a bottle, oilskin tablecloths. He sat down next to a window. And then saw her. Saw her approach the Portuguese restaurant. His mistake was not to stop looking. Most of the workers glanced at her when she came in. Some of them probably knew her. Though there was nothing about her to draw attention. Just herself. She was wearing ankle boots, trousers and a dark blue jersey. Hair cut short, grey. She entered with discretion, but her eyes came on stage. The presence of a woman it wasn’t necessary to ask if she was alone. A wild, roving look.

Which is why Gabriel Samos made the mistake of staring at her. Not deliberately. He simply didn’t realise. She did. She realised. Gave him a serious look while lighting a cigarette, perhaps so she wouldn’t have to address the ogler. He became embarrassed. Instead of taking a step forwards, tried to hide it. Without saying a word or moving a piece, opened the pit of the intruder.

The performance of
The Tragedy of King Lear
at Gennevilliers National Theatre was sold out for this night and the next. A woman, María Casares, was playing the legendary king. The reviews had been highly favourable. Talked of her energy, her hoarse voice, her face carved out on the stormy stage. She’d acted in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and
Macbeth
. Lear was waiting. And now she was Lear, the king named after a Celtic sea-god. María always thought in terms of nature for a role. The sea was strong and melancholy, impulsive and sweet, brutal and loving. She found her ideal of mature beauty in the weather-beaten faces of those who inhabited Atlantic shores. Since she couldn’t be in Galicia, she was sorry not to live in Brittany. But the theatre itself was a Finisterre, a windy outcrop. In her early seventies, she’d finally acquired the look of an old sea lady.

The books her family had taken on their last trip from Coruña to Madrid, which had accompanied her into exile, included volumes of works by Shakespeare, Valle-Inclán, Manuel Curros Enríquez. This had been her father’s favourite poet. A memory that goes with her everywhere. Not a relentless ghost, but a place made of voice she returns to when necessary. The feeling is warm and strange. An exile within an exile. To send her to sleep, her father recites
Galician Melody
. Recites fragments from Curros’
Airs of My Land
, verses he knows off by heart, which seem to come not from the memory that plays with elevated notes, but from another corner, a deep cave.

‘Another beakful?’

‘Go on then!’

He calls each stanza this, the amount of food a bird carries in its beak for its chicks. María thinks it’s the verses that remind her of him, of Santiago, as he murmurs them next to her bed in the twilight. When she was a girl, her father had periods of frenetic activity followed by bouts of illness. The
Melody
’s verses are like lines drawn on a face that takes shape as they’re spoken. Lines that contain the mystery of life: what’s hidden behind the eyes. As when she went with her mother to visit him in Madrid’s Modelo Prison. She was eight. He’d been arrested for participating in the clandestine Republican government during Berenguer’s regime, which supported the monarchy. She was horrified. What she saw was the ghost of her father. A bag of bones suffering from consumption and imprisonment. Everything had changed. There was no warm home. The only thing that remained was what was hidden behind the eyes. Which is why the
Melody
doesn’t rock her to sleep, it makes her more alert, keeps her company. The
Melody
remembers for her. Wherever she may be. In the dovecot on the Rue de Vaugirard. In La Vergne, her house in Charente. On the Rue Asseline. On all her artistic tours, in the loneliness that follows her artistic triumphs. She has photos, postcards, letters, small personal belongings she keeps like talismans or relics. But nothing like those verses that escaped the burning, the pillage. Something no murderous tyrant or governor can imagine. A
Melody
protected by the mouth’s dampness or, as her father, Santiago, would say, kept in a corner of the occipital ark. A
Melody
that talks of the siren (who has song), the snake (who has breath) and God (who has hell).

Shakespeare was fortunate to make that journey from Coruña to Madrid when her father was appointed minister. He stayed alive. Then accompanied them into exile. Was now on the main bookshelf in the house on the Rue Asseline. She needed to have those books always in sight, within reach. She liked the way they weighed like arks or flagstones. They contained all the others. All the deceased books from 12 Panadeiras Street. When she agreed to act the part of King Lear in her early seventies, she reread the play in one of the volumes that had been saved. Ran her finger along each line. In Madrid, her father had a secretary who read books she loved like this, churning up words with her long varnished fingernail. Her finger ploughed the furrow of words as if she were reading not only with her eyes, but also by touch. María had heard her father mention a captain in the army who learnt Braille so that he could read in the dark when on campaign. She felt darkly pleased when they suggested she represent King Lear. The same feeling she had during the end-of-summer storms, when the rafters of the sky over Paris gave way. Finally the clouds of the Atlantic carrying the sea were here.
Écoute, Paris!
She was carrying the storm on top of her head. The unsettling joy of the first downpour after the drought. It’d been more than fifty years since she left Madrid and went into exile. The first thing she did was pull down the volume and run her eyes along the rail of her index finger:

María can see the faces in the audience, faces determined to believe in the truth of the legend, convinced that what’s been said has something to do with the times they live in.

The audience? She always chooses a face. Her mark, she calls it.

Gabriel’s convinced she’s looking at him. Some actors use this method. Seek out a reference point, a face they can address in the audience. But why him of all people? He’s sitting in the third row. Is tempted to look away. Perhaps it’s a false impression. Perhaps María Casares’ look deliberately has this vague precision. Is able to take in each and every face in the audience. That must be it. But no. She’s looking at him. He’s sure of it. He can feel the parcel on his thighs, under his folded coat. A small package containing three books and the report written in 1955 by the Inspector of Archives for the Northwest, a civil servant who seems punctilious, but omits his name. All he needs is for the contents to move, to give off smoke. In the hotel, he went over everything. In preparation for the symbolic return.

She, Lear, stares at him:

That night, as she left Gennevilliers National Theatre, María Casares was handed several letters and notes from spectators. And a parcel. It could be said she had a premonition, but not enough time to give it shape. The first thing she saw, in large letters, was the return address: ‘12 Panadeiras Street’. And, by way of stamp, a drawing of a ladybird.

Working for Eternity

‘You’ve a visitor, Francisco!’ shouted Aphrodite from the door. She and the porter wheeled a bed into the other half of the room. Polka saw everything in large blots verging on diffused clarity, exactly the opposite of what he’d always imagined blindness to be, a progressive and definitive sinking into darkness. What he perceived of his new hospital companion was a white head and nothing else. Then Aphrodite, as he called the nurse, that woman who had the grace to be cheerful and pleasant, drew a curtain between the two beds, creating two compartments.

‘He’s a bigwig,’ the nurse whispered to Polka, ‘a judge. Had a heart attack too. Has just come out of Intensive Care. Will soon get his own room. He has influence. He’s a chosen one.’

Polka fell silent after hearing this but, when the nurse made to leave, said in a loud voice, ‘If you need a gravedigger, here I am, girl! Working for eternity.’

He wasn’t sure if the gesture the nurse made from the door was one of farewell or another kind of message. He did think she smiled, though.

‘Why’d you say that?’

Polka was surprised the man behind the curtain spoke so soon. He’d just fallen into a mid-afternoon stupor as he tried to sew together the rags of white and grey blots. Put them in order for when his daughter arrived. She still didn’t know he’d lost his sight. Couldn’t read. Couldn’t even dig graves. At least, he wasn’t the one who shovelled earth or sealed niches. He could still play the bagpipes, though, when asked to do so. A march.
Mother
, or
Ancient Kingdom of Galicia
, or
St Benedict
, or
Laíño
, the one he liked so much, it always sounded good, from cradle to grave. At night, he’d listen to the radio. He enjoyed moving the dial, listening to stations broadcasting in foreign languages. Words sound wonderful when you can’t understand them. Animal electricity. He could barely read, but occasionally he’d open the pouch and hold the books in his hands. Feel their electricity. He recalled Jaume Fontanella,
Joan Sert
, his fellow prisoner, the Catalan architect who fled on a Portuguese passport and studied Braille so he could read at night. Polka copied that movement. He didn’t know Braille, but he could imagine. His fingers ran over the paper’s geography, relief. He felt the excitement, the way the words bristled under his touch. He could rattle off the whole of
The Invisible Man
.