Books Burn Badly (71 page)

Polka waited for the other to laugh at his irony. It was a pretty sad story, but the man didn’t have much of a sense of humour. He cleared his throat and asked, ‘Was there a copy of the New Testament? It’s not the kind of thing you just forget.’

‘It was like treading on bones, you bet. Point is I was then arrested. Do you know why? For playing. Doesn’t sound very serious, does it? Well, I was arrested for playing music. Someone denounced me because I was due to play on a union excursion. The cultural associations had organised a special train to attend the Caneiros festivities. Upriver. I was a gardener, but played the bagpipes as a hobby. I played for the union, but for the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel as well. You see, one piece does as well for a wedding, a baptism, a funeral, as for a union march or a procession. But that train never departed. Had it left, it’d have been empty. Understand? It’s as if they came and asked for our tickets. In a short time, we’d all been arrested. Those who didn’t flee were killed. I was lucky. I was imprisoned to start with and then sent to a labour camp, a wolfram mine. I was a slave, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Do you know what the worst of it was? Knowing, when you dug up that mineral, it was for fattening the beast. Do you understand or not?’

‘Excuse me,’ said the man behind the curtain. ‘What you’re saying’s all very interesting. But I was thinking about the books. The day you buried the books. You said some of them were still alive.’

‘In a manner of speaking. Ashes are ashes. But some were almost intact.’

‘You mean they were asking for a hand.’

‘I suppose you could say that.’

‘So you took some.’

‘You could get killed for doing that.’

‘Even so, you took some. You took some of those books. There was one. A copy of Scripture dedicated to Antonio de la Trava, the valiente of Finisterra.’

‘The valiente of Finisterra? No, I didn’t take any books.’

‘You couldn’t help yourself. You felt sorry. I can see it now. You’re a good person. You felt sorry for that book and hid it under your shirt. Am I right or not?’

‘Nothing of the sort. I didn’t take anything. I buried the lot. Even those sticking out.’

‘I’m sure you kept one or two. Sure you’ve still got them. Trust me. I can pay you a fortune for that book.’

Polka felt for the switch. Found it and rang insistently.

‘What is it, Francisco? What do you want?’

‘Aphrodite, what time does one eat around here?

‘That’s not the best part, girl. Do you know what happened next? He seemed to calm down when the nurse came in. Lunch was served soon after. Hake with potatoes and peas. Followed by yoghurt. You know what I think of yoghurt, but still I ate it. He didn’t eat a thing. Carried on deliberating. I could hear him deliberating. I swear the conspiracy in his head was as loud as the sounds emitted by clinical machines. I know that sound. It’s the beep of troublemakers. Up to him if he didn’t eat. I can be at death’s door, I still won’t leave peas on my plate. “
Bon appétit
,” I said and fell into a doze. It was a way of bringing the matter to a close. But when I woke up, he was there. Not in bed. He was standing. Clinging to the end of my bed. Staring at me. Tall and strong. In a cloak.’

‘A cloak?’

‘OK. A very smart dressing-gown with a velvet collar over his shoulders, on top of his pyjamas. My God! He looked like General Primo de Rivera. A light in his eyes like that of the one who played Dracula, set the screen in Hercules Cinema on fire, left two holes like cigarette burns. First thing I did was close my eyes. To slow my heart more than anything. What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over. I had to think. And I thought I knew that man from somewhere. He belonged to another class. The skin on his face, his hands, hadn’t weathered. And off he went again.

‘“I can offer you a fortune for that book.”

‘I swear he had the same light in his eyes as the actor Bela Lugosi. He was turning into a nightmare.

‘“You don’t have to worry about a thing. Nobody will know. I’ll make you an exact copy, a facsimile. It’ll be like having the original. And a mass of money. You can name your price.”

‘“Let me think,” I said, hoping this would calm him down. But it had the opposite effect. That man was like a horse. We’d obviously not been treated by the same doctor. He came up to me with emotion, took my hands. His look was – how shall I say? – Eucharistic.

‘“So you do have the book dedicated to the valiente of Finisterra?”

‘I said, “Yes, sir, I have it.”

‘“Borrow’s New Testament?”

‘“The very same.”

‘“You have to sell it to me!”

‘“We’ll talk about that later.”

‘“Later?”

‘“Yes, now I need to sleep.”

‘What was I supposed to say, O? The guy was crazy. It hurt me to look at him. He was boring a hole in my head.’

‘The truth,’ said O. ‘You could have told him the truth. That you had another book, Elisha’s book, as you like to call it.’

‘No, I couldn’t have said that.’

‘Why not, Papa?’

‘That’s my business. I still have to return it.’

O had already discussed this with him. She’d been the repository of a secret, but couldn’t believe he was still feeling guilty.

‘Who are you going to return it to, Papa? That book’s yours. It belongs to you more than anyone.’

‘There’ll be somebody. Somebody’ll have the key. Maybe even Minerva. Women live longer than men. And they’re more careful about keeping things.’

‘If that guy’s so crazy, he’ll bring it up again. You should have told him about
The Invisible Man
. Told him the truth.’

‘What for? He didn’t want to listen. He could have killed me then and there. I could see he was capable of such a barbarous act for the sake of a book. Capable of killing for a copy of Scripture.’

Bigarreaus

As he sits on the terrace of the Dársena Café, things move in and out of his glass of amber and ice cubes. For example, he’s convinced the cloud of starlings drawing a protective bird in the sky, a bird composed of dots like a pop cartoon, wasn’t there before. He decides to count them. A hundred thousand, give or take. Nor was the puppet there before, standing in front of him, in front of his eyes.

Leica stirs in his chair. This is a man who doesn’t want to know anything about anybody except those moving in and out of his glass. He no longer argues with customers. Today he was even polite. A woman came to his studio. The doorbell made him nervous, particularly edgy, to start with he’d fidget about. Who can it be? Why are people still interested in having their portrait done?

‘What is it?’

‘I’ve come to have my portrait done.’

‘Why?’

Yes, why? Were they not able to spot impending disaster? Were they not aware of the world’s structural ugliness? No. They were optimistic! Sufficiently optimistic to want an immortal portrait.

But Leica had changed. He’d had some terrible years trying to get rid of himself. He used to say he was afraid of his own body, which is why he didn’t dare destroy it. Who knows how that brute will respond? he used to think. He hated it so much, was so bored of it, this carcass holding on to him, so afraid, he couldn’t even pluck a hair from his nose. He imagined it spewing a jet of blood. What a ridiculous way to die, to empty like a barrel. The nightmare of stepping in his own blood and wandering off, like a ghost, leaving acrylic footprints on the pavements. He longed not to be. From time to time, a student of local culture would refer to a Coruñan brand of existentialism. Coruña, despite the persecutions, kept up an international beat, the systole-diastole of new tendencies, etc., etc., and when existentialism was needed, well, there it was. Among them, Leica the photographer, our own Robert Doisneau, our own Henri Cartier-Bresson. What a shame! They hadn’t even bothered to find out if he was still alive, had ever really existed. Only the selfishness of cells, the irrational tenacity of organs, the stubborn functionality of the respiratory system, explained his inopportune presence in this world.

‘Why what?’ asked the woman. Her tone of voice matched her eyes, which darted about a little.

‘Why do you want a portrait?’

Leica almost always achieved his goal. To make the person who’d come for a portrait take in the studio, suddenly aware they may have fallen into a murderous psychopath’s lair. The old curtain at the back showing the lighthouse had acquired sombre tones, filled with black clouds. A storm was trapped inside it. Then there was the wooden aeroplane. The seat looked every bit as if it wasn’t for sitting in, but for denouncing the absence of children who’d sat there previously. And all the tools. The cameras.

‘I’ve got a cold. My nose must be like a beetroot. That can be arranged, right?’

‘There’s no need. Your nose is extremely . . .’

He looked at her, afraid something was happening in his mouth.

‘Greek,’ he said finally. ‘Classical.’

‘Like one of those statues missing a nose?’

They laughed. And he breathed in. On any other occasion, he’d have been enraged by the suggestion he might retouch a photo. He was quite direct with customers about it. ‘If you want to look pretty,’ he’d shout at them, ‘go visit a surgeon . . . or Mago Photos!’ But now there really was something happening in his mouth.

‘Excuse me. We’d better get on with it right away,’ he said with sudden urgency. ‘I have to go out. Photograph a wedding.’

‘A wedding?’

Why was she laughing? Everything struck her as funny. She must have been about fifty years old, though it was difficult to be sure. Curly hair, swimmer’s body. What Sada the painter called a nautical age. Against the current. You advance in time, not time in you.

‘A wedding so late?’

‘Nowadays people get married at night.’

‘With malice aforethought.’

He laughed at the woman’s comment. His mouth. What was going on in his mouth? He swallowed. His saliva had a strange taste, of grass. He realised he hadn’t spoken in ages.

He asked her to stand on the stage, with Hercules Lighthouse in the background. There was a small table with a plant, a begonia that miraculously also advanced in time and not the other way round. She instinctively drew near the plant. He was now concerned about her face. The light on her face. He ignored her swimmer’s body. Forgot about asking her if she was the Sea Club’s Esther Williams. Saw her face out of the water. Her curls intertwined with seaweed.

Her beauty was
intolerable
. When and where had he read this? He thought alcohol acted like bleach on the memory. Ended up erasing everything. The imagination. Dreams. Culture. All that nonsense.

His mouth. That was it. Something in his mouth tasted of seaweed. Never mind!

‘Are you sure you want one of my portraits? I don’t do colour, you know. I paint the photo. So don’t tell me afterwards you’re not happy.’

She gazed at him in silence for a minute. The sitter now studying the lack of light on the artist’s face.

‘I’ve been walking past here for years. I always wanted to have my portrait done. A painted portrait. Then today something strange happened. I thought the studio would be closed. You no longer existed.’

‘You say you come past here every day?’

‘Every day. I’m the fruitseller. You used to buy bigarreaus. At the start of summer, you’d always buy a cone of bigarreaus.’

‘They’re a little harder than cherries. That’s why I like them. Because they’re just that little bit harder than cherries.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘And they don’t have a stalk.’

‘No.’

‘Why don’t bigarreaus have a stalk?’

‘I already told you that a thousand times.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yes, whenever you bought a cone. Bigarreaus don’t have a stalk because they let go of it when they’re gathered from the tree. Like lizard tails.’

He fidgeted about, glancing in all directions, seeking a memory, but without taking his eyes off her.

A memory! My memory, like a bigarreau, has lost its stalk. One moment if you please!

There was just enough light. There, on the hat-stand, was the body that contained it, had kept it until now.

‘Put this on if you would.’

She draped the night-blue shawl over her shoulders. Positioned her arms as if holding and protecting it. Behind her, the trapped storm gathered momentum.

‘Every day?’

‘I used to. Almost every day.’

He sits on the terrace of the Dársena Café. Looks at the camera. Can’t bear the camera’s look because it tells him the truth. Is aware the best photographs were its decision. To hear it better, he has to take it in his hands and look through the viewfinder. He seems to be taking photos of boats, but he isn’t. He’s listening to the camera. To see what it has to say.

‘How could you let go of those photos?’

‘Don’t start that again. What was I supposed to do?’

‘Photos of dead friends. You had to protect that film like a roadside shrine.’

‘You know what happened. They were after the other photos, but they were all mixed up. The photos of friends the day we went to Ara Solis together with the photos of burning books. They were on the same film. Too much pressure. Having them was like putting a bullet in your head.’

His eyes are on the glass. He sees the puppet’s reflection.

‘Shall I tell you a joke, sir?’

‘No.’

He was about to say he didn’t like jokes or jokers. I despise jokers even more than jokes. He kept quiet. He could have spoken, but he’d renounced the art of conversation. It didn’t seem reasonable to have to explain himself to a puppet. On the other hand, he didn’t have the energy to lift his head and observe the puppeteer. If he had to speak, he preferred to speak to the puppet.

‘Have you seen a boomerang go past, sir?’

‘No, not today.’