Books Burn Badly
Table of Contents
Cover
Copyright
Also by Manuel Rivas
Dedication
Author’s Acknowledgements
Books Burn Badly
1. The Water Marks
2. The Night of the Moths
3. The Newspaper Seller
4. The Breadcrumb
5. The Matador
6. The Burning Books
7. The Books’ Burial
8. The Invisible Man
9. I’ll Just Go and See Who It Is
10. The Rabble and Providence
11. Natura Est Maxima in Minimis
12. Live Phosphorus
13. Open Body
14. Dead Man’s Slap
15. The Doorknocker
16. The Street Singer
17. The Lead Locomotive and the Flying Boat
18. Dez and Terranova
19. Curtis’ Second Fight
20. The White Roses
21. The Prickles of Words
22. Grandpa Mayarí’s Cane
23. O and Harmony
24. Chimpanzee Language
25. The Strategy of Light
26. The Urchin Woman
27. Jolies Madames!
28. The Apprentice Taxidermist
29. The 666 Chestnuts
30. The Gravedigger
31. King Cintolo’s Cockroach
32. Acetylsalicylic Acid
33. The Witch’s Kiss
34. Pinche’s Bike
35. The Woman at the Window
36. The Judge’s Drawer
37. The Mysterious Outsider
38. The Yoke Collector
39. The Supplier of Bibles
40. I Was Forsook
41. The Bramble Sphere
42. The Unfalling Leaves
43. The Star and Romantic the Horse
44. The Prohibited
45. The Championship for God
46. The Photos
47. The Paúl Santos Smile
48. The Inhabitants of Emptiness
49. The Diligent’s Ball
50. The Roswell Man
51. The Chemin Creux
52. O and Famous Men
53. The Phosphorescent Diver
54. Your Name
55. The Price
56. Élisée’s Book
57. Nel blu dipinto di blu
58. Banana Split
59. Montevideo’s Cabin
60. The Song of the Birds
61. Leica and Silvia
62. A Dramatic History of Culture
63. ‘A Sacred Feast’
64. The Compulsive Writer
65. The Lighthouse’s Novel
66. O and Animals
67. The Portuguese Architect
68. The Hotel of Mirrors
69. The Lights Going Out
70. The Denunciation
71. The Notebook
72. A Load of Suspicion
73. Judith
74. The Whale’s Belly
75. The Tachygraphic Rose
76. Ren’s ‘Museum’
77. Blue Mist
78. The Arrest
79. Popsy’s Delivery
80. The Lucky Gambler
81. Disguises
82. The Camden Town Fire-Eater
83. Felicity of Expression
84. The Medal
85. Purple Rain
86. Coccinella septempunctata
87. Working for Eternity
88. Bigarreaus
89. You I Can
90. Something Special
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Epub ISBN: 9781409089490
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Copyright © Manuel Rivas and Santillana Ediciones Generales, S.L. 2006
English translation copyright © Jonathan Dunne 2010
Manuel Rivas has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published with the title Os libros arden mal in 2006 by Edicións Xerais de Galicia
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by
HARVILL SECKER
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road
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Also by Manuel Rivas
FICTION
The Carpenter’s Pencil
Butterfly’s Tongue
Vermeer’s Milkmaid
In the Wilderness
POETRY
From Unknown to Unknown
For Antón Patiño Regueira, naturalist and book-collector, in memoriam.
Burning of books by the Falangists, Coruña Docks, 19 August 1936
‘The future is surely uncertain: who can say what will happen? But the past is also uncertain: who can say what happened?’
Antonio de Machado, Juan de Mairena
Author’s Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the following:
The staff of Coruña and the Archive of the Kingdom of Galicia’s libraries. Xan Carlos Agra, Xesús Alonso Montero, Cleudene Aragão, Mimina Arias, Pedro and Pepe Barrós, Manuel Bermúdez Chao, Vicente Boquete Tito, Fermín Bouza, Manuel Bragado, Euan Cameron, Picco Carillo, Esther Casal, Xosé Castro, Ramón Chao, Xosé Chao Rego, Cheni, Antonio Conde, Juan Cruz, Isaac Díaz Pardo, Pilar Diz, Antón Doiro, Jonathan Dunne, Amaya Elezcano, Xaime Enríquez, Guillermo Escrigas, Manuel Espiña, Carlos Fernández, María Estrela Fernández and the family of the murdered Coruñan book-collector Eirís, Benito Ferreiro (son), Xosé A. Gaciño, Víctor García de la Concha, Beatriz Gómez (from Silva), Benito González, Xesús González Gómez, Henrique Harguindey, Juantxu Herguera, the tailor Mr Iglesias, Luis Lamela, Xurxo Lobato, Lola from Lume, Antón López, Alberte Maceda, Santiago Macías, Bernardo Máiz, Danilo Manera, Xosé Luís Martínez, Carlos Martínez-Buján, Xosé Mato, Serge Mestre, César A. Molina, Enrique Molist, Xulio M
ontero, Eirín Moure, Serafín Mourelle, Xosé Manuel Muñiz, Antón Patiño, Dionisio Pereira, Nonito Pereira, Carlos Pereira Martínez, Gabriel Plaza, Xulio Prada, Miguelanxo Prado, Xesús María Reiriz, Manuel Rodríguez, Ana Romero, Josep Maria Joan Rosa, Andrés Salgueiro, Carme Salorio, Manuel Sánchez Salorio, Antón de Santiago, Sito Sedes, Felipe Senén, Xavier Seoane, Xurxo Souto, Celia Torres Bouzas, Dolores Torres París, Olivia Tudela, Alberto Valín, Elvira Varela, Ánxel Vázquez de la Cruz, Mari Vega, Graça Videira, Manuel Vilariño, Dolores Vilavedra, Elke Wehr, Manuel Zamora.
Iria, Gastón, Miguelón, César Carlos Morán, the group Jarbanzo Negro and Rómulo Sanjurjo.
Pedro de Llano.
His uncle Francisco and aunts Manola and Pepita.
Paco, Sabela and Felicitas.
Sol and Martiño.
Isa.
The Water Marks
At first, he bothers me. He’s young. I don’t know him. It happens sometimes. They get in the way. I was watching out for the tango singer who appeared on stage at the invitation of Pucho Boedo of the Oriental Orchestra. In a white suit and a red cravat. Please welcome a friend of mine who sings like the sea rocked to sleep by the lighthouse: Luís Terranova . . . A real looker. Even more so when he opened his mouth. All his childish features vanished and his bones stood out. It was ‘Chessman’, about someone who’s been sentenced to death. I’d never heard a tango sung like that. It was as if he’d just composed it, was making it up. It’s ten and the clock chimes as I take a step into God’s time. Would you believe the time was right? That was at the dance in San Pedro de Nós. I don’t remember now, but I think even the musicians stopped playing. That summer, I went with Ana and Amalia to the different fairs, hoping to hear him again, but he’d disappeared. I would sing the tango by the river – My steps are books, the Lord’s passion; my rest a chair the world put there – and with a bit of effort I finally managed to compose his figure in the water. I know it’s cheating. But I also have the right to evoke some images, not just to wait for those that turn up.
Like this one. This one came of its own accord.
He’s a soldier. At first, I’m a little shocked. He seemed a bit of a monster. So young and in uniform. Smooth-faced. Baby-faced except for the lips, which are fleshy and more forward than his other features. Maybe the mouth hangs open like that when it’s in the water, against the current. He looks at me with curiosity. And a sad smile. He has a round face, like those in our family. He’s blond. The water is golden, not from the sun’s rays, but maybe because of his blondness. I enjoy the figures’ company, but I don’t like it when they stare. I drop the garment I’m washing in their direction, slowly, not to smash the image, but so that it fades away, lurks under a pebble, has a chance to hide in the reeds.
But this time I don’t. This time, I let it be.
A baby-faced soldier with a man’s look. A smooth-faced soldier. In a trenchcoat with big buttons and a stiff collar. Framed by a circle of water. His arms are crossed and he wears a badge on his left sleeve. A man’s look, that’s right. He looks at me without pride, but also without pity. It’s what they do, the water figures, they come and see, look when you look.
I asked Mum about him.
I asked her about the young soldier.
She pretends not to hear me.
Slap, slap! Cloth on stone.
I think Mum would prefer not to know about my figures. Maybe she has enough with her own. I notice she avoids shaking the clothes out by the river when she sees me gazing into the water. I think they also move, change looks along the river, because they’re extremely restless. When one disappears for a while, it’s probably off somewhere in her circles. That’s what happened to the boxer. The boxer hung around here for a while, on my part of the river, and then left. I reckon he went to where she washes since Polka told me the boxer liked women who worked in the local factories.
But she pretends not to see my figures, and I pretend not to see hers.
‘What’s that?’
‘A soldier, a baby-faced soldier.’
‘There’s been more than one soldier,’ she said. Slap, slap!
‘Right. The one I’m talking about is smooth-faced and blond. And smiles. Or sort of, anyway.’
‘You mean Domingos,’ she finally replied, ‘who died at Annual in 1921. The one with the tubes of laughter.’
The figure smiled. It was him, the one with the tubes of laughter.
‘He always smiled,’ said Olinda. ‘Smart as garlic, but weak. Sickly. Our mother, Grandma Dansa, accompanied him to the recruiting office.
‘“This lad’s no good for war,” she told them.
‘And one of them replied, “Everyone’s good for war, if not for killing, then for dying.”
‘One day he wrote a letter, saying he had responsibility for the tubes of laughter, the name they gave the radio operators’ poles. He’d carry the radios on the back of a mule. And he learnt things. Said he could now understand the language of birds. All of his letters were a kind of joke. They seemed to have come not from a war, but from a comedy. They were such a joke grandma cried when we read them to her. At the end, he always put IKTH, which meant I Kiss The Hand Of My Mother. And grandma couldn’t stop crying because of what he’d learnt at war.’
And then Olinda opened up. She talked about something she always avoided, about the soldiers in our family and our locality. The Philippines. Cuba. Morocco. ‘Go forth and multiply as cannon fodder. An empire of bones, piled up year after year. Followed by those who died in the Civil War. What the army lost abroad they tried to reconquer at home.’ That’s what Olinda said. Slap, slap! The wet cloth striking against the stone seemed, in someone so taciturn, to be a way of expanding the story. Words with a layer of dusty sweat, iodine and blood, suddenly soaked, twisted, slapped, soaped, twisted, wrung out. Left in the sun. Clean. A white shirt drying. Some trousers. The wind filling the vacant clothing. At the washing place, in a crack in the wall that stops the north-easterly, there is always a robin. When the women fall silent, the robin sings. A tube of laughter. The old burying the young, according to Olinda. That’s what war is.
Now there’s something funny, and I don’t know if it’s normal or not, but I can’t see myself in the water. I can see Olinda. I look sideways and see my mother both in and out of the water. She’s on her knees, her body next to the washing stone. An angular woman’s body. The stone seems to have been gradually worn down by the stroke of bellies. The axis in our bellies and the shape of the stone are what link the sky, the earth and the water. As she applies soap, I look sideways, first at her reflection in the water and then at her. The sun’s behind her, her hair is gathered by a headscarf tied at the back of her neck, she again adopts an expression of hardness. She’s hard on the inside. Her eyes give nothing away. You can see that better in the water.
The Night of the Moths
Oulton Cottage, night of 11 July 1881
‘I asked the steersman if there was any hope of saving the vessel, or our lives.
‘“None of us will see the morning,” he replied.’
For the second night running, old Borrow recounted the storm off Cape Finisterre. Henrietta MacOubrey, his stepdaughter, decided that this time she’d listen for as long as it took a white moth to collide with the lamp. Two white moths if the first arrived too quickly. It seemed fair enough. He was a good narrator. When he told stories, his whole body became calligraphy in motion, from the flexing of his fingers to the dilatation of his pupils. Having been a Biblical propagandist, he knew the rules of suspense. And that’s why he advanced in stages, subtly, without committing excesses, because he loved to invent, but he despised anything that smacked of implausibility as much as fanatical truth. So he wasn’t telling the story for the second time, but getting a little closer, with inflamed accuracy, to that storm with hurricane winds on the night of 11 November 1836, off Cape Finisterre, the world’s rockiest coastline.
He’d been excitable of late. Spring had been delayed, so summer came
to Oulton Cottage like a frenzied agitator. The dwelling was festooned with the modest exuberance of fuchsias, gypsy flowers he called them, poking through the windows like prodigious Lepidoptera. An ardent atmosphere of drones and pollen made use of each crack and charged in, ready to deliver its message. Inside, everything seemed to hang on his renewed magnetism and to breathe a sigh of relief after the winter episode of a grumpy, prostrate Borrow in the grip of a repulsive current he himself didn’t recognise. Now things were different. He received a few visitors, the occasional gypsy friend who couldn’t tell the time, a virtue Henrietta found annoying. But the old gypsies behaved as if Borrow, the tireless traveller, the polyglot, the youth who could cover a hundred and twenty miles in a day on a pint of beer and two apples, had come back to look after them. Lavengro they called him, which meant wordsmith. Spirited Lavengro never failed to return.
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