Books Burn Badly Read online

  You cannot step into the same river twice, he wrote. It wasn’t highly original, but he was pleased with this beginning. It would allow him to talk of that point in history, of everything that was happening, based on the trip upriver due to take place on 2 August.

  Reality is constantly changing. We can say it’s never the same, as Heraclitus said of the river. Heraclitus was right, but Parmenides wasn’t wrong. He maintained the river was always the same. Humanity flows like a river. We think everything’s changing, moving, progress is driving history. But it may be an illusion. Parts of the river are stagnant and lifeless.

  He created a circle with his arms. And out of that circle an article slowly took shape. As he typed it up, his body imitated its movements.

  ‘I’m going to call it “The River of Life and Death”.’

  ‘What river’s that? The Nile? The Ganges?’

  ‘No, stupid. The river that passes through my village.’

  He typed on the Ideal, using a couple of fingers. Above it, a bare bulb hung from interlaced wires in a cloth casing. As his fingers danced over the keys, Curtis couldn’t help seeing Arturo’s exploratory movements inside the ring. On tiptoe, as if he were skipping. His whole body behind the fingers that were typing. Gradually warming up. Now jumping by themselves. When the metal bars got caught up, he took a deep breath. He lived the construction of each sentence in its literalness. As he sought each letter, his fingers an extension of his eyes, what registered on the paper was for the first time. For example, when he wrote ‘elevation’, what Arturo did as he pressed the key was add everything the word could lift. And so, when he moved on to another sentence, his final flourish, the one he’d thought long and hard about, the one that said ‘The river flows inside of us and life is the art of hydrokinetics’, then he got a little nervous, excited, and pressed down hard with the fingers of a dowser searching for a spring. He found a patch of hard ground, the bars got entangled, the carriage got stuck.

  ‘It’s no problem,’ said Dafonte, who understood the Ideal best. As he repaired the machine, he looked at what he’d written. ‘What’s hydrokinetics?’

  ‘Something to do with reading in water. I came across it in The White Magazine. It’s a naturist idea.’

  ‘You’d better explain it.’

  He nodded in time to his index finger pressing the ‘x’ key and deleting what he’d written. At first, he didn’t like to delete things, but then he started to enjoy it. The ‘x’ was a curlew leaving its footprints on the sand. He thought as well about the pleasure of stepping in others’ footprints, filling their mould on the beach. He deleted. X xxxxxxxxxx. Curlews. Sandpipers. Plovers. Redshank. Bunting.

  Curtis looks up from the book. He’s already learnt there are different kinds of heat. Sensible heat, latent heat and specific heat. Specific heat is the most important, technically speaking . . .

  ‘Well, blow me down if that isn’t Papagaio’s Hercules. Arturo da Silva’s pupil. Of course it is.’

  They move towards him, with diligence, forming a circle.

  The silence is broken by the sound of turning wheels. Everything seems to be waiting. The gulls adorning the pinnacles of roofs and masts. The sound increases, turning on the stones. Curtis and the Falangists look towards the Rey building on Porta Real. There are the caryatids with flowers in their hair, supporting the balconies. Women’s heads holding the house up.

  Then the horse appears. It was a wooden horse making all that noise. The horse Leica kept in his studio on Nakens Street. His father walks in front, with the travelling photographer’s tripod camera over his left shoulder and his inseparable cane in his other hand. Leica pulls on the pretty piebald horse, which today looks like a natural animal, part of the caryatids’ modernist landscape.

  ‘When are you taking that horse out?’ Curtis had asked him not long before. He couldn’t understand why he kept it shut up in his studio. It would draw the crowds in Recheo Gardens. The finest photographer’s horse. And Coruña was a city that had lots of wooden and papier-mâché horses. It even had a horse factory at the bottom of the hill of Our Lady of the Rosary. But the horse Carirí, the horse that had come all the way from Cuba, was quite a horse. ‘When are you taking it to Recheo?’

  ‘I’m not. It was my father who brought it from Cuba. The whole lot came together. Cameras and horse. I think it was the horse he liked most. But I don’t want to be an instant photographer. I want to take artistic photos. Why don’t you have it?’

  The page of an illustrated magazine nestled at Antonio Vidal’s feet the day of his departure in July 1933 on the quay in Havana. This lost, flying page, which had reached the end of the pier, along the ground, and was about to fall into the sea, but suddenly gained height, spun in the air and came towards him as if it had found a direction. It landed at his feet, he didn’t have to harpoon it, spear it with the tip of his cane.

  Spirals of smoke rising from their coquettish lips

  He felt the smoke had nothing to do with tobacco or the picture of a happy life, but was a message in itself, aimed at him, rising from the paper like a swift climbing plant. He could read so well because a large part of the surface was taken up with photos of women’s faces. He couldn’t tell them apart. They were smiling, but each one seemed to contain a mystery. At this distance, for a man who, to walk, had to overcome his legs’ resistance and whom others were beginning to regard as a watch running slow, all the smiles were as one before disappearing into the cone of the paper wrapped around the cane.

  Farewell, Havana.

  The page searching for him now in Coruña has other concerns. Mayarí shakes the sheet in an effort to get rid of it. While he finds it difficult to resist paper flying in front of him, today he’s on another mission. To reach the coach as soon as possible and save his son. The son pulling on the wooden horse. Ever since he set eyes on that horse, he’s always trusted it.

  He tries to shake it off, but now it’s the page that doesn’t want to let go and enfolds him. Antonio Vidal’s attempt to shake it off, the rotatory movement of his arm, a slap in reverse, seems to provoke the large sheet, which sticks to him, holds on with the desperation of someone who doesn’t know how to escape. So he has to stop. Put down the camera.

  ‘Come here,’ he says to the sheet of paper. ‘Calm down. The world’s such a big place, didn’t you have anywhere else to go?’

  A photo. It catches his eye because it’s the only photo and the scene is very real. It looks as if it’s been taken from where he’s standing. And what can be seen in the background of the photo is what he can see as well. The fires. The burning books, but also the Falangists who are burning them, making the Fascist salute. He now understands why the sheet clung to him. It was fleeing from the flames.

  ‘Hey you, photographer!’

  On seeing the cameras and horse, everyone seemed to lose all interest in the boy next to the fire.

  Hercules, meanwhile, was focused on something else.

  Yes, he’d swear it was him, Terranova, with his hands in his pockets. Now he takes out his hands and puts them to his mouth. For God’s sake, don’t shout, don’t give yourself away. What’s he doing? Whistling with his fingers. Yes, it could only be him. The whistle attracts the Falangists’ attention again, puts them on their guard. They peer through the clouds of smoke to see where it’s coming from. What’s that idiot up to? Now he wears the horn in the artistic style of Lucho, maker of Andalusian costumes. This apparition, whistle, ornamental gesture with the horn, upsets everything. Curtis takes a few steps back and performs an unusual manoeuvre. He takes to the air, jumps over the largest fire and enters the open corridor.

  ‘Have you got my ticket?’ shouts Terranova.

  ‘Run! They’re shooting.’

  They leg it up Luchana Alley, Rego de Auga, Anxo Alley, Florida Street. If they can reach Ovos Square, they’ll be safe. Curtis has thought of a hiding place. The store on Panadeiras Street. It’s summer. The garden will be covered in fluffy wool.

  �
��Who are they shooting at?’

  ‘Us!’

  ‘These bastards can’t take a joke.’

  They didn’t find those two. They disappeared after Ovos Square. What does it matter? All that fuss over a couple of clowns! The stocky soldier likes to boss everyone around and is ready for anything. Trigger-happy. Dagger-happy too. The one who’s going to be a judge is smarter, but he’s a bit soft next to the other, the big guy, always on the lookout. Who knows what he’ll get up to tonight with that vocation? Because tonight, you can tell, is going to be terrible. Apparently they’ve got Huici, the inventor of coloured waistcoats, in the barracks of the Falange. But rumour has it tonight they’re going after the last Republican governor’s wife. The librarian Juana Capdevielle. They shot him on 25 July and they already sent her death flies. She lost a child in her womb. It’s her turn tonight. They’re going with the intention of killing her several times over. It’s something that has to come from the top, from the so-called Invisible Tribunal, the Delegation of Public Order, whose director is Mr González Vallés. This evening, Mr Vallés’ daughter will preside over a friendly football match to be played in Riazor between a team of Falangists and another of crewmen from a Third Reich warship. They’ll go for the librarian early in the morning. It’s not his turn to go out hunting tonight, so Parallelepiped is going to try to slip away, to skip it. He gave the river something to eat from Castellana Bridge. Yep, tonight he’ll skip it. Now, for instance. The others were busy having their photographs taken. Their portraits had already appeared in two newspapers, with them saluting like Romans in front of the fires. Well, now they wanted more photos. The one who’s going to be a judge, Samos, spoke on behalf of the old man in a straw hat and the boy with the wooden horse, ‘Let them go! They’re like family. I might still ask for your daughter’s hand, Mr Vidal!’ He was distracted, had a lot to think about. So Parallelepiped could finally put the book under his blue shirt, very surreptitiously. And leave without saying goodbye, in the shadows, down the corridors of smoke, while they stood tall and proud in front of the pyres. Shame not to have a librarian to hand, someone to consult about the value of this book to the valiente of Finisterra. Better to keep it under wraps for a while. Not tell anybody. Samos said it was very valuable. He might be cultivated, but he wasn’t very observant. You have to dirty your hands if you want to get something. Now it belonged to him. The emotion of nicking something. The emotion of reading ‘For Antonio de la Trava, the valiente of Finisterra’.

  Parallelepiped walked along the Western Quay. He lived in Garás. He looked at his hands. They were blackened. He was happy, pleased with his booty. It was about time he found something valuable. Dead men’s pockets don’t even carry air. Judging from Samos’ anxiety, this book must be worth a fortune.

  It was then he felt a slap on the back that made him stumble. A paw that had little to do with greeting or friendship. He knew the effect of this surprise impact. Intimidation. He himself was an expert in the surprise blow to the back of the neck, which terrorised poor souls scurrying away, hoping to avoid making the Fascist salute. With his elbow, he held on tightly to the New Testament hidden under his shirt and this immobilised one arm. He turned around. Ren, his robust colleague, grabbed him by the collar. His hands were iron claws. He unarmed him.

  ‘What you got there, Parallelepiped?’

  ‘A novel, comrade. A Frenchy to read in the toilet.’

  ‘I’d better read it myself first. Hand it over.’

  The Books’ Burial

  ‘You.’ ‘Me?’ ‘You too.’ Ten men he pointed to. With rakes and shovels. Rakes? It was August, but I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn the leaves were falling off the trees. That was the first thing I did. As soon as we entered Cantóns, I looked to the right to see if the beech still had leaves. It was beautiful, in season, like the bust underneath belonging to Mr Pondal. I mean the bust was also in season, with the dark age of bearded men in white marble. If we have to collect leaves, then I hope they’re the beech’s. That beech’s. But the lorry went straight past at an improper speed. Even if all the men in the back of the lorry were disaffected, the speed was still improper. We’d heard the order. To pick men who were disaffected. There we were, park and garden employees, and the new manager pointed to ten men. ‘You, you, you,’ and so on, up to ten. That finger stung like a horse-fly. It doesn’t matter what it’s for, who likes suddenly to be called ‘disaffected’? Because just now, a few days ago, there weren’t any disaffected. I mean I was unfamiliar with that label. Had I had to introduce myself to the world, I wouldn’t have started: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, my name’s Francisco Crecente, Polka to my friends, municipal gardener, specialist in pruning palms, oh and by the way I’m disaffected.’ It was like an oedema appearing that hadn’t been there before. Or a tic. He pointed with his index finger, ‘You! You! You!’ And with the same reflex action of pointing to ourselves, we replied, ‘Me? Me? Me?’ Like that. As if we all had tics, which we didn’t. On the lorry, swaying from side to side, the disaffected, clinging to the rakes, more than that, physically attached to the rakes, which have the solid shape of tools that put down roots even on a violently unstable lorry. The lorry had acquired the arrogant attitude, the cheek of heavy machinery that’s been relieved of its scruples. The soldier who gave the order and the new manager who carried it out travelled in the motorcycle and sidecar combination behind. We disaffected, with tics, dancing around for them. Stuck to our rakes. Estremil looked to see which way we were going and then tried to explain something, something important, but couldn’t make himself understood because it was like riding a horse, your teeth cut the words short.

  ‘What?’

  The lorry turned sharply. The wheels creaked. It braked suddenly.

  We were next to the port in a kind of low, grimy mist. I now understood the reckless driving and the hollow feeling in the stomach. We hadn’t travelled horizontally, we’d fallen. Now I could hear Estremil, the echo of what Estremil had been trying to say. He was cursing. ‘Blasted mouth of hell!’

  ‘Out!’

  The ground was giving off a thick, sticky smoke that, rather than leaving, seemed to return. Sniffed around the embers. A smoke that, instead of disappearing, came back to the trail left by the rakes’ teeth. It wasn’t until we were down by the docks that we realised why we were there. To rake up the ashes and smoking remains of books. Some of those who’d burnt them hung about, sifting through the pyres, kicking at the bones of books. This gesture reminded me of the first image I had of death. Not the first time I saw a dead person, when I was small, which didn’t frighten me since it was my grandfather, who looked very peaceful, cradled by women’s prayers, his arms over the sheet, one hand on top of the other as if he’d caught death with his fingers, but the first time I saw death out of a box, another image. There’d been a fight between two men after a party. They got on badly, but that night, strangely enough, they’d been drinking together like lifelong friends. I remember my father interpreted it as a bad sign. Afterwards he was annoyed with himself for getting it right, ‘If it’s a bad sign, son, don’t say so, because words hanker after what they’ve said.’ Someone woke us early the next morning with the news. One of them was badly wounded, the other dead. They’d come to blows at the crossroads. We children ran to have a look. The corpse had been piously draped in a sheet, awaiting the magistrate’s arrival. All we could see was the outline. A woman told us to go away. She called us ‘death flies’. ‘You’re like flies that won’t leave. I should drive you off like flies.’ This also impressed me. There was something about the label that was right. So I was about to leave, but then one of the deceased’s brothers appeared on horseback. He got down and, without letting go of the reins, approached the body. He was wearing boots with spurs and had a thick, blond moustache like a covering of hay on his upper lip. He didn’t pay us any attention. With the toe of his boot, he pulled back the sheet to reveal the dead man’s face. That was the first time I saw the horror of death, a pointle
ss, ugly death. This may have had something to do with what the brother said. ‘That’s it,’ he spoke to him reproachfully. ‘The time has come for you to sleep out in the open.’

  The one stirring the badly burnt books with the toe of his boot had a resinous voice. Part of the smoke had got inside his throat. The action of his toecap lifted layers of ash. He flicked out orders in an effort to speed things up. And warned us, ‘If you see a book which says New Testament or Holy Scripture or something like that, give it to me, understood? It doesn’t matter if it’s damaged or charred. I want it!’ The bitterness with which he spoke made our work even more irksome, as if we were partly to blame. I wish he hadn’t said anything at all. Now everything had a sacred feel. Even the smoke weighed down on our shovels. If those who wore the Sacred Heart as a symbol went so far as to burn Holy Scripture, then my father was absolutely right, ‘Better not to predict what’s coming next’. Everything that had burnt was in that sleepwalking smoke. I thought about the governor’s wife, the librarian. She’d turned up dead yesterday in a field next to the road to Lugo, having been raped and riddled with bullets. She was walking barefoot on the coals, her skin entirely blackened, naked and sleepless among the piles of night.

  There was lots of cleaning to do. Here and in María Pita Square. Lots of burnt books. We’d heard they were burning books by the sea. There’d been fires before, when the coup started. But this was something else. Whole libraries going up in flames. Apart from the resinous voice of the one in charge, echoed by the new manager, the only sound was of rakes scratching the ground and shovels loading the lorry.

  The one in charge wanted us to go faster. But this wasn’t something you could do any old how. All jobs follow certain rules and none of us could remember how to load the remains of burnt books. Nor could the tools. We were both used to collecting fallen leaves, to the scent of autumn bonfires, which lent the city a medicinal aroma. More than smoke, it was that, an aroma. Nature whose time had come. What was burning today, however, was time itself. I realised that. I didn’t say anything, but I thought it. Estremil, my friend, time is burning. Not hours or days or years. Time. All the books I never read, Estremil, are burning. He was a good reader. One of those who stopped to read, and did so conscientiously. Estremil did everything conscientiously. I bet some of the books he’d read were there, in the ashes being raked up, in the shovel-loads filling the lorry.