Books Burn Badly Read online

  I picked up a spadeful. There were plates of ash retaining the form of pages and the ‘black shadow’ of printed lines. Some of those plates hadn’t burnt completely. The flames had gone in a circle and left bits of paper intact. My fingers reached out to one of those wafers quivering on the surface.

  ‘Look, Estremil, “a drop of duck’s blood”.’

  ‘What’s that? You’re crazy. You treat everything as a joke.’

  I wanted to give it to him. Gave it. As the plate fell apart, the piece of paper was no bigger than a samara wing.

  When he trained me, Estremil used to say of autumn leaves, ‘Don’t kill yourself running after them, they’ll come to you. It looks as if they’re falling haphazardly, but they have a direction. See? The flurry bends a certain way. Build a good bonfire, find a good place, and then wait. They’ll soon come.’ He was pulling my leg, testing me, I could tell from the glint in his eyes, but there was meaning in what he said. That was some time ago. Now Estremil was quiet, uneasy. Gritting his teeth. Like me. To stop them banging together. That day, something happened to me that had never happened before. The sway of the lorry stayed in my body. Wouldn’t leave. I couldn’t stop my teeth chattering. I listened to them resounding inside, behind my eyes. Maybe the same thing was happening to Estremil. If he gritted his teeth, he could hold his body together better and concentrate on his pulse to keep the spade steady and not spill the ash, the folds and tips of toasted skin, the nervous resistance of gut-string, the bony splinters of shrivelled paper. The books’ remains.

  The Invisible Man

  On Cantóns, Curtis can clearly see the thick, ashen, earthy clouds, the breath of ruminant fire, coming from the docks. The sky above María Pita Square is also overcast. He knows he can’t turn back. Has to continue to see it with his own eyes.

  He looks at the clock on top of the Obelisk. Remembers, ‘His lordship, Time!’ It looks as if it’s always been there, marking centuries, as if the hands had yet to make a circuit. Sada was right. A cuckoo clock would have been better. If a cuckoo were to come out now, thought Curtis, maybe everything would be different. It’d raise the heads of those walking uneasily, counting questions on the slabs of stone like someone stepping on the squares of a chessboard. It might alter the march of those following a straight line. The cuckoo might hinder that soldier in the bonnet galloping astride a straight line.

  He thought he saw him, Sada, on his way through Pontevedra Square, where troops were starting to enlist. The rebel army had taken over the city and had control of Galicia, which would be a rearguard territory for what the insurgents called the ‘new reconquest of Spain’. Yes, he thought it was Sada. So tall and burly, he was difficult to miss. He thought he recognised other faces, though recently not only had people’s mood changed, but their faces, presence, physical features as well. This was one of the things that had most surprised him on his walk. A kind of winter had suppressed the summer season. From the skylight, he’d seen the desolation of Riazor Beach. It was the sight of an urban beach deserted in summer, on a beautiful sunny day, that made him afraid. Unfamiliar fear caught up with him. There were days only the Headless Man seemed to emerge from the city’s shell, sitting on the breakwater with a book in his lap. When he decided to escape through the skylight, when he tricked his mother and aunts in the Dance Academy, he discovered years had gone by in days. Hairdos had disappeared, colours had darkened, skirts and dresses lengthened. People had changed their way of looking. Of walking.

  He realised there were people and things asking not to be named. To be spared words. Which is why he stopped scrutinising the soldiers. He knew he shouldn’t do it. For his own good and for theirs.

  If they asked him who Sada was, he’d say, ‘I don’t know, I can’t see him.’ And Sada would call him to one side, ‘Can you really not see me, Curtis? Praise be to God, long live the Umbrella Maker of the Universe!’

  ‘If you want to stay safe, become invisible.’

  He was told this plainly by a well-informed man. A Navy legal officer who admired his painting and had a certain sense of humour. ‘I like most of all the way you paint echinoderms and gastropods.’ ‘Now listen here, you,’ replied Sada, ‘there’s no need to insult them.’ The officer was kind enough to warn him. He wasn’t interested in war. His hobby was studying the first world circumnavigation. By Magellan, Elcano and what he called the enigma of the third name. Sada would have liked to return the favour at once and become immediately invisible.

  But although he was up to date with Franz Roh’s theory about magic realism in art, Sada didn’t know how to become invisible. He was just too big for escapism. He had magician friends he was unable to help in rehearsals or performances because all the swords wounded him, all the saws sawed him and, in the disappearing act, when the magician announced he’d vanished and was no longer there, he’d appear, ruining the spectacle, like a heavy load that doesn’t know how to transform into spirit.

  His informant was clear. He was on the list. Sooner or later, they’d kill him. To be invisible was to become a soldier, to join the conquering army and go to war.

  No sooner did Sada’s enormous bulk reach the front in Asturias, no sooner did it slowly stand up in the trench, than he was shot three times. You’d have thought this is what he wanted. But his fellow soldiers told their bosses he’d been talking all the time about being invisible. He considered himself an invisible man. And this is what they called him: The Invisible. One soldier kept quiet. The one whom he’d told about the child and the matador the night before.

  In metaphysical art or in magic realism, there as well, the lame matador pursued him. Pointed with his stick, ‘That’s him, that’s the one, the Invisible.’

  I’ll Just Go and See Who It Is

  They’re killing all his friends. One by one. He has to send them to a safe place.

  ‘Safe? Where’s a safe place?’

  ‘The land of wolves. That’s the safest place nowadays.’

  When Pombo talked about the land of wolves, he knew what he was talking about.

  From the beam in the shepherd’s hut, Curtis had hung a sack full of sand from the river. A gunny sack which, every time Curtis hit it, gave off a fine spray. Terranova encouraged him with that refrain ‘Yamba, yambo, yambambe!’ But sometimes he fell into a melancholy trance and watched the sack swing from side to side. Seeing him stuck in the station of sadness was something new, since Curtis thought he had a permanent spring in his mind protecting him from nostalgia. He’d sing to the sack. ‘The Moorslayer’s not working!’

  Underneath the outer roof, the hut had a second ceiling of large cobwebs, not as resistant as gunny, but thick and well made, like a large canopy. ‘There are no spiders,’ said Terranova one night in the light of an oil lamp. ‘Have you seen a spider? Who’s making these webs, Curtis? They must be tireless spiders, but I haven’t seen any. One day, they’ll envelop us and gobble us up. We have to eat them first. Remember what Holando used to say about the French astronomer who only ate spiders? They’re the messengers of time. We can’t see them because they’re spinning with our eyes, with the threads of light. If we eat them, we might see the stars. Otherwise they’ll eat us. Or the bats will.

  ‘I should be eating skylark pâté, like the soloist of a French cathedral choir. As Picadillo once said, “Nightingale pie, ladies and gentlemen, for the singers.”’

  He’s losing his mind. The spiders have got inside his head, thought Curtis. He left the hut. Was going to make him a present. To lift his spirits. He knew where there was food. In the roadside shrine, up at the crossroads. There was a stone relief showing prelates and pontiffs in the flames of purgatory. And a saint with scales for weighing souls, probably St Michael, whom he’d heard about in the Dance Academy’s kitchen from his mother and Pretty Mary. The weighing of souls would take place at the Last Judgement. How much would a good soul weigh? ‘The scales must be pretty accurate,’ said Milagres, ‘like the ones they use on Galera Street for spices.’ She added, ‘
Souls must be like saffron. A gram is worth a fortune.’

  In the niche, behind the little lights of burning wicks floating on oil, among flowers, he found the present. The dead didn’t care! Terranova was a spirit as well. He also needed an offering. His spirits needed lifting so that he could sing. Curtis didn’t mind what it was. What he wanted was for him to sing. Never to stop singing or pretending to be his trainer as he laid into the sandbag, the sack of time, with his fists.

  ‘Yamba, yambo, yambambe!’

  He found food. More than on previous occasions. At the end of August, gusts of furtive, northerly wind were already scouring the fields of hay. Winter could be very long and swallow up autumn and spring. Eyes open in the back of his head, Curtis cautiously felt inside the niche and, aside from foodstuffs, found an unexpected treasure. A bottle of brandy and half a dozen Farias wisely wrapped in a cabbage leaf that had been tied with a straw plait. He smelt the tobacco inside the cabbage, that rude, precious package, and the mixture seemed to him strong and evocative, even though he didn’t smoke, or perhaps because of this, like the fragrance in the corridor leading from the Dance Academy’s sitting-room to the kitchen, where Milagres kept the factory of tastes and smells working round the clock, with the humble, captivating vapour of soup in the background, visible like a family heirloom. Sometimes he thought it couldn’t be. The girl with the budgies from 12 Panadeiras Street had never set foot in that kitchen. But it was the image of a bowl of cabbage soup, her anxiety as she eats it, that made the memory plausible. Milagres’ laugh, a laugh of popular satisfaction at the joy of eating, eating from hunger, of a rich girl, daughter of a cultivated man she admires, who’s turned up out of the blue, from across the border. Yes, it must be true. Can’t you hear them calling for her, Vitola, María, Vitola, thinking she’s hidden in the garden?

  ‘Look at her eat,’ says Milagres with pride. And with pleasure, ‘Poor girl, she must have been hungry!’

  ‘No,’ she replies. ‘I wasn’t hungry. It’s the smell of cabbage. Ever since I was little, I’ve always been desperate to try it.’

  So that’s what it was. The fragrance of Milagres’ cooking crossing the border between two cities.

  He didn’t smoke, but Terranova did. Despite having a small chest, he liked Havana cigars. They sometimes formed part of his payment in kind, his dockside business activities. He’d drink brandy whenever he could before singing. Two glasses better than one to clear his voice. Who’d have thought that today in far-flung Xurés, working as a shepherd in a mountain hut, he’d have good tobacco and brandy as well as food in abundance?

  He unwrapped the cigars and savoured the smell. Took a swig of brandy. Looked at him with theatrical eyes, ‘Now I know who you are, Curtis, after so many years. The souls’ mafia boss! You kept that quiet! I’m at your service. I’ll be whatever you want me to be. Your butler. Your servant. Your shepherd. My captain of souls!’

  The weather was changing. One morning, the swifts stopped drawing lines in the sky. Curtis crushed a furiously stinging horse-fly behind his ear and then didn’t feel another. The cicadas suddenly fell quiet and the mountains reverberated. The flocks and herds returned to their stalls.

  As they were tucking into the salami from the roadside treasure, there came a knock at the door, a tender rap of the thunder’s knuckles.

  It was the three seamstresses, each with a sewing machine on top of her head. They’d dropped in before. They travelled from village to village, carrying their little Singers. They stopped in a place for a while, depending on the jobs that needed doing. As well as a bed and food, they received a day’s wages in cash or kind.

  The youngest and liveliest was called Silvia.

  ‘Let us in. The lightning is chasing our sewing machines and it’s pouring down!’

  They knew how in this weather the Atlantic climbed up the mountain ridge. Scores of miles inland, the clouds carried a bellyful of sea. Which is why they had specks of Irish moss in their hair and smelt of salt.

  Terranova stroked the back of a Singer. ‘I can sew as well,’ he said. ‘Lucho from Mount Alto taught me. He had a little theatre and used to dress up as an Andalusian woman. At night, he’d sew his polka-dotted costumes. He had a brother, a tough guy, who wouldn’t let him. This brother was a stevedore. So Lucho would sew his Andalusian costume at night, when his brother was down on the wharf. He sewed pretty well. Not like me.’

  The seamstresses gave him a suspicious look. He could be making fun of them.

  ‘The thing Lucho taught me best was how to make rude gestures, including wearing the horn. He was very good at wearing the horn. He’d go down Independencia Street and the women who lived there would deliberately come out to watch him declare his allegiance to the Fraternity of St Cornelius. No one in Coruña wore the horn better than he did. Watch.’

  Then he made them laugh. They’d never seen horns lifted in this way, with hands reversed, on buttocks, and cheeky fingers dancing obscenely.

  They invite them to eat. Silvia becomes serious and steps forward. Appears to speak for all three of them. No, they don’t want to. They’re not hungry. They already ate on the way.

  ‘Then let’s have a dance,’ says Terranova. He’s feeling happy, replenished. ‘I’ll sing. You three can dance with him, let me tell you, with Hercules himself. Mystical roses, you have the opportunity to dance with a prince from Un-deux-trois, on a tour of the mountain ranges. Dance cheek to cheek, Spain’s perdition, no peeping!’

  The light burning in your eyes

  dawns if you open them,

  as you close them

  dusk seems to fall . . .

  When it’s Silvia’s turn, she comes up close, embraces him. The other two laugh, pretend not to watch. Terranova jokes, ‘Don’t get burnt!’ Changes tune. ‘What do you care, my love, if you no longer feel the same?’ Silvia talks to Curtis, whispers in his ear, ‘Don’t you dare touch the food in the shrine again.’

  He looks at her in surprise. Why?

  ‘It’s not for the dead, it’s for my father. Understand? My father’s hunger is not like that of souls. It’s the hunger of a hungry fugitive. Do you understand or not?’

  He understood all right. Terranova always said there was an invisible man in those parts. An ex-man. Who must be living in Barxas Wood. In the eye of the water. The trees had long, ancient beards. The Invisible as well.

  Some guards once passed the cabin. In cloaks. The barrels of their guns sticking out. They were obviously in a hurry, but made enquiries. And then Terranova gave them the spiel. They were Portuguese, from across the border, hired as shepherds, when they were young they’d been offered to Our Lady of the Rock, the tallest stone staircase in the world, etc. Curtis was amazed by Terranova’s skill at accents, his palatal pattering speech.

  ‘Has the cat got his tongue?’

  ‘He’s dumb. Name’s Hercules. Lots of brawn and no brains.’

  ‘Lucky him,’ said the corporal. ‘Seen anybody about?’

  ‘Not a soul.’

  ‘If someone comes asking, don’t give him a thing, any bread or water.’

  ‘Even if he’s a Christian?’

  ‘He’s not a beggar, you know. He’s a fugitive. A bandit. A red. A descendant of the one in Anamán who shouted the poor don’t have and the rich won’t give.’

  ‘How can we tell?’

  ‘Because he doesn’t know how to curse. Whoever heard of a Christian that can’t curse?’

  ‘Change of partner. Dance by ear!’ announces Terranova. ‘If you see your father, tell him when he doesn’t receive alms, he has to curse. Blaspheme. They’re on to him because he speaks properly. Words are the most visible footprints.’

  ‘The thing is he doesn’t believe, so he doesn’t blaspheme. When he gets really worked up, the worst insult he comes out with is “Papist”.’

  ‘I could teach him to say, “I pick my teeth on a fragment of the Holy Cross”. I could make a list and leave it in the shrine. I had a thorough education. My mot
her’s a saint. He has to ask like a chaplain and curse when he doesn’t get. He believes in souls, doesn’t he? They say if you bump into a soul, you have to make the following request, “If you’re a soul from the other world, say what it is you want.” My mother and Curtis’ are always getting bogged down with souls, because they ask them what they want. The best thing is to send them packing, as priests do, “Christian soul, off to heaven with you!”’

  When the storm had passed, the seamstresses put their sewing machines back on their heads and asked Curtis and Terranova to go with them for a bit.

  ‘We’re headed for Barroso,’ said Silvia. Adding mysteriously, ‘Come with us to see how goats fly!’

  ‘There are more crazy people in this world than in the world of spirits,’ said Terranova. ‘Lead on!’

  Several hours later, Terranova asked, ‘Where are the flying goats?’

  ‘Not far to go now.’

  Nightfall. The gloaming hour. They were on the edge of an inland cliff. In front of them, a huge marsh giving off mists. They’d clearly reached a limit. Then they heard bleats falling from the sky, spine-chilling cries that drew lines, wrote acrobatics two by two. Bleats joining in a serpentine drawing.