Books Burn Badly Read online

  ‘Lavengro,’ he whispered.

  Henrietta glanced at the window in case something was moving beyond the fuchsias.

  ‘There’s no one there.’

  ‘A terrible winter,’ he said. ‘Forgive my hedgehog’s tenderness.’

  Henrietta thought nothing is quite so tiring as an old person’s excitability. More tiring than tiredness itself. Borrow bravely resisted the temptation to go to bed and spent most of the time tied to his desk, like a helmsman at the wheel, he said. He would read Scripture with the severity of someone threading the needle of eternity or start writing feverishly. But from time to time, which upset his stepdaughter, who suffered from what is sometimes termed caretaker’s syndrome, Borrow would leap up in a fit of madness and take to the road, calling out for his gypsy friends, offering to let them camp in the garden, or begin to recite the poems of Iolo Goch and Dafydd ab Gwilym in the rain, natural prayers he himself had translated from the Welsh.

  For the second night running, he went back to Finisterre. Henrietta had had a long day, but she still wanted to listen to the old man, who drew strength and a Biblical voice from the night. She didn’t find such a description irreverent, something must have stuck after so many years travelling on the road with the Word of God. Though Borrow still joked about himself when he appeared to adopt too missionary a tone. ‘Heavens above, I sound like a prophet of doom. Or a St Lupus!’

  Henrietta could see the storm at Finisterre in the camera obscura of Borrow’s eyes thanks to the light and shade in his voice. She saw herself as a moth attracted by the thunder and lightning of the story. The first moth.

  George Borrow was convinced that the description of the storm, included in his book The Bible in Spain, was one of his finest literary achievements. The act of writing it had been like a second storm with gusts of wind and immense waves. He dipped his pen in the chaos of the inkpot, scratching the words in the belief that writing fast would create an inflammatory style. But now it was his translations, the murmur of youthful verses, that stirred his memory:

  The wild Death-raven, perch’d upon the mast,

  Scream’d ’mid the tumult, and awoke the blast.

  The sickly steamer left London along the Thames, put in at Falmouth and finally departed with a crowd of passengers suffering from tuberculosis, fleeing from the cold blasts of England’s winter in search of some sun further south. This time he gave the story an ironic twist Henrietta hadn’t heard before, which referred to the state of the ship’s engine: the boat was consumptive as well. This became obvious right from the start. Henrietta knew all the details, she’d heard the story before, but she still liked it when Borrow used the image of cathedrals to describe the clouds of spray and foam. ‘The right ship for the time and place,’ said Borrow ironically. And he added, ‘With the ideal steersman.’ The day before, he’d made mention of the captain, a person picked up in a hurry, who took the vessel too close to the shore, but to whom he attributed the utmost coolness and intrepidity, as he did to the rest of the crew. However, the only voice that speaks for itself in the story is that of the steersman. ‘In less than an hour,’ he says, ‘the ship will have her broadside on Finisterre, where the strongest man-of-war ever built must go to shivers instantly.’

  He had written, and was about to repeat, how a horrid convulsion of the elements took place and the dregs of the ocean seemed to be cast up, but in the end he said, ‘Thank God for lightning. It’s good for swearing!’

  In a flash of lightning, he saw Cape Finisterre and swore he’d come back with a book of Holy Scripture in thanksgiving. Had the darkness been complete, there’d have been no way of reacting, of putting up resistance. Had the lightning not intervened, with the engine dead and the ship being tossed like a feather, the crew might not have committed the apparently absurd act of hoisting the sails in the face of impending destruction, just as the wind, without the slightest intimation, veered right about.

  ‘I went back. I kept my promise. And there I met Antonio de la Trava, to whom I gave a copy of the New Testament, the only one I ever dedicated.’

  The first moth collided with the lampshade. It had a white, hairy head and the uncannily human features of some moths. The savage, stubborn, suicidal collision gave Henrietta a start and she resolved not to stay beyond the second.

  ‘Spain is not a fanatic country, but life there can hang on a single word.’

  Henrietta forgot the moth and smiled. She loved this episode in which Borrow, being mistaken for the leader of the Spanish fanatics, Don Carlos himself, and on the verge of being shot by the liberals or negros of the Atlantic coast, was saved in extremis during questioning, when proof of his innocence was the way he pronounced the word ‘knife’. ‘“Knife”? Did he say “knife”? The man’s innocent,’ declared Antonio de la Trava, the valiente of Finisterra, knife in hand. As Borrow went into details, Henrietta laughed so much she had to rub her eyes.

  ‘In Madrid, we printed five thousand copies of the New Testament. Soon after I arrived, in May 1837. I distributed a large number myself through Spain by hand. Otherwise they’d have rotted in some dungeon, as some of them did a year later, when I was arrested and it was forbidden to sell or circulate the New Testament. The Papists didn’t want the people reading the Gospel! The Vatican assigned Spain the role of butcher and always kept the people apart from the Word of God. A scandal that was never talked about. In the most Catholic country in the world, people were afraid to buy the Holy Scriptures. You could see their nostrils quivering when I put a book in their hands. They could smell the flames of the Inquisition.’

  ‘There’s one thing I didn’t understand today or yesterday,’ said Henrietta. ‘Did you actually sign the Holy Scriptures?’

  ‘Not sign. It was an act of thanksgiving, a bold step I never repeated. I wrote a dedication: “For Antonio de la Trava, the valiente of Finisterra”. And then my signature. The man saved my life. And there’s no denying that whoever saves a life saves mankind. You’re inclined to agree with the Talmud, especially when it’s you being saved. I presented him with the book on a night like this. He’d escorted me to the town of Corcuvion, to the house of the head alcalde, a conceited man who laughed at me for travelling with the New Testament. Antonio, however, was moved. He told me he would read the Word of God when the winds blew from the north-west, preventing their launches from putting to sea. I think he was a little merry. He’d been drinking brandy during my interview with the alcalde. He addressed me as captain and told me, when I next came to Finisterre, to come in a valiant English bark, with plenty of contrabando on board. He was clearly a liberal through and through.’

  A second moth crashed into the lamp. A huge, white-haired saturniid. The moths first banged against the window and then found their way in with the breeze, together with the scent of lavender.

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ said Henrietta. ‘You should do the same.’

  It was the month of July 1881. Summer had irrupted into the old man’s body. Now, having told the story of the storm at Finisterre, he seemed to have calmed down. He took a few unsteady steps towards his desk, wanting to translate some Armenian poems.

  ‘Good night,’ said Henrietta.

  ‘Knife!’ he answered.

  The Newspaper Seller

  16 June 1904

  His. He thought it was his. Just as a new swarm, when it leaves the hive and takes to the air with the queen, belongs to whoever catches it. He’d caught a newspaper dated 16 June 1904. Today’s newspaper. He was in the docks, on his way to the far end of the Iron Quay, it being about time he embarked, when the newspaper flew in front of him. The sluggish flight of newspapers that haven’t been read yet, pursued by the seagulls’ mocking calls. Not since his childhood had he been able to let a printed piece of paper take off like that. Others went after bird nests or bats, but he, Antonio Vidal, went after printed matter. Anything would do so long as it had writing on it. Even toilet paper, strips cut up with no respect for the columns’ order, so he’d soon l
earnt not only to read, but to put the pieces back together. Which helped him to see the world. To spot what was missing.

  Antonio Vidal trapped the newspaper by stepping on its wings. He then picked it up and folded it. Calmed it down. The newspaper was no longer alone, it now had someone to read it. It contained news of important events. A Greek freighter had sunk off the Lobeira Isles in the Corcuvion estuary. There’d been so much fog the members of the crew had been unable to see each other on deck. This was followed by reports of adulterated wine, fishing with dynamite . . . But his eyes were drawn to the section of Telegrams. He had an instinct for the latest news.

  MADRID 15 (23 h.) Parliament extremely dull today. Most MPs went to the bullfight.

  ‘What? You collecting stories from the ground?’

  A strange apparition with a sunlike halo appeared before him. A woman carrying birds on her head. What in fact she was carrying in her basket were newspapers flapping their wings in the sea breeze. The young girl held out her arm, demanding what was hers, with a magnetism in her fingers. Who could say no, it doesn’t belong to you, to someone carrying the weight of the news? He handed back the newspaper and was about to leave when she set down her basket and arranged all the headlines in an extraordinary fan. He stood there while she hawked the news. He’d heard all kinds of things being sold before, animals and fruit at fairgrounds. He’d heard a blind man sing. But never a girl hawking fresh news.

  ‘What? You going to take the lot?’

  His whole body started. He hadn’t been expecting to run into a newspaper seller who was only a girl, early teens at the most, but who spoke like a fully grown woman. She spoke in a way that guarded her body and was dressed like the local fishwives. She might end up selling fish too. If he could contain his surprise, Antonio Vidal might end up seeing fish in that basket. A basket that could carry strawberries and cherries, sea urchins and sardines, depending on the season. But now she was hawking the news in a singsong voice that made her the city centre. If she changed position, the centre would also move.

  ‘Is your hand stuck? Don’t you know how to tell the time?’

  Her last question brought Antonio Vidal back to reality. Over their heads was a scoffing sky, the seagulls’ mocking calls. He counted on his fingertips in his pocket. He’d spent a large amount buying his uncle ‘Doctor Ayala’s Asian Tonic’ and ‘The Miraculous Zephyr’, inventions that were supposed to stop you going bald. He felt he was being guided with a healthy vengeance by his mother’s ghost because in Sucesores de Villar he also bought ‘Carmela’s Miraculous Waters’, a lotion to prevent your hair going grey and to restore its natural colour. His mother insisted, ‘As a boy, he had a receding hairline.’ And added, ‘A receding conscience as well.’ There she stopped and he never wanted to find out more about Uncle Ernesto’s receding conscience. In Havana, he had helped to set up a modern school in Cruceiro de Airas and from the pulpit it was rumoured the emigrants had turned into ‘Masons, Atheists and Protestants’ and were trying to corrupt children. ‘You can’t be all things at once,’ observed Antonio Vidal. ‘You can’t be what?’ ‘A Mason, an Atheist and a Protestant, you can’t be all three things at once.’ ‘You shut up, what do you know?’ his mother, Matilde, told him. ‘Say hello to Uncle Ernesto and then get on with your work, unless you want to end up with a receding hairline too. And don’t go wasting your money.’

  ‘Do you need a bullet extractor?’ asked the newspaper seller.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For your coins.’

  Antonio Vidal scrabbled in his pocket. What he was really looking for were not coins, but some quick, light-footed, low-denomination words to get him out of a tight situation.

  ‘I’ll take one today,’ he said. And then thought better, ‘No, two. Give me the one that was flying away.’

  ‘Lucky me!’ she commented ironically. ‘I found myself a tycoon to support me!’

  ‘I’m off to Cuba, on the steamer Lafayette.’

  ‘How I’d love to own a news-stand in Havana’s Central Park.’

  ‘What do you know about Havana?’

  ‘Everything. Or almost everything. As if I’d been a rich lady sitting in the colonnade of the Inglaterra Hotel. When you get off the boat, don’t go up Prado Avenue. People will laugh at you. And anyone laughing at your accent and beret is a Galician who arrived before and now has a white suit and a dandy white hat. Don’t go up Prado Avenue at least until you’ve got yourself a white suit.’

  The whippersnapper handing out advice. She really seemed like a chatterbox now. Talking nineteen to the dozen, words spilling out of her mouth. All that talking made her look smaller. Vidal decided he’d wasted quite enough time. He forgot about walking to the end of the Iron Quay. He still had to visit his boarding-house and the General Transatlantic Company.

  ‘I’m in a hurry,’ said Antonio Vidal. He folded the two newspapers under his arm and left her gawping.

  ‘Keep them, take them with you!’ she shouted seriously, sensing his distrust. ‘They’ll each open a door for you, you’ll see.’

  She was going to add, ‘I can’t come tomorrow. Tomorrow I have to collect clay on Lapas Beach.’ But she didn’t, he was far away by now. Who cared whether she came tomorrow or not? He hadn’t even asked her name.

  Antonio Vidal felt ridiculous with his bottle of ‘Asian Tonic’ and other lotions to stop your hair falling out. Uncle Ernesto had a full head of hair and a stylish haircut. ‘What you looking at? You like my hair?’ He took it off. ‘Here you go, a genuine wig imported from New York. The best there is. Made from the hair of a virgin Amazonian Indian.’ Having arrived in Havana after a two-week crossing, he still wasn’t sure when his uncle was joking or being serious. But the thick, black wig shone in his hands like jet. ‘This is where progress is, don’t forget,’ Ernesto told him, ‘you’re the one coming from behind.’ Yes, he was coming from behind. What’s more, on the steamer Lafayette, having got over his seasickness, he spent almost all the time astern, watching the ship’s wake and reading the newspapers the girl had sold him. He read them from top to bottom every day of the fourteen the journey lasted, enough to learn everything by heart, including the chapter in the literary supplement that came with El Noroeste. He’d read the supplement with the chapter from Anna Karenina so often it seemed the most real part of the whole newspaper. ‘“Here, if you please,” he said, moving on one side with his nimble gait and pointing to his picture, “it’s the exhortation to Pilate, Matthew, chapter xxvii,” he said, feeling his lips were beginning to tremble with emotion. He moved away and stood behind them.’ Everything he knew about the painter Mihailov was in that chapter, but it was enough, he thought. From this fragment, he’d built up a picture of the novel and was convinced it would be extremely similar to the one the Russian author, Leo Tolstoy, had written. Standing astern, he felt a bit like Mihailov. The newspaper, the ship’s wake, mirrored his guilt. He couldn’t get the girl out of his mind, with her basket of newspapers flapping their wings in the sea breeze.

  This newspaper would end up in the hands of an even more elegant friend of his uncle’s. There was Fermín Varela in the portico of the Inglaterra Hotel, devouring the pages of El Noroeste. Uncle Ernesto was reading it over Varela’s shoulder, a glint in his eyes. Artificial wine? Fishing with dynamite? MPs at a bullfight? He looked at him as if he were to blame. After all, Antonio was the last to arrive. ‘Is ours a country or a scorpion?’

  ‘What can you do?’ asked Fermín Varela.

  ‘A bit of everything.’

  ‘I like the sound of that,’ said Varela.

  ‘That’s the good thing about being born in the sticks,’ observed Uncle Ernesto. ‘You learn a bit of everything.’

  ‘Can you fire a gun?’

  He couldn’t. But he said he could.

  ‘Can you give orders?’

  ‘Give orders?’

  ‘I mean, can you tell other men what to do?’

  He was asking very difficult questions. Antoni
o Vidal had never thought about that, about the possibility of telling others what to do. He’d come in search of a job. He could work hard, without stopping. But giving orders was something else.

  ‘He’ll soon learn, Varela,’ Ernesto intervened. ‘There’s nothing that can’t be learnt.’

  ‘What do you want to do?’

  He tried to suppress it, but a voice replied for him, ‘Own a news-stand in Central Park.’

  They burst out laughing. They hadn’t been expecting such a remark. But then Varela said, ‘It’s not such a bad idea. I like it, Vidal, I like it. You’ve got potential. The future lies in Vedado, that’s the golden rectangle. But for now your fate’s a little further off. I can offer you a job in Mayarí. Go and work for my wife. A bit of everything, like you say. She’ll teach you how to give orders. She’s a real field marshal!’

  Varela spoke with a mixture of irony and boredom.

  ‘Are you not coming, sir?’ asked Vidal.

  ‘It’s time for me to be dirty. I’m fed up of the provinces, my Galician friend. I feel like the people of Havana, now I can’t stand the countryside. You’ll feel the same one day.’

  ‘I come from a village, Mr Varela, well, a crossroads actually.’

  ‘There you go. But who do you think fills the music halls, gets their shoes cleaned twice a day here, in the colonnade of the Inglaterra, has a drink in the square? We all got off the Central Train, so to speak. And we don’t want to go back. Work hard and you’ll earn enough money to put a wrought-iron news-stand right in the middle of Central Park, next to the Diario de la Marina, and still have enough to build yourself a house on Seventeenth Street.’

  ‘What kind of work is it?’ he asked his uncle when they were alone.

  ‘It’s a large estate with wood and cattle in Mayarí,’ replied Ernesto. ‘Remember giving orders also means shutting up. His wife will expect you to give orders and to obey them. She’s the really rich one. And there’s something he didn’t tell you. She’s an educated woman. Reads books and the like. Even prefers them to Varela. What was that about a news-stand in Central Park?’