Books Burn Badly Read online

  Zamorana is not really a beggar. She has a job paid for by tips that is very important for the city. Coruña’s late departed look out to sea. Near the shore by the cemetery are the Ánimas shoals, the best breeding grounds, with more starfish on the bottom than can be seen in the sky. Though they can also be spotted falling from on high. Seagulls and cormorants fly with starfish in their beaks, so the starfish jettison their captive limb and return to the sea an arm short. The cemetery affords the best view of the mouth of the bay. And this has something to do with Zamorana, who asked Curtis for a light the night he spent by the graveyard. The beggarwoman is a sentinel. When a liner comes into sight, she goes down Torre Street, warning of the boat’s arrival. A liner is full of rich pickings. Zamorana’s voice sounds like a husky conch shell. ‘Boat’s coming, Mr Ferreiro, boat’s coming . . . Boat’s coming, Mr Ben, boat’s coming . . . Boat’s coming.’

  Zamorana emerges with her ditty about a boat’s arrival, and she emerges from the cemetery, not from any old place. Curtis recalls how when he was a boy, Zamorana was already old, already announced boats in her husky voice. He thought she and others like her lasted for ever. María Pita, for example. The procession of country dead remained at the city gates. And the seaside cemetery’s occupants delegated the lighthouse and Zamorana’s husky conch to rouse the city: ‘Boat’s coming.’

  The reason Vicente Curtis, otherwise known as Hercules, is thinking about Zamorana is because she’s standing by the Parrote viewpoint. Besides the arsonists, she’s the only discernible presence. She’s unmistakable. She’s wearing all the skirts she owns, the skirts of a lifetime, one on top of the other, so she looks like a female bell. Some ships arrived yesterday. Warships. They’re moored next to the yacht club and are part of the Third Reich’s fleet. She saw them coming, but didn’t go down Torre Street, singing her ditty, ‘Boat’s coming, boat’s coming!’ She watches. She’s seen many things. But not that kind of fire. She’s never read a book. There was a time, perhaps her happiest, when she sold newspapers. She hawked news though she couldn’t read. That’s why she thinks they’re hurting her. Going against her. They’re burning what she never had, what she always needed. There’s something strange about the smoke, it stings, gets behind the eyes. Reminds her of a time she’d rather forget. The day a stranger set fire to the blanket she was sleeping rough under, the day she put out her flaming hair with her hands. And now her hands are scars healed by the sea. That’s why she decided to sleep among the tombs. Where are the readers of books? Why are they taking so long?

  ‘Oy you, old witch, what you looking at? Get out of here!’ shouts one of the soldiers. ‘Go find yourself a billy-goat on Mount Alto!’

  She never kept quiet. This Cain had better listen up. She was going to tell him a thing or two. Put a few things straight. Have it out with him, face to face.

  This strange smoke that gets behind the eyes. This itching. The smoky torch. The fire. The smell of fire in her hair. She burnt once already. The skin’s memory. The scars’ itching. She moves off. Better to keep the peace. She returns to her tombs, trailing her bell of cloth. All the skirts of a lifetime.

  The book fires are not part of the city’s memory. They’re happening now. So this burning of books isn’t taking place in some distant past or in secret. Nor is it a fictional nightmare thought up by some apocalyptic. It’s not a novel. This is why the fire progresses slowly, because it has to overcome resistance, the arsonists’ incompetence, the unusualness of burning books. The absentees’ incredulity. It’s obvious the city has no memory of this lazy, stubborn smoke moving through the air’s surprise. Even what’s not been written has to burn. Someone arrives from the local tourist office, carrying a pile of leaflets with the programme of festivities, ‘fresh meat’ they call it, possibly in reference to the woman bathing on the front cover under the heading Ideal Climate and the town’s official coat of arms, the lighthouse with an open book on top acting as a lamp giving off beams of light. All this will burn slowly, the design as well, which won’t make it back on to the city’s escutcheon.

  ‘Plato’s Republic. About time! What’s this? An Encyclopedia of Meat!’ Bam!

  It’s a thick volume that sends embers flying and eats away the angles of ruins like the sudden collapse of a seam on lower buildings. The word ‘meat’ was enough to activate the throw. The head imagines a treatise on lust, pictures of orgies, shame not to have had a peek. When the volume reaches the end of its fall, the Falangist gives it a little kick on the corner with the toecap of his boot. As it opens, with a new eruption of smoke and cinders and the first flames, what meets the eyes is a two-page map of the peninsula with the different provinces shown in colours. The effect is too causal, an accidental jerk of the boot, which the eyes hasten to correct. No, they’re not the provinces of Spain. It soon becomes obvious it’s really an illustration of the different parts of a cow. Loin, sirloin, hock, coccyx, rump, rib, brisket . . .

  ‘What you’ve thrown in there is a book of recipes!’ comes a mocking voice from behind.

  ‘Then it’ll make a nice barbecue.’

  The fires are in the most public part of the city, opposite the symbolic seat of civil power. Hercules shouldn’t head in that direction because Hercules is far better known than he thinks. But for now he’s in luck. He approaches the fires and none of the operators, all of them armed and dressed in the Falange’s uniform, pays him any attention, taken up as they are with the problem of books burning badly. One of them likens them to bricks. And then attaches a geometrical clarification even he finds strange:

  ‘They’re parallelepipeds!’

  Next to him, the youngest soldier wishes to repeat the long word, but realises it isn’t easy and tries whispering it. It sounds like the name of a very rare species of bird. More complicated than palmipedes. He doesn’t have any problems with that, with palmipedes, and looks at the pyre without reading the titles, like an abstraction, like the model of an Aztec pyramid.

  ‘Pa-ra-lle-le-pi-peds! That’s it. Parallelepipeds.’

  He finally got it. He feels better now.

  ‘Parallelepiped!’ says the sergeant, slapping him on the back.

  ‘Parallelepiped,’ he replies proudly, following the trail of smoke and gazing up at the sky. Encouraged by his success, he tries to remember the names of clouds he studied at school. All he remembers is nimbus. What’s a nimbus? What kind of cloud is made by the smoke rising from the pyres? But he stops thinking about clouds because the one who likened the resistance of the books to bricks and pronounced the word ‘parallelepiped’ with incredible ease is preparing to fan the fire with some sheets of newspaper. One of them slips out of his hands and flies like a palmiped. A strange bird, the beginnings of a collage in the sky. Curtis also follows the sheet through the air. The soldier who lost it runs after it, jumps and traps it in the claw of his hand. Looks smug. Calls the others over. There they are with arms upraised in a photo taken yesterday, when they lit the first fires, which the clerical daily El Ideal Gallego printed today, 19 August 1936: ‘On the seashore, so that the sea can carry off the remains of so much misery and corruption, the Falange is burning heaps of books.’

  It’s a strange kind of fire, this, Curtis thinks to himself. Its tongue is invisible. It’s a fire that chews, with canines.

  Not long before, at the end of June, huge festive bonfires had been erected in the city to celebrate St John’s Eve. Curtis had been one of a group of boys and young men from Sol Street who collected dried branches, worm-eaten pieces of furniture that held themselves together with the dignity of geometrical spectres and the usual donation of wooden remains, broken planks, disjointed limbs, from the highly active Orzán window factory. The structure they raised around the central post was reminiscent of the large stacks of maize that could be seen in winter, conical formations like those in Indian settlements, in the villages of Mariñas and Bergantiños, the countryside that opened up as soon as you left the city’s isthmus, from San Roque de Afóra, San Cristovo
das Viñas, San Vicente de Elviña and Santa María de Oza to the fertile valleys of the River Monelos and Meicende, Eirís, Castro, Mesoiro, Feáns, Cabana, Someso, Agrela, Gramalleira, Silva and Fontenova. But these stacks were never burnt. Once the maize had been husked, it was used as fodder for the cattle during the long, hard winter and for the warp of the land. The image of American Indian settlements belonged to Curtis, who associated tepees with the way the maize stalks were arranged after the harvest. But burning books was new to him. The bonfires this year had burnt well and the fire’s final smell had been of sardine fat soaking maize bread, for such was the fire’s destiny, to cook fish and ward off evil spirits. Which is why you had to leap over it seven times.

  But this fire is different. It’s not for leaping over. There aren’t any children around it. This also is a way of distinguishing fires, whether they’re for jumping over or not.

  Curtis wasn’t sure he’d jumped over the fire on Sol Street seven times on St John’s Eve. He’d certainly jumped more than once. Now he was sorry he hadn’t counted. He had been in a good mood and felt like talking. Not just because his first fight was coming soon. His opponent was someone called Manlle. He had also informed anyone who wanted to listen of two important pieces of news. The first, that his friend, Arturo da Silva, Galicia’s flamboyant lightweight champion, had found him a job as an apprentice climatic electrician.

  ‘Climatic?’

  ‘That’s right, climatic. Heat the cinemas in winter and then cool them in the summer. And install large fridges up and down the country so that there’s always something to eat.’

  ‘That’s fantastic, Curtis. A real revolution.’

  But equally important to Curtis had been the second piece of news. This year, he let it be known, on Sunday 2 August, a special train would depart for the Caneiros festivities. And everyone there, their mouths trimmed with sardine scales, listened intently because a trip upriver, to Caneiros, in the heart of the forest, was the most enthralling excursion for miles around, in a country that knew how to celebrate. Leica said that Curtis had a photographic memory. A shutterless camera. And now he was focusing on life. That’s right, he added, he himself had tickets for the special train, which included the trip by boat and a buffet.

  ‘A buffet?’ asked someone who’d drawn close to the Sol Street bonfire. ‘What the hell is a buffet?’

  Curtis had a photographic memory so, given his role as impromptu spokesperson for the event, he decided to borrow a phrase Holando had used.

  ‘It’s a sort of Pantagruelian meal.’

  ‘And what’s in that alien meal?’

  Curtis wasn’t entirely sure what Holando had meant. But he’d liked the phrase and understood what he was trying to say not just from his ruddy expression, but because of the word itself, which was fulsome and whose meaning seemed to dance on top of its letters.

  ‘Pantagruelian is Pantagruelian, as its name indicates.’

  ‘Lots of it?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you say so, so that people can understand?’

  ‘It’s a question of culture, right, Curtis?’

  ‘That’s right, culture. And there’ll be lectures too.’

  ‘Lectures? Hmmm. Don’t scare everybody off! A party’s a party.’

  ‘They’re before the meal. To give you an appetite.’

  ‘All right then. It’s not just the rich who’ll partake of a bit of culture.’

  ‘Caneiros is an excursion the dead would go on if they could,’ underlined another.

  ‘That’s right,’ Curtis agreed, ‘and I can get you tickets. This year, there’s a special train. That’s right, a special train.’ He liked to repeat it because he thought, as he gave the information, he could hear the departing whistle and the engine’s eager optimism as it pulled out. And then they were on the boat, the Atlantic tide returning the river to its sources and the bagpiper Polka playing an aubade on the stern.

  Three pesetas each. And he could get them tickets for the special train to Caneiros.

  Vicente Curtis realised he’d never wondered where the material books are made of came from. No, he wasn’t thinking about ideas, doctrines and dreams. He knew that books had something to do with trees. There was a relation. It could be said somehow or other – and as he walked towards the pyres, he clarified his thoughts – that’s right, we could say that books come from nature. It might not even be false or exaggerated to say that books are a kind of graft. Though that would be to speak in metaphors. This was one of the things that had impressed him about Arturo da Silva, Galicia’s lightweight champion, that his head was full of metaphors. He wasn’t known for this, he was known for his hook, feared like a cobra, and for how he moved, his tireless dancing during fights. His celebrated jig. At this point in his recollections, as the first gust from the fires reached him, so similar it seemed to the leaves in autumn, a smile flickered across Curtis’ face as he heard Arturo da Silva reply to a journalist’s question in a teasing voice, ‘My jig? Don’t tell me you’re one of those who come to see a boxer’s legs!’ The second wave was the smell of untimely smoke, the mournful, afflicted smell of things that won’t burn, it reminded him of the damp, discordant smoke of green wood or the unwilling smoke of sawdust and the remnants of formwork, a fire that hides, grows cold. He knew it well because it signified bad weather and drowning. But he carried on. He knew how much Arturo da Silva loved those books. The people carrying and throwing them called out the source of their spoils, as if a guarantee of origin would give the flames the stimulus they needed, ‘Germinal Library! Hercules Cultural Association! New Era Libertarian Association! Galician Torch of Free Thinking!’ The soldier who seemed to be in charge of the fires, since he was the one others consulted, who from time to time read out titles and origins with gusto but also with nuances, like someone pronouncing a final judgement or a last word, is a man who is devoted to his mission, focused on the sacrifice, who eagerly accepts a copy a joyfully exultant colleague has run across to give him, holding it open by the flyleaves, open, that’s it, and pinned down like someone who’s just caught a rare lepidopteron and is taking it to the leader of the expedition. Time runs around like a stiff breeze, flaps its wings over the pyres and then stops. Everything now hangs on the decree. Finally the supervisor cries out, ‘My word, it’s a Casaritos!’

  He pores over the guarantee of authenticity, the distinguishing mark, the ex-libris that matches the owner’s signature.

  ‘Yes, well done. It’s a genuine Casaritos!’

  Curtis knows who he’s talking about. He knows who the supervisor is referring to by this diminutive he relishes with pleasurable disdain. On one occasion, on Panadeiras Street, next to the Capuchins’ myrtle, his mother pointed out Santiago Casares Quiroga, the Republican leader, to him and then boasted, ‘We’re practically neighbours.’ Then, however, Curtis had paid attention not to Casares, whom he already knew as the Man with the Red Buick and the yacht Mosquito, but to the woman and girl accompanying him. The woman wore her hair down in a mahogany blaze while the girl, unusually for her age, wore a white velvet cap with a hairnet, which covered her dancing curls. The Woman with the Mahogany Hair smiled, adopting a pose Terranova would have termed ‘a natural close-up’, while the Girl with the Hairnet seemed preoccupied, her presence austere and even surly. She kept looking back as if she feared that some of those applauding, since many of the people on the pavement had burst into spontaneous applause, would turn into a mob, snatch her cap and abduct her parents. The rest of the time, she stared at the ground absent-mindedly. Casares’ shoes were black and white like a tap-dancer’s. Curtis was convinced that if he showed the soles for a moment, they’d be as shiny as the rest, polished like an upside-down mirror. It wasn’t long before they became the object of the couple and their daughter’s attention. Curtis’ mother was carrying a rolled-up mattress on her head. The mattress had a red damask cover and Curtis’ mother was content. She smiled at the couple and their daughter. This ge
sture had the effect of cheering the girl, who was surprised, intrigued by a woman smiling with such a load on top of her head. Curtis was also content. He was carrying a blue damask mattress. But he was used to that. The first thing he’d learnt in the street was that he was the son of a whore.

  ‘Hercules, son of a whore!’

  There was Hercules Lighthouse, Hercules Cinema, Hercules Café, Hercules Transport, Hercules Insurance. The city had a myriad Hercules. Why did he have to be precisely Hercules son of a whore?

  No sooner had he emerged into the street than he heard the drone of that nickname. He heard insults and would have liked them to pass on by, to fly far away from him. But the nicknames clustered around him like wasps. And sometimes they stung him. Died, stuck to his skin. So as a small boy Vicente Curtis understood that, just as his mother carried a mattress on her head, he carried another being on his shoulders. His nickname. Hercules, son of a whore. The difference between one Curtis and the other was that Curtis the carrier looked permanently mystified while Hercules, the other Curtis, was indomitable. Years later, when he was a travelling photographer and had a wooden horse, the mystified and indomitable took turns to be cameraman or invisible horseman. Which is why Hercules sometimes didn’t talk or talked to himself. Before the war, when he was a promising boxer, the boy who held the champ of Galicia’s gloves for him, his friends couldn’t understand why he minded being called ‘Hercules’. He would have preferred ‘Maxim’ or ‘The Corner’. Even ‘Tough Guy’ was better, which is what Terranova the singer called him. But not Hercules. He didn’t like it. ‘What do you mean, you don’t like Hercules, you fool?’ they said to him. ‘That’s how you were born. You know nothing about honour. Just imagine the poster: “Today, Saturday, in Coruña Bullring, star combat: Vicente Curtis ‘Hercules’ versus . . .”’

  ‘He has another daughter,’ said Milagres suddenly. ‘He has another daughter studying abroad. He’s a good man.’

  He had another daughter and was a good man. Curtis felt as if he were missing part of the story. So he waited for Milagres to catch her breath. When you’re carrying a mattress on top of your head, even if the cover is damask, it’s not easy to go into great detail.