Books Burn Badly Read online

  From the room, we can see the small gardens with their trees. We can’t set foot inside them. Our key is for one floor only. But now we’re able to run across them, jump over the hedges, come and go with the wind. Pictures are fine, but there’s nothing like a window. Windows are better for framing an embrace. Everything we see belongs to the embrace. The railway, the hoarding, the barbed wire, keep out, the plastic bag lifted up, up, but then falling, nostalgic for its weight, as if searching for what it carried.

  The wind is one and the same, but each tree has its own. They move in different, sometimes opposite directions. Look. Even the branches of a single tree move differently, as if they’ve torn off bits of wind. The birch shakes, is embraced, more than the others. That plane tree still has a few leaves. Another mystery. Almost every tree has a few leaves that don’t fall. They’re there the whole winter and don’t fall. Why not? The rain as well. I mean the rain is one and the same, but each tree, each bush, has its own. The fatness, the gleam of the drops is quite distinct. See how the drops hang after it’s rained. How they settle on the branches, the buds, the tips of the buds. Settle like notes in a score. Not just the trees. Each house has its own rain. Each window. This window.

  Lucky.

  Lucky wind.

  Lucky rain. Notes sliding down the windowpane.

  ‘Lucky you,’ they told me for finding someone like Pementa.

  ‘Lucky,’ murmured Pementa when he found the mole on my back. Lucky. Rocking like a boat on the water bed, he found the mole on my back, the circle of his lips around it, a sucker, his tongue whispering, writing. Lucky. A murmur I heard through my skin, which resounded in the cavern of my chest, alongside my heart, climbed my throat and emerged like a sloe. The black mole opening, ‘Snowdon’, Kew’s rose, the white rose on the way to Elviña, blue wellies, stiletto heels, with the one I like, everything, tossing and turning, black mole, white rose.

  Lucky.

  The Medal

  He was about to open the back door of the house by the marina when someone got ahead of him and opened from inside. That nightmare he sometimes had. Gabriel had seen her only once. They could have been the same age. Except he was the father’s son and she was the wife. Her hair in a bob, smooth and coppery, matched her skirt. Golden locks that were like a continuation of the letters printed on the invitation to the wedding he didn’t attend. Gabriel the Odd sent a cold, irreproachable telegram. Katechon came into his mind. The one who holds back the years, though they’re still there, riding an invisible merry-go-round. ‘No, Ricardo’s not at home. He’s too busy. He had a pressing engagement followed by an important lunch with the directors of the Academy of Political and Moral Sciences, who, as you should know but don’t, are visiting, a token of their appreciation, quite unusual really, despite the fact we live in Madrid. The session will be here, during the summer. They’re to pay him a tribute in the provinces. You can imagine the state he’s in, having just received the Raimundo de Peñafort medal.’

  ‘Yes, apart from the medal, how is he?’

  He shouldn’t have asked this question she was waiting to answer with one of those fateful punches you get in a clinch in the ring.

  With a youthful spirit. Like an ox. Living a second spring. Any one will do.

  ‘Unbearable,’ she said with a triumphant smile, as if she meant a little child. ‘He won’t stop.’

  Yes, in this meeting, she was giving him a good hiding with the back of her tongue. He’d come in search of sin, the stain of history, but it wasn’t going to be cheap as far as she was concerned.

  Another punch.

  ‘He’s in fine fettle. Gets up early every day, when it’s still dark, does his exercises on the bearskin, as you know, works in the study and then attends first Mass. Won’t hear about a siesta. Before lunch, he has a quick doze, a few minutes, what he calls the ram’s sleep.’

  He’s waiting to be asked in. Would you like to come in? But no. She says, ‘I’m sorry not to invite you in, but I was just on my way out. And next time don’t act like a terrorist. Use the front door!’

  She raised her index finger, an apparently spontaneous movement that is aimed at poking out the other’s eye. ‘I’m in a hurry! Ricardo and I are due to have lunch with the board of honour of the Academy of Political and Moral Sciences in recognition of a whole life devoted to Law and Justice. Work that has always been solid, discreet, rigorous, never political or biased. The work of an exemplary civil servant. I’ll tell him you called.’

  Purple Rain

  In La Boîte de Pandora. People betting around the aquarium. Twin dragons fighting. Small fish, large jaws. Destroyed in seconds. The host introduces new combatants with the seriousness of a croupier dealing out cards. Zonzo offers him the house speciality. A drink called Purple Rain. She’s there, singing fados. The reason he came after so long, at nightfall. The effect of her voice: a brush running over his hand, painting a souvenir, walking on soft grass near the cliff face.

  ‘So you’re a judge?’ asks Zonzo.

  ‘Yes. That’s my job.’

  ‘It’s a good job. Meting out justice and all that. But you have to be stricter. The world’s in a terrible state. No moral principles. No authority.’

  ‘How did Manlle die?’

  ‘I don’t know. Don’t know the details. Seems he died in his own way. Slowly.’

  ‘People don’t usually die because of a harpoon.’

  ‘Why not? He was by the sea.’

  Gabriel Samos thinks the conversation will end there. He remembers Zonzo. He’s capable of closing in on himself like a mollusc. There’s no point insisting.

  ‘He shouldn’t have gone,’ says Zonzo surprisingly. ‘But then you know what he was like. No, you don’t. How could you? He wanted to be in all places at once, do everything. What was he doing combing the beach for a lost shipment? Someone had got a hold of the bales, OK, and so what? I heard rumours. Remember that Bible full of banknotes I showed you? He went with it to buy a woman in Brussels central station. A woman from the east. Why’d he have to go? He didn’t. He found out later the woman was missing a toe. Wanted to try her out in a small pension. At his age, he still wanted to do everything. And saw she was missing a toe. He should have let it go. It’s a way women for sale are sometimes branded. So he went back to the central station, wanted to reverse the agreement, to get the Bible back with its banknotes. He’d been buying a woman who was whole. He wanted to do everything. Ended up with a harpoon stuck in his chest. I don’t know who it was.’

  ‘Your mother sings better than ever.’

  ‘She comes from time to time.’

  ‘I remember she was always at the window.’

  ‘Still is. Watching out for boats.’

  ‘Customs patrol boats?’

  ‘No.’ Ironically, ‘yachts.’

  Coccinella septempunctata

  Gennevilliers National Theatre, spring 1994

  He was awake the whole night. Couldn’t get the bill out of his head. Read the reviews, which were favourable, some of them enthusiastic. The woman with the hoarse voice was playing King Lear. Three hours on stage, six days a week. He was actually quite grateful not to have got a ticket the first few days. He’d use them to see other things in Paris without the stifling heat. He remembered one August when he’d managed to survive a trip to the Botanic Gardens and Père Lachaise Cemetery. He thought he could still see the acrylic memory of those touristic footsteps sticking to the pavements. But most of all he viewed the delay as a kind of mourning. He took the most sensitive evidence out of his suitcase: the books with burnt edges and a survivor’s vitality. Then a copy of a document with lists of confiscated and imprisoned books. Incomplete lists since disappeared, burnt books, deceased books, had not been included. Several postcards from Durtol Sanatorium. A magnifying glass. The books he’d brought had not been chosen for their literary or bibliographical value. He’d let his hand pick them out. The first books he’d read in the section of charred remains. The start of his secret
induction. He planned to tell her how the books from 12 Panadeiras Street had resisted. Lots had fallen. But some had survived the flames, the dampness of the dungeons, the robbers in the Palace of Justice. The books he’d brought had something else in common: Santiago Casares’ stylish signature, an elegant calligraphic portrait. Anthropomorphic.

  He went to 168 Rue de Vaugirard and tried to glimpse the sixth floor. He was tempted to climb the stairs and ask who was living in the dovecot, the garret that was their first home in exile. But he checked his detective’s instinct. Then, at midday, took a taxi and decided to visit the Rue Asseline.

  He made a mistake.

  He passed in front of her house. Thought he heard the sound of the news on television. But couldn’t see anything from the street. There was a window with a net curtain and a thicker cloth curtain behind. He could ring the doorbell, but he didn’t have the books with him. It’d been a furtive incursion, a strong wish to visit the Rue Asseline and see where 12 Panadeiras Street had got to, where the dramatic corridor of history led to. He’d left everything back in the hotel. It’d be ridiculous to turn up now and stammer out a story with nothing to support it. What would she think? She’d be suspicious of someone arriving out of the blue, stirring up the embers. A judge, son of a Francoist judge, who’d come to talk about extant books. Maybe not. Maybe she’d have a taste for such surprises. Someone who in her twenties had played Death in Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus and in her seventies still had it in her to play King Lear had to be brave.

  He entered a Portuguese eating-house on the corner. Most of the customers were building labourers or mechanics, depending on their work clothes. He fancied eating in a place like this, wine served in a jug, not in a bottle, oilskin tablecloths. He sat down next to a window. And then saw her. Saw her approach the Portuguese restaurant. His mistake was not to stop looking. Most of the workers glanced at her when she came in. Some of them probably knew her. Though there was nothing about her to draw attention. Just herself. She was wearing ankle boots, trousers and a dark blue jersey. Hair cut short, grey. She entered with discretion, but her eyes came on stage. The presence of a woman it wasn’t necessary to ask if she was alone. A wild, roving look.

  Which is why Gabriel Samos made the mistake of staring at her. Not deliberately. He simply didn’t realise. She did. She realised. Gave him a serious look while lighting a cigarette, perhaps so she wouldn’t have to address the ogler. He became embarrassed. Instead of taking a step forwards, tried to hide it. Without saying a word or moving a piece, opened the pit of the intruder.

  The performance of The Tragedy of King Lear at Gennevilliers National Theatre was sold out for this night and the next. A woman, María Casares, was playing the legendary king. The reviews had been highly favourable. Talked of her energy, her hoarse voice, her face carved out on the stormy stage. She’d acted in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth. Lear was waiting. And now she was Lear, the king named after a Celtic sea-god. María always thought in terms of nature for a role. The sea was strong and melancholy, impulsive and sweet, brutal and loving. She found her ideal of mature beauty in the weather-beaten faces of those who inhabited Atlantic shores. Since she couldn’t be in Galicia, she was sorry not to live in Brittany. But the theatre itself was a Finisterre, a windy outcrop. In her early seventies, she’d finally acquired the look of an old sea lady.

  The books her family had taken on their last trip from Coruña to Madrid, which had accompanied her into exile, included volumes of works by Shakespeare, Valle-Inclán, Manuel Curros Enríquez. This had been her father’s favourite poet. A memory that goes with her everywhere. Not a relentless ghost, but a place made of voice she returns to when necessary. The feeling is warm and strange. An exile within an exile. To send her to sleep, her father recites Galician Melody. Recites fragments from Curros’ Airs of My Land, verses he knows off by heart, which seem to come not from the memory that plays with elevated notes, but from another corner, a deep cave.

  ‘Another beakful?’

  ‘Go on then!’

  He calls each stanza this, the amount of food a bird carries in its beak for its chicks. María thinks it’s the verses that remind her of him, of Santiago, as he murmurs them next to her bed in the twilight. When she was a girl, her father had periods of frenetic activity followed by bouts of illness. The Melody’s verses are like lines drawn on a face that takes shape as they’re spoken. Lines that contain the mystery of life: what’s hidden behind the eyes. As when she went with her mother to visit him in Madrid’s Modelo Prison. She was eight. He’d been arrested for participating in the clandestine Republican government during Berenguer’s regime, which supported the monarchy. She was horrified. What she saw was the ghost of her father. A bag of bones suffering from consumption and imprisonment. Everything had changed. There was no warm home. The only thing that remained was what was hidden behind the eyes. Which is why the Melody doesn’t rock her to sleep, it makes her more alert, keeps her company. The Melody remembers for her. Wherever she may be. In the dovecot on the Rue de Vaugirard. In La Vergne, her house in Charente. On the Rue Asseline. On all her artistic tours, in the loneliness that follows her artistic triumphs. She has photos, postcards, letters, small personal belongings she keeps like talismans or relics. But nothing like those verses that escaped the burning, the pillage. Something no murderous tyrant or governor can imagine. A Melody protected by the mouth’s dampness or, as her father, Santiago, would say, kept in a corner of the occipital ark. A Melody that talks of the siren (who has song), the snake (who has breath) and God (who has hell).

  You have enough

  with what is hidden

  in those eyes of yours.

  Shakespeare was fortunate to make that journey from Coruña to Madrid when her father was appointed minister. He stayed alive. Then accompanied them into exile. Was now on the main bookshelf in the house on the Rue Asseline. She needed to have those books always in sight, within reach. She liked the way they weighed like arks or flagstones. They contained all the others. All the deceased books from 12 Panadeiras Street. When she agreed to act the part of King Lear in her early seventies, she reread the play in one of the volumes that had been saved. Ran her finger along each line. In Madrid, her father had a secretary who read books she loved like this, churning up words with her long varnished fingernail. Her finger ploughed the furrow of words as if she were reading not only with her eyes, but also by touch. María had heard her father mention a captain in the army who learnt Braille so that he could read in the dark when on campaign. She felt darkly pleased when they suggested she represent King Lear. The same feeling she had during the end-of-summer storms, when the rafters of the sky over Paris gave way. Finally the clouds of the Atlantic carrying the sea were here. Écoute, Paris! She was carrying the storm on top of her head. The unsettling joy of the first downpour after the drought. It’d been more than fifty years since she left Madrid and went into exile. The first thing she did was pull down the volume and run her eyes along the rail of her index finger:

  The weight of this sad time we must obey;

  Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

  The oldest hath borne most: we that are young

  Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

  María can see the faces in the audience, faces determined to believe in the truth of the legend, convinced that what’s been said has something to do with the times they live in.

  The audience? She always chooses a face. Her mark, she calls it.

  Gabriel’s convinced she’s looking at him. Some actors use this method. Seek out a reference point, a face they can address in the audience. But why him of all people? He’s sitting in the third row. Is tempted to look away. Perhaps it’s a false impression. Perhaps María Casares’ look deliberately has this vague precision. Is able to take in each and every face in the audience. That must be it. But no. She’s looking at him. He’s sure of it. He can feel the parcel on his thighs, under his folded coat. A small package containing three boo
ks and the report written in 1955 by the Inspector of Archives for the Northwest, a civil servant who seems punctilious, but omits his name. All he needs is for the contents to move, to give off smoke. In the hotel, he went over everything. In preparation for the symbolic return.

  She, Lear, stares at him:

  Thou art the thing itself:

  unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor bare,

  forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings!

  come unbutton here.

  That night, as she left Gennevilliers National Theatre, María Casares was handed several letters and notes from spectators. And a parcel. It could be said she had a premonition, but not enough time to give it shape. The first thing she saw, in large letters, was the return address: ‘12 Panadeiras Street’. And, by way of stamp, a drawing of a ladybird.

  Working for Eternity

  ‘You’ve a visitor, Francisco!’ shouted Aphrodite from the door. She and the porter wheeled a bed into the other half of the room. Polka saw everything in large blots verging on diffused clarity, exactly the opposite of what he’d always imagined blindness to be, a progressive and definitive sinking into darkness. What he perceived of his new hospital companion was a white head and nothing else. Then Aphrodite, as he called the nurse, that woman who had the grace to be cheerful and pleasant, drew a curtain between the two beds, creating two compartments.

  ‘He’s a bigwig,’ the nurse whispered to Polka, ‘a judge. Had a heart attack too. Has just come out of Intensive Care. Will soon get his own room. He has influence. He’s a chosen one.’