Books Burn Badly Read online

  ‘The Divine Sketch is by Curros!’ said the supervisor without having to look, which impressed his subordinate.

  The queries were few and far between. There wasn’t much selection. Books were unloaded in heaps or thrown haphazardly from boxes. When one did emerge from anonymity, like a face emerging from a common grave, the reading aloud of its title conferred on it a dying distinction, the ultimate proof that the title was actually a good one, since there was that cretin, in his own words, Parallelepiped, with certain pomp, asking about it. Here perhaps, unlike with others that gave rise to jokes, the allusion to the divine made his hands itch. Until that moment, he hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to the meaning of the titles, only to the humour in them. He hadn’t discriminated between them. So it was no surprise he should now think there was something strange in his having picked up one that spoke of ‘the divine’ alongside ‘sketch.’ The one that referred to God to ask if he existed shouldn’t be allowed to exist for another second. But this one, The Divine Sketch, suggested the idea of a superior laugh. And he liked to laugh. To laugh at danger as well. He had guts, you might even say he was hardened. Before the military uprising achieved its purpose, he’d been involved with a group of trained gunmen in acts of provocation aimed at destabilising the Republic. On one occasion, they’d broken up a meeting and someone had been shot. It took him some time to believe that he’d done it. And he never really accepted the fact. He’d been shocked. In his view, the amount of blood a wounded man can lose bore no relation to the simple act of pulling a trigger. After a few days, it became less important. Now it wasn’t important at all. Now even winning the war wasn’t enough. The idea of war itself had little to say. Things had advanced to another stage. Beyond war.

  ‘Manuel Curros Enríquez, that’s right.’

  The Falangist, whom everyone now calls Parallelepiped, remembers why the name sounds familiar. The city’s largest sculpture is dedicated to Curros. He must have done something. In the gardens, surrounded by a lake. Very near there. He noticed it because on top of the monument is a naked woman rising triumphantly into the sky. Now that’s a monument. Were it not for the new Post Office, the woman could see the fires. Amazing what you can do with stone. Afterwards he’ll have to go and have another look. At the stone slut.

  ‘What? What shall I do with this one? Under house arrest?’

  Curtis guessed that the authority of the man who decided the destiny of books derived not just from his position in the hierarchy, but from the fact he read a lot and was what is generally termed ‘a man of culture’. In fact, he didn’t stop reading and consulting books, some of them rescued from the flames. While his subordinates carried out the burning, egging each other on with jokes and directing insults at particularly obnoxious titles, their boss circulated. He went from group to group, issuing the same instruction under his breath, ‘Any copies of Scripture, in particular the New Testament, let me know at once.’

  Now he frowns.

  ‘You can throw The Divine Sketch in the fire!’

  Parallelepiped moves his arm like a lever, releases his fingers and drops the book without further ado. Then unconsciously, either because his last memory of the sculpture is of water bubbling on stone or because his skin senses rather than feels an itch, what the boy in uniform does is shake his hands and rub them on his trousers. And then he falls quiet.

  With the passing of time, the initial funeral procession of mockery turns into a routine, an industrial-scale burning, which must have something to do with the increasingly thick smoke, a tactile, sticky stench that suggests to Curtis one last metaphor. The books had come down from the trees and fallen into the trap of some men with viscous arms. So, from close up, the embers at the bottom of the fire resembled a cluster of birds reduced to ashen silhouettes and glowing yellow or orange beaks. Had Arturo da Silva been here, the books wouldn’t be burning, thought Curtis. Or perhaps they were burning because he wasn’t here. The fact they were burning was further proof of his loss. And Curtis’ mind, which in Arturo’s words was a spiral staircase, ascended, or descended, another step. It was the boxer from Shining Light, the writer of Brazo y Cerebro, who was burning. The books’ last smell was of flesh.

  ‘Revista de Occidente. Federico García Lorca. New York (Office and Denunciation). What have we here?’

  The name sounded familiar to Parallelepiped. He hadn’t read anything by him, but he’d heard lots of jokes about him under the heading ‘red queens’. In a Fascist publication, one of those papers he did read, there was always a stubborn misprint in the second surname: García Loca or ‘madwoman’.

  He opened it up. Adopted a humorous tone:

  Under the multiplications

  is a drop of duck’s blood

  Shit! He didn’t read any more. The drop of duck’s blood changed his voice. He looked away and made an effort to shout:

  ‘Boss! There’s a Lorca here.’

  He threw it with obvious hatred into the middle of the volcano, which spewed out black smoke and shiny sparks.

  He took another handful. Meanwhile his boss had approached. The first of the new lot was a slim volume, the only illustration a single scallop shell in the centre.

  ‘Six Galician Poems! Fe-de-ri-co . . . What’s this? Can’t they leave each other alone?’

  He turned to face his boss with the book held out and a look of disgust.

  ‘Samos! Did this faggot also write in Galician?’

  His boss lingered over the cover, though young Parallelepiped thought there was hardly much to read. Six Galician Poems by Federico García Lorca. Foreword E. B. A. Nós Publishing House. Compostela. Samos may have been investigating those dots after the letters. Deciphering those initials. He leafed through it slowly, page by page. Parallelepiped tossed the other books while watching Samos. What’s he up to? Is he going to read the whole thing?

  Locks that go out to sea,

  where the clouds their glittering dovecot keep

  The book danced in his hands. He looked at the boy observing him steadily, waiting for some informed remark.

  ‘He spent some time here,’ said the supervisor, ‘with a theatre company, Barraca. Yes, he was right here. I think he made a lot of friends. The book’s recent. Under a year.’

  ‘That was another age, Comrade Samos,’ declared the young boy.

  A year. The phrase Parallelepiped used was of someone measuring an astronomical distance. The look of someone abolishing time. He was right. After all, he knew how to measure what was happening. It was a month to the day since the war had started. The first month of Year I.

  The war had changed all concept of time. The war had changed many things, but above all measures of duration. Nós Publishing House. He could have given him a lecture, but it didn’t exist any more. It had no future and it wouldn’t have any past either. That was where Galicianist Republicans hung out, those who had this stupid idea of a federal Spain. The publisher was Ánxel Casal. Mayor of Santiago de Compostela. Or rather ex-mayor. In a dungeon right now. Like Coruña’s mayor, Alfredo Suárez Ferrín. He felt something like vertigo to think that these two figures of the Republic, democratically elected mayors, had been imprisoned as enemies of the nation. But the vertigo was exciting, intoxicating. He’d finally arisen from inaction, from a bland form of Christianity. He could shout as during the Crusades, ‘God wills it!’ And in fact this is how, with a warlike cry, he’d ended a short speech at the local branch of the Falange, which now had a large skull painted on the wall. Yes, he felt the telepathic force of Carl Schmitt, his new, revered master. It was naive to believe in a telepathy of words, but not of ideas. In the thesis he was preparing on Donoso Cortés, concerning the dictatorship, he’d noted down an idea he later discovered in one of Schmitt’s texts: a state of emergency was to law what a miracle was for theology. Since the machinery of conspiracy had been set in motion and above all since he’d felt the itching in his brain that came from holding a weapon in his hand that afternoon when Dez invited him
to military training on the beach, since then he’d been accompanied every day by the image of Heidegger, the Nazi Rector of Freiburg University, giving the order to descend to Plato’s cave to requisition the projector of ideas. Yes, he knew them. He knew Casal. Compostela’s mayor had been born in Coruña and founded his publishing house there. His wife, María Miramontes, was a well-known designer. His mother, Pilar, had even ordered her famous dress of black chiffon with black velvet grapes from her. The mother’s final act of daring. Needless to say, Casal and Miramontes were friends with Luís Huici, the artistic tailor, the inventor of incredible double-breasted waistcoats and broad-shouldered jackets which were so popular with Coruña’s Bohemians. Waistcoats, ideas. He’d got the young drunk with his speeches at Germinal. Right now, Huici was probably tasting castor oil in the barracks of the Falange.

  He gave the book back to Parallelepiped, ‘You can throw it!’ Parallelepiped might have wondered why he didn’t throw it himself though, given the circumstances, that would have been a strange thought. So he just carried out the order. Should somebody ever write a history of the burning of books in Coruña, they could add a non-gratuitous detail: Ánxel Casal and Federico García Lorca were murdered that same morning. The Galician publisher in a ditch outside Santiago, in Cacheiras, and the Granadine poet in the gully of Víznar, Granada. At about the same time, six hundred miles apart.

  The book landed on some copies of Man and the Earth by the geographer Élisée Reclus. It was still there, safe for the moment, on those sort of rocks which formed a mountain range the fire ascended. Samos kept looking at it. He was sometimes superstitious and trusted his instinct. Now he was thinking this little book could one day be a rarity. A work printed in the Galician language might become a relic. A first edition of the Six Poems would be as valuable as a medieval parchment.

  ‘What? Feeling sorry for it?’ Parallelepiped asked him.

  Prattler, thought Samos. But right now he didn’t mind him being so nosy.

  ‘Not sorry,’ he said. ‘Those initials! I’ve just remembered why they could be useful to me. See if you can fetch it . . .’

  ‘Here it is, boss. Just in time.’

  ‘In extremis,’ said Samos with a sigh.

  ‘In extremis,’ whispered Parallelepiped. He was learning lots, he thought, while the books burnt. That’s it, in extremis.

  ‘Wells, Wells, Wells!’

  There’s a flurry of activity.

  ‘Wells, Wells, Wells!’ shouts the one we already know as Parallelepiped, throwing a book each time he imitates a dog’s bark.

  ‘More Wells! There’s lots of him. Wells, Wells, Wells!’

  For a moment, for the briefest of moments, when he heard that mocking onomatopoeia – ‘Wells, Wells, Wells!’ three books into the fire – there was an acidic reaction somewhere in Samos’ digestive system, which caused him a slight indisposition, a rumbling in the bowels, part of which involved remembering fragments from The War of the Worlds, not as they were, but in Héctor Ríos’ penetrating voice, ‘Does time pass when there are no human hands left to wind the clocks?’ It’s Easter 1931. They’re in the Craftsmen’s Circle, in a group of declamation and amateur theatre directed by Ríos, who is studying already at Santiago University, in the Faculty of Law. Two years older, he’s in front of Samos, but they still work together at weekends on that project that so excited them to begin with. A radio version of The War of the Worlds. ‘The radio’s an extraordinary invention,’ asserts Ríos. ‘It’ll transform communication, culture, everything. It’ll cross borders through the air. Coruña Radio is due to start broadcasting soon.’

  ‘Wells, Wells, Wells! Out the door, and you’re not coming back.’

  Samos felt bad and was about to say something. Pull him up. Why did he have to be so uncouth? He was going to ask him to be a little more polite. A bit of culture, please. You don’t have to bark. But he realised the absurdity of such an order at that time. They’d all burst out laughing. That’s a good one. Some of the older soldiers might recall the impresario Lino’s historic intervention in his Pavilion of Spectacles when, at a charity performance in the presence of some nuns, he attempted to subdue the top gallery, ‘Manners, gentlemen! Manners! There are ladies in the audience, some of whom are even decent. Ho, ho, ho. Your manners, please!’

  But he didn’t say anything. The gripes were building like an inner storm. He had to suppress his body’s rebellion. The upset of some scruples. He addressed Parallelepiped in an energetic voice, ‘Throw them all in at once, for fuck’s sake. Without consideration. I’ve had it up to here with Wells!’

  And then he seized the moment, sidled up to Parallelepiped, who had a good eye. A bit of culture and he’d make a good hunter of books. He said, ‘Don’t forget the New Testament.’ Went further, ‘It’s not any old book. It’s of great historical value, got it?’

  ‘How will I know which one it is, Comrade Samos? Scripture, there’s plenty. Even the Masons on Nakens Street had a stack of Bibles, more than in my parish.’

  Samos suddenly hesitated whether or not to carry on giving information to that numskull. ‘You have to be discreet,’ he said to him. ‘Find the book, talk to me. Only to me. You’ll get your reward.’

  ‘Right, but how will I know which one it is?’

  ‘It’s easy. It’s the only one with . . . a dedication.’

  Samos bit his lips. There was no going back.

  ‘What’s the key, boss?’

  ‘It says: “For Antonio de la Trava, the valiente of Finisterra”.’

  ‘I like that,’ said Parallelepiped. ‘I’ve got relatives in Finisterre.’

  ‘Good then. But be discreet. Don’t start shouting. Bring it to me by hand. No noise, no fireworks.’

  Parallelepiped was a bit annoyed by Samos’ superior tone. There was a coldness about him. But he replied seriously, ‘Not to worry. I also know how to get on in the world, comrade.’

  Next to the first fire, Curtis took another step forwards.

  To be more exact, the burning books smell of leather mashed with flesh. Of boxing gloves.

  ‘Hey you with the cap! You like books? Can’t take your eyes off them!’

  ‘He probably likes the fire. If he’s here, he must be one of us.’

  Curtis pretended not to hear. He’d spotted a living book which the flames were just starting on. A Popular Guide to Electricity. Arturo da Silva wasn’t a professional boxer. You couldn’t live from boxing unless you made the jump to Madrid or Barcelona. And he hadn’t wanted to. He was a plumber by trade. His job, directing the forces of water, had something in common with the way he behaved inside the ring. He’d convinced Curtis his future was in electricity. More specifically, in air conditioning. So Curtis had gradually become the champ’s right hand. ‘You’ll succeed him. Hercules of Shining Light’, Abelenda in the gym had told him. He was sure of it. On the poster for his first fight, he could see the words ‘Hercules of Shining Light versus . . .’ But there was no poster for his first fight. There wasn’t time. It would be on 17 July. His debut as an amateur boxer then would be with another youngster called Manlle. There’d been a cancellation and they’d agreed to include them. The typical warm-up fight while the spectators found their seats. But for Curtis it was the most important event of his life. He’d trained hard with Arturo. ‘On one condition.’ ‘What?’ ‘You’ll start as an apprentice in a workshop for climatic installations, soon to be opened by the Chavín factory, which makes Wayne refrigerators. I’ve a friend there. But to get in, you’ll have to know something about electricity. You’ll have to study. What do you think?’ He thought it was great. If he ever had a business card like the ones he’d seen travelling salesmen use at the Dance Academy, he could write: ‘Boxer and Climatic Electrician.’

  Arturo da Silva had told him that sometimes the safest place was the middle of the ring. The harpooner had talked to him of the calm at the centre of a hurricane. Maybe it was that instinct which had brought him here, to the city centre, after thi
rty days in hiding. A whole month stuck in the attic of the Dance Academy, also known as Un-deux-trois, his only company a mannequin the harpooner Mr Lens had given his mother. A headless mannequin. A very tall woman, the mannequin, which the sea had thrown up unharmed among a multitude of cripples, maimed figures, loose heads, broken busts and odd extremities. The ship that lost them when it listed violently in a storm off Rostro wouldn’t come back for castaways like these. Mr Lens scoured the beach, slung the tall woman, the only one who was complete, over his shoulder and also picked up three wooden female legs. These were gratefully received by hosiers across the city. They were long, very slim, and were soon on display in the windows of Crisálida, Gran Corsetería Francesa and Botón de Oro. But he couldn’t place the mannequin. The ebony woman was simply too tall. ‘If the country progresses, if we advance, there may yet be room for such tall women,’ said the clothes manager in the Espuma department store on San Andrés Street, who was considerate enough to offer Mr Lens a blanket to wrap her up a bit since, while it was a liberal city, people had their own views and susceptibilities and Mr Lens didn’t want to run into the procession coming from St Nicholas’, bearing Our Lady of Sorrow, being in possession of this tall, black woman.

  ‘It must be heavy,’ said the clothes manager. ‘Though beauty weighs less.’

  For the first time, Mr Lens took a close look at his discovery. When he’d found it, it had been half buried in the sand. What the sea had made with the scattered bodies and mangled limbs was a horrifying pastiche. He thought that now, not before. On the beach, he’d gone in search of useful items. The sea wasn’t going to surprise him. The tall woman’s head was like a highly polished large wooden egg. As he turned it around, he observed there were no eyes, mouth or nose. So what was there to look at? And yet now, in the shop, before he slung it over his shoulder, he examined the head carefully and noticed some very delicate features, the beginnings of a face. First of all, he saw some cheekbones and then, below the cheeks, the melancholy protrusion of some lips. He stroked the head and decided it wasn’t quite smooth. He could feel a few invisible hairs pushing through. This woman was coming into being. He took a fancy to it. He’d take it to the Dance Academy to see if Milagres would keep it for him. He wouldn’t say anything about the life in the wood. They might think he was bringing them a monster. She’d already been scared the last time, when he showed her a small but ferocious-looking revolver. A Bulldog.