Books Burn Badly Read online

  A newspaper was lying on the floor. It seemed to have been written there. Printed in that very room. The matrices of the letters scattered by Neto’s broken anatomy.

  CHAMPION’S CALVARY

  Good headline, thought Curtis. That newspaper was a bit like a mirror. He watched Arturo da Silva pick it up off the floor and casually put it out of sight.

  Neto spoke through the cut in his eyebrow. Monosyllables, short sentences that pushed their way through the stitches. The rasping of words. Craters in some sentences where syllables had been punched out. Arturo da Silva administered the necessary dose. They now understood the reason for their visit was to cure, not celebrate, his victory.

  ‘All I can see are clouds. Your face looks like a storm’s coming.’

  ‘Every cloud has a silver lining. Who was it told me that rubbish?’

  ‘Could have been me,’ said Arturo with the same irony.

  ‘Culture’ll be the end of you, Arturo. Silver lining, my foot! Are you still attending the Rationalist School?’

  ‘In the evenings. Occasionally.’

  ‘I liked it, but I’d doze off. Without my knowledge, as I lay snoring on the desk, old Amil would use me to talk of the evolution of species.’

  Curtis and Terranova also attend Master Amil’s evening classes. Arturo persuaded them. Curtis’ first teacher had been Flora, the Girl, the Conception Girl. She hated being interrupted when she was teaching him letters and numbers, but then she still held her tongue. Looking back at his life, in front of the pyres, Curtis remembered the last time he’d seen Flora, when she caused an earthquake in the Academy.

  ‘I’m leaving,’ she said in the dining-room.

  No one seemed to have heard anything. They carried on eating. The suspense of spoons striking the bottom of plates.

  ‘What are you leaving?’ asked Samantha.

  ‘This. All of this. It’s nothing personal.’

  ‘Are you not happy? Do you want a bigger share?’

  ‘It’s not a question of how much. I won’t sell myself any more.’

  Samantha exploded, brought her fist down on the table, ‘There isn’t much to sell!’

  ‘Well, what’s left of me.’ Flora didn’t take her eyes off Samantha and spoke surprisingly calmly, ‘Don’t be daft. I already said it wasn’t personal.’

  ‘Who converted you? The boxer? You think he’s going to change your life?’

  ‘Don’t bring him into this. You don’t have to drill holes with your tongue.’

  ‘Plenty of beach now. What happens when winter comes?’

  ‘Carry on with your sums,’ Flora would tell Curtis when she was teaching him how to multiply and had to go at the request of a client. ‘Remember how many you’ve counted. I’ll be right back.’ He counted by piles. She’d taught him using beans, chickpeas, grains of rice. Whatever there was. Numbers had colour and value. But now he had nothing to hand, they’d taken Flora and he had to replace real things with downstrokes. Two by four. Two piles of four. He then discovered she’d come back as he was finishing his sums. He thought if I’m quicker at doing the sums or writing out the sentences, she’ll come back sooner, she’ll get rid of that untimely client sticking his nose in where he’s not wanted. And so it was. The power of letters and numbers.

  When he laughed, Neto complained most about the space around his eyes. It hurt him to look. So they had to be grateful to him for looking at them, and this is where he made a heroic effort. Curtis learnt that day that winning in questions of merit involves extra work. Had he lost the fight, Neto wouldn’t have been under any obligation to view them with sympathy. He wouldn’t have had to look at anyone and so he could have given his eyes a rest.

  He had a white towel around his shoulders, his feet in a zinc bucket, while the upper light slid down the seated man to the foam’s flower arrangement. They’d arrived during the afternoon. It was December. The slats of the blinds began to contain the darkness. Dampness stretched, leapt out of the bar of soap and licked the pale cracks in Neto’s fingers.

  Many of the scenes Arturo moved in, like the boxer Neto’s house, shared one characteristic. You could witness the waking and falling quiet of things. The water in the tub was quiet. An example of sad water.

  In one of the talks at Shining Light, Curtis had heard a painter called Huici refer to things falling quiet. He was distracted, thinking about the special train and the tickets he hadn’t sold yet, but his memory was alert and reminded him. The falling quiet of things. Things fell quiet and spoke. A thought put simply, but not easily reached. There it was, like a buoy under the water, but you had to pull on it.

  Things spoke and things fell quiet. Here were two perceptions that made a picture or a poem special. One, the speaking of things. Capturing the speaking of things, their expansive aura, their meaning, and translating it into the language of light or sounds. The other, the falling quiet of things. Their hiding. Their being absent. Their emptying. Their loss. Relating or reflecting that was another shudder. The first art caused a frontal shudder. The second, a lumbar tremor.

  Just a moment. Even when things fall quiet, there are two classes of silence. A friendly silence that keeps us company, where words can be at leisure, and another silence. One that frightens. One that Rosalía de Castro, Huici told them, called ‘mute silence.’

  The warm water in the tub was quiet, a friendly silence. Curtis thought about the special train, the boat, the trip to Caneiros. Which would be on 2 August. The procession upriver. The waking of water.

  Neto called to his wife and whispered, ‘Bring the child, will you, Carmiña?’

  And then they saw it. The head with the same slight lean of a globe and the relief of bruises, the physical geography of nightmares. The girl had emerged from the painful falling quiet of things. Neto took the child in his hands and gently placed her like a live poultice on the cuts and bruises.

  ‘Her fontanel, her little head, is the most soothing.’

  ‘Do you feel relief?’

  ‘Relief? It’s the best cure,’ said Neto. ‘I can’t explain it. Like a skin graft.’

  He rocked forwards with the child on his lap. Gestured to say something. Curtis had the feeling he was about to float an original thought, but the boxer held back the words in the reservoir of a half smile. A position his wounds copied.

  At Santa Margarida Fountain, Curtis took a sip of water. An obligatory rite. Arturo da Silva said it was the best water in Coruña. There were women with buckets and children with jugs. He only wanted a sip and they let him through so he could use a spout. It seemed to him they also suddenly fell quiet. Not the water, though. The water sang out its tango.

  ‘Go, go in front.’

  He wiped his face on the back of his hand and said thanks. It was then they spoke.

  ‘I’m not going in today.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘There’s a fire in the centre. Something’s happening. Can’t you see the smoke?’

  ‘What can happen that hasn’t happened already?’

  ‘Now they’re burning books.’

  The others’ thoughtful silence next to the water’s bubbling. The boy who brought the news, who’s come to fill a jug for some workmen, blurts out, ‘My mouth’s dry!’ Cups his hands, fills, sips, gurgles and then spits out. Places the jug under the spout.

  They all had their reasons for being there. Something to fill. Barrels, buckets, jugs. Curtis had nothing. Only his cap of green rhombuses and dishevelled clothes that mark him out as an erratic person. This may be why the boy who told them books were burning looked at him, then at the spirals of smoke, and announced:

  ‘They’ve taken the books from Shining Light as well. In a van.’

  ‘These look good. They’ll go up in no time. Shining Light!’ He was looking at the bookplates, a stamp of the sun in flames. ‘Hey boss! What do you think? Shining Light Centre for Studies in the Abyss.’

  ‘Those idiots in Fontenova,’ said Samos. ‘That’s what I call a rendezvous
with destiny!’

  Parallelepiped laughed. He liked it when his boss was more talkative.

  ‘Into the abyss!’

  Hercules listened without looking in their direction. Went right up to the fire, stepping on thin air, ready to jump into the ring. Saw a living book the flames were starting on. A Popular Guide to Electricity.

  When he told her, when he explained he was going to train as a climatic electrician, she would burst into tears. Curtis wasn’t sure whether to tell his mother the good news because good news made her very nervous. She wasn’t used to such things. They lived in a garret in the house in Papagaio where she worked. If she works in Papagaio, Coruña’s seediest district, his mother must be a whore. No, he’d learnt to reply with great assurance, my mother’s the one who fluffs up the mattresses. Later on, he learnt from Arturo da Silva there’s a similar response in boxing: opening up side spaces. Throwing off balance. Empty corridors. ‘My mother’s not a whore. She fluffs up the mattresses. Sews the damask covers.’

  ‘Hercules, son of a whore!’

  They really lived in the attic, which had been converted into four rooms with wooden partitioning. The attic was almost too low to walk straight, but had the advantage of being the quietest place in the house. Hercules occupied one of the rooms with his mother, while three women he called aunts lived in the others. As a child, he was very well looked after, being passed from lap to lap. Afterwards, in the street, another Hercules came to life, the one he carried on his shoulders, who only came down to fight. When he was born, they’d put a skylight in the roof, in his room in the attic, and the time came when his head knocked against the glass and opened the window. Before he escaped, this was the only way Hercules had of standing up straight, with his head above the roof. He was a partial inhabitant of the skies. He sometimes stayed still for ages, sharing the condition of seagulls and cats as an architectural plume.

  At night, he would open the skylight, stick out his head and not only see the beams from Hercules Lighthouse, but feel them as well. The touch of a lighthouse beam is similar to the turndown of a sheet. The circle of Hercules’ life widened, he only went up to the attic to sleep, but he always had the impression this was where the centre was. He’d bring his mother sea urchins he’d collected in Orzán Creek or barnacles he’d prised off the lighthouse cliffs. These presents also made his mother nervous since she was very afraid of the sea, the sea that had swallowed the father of her son’s best friend, Luís. ‘He’s going to be an artist,’ he says. ‘You should hear him sing. And imitate. Anyone from Charlie Chaplin to Josephine Baker.’ Your attention, distinguished audience. Society note. This city has just received the visit, on a liner of course, of the dancer Josephine Baker, known as the Black Pearl, and the architect Monsieur Le Corbusier, whom we shall affectionately refer to as Corbu. She changed the history of the body. He, the history of the house apparently. So you see, architects will also be famous one day. What happens, people of the sea, if you make a body out of a house? A boat! The talented couple never left their cabin on the Lutetia, with the complete understanding of the people of Coruña, ever respectful of humanity’s star-studded moments, meaning no disrespect to yours truly, an expert in dockside activity, who managed to peep through the porthole. The whole day in Josephine and Corbu’s nautical suite. The dance of architecture, the architecture of dance. Oh, I’m dizzy! He can also do the Man of a Thousand Faces. Though he makes his own mother laugh and cry when he dresses up as Mrs Monte and acts out the Fascinating Widow. He grows thin and fat, like Laurel and Hardy. In order to sing, he sometimes goes to rehearse on the hill by Hercules Lighthouse, with Curtis as sound technician.

  ‘Sound technician?’

  ‘You have to say whether you can hear OK when I sing. I’ll gradually go further away. Oh, and work with your right ear. It’s a little bigger.’

  ‘No, it’s not. They’re the same,’ said Curtis, distrustful for once.

  ‘A gift from the Universal Architect, Vicente. When I triumph, I shall hire you. You’ll be my ears. You’ll earn a fortune just for listening. You’ll only have to move your hand up and down. Louder, softer. Like this.’

  The last time they carried out a sound check was for Carlos Gardel’s Melodía de Arrabal.

  ‘I’ll redo that part,’ said Terranova. ‘Move back a bit.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Curtis. ‘It’s not “tear drops”. It’s “tear dwops”, got it? Tear dwops.’

  ‘Got it, “tear dwops”. There it goes! One tear. Goodbye, tear!’

  Curtis moves off. With the sea behind him. His silhouette on the ocean’s horizon.

  ‘Louder, louder!’ shouts Curtis.

  ‘I haven’t started yet!’ mumbles Terranova. Then he shouts out, ‘Wait a minute, Tough Guy, you dummy.’

  ‘Louder!’

  That night, seated on the roof under the vanes of light.

  Quarter silvered by the moon

  Quarter silvered by the moon

  Milonga murmurs

  Milonga murmurs

  All my fortune

  ‘All my fortune. Hear that, Tough Guy? Today, when we were rehearsing, I noticed something. The city has a triangle.’

  ‘A triangle.’

  ‘A triangle that’s connected with us, where we’ve always played. If you look to the right, there’s San Amaro Cemetery. The first vertex. If you look to the left, there’s the provincial prison. The second vertex. There’s no future either to the left or to the right. That leaves only one vertex. The lighthouse. The beams from the lighthouse. And what do they say?’

  He already has an answer, ‘They say goodbye. Goodbye! The light of emigration. Our light, Hercules!’

  ‘To me, they don’t say goodbye,’ grumbles Hercules, who doesn’t like to contradict his friend.

  ‘You don’t understand, Vicente. You just don’t understand when you don’t want to.’

  They fell quiet. The intermittent beams moved the emotions like cartoons.

  ‘You already have a legend, Curtis. You’re Arturo da Silva’s sparring partner. You’re Papagaio’s Hercules. In the first round of your first fight, you knocked your opponent over. Floored him. What was it? A side corridor? People laughing. And when he got up, you did Arturo’s one-two. End of story. That’s what I call creating a legend, Curtis. The tooth stuck in your glove. Which you gave back to him. “Here you go, Manlle, your tooth.” You even wanted to sell him a ticket for the special train! That won’t be forgotten. That’ll go down in history. But as for me, I don’t have a legend.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘That you were born in a fish basket. Among scales.’

  ‘That’s an embarrassment, not a legend.’

  ‘I like it,’ said Curtis. ‘My mother too. And Flora. Everyone does.’

  His father at sea. His mother, a fishwife. Alone on her rounds, she gave birth down a lane and placed the child on the softest thing she had. Among hake, wrasse, sail-fluke, horse-mackerel, sardines. His mother would leave Muro Fishmarket early to sell cheap fish in the outlying villages. Horse-mackerel is humble, even in its colour. But Luís couldn’t understand how wrasse could be so cheap, having all those colours. It’s rainbow meat. He used to make a pause for the fish basket’s contents and crack jokes like the one in the Academy, ‘I’m just a poor sail-fluke, but don’t think I was lucky!’ Milagres, like everyone else, thought he’d made up the story about being born in a fish basket. He was certainly imaginative enough. Until one day she bumped into his mother, Aurora, the fishwife, who confirmed it was true. She’d been to Cabana and Someso and taken the path that leads to Castro by the River Lagar. There was nobody about. It was some time before anyone saw her.

  ‘What better place for him than among the fish?’

  When Milagres cracked open a sea urchin, it made her life worthwhile. Curtis knew this and at low tide he’d collect sea urchins, since he knew where they hid in the rocks, where there were likely to be lots of them, though he prefe
rred the risk of fishing for barnacles on Gaivoteira. If there was something that worried him about sea urchins, it was getting their spines stuck in his skin. He’d made his best friends there, on the sea’s stormiest coast. You didn’t have to pretend. Next to the stormy sea, you had no enemies. One of those rock friends was Luís, who taught him how to treat the spines. The problem is their thickness. Unlike other prickles, such as a horse chestnut’s, they don’t have a sharp point. When trying to remove them, people become desperate and carve out deep flesh wounds.

  ‘No craters,’ said Luís. ‘A sea urchin’s spines come out by themselves. They work their way through the flesh together with the tides. Go down to the sea at low tide and they’ll come out on their own.’

  This was partly a joke, partly true, as always with Luís. He was almost always playing with something. With the sea as well. He played with the sea most of all. When it was calm, he’d leapfrog Cabalo das Praderías or hang off the side of Robaleira Point and provoke it, ‘Oy you, beardie, Neptune, stupid dummy! Look who’s here! The ghost of Terranova! The son’s father. The father who died on a Portuguese doris.’ ‘It’s a big boat,’ he’d told Curtis, ‘full of small vessels. Each old fisherman boards his own green launch and comes or doesn’t come back.’ Once a pair of Basque cod trawlers called to pick up Galician crewmen and Terranova mounted a bollard with an empty bottle as an aspergillum and in a priestly voice mimicked the words he’d once heard predicated from a pulpit, ‘Work, fisherman, work! Only work dignifies a man. Do not fear the biting wind or rising sea, for death respects the brave. More men die in wine than at sea.’ The crane operator felt sorry for him and moved the hook towards him. Luís hung on and the operator raised him, lowered him, swung him to the left and to the right until he began to laugh. The crane had a wooden cabin with windows and was like a house in the air, with a bed and everything. The operator had painted the name ‘Carmiña’ on the outside. All the cranes were named after women. There was a ‘Belle Otero’, an ‘Eve’ and, on the Wooden Jetty, a ‘Pasionaria’. ‘Carmiña’s’ operator had a shelf of books in the cabin. One section labelled ‘The Day’, with scientific texts, and another labelled ‘The Night’, with novels. The operator didn’t just read. He wanted to be a scientific writer.