Books Burn Badly

by Unknown

  ‘And an Epiphany parade.’

  ‘Grande Obra asked first,’ said Samantha. ‘The Bolshies have enough with their revolution.’

  ‘They’re not Bolsheviks. They’re anarchists.’

  ‘Like me. From here on down.’

  ‘You’re a brute the size of a plough.’

  ‘I’m from the village, like you. And proud of it.’

  ‘I’m not from the village,’ said Flora. ‘I was washed up by the sea.’

  ‘Now listen here, you . . .’

  ‘The important thing,’ the Widow intervened, ‘is to have a godfather who can say the Creed. So the child doesn’t stammer.’

  ‘In Italy, there’s a baby Jesus who’s a girl.’

  ‘And in Vinhó he’s dressed up as Napoleon.’

  ‘Aren’t we international!’ Samantha exclaimed, while Pombo started singing a Peruvian carol:

  Here comes the Mayor’s child

  Here comes the Christ-child

  It may have been the effect of having to draw back an entrance curtain, but many of the stories the sailors told Curtis or, to be more precise, told his open, attentive eyes were about things that turned up in whales’ bellies. Some brought not only the stories, but the things as well. Like the harpooner Mr Lens.

  There were two big whaling companies in Galicia, the Spanish Whaling Company and the Spanish Crown Society. Behind both of them was the influential industrialist Massó. One of the factories was in Caneliñas, in Cee, with the whaling ships based in Coruña Harbour. Lens of Arou, the harpooner, knew nothing about Massó, but a lot about whales. They were his life. The first time he saw a whale was on top of a rock on Lobeira Beach. He was fishing for octopuses with an ear of maize. The rope, the stone, were an extension of his arm. Despite all their intelligence, and Lens’ father said they were like people, octopuses had a weakness, an irrepressible desire to latch on to an ear of maize. And that ear was part of Lens’ body, a third arm. He once caught an octopus as big as himself. When it saw itself out of the water, betrayed by that alluring, golden ear of maize, the octopus, which was huge on the Lens scale, infuriated by such skulduggery, enveloped the boy’s body, and face as well, with its eight arms. But Lens wouldn’t let himself be dragged out to sea. With the octopus stuck to his head, he ran to where his father was and when he finally got rid of it, little Lens bore the mark of its suckers and had been completely drained. ‘It was the octopus’ revenge,’ he told Hercules. ‘It sucked out everything I had. I didn’t have much education, but what I did know, I lost. I had to start from scratch. Put it all back. The names of people and things. Every single word. The whole lot.’ A whale was his unit of measurement. Especially when talking about emotions. Joy, when great, was of whale-like proportions.

  ‘How many whales have you killed?’

  ‘The joy is not in killing them, but in watching them emerge. Seeing a whale emerge. It’s the kind of joy that doesn’t fit inside your body. Pain’s like that as well. The trouble with a great sadness is that it doesn’t fit inside your body.’

  Hercules remembered this unit of measurement the harpooner taught him on afternoons in the Academy. Real joy and pain were too big to fit inside your body. It can be very painful to see a giant man cry. He’d seen this. Harpooners collapsing with sadness on the table, smashing glasses and bottles. Their pain was as heavy as a whale. But a weak, scared woman can also carry tons of pain on top of her head. A premonition. A whale.

  ‘And your mother?’ asked Lens of Arou.

  ‘My mother? My mother cooks,’ replied Curtis hastily, ‘sews and fluffs up the wool inside the mattresses.’

  ‘I know that. But where is she?’

  ‘She went to buy some damask,’ Hercules lied.

  ‘Some damask?’

  ‘For the covers. She has a thing about damask.’

  Vicente Curtis liked the harpooner. But when it came to his mother, he tried to keep men at a distance. The harpooner was twice the size of Milagres. Even Curtis had been too big for her. When he emerged from her belly, he left an empty space in what the Widow called her ‘sacred chamber’.

  ‘The birth,’ warned the Widow, ‘will be followed by a melancholy air. An insatiable wind that preys on newly delivered mothers.’

  ‘What do we have to do?’

  ‘It’s a crafty, human wind that searches out gaps in people and likes to plant sadness in the space left by the baby. Keep the child always close at hand. What the wind wants is for her to hate the child so that it can take his place. You have to love her. And the child as well.’

  ‘And who’s going to love me?’ asked Samantha.

  ‘Some questions in life just don’t have an answer,’ said Flora.

  ‘That was a good one,’ said the madame. ‘I won’t hold it against you.’

  Milagres had the child always with her. Not just tied, grafted on to her body. On her back or front, in a series of girdles. When he started walking and disappeared from view, she let out a whine that was like a cat or seagull mewing. Later, when they made the skylight and Curtis embarked on his existence as a head popping out of the roof, the cats and seagulls were like distant company, suspicious residents. He realised how similar they were at night. A crossbreed of feline gulls and cats about to fly. Sleepwalking fauna for a sleepless city.

  Curtis would have liked the roof fauna to come down and sniff around the books’ remains. Something to fill the void. Even the books burning badly, slowly being consumed, seemed to be waiting for somebody. Cats and gulls, rooftop plumes, gull-like cats and cat-like gulls remained still, taxidermic, as in an experiment to dispense with the atmosphere.

  If only Milagres was with the harpooner now. Curtis had discovered that Mr Lens’ size was proportional to the stories he stored inside. If anyone could exorcise the void, it was the harpooner. To start with, following his mother’s instructions, Curtis provided a barrier. The harpooner would arrive in the Academy at some sleepy hour of the afternoon, when even Pombo took a break, leaving Curtis in charge, practising his scrawl in the light of a green lamp. He would ask after Milagres, the boy would come out with some excuse, sounding increasingly unconvinced, but the harpooner never kicked against the pricks. He’d deposit part of his store of stories in the boy, leading his body to become normal while Curtis’ grew. There was not a drop of fat in the harpooner’s storytelling, it was all lean meat.

  ‘Do you know where all the umbrellas the wind takes in Galicia end up? On the same boat.’

  ‘Always the same one?’

  ‘That’s right. An old container ship, which acts like a magnet for umbrellas. About two hundred miles out to sea. It’s called the Mara Hope. From here, it goes to Rotterdam and sells them on in bulk.’

  He then told him how things from the sea rain on earth and things from the earth rain at sea. In Galicia, in the middle of winter, a shower of pilchards had fallen inland from a cloud of seaweed. The cloud had burst, like someone opening a net in mid-air. Thousands of small, silvery sardines falling on the rye. Which is why the fields of Courel sometimes smell of the sea. While the woods are covered in a moss of seaweed with starfish hanging from the treetops. These are the so-called animate waves which rise in gale-force winds, turning into pregnant clouds. ‘Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of animate waves and pregnant clouds. Isn’t there an old newspaper lying around?’

  ‘It’s true what he says about umbrellas,’ intervened Pombo, who’d finished his break. ‘The other way round too. Have you never seen a flock of cod heading in the direction of Terra Cha? And in Riazor Stadium the other day it bucketed down caps with the name “Numancia” embroidered on them.’

  ‘I can only talk about what I’ve seen,’ said Mr Lens a tad suspiciously.

  ‘Honest to cod,’ insisted Pombo.

  Curtis enjoyed this duel. Things to-ing and fro-ing by air and sea. They vied not to tell the truth, but to invent the biggest story. Before working as a harpooner in the North Atlantic, Lens had spent many years in the Gulf of Mex
ico and the Caribbean.

  ‘Never trust the calm,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘It’s what I’m most afraid of. The calm. You know, when nothing happens, there’s a dead calm, the sea like a plate.’

  Curtis shook his head.

  ‘At the centre of a hurricane! What they call the area of calm. Don’t forget it. In the area of calm, be alert, in a state of emergency.’

  Curtis thought he heard Pombo blink. Alert. His tongue tickling.

  ‘You can be on the boat with nothing moving. Everything completely still. When suddenly, swept offshore by the hurricane, something falls. What you’d least expect. Because it’s one thing,’ he said sarcastically, ‘for it to rain a tin of sardines in the mountains the day Pombo goes for a picnic and quite another for it to rain, as I have seen – I have seen! – a flock of sheep on board a ship, carried along by a hurricane.’

  ‘Sheep with umbrellas, I suppose,’ commented Pombo ironically.

  ‘Only when the flock has a shepherd. Then they fall with a large umbrella, of the type called “seven parishes”. In the Caribbean, I’ve seen it rain a whole chapter, a Mexican chapter.’

  ‘It’s normal for a flock to have a shepherd of souls,’ added Pombo, ‘and fall right on top of a pagan from Death Coast.’

  ‘What’s frightening is to be in the area of calm and think the worst is over,’ said Lens seriously, ignoring Pombo’s jokes. ‘That’s it, you think the worst is over when in fact it’s just beginning. You think the hurricane’s gone and you’re in the eye of the storm.’

  His tone now smacked undeniably of the truth. The ship’s name was right. The Mara Hope.

  As they listened, even Pombo’s mocking hemisphere was eclipsed. Whether in suspense or under the force of Lens’ memory, the silence in the Dance Academy had acquired the sound of an electric hum, of sultry heat, around the green lamp, which Pombo’s long eyelashes had been drawn to.

  ‘It’s terrible what you’ve endured,’ Lens continued. ‘Everything’s in disarray, the boat and your bones. And then you find yourself under the illusion that it’s all over. Because the other boats you thought had foundered in the storm are coming towards you, safe and sound. A horizon of ships. You’re dumbstruck by such a miracle. Merde! Shit! Verdammt und zugenäht!’

  The harpooner, like many other maritime residents and guests, practised the art of saying ugly words in foreign languages for them to sound a little distinguished. A kind of crude elegance.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Pombo on tenterhooks, he who’d heard so much.

  ‘Not a single ship. It was a decapitated forest. Bits of forest torn to shreds which, after the storm, came together at sea and interlaced roots to hold up trunks and crowns like the masts of sailing ships, with nature’s will for weaving tapestries out of tatters. It’s normal in shipwrecks to find a brotherhood of remains. But this was as big as the horizon itself.’

  The harpooner’s enormous hands ordered the geology of earth on the table’s tectonic plates. He took a slice out of the table with the corner of his right hand and lifted up a chunk of Yucatan. ‘It was this wooded territory coming towards us, towards our ship in the area of central calm.’

  ‘Was that before or after you had cataracts?’ asked Pombo at last, unable to control himself.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The wood moving at sea.’

  ‘I’m talking here to Hercules. Anyone else can shut up or provide tobacco.’

  ‘Portuguese blond,’ said Pombo in a conciliatory tone, holding out a cigarette.

  ‘To start with, we thought no,’ Lens continued, ‘they were boats, an entire fleet that had been reunited. Because we could hear shouts as well. Isolated, distant. Unintelligible. Sometimes they sounded like hurrahs of joy carried on the wind, others like cries of agony and anguish filling the sea with fear. We approached with our hearts in our mouths. No, they weren’t boats. This was no vast fleet of salvaged ships. As we got closer, our eyes were forced to accept something even more fantastical. What was coming towards us was the forest. The sea had gathered strips of wood, drifting timbers. The masts we descried in the distance were in fact large trees, huge mahoganies. Then we heard an orchestral guffaw. A spine-chilling peal of laughter. All of that nature was making fun of us. Laughter can be truly terrifying when you don’t know where it’s coming from. Until the mystery was revealed. The trees had their birds in them. A colourful display of parrots, orioles and long-crested cockatoos. Someone shouted, “The birds are warning us!” But it was too late. When we tried to turn around, the boat was surrounded by the forest.’

  ‘And what happened?’ asked Curtis uneasily.

  ‘The forest gobbled us up. Swallowed us whole.’

  ‘That’s more or less what happened to me with the wolf,’ said Pombo after the requisite pause to take a swig.

  ‘What happened to you if you never left this hole?’

  ‘I’m from the mountains, and proud of it. Bloody mountains! One freezing winter’s day with a lot of snow, the height of a man at least, I was sent with a message down by the border and bumped into the wolf on my way. It stared at me. I stared at it.’

  Everyone remained silent. Pombo marked a bony kind of time by rapping the bar with his knuckles.

  ‘And what happened?’ asked Lens finally.

  ‘It ate me.’

  Pombo adjusted the knot of his necktie and stared at the harpooner artistically. ‘What did you expect? It ate me! That’s right. The wolf ate me.’ And he waited before delivering the final blow, ‘Just as the forest ate that ship of yours.’

  ‘You don’t know what the area of calm is,’ replied the harpooner painfully.

  Some of the fishing boats still have their festive pennants. The vessels haven’t left port for a month. Haven’t been back out to sea. The sirens sounded on the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. A few days later, with the military coup, they sounded again. A day and a night. Without stopping. In the Academy’s attic, Curtis heard them one after the other. He couldn’t see. He could hear. He heard shots and sirens. Shots against sirens. For a time, the shots stuttered, as if sliding down the sirens’ greasy hair. The shots increased, the sirens diminished. The sound of the sirens was round, slow, fleshy, labial. The shots were straight lines which multiplied, pulling on each other, sieving space. Eventually there was only one siren left. Very clear. In long hoots. The shots fell silent. Seemed to be listening as well, in surprise. Then there was a loud volley. The death throes of the last sound being riddled with bullets. Lots of the pennants are frayed, bitten. The atmosphere around the burning books is full of holes. Perforated.

  The smoke was looking for somewhere to hold on to, to clamber up. In the upper part of his body, Curtis felt the tickle of its creepers and suckers. Climbing up his face. Invading his nose. Catching on his eyes. Sealing his mouth.

  Another day, the harpooner had told him how a sandstorm had consumed paradise in a single night. A place called Tatajuba in Brazil. Curtis realised he wasn’t making it up, he’d been there as he said, from the way he went into details. He even made a pencil drawing on the marble of the kitchen table. How well the harpooner could draw America! His map of Europe was pretty good too. On the Iberian Peninsula, he took great care over the twists and turns of the Galician coast. But America came out from north to south as if by memory. He put a cross to show where paradise had disappeared overnight, eaten up by the sand. This is Tatajuba. This is Camusin. He’d been walking from Camusin, all along the beach, because he’d heard what a paradise it was. On the way, he slept on the beach and woke up to see a sow with piglets bathing in the sea. Or else they were eating fish. Because the fish there could be caught by hand. Skate, swordfish, mullet and porpoise, all jumping about. A Galician fisherman’s dream. Pigs swimming and fish jumping in the air. When he reached Tatajuba, it really was paradise. The following day, it no longer existed. A sandstorm had swallowed it up overnight. What Curtis remembered best about the sandstorm that buried paradise in one night was how the harpooner told
him people stopped talking. The sand set their teeth chattering and drowned out their words. And that’s when the men and women who’d worked so hard, with such devotion, gave up.

  Curtis hadn’t read many books. All the burning books had something to do with him. They were books he hadn’t yet read. But this one had clearly belonged to him since he’d set foot on the scene. In the end, he picked up A Popular Guide to Electricity.

  ‘Hey you, put that back!’ The stocky soldier hadn’t let him out of his sight and this time he really did take out his pistol.

  ‘Now, now, calm down!’ said Samos. ‘It’s just a clown looking for some Tarzan comics. Which one of them would dare show his face?’

  Arturo da Silva used first to write out his texts by hand. He had curious handwriting. It was very neat, as if the act of writing, though it called for action, or perhaps because of this, was incompatible with speed. Given the size of his fingers and the heavy machinery of his hands, it must have been a real effort. And the truth is Dafonte, Holando, Félix Ramón, Varela, Curtis, Terranova, Marconi, Leica, Seoane, all the new group of boys who visited the Shining Light premises, some of whom contributed to Brazo y Cerebro, tried to make room when he was using the table to write, forging a territory with his bulk, his head close to the paper and his whole body focused on moving that caravan of words like beasts of burden forwards against all the odds. To start with, the paper had the texture of rocky ground or was treacherous as a marsh. A few words opened the way, like tracks, sleepers or stepping-stones. They were the eyes and feet of those running behind.

  It helped him to hear a voice, a voice like that of Amil, the teacher at the Rationalist School, tugging at his fingers.

  Amil, who always talked to them of Heraclitus and Parmenides. Life, the course of the universe, all explained as a river. A river which is never the same, which is always changing. You cannot step into the same river twice. A changeless river, a river which is always the same. Heraclitus and Parmenides are so familiar he’s surprised no one in the city is named after them. They’re in the ring. Heraclitus constantly on the go. Parmenides solid as a rock.