Books Burn Badly

by Unknown

  ‘They’re woodcocks,’ said Silvia. ‘In these parts, they’re called goats.’

  ‘I never heard birds make such a sound.’

  ‘They make it not with the throat,’ said the seamstress, ‘but with their feathers. With the wind and their bodies.’

  ‘Louder!’ shouted Curtis. ‘Louder!’

  ‘He can speak!’ exclaimed Silvia in surprise.

  ‘He has his days,’ replied Terranova. ‘Only when he gets emotional.’

  The weather changed from one day to the next. It wasn’t a summer storm any more. The clouds were full of stones and dark sea. They creaked and crushed brutally, with adult gearing, having lost the artifice of summer storms suitable for all ages. They had to think of returning. In mid-September, they’d take the sheep back to the village on the border. They’d still have time for a quick trip to the feast of the Acclaimer, the virgin who won’t keep quiet, music booming over the mountains all night. And then back into the Salgueiros’ basement, the house of the Stone Man and the Woman with the Black-beaded Rosary, to make baskets out of chestnut branches as the Stone Man had taught them. The village was good at this trade and the merchandise was sold at markets along the border. That was the deal. In summer, shepherds in the mountains; in winter, basket weavers hidden in the shade. Why was he called the Stone Man? Because he was made of stone. He’d sometimes move, stick his finger up his nose and pull out navelwort of the sort that takes root in between stones, on the edge of roofs. That’s what Terranova would say to make Curtis laugh. The Stone Man had navelwort up his nose, in his ears and all his body’s various orifices. ‘The point is they’re good folk. We don’t know what they think, but we know what they do. They fulfilled their side of the bargain. Gave us shelter. Never asked questions. How long’s it been, Curtis?’

  On 2 August, the day the special train was due to leave for Caneiros, Terranova had been circling the station. Waiting for Curtis. He was sure he’d come, because Curtis had his ticket. Days before, he’d gone to the Academy during the night. Pombo half-opened the door and told him neither Curtis nor anybody else was in, he himself did not exist, and what Terranova had to do was stay in his mother’s house and not go wandering about, which was like wearing a cowbell around his neck. When he went to the station, he couldn’t get in. It was heavily guarded. He peered through the fence from Gaiteira. All the trains were still, a silence of engines that seemed to him resounding. The train to Caneiros never left. It transformed into a phantom locomotive. When they did start up again, all the convoys, somehow or other, were headed for war. Anyone who knew about trains realised they’d changed sound. The engines and tracks were still the same, but the sound had changed.

  He found Curtis the day they burnt books. Following Pombo’s plan, they finally boarded a train, but this time as corpses, inside coffins, using real dead people’s identities. As far as Ourense. From there, by road. The driver stopped in Maus de Baños at night. Which is when they dropped their coffins into the River Limia.

  ‘You’re dumb,’ their contact said to Curtis. ‘You say no to everything. It doesn’t matter what they ask you. Unless they say Guiné. If they say Guiné, you say yes. It’s a code, see? You,’ he said to Terranova, ‘you’re a gypsy.’

  ‘A gypsy?’

  ‘A Portuguese gypsy.’

  ‘All right then.’

  Curtis was reading his Popular Guide to Electricity in the smoky light of a carbide lamp. The printed lines trembled in the shadows, as if marching over the yellow surface towards the charred margins, telling a capnomancy, the matter of an ancient divination. The flickering light and spirals of smoke, reflected against the book, appeared to rise from the pages and not from the carbide’s death throes. The Stone Man slept next to the hearth. The woman’s litany sounded like a radio. Domus aurea. Broadcasting at night. Foederis arca. Once he’d heard her sigh over the airwaves. Janua coeli. Salgueiros would die if they didn’t bring the light. Stella matutina. At this point, the Stone Man stirred, opened and shut his eyes. It really was like this, thought Terranova. The woman’s voice was a radio, a connection he’d found. He listened to it as when he used to search for tangos on the crane operator’s Atwater Kent at night and out came uncertain voices. This is how he discovered Paul Robeson. At times, he seemed to fade, to go, to leave them behind. At others, he sounded stronger, with renewed intensity, and you could light a match in his breath. Rosa mystica, Turris Davidica, Turris eburnea. But there was always a distance, as if she were one thing, her voice another, and she also were listening. The woman stopped praying, stopped telling the beads of her rosary. Her fingers, however, kept going. They left the jet and started making beads out of breadcrumbs. One to start with, slowly, it looked as if it would be the only one. Then more and more quickly, small spheres filling the blue and white squares of the oilskin tablecloth. Terranova copied her. The two of them rolling stars. Something had changed in her as their departure approached. She’d thrown off her mourning. Let down her hair. When they went back to the city, he’d send her an Atwater Kent. With batteries and accumulators.

  She lifted her eyes, which were damp, glistening. Her shaky hand felt under the table. A rosary of years to make that movement. Finally to whisper an invitation.

  ‘The dogs are barking. Shall we go and see who it is?’

  The Rabble and Providence

  Something happened which upset him and left him speechless. One of his colleagues, who’d later occupy an important post, started urinating on one of the pyres. There’d just been an incident. Someone, that huge lad they called Papagaio’s Hercules, had unexpectedly jumped over the fire the way they do on St John’s Eve to ward off evil spirits. They’d gone after him without success. He ran as if he had wings on his feet. The point is this colleague, back from the chase, went and pissed on one of the pyres. And all the others in their squad, without prior agreement, automatically went and pissed with him. Though he was one of those in charge, Samos was incapable of expressing his disgust. On the contrary, he reacted with a nervous smile. Exempt. This lowly act ruined the picture he’d composed of having an archangelic sword to hand. The books stank more than ever, a mixture of urine and smoke, animal remains. He could make out the folds and tips of Dutch binding, Valencian boards. The horse-nerve twines. That warm piss, spattering on the remains, gave off an unfamiliar smell. They may not have noticed it. The breeze lifted the pestilence to his nose.

  When they were out hunting, there was a moment in which the group, already somewhat inebriated by nightfall, would obey a kind of natural order and the hunters would line up to piss in manly formation, with rude, brazen jokes. A disgusting scene. An ugly, base form of Fascism. One of his Portuguese colleagues, his host in Coimbra, who’d taken part in the Viriato Legion of volunteers backing Franco’s army, had been amazed by what he’d seen among fellow troops. Teutónio confided in him, ‘Samos, Spain’s a dangerous country. Are you not afraid to have such colleagues?’

  When in 1940 he’d visited Milan and Berlin, he’d been impressed. There was an aesthetics, another dimension, an athletic kind of futurism, he’d said. A harmony of bodies and weapons. Ren was an example of coarseness. León Degrelle, another Fascist who’d sought refuge in Spain, after the war went on the Road to Santiago and complained about the fleas and lice in the towns’ boarding-houses. Ren, who’d gone to welcome him in Portomarín, as a government representative, laughed about him, ‘Very refined, don’t you know!’ Samos the judge had later heard the Minister say, ‘We have to plough with the oxen we have.’ The stink came and went. As for the hunting squad, he and one or two others, Father Munio when he came of course, would try to hold it in or, if they had to, do it a little apart, at a discreet distance, not so far apart as to attract attention, but without joining the common flood. Lofty thoughts don’t come when you want them to. What gave the regime real meaning was not bravado, but the idea of divine leadership. ‘Forget about the vulgar nature of the rabble and think about history,’ Dez had said to him one day. He w
as the most refined in their circle, spoke with nostalgia of Primo de Rivera’s poetic court and shared his sentiment, ‘What we need is culture.’ Their leader was an envoy of Providence. They had to maintain the link: follow our leader, follow Providence, keep the enemy at bay. That was the important thing. What was written on the face of coins being used by every single citizen: ‘Caudillo by the grace of God’. What was on the reverse, not written, but in everyone’s mind, like a tonsure clipped with scissors of fear, could well be the title adopted by the Assyrian king Tiglath: ‘He who subdued his enemies’. A historical reference he resorted to with delight. In his lectures and seminars, and above all in his involvement with Arbor in Compostela and Coimbra, were those two special moments when he released his Christian Epimetheus, opened Pandora’s box or descended with Heidegger to Plato’s cave in order to arouse the soft, comfortable descendants of the Victory elites. He knew how to wake them. Nothing better than a bolt of lightning from his revered master Schmitt: ‘And Cain killed Abel. This is how the history of mankind begins . . .’

  At that point, he’d got their attention. The judge would then turn to another hammer-blow from another of his most distinguished colleagues, the future Minister: ‘Without war, there would be no history.’ He’d then take a good look at the Old Testament, where God is known as the Lord of Hosts. ‘The Lord is on my side. Whom shall I fear? The day of the Lord is great and terrible.’

  Natura Est Maxima in Minimis

  He’s going to examine a sample of his blood. Having coughed. His blood on the slide. The new world he’s going to discover today was inside his chest. If a drop of water is the first sphere, that drop of blood is a final sphere, since in it are life and death, the two of them working for each other. It’s one of the extraordinary moments in 12 Panadeiras Street. He recalls the eye’s expectation as it approaches the microscope, blinks, sings Natura est maxima in minimis, drawn by the universal exhibition contained in a drop of blood, his own blood. They’ve plundered his cabinet of curiosities, his amateur scientist instruments, appliances for finally seeing what’s invisible, this and the other side contained in a drop of blood. In every drop of blood. Speaking of spheres, they’ve plundered that as well, his wooden globe made in England. The first thing he noticed on that globe, like strange, unnamed territories, were the roses of the winds and the drawings of unusual sea creatures. The one he liked most, and continued to like as time went by, was a half sea-serpent, half-man, playing the lute by the Seychelles. After that, he ventured into the large patches of colour. On the seas and oceans, the globe was marked with sailing ships tracing historical routes. The first his father’s finger pointed out to him was the Beagle, next to the Galapagos. Darwin’s ship. A stubborn finger. It always went back there. The Beagle, the Darwin finger. Later, when it was his own finger doing the pointing and his daughter reading, the thing that captivated her most, the great discovery, were the names of places. These words were the globe’s greatest charm. The Pacific, for example, was populated with words. The dots showing the islands were barely visible, but what really came across were the names. Nanumea. Nanumano. Nanumanga. Nukononu. Pukapuka. In November 1937, in his native city of Coruña, Governor Arellano sends a letter to the president of the Tribunal, proposing that the sheet in the official register recording the birth of Santiago Casares Quiroga be torn out and destroyed. A hitherto untried punishment. The eradication of his name.

  Which is on page 447. There the magistrate, one Pérez Arias, certifies that at half past ten in the morning of 8 May 1884, at number 6 San Andrés Street, a child was born, named Santiago. Page 446 belongs to a child called José Suárez Campos and 448 to a girl by the name of María de la Concepción Vaamonde. The secretary, Mr Patiño’s handwriting is very neat, reminiscent of a musical score with quavered letters, a fountain pen like the crest of a golden oriole.

  Natura est maxima in minimis. Come, Vitola, come. See what’s inside a drop of water. The whole seed of the universe. Come, come. See what’s inside a drop of blood. The composition of life. It’s all there. Hate as well. We can approach the mystery of life, but it’s impossible to understand the mystery of hate. The kind of hate that causes people not only to kill, but to want to erase you from the census of births. I have to concentrate on that mystery. Read everything there is. It has to be in a drop of blood. It has to have its chemistry.

  No, he doesn’t say anything. He’s motionless. Watching himself. Trying to burn up as little oxygen as possible. When he has a relapse, María Casares, Vitola to her parents, thinks of the image of someone carrying an invisible bucket of water on their head. Not a single drop of water is allowed to fall under pain of death. There was a time he hoped he’d beaten it. As a young man, in the sanatorium in Durtol. He always had that bucket. Always had the scythe nearby. Death was part of the way he lived. What he never imagined was that one day they’d try to make him non-existent.

  He’d never met this Arellano, the governor who officially declared him a pest and ordered that the name of Santiago Casares Quiroga be removed from the register of the College of Lawyers and any other book for ‘future generations to find no more trace than the record of him as a fugitive’. For many years, Casares, who at one point was Prime Minister, did not appear in Spanish encyclopedias. María Casares knows that Spanish Fascism largely achieved its aim of erasing him from the map of mental geography. He was a symbol of the Republic and now he’s a crater. They’ve plundered all his things. His books, furniture, home. Microscope. Herbaria. Entomological boxes. There’s something on the tip of her tongue. A round, reddish word with seven black dots on its wings.

  One of the first songs he taught her. A song for learning how to count. A folk-song, a scientific song.

  King-king, how long will I be?

  Twenty-five? Could be.

  One, two, three . . .

  ‘The seven-spot ladybird, Coccinella septempunctata,’ he explains, ‘is, together with the glow-worm, the creature with the most names in Galicia. Why is that? Why those two? It’s called “king-king”. “Little Maria”. “Sunsucker”. “Spotty”. “Seamstress”. “Little Joanna”. Little things have the most names. As Jules Renard says, “truth is of small dimensions”.’

  In November 1944, in Paris, they received the news that 12 Panadeiras Street and the rest of the Casares’ property now belonged to the Fascist State. Pillage became law. He was in London at the time, to avoid falling into the hands of the Gestapo. She stopped playing the game that if she closed her eyes at the door of 168 Rue de Vaugirard, she’d turn up on the stairs of 12 Panadeiras Street. On his return, the atmosphere of a liberated Paris helped him to breathe better. As he said, on account of his consumptive optimism, he could see every molecule, taste the air: Natura est maxima in minimis.

  A few months later, Gloria died of a cancer that had appeared suddenly like the dagger of an efficient assassin. He was able to close her eyes. María was stunned at the sight of her dead mother. All her previous faces returned to her. Daughter of an unmarried factory worker, seamstress, melancholy woman at the window of 12 Panadeiras Street, minister’s wife, nurse in a military hospital. The word that came to María’s lips, forced a way through her suffering, was beauty. What beauty! And her father said, ‘She always was pretty, whatever she did.’

  He felt the crises arrive in the barometer of his chest. They were increasingly strong. He’d adopt the lotus position without moving, like a diver running out of oxygen.

  The worst thing was when his temperature rose, because then he’d consume oxygen in his dreams, his nightmares.

  One day, he emerged from his delirium, looking wide-eyed and mutilated, as if he’d lost all his teeth. He said he’d been pulled out. He felt in his flesh how he’d been pulled out of the register. Of the book of births.

  ‘Don’t think about it, Daddy. They’d never do that.’

  ‘I don’t even know who he is, this governor who wants to tear out my birth certificate. I have to study this, the nature of hate.’
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br />   ‘Don’t think about it now, Daddy.’

  ‘You’re right. It uses up lots of oxygen.’

  And then he spoke with his hands. If she gave him a finger to hold on to, he’d grab it with the strength of a newborn baby.

  Live Phosphorus

  Polka had stopped playing the bagpipes long before. He hadn’t played them since the war. When he was freed, after labouring in a wolfram mine, it was some time before he could even hold the instrument, let alone play it. While he was away, Olinda would occasionally allow their daughter to blow and try to fill the bag, made of goatskin covered in dark blue velvet with a similar-coloured trim. The girl thought it was always on the verge of turning black as if night had sheltered in the bagpipes with the mystery of her father. But her father returned and the bagpipes remained hanging on the wall. As time passed and the bagpiper paid them no attention, O thought they got smaller, condemned to extinction, like an ancient creature in a forgotten legend, skin and bone of a rare, long-legged bird, with their melancholy colour and golden tassels which seemed to have lost their majesty, but for her were like coloured caresses. No, he couldn’t touch them. Later maybe. Polka said he’d run out of air. His chest wasn’t strong enough. But one Christmas Eve, when Olinda was pregnant with Pinche, he played them again. O was amazed and Olinda almost died laughing as she cradled her own belly. To start with, both Polka and the instrument looked as if they would burst. Polka’s face was red from the effort of containing the air. But the bagpipes sounded again and it seemed to O they were finally letting go of all they’d been saving.

  The bagpipes kept not only the light they’d saved up inside their black velvet, but a lot of silence. Silence must be kept. O soon distinguished two classes of silence. There was mute silence. The silence of suppressing what cannot or should not be said. A precautionary, fearful silence. And then there was friendly silence. The silence that makes you think. The silence that protects you and allows room for meditation. The silence of the bagpipes waiting for Polka.