Books Burn Badly

by Unknown

  ‘It’s a boat-house. Isn’t it beautiful?’

  ‘Where did you go, Gabriel?’

  ‘To Santa Cristina.’

  His father’s concern abruptly switched objective. Abandoned him to focus instead on this other place.

  ‘To Santa Cristina? To that beach in this weather?’

  Grandpa Mayarí’s Cane

  Grandpa Mayarí hunted down items of news with the iron tip of his cane. He preferred the yellow ones, dipped in sun and frost, swept along the same paths as the dry leaves, though newspaper stays one step behind, on its own. The leaves of trees and newspapers, freed from the date, move westwards in flocks of crazy melancholy. They sometimes crouch in an abandoned doorway, all mucky, like the hair of a pet which has come back from its nocturnal outing with a dead man’s cold slap and been unable to locate the cat-flap. On Mount Alto, the hill on which Hercules Lighthouse stands, some of these itinerant leaves catch on prickly thickets and turn into dry meat. But a few go into a trance and are carried this way and that, tattooing the wind.

  These are the ones sought out by the tip of Antonio Vidal, Grandpa Mayarí’s cane.

  Here’s one now. The cane pretends not to see. Suddenly darts through the air and harpoons the piece of news on the sea lane opened by feet in the soft grass. We’re on the high cliffs of Gaivoteiro, in the direction of Fura do Touciño, and there’s something of the sea bird in the piece of paper. A final flapping of navigational wings.

  Mayarí vacated his position at Aristotle’s Lantern, grocer’s, and chose the start of summer, the best he could remember, to spend a period of time in Coruña. He came to see the boats. This was no excuse, no figure of speech. It was true. Absolutely true. He’d get up very early to go to Muro Fishmarket, which is where fishing boats, bacas and bous from the Great Sole, unloaded. Although all sales there were by auction and in large quantities, he’d always get some fish, if possible scad and sail-fluke, and sometimes bring one of those large hakes people of the sea call ‘Baby Lola’, perhaps because of their resemblance to baby mermaids, something he accepted because it fell into his hands and he couldn’t say no to the patter of a fishwife, like anyone in the din of a fishmarket who was born a farmer. He never ate it. He liked boats, not fish. In time, I reached the conclusion he bought it for the news, in this case wet and scaly news, since it was usually wrapped in newspaper. He soon got rid of the fish, like someone finally surrendering an infinite, innocent sadness into safe hands, those of Neves, maid and cook, though for a few moments he’d read those sheets of newspaper serving as a shroud. This observation of mine shouldn’t sound strange. What was strange, hence it caught my attention, was that Grandpa Mayarí didn’t read normal, whole newspapers, there being several, including the two that arrived a couple of days late by subscription from Madrid.

  From this first visit to the fishmarket, he’d return when dawn was straining at the oars on the other side of the bay, in Mera. He’d come home when the sun was the height of a man in the east. He’d then have breakfast and, happy as a frog in a puddle, take in a view of the port from the gallery. He adored his daughter and maintained a solemn silence in front of her paintings. His daughter, Chelo, respected this silence. I don’t recall her ever asking for his opinion, in search of an adjective, though she could so easily have elicited praise from someone who loved her so much. I’m sure Antonio Vidal liked those paintings, I’m in no doubt, I think I knew him quite well, but I suppose, like almost everyone else, he wondered why Chelo didn’t paint landscapes and, above all, why she didn’t paint seascapes.

  I possessed the answer to the question grandpa never asked, but to the one who did ask, I didn’t want to give it.

  Chelo painted landscapes on the palm of my hand. Souvenirs, she called them. When she was satisfied, she’d sign them: Souvenir by Corot. So this name was always familiar to me, like someone tickling my hand. A name that went from my hand to my eyes with an easel on its back.

  When I couldn’t speak, when I stumbled on a word and she saw that this struggle with language was filling me with icy horror, that of an inner being whose teeth are chattering in the cold, teeth and a cold which got inside, behind my eyes, under my tongue, she’d say, ‘Come.’ And paint a souvenir on my hand. ‘White, blue, grey and silver today.’

  The habit of opening and closing my hand.

  ‘Hey, what’s that?’ Grandpa Mayarí would ask.

  In the afternoon, we’d go out to Mount Alto, as far as Hercules Lighthouse. But first we’d stop at the Grapevine bar and sit under the trellis. He’d say to me, ‘You watch her laugh.’ When the woman came, he’d order a fizzy water for me. ‘And for the old man,’ he’d say, meaning himself, ‘an electric Ribeiro.’ And it was true, the woman did laugh.

  ‘Now let me see what you’ve got in there.’

  I opened my hand very, very slowly.

  ‘A boat, eh? A boat in the mist. Lucky you.’

  But there was something else Chelo did to help me with language. Teach me how to read and write as soon as possible. Long before I went to school. Chelo’s idea was that I had to transfer my thoughts to my hand. ‘Your mouth,’ she’d say, ‘will speak through your fingers. And what you do with your fingers will demand sound.’ It was true. A straight line had a sound. A wavy line demanded a sound. A curved line, another. You had to write them down. Play with sounds. Not be afraid of them.

  I started writing by drawing. Before letters, forms. Zigzags, spirals, crosses. And it’s true that forms produce a sound, a sound that’s already inside you, lying in wait, in the gorge of your throat. I realised this the first time I drew a large triangle. A large triangle demands the sound of a large triangle. In this way, my voice followed the line drawn by my hand. So that letters, when they arrived, were also forms of nature, as t is the mast of a boat and l a cypress. O can be lots of things. An o can be the sun or moon. We had a washerwoman called O. In the calendar of saints, there was Our Lady of Expectation, Mary of the O. I used to laugh when my mother saw her in the distance and exclaimed, ‘Here comes Our Lady of Expectation!’ She was easy to spot since she carried a huge O on top of her head. An O full of clothes. When she arrived, her face was also a smiley O, with two clear eyes, so that her presence recalled the sun and circles of water.

  ‘Hello, O.’

  O, the washerwoman, was one of the women Chelo painted. A series that seemed unending, and in fact was, which she called Women Carrying Things on Top of Their Heads.

  O and Harmony

  He wasn’t a baby any more. When he was five or six, he wet the bed. Not before. It was around that time. It wasn’t something to shout about. You didn’t come for the clothes, only to be told, ‘I’m afraid the boy’s wet the sheets, he can’t control himself.’ The thing is clothes tell their own stories, like a book. Not that I go about repeating what they say. It’s our secret. The clothes’ and ours. Which is why the bit I like most about washing is laying the clothes in the sun. The point when the sun puts colour back in the clothes and things, the way it shines you’d think you washed the whole place. Puts colour back. In clothes, right, but also in the landscape, in objects, in people’s expressions. So you’re the one who puts black and canary yellow in ears of maize and the football shirts of Elviña Wanderers. Purple in heather. We sometimes think of happiness as being impossible. Between you and me, the closest thing to an unhappy person is someone who’s happy. I’ve heard Brevo, not a bright lad, I’ve heard Brevo called happy and unhappy. What does it matter? The children just call him stupid. Children. Who’d believe it? I’m not surprised some people get stuck on words. Some words are like insects, they change, they seem one thing and in fact they’re another. Polka reckons we’ve got it wrong. Words did not come into being to name things. Words existed first and things came later. So someone said ‘centipede’ and out came the insect. I know it doesn’t have a hundred feet. It’s the intention that counts. Whoever invents the word sets the trap. I wouldn’t want to think of a name for something bad. Imagine you sa
y it and it works. You have to watch what you say. Or not. Maybe the boy, the painter and judge’s boy, maybe he wanted to take the words inside and they turned into a ball, a plug. Because words are like crumbs. When I’m alone with my thoughts, sitting quietly at the table, my fingers make beads with the breadcrumbs on the oilskin tablecloth. By the time you realise, snap out of it, those spherical forms, polished like stars, are watching you. I don’t know about you, but what I do is eat them, the words of bread, of silence, very slowly so as not to choke. Lucky for me I had Polka. Papa. Had it not been for him, I don’t think I’d have got off the ground. I’d be happy. Unhappy. Dumb. I’d still wet the bed. I’ll have to take him to see the boy, Gabriel, one of these days. I bet he’ll know what to do. The painter smiles more than she talks. Not that I like to gossip. About other people. You won’t hear me saying, ‘This boy wets his bed!’ I suppose this business of wetting the bed, this incontinence, has something to do with his stutter. His mother told me it was a nervous thing, some fear inside his head. Which got worse when he started speaking. Stuttering. The body’s full of channels and sluice-gates, I’m well aware of that. What I can’t handle is laughter. If I burst out laughing and can’t stop myself, however tight I squeeze my legs, this joy comes pouring out of my organism. Polka tells the story of a colleague who’d been drinking and stopped to pee at the side of the road, without realising there was a fountain on the other side of the wall. The man had released a whole ocean, but he carried on standing there, his member confused with the spout, until finally he grew anxious, ‘Holy smoke! I’m weeing to death!’

  Harmony tells me off, ‘There you go again! You think everything’s a joke.’

  No. I don’t agree. The thing is I like talking to myself. Sometimes I can’t wait to be alone, so that I can talk to myself. I start walking and talking and feel a special joy in my legs. My whole body is talking. There are times when I’m about to invent a word and have to stop. Not a good idea. There was one I saw that looked invented to me. A brickie was carrying a sack of cement, which said PORTLAND in big letters. I thought that word was invented. Hadn’t existed before. I could have asked him. He was pretty dishy in that skimpy T-shirt. After that, I saw lots of them, who weren’t bad-looking either, all carrying that word on their shoulders. PORTLAND cement, I mean.

  The only one I have to explain myself to is Harmony. Harmony, you see. I know I have to pay her attention.

  The painter told me she’d found an alarm mechanism which warns you when the boy is going to pee in his sleep. A mechanism from abroad. I think that’s good. We all need an alarm, whatever the fault. When I saw it, I realised the world was changing. The importance of machines. And those yet to come. Some people are opposed to medicines. For the head. It’s easy to say, but if I get ill, they can give me anything. Acetylsalicylic acid straight off. Whatever’s necessary. I don’t mind being left alone, but not without something to take against a migraine. Sometimes, when I go too far, when I stand against the world, I’m afraid she who organises things will get upset and leave me. Because, of all the women inside, Harmony’s the most affable. She’s great at tidying up the mess, at picking up the pieces, all the scattered rubbish, at putting the mouth back on its hinges and above all at pairing socks. Because if there’s something that bothers me, come nightfall, it’s having odd socks. Not one, not three, but up to half a dozen socks without a partner, which on their own are a question: what happened to the other? It’s one thing for that to happen in a room, quite another at the washing place, where it’s cold, damp, and you’re searching for socks which, when they’re loose, are like insects with a mind of their own. They like to be unpaired. It’s the same inside your head. You’re about to go to sleep when you notice there’s a mess, the things you thought or said are missing a sock. One’s caught on a bramble bush, in a corner behind your eyes, and you have to go and look for it. That’s where Harmony comes in. And she still has time to talk to you with the voice of a bonesetter putting the bones of words in their place, so that you can sleep without pain, without itching, without the cold that makes you lose your hands and feet. That can really happen. Suddenly you don’t feel your hands. You’re washing, but you can’t feel them. They’re the colour of elder wood. You smack them to get the blood running. You breathe on them, as much as you can, like an ox in the crib. Though the best solution is to pop them up your skirt, between your thighs, in the nest. There they warm up. There they revive. But it’s much worse when you lose your hands in a dream. Then it’s Harmony who comes to the rescue and gives you some new hands, like those of a mannequin. What a relief!

  Harmony, Harmony. How I love Harmony! There are lots of other women stuck in my head, each doing her own thing. Each with her own tics and peculiarities. There are some that disappear one day and come back when you’re least expecting it. Some you don’t miss so much, but Harmony I can’t let out of my sight. When I lose her, when I’m desperate about something, when the socks are unpaired, the first thing I have to do is find Harmony. Which I almost always do in shop windows. I don’t know why. But there she is. The last time was at Bonilla Chocolates. ‘Bonilla in sight!’ it says on the sign with its little sailing boat. First of all, I saw my reflection in the glass. I looked bad. The bundle on top of my head was shaped like a crag. I’d left Grumpy in Pontevedra Square, in the place for animals. That day I’d had a run-in with a local policeman. With old cross-eyed shorty. There are some, the shorter they are, the more they look over your shoulder.

  A policeman who said to me on Falperra, on the way to Santa Lucía, ‘Get that starlet out of here.’ I knew he meant Grumpy, but I didn’t like his superior tone. He must have noticed my surprise because he added, ‘Sometimes it’s difficult to tell who’s more stupid, the one on top or the one underneath.’ Who was he to call me names? So I replied, ‘To have authority, the first thing you need to be is polite.’ I lost all the fear inside me. I reacted and out came Griffin’s voice, ‘I wish you’d keep your fingers out of my eye.’ Those in authority in these parts are always resorting to physical or verbal violence. Torture. Inflicted on so many. ‘Those in authority,’ says Polka, ‘are like Judas. The world upside down. In this country, we’re ploughing on the bones of the dead, girl.’

  ‘Have you any idea who you’re talking to?’

  ‘Not if you don’t stand on a stool.’

  ‘For that quip, I’m going to give you a fine, so that you’ll remember me for the rest of your life.’

  The milkmaid was the first to protest, ‘What’s that, dummy?’ Then another woman, who put down her basket of sea urchins and made the sign of Capricorn, ‘Colonel, colonel!’

  He must have felt alarmed because there were lots of women showing him the horn and calling him Beelzebub, pervert, goatee, so he soon changed his tune.

  ‘Enough’s enough. On you go now. End of story!’

  And they say that words don’t help.

  All the same, that man spoiled my day. My mood. I was going to leave the clothes at the house of the judge and painter. My words were in disarray. I started getting nervous. I’d lost Harmony. That made me afraid. Because along came The Horror, my worst memory.

  It was back at school. When she came in, like a virgin, with her child. OK, it was a doll, but what did they care if it was a doll or a baby? She carried it in her arms like a baby, came into school and sat down at a desk. I think she came in there because she thought who’s going to hurt me in a school. Well, in a school, if you want my opinion, the first who can hurt you are the children. She unbuttoned her dress and pulled out a breast to feed the baby. Yes, I know, it was a doll. It wasn’t even a china doll. It was stuffed with sawdust and had a head made of maize husks. But she behaved like a Madonna. Every gesture she made was genuine. She’d come into school because it was winter and children were there. And because she’d run away from home. Who could possibly hurt her in a school? She came in slowly, without a sound, I reckon she was barefoot, and we only realised she’d occupied an empty desk, the o
ne at the back, from the look of shock on our teacher’s face. Our teacher was frightened. She didn’t know what to do. You could see in her eyes she’d never been taught what you have to do when a woman carrying a doll in her arms, pretending it’s a baby, comes into school in search of refuge. Until her husband showed up. Took off his belt. Whipped the floor with it as if whipping the school’s back. The roof and beams. He hit the floor, but we looked up at the ceiling since it seemed everything was falling down. I never thought a leather belt could make so much noise. That day, I saw everything was unpaired. Including the teacher’s eyes.