Books Burn Badly

by Unknown

  ‘Stop doing that!’

  ‘I can’t, your honour. I’ve got something in my eye.’

  ‘You should have thought about that.’

  ‘You don’t think about something in your eye, your honour,’ reasoned the defendant, surprised at having to explain such a basic law of nature to a judge.

  He really was the spitting image.

  While a female witness gave evidence, the defendant pulled out a book he had hidden under his shirt and started reading.

  ‘Behave!’ said the judge. ‘This isn’t a reading-room.’

  The defendant was about to put the book away when the judge ordered it to be handed over. ‘My word, this looks interesting! The Spirit of the Laws by Montesquieu. I’ll have to read it. It’s been confiscated . . . By the way, what were you before you turned up here?’

  ‘I was a judge, but I meted out justice.’

  The outsider’s reply caused a wave of consternation to spread through the courtroom.

  ‘I sentence you to life in exile,’ pronounced the judge. ‘I don’t want to see you in Oklahoma again.’

  From The Mysterious Outsider by John Black Eye, Far Off West series.

  The Yoke Collector

  The director, publicist, only editor and typographer of the newspaper Maritime Awakening, Ernest Botana, walked in a daze, having received the order to close issued by the Judge of Oklahoma and carried out by the sheriff, Trigger Happy, and his not very bright sidekick, Light Weight.

  ‘Why?’ he asked the judge in the short interview he was allowed with the door ajar.

  ‘In the law, there are no whys,’ replied the somewhat oblique voice of Large White, the Judge of Oklahoma. Adding from a dark room, ‘The point of the law is to be the law, not to be just.’

  He’d heard this before and had felt a mixture of fear and disgust, something akin to what a goldfinch must feel when it lands on a limy twig.

  ‘And don’t lodge any more appeals. I’ve ordered the building to be razed to the ground. I already told you there’s no sea in Oklahoma.’

  Suddenly, on the main street, he bumped into a poorly paved shadow. He rolled his newspaper into the shape in his passionate columns he called ‘the Winchester of freedom’ and looked up to find the flinty profile of the supremo. His heart told him to express contempt. That the lives of people in Oklahoma should be in the hands of individuals like the judge at this stage of civilisation made him feel a fatigue he defined as ‘reticulate drowning’. There was a time his optimism knew no bounds and grew on top of itself, step by step, like a cabbage. It was then he’d written a brave and memorable denunciation of State abuse and corruption: The Yoke Collector.

  Memorable especially for the judge. The day, no doubt, he swore to get his revenge. And summoned him. He was really annoyed.

  ‘You’ll feel all the weight of the law . . . and a little something extra from me.’

  What was published in Maritime Awakening was true. The judge did collect yokes, which he hung in the hallway. He had three particularly interesting specimens: a Texas yoke, a Kansas yoke and a yoke from Oklahoma.

  From The Yoke Collector by John Black Eye, Far Off West series.

  Sulfe looked around. Between the stag’s antlers was a crucifix. The vision of St Eustace, patron saint of hunters. Three yokes hung in the hallway like coat-racks. One of each of the local kinds, called Galician, Portuguese and Castilian. Why had the judge summoned them? Did he suspect one of them of feeding information to a writer of western novels? What was his name? Black Eye.

  ‘There are the three yokes, but it’s not a collection. One good yoke is enough,’ said the judge with studied humour that made the others laugh. ‘As you well know, what I collect are Bibles. Tell me if the man isn’t mad!’

  ‘Who could it be?’ asked Father Munio. ‘Do you suspect anyone?’

  He had the novel now. Everything in those hands, clad in a pair of soft white gloves, took on the appearance of remains waiting to be expunged.

  ‘All I know,’ said Samos, ‘is that someone wishes to malign me in this twisted, abject way. Without naming names, in a world of fiction that is vulgar and remote . . . Cast me as the bad guy. A perverse judge of Oklahoma! The trouble is you never know where such a ridiculous, infamous game might end up. Imagine this judge, practising in Oklahoma, is blamed for things, atrocities . . . Some people are obsessed with the past.’

  ‘They’re coincidences,’ said Tomás Dez. ‘That’s all it is, Ricardo, chance.’

  The judge and censor exchanged glances. Dez realised this meeting was an indirect way of forcing him to act more diligently. They’d always been close. He couldn’t understand why Samos, who was usually so calm, had lost his nerve over something so trivial. The worst thing he could do was show his fear. Imagine . . . There was no need to imagine anything.

  Samos, however, regained his composure, adding a touch of humour, ‘I just wanted, friends, to fill you in on this rather picturesque situation. Even in a country as secure as ours, there’s no escaping the evil eye.’

  ‘There’s something artistic, deeply human, about yokes,’ said Sulfe after a pause. ‘And about halters, those wire and wicker art pieces for muzzling mouths.’

  Sulfe stopped abruptly. He had a passion for ‘alighting on the classics’. Being one of them. Each of them. Cultivating his chosen model to the end. Not just knowing what they thought, but how they expressed it. Assuming their voice, as he said. In short, copying them. So his relationship with knowledge was a form of possession. The secret of his moments of brilliance was this identification that led him to act in his lectures, though he was generally a shy man who spat out monosyllables. Recently the process had been reversed. He began to feel possessed by those he studied and delved into. There was no telling when it might happen, no warning. It was like having a ventriloquist who spoke for him, without permission. Who controlled not only the levers of thought, but the threads of speech as well, until turning him, in the most unfortunate circumstances, into a comedian, a satirist or a gossip. Some people lost their memory. Sulfe acquired new memories. He started consuming what he’d always reviled. From Catullus and Sappho to Afonso Eanes do Coton and María Balteira, the last to mention two members of the most obscene school of Galician-Portuguese cancioneiros or songbooks. The discovery of this branch of wild eroticism, words fornicating like bodies, in medieval lyric poetry, together with his interest in Rabelais, had caused not only a mental upheaval but a shift in his organism similar to a radical change of diet. Possibly to defend herself in a conservative environment or else to justify the daring act of absorbing and disseminating universal poetry’s most obscene creations, Carolina Michaëlis talks of this ‘the most dissolute carnivalesque pasquinades’, of compositions whose language is on a par with that of ‘brawlers and gamblers’. Another leading authority on the medieval treasures that lay hidden for centuries, Rodrigues Lapa, talks of a spirited willingness to confront ‘certain verbal sewage’. Dissolute pasquinades! Verbal sewage! When having to refer to these compositions, Sulfe himself didn’t hesitate to talk of ‘a vulgar and immoral branch on a golden tree’. And as he recovered his health, he’d think of a poem by João Soares:

  Miss Lucy, Lucy Sánchez, for God’s sake,

  if fuck you I could, fuck you I would!

  ‘Finally,’ he heard the familiar voices of Gargantua and Falstaff, ‘you can tell the difference between pleasure and enjoyment, you’re poking your nose in where you should.’ There was indeed ‘a second world and a second life outside officialdom’, to quote his now revered Mikhail Bakhtin, but not just in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. It was a secret, but he was living a second life in a second world. Yes, he was an amphibian in the new Spanish Middle Ages. On the outside, he was the same old doctor. ‘See these fingers yellowed not from tobacco, but from alighting on the classics.’ He was capable of vehemently, even angrily, defending what he called ‘the grammar of power’. The essential superiority of some languages over others. The mystical, w
arlike quality of Spanish, which made it more suitable for talking to God. The relevance of Nebrija’s warlike grammar, the Empire’s companion language, as a contemporary apothegm. And so on. But anyone who knew him from before, when he came offstage, would observe an ironical form of boasting, an obvious horror of any kind of ambition for public notoriety, be it in the academic sphere or the sphere of official culture and journalism, where he’d attained the stature of a golden personality. When called on to give his opinion on special occasions, he had a sixth sense which enabled him consistently to match ‘the grammar of power’, the taste of mandarins, which he seasoned with a culture they lacked. There were things he couldn’t even mention. Once he bumped into the mayor and greeted him in his most colloquial Latin, ‘Quo vadis, your worship?’ The mayor answered him with sickled face, ‘There you go again, Sulfe, spouting German.’ He now enjoyed himself as never before. He’d crossed ‘the threshold of invisibility’. He was a secret being. He worshipped one, mortal God, the great Dionysius, whose feet the dog Cerberus licked at the gates of hell. It was through him, through Dionysius’ eyes, he saw the world now, without others knowing. He was particularly bold when it came to those he’d always avoided. He turned his reading hours into a nocturnal spree in search of ‘dissolute carnivalesque pasquinades’ and ‘verbal sewage’. It had all started as a funny paradox. He’d been asked by the chapter of Santiago Cathedral to study expressions of risus paschalis, paschal laughter, and the so-called festa stultorum, feast of fools, as well as the existence or not of a ‘feast of the donkey’ in the Compostelan Church’s tradition. He didn’t get very far. He couldn’t cope with the fields that suddenly opened. All those books waiting for him on inveterate shelves, in locked cupboards, buried alive in filthy attics and basements. He started poking his finger in cracks he’d previously despised. His warrior philologist’s yellow fingers smelt now of sex and shone like tasty word-slops. What he’d run away from became his bread and butter. As he read, he heard, as if in prayer, the emotional, excited chorus of Bacchantes, ‘When Dionysius leads, the earth will dance.’

  He could claim to have been a bibliophile ever since he was a child. He’d certainly grown up with ordered reading, tutored by a pack of Carlist clerics, who kept an eye even on the Spanish mystics and allowed access to enlightened fathers such as Feijoo and Sarmiento only in tiny measures served with little spoons. But somehow he’d become an expert. Books were his most treasured property. When he thought of the old family seat in Ribeiro, he pictured not the land, but the volumes. This set him apart from many other professors and ecclesiastical friends and Compostelan theologians, who were leading authorities on property registers and lawsuits over land inheritance and ownership. And extremely concerned about the culture of rents and the number of feet in a granary. He’d alighted on the classics. And if he’d been given a chair, it was as a result of his knowledge, not of booty or contacts. He was very conservative. A traditionalist. He’d never hidden the fact. Even as a boy, he’d come to the conclusion it was something biological, in his nature. He remembered this with horror when the Dean of Sciences in Santiago conferred a doctorate honoris causa on Franco, comparing his warlike activity to ‘a biological, scientific experience’. In his second life, Sulfe had a stock response, ‘I’m conservative, not inhuman.’ A message that was so simple, constantly repeated as it was in the endless post-war period, it sounded like a bizarre riddle.

  Hardly anyone knew about Professor Alfonso Sulfe’s second existence. They may have set out from a similar port, but he’d long since veered off on a course that had nothing to do with the judge Samos or those others who were convinced they had a direct link with God. If he’d renewed a friendship dating back to the 1940s and accepted Samos’ recent invitation to join their conversations in the so-called Crypt (which the judge, with intellectual coquetry, also termed his San Casciano in reference to Machiavelli’s retreat), it was for a reason he kept secret. To start with, he’d replied to the invitation with grateful politeness, alleging, however, that his teaching commitments and his own studies made it difficult for him to attend. He’d be delighted to do so occasionally. But then the embers of a memory revived, turning into a fire that blazed day and night in his brain.

  ‘It being a madman . . .’

  Dez was not happy with the meeting. He failed to understand how Samos, who was intelligent, sly when necessary, could have exhibited his paranoia with that western novelist so publicly, albeit among friends. He appeared now to be taking it lightly, but Dez knew how much it bothered him.

  ‘Strange the way it continues,’ said Father Munio, who with his white gloves turned every book that fell into his hands into an object for dissection.

  Ernest Botana the journalist tipped his hat to the pruned, skeletal, naked poplars:

  ‘Courage, old friends!’

  Then he saw the judge coming and stretched out his hand:

  ‘I absolutely will not allow you to consider me an enemy.’

  The servant of the law was confused and blushed. He left, irritated by the weight of that pious affront.

  The judge held out his hand to retrieve the novel. He’d have preferred it if Father Munio hadn’t chosen that particular passage to read aloud. It had quite upset him, which is why the page was marked. And now hearing someone else read it aloud finally revealed the source of the unsettling echo in his head. There was the memory of a similar sentence addressed to him.

  It was the last time he’d talked to Héctor Ríos in Mazarelos Square, Santiago, outside the Law Faculty, that Christmas Eve in 1935. The day he refused the gift of a book by Wells and Ríos had the audacity, the unbearable goodwill, to comment, ‘I absolutely will not allow you to consider me an enemy.’

  A fine coup de théâtre.

  That’s right, he refused the book from Ríos, with whom he’d shared a passion for bibliography ever since they were children. He refused the book by Wells, an essay on The Salvaging of Civilisation.

  ‘I already read it,’ Samos lied.

  ‘And I read your article,’ said Ríos eventually. ‘“Germany’s Scholars Align Themselves with the Führer”. I think you’ve forgotten one or two . . .’

  There was Héctor Ríos, saying goodbye to Professor Del Riego on the steps of the Law Faculty and then jovially turning towards him, with his Kantian categorical imperative spectacles, a bundle of books in one hand and bulging jacket pockets. Who knows? He may still have been carrying his notes on cards from Xohán Vicente Viqueira’s lectures in Coruña on ethics, which the pupils of the Free Teaching Institute exchanged with lay devotion, like prayers. ‘Listen, Samos, to what Viqueira has to say: “Conscience is the mental activity of esteeming the good”. Could anyone have put it better?’ Once, in the spring of 1931, Ríos had persuaded him to attend a tribute to Viqueira in Ouces Cemetery. One of the participants, Bieito Varela, knocked on the gravestone and said, ‘Mr Viqueira, the Republic has arrived!’ The atmosphere was pleasant and effusive, with lots of cultured people, but Samos felt uncomfortable. Viqueira’s grave was outside the Catholic cemetery. Why was he buried outside? Ríos looked at him the way he did sometimes, through ironic spectacles that made him feel a fool, and said, ‘He’s outside because they wouldn’t let him in.’

  Now, in 1935, Héctor Ríos is on his way to Madrid, to the hall of residence, with his brilliant academic record and plans to become, with the help of the prestigious penologist Luis Jiménez de Asúa, one of the youngest public prosecutors in the Spanish Republic. Héctor Ríos, with whom he’d shared children’s games on Parrote Beach, secondary studies, declamation classes in the Craftsmen’s Circle and a youthful passion for Herbert George Wells.

  ‘You’re not going to consider me an enemy, Mr Samos?’ His Kantian glasses looked at him with irony and Samos again felt small. ‘If you are,’ declaimed Ríos on the faculty steps, ‘I will not allow it.’

  He came down the steps.

  Held out his hand.

  Samos was slow to accept the gesture, but
did so in the end, unwillingly. He knew this meant carrying on the conversation. He now despised what he had once thought of as a virtue. Héctor Ríos enjoyed a polemic. Never gave in. So he didn’t pass up the opportunity to suggest, for his forthcoming thesis on Juan Donoso Cortés’ influence on contemporary thought and more especially on the prominent German jurist Carl Schmitt, he’d do well to read the Austrian jurist Hans Kelsen, to which Samos replied he’d already read a bit and he wouldn’t last a round with Schmitt. ‘With the rise of Nazism,’ answered Ríos, ‘while most jurists went into hiding, Hans Kelsen had the courage and the clarity to say there were only two possible kinds of State: a democracy or an autocracy. That is to last not just a round, but the whole fight. Kelsen is no wizard, but he’s right. It’d be crazy to put the terrestrial globe on your Mr Schmitt’s head.’

  Right? There was no point arguing now. The sun’s gone past the door already, Ríos. No, he didn’t say that. It wasn’t the right time. Héctor still lived in his old liberal world, full of ideas. Nor was he going to answer the question Ríos then asked, begged him to think about. ‘Can you be a Christian, a Catholic conservative, and approve of Fascism? Isn’t tyranny the ultimate moral failure?’

  In conversation, Samos was usually cautious. Not in writing. Recently, under the pseudonym Syllabus, he’d been expressing himself more and more freely, getting more and more excited. He converted this ardour into speech. He felt like talking with ferocity.

  He had nothing to think about. That was his answer.

  ‘I’ve nothing to think about,’ he said suddenly.

  It felt good, addressing him like this, boldly. Ríos had always been up front, but now he’d taken over his position. It was a strange, thrilling sensation. Ríos, the mature young man, struck him now as naive. His revered Schmitt talked of a ‘providential’ meeting with Donoso Cortés’ Speech on Dictatorship. He felt the same ‘providential’ moment with Schmitt. He gave Ríos some information he lacked: history was preparing to move with steely ferocity. Ríos still trusted in Wells’ fiction in one pocket and Viqueira’s cards on ethics in the other. On his way to the hall of residence in Madrid, with his jacket worn out at the elbows.