Books Burn Badly

by Unknown

  ‘Did he never tell you about the dance in L’Étoile?’

  Now it seemed to be the characters in the cover photos listening to her narrative. Dez guessed she wasn’t the kind of woman to start crying, but she blinked and rubbed her hands, ‘In his last days, of course we didn’t know it, he’d pay tribute to the smallest things. I’d give him an apple for dessert and he’d carry on looking at it for hours. He’d say to me, “Isn’t it wonderful, Miss Dalia?”’

  Dez glanced in the same direction as the Sahara lady, but found nothing that could be described as wonderful. She abruptly shook her head and said, ‘If what you mean is whether Mr Anceis had a secret, I’d have to reply I don’t know. If he had any secrets, he took them with him. All he left me was a Festina watch.’

  ‘That’s all very interesting from the point of view of Anceis as a poet. But right now I was thinking about something else. Do you think there’s any possibility Aurelio Anceis hasn’t died?’

  She was stunned. Dez would have liked to know whether her contemplation had to do with him, an assessment of his sanity, or whether she was really considering the hypothesis Anceis might not be dead.

  ‘Listen, sir. It was very polite of him to die the way he did.’

  The Sahara lady had adopted a hard tone that sounded quite genuine.

  ‘He spent the nights coughing,’ said Dalia. ‘I even considered throwing him out, fond as I was of him. “Mr Anceis, why don’t you go to a hospital or some home?” When I said this to him, he fell quiet. He got over his cough for a time. Either that or he smothered it, who knows? He then had the decency to go and die outside. Without bothering anyone. He even made his own bed. He wrote a farewell letter, which I gave to the police. But first he made his bed. He’d smooth out the creases in his quilt with his hand, like an iron. It was very kind of him to die like this. One thing about sailors, they can fend for themselves.’

  Her expression hardened further as she addressed Dez. What questions was he asking? Wasn’t he his friend? She said, ‘Mr Anceis was a correct man. Didn’t they find his polished shoes neatly placed together on the Coiraza wall in Orzán as if he’d gone and lain down on the sea?’

  The next step was to go in search of Sada. When he found him, on the terrace of the Galicia Café, he spoke with the utmost caution. He had to obtain information, discover what he knew, but not slip up. Sada was either in another world or pretending to be mad. Or both. But, if he did know the truth, he had plenty of reasons to plot his revenge.

  ‘Anceis?’

  ‘It’s not an official matter, Sada, my friend. I’m acting as intermediary. They’ve expressed interest in him from the Index in Madrid. He sent some poems. They’re impressed and want to publish them with a fanfare. Funny thing is he only wrote his name and the following address: Orzán Sea, Coruña.’

  ‘Orzancy is a poet. That’s right.’

  ‘Not Orzancy. I’m talking about Aurelio Anceis. He hasn’t published a book. I said I’d look into it. Try and remember, Sada. Is there a hidden Parnassus among the bars of Orzán?’

  ‘Anceis? Never heard of him. There was an Aurelio, the great Aguirre, who drowned in the wildness of Orzán, not in a bar. He’d go around with his head uncovered during God’s storms. Wie wenn am Feiertage . . .’

  Dez the censor was aware that words, even those pulled out of a hat by chance, had a purpose. ‘As on a Holiday . . .’ He knew the poem, he’d heard it before, but what was the point of quoting Hölderlin? Sada was starting to rise. Ascending through clouds of expressionist Atlantic thunder. He was getting away and the mystery hadn’t been solved yet.

  ‘But that, Mr Dez, was another time, when shells were still coated in nacre.’

  He made a final attempt.

  ‘He may not still be alive,’ said Dez. ‘Is there anyone whose absence has been noted? If not in Orzán, then on other seaside Parnassuses. The heroic route of the Star, Elms, the Galley, the Strip . . . To say nothing of the islands in Coruña’s Aegean: Enrique’s, Leonardo’s, Delicacies, Nautilus, the Cribs . . .’

  ‘Don’t torture me now, Dez. I was born yesterday in the Cuckoo’s Song, resuscitated in the Ship’s Lantern and died in the Cuckoo’s Feather. There are abstemious poets too. Go and find one. After all, it never rains but it pours.’

  ‘Don’t try to be difficult, master. Geniuses like you are not allowed to indulge in such flaws. Please. Take a trip around the world of spirits. If there’s any news, give me a call.’

  ‘I’ll toast you with Ferrero Tonic. And the soul of the loin of pork in Enrique’s. By the way . . .’

  Tomás Dez realised he’d kept the conversation going too long. There were seconds that got stuck in time like bits of dust in the eye.

  ‘What is it, Sada?’

  ‘How’s it going with Oeste?’

  He was about to say, ‘It’s fine, being processed.’ But the dust had taken its toll and Dez replied carelessly:

  ‘Between you and me, there is a problem. Have you read it all?’

  ‘No, not all of it. I did the cover and a few illustrations. What I can tell you is that magazine is more innocent than Carral bread, Mr Dez.’

  ‘In the strictest confidence. My report was favourable, but authorisation has been withheld somewhere up the line. The Madrid offices are in disarray. The Julián Grimau case has made a mess of things. We have to be patient.’

  ‘Patient? Do you know why there are so many seagulls and mullets in this city? Because they feed on patience. The drains are full of patience.’

  He made as if to summon the waiter and said, ‘A foie gras of patience, if you please.’

  ‘Remember, Sada, that was in confidence. Oeste will be published. We may have to pull some strings. Prune it back a bit. But you can trust me. Whatever the circumstances, I’ll always be on the side of art, you know. Which reminds me, I’ve a new work on the way. The Moment of Truth. That’s the title.’

  ‘Very good,’ said Sada. ‘Very bullish.’

  Dez left without looking at the seagulls, but he heard their calls like a soundtrack of suspense on the way to his office. Very bullish. What to make of that? The bastard. He had things to do, the sooner the better.

  He hatched his plan. He would have to shake up, send tremors towards, the director of the Expreso. They’d never been close. His professional style, the way he kept his distance.

  The other key figure was Samos.

  He gave him a call. There was a problem with Oeste and he preferred to discuss it with him out of friendship and to avoid disturbing Chelo Vidal. He then made another call. To the printer’s. He’d decided to withdraw three poems he wasn’t quite sure about: ‘Zero’, ‘Infinite’ and ‘Standard Vivas’.

  He met the judge that same afternoon in the Union Café. Oeste, he explained, was being considered by the General Direction in Madrid. He’d been favourable, even enthusiastic, in his report. Everything was going well until the fishing line, so to speak, unexpectedly got caught and became knotted. Someone had noticed some poems which were described as perverse and the fact of being anonymous made them even more insidious. In confidence, it was a senior official. He couldn’t say the name, the judge would understand.

  ‘Yes, I understand. In my situation, as you well know, I also understand how uncomfortable one can feel in front of texts that are anonymous or written under a pseudonym.’

  Yes, of course. They’d come to that later, said Dez. He had some news. But going back to the problem of Oeste, circumstances had something to do with it. The state of emergency declared for two years, the Grimau case, the international campaign . . . It all had an impact and at such times controls were tightened. Each to his own. As for the poems, they may have been a little heated, he couldn’t say. He’d pulled some strings and been given a solution. The magazine could come out if those poems were omitted. But there was another demand he wished to discuss with the utmost discretion. The authorities wanted to know who’d written the poems. In short, he had to put together a confidential repo
rt. Their personal details and public conduct. The authorities had thought to go through the usual channels and seek information from the Brigade of Politico-Social Investigation, but he’d persuaded them that wasn’t necessary, at the head of the magazine were some highly respected individuals who were close to the regime and could be trusted, first among them his honour’s wife. This reference had sufficed, explained Dez. So he’d offered to look into the matter himself. Which is why he’d called and here they were. It was a question of avoiding any damages and making sure Oeste came out.

  ‘The most important thing for us all is that none of this has a knock-on effect.’

  ‘I understand, Dez. I’ll talk to Chelo. There won’t be a problem. She may seem to have her head in the clouds, but she’s rooted in reality.’

  ‘I know. That’s why I came to you. I thought it had something to do with Sada. A pseudonym. I spoke to him before, without telling him the truth. You know how it is, he needs feeding separately.’

  ‘We’ll solve the case of the perverse verses,’ said the judge ironically. ‘I mean it. Perversity is a concept of great importance in our legal history.’

  ‘As for the other matter,’ continued Dez, ‘I thought you’d want to know. Something’s come up in the case of Black Eye.’

  The censor saw yet again how the mere mention of that name, for whatever reason, had an epidermal effect on the judge. It altered his disposition. To help him relax, he added, ‘I’ve taken a liking to western novels and brought you a present.’

  To the judge’s surprise, he pulled a western novel out of his pocket. Samos went along with the joke and accepted it. It was called Romantic the Horse. And signed John Black Eye. Showing he already knew it, even though it had only just been published, he searched for the chapter where there was a trial and discovered that Dez had already underlined the relevant paragraph. The judge nodded in acknowledgement. He read, ‘Even after the verdict, the lawyer Henry Botana had the courage to tell the Judge of Oklahoma that the death penalty was a form of premeditated killing.’

  ‘Of course we couldn’t just leave that alone,’ said Dez. ‘With all this fuss about Grimau being shot! But in the censor’s office there’s a dislike for trashy literature. My colleagues are highly academic. Who’d have looked at Romantic the Horse past the first paragraph? Even that would have been a lot. There are more readers of sentimental stories.’

  Dez opened the novel at the beginning and adopted the tone of a radio series, ‘Henry Botana was six feet tall, had a girlfriend who loved him, a horse named Romantic and a head the judge had set a humiliatingly low price on. He hoped, on the day of the Last Judgement, Archangel Michael would be fairer about his soul’s weight.’

  Dez smiled ironically and closed the book.

  ‘Not bad, eh? Listen, Ricardo, I wasn’t inactive. If you thought that at some point, you were mistaken. The truth is it wasn’t a difficult mystery to solve. There was some confusion because, at his publisher’s in Barcelona, our man was known as Dr Montevideo, actually an alias. Force of habit. That is until, after my insistence, you might say warning, they uncovered his real identity. Héctor Ríos. He’s our man.’

  Dez had known all of this for quite some time, without having to read Romantic the Horse. But he thought the judge would enjoy the dramatic denouement. Samos’ expression wasn’t exactly the look of someone who’s finally trapped their prey. He seemed to grow pale.

  ‘Do you know that name?’

  ‘Yes, a bit.’

  ‘Was it who you suspected?’

  In the storm, the Orzán waves attempt to regain their ancient channel, the memory of the isthmus, before the great Recheo put a stop to the union of two seas, the wild side and the calm bay. The former attempts to force an entry, climbs up Riazor and manages with its tassels of foam to get as far as the giant eucalyptus in Pontevedra Square, the spot where day labourers wait to be hired. And where saleswomen from the suburbs and washerwomen moor their beasts of burden. It’s raining with seaside conviction. They’re young. Héctor’s a little older. He’s been in Santiago for two years, studying law, but at weekends he still works with the group of theatre and declamation in the Craftsmen’s Instructive and Recreational Circle. Thanks to him, Samos read in public for the first time in the hall there. They recited the scene with the two gravediggers in Act V of Hamlet. He played the part of the First Clown. How often had they weighed up the curve of that question! ‘What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?’ Now Héctor’s planning a new project. An adaptation for Coruña Radio, which is due to start broadcasting, of Herbert George Wells’ most popular works. Samos has to help. They share a passion for this author. A series called Wells, Wells, Wells. With a signature tune in Morse code. They’re on their way to rehearsal, in the rain. It doesn’t matter. Ríos pulls out a book from under his coat. Reads, ‘“From Castro to Mount Alto, the face of Coruña was grimy with powder of the Black Smoke”. Yep, the first radio broadcast will be a version of The War of the Worlds. What do you say? Then we’ll move on to the adventures of The Invisible Man.’

  Héctor doesn’t let up. He’s optimism personified. In the summer, he helps out in the family academy. Since he was a child, he’s been good at both skills, typing and shorthand. He always says they were his childhood games and he finds it difficult to write normally. He’s a devotee of Esperanto, which he’s fluent in, having studied it at nights. His passion for a universal language is based on the ideals of rational socialism, for which he drew inspiration from Ramón de la Sagra, a Coruñan of the nineteenth century who, in his opinion, is on a par with the Frenchman Proudhon or the Welshman Owen. He’s also always flicking through his notes on ethics by Xohán Vicente Viqueira. To start with, Ricardo Samos likes the sound of this message of faith in humanity. They’re heading towards the Craftsmen’s Circle, down San Andrés Street. Héctor Ríos, as always, is carrying a book in his hand. He alternates between speaking and reading, with fervour, as if it were a musical score. They bump into Dr Hervada, who points out he’s walking with one foot in the road and the other on the pavement. Héctor replies with quick wit, ‘Thank you, doctor, I thought I’d suddenly gone lame.’

  ‘In the time of the Spanish Republic, were you never tempted?’ Schmitt asked Samos one day when they met in Casalonga during the summer of 1962.

  ‘I was a rational socialist for a few hours of crazy joy,’ he replied ironically.

  His attraction for Ríos lasted a little longer than that. Samos had been brought up in an atmosphere of traditional, monarchist Catholicism. A few months earlier, in April, the Republic had been declared. The swift course of events made him dizzy. To start with, he shared the other students’ joy. The Republic had arisen like spring, a creative impulse in society. In that vote in 1931, of the thirty-nine members of Coruña Town Hall, only five were monarchist. But gradually he felt the distrust that dominated in the family home, where the fall of the monarchy was labelled a disaster. There was an air of tension at home. His mother’s apprehension about laicism led her to pray for the salvation of Spain, sometimes on her own, other times with groups of female friends. His father, a Navy legal officer and historian by vocation, seemed to be distant from it all, including his marriage, though he’d occasionally let fly about the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Morocco and the Statute of Catalonia. Whether he liked it or not, Ricardo Samos was subject at home to a constant sense of apocalyptic doom. During this time, Héctor Ríos provided a balance. It was he who embodied the charming side of current events. Ricardo was also going to study law. If they coincided in Santiago, could Ríos teach him Esperanto? Of course he could. But when that meeting took place, a year later, Samos expressed no interest and Héctor was no longer absorbed in the task of disseminating a universal language.

  ‘There’s one priority for which we need all languages. We have to talk about the League of Human Rights.’

  Samos was unhappy about the boarding-house. Perhaps because he was a freshma
n, he’d been given a small, dark room with damp patches on the ceiling. He still hadn’t decided whether he was going to fulfil his promise to his mother to attend first Mass in the cathedral the next morning.

  ‘Why’s that?’

  When he got enthusiastic, Héctor had a tendency to construct paragraphs. ‘The only way to oppose totalitarianism is to aim for a World Federation governed by just principles of universal law. These human rights, without borders, will be the framework for a common language, the real Esperanto.’

  They’d known each other as children. They were neighbours in the Old City. Playing on the beach. They can’t see. It’s a game of gangsters in the Wild West. You have to crouch down, move stealthily and find your enemy without being seen. You shoot with your mouth.

  ‘Bang, Ríos!’

  ‘Where am I then?’

  ‘What you say about the League of Human Rights sounds Masonic,’ Samos blurted out. His mother had said his voice was finally dropping and he’d have sworn it happened on that day, at that moment.

  Héctor felt the blow. Was confused. Samos’ voice, which sounded so different, may have had something to do with it.

  ‘Masonic? Is that good or bad?’

  Samos preferred not to reply. He emphasised his silence. He knew this silence was the sign of a definitive parting of the ways. Months later, he’d come into contact with those at Acción Española. In the Law Faculty, there was also a very active group of traditionalist teachers openly conspiring against the Republic.

  ‘Now you’ve a voice of thunder. You’d be terrific playing the part of the Last Martian. Remember? Instead of Regent’s Park, we’ll choose Mount Alto, next to Hercules Lighthouse. That superhuman note. Ulla, ulla!’

  They laughed.

  ‘Ulla, ulla, ulla!’

  It was burning. The flames were licking at the cover. The books had been released by the blasted time machine. He hears a voice. That guy who’s taken to reading out the titles and their authors on the pyres by the docks.