Books Burn Badly

by Unknown

  ‘You can see they’re no cars for war,’ he said.

  He knew they were going to take them anyway. They hadn’t come to discuss mechanics, but to hop in the cars and leave. However, he felt he had to speak for them. To intercede. Say something. For the cars. He loved so much. It was a moral obligation. When they were returned, if that ever happened, they wouldn’t be the same. The vehicles stood waiting, in the shadows, lost in thought. Heads bowed.

  ‘The cherry’s just for outings.’

  Since everyone remained silent, what he’d said swept around the corners. He realised the terrible import of the word ‘outings’. When they changed hands, things acquired a different meaning. As if he’d unwittingly said, ‘The cherry’s just for killing.’

  ‘That’s why we’re taking it, Mr Alvedro,’ said one of the confiscators. ‘To go on outings.’

  The driver smacks his lips as if he were chewing gum, but he isn’t. He simply accumulates saliva, which he then chews. He comes to a halt just in front of the Montoyas. In the short distance that’s left, Antonio stops singing and the night’s dark breeze whirls around the Opel. The driver chews his ball of spit. The other two get out of the car, holding their pistols, aim at the basket-makers and force the Montoyas to lie down in the back, without heeding their protests. The youngest doesn’t want to let go of the baskets or maybe it’s the other way around. He’s learning the trade and fingers and osiers still form part of the weaving. The Opel pulls off. The Montoyas turn up dead in Montrove the next morning. Each with a bullet hole in their head. ‘Meningeal haemorrhage’, it says on the death certificates.

  Coffee. Meningeal haemorrhage.

  They were passing by.

  ‘They killed three basket-makers who were passing by. One of them was your age.’

  ‘Passing by where? Where they killed the champ?’

  ‘No. Wherever it happened to be. They came across the murderers’ car and were given coffee.’

  As soon as he spoke, he regretted using that expression. The unreality of euphemisms. A petty, macabre genre.

  ‘Coffee?’

  ‘They killed them.’

  ‘Were they anarchists as well?’

  ‘They were just some basket-making gypsies. One of them was fourteen, another sixteen. Your age, more or less.’

  ‘Did they kill them because they were gypsies?’

  This boy, Korea, had a hard head. Other times, it was in the clouds. You never knew if he’d heard you or not, though he did repeat snippets of conversation. As with the difference in age, there were very few similarities. He was vain, always worried about what he was wearing. One of the reasons he came down to the port. He bartered with sailors from other countries. He was crazy about jackets and weird trousers, like the bell-bottoms he’s wearing today, which are orange and covered in zips for non-existent pockets. The crane operator wasn’t particularly fussy about clothes, but what was the point of having zips if there was nothing to close? Korea had abandoned his studies and had no fixed occupation. He said he wanted to be a boxer. That’s what he said. When he turned up with his gang, it was obvious he could rule the roost, but he wasn’t normally in a group. Occasionally he’d arrive on a motorbike he’d borrowed, almost always with a girl behind. For a time, he’d often turn up with the same girl. She would be dressed in her convent school uniform. White socks, tartan skirt, green V-necked jumper and white shirt. The contrast between Korea’s style and the teenager’s uniform was funny. But all this was, so to speak, at the service of sublime nature. What was unforgettable was the girl’s long, blond hair flapping like a head on the seas. Together they looked like a fearless, beautiful human machine. They’d circle the crane a few times and then zoom off. There was a reason Korea behaved like this. The crane operator appreciated these fleeting appearances of the blonde Amazon in a schoolgirl’s white socks, as if he’d been offered a sequence from a dream. One day, Korea turned up without a motorbike, on foot, with his cap pulled down.

  ‘Now you can see what’s inside my head.’

  He removed the cap. His head was so shaven it looked transparent, pale white, like tripe that’s just been washed.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Station house style. A number zero. Have a look inside.’

  He’d been arrested. Two days in the clink. He hadn’t been taken before the magistrate, there were no specific charges. But he knew why.

  ‘You know why you’re here, don’t you?’

  He shook his head. Which they’d yanked backwards. And were holding by the hair.

  ‘You’re a step away from the reformatory, Goldilocks.’

  It wasn’t the first time he’d heard this joke. The one about destiny. He lived next door to the remand home. They asked him about the gang of Red Devils. A fight in Vigo Square, outside the Equitativa Cinema, where he’d been seen carrying a bicycle chain as a weapon.

  ‘That’s history,’ he said. ‘I left it. I’m not a devil any more.’

  ‘When d’you leave it?’

  ‘Ages ago. I don’t know. A day perhaps.’

  Why wouldn’t they let go of his hair? Each tug pulled out a handful, but also chippings from inside his head, bits of thought.

  ‘It hurts, doesn’t it? That’s your fault for having hair like a girl’s. Where’d this fashion come from, that you look like a bunch of queens? If it were short, we wouldn’t be able to pull on it like this . . . and this . . . and this.’

  Girl’s. A queen’s. It really hurt. Each root was a girl or queen.

  Like counting hairs on a dog.

  He’d always been told there was a good guy and a bad guy. Where was the good guy then? He finally arrived. An inspector who only talked. Talked to him about outings. Outings on a motorbike. A blonde girl. A blonde girl’s father.

  ‘Don’t you go pissing outside your pot any more. Listen to me. You ride that girl again, they’ll slap a clamp on your balls you’ll regret for the rest of your life. Do you know what it is to be accused of fucking a minor?’

  ‘I’m a minor as well. We used a condom. Next to the lighthouse.’

  ‘A condom? Tell the magistrate that and he’ll make it an aggravating factor. You used a condom next to the city’s main monument. Have you any idea what country you’re living in? Whose daughter she is? You can’t go in there. They think you’re a goat. A bum. A zero.’

  A zero?

  He liked the way this cop talked. He sounded like he was self-taught.

  ‘She’s the one who’s in love with me. I don’t give a damn.’

  ‘Said the cat walking over the coals. Remember this. Water doesn’t mix with oil, Spain doesn’t mix with France. Stay away from that convent school. The further, the better. Or they’ll separate your body from your soul. What’s the name of that other gang?’

  ‘What other gang?’

  ‘Don’t act dumb with me. The ones you fight to see who can make it to Charon’s boat first.’

  Whose boat? Charon’s? He was definitely self-taught.

  ‘Those pricks are the Mau Mau.’

  ‘Then watch out. Think you’re clever and you’ll find the worst Mau Mau is an angel next to a senior official whose daughter is being fucked by a red devil.’

  He didn’t wait to be asked.

  ‘Take a good look,’ he said to the crane operator. ‘You can see everything inside my head. Now is it or is it not empty?’

  A shiver. He didn’t like the locks, but right now he missed the boy with long hair. He was tempted to cover it so that Curtis wouldn’t see. Curtis was very sensitive about blows to the head.

  ‘It looks like a sphere. The terrestrial globe.’

  ‘And you’re the one who says I’m not self-taught. That champion you keep talking about, no one’s heard of him. There’s no memory of him. At the snooker club or gym. Arturo da Silva? No fucking idea!’

  He liked to visit the crane operator’s cabin. You climbed a ladder and were in another country. The crane was on the jetty, but in a floating world.
Over there, the crowns of trees with starlings fluttering about like winter leaves. In front, the decks of ships, their masts, the piles or mountains of material waiting to be loaded, stripped of their old reality, as was the case with goods that had been unloaded. There were the red, double-decker buses, which had been pensioned off in London. Korea had also witnessed the landing of studs from Canada whose purpose it was to improve the Galician race. One of the bulls had got hurt on the journey and had to be lowered on the crane, tied in with leather straps. It hung in the air for a time, calm as a totem, with the starlings flying around. Another crane operator, a friend of Ponte’s, had lifted an American plane rescued with its pilot by a Galician fishing boat in the Great Sole, on the Irish Sea. What most amazed him, an operation he watched in silence for hours, was when Ponte loaded a ship with three hundred coffins for export, ‘Made in Galicia’.

  ‘They’re for a rich country. Chestnut wood. Immortal.’

  Korea thought there was a link between things hanging in the air, a kind of sustained vulnerability. The Canadian stud with the broken horns, the plane with the detached wings, the old London buses, the empty coffins.

  Inside the cabin, Miguel or Korea could handle a historic jewel. The first football to reach the city. The genuine article. Made of English leather. It had fallen off a ship, the Diligent, and not made it back on board. The crew scoured the port, but of course they didn’t find it. When someone’s looking lost, it’s said they’re searching for the Diligent’s ball. And somehow or other, Ramón Ponte had inherited the ball from his father.

  He also had a pair of boxing gloves.

  Hercules’ gloves. From his first and only official fight.

  ‘Look. This is where the tooth was. Back then, they never wore a gumshield. Not on that day. And here’s where the tooth got embedded. Not any old tooth. Manlle’s tooth.’

  ‘Manlle’s?’

  ‘You think I’m lying? Do you think he could lie?’

  The ‘he’ in question was Vicente Curtis, Hercules. Down below, at the foot of the crane’s ladder, his horse was waiting. Carirí.

  ‘Because he was a champ. Those who lost against him in the ring added their own bullet, their own bit of torment. One of the shots went through the palm of his left hand. A mark left by the murderers. Lots of corpses turned up with a shot in the left hand. But the thing is he was also left-handed. Apparently they made him box. Crippled, lame and blind. His face smashed in. Who knows what they said to him. “Go on, hit, dance! Let’s see you dance, champ!” Like cowards. It was over there, on the other side of the bay. A few farmers went down to the beach to collect seaweed with which to fertilise the land. They took pity on the dead man and loaded him on to the ox-cart, in amongst the seaweed, so that they could give him a decent burial.’

  ‘I still don’t understand,’ insisted Korea.

  ‘How could you understand?’ replied the crane operator angrily. ‘Your brain’s in a mess. You spend your whole day getting into fights, like someone who’s playing, and you’re incapable of seeing what real violence is. A dictatorship is permanent war. The whole country has been conquered.’

  ‘Conquered? Who conquered it?’

  ‘Cain and the god who made him! You are dumb. You’ve no sense of history. You’ve no . . . no visual angle.’

  ‘I can see very well, thank you,’ said Korea. And he span around like a crane. ‘History was the only subject I passed. History and Religion. So you see. I know all about conquest, reconquest and Cain.’

  ‘You spend your whole day in the snooker club and you’ve a brain the size of a snooker ball. Imagine Al Capone was appointed governor to keep order.’

  ‘I can imagine that, see?’

  ‘We all have to start somewhere.’

  The one called Korea became thoughtful. He wanted to say something about snooker, but couldn’t put his finger on the idea. He knew the other was taking the mickey, as if he’d hung him on the crane’s hook by a nappy. He jumped in and said to the crane operator, ‘I don’t like what you’re insinuating.’ He was subtle in his own way and the bit about the snooker ball sounded humiliating. He wouldn’t have allowed anyone else to treat him like that, but the operator was special. An Autodidact. There were two guys in the world Korea respected, the actor Robert Mitchum and the crane operator. If he was self-taught, then surely the actor was as well. They looked almost identical. Yes. Being an Autodidact was something different from, and more important than, a profession.

  It affects your whole being, from top to bottom, head to toe. You can’t be an Autodidact only in part.

  ‘Aren’t I an Autodidact? Everything I know is self-taught,’ alleged Korea. He glanced at his hands. A tribute to Mitchum, in The Night of the Hunter, who had LOVE tattooed on one hand and HATE on the other.

  Stringer, to a certain extent, was also self-taught. Curtis was an Autodidact. So was Mr Gantes. But he wasn’t.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You could be, but you’ve a branch of madness.’

  He said it as if he really did have a vegetal appendix, a climber sprouting out of his head. There were things only a genuine Autodidact could know. And he gave him an example.

  ‘Where does the word “sport” come from? From “port”, right? When the sailors were at sea, they were at sea. When they were on leave, they were ex portus.’

  The operator joined his index fingers and spoke slowly as if describing a graft of universal import, ‘Ex portus. Sport. Sporting. Deportivo Coruña.’

  Korea’s real name was Miguel. He was sometimes escorted, like a boss, by a group of other boys from Casas Baratas. They called themselves the Red Devils. Today he was alone. Wearing a black jumper with two yellow horizontal stripes and the trousers with zips for non-existent pockets. He’d arrived there by tracking Curtis, the photographer, and his wooden horse, Carirí. He was, for some reason, intrigued by him and followed him down through the port. Very intrigued.

  ‘What was that champ’s name?’

  ‘Arturo da Silva,’ said the crane operator. ‘You know where Silva is, don’t you?’

  ‘Yeah. The ends of the earth. So what makes him a champ too?’ he asked, looking in the direction of the horse photographer.

  ‘I told you a thousand times,’ replied Ramón Ponte. ‘That’s Hercules. He’s called the champ of Galicia because he was the one who carried the champ’s gloves for him. They were friends. Went everywhere together. Arturo died without losing. Which means he’s still champ. Isn’t that right, Curtis?’

  Curtis nodded without speaking, a forced, polite movement. He had two cherry stones in his mouth, which he moved patiently around like a set of gears, as if he were chewing a clock’s escape mechanism.

  ‘Arturo da Silva,’ said Korea, again addressing Curtis and adopting a boxer’s stance. ‘What was he good at, eh, Hercules? How did he fight?’

  It looks as if Curtis won’t reply this time either. Across his big, open eyes, like a hare’s, pass large films. Not fuzzy patches, but real forests. Through the clouds, the eyes watch the legendary cranes, the irresistible machines of Maritime Awakening’s operators. In the past, they each had a name on the cabin: ‘Carmiña’, ‘Greta’, ‘Eve’, ‘Belle Otero’, ‘Pasionaria’. These had also gone, though Ramón Ponte still had the name Carmiña, given by his father, on his cabin. Inside he still kept, and had added to, a small library, some stills and his cabinet of curiosities, whose prize exhibit was the Diligent’s ball.

  Curtis’ eyes reflect what’s outside and the view outside behaves like a thought. The hundred thousand starlings drawing a giddy cloud, a protective bird in the city’s firmament. The mullets joining in a single marine muscle that snakes between the pontoons. The jumps of the Sea Club’s Tritons and sirens, magnificent dancers of the tango too. Three sea urchins that Arturo da Silva throws in the air in a risky piece of juggling.

  ‘Nothing. He’s got stuck again,’ says Korea. ‘Hey, champ! Hey, Hercules! Nothing.’

  Marconi goes by, quickly, in
a pair of espadrilles. He keeps making a sound, a constant hum. Ommmmmm. Occasionally he bursts into onomatopoeias. As if he were spitting out screws into the oily waters of the port. A few mullets leap up to snatch a kataplum. A plof. A pliss plam boom. Tackateee! The crane operator calls out to him. Marconi panics when he hears his own name. Who’s calling? Why? What for? At first, he remains upright. Rigid. Even his eyes are so frightened they don’t move. He’s hoping a mute let slip a word. But the operator again bawls out his name, ‘Hey, Marconi!’ And then he jumps in the air, doesn’t look back and accelerates on the back of his hum. Ommmmmm. All he remembers from the last time they took him – ‘It’s nothing, just routine’ – is he’d decided to stop being who he was. He explained to his captors that beating affected his skin a lot because he was diabetic. He had the innocence of people who watch the operation of cause and effect. ‘What union do you belong to?’ ‘The Union of Light.’ That was the name of the electrical workers’ union. He shouldn’t have said that. When he regained consciousness, his body was no longer bruised, it was almost rotten. They did it badly. They hit him so hard, in the barracks of the Falange, instead of killing him, they took him past death. They smashed his insides. Realised he’d gone crazy. All that came out of his mouth was a rasp of words. Disconnected phrases, bits hanging off his lips, which he only got rid of with his onomatopoeias, blisters bursting with language. Shhhhhh, kataplum! Maybe they didn’t kill him out of superstition. Or because they’d gone a step past death. As he strode through the city, his humming was a broadcast, a constant reminder. He’d opened a door into fear. So he had to find a solution. Live in another sphere. At an ultrasonic frequency. It was on that wavelength he came into syntony with Galatea of the Seaweed and Shells, spokesperson for the Hypernauts of Infinite Space and the Inhabitants of Emptiness. He searches again with the dial. Finally locates the point. Ommmmmm.

  There’s Marconi. Everything he owns is in that sailor’s canvas bag. All his belongings. Valves, cables, coils, washers, bulbs, all kinds of screws, stuff he’s collected to build the decisive machine, a transmitter and receiver of Souls to communicate with the Inhabitants of Emptiness and transform their signals into cosmozoons, invisible spores like pollen, words with a translucent samara or wings like the pine-seed, carriers of a different life. He wanders around the city at night, rummaging through the rubbish from electrical repair shops, ironmongers, mechanical workshops. Apparently his house is full of faulty equipment. A house full of faults. During the day, he puts a new prototype of the Soulder into his bag and heads for Hercules Lighthouse. He always tests the machine in the same place. Sitting on the same stone. With a little exaggeration, it might be said the rock is gradually taking the shape of a chair where Marconi sits. It was there he was interviewed by Stringer, who introduced him as a Galician Roswell. The Hercules Man, a human body carrying an extraterrestrial being. The first time a UFO incident had been recorded in Galicia.