Books Burn Badly

by Unknown

  He’d been there and counted it as one of the most memorable acts he’d been fortunate enough to attend. ‘The master of ceremonies was wonderful and I’m not just saying that because he’s now minister. What a minister he’ll be! A long-range cannon. Did you see how he devoured the international media? And something that’s important given the current situation. He’s a man of law. He has our training.’ He was sure the last bit would please his fellow guests. ‘It was a lesson in oratory. Going back to the roots. A man with fiery words, as Donoso was said to be.’

  They were serving the first course after some appetisers. The judge looked at his watch. Chelo would be here soon. Fasco the prosecutor raised his glass and proposed a toast, ‘To next year!’ He then addressed the judge, ‘The lights going out must have been a pretty special moment. Weren’t you afraid?’

  In the hotel’s main reception room, the lights did not go out, but Fasco the prosecutor and Samos the judge could not help feeling partially responsible for what happened next. A cloud of lampoons fell from the interior balcony, covering the chandeliers and causing momentary darkness. Rather than being a cloud, its form was of a flock of white birds gliding softly. On the one hand, the flock of lampoons silenced all the guests, who were astonished and raised their heads. On the other, their sound, that of the lampoons, had more in common with the idea of music than with noise, since their descent was in slow motion, autumnal.

  Faces of shock, amazement, irritation. In short, blank lampoons.

  ‘Well, they’re not entirely blank,’ said Fasco in an intriguing voice, feeling and examining the pieces of paper. ‘They’re in Braille!’ He glanced at his fellow guests, stood up and went towards the top table, his annoyance at such an absurd event causing him to mutter, ‘In Braille!’

  The others did the same. Fingered the pieces of paper. He was right, they had raised points, they had perforations.

  The language of the blind. Blind, blind, blind. Wells, Wells, Wells. The judge drank some water. The taste of water. It could do with some sugar. Yes, the gorilla who’d urinated on the pyre was there somewhere, in full-dress uniform, an authority now. They hadn’t read Wells. They hadn’t read his story, The Country of the Blind, about a man who fell into a valley where the faculty of sight was considered abnormal. Blast it! Why did this scandal, this act of subversion, make him think of Wells? There were days he became angry with his memory, his mind’s insistence on going off alone.

  After the initial commotion, pre-war posturing, the dinner guests of the National Movement returned to their ranks and were harangued by the governor. Meanwhile plain-clothes agents picked up every single blank lampoon.

  Chelo ran as fast as she could down Tabernas Street. She knew she couldn’t keep going for long. But she also knew she had an option. A refuge. Santiago Church. She’d been there often as a guide. And had often exchanged messages in missals. There was a place, a hollow under the altar of Our Lady of Milk, which a restorer friend had shown her and even the priests didn’t know about. Long enough for the immediate danger to pass. She’d leave in the morning, as the first Mass was being said.

  Shame about the shawl. She needed time. She had to think. An item of clothing could change everything. The situation struck her now as absurd, but absurdity is defined by bad luck. That bogey. When she entered the hotel through reception, where she was received with smiles, from the policemen as well, she’d seen the danger, that woman sitting alone at the bar. Reading a newspaper. A strong woman with lots up front, on the verge of bursting at the seams. She’d reminded her of the Feminine Section chief Sada always joked about because of the way she walked, ‘There goes the National Movement!’ But it wasn’t her. Chelo hadn’t seen her before. She carried on. Checked her watch. Soon it would be time for the governor and provincial chief’s speeches. The best moment. She headed towards the mezzanine, as if to enjoy the views of the port. She propped the pack of lampoons against the balustrade. There was a timing device which would set it off. But as she was preparing it, she felt the shadow behind her. Coming after her. It couldn’t catch her. But it grabbed her shawl.

  Inspector Mancorvo discreetly approached the judge. Said, ‘Please don’t get up now, Samos. But before you leave, don’t fail to talk to us. We’ll wait for you at the exit.’

  And there they were. Mancorvo, Ren and a third person, a woman he hadn’t seen before, in a suit. Tall and strong.

  ‘We have a serious problem, your honour,’ said Ren.

  They went to the far end. There really was a magnificent view of the bay. The twinkling of green and red lights. Their vibrant reflection on the water. The crane lights. Ren pulled something from under his jacket.

  ‘Do you recognise this?’

  He was going to touch it, could have said, ‘Night blue with a black velvet pattern.’ But Samos kept quiet. Just nodded.

  The Denunciation

  I embark on this poem in the hope its felicity of phrase will speed the boat towards St Pierre and Miquelon. I was practising how to type without looking at the keys. Copying a poem from an anonymous book that came to me in an envelope with no return address. We get lots of anonymous letters at the station. Mostly denunciations. You’d be surprised how many anonymous denunciations there are going around. In some of them, you can see the care they’ve taken with their handwriting. How it’s been written and rewritten till the letters look elegant and pretty. Maybe the person writing it thinks this will make their denunciation more effective. Some of the poems in the anonymous book were in fact denunciations. True ones, against history, but I couldn’t process them. They were good poems. The ones that attracted me the most talked of voyages through cod-infested seas to Terranova and Nova Scotia, even higher up, to the limits of Greenland and the Arctic. So my fingers were trotting happily along, driven by nostalgia for a didactic embrace from Catia, the teacher in the typing academy, when an alarm pulled them up. Without looking, I can tell a Fascist by the way he opens the door, since I work with Fascists. It didn’t take me long to realise that the one who’d come in had a fire burning inside him. The sea breeze makes summers in Coruña cool, but suddenly, as if activated by the Hispano-Olivetti carriage return, the temperature rose by several degrees. I knew the man. He was a cold man. And yet now he was dying, burning, to find his wife. Invested with authority, he could have been wearing his gown, but despite controlling his words, he still couldn’t extinguish the fire they caused to spread across his face and light up his eyes. Love? A red colour, I know, but I’d say there was a stronger type of fuel in that mixture. When he talked to me of ‘wounded pride’ and ‘a question of honour’, the way he said it, I knew he was chewing on hot coals and ashes.

  At that time, when a woman of her class would never flee, I found the case enthralling, a strange present of amazement wrapped up in surprise. One of those moments you have the exciting sensation your badge has become a hunting permit for banned specimens. And as he discussed certain details, with lots of usury, I felt part of his hotness being passed on to me. He stopped before long. He had a problem. She had a problem. I had a handful of embers.

  Paúl Santos leant out of the window. The year before, when he joined the station at around the same time, in the distance, beyond the swinging necks of the cranes, moored next to the yacht club, he could discern the solid presence of the Azor, Franco’s recreational boat. The Head of State would sometimes arrive on it at the end of a fishing trip in the Bay of Biscay. But more often than not the boat arrived first, while the dictator travelled from Madrid by road. In his studies of physiognomy, Santos found a total, excessive, even grotesque correspondence between the Caudillo and his boat. The yacht was snub-nosed, simple in profile and heavy to sail. Any bou heading out for the Great Sole was more elegant. The most complete picture he had of the Azor was on the day it appeared in the bay towing a cetacean that had been shot dead. In the shimmering sea, the hard colours of dusk, Santos observed a violent tension in language. The only verb he could use to describe that act was ‘gun
down’. More than an aquatic machine, the Azor was a steamroller of water. As a boat, starting with the name, which meant goshawk, it was a paradox. An absurd reality. Santos knew this thought, even if it were never expressed, placed him on dangerous ground. The truth is the Azor was an imposing, intimidatory presence. That ugly, stunted boat dominated the port. Determined time. Altered measurements. And space.

  Santos’ mind had undergone a similar process to when he learnt how to type without looking at the keys. One thought led to another and these two to a third, which to start with caused him anguish (a voice that said, ‘You’ll think the worst’), as when he got trapped around the waist on a potholing expedition down a little explored passageway in King Cintolo’s Cave, Mondoñedo. Having surmounted the difficulty, he found himself in a larger space. Which is what enabled him now to ignore the very idea of the Azor and observe the movement of the cranes loading logs on the Western Quay. Before entering the line of descent, they swung in the air. And he thought it was the stripped, shaken memory that caused the freshness.

  No. The boat hadn’t arrived yet this year. Something was up, no one quite knew what. The city had witnessed that strange event, an incident on the evening of 18 July, in the presence of all the authorities and National Movement’s guests at a banquet to celebrate the mutiny that replaced the Republic with a dictatorship. Paúl Santos didn’t need to work it out. The war had started twenty-seven years earlier. He’d been born almost nine months after 18 July. The war of wars. Omnipresent war. A war that stuck like another component in the air, oblivious of time. He didn’t want to think about it. There it was, happy as Larry, thinking everyone’s thoughts.

  He had to think about specific things. His job as a scientific policeman. An outstanding detective in Crime. With two important cases on his hands. Different in size, but both affecting the city’s very foundations. On the one hand, Manlle. Manlle’s organisation. He’d been lucky, made lots of progress, had almost all the evidence he needed to expose this criminal empire. And now a kind of gift. He had to find an upper-class lady, a beauty of exemplary conduct, who’d just abandoned her husband, a judge with a promising career in front of him, who was well connected, influential, and about whom it was repeatedly rumoured he’d soon move on to higher things. Come on, think, Paúl Santos. Why did Ricardo the judge call at your office? He could have summoned me to the courthouse and I’d have gone running. He could have done it differently. But no. He came here and denounced his wife for abandoning the conjugal home and, he had reason to believe, committing the crime of adultery.

  It must have been the station chief who told him to do this. They were testing him, right? Come on, Santos, think. Be more specific.

  Paúl Santos walked over to a shelf where he had his reference books. Carefully read the articles in the Penal Code, and accompanying notes in Civitas, that had some bearing on the Vidal case. He never could have imagined his heart would beat faster on account of the Penal Code.

  Adulterous conduct consists of carnal union between two miscreants that can be expressed by the terms: lying together, carnal access, copulation, cohabitation, leading a joint, intimate or marital life. It is essential that the lying together be evident or deduced from proven facts but, given the difficulty of surprising someone in the complete, material act, its existence can be deduced from facts that are more symptomatic, such as spending eighteen days in a hotel . . .

  Eighteen days?

  Why eighteen days?

  Despite its absurdity, this law tested the imagination. The penalties were severe, involved imprisonment and related only to woman. According to the law, she could be convicted if she was surprised once with the other miscreant in bed. Adultery is committed by a married woman who lies with a man who is not her husband, and by the one who lies with her, knowing her to be married, even if the marriage is then declared null and void. Paúl Santos, however, was thinking about something else, not the judge or his wife. Eighteen days in a hotel room with the Tachygraphic Rose. He tried to trigger his imagination, but couldn’t get past the first day. He was happy like this. Went back to the typewriter. Pressed a few keys. The word cohabitation. The word miscreant. The word bed. The metal bars got entangled and prevented the carriage return. He started again. Arms at right angles. The optic nerve connected to the fingers, but without looking. That’s right. Have another go. I embark on this poem in the hope its felicity of phrase will speed the boat towards St Pierre and Miquelon.

  The Notebook

  ‘You can be present if you wish, Mr Samos.’

  ‘No, it’s better if you talk to him alone.’

  Gabriel didn’t talk. He read from his notebook. After saying goodbye to the docks, or on the boat to the Xubias, or when crossing Ponte da Pasaxe, or going inside the boat-houses, or taking the tram to Sada, or on the train to Betanzos, and once (‘Surely not!’ muttered Chief Inspector Ren), once it even happened on the upper deck of a trolleybus, one of those red trolleybuses from London, the number 2, Porta Real–Os Castros, there too they did it, made love or something, his hand up her skirt.

  ‘Surely not!’

  Yes, she’d been protected, covered by this city of Mist Pee, Fly Pee, Wind on the Side of Hunger, Widows’ Wind, Night Enclosure, Sky with a Shell, with an Awning, Bramble Sky, Oza in a Thunderstorm, thunder and lightning, this city with its carnal, voluptuous, promiscuous sky.

  Between thunder and lightning, when it cleared, thanks to Gabriel’s tale, everyone began to see clips of Chelo Vidal kissing and loving the Portuguese architect. Or whoever it was. And in this third party’s tale there was an enjoyment, a lingering, that acted like a sucker on the temples of all who listened.

  Everything Gabriel said was noted down in shorthand or in handwriting no onlooker could read. But Santos wasn’t looking at the strange notebook, he was watching the window, which was a moving picture of boats and cranes. Everything inside him was moving too. Rarely had he felt such excitement on account of language.

  ‘In the sea?’

  ‘Yes, they’d stay there for two, three, even four minutes and then emerge, blowing a siphon of water. In Canaval, when there was no one about, they’d wrap themselves in seaweed and roll in the sand.’

  When he turned around, Ren was blowing smoke rings, which Mancorvo followed as they rose to the ceiling. The central table was empty, completely bare, except for Gabriel’s notebook, which gave it the air of an incendiary device. The eyes, facial muscles, position of the body, suggest an initial critical reaction to the text. The line of the mouth, for example, is a type of pronouncement. They were satisfied to begin with. Both were in a stupor, but it was a victorious stupor. With his smoke signals, Ren seemed to be savouring this surprising tale like a triumph. Having this degree of information about a life doesn’t just give you the power to dispose of it, it grants you access to a particular kind of enjoyment: the dissection of someone else’s enjoyment.

  ‘He’s finished. How many meetings was that?’

  When they looked at each other, Ren’s face seemed to hide a complex thought after he’d blown so many smoke rings into the air. But what he said, with clearly universal connotations, was, ‘Unbelievable!’

  Mancorvo nudged him. ‘Just as well the judge wasn’t here!’ Ren ignored him. He was reaching the same conclusion as Santos. The boy had laid a trap. A tale moored to reality. He was pulling their legs.

  It was Santos who took the initiative. ‘Tell us the truth, Gabriel. Everything you’ve written is a lie, isn’t it?’

  ‘Everything,’ Gabriel replied with certainty.

  ‘What’s Durtol, Gabriel?’

  ‘A sanatorium.’

  ‘Have you been there? Why do you write from Durtol? What happens in Durtol, Gabriel?’

  ‘Let’s leave it,’ suggested Santos.

  ‘Katechon!’ Ren exclaimed bitterly. He looked at Gabriel’s unintelligible notebook. ‘You know how to scrawl, don’t you?’

  A Load of Suspicion

  ‘Judith?’

>   They could have enquired after anyone. But they go and ask about someone who doesn’t exist. There are loads of names in these parts. Some people have three or four names. But, outside the Bible, I couldn’t think of a single Judith. And even if I had, I wouldn’t have told them.

  ‘Police,’ said the spindly one with a lack of enthusiasm. If you’re police, I thought, you could at least act the part. Show a golden badge the way they do in American movies. No style! The spindly one looked like he had an invisible toothpick in his mouth. His hair was slicked back with brilliantine, he was a bit of a dandy. Maybe that was why he couldn’t be bothered. The road had just been tarmacked, the tarmac was still fresh. The day was heavy, threatening rain. The dogs were barking. Soon as the car arrived, creeping along at that funereal pace, all the dogs started barking. They can’t have liked that. So many dogs barking. Who can tell them to be quiet? The other was stocky, thickset, in an ashen suit and hat. He stood a little further back, leaning on the bonnet. What was he looking at? He kept staring at the load of washing.

  ‘Judith. You ever heard of someone called Judith?’

  I was going to tell them about the book in the Bible, but I could see them coming, they’d snatch at a loose thread and pull. A washerwoman talking about the Bible. What else do you know about the Judith in the Bible?