Books Burn Badly

by Unknown

  ‘Rumours are like the flow of a river,’ said Santos. ‘There’s no stopping them.’

  Ren growled intriguingly, ‘Yes, there is. You create others.’

  ‘The best way to stop rumours is for there to be no reason for them,’ said the station chief less abstractly. ‘We have to act fast. Locate Chelo Vidal. And not get nervous. Right, Ren?’

  ‘Absolutely, boss. It’s fallen to us and there’s nothing we can do about it. And I always thought life in the provinces was meant to be peaceful.’

  ‘Those are the orders,’ concluded the station chief. ‘No political case. Imagine the scandal at home, not to say abroad. The wife of a judge, one of the regime’s most distinguished jurists, turns out to be a resistance hero. A clandestine myth from her youth. This scenario would please all our enemies. Make us an object of ridicule abroad. An international laughing-stock.’

  Paúl Santos was thinking about that, the idea of being an international laughing-stock, when the station chief suddenly started talking obliquely, somewhere between light and shade, you could and yet you couldn’t understand what he was saying. It took Santos a little while to react because he had to switch on the Spirit of Contradiction.

  ‘Gentlemen, we’re not going to let this situation get out of control. It’s my job to make sure that doesn’t happen. Everyone – that means everyone, Mr Santos – will have to contribute something.’

  ‘Right you are, sir,’ replied Santos. ‘You can count on me.’

  ‘Because we can’t start groping in the dark, now, can we?’ said the station chief.

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘We’ve spent too many years in the dark on this case. We have to find Chelo Vidal quietly, without turning the city upside down.’

  In an attempt to understand the station chief’s meaning, Santos decided to look into Ren’s face as into a mirror. His expression was calm. Sarcastic.

  ‘Someone’s offered to collaborate,’ said the station chief. ‘We didn’t go after him, he came to us. It’s a service that on this occasion, however much it hurts us, we can’t do without. I know one of you, namely Mr Paúl Santos of the Criminal Brigade, has been working with admirable courage, unprecedented steps of great intelligence, to unpick the criminal network it would seem is directed by a certain Mr Manlle.’

  Paúl Santos froze. Amazed by what was coming. But his hands took a decision. They started to write, to transcribe what the station chief was saying in shorthand.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Taking notes, sir.’

  ‘Then do it in your head. That’s enough.’

  The station chief’s face was burning. His eyes were pouring out fire. Chief Ren was growing. Consuming and pumping most of the air in the office. He grinned at Santos.

  ‘Listen to me. We’re going to get this time bomb that is Samos’ wife. I don’t give a damn about the rest. The smuggling, the whorehouses, the intimidatory purchase of land, the gold business, the receipt of stolen goods. All of this is irrelevant compared to her. Compared to Judith. Got it? Everyone, from the top down, is after Judith’s head. I received a call from the governor’s office, they’re sending people from the Special Brigade . . . What do they care about your progress with Manlle? Manlle won’t go anywhere. He’s part of the landscape. What we can’t allow is the Azor to appear on the horizon while that woman’s on the loose.’

  ‘But you know how difficult it was to get where we are now, with absolute discretion, sir,’ said Santos by way of reproach. ‘We’ve got everything. The structure of the empire and, for the first time, the witnesses we need to dismantle it. Let me try and get to Judith.’

  ‘There’s no time, Santos. It’s a done deal. The Caudillo can’t delay his holidays any longer. There are enough rumours. We’re on one side and amphibians will take us to the other. Manlle’s an amphibian. So you’re going to leave him alone for a while. And he’s going to help us.’

  He was in his office. He decided to try and type it all up. He needed to see it in printed letters to understand that everything he’d heard was real. Pazos came in, the man he’d saved, the inspector in Crime he’d managed to pull out of the pit of scepticism. He dropped his jacket on a chair like someone shedding their last hope. Their final skin.

  ‘There’s no secret witness. Boa’s dead.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yep, our number one witness. She was found with a shot in the head, holding a small revolver, a Bulldog. A hole in her temple. Another sewer in history. Apparent suicide. Bullshit.’

  ‘Suicide? That woman would never have killed herself.’

  Santos left, muttering, ‘Not even for the prize of immortality would she have killed herself.’

  The Whale’s Belly

  Sada to Dr Montevideo on the subject of boats, ‘To think I could bring them here and not depart on them.’ Suddenly his eyes blazed with St Elmo’s fire. Montevideo knew the painter had just discovered how to enter the mural and perhaps leave for ever. He felt the wall and remarked in surprise, ‘It’s only a thin membrane.’

  The Tachygraphic Rose

  He’d been thinking about that moment for quite some time. He wasn’t at all sure. He was used to observing people, watching them, examining the smallest details. A hair. The prints left by fingers or lips. To reading the writing bodies leave behind them in a space. The extraordinary information that can be contained in a bin full of rubbish. He thought about it one day. Writing poems, each of which was about a rubbish bin. It would be both biography and geography. It was one of the aspects of his job that most attracted him. He wouldn’t tell anyone this. He’d tell her. A little later on. How the act of emptying a bin on a large table, sorting and arranging families of refuse, was a way of constructing a poetic place, a genuine, enthralling fiction. Catia was an intelligent woman. She’d be interested. For sure. In fact, being a policeman was like being a historian. And the search for clues, rummaging around in a rubbish bin, was a kind of archaeological dig. This position gave him security in front of the other, the one being observed, followed or watched. The biographee, so to speak. With Catia, he had the opposite impression. He was the one being studied. He was under her control, starting with her position in the class of speed typing. From the front, it was she who gave instructions that affected his whole body, who guided him with the invisible threads of words to achieve the goal of his fingers being as fast as his eyes. But it wasn’t just in this time he spent as an automaton, sitting in a row with other pupils. When he stood up, before this woman who was younger and shorter than he was, he felt the mandate continued. His techniques of self-control didn’t work. His desire to neutralise his muscles’ spontaneous joy when, for example, she came to advise him on the position of his elbows actually caused extreme rigidity. It was the same with his speech. He was like a lopsided pair of scales. So when he finally took the step of asking Catia out one Sunday afternoon, after she’d twice agreed to have coffee with him in Borrazás during the break, and when Catia said yes, OK, she’d be there the day after next, at five o’clock in the Beach Club, his typewriter got stuck because he pressed several keys at once.

  ‘You’re a policeman?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why did you hide it at enrolment?’

  ‘I have my reasons. Secrecy, a certain kind of secret, is a tool of the trade. More important than a gun.’

  ‘Why are you telling me now? Better to have kept it a secret.’

  ‘Right now I’m not a lawyer or a policeman. Or even a criminal. I’m just a guy who’s nervous on a date with a girl he likes.’

  ‘I’m not in the habit of ruining dates,’ said Catia, ‘but let me get something clear. I don’t see a policeman or a lawyer or a criminal. I see someone who hides what he is.’

  ‘Listen, Catia, we need the police. Call it what you like. They’re here to protect people. And in my case a little secrecy is needed. I can’t go around with a placard saying, “Long live people!”’

  ‘It’s not like
that,’ said Catia. ‘Don’t try and pretend we live in a normal country. I’m the one who has to be cautious.’

  And she did speak cautiously, in a low voice, but what she said sounded very loud, incredibly loud, perhaps because it was unusual for the time and place, and seemed to spread as far as the eyes could see, which was a long way. As far as the lighthouse. She said, ‘There’s violence everywhere and it’s fear because of you. Don’t try and pretend this is a normal country. It’s governed by . . .’ She was going to say, ‘It’s governed by a dictator.’ But she went even further. There was something in this man, Paúl Santos, that encouraged her to be bold. ‘It’s governed by the worst possible criminal.’

  ‘Do you want me to arrest him and haul him up before a judge?’ asked Santos with the voice of a detective in films. It was a quick, spontaneous reaction. And made Catia accept the joke. Smile for a second.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ she said.

  ‘Then I’ll do my best.’

  That was all the humour Catia could take.

  ‘What do you think of my uncle?’

  ‘He’s a great guy. An extraordinary intellect.’

  ‘He’s a wreck, isn’t he?’

  ‘No, I didn’t say that.’

  ‘I did. Did you know that Héctor Ríos, Dr Montevideo, was going to be a public prosecutor under the Republic?’

  ‘No. You can tell he knows about law, though.’

  ‘Actually he was a prosecutor when the war started. He’d passed all the exams. And was waiting to be posted. He passed with flying colours. He was passionate about literature and had a way of reading legal texts, even the dullest, most chaotic ones, as part of literature. As he says, literature with . . .’

  ‘Implications.’

  ‘Yes, implications,’ continued Catia. ‘Héctor Ríos wasn’t even in the war. When it started, he’d just arrived from Madrid. He’d come to spend his holidays after those exams to be a prosecutor. During the first days of the war, he kept low. He went from the beach, the sun of the beach, to a hole. He finally managed to escape through Portugal. Lots of fugitives were detained by Salazar’s police and returned to the border. He got to Lisbon and sailed for America. To start with, he was in Buenos Aires. He worked on a newspaper called Crítica. The owner’s name was Natalio Botana. Lots of the heroes in his western novels are called that, Botana. He mentions them both, Botana and his horse Romantic. When I was typing up his novels, I always thought Botana and his horse were two fictional characters. But then, not long ago, while typing up a chapter on exile in that book he’s so taken up with, A Dramatic History of Culture, I discovered that Botana and Romantic actually existed. They were responsible for saving the refugees on the Massilia. This boat, crowded with Spanish and Jewish fugitives, had left Bordeaux in October 1939. It reached Buenos Aires, but it wasn’t exactly a good time in Argentina either. The Massilia remained in port, full of hungry people, being treated like a phantom ship by the authorities. Natalio Botana’s horse, Romantic, had the courage to win the most important race at Buenos Aires’ racecourse and the first thing Botana did was declare that the prize money was for the refugees on board the Massilia. This immediately drew attention to the boat. Thanks to a horse, the boat became a symbol.’

  ‘That’s why it’s Romantic!’ exclaimed Santos.

  ‘Yes, he has these moments of optimism. He lived for years between Buenos Aires, Mar del Plata and Montevideo. He then had the idea of returning. Looked into it. There were no proceedings against him. No lawsuit. There was no reason not to return. Of course he couldn’t be a public prosecutor, but he’d be left alone so long as he stuck to private activities. This is what the Spanish diplomats told him. It was a lie. I’m talking about six years ago, in 1957. Everything was a lie. No sooner had he arrived than they were after him. Which is when this guy turned up, claiming to be a civil servant. He could get them off his back. There was a way: by paying money. How much? All he had. They knew what his savings were. They were very well informed. And before he could even think of denouncing them, the guy got there first, “You’re not going to denounce us, are you?” He showed him his own denunciation, one that he’d prepared against Héctor Ríos. My uncle was amazed. It contained everything. All his steps since a year before the Republic, since his participation in the Spanish University Federation. Even a short course in Esperanto he’d given at a cultural association. This also had been noted down. It was a terrible nightmare, as if a camera had been following him all his life. And then the extortioner mentioned the Law of Political Responsibilities. He could be tried not just for having Republican links. He could be tried, eighteen years after the end of the war, even for what he hadn’t done. For the crime of passivity. He was ready to resist, but the following day two members of the Political Brigade came to carry out a search. They turned everything upside down and took away his passport. In the afternoon, the guy came back. I was present that day. He again insisted that everything could be arranged. I remember his gesture. He brushed against a keyboard and said, “Carriages won’t go unless you grease them.” That’s what he said. He then hinted something about me and the academy. That’s when Montevideo gave in, I think. I didn’t know he’d paid. He retired to his room, the cabin, as if into a second exile. And started writing non-stop. He hasn’t stopped writing since. But you know that part.’

  Yes, he knew that part. How he wrote western novels to earn a few pennies and then that work that filled his head day and night, A Dramatic History of Culture. He could hear the doctor, during a break in the class of advanced stenography according to the Martí method, asking him, ‘Do you consider yourself brave, Mr Santos?’ ‘I think so,’ Santos replied after pondering the question. It was then Montevideo said to him, ‘I’m only a little brave when I write.’

  The echo of the question came back to him. ‘Do you consider yourself brave, Mr Santos?’

  He could have guessed the ending to the story Catia was telling him since his incursion into the museum of horrors that was Ren’s house. But Santos didn’t dare say, ‘I know.’

  He replied, ‘What you’re telling me is awful. Things’ll change, Catia. History will do justice. To Dr Montevideo as well.’

  Shame about history, thought Paúl Santos. He also had a matter to settle with history. He was about to tell Catia something about the mystery of his biography, but his scientific gaze was stubborn. It was now examining colours. The various crimson shades of her lips, nails, knitted dress.

  ‘I have to go,’ she said, rising to her feet suddenly.

  The knitted dress was cherry-coloured and had a black belt.

  Paúl Santos stood up as well. He was going to protest, but he thought better and said, ‘I’ll go with you.’

  ‘No, I’d rather be alone today.’

  That adverb, the word ‘today’, struck him as a trail worth following. An adverb to be studied through a magnifying glass.

  Before leaving, however, Catia turned and spoke to him at high typing speed, ‘Do you know anything about two men in ashen suits who followed me down the street? Do you know why they were taking photographs?’

  Paúl Santos picked up the chemical signals of imminent danger, but had no reply. He stopped seeing cherry colour and, looking into her eyes, shook his head. A scientific failure.

  Ren’s ‘Museum’

  The shutters were closed, the darkness thick and humid, a condition that seemed to belong to the house, a darkness incorporated, infiltrated, into the building, where the strange thing would have been light. But Santos picked out, with what he imagined was a mole’s eyesight, the scent of outlines, regardless of the position of windows and lamps.

  He lifted the torch very slowly, feeling it in his grasp. As a boy, he liked to think it was the light that moved, using his hand. This torch was his companion, his weapon, a continuation of his body. He knew he could trust Catherine Laboure the night he was caught in the Room for Secret Deliveries and his torch wasn’t confiscated.

  The whole of Ren’s sitting-ro
om resembled a history museum. At first glance, Santos didn’t realise almost everything on display was recent. In the light of the torch, objects expressed mute surprise, helplessness. Even the swords.

  Swords? Yes, swords. Swords with gold and silver embossed hilts and scabbards, decorated with ornamental or symbolic leaves. Lying on velvet, with labels held by a cord, they were swords that had lost their warlike function and seemed to be afraid. Santos took one with an attractively well-rounded hilt. ‘Venerable Master’s Sword’, it said on the label. With the point, he touched the label of the most ornate one: ‘33rd Degree Sovereign Grand Inspector General’s Sword’.

  All the objects he found at first had to do with Freemasonry. There was even a mallet and 24-inch gauge. The mallet was similar to one he’d seen in the judge’s office, in the Palace of Justice, which he’d identified as a judge’s gavel. Now he understood what Ricardo Samos meant when he said, ‘It has more history than it seems’.

  The torch moved excitedly onwards, the light sniffing out great surprises. A glass cabinet contained the badges and devices of Galician and Portuguese Freemasons or pedreiros livres. The torch stopped at a pair of white gloves. Not exactly a pair. They were the same colour, but of different sizes, as if one of the gloves was for a woman’s hand. Nearby there was an acacia-leaf brooch.

  The torch went from one surprise to the next, travelling through history. A design on a matchbox from the First Republic. A peasant in a Phrygian cap saying, ‘Don’t call me Balthazar; I’m a citizen’. The Republican Madonnas Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, shown with wings, diffusely erotic in the darkness. The same or similar ones of modernist sensuality that appeared in the illustrated magazine of Coruña’s Masons which the torch focused on now: Brisas y Tormentas, No. 1, Yr 1, Coruña, 15 April 1900. Paúl Santos took the torch in his left hand and passed his right hand over the magazine. It’s true that, in secret vision, things emit what they say. ‘Breezes and Storms’. Aprons, collars, embroidered in gold. One of the latter with a triangle and the number 33 in red thread inside it. A blue silk sash with white veins telling the years like tree rings. At one end, a jewel in the form of a key. On the label, it said ‘Secret Master’s Sash’. Santos focused the torch for a long time on that enigmatic key with the letter Z on the wards. He was passionate about keys and locks. Anything connected with this invention. Nobody in Charity Hospital had been able to explain how the boy got inside the Room for Secret Deliveries, to which only three people had access at any one time: the medical director, Mother Laboure and the woman who was due to give birth. And she entered through an outer door. She never saw or was seen, except when she was in that kind of camera obscura she came to give birth in. He got in there. Nobody knew how. He was found in the middle of the room, in the dark, with the torch on, inside his mouth, his cheeks acting as a pink lampshade.