Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

‘And why do you live here?’ O dared to ask.

‘I live here because it belongs to me. But now he wants to throw me out. Leave me in the street like a beggar. What am I supposed to do — sleep in a doorway? Trouble is he finds papers where there weren’t any. He puts himself about and, wherever I go, buildings or offices, they look at me like I’m a scarecrow. I’m not stupid. He’s taking everything. Making a mint with the old Dance Academy. I had it all, girl. Almost all. A lot. Something. I had something. You never heard of me, girl? Never heard of the Dance Academy? Look at that portrait. That’s hardly a scarecrow, now, is it? That boyish haircut. You should have seen me dancing the Charleston, foxtrot, cuplé. And all the rest of it. I was always ahead of the fashion. I always loved life, girl, though it’s a bitch. I got up to all kinds of things. But you won’t catch me in a confessional. You have to have a little bit, just a little bit of shame.’

She pointed to another portrait on the wall, that of a thin woman wearing an Andalusian costume. ‘Take her. Her name was Flora. She was a brave woman. Always contradicting me. She was almost always right. I was a bit bossy. And she did look better dressed as a flamenco dancer. She was right about that too. She disappeared during the first days of the war. That was the last I heard of her. I suppose, if she could, she died fighting.

‘Others had a better time of it. Even during the war. That one there’s Pretty Mary. She seemed very shy and delicate, like an eggshell. She was very devout back then, I suppose she still is, you can be both things at once, there are mystical women you had to see in order to believe when they let themselves go. They really could drive a man crazy. Pretty Mary is Manlle’s sweetheart. She still sings from time to time, but her job is to stand at a window, OK, it’s a luxury apartment, watching out for boats. Customs patrol boats, if you get my meaning. All she has to do is sing down the phone. “They’ve just left, Daddy. They’ve just come back, Daddy.” That way, the smugglers never get caught. There’s a merchant ship which is always just inside international waters. Called Mother. With a bellyful of tobacco. That’s the one that keeps everyone supplied. Manlle knows more about port traffic than the customs chief and police combined.

‘You know why I know so many things? Because I’m also a Mother.’ She draped the boa artistically over her shoulders, stroked her breasts and burst out laughing. ‘I used to be more of a Mother than I am now. This boat’s spent lots of time out in international waters. And some things only naughty mothers find out.’

O was curious about a smaller photo which was more worn than the others, had a serrated edge and showed a woman with a mattress on top of her head.

‘That’s Milagres. The cook who fluffed up the wool.’ She again shrieked with laughter. ‘The cook who fluffed up the wool! You probably know her son. He’s a travelling photographer, large as a lighthouse, called Hercules. Goes around with a wooden piebald horse.’

O knew Hercules. Of course she did. He’d always enquire after Polka. One time, the photographer with the horse and O with the donkey met. ‘What’s the donkey’s name?’ ‘Grumpy. And the horse?’ ‘Carirí.’ ‘They’d make a good couple, Grumpy and Carirí.’

‘I was there at the son’s birth. Curtis was already a lighthouse when he was born. He would have been champion of Galicia.’

Every time O went to the Hotel of Mirrors, she saw the Old Woman with the Feather Boa, who knew things others didn’t. Sometimes she was frightened by what she heard. She’d leave the hotel with the exciting and dangerous sensation of knowing too much. On top of her head, she’d be carrying a load of clothes and another one of Samantha’s secrets.

‘Were you called Samantha as a child?’

She used a long holder to smoke scented cigarettes. O realised, whenever thorny episodes came up, Samantha created a cloud.

‘I was never a child. I didn’t have time to be a child. Childhood didn’t exist when I was born.’

On such occasions, the smoke would pour out of her mouth’s exhaust, in a grimace her make-up multiplied by three. O reached the following conclusion: everything in that woman was multiplied by three because of her superimposed faces. It wasn’t farcical, it was real. When happy, very happy. When sad, three times dark.

‘I had to run away from childhood. Hence my physique. I had to grow up quickly. Were you not maltreated when you were little?’

‘By whom?’

Three times horror. Samantha blew out another cloud of smoke. Her face had turned deathly pale.

‘I won’t let them abuse me now I’m old.’

She went back to the subject of Manlle. He’d started making money transporting wolfram to the docks from the Carballo and Silleda mines. At the start of the Second World War, when the Nazis redoubled their efforts, wolfram became a precious mineral. ‘Anyone with initiative and four wheels could make pots of money. He sought out vehicles wherever he could find them. Vehicles requisitioned during the war. Belonging to official organisations. To the army. Under wraps. He also covered up for others. Made lots of contacts. He can pull strings in the most unlikely places. But he’s a spendthrift as well. He’s like a spoilt child who’s never had enough. To start with, I liked him for it. His background was poor, but he was open-handed. We came to an agreement. I’m not the peace of the world, its daily bread, but I keep my word. He’s false. Like Judas. When he acquired the Dance Academy, he swore he’d give everyone work and he promised me the mirror suite for life. I trusted him. More fool me!

‘Milagres, Hercules’ mother, the woman with the mattress, eventually left for South America when her son came down from the mountains, having been on the run because of the war. She left with a harpooner who’d worked on a whaling ship in Cee. The harpooner had a cetacean’s goodness. They went to Brazil. Opened a restaurant in Recife called the Whale’s Belly. I’m not surprised. He was always giving Milagres things that had turned up in the bellies of whales.’

‘What things?’ O asked the Woman with the Feather Boa incredulously.

‘You can find anything inside a whale’s belly,’ she replied. ‘St Gonzalo once entered a whale and came back with an image of the Virgin. So just

imagine what it’s like now!’

‘For example?’ insisted O.

‘He gave her a beautiful doll whose hair grew because it was natural.’

‘What else?’

‘A revolver,’ said Samantha, twirling her feather boa.

‘He gave her a revolver and a doll?’

‘No. He gave her the doll with the china face and goatskin body. I got the revolver, girl. Do you want to see it?’

‘No way! Oh, go on then.’

O wanted to see what was used to kill men.

‘It’s called a Bulldog.’

And that’s what the revolver was like. Snub-nosed and fierce.

18 July 1963

THE JUDGE TOLD the story again that evening in the main reception room of the Finis Terrae Hotel. Here a banquet was being held to celebrate 18 July, day of the National Movement, which had been declared a holiday in commemoration of the start of the military uprising against the Republic. It was attended by all the provincial and local authorities and leaders of the only party and trade union, arrayed in their uniforms, badges and medals. There were also select representatives of what was termed in official language ‘the city’s strata and kinetic energy’. This year, Franco’s arrival had been postponed, but several prominent members of the regime had come from the capital to prepare the Caudillo, his family and entourage’s summer visit. The main reception room, which had a mezzanine by way of a large interior balcony, was equipped on one side with tall windows which gave on to the port, but the scene that evening was dominated by majestic chandeliers and omnipresent marble, solid in the columns and stairs, shining on the surface of the walls, with a pastiche of festoons and honeysuckles. The guests occupied the main floor, the tables having been set out with exact, hierarchical precision. Despite the architectural consistency and a tendency towards uniformity of style in the guests, broken only by the bold anecdote of a few women’s garments, there was this year a subdued murmur underpinning the tinkle of cutlery, which had to do with the delayed start to the Head of State’s holidays and the spring’s events.