Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

‘That’s right.’

‘He could have left us a present. Shared the weight out.’

‘I think he was carrying books. Books for the most part. Books are heavy.’

‘Well, he could have given us one!’ exclaimed Terranova. ‘Even if it was a book. To say the least!’

One of Curtis’ part-time jobs had been to cart books for the Faith bookshop. He brought them in a barrow from the railway station. They were kept in boxes. One of them, the biggest, had a label which read Man and the Earth (Reclus). Another big one contained The White Magazine-The Ideal Novel . Smaller ones were marked Mother (Maxim Gorky), The Story of the Heavens (Stawell Ball), Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka), How to Become a Good Electrician (T. Corner). As he pushed the iron-wheeled barrow, he stared at the labels. ‘Maxim’. He liked that name as a possible alias for the day he became a boxer. ‘Kid Kafka’ wasn’t bad either. And ‘The Corner’. That was perfect. But he liked ‘Maxim’ as well. The books were heavy. Tobacco weighs a lot less. As do condoms. Terranova was into the international trade of liners. Whatever he could hide under his coat. He was paid in kind by the crew members he took on a tour of the city. An easy job. Many of them stopped not far from port, in Luisa Fernanda’s cabaret or the Méndez Núñez, charmed by the Garotas variety show. The way they came out half naked, singing with a puppet between their legs, ‘Mummy, buy me a negro, buy me a negro from the bazaar, who dances the Charleston and plays the Jazzman.’ Terranova imitated their performance with a boxing glove between his legs. What a clown he was and how well he did it. As when he pushed the barrow and stopped. Read the labels on the boxes one by one. ‘Man, earth, heavens, mother. . What you doing with all this weight, Curtis? You got the whole world in here.’ ‘I’m going to the Faith bookshop.’ ‘That’s right,’ he replied, ‘always trying to help. To carry all this, you’d need the barrow of faith.’ There were days he spoke like an old man.

‘Maxim’ wasn’t bad, ‘Kid Kafka’ was unsettling, but he liked ‘The Corner’ best.

A gong sounded again inside 12 Panadeiras Street. It was louder this time. Came from deep inside the house. Cut straight through them. Like the cold. Like the moon.

‘A book at least,’ murmured Terranova, ‘would be something.’

‘You want a book?’ Curtis asked him. ‘You really want a book?’

Both of them had their hands in their pockets. Terranova’s feet were half off the kerb and he was leaning forwards. The same game that annoyed Curtis so much when he played it on the edge of the cliffs. His insistence on always walking along the edge, hanging out over the abyss.

He pretended to fall. Did a somersault. ‘Yes, I want a book!’

‘Come on then. I know where we can find some books.’

It was Christmas Eve 1931. They met no one on the way. The sea in Orzán redoubled its efforts when it saw them. Threw foam, drowned in its own roars. They were counting on this. On certain dates, the sea has a tendency to be vainglorious. The more witnesses there are, the more powerful the waves. They advance sideways against the wind. The water runs down their faces. They laugh and curse. In a corner of the Coiraza wall, which acts as a breakwater, the fashioned stone of the quarries is piled up with natural rocks. Kneeling down, with his back to the sea, Curtis moves a stone and puts his hand in the gap. He knows Flora has a store of The Ideal Novel in there. She goes there to sunbathe. And sometimes smokes what she calls an aromatic. These, she says, are her two square metres of paradise. The naked body revives in the open air. Here she reads her short novels. Keeps a stack of them under the stones.

‘ The Ideal Novel? These aren’t books, they’re handkerchiefs. Look what’s here: Sister Light in Hell, My Misfortune, Last Love, Decent Prostitutes, The Executioner’s Daughter, Nancy’s Tragedy . .’

‘You can only pick one,’ says Curtis, impervious to his remarks. ‘They’re Flora’s. They’re OK. I like them.’

‘I’m not in the mood for crying. I already have to have dinner with my mother and an empty plate. What’s the son of the orphan’s father going to have for dinner? Cod. Corpus meum .’

‘Why don’t you tell her not to lay three places?’

‘She won’t listen. She goes crazy. You don’t know what she’s like. Poor Mummy Cauliflower! She’d accepted it. What does it matter whether he died in St John’s or here? But someone went and said something, and now she’s got this idea a dead man could have been stored in salt. If cod is stored in salt, why not a salted man? Some cod are as big as a man.’

Curtis stared at him in disbelief. Stretched out his arms to measure an imaginary leaf.

‘I’m not joking,’ said Terranova. ‘Some cod are like men.’

Water was pouring down his face. Not all of it from the sea. He took a sip. Spat it out. ‘I’ll take this one. The Decline of the Gods by Federica Montseny. Judging from the title, it’ll go against the world, be a little funny.’

That’s it. A ‘Casaritos’! The supervisor wouldn’t look at the book in the same way if it didn’t have that signature, the ex-libris of his name in artistic handwriting. He feels the excitement of having captured something of its owner. He feels that somewhere in Madrid, wherever he may be, Casares is aware two claws have just grabbed him by the lapels and are prising apart his weakened ribs. He examines the signature. He’s not an expert in calligraphy, but he can see the portrait of the man in it. His signature is really a drawing. With its angles and curves. The second ‘a’ of ‘Santiago’ and the first ‘a’ of ‘Casares’ are eyes. The most peculiar stroke is that linking the ‘g’ of ‘Santiago’ with the ‘C’ of ‘Casares’, as if the missing letter, the final ‘o’ of ‘Santiago’, had given its skein to join them. In this case, the second surname, ‘Quiroga’, is represented by the digraph ‘Qu’ and a full stop. Like this: ‘Santiagcasares Qu.’ There is a slanting line underneath, which rather than underlining his name, acts as a gently sloping ramp which the signature ascends.

Weren’t there any more?

Santiago Casares was known to have owned the city’s finest private library. 12 Panadeiras Street had two kinds of superimposed walls: the external wall and the internal bookshelves. Having inherited the library from his father, he received new publications from some of the best bookshops in Europe. Many such books arrived by sea. The supervisor remembered having read an interview in which Casares explained how sailors brought his father books by hand that were forbidden or unavailable in Spain. And how one of his happiest childhood memories was opening the packages ‘brought by the sea.’ He remembered that bit perfectly. He also knew something about packages brought by the sea.

‘Brought by the sea,’ he murmured.

‘What?’

‘More, there must be lots more.’

‘There’s a pile of them burning over there, in the main square. And a bunch were arrested and taken to the Palace of Justice. There are also some in the bullpen.’

The supervisor acknowledges his subordinate’s intention with a smile. Books as defendants, under arrest, against the wall. With their backs to people. In a line, squeezed tight, unable to move, in mute silence. They were the lucky ones. Days, months, years will go by and the arrested books will gradually disappear. A slip of the hand. A determined grip. Book by book, the dismantling of the library, what’s not burnt, in the Palace of Justice. And the same thing will happen to the man’s entire credentials. Everything will be the object of pillaging. Possessions great and small. Even little, intimate things. Not just his books, but the carved wooden shelves that hold them. The collections of the amateur scientist, the curious naturalist, have been carried off or destroyed. The lenses, measuring instruments, appliances for seeing what’s invisible. His herbaria and entomological boxes. All his effects, all his fingerprints. Here’s the last of the pillagers, one who was there in the beginning and returned as if to a wreckage. He’d already made off with a stack of books and optical instruments. This time all he found in the hallway, lying on the floor, was one of the entomological boxes containing labelled insects. What he saw were some repugnant bugs that looked like beetles. He kicked it away with disgust. Why weren’t there any large butterflies? He then went to what must have been the girls’ bedroom. There was a china doll. Broken. On the window sill, a dried starfish and some sea urchin skeletons. He decided to shake the skeletons and out fell some jet earrings. That was something at least. From the window, he could see the garden with a large lemon tree in the middle. The garden’s back wall formed a border. On the other side: sin city. The dividing walls of Papagaio. He looked carefully. Something was stuck to the wall, in among the weeds. Something black. Possibly a ball. But balls weren’t usually black. He went downstairs and descended the garden steps. Swore again. The ball was a strange, oval shape, glistening from the rain. A head. But a head that wasn’t a head. He picked it up. Made of wood. It looked like a head. Eyes, mouth, nose barely discernible in thin lines. And a hole as of a bullet. You never know. Perhaps it’s meant to be like this. It could be a sculpture. Something valuable. The Casares were fashionable people. À la mode. He’d take it. It wasn’t bad, the black woman’s head. Something at least. And as he pondered the mysterious value of things, he glanced at the entomological box and read Coleoptera . If they’re Coleoptera, maybe they’re not beetles. Who knows? There are some strange folk around. Someone might even pay for them. This one, for example. What’s it say? Coccinella septempunctata .