Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

Yes, my girl, I know you’ve hidden the fire in your mouth. I’m not afraid of your fire. If only you knew the fire I carry inside. .

London, 10 January 1968

I CAN BE bad as well. Thing is you can’t pretend when it comes to clothes. You can’t lie about the weight of clothes. If they’re damp, that’s worse for me. More weight. They say with washing machines clothes don’t last so long. Who knows? I’d have thought hands are more delicate. Or both. Hands have to slap clothes against the washing stone. Twist them. Wring them out.

Clothes have eyes. Like worms. The eye doctor once told me worms can’t see, but they can feel light and shade. Olinda used to wash the clinic’s coats, sheets, towels, clothes. Pinche had a bad eye, not the evil eye, he saw badly out of one eye. How did we know it was only one eye? Because, when he looked through the keyhole, he saw fine. He told us this himself. He saw better when looking through a keyhole.

‘What keyholes are those?’ asked Olinda.

‘Who cares?’ replied Polka. ‘The important thing is. . the diagnosis.’

He was so happy to have found that word he smiled at me, repeating it like a gift, ‘That’s it, the diagnosis.’

Olinda mentioned it to the eye doctor and off I went with Pinche. It was very funny when he said Pinche had a lazy eye. The right sees less than the left. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Well, to start with, because it doesn’t want to. That’s why we call it a lazy eye.’ It was a pleasure talking to him. Most doctors never explain anything. They detect what’s wrong, hand you the armament, but you never know what it is you’re firing against in your own body. Dr Abril explained everything and I understood him straightaway. Must be because we both work with the light. That’s something machines don’t do, leave the clothes in the sun. Bring them in when it’s raining, stretch them out again when it clears. There are days the sun is lazy and then it clears, the sun peeps out of the clouds, a kind of grand absolution. Worms only have light and shade. The first way of seeing. Skin-sight. We’re a bit like that. I love the sun. Seems to forgive everything.

‘A lazy eye,’ said Dr Abril.

Pinche kept quiet. His manner was contrite. If he had a lazy eye, he must be partly to blame.

‘What are we going to do?’ I asked.

‘We’re going to make it work. That’s what you do with lazy eyes.’

I’d always thought eyes were the same, Pinche’s or anyone’s, except for Miraceu’s, each of which went about its own business. But in the clinic I quickly realised not only eyes but also profiles were completely different. Which is why Pinche had two sides to him. He could be very brave and very cowardly. Very joyful and very sad. Very good and very bad. Maybe it was all because of his eye.

‘What we’re going to do,’ said Dr Abril, ‘is put a patch on the eye that sees OK. And leave the lazy eye as it is. I know, I know, it seems unfair. It is unfair. We’re depriving one eye, the eye that wants to see, of the pleasure of seeing. But that’s life. It won’t be for long.’

Which may have been why Mr Sada’s poet friend and I never met. Because of a lazy eye.

One eye didn’t fight for him. That may have been it.

‘What are you looking at?’ asked Pementa.

‘Nothing.’

I went red. This was in the Troubadour when Glenda, Pementa and I went out for a drink for the first time. Pementa had just started as a hospital porter. Before that, he’d worked in a psychiatric hospital in Epsom for years.

‘I was lucky,’ he told me. ‘I found the job as soon as I arrived. They even gave me accommodation. I hardly ever left. The patients left more than me. What for? There was a good library, with books in Spanish and Portuguese. I’d never read before, I read like crazy. I learnt a lot there. From the patients. Languages. How to play chess. How not to go crazy. I once went with a group of them to the races. A doctor said to me, “Mr Pementa, a group of patients has been invited to the Derby, would you care to accompany them?” They were all, we were all very elegant. The women in outrageous hats and dresses that looked like artistic grafts on the landscape. The men in suits, the suits of their lives. They’d been waiting for that moment for years. They soon caught the attention of people and the cameras, hats were as much centre-stage there as horses. And our group of Epsom aristocrats was the most visible. I was lucky to find that job. Then came that real lunatic with her government, shut Epsom’s mental homes down. It wasn’t paradise, but I was lucky.’

We were in the Troubadour and Glenda got up to buy another round.

‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ he asked.

‘I’m looking at you with both eyes. The lazy one and the other.’

I’d been lucky too. I didn’t want to come to London, to a general hospital. They’re not like mental homes. They’re much more complicated. More bizarre. Anything can happen. Mental homes are much more tranquil. People are polite and cultured. Here there’s stress all the time, accidents, sirens at night.

Repartee. Before Glenda came back, I had to say something funny.

‘I’m looking at you with both eyes. So that you don’t get away.’

‘Lucky me,’ said Pementa. ‘Ending up in this hospital.’

The night was hard. Pementa slept at the hospital, in a room for porters. No, he wasn’t on duty tonight. So I loosened my tongue and said why didn’t he come and sleep at my place? Tomorrow we’d go to the hospital together. Glenda protested. No way. Her place was much nearer. Besides, when we’d arranged to go out, she’d told Pementa — hadn’t she, Pementa? — there was plenty of room in her flat. Reality was on Glenda’s side. Her flat was half the distance. Less than half. A stone’s throw away. Pementa in the middle. Each of us tugging at his arm, without touching. ‘You’re right, Glenda. I’ll come with you! A night’s a night.’ Glenda, my soulmate, my fellow Godspellian Sunday mornings in Willesden Green, I feel so well with you, Take my hand precious Lord, lead me home . She pierced me with a look, silently cursed me. Jezebel, bitch. She would have killed me.

The two of us sleeping together, in bed. Pementa, on the sofa. Glenda and me with our backs to each other to start with. Embracing our own patch of darkness. Resentment sprawled in between. Pementa’s whistles as he slept, lucky him, like a steamboat departing in the night. So I turned and sought Glenda’s body. She moved away, but couldn’t go very far. I inched closer.

‘What is it?’

She spun around. Breathing heavily. Anger on her breath. She could have strangled me if she’d wanted. She was much stronger than I was. In life, she was a gentle, sensual creature. She taught me to appreciate sounds, colours, body postures. A second start in life. Rousing what was asleep. In return, I made her laugh. All those mantras, yantras, asanas, kundalini, latent energy, it’s not that they didn’t work, opposite, they worked far too well. Her body was excessively happy. Ticklish all over, including her eyes and thoughts. Glenda reaped much more than she sowed.

She was probably furious. I wondered what a furious woman would be like inside placid Glenda.

I whispered, ‘I’ve an idea.’

‘Will you leave me alone!’

Quietly, ‘Listen, Glenda, we can share him.’

‘What? You’re crazy!’

In a low voice, ‘One day for you, one day for me.’

I knew she’d laugh. When she laughed, her whole body shook. Without stopping. A reverse Negro spiritual.

Take my hand precious Lord, lead me home.

Finally that Sunday in winter arrived. It was freezing. We arranged to visit Kew Gardens and saw a rose despite the cold, a white rose, like the ones on the road from Castro to Elviña. There it was, a tiny white rose, next to the ground, opening like a memory in the frostbitten earth. ‘Snowdon’, it said on the sign. That day, the flower, reminded me of a compliment a stranger once paid Amalia, which left us amazed.