Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

‘Your beauty is intolerable!’

Though she was quick enough to reply, ‘And you haven’t really seen me!’

He was more or less blind, despite having a good eye, because he was unable to turn back. Some people are afraid of being lucky.

Lucky me, I thought, next to winter’s solitary flower.

Lucky I wore stilettos that were killing me, chafing my skin, freezing my toes. Even when I’m naked, I won’t take them off. Till the pleasure is too much and they fall off.

Lucky all the cafés shut their doors in our face. A moment ago, I’d have given anything for a hot cup of tea and a cloud, lucky, but now I keep quiet because we’re hugging and kissing, next to the iceberg, and everything’s in motion, there’s pleasure in the world’s navel, which is good for the circulation, and hot air that goes to your head, the warmth of chestnuts roasted in their own burs.

Lucky the Underground carriage was empty to start with, a nuptial carriage that Sunday afternoon, rocking, taking us from corner to corner.

Lucky I kept the fire inside my mouth. The fire the girl from Camden Town gave me.

Lucky we opened the red door. Lucky we climbed the stairs. Lucky we entered the room, embraced in front of the window. Lucky there’s someone to take you from cold to heat. To the other side of the wind, but still inside it.

From the room, we can see the small gardens with their trees. We can’t set foot inside them. Our key is for one floor only. But now we’re able to run across them, jump over the hedges, come and go with the wind. Pictures are fine, but there’s nothing like a window. Windows are better for framing an embrace. Everything we see belongs to the embrace. The railway, the hoarding, the barbed wire, keep out, the plastic bag lifted up, up, but then falling, nostalgic for its weight, as if searching for what it carried.

The wind is one and the same, but each tree has its own. They move in different, sometimes opposite directions. Look. Even the branches of a single tree move differently, as if they’ve torn off bits of wind. The birch shakes, is embraced, more than the others. That plane tree still has a few leaves. Another mystery. Almost every tree has a few leaves that don’t fall. They’re there the whole winter and don’t fall. Why not? The rain as well. I mean the rain is one and the same, but each tree, each bush, has its own. The fatness, the gleam of the drops is quite distinct. See how the drops hang after it’s rained. How they settle on the branches, the buds, the tips of the buds. Settle like notes in a score. Not just the trees. Each house has its own rain. Each window. This window.

Lucky.

Lucky wind.

Lucky rain. Notes sliding down the windowpane.

‘Lucky you,’ they told me for finding someone like Pementa.

‘Lucky,’ murmured Pementa when he found the mole on my back. Lucky. Rocking like a boat on the water bed, he found the mole on my back, the circle of his lips around it, a sucker, his tongue whispering, writing. Lucky. A murmur I heard through my skin, which resounded in the cavern of my chest, alongside my heart, climbed my throat and emerged like a sloe. The black mole opening, ‘Snowdon’, Kew’s rose, the white rose on the way to Elviña, blue wellies, stiletto heels, with the one I like, everything, tossing and turning, black mole, white rose.

Lucky.

HE WAS ABOUT to open the back door of the house by the marina when someone got ahead of him and opened from inside. That nightmare he sometimes had. Gabriel had seen her only once. They could have been the same age. Except he was the father’s son and she was the wife. Her hair in a bob, smooth and coppery, matched her skirt. Golden locks that were like a continuation of the letters printed on the invitation to the wedding he didn’t attend. Gabriel the Odd sent a cold, irreproachable telegram. Katechon came into his mind. The one who holds back the years, though they’re still there, riding an invisible merry-go-round. ‘No, Ricardo’s not at home. He’s too busy. He had a pressing engagement followed by an important lunch with the directors of the Academy of Political and Moral Sciences, who, as you should know but don’t, are visiting, a token of their appreciation, quite unusual really, despite the fact we live in Madrid. The session will be here, during the summer. They’re to pay him a tribute in the provinces. You can imagine the state he’s in, having just received the Raimundo de Peñafort medal.’

‘Yes, apart from the medal, how is he?’

He shouldn’t have asked this question she was waiting to answer with one of those fateful punches you get in a clinch in the ring.

With a youthful spirit. Like an ox. Living a second spring. Any one will do.

‘Unbearable,’ she said with a triumphant smile, as if she meant a little child. ‘He won’t stop.’

Yes, in this meeting, she was giving him a good hiding with the back of her tongue. He’d come in search of sin, the stain of history, but it wasn’t going to be cheap as far as she was concerned.

Another punch.

‘He’s in fine fettle. Gets up early every day, when it’s still dark, does his exercises on the bearskin, as you know, works in the study and then attends first Mass. Won’t hear about a siesta. Before lunch, he has a quick doze, a few minutes, what he calls the ram’s sleep.’

He’s waiting to be asked in. Would you like to come in? But no. She says, ‘I’m sorry not to invite you in, but I was just on my way out. And next time don’t act like a terrorist. Use the front door!’

She raised her index finger, an apparently spontaneous movement that is aimed at poking out the other’s eye. ‘I’m in a hurry! Ricardo and I are due to have lunch with the board of honour of the Academy of Political and Moral Sciences in recognition of a whole life devoted to Law and Justice. Work that has always been solid, discreet, rigorous, never political or biased. The work of an exemplary civil servant. I’ll tell him you called.’

IN LA BOÎTE de Pandora. People betting around the aquarium. Twin dragons fighting. Small fish, large jaws. Destroyed in seconds. The host introduces new combatants with the seriousness of a croupier dealing out cards. Zonzo offers him the house speciality. A drink called Purple Rain. She’s there, singing fados. The reason he came after so long, at nightfall. The effect of her voice: a brush running over his hand, painting a souvenir, walking on soft grass near the cliff face.

‘So you’re a judge?’ asks Zonzo.

‘Yes. That’s my job.’

‘It’s a good job. Meting out justice and all that. But you have to be stricter. The world’s in a terrible state. No moral principles. No authority.’

‘How did Manlle die?’

‘I don’t know. Don’t know the details. Seems he died in his own way. Slowly.’

‘People don’t usually die because of a harpoon.’

‘Why not? He was by the sea.’

Gabriel Samos thinks the conversation will end there. He remembers Zonzo. He’s capable of closing in on himself like a mollusc. There’s no point insisting.

‘He shouldn’t have gone,’ says Zonzo surprisingly. ‘But then you know what he was like. No, you don’t. How could you? He wanted to be in all places at once, do everything. What was he doing combing the beach for a lost shipment? Someone had got a hold of the bales, OK, and so what? I heard rumours. Remember that Bible full of banknotes I showed you? He went with it to buy a woman in Brussels central station. A woman from the east. Why’d he have to go? He didn’t. He found out later the woman was missing a toe. Wanted to try her out in a small pension . At his age, he still wanted to do everything. And saw she was missing a toe. He should have let it go. It’s a way women for sale are sometimes branded. So he went back to the central station, wanted to reverse the agreement, to get the Bible back with its banknotes. He’d been buying a woman who was whole. He wanted to do everything. Ended up with a harpoon stuck in his chest. I don’t know who it was.’