Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

‘Get to the point, will you? The books! What about the books?’

‘Electricity is an amazing thing. You have electricity. A tree has electricity. When life runs out, electricity goes to earth. That book about Galvani and animal electricity must have burnt as well. Though I looked for it among the carnage.’

‘The carnage?’

‘The remains. The remains of books. They stank of flesh.’

‘Some of them were probably bound in leather. It’d be the leather.’

‘I suppose so. It happened right here, a short distance away, in the docks and María Pita Square. They brought loads of books to be disposed of. The pyres burnt for two whole days. I was a park and garden employee at the time and was assigned to clean up the ashes. It was during the summer. August, the 19th of August. Some things you never forget. My body still sways with that blasted lorry, I can feel my teeth chattering. The whole ground was covered in ash, but some were only half burnt. The lorry had to make several trips. We buried them in a waste tip in Rata Field, on the other side of San Amaro. We worked with rakes, it was like scraping away the skin, revealing flesh. Some people vomited, chucked their guts up. After we’d covered them, I could still feel them bubbling under my feet. I threw earth on top, pressed it down as hard as I could, but still felt the bones under my galoshes. I was fired after that. Apparently I was on a list for belonging to the union. That wasn’t all. Half a year later, I was arrested. I was married, my wife about to give birth. Some nativity scene!’

Polka waited for the other to laugh at his irony. It was a pretty sad story, but the man didn’t have much of a sense of humour. He cleared his throat and asked, ‘Was there a copy of the New Testament? It’s not the kind of thing you just forget.’

‘It was like treading on bones, you bet. Point is I was then arrested. Do you know why? For playing. Doesn’t sound very serious, does it? Well, I was arrested for playing music. Someone denounced me because I was due to play on a union excursion. The cultural associations had organised a special train to attend the Caneiros festivities. Upriver. I was a gardener, but played the bagpipes as a hobby. I played for the union, but for the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel as well. You see, one piece does as well for a wedding, a baptism, a funeral, as for a union march or a procession. But that train never departed. Had it left, it’d have been empty. Understand? It’s as if they came and asked for our tickets. In a short time, we’d all been arrested. Those who didn’t flee were killed. I was lucky. I was imprisoned to start with and then sent to a labour camp, a wolfram mine. I was a slave, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Do you know what the worst of it was? Knowing, when you dug up that mineral, it was for fattening the beast. Do you understand or not?’

‘Excuse me,’ said the man behind the curtain. ‘What you’re saying’s all very interesting. But I was thinking about the books. The day you buried the books. You said some of them were still alive.’

‘In a manner of speaking. Ashes are ashes. But some were almost intact.’

‘You mean they were asking for a hand.’

‘I suppose you could say that.’

‘So you took some.’

‘You could get killed for doing that.’

‘Even so, you took some. You took some of those books. There was one. A copy of Scripture dedicated to Antonio de la Trava, the valiente of Finisterra.’

‘The valiente of Finisterra? No, I didn’t take any books.’

‘You couldn’t help yourself. You felt sorry. I can see it now. You’re a good person. You felt sorry for that book and hid it under your shirt. Am I right or not?’

‘Nothing of the sort. I didn’t take anything. I buried the lot. Even those sticking out.’

‘I’m sure you kept one or two. Sure you’ve still got them. Trust me. I can pay you a fortune for that book.’

Polka felt for the switch. Found it and rang insistently.

‘What is it, Francisco? What do you want?’

‘Aphrodite, what time does one eat around here?

‘That’s not the best part, girl. Do you know what happened next? He seemed to calm down when the nurse came in. Lunch was served soon after. Hake with potatoes and peas. Followed by yoghurt. You know what I think of yoghurt, but still I ate it. He didn’t eat a thing. Carried on deliberating. I could hear him deliberating. I swear the conspiracy in his head was as loud as the sounds emitted by clinical machines. I know that sound. It’s the beep of troublemakers. Up to him if he didn’t eat. I can be at death’s door, I still won’t leave peas on my plate. “ Bon appétit ,” I said and fell into a doze. It was a way of bringing the matter to a close. But when I woke up, he was there. Not in bed. He was standing. Clinging to the end of my bed. Staring at me. Tall and strong. In a cloak.’

‘A cloak?’

‘OK. A very smart dressing-gown with a velvet collar over his shoulders, on top of his pyjamas. My God! He looked like General Primo de Rivera. A light in his eyes like that of the one who played Dracula, set the screen in Hercules Cinema on fire, left two holes like cigarette burns. First thing I did was close my eyes. To slow my heart more than anything. What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over. I had to think. And I thought I knew that man from somewhere. He belonged to another class. The skin on his face, his hands, hadn’t weathered. And off he went again.

‘“I can offer you a fortune for that book.”

‘I swear he had the same light in his eyes as the actor Bela Lugosi. He was turning into a nightmare.

‘“You don’t have to worry about a thing. Nobody will know. I’ll make you an exact copy, a facsimile. It’ll be like having the original. And a mass of money. You can name your price.”

‘“Let me think,” I said, hoping this would calm him down. But it had the opposite effect. That man was like a horse. We’d obviously not been treated by the same doctor. He came up to me with emotion, took my hands. His look was — how shall I say? — Eucharistic.

‘“So you do have the book dedicated to the valiente of Finisterra?”

‘I said, “Yes, sir, I have it.”

‘“Borrow’s New Testament?”

‘“The very same.”

‘“You have to sell it to me!”

‘“We’ll talk about that later.”

‘“Later?”

‘“Yes, now I need to sleep.”

‘What was I supposed to say, O? The guy was crazy. It hurt me to look at him. He was boring a hole in my head.’

‘The truth,’ said O. ‘You could have told him the truth. That you had another book, Elisha’s book, as you like to call it.’

‘No, I couldn’t have said that.’

‘Why not, Papa?’

‘That’s my business. I still have to return it.’

O had already discussed this with him. She’d been the repository of a secret, but couldn’t believe he was still feeling guilty.

‘Who are you going to return it to, Papa? That book’s yours. It belongs to you more than anyone.’

‘There’ll be somebody. Somebody’ll have the key. Maybe even Minerva. Women live longer than men. And they’re more careful about keeping things.’

‘If that guy’s so crazy, he’ll bring it up again. You should have told him about The Invisible Man . Told him the truth.’

‘What for? He didn’t want to listen. He could have killed me then and there. I could see he was capable of such a barbarous act for the sake of a book. Capable of killing for a copy of Scripture.’

AS HE SITS on the terrace of the Dársena Café, things move in and out of his glass of amber and ice cubes. For example, he’s convinced the cloud of starlings drawing a protective bird in the sky, a bird composed of dots like a pop cartoon, wasn’t there before. He decides to count them. A hundred thousand, give or take. Nor was the puppet there before, standing in front of him, in front of his eyes.