Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

He looked at his flies. It was true. They were open.

‘Thank you. Much obliged.’

‘Don’t mention it, sir. Manolo Pinzón at your service.’

It left. He was sorry now. Really a very interesting puppet. Sharp-witted. And not at all boring. He went back to his glass. Who knows? Perhaps, if he followed it, he’d come to a city beyond the sea. They’d go down street after street until suddenly the puppet started moving him. He’d be the one hanging on strings. They’d stop in front of a building with a shop sign on which was written Invisible Remedy . The puppet would say, ‘Now, Leica, raise your head. Look up there, at that window on the third floor. It’s her.’

‘Impossible! I can’t see anything.’

‘Don’t be daft, Leica. It’s her!’

He sits on the terrace of the Dársena Café, his eyes sunk in a glass of amber. Liquid photos. Curtis goes by with the horse Carirí. Leica recognises them, but is not sure why. They must be coming from the lighthouse, Hercules Lighthouse. He sometimes thinks people coming down from Mount Alto are amphibian and also aerial creatures. They stop. The travelling photographer greets him with affection. He likes creatures that give you a wave and then carry on. They leave a wake in the amber and that’s all. Farewell, friend. Farewell, horse. Farewell.

TODAY HE WON’T listen to an extract from The Invisible Man , as he usually does. Today he’ll be late. Who knows what time he’ll turn up? After funerals, the men invite him for a drink. And he has to go. Says it’s part of his duty to toast the souls. Give them one last push.

He has his very own toast for bars: ‘Matter is neither created nor destroyed, it is simply transformed.’ He always says this, with feeling, and the deceased’s relatives are grateful because it sounds convincing. Scientific. Like a commandment. ‘Another round?’

It’s what he says when Olinda tells him off for drinking too much.

‘A fine state you’re in!’

‘Matter is neither created nor destroyed, sweetheart, it is simply transformed.’

When Polka drinks too much after a funeral, he sings hymns to everything. You can tell he’s drunk by the way he opens the door. Today scientific proof, as he’d say, because when he opens the double door, the upper leaf bangs against the wall. He’s always telling us to open the door slowly so the upper leaf doesn’t bang against the wall and spoil the paintwork. Pinche makes him suffer every time he bangs the door when he comes in. So whenever he opens the door and there’s a slam, Olinda and I know that Polka, in an attempt to dissemble, is going to shout out some vivas — long live electricity, long live Carballo bread, long live fillets of cod and cauliflower, long live the Umbrella Maker’s whistle — and then sing ‘The moth alights in a very pretty way’. He pops into our bedroom in the hope that Olinda will go back to sleep and forget about her invisible man. Sits next to my bed and murmurs the refrain: ‘Till it finds a flower, it never wants to alight’.

He sings the one about autumn leaves.

‘This is no time for singing!’ shouts Olinda from bed.

He likes that song a lot. I like it when he sings it. ‘We’re two autumn leaves’.

‘We’re out of time, girl.’ Then he asks me one of his scientific questions, ‘Why do leaves change colour?’

‘To save light.’

‘Why?’

‘To live longer. There’s less light in autumn and the leaves change colour to make the most of it.’

What he wanted was for us to be knowledgeable. What I wanted was for him to carry on talking. Because of what he said and to watch the way his Adam’s apple moved.

He hasn’t shaved for days. Darkness has gone to sleep, so the light of the table lamp concentrates on his face. You can see him better than during the day. Polka’s so skinny, instead of a double chin, he has a hollow that arches the roof of the grotto where his amazing Adam’s apple holds stage. His beard’s a bit ancient. Roots sticking out through cracks in the stone. A laborious renaissance of thickets among crags, stalks with colourful spikes you couldn’t see before his beard went grey.

He was tired that night.

‘I dug the grave and saw myself on top of a palm tree. Felt dizzy again. The body’s memory is such a strange thing.’

‘What were you doing on top of a palm?’

‘Pruning and climbing. It’s the only place in the world you cut and climb.’

‘You used to prune palm trees?’

‘I did. I pruned the palms in Recheo Gardens.’

‘Were they very tall?’

‘They were of a certain height. And I made them taller.’

‘You did?’

‘That’s right. You have to make palm trees. Like building a staircase in the sky.’

I stayed silent because there was a wounded note in Polka’s response as if the pruning had affected his body. I imagined him clambering up the palm tree’s old cuts to reach the branches he still had to saw.

‘Pruning a tall palm is very different from pruning any other tree. It’s like cutting wings. The whole leaf shakes as you’re sawing. Though they’re not really leaves. More like spines. Skeletons.’

His glistening eyes also lived in holes. Polka’s face was an inhabited rock. Not round, a succession of stone slabs with caves where shiny-skinned, expressive creatures darted about. I watched him with my face on the pillow, Pinche having been rocked to sleep by his flowing tones, and it seemed to me his apple was a pendulum moving his lips and the scent of words brought his eyes out, his eyes and his memories, since they illustrated the story he was telling. Polka’s mechanism, set in motion, went in the other direction to night. He was able to resist it. Olinda knew this and called him to bed.

‘Skeletons?’

‘Spines of big fish. Swordfish.’

With my face lying on the pillow, in the mist of sleepiness, I could see him up there, on top of a palm, sawing the skeletons of swordfish. Polka is shaped like a spine. Never had much flesh. He had a friend, Celeiro, whose skeleton alone weighed a hundred and twenty kilos. At death’s door, he said to him, ‘Polka, death doesn’t want you, you’ve nothing to gnaw on.’

Now Polka’s lying down and O is standing next to his bed. Polka’s feet are cold, the rest of him is warm. His ribs are becoming more and more visible, even under the sheet. A body assembled on a palm leaf. The creatures living under the stone slabs of his face seem to be quiet tonight. Except for his eyes. His eyes are wide open and look at her in surprise. Suddenly he blinks as if trying to clear a mist. O doesn’t want to stop talking, maintains the flow of her voice. She may be watching him on top of a palm tree, sawing swordfish spines. Sawing and climbing.

Before falling asleep, O hears Olinda calling to Polka, ‘A lot of hare your mother must have eaten when she was pregnant with you!’

It’s true. He sleeps with open eyes.

O wakes up with a start. Sweating. Has the sensation the imitation leather on the hospital chair has been grafted on to her skin. She was asleep for a few minutes, but saw herself descending one staircase in Polka’s arms, and climbing another, holding him.

‘What do you do in that hospital?’

‘The laundry, Polka.’

‘Are you your own boss?’

‘Mine and the washing machines,’ replied O ironically.

‘That’s good. The washing machines kicked you out of here and now you press their buttons. Let the machines do the work, damn it!’

‘Before going to London, I worked in the house I told you about. In Sussex, invisible man country.’

‘I don’t suppose you saw him,’ said Polka.

‘No. I was the one who became invisible.’