Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

The name sounded familiar to Parallelepiped. He hadn’t read anything by him, but he’d heard lots of jokes about him under the heading ‘red queens’. In a Fascist publication, one of those papers he did read, there was always a stubborn misprint in the second surname: García Loca or ‘madwoman’.

He opened it up. Adopted a humorous tone:

Under the multiplication

is a drop of duck’s blood

Shit! He didn’t read any more. The drop of duck’s blood changed his voice. He looked away and made an effort to shout:

‘Boss! There’s a Lorca here.’

He threw it with obvious hatred into the middle of the volcano, which spewed out black smoke and shiny sparks.

He took another handful. Meanwhile his boss had approached. The first of the new lot was a slim volume, the only illustration a single scallop shell in the centre.

‘ Six Galician Poems! Fe-de-ri-co. . What’s this? Can’t they leave each other alone?’

He turned to face his boss with the book held out and a look of disgust.

‘Samos! Did this faggot also write in Galician?’

His boss lingered over the cover, though young Parallelepiped thought there was hardly much to read. Six Galician Poems by Federico García Lorca. Foreword E. B. A. Nós Publishing House. Compostela. Samos may have been investigating those dots after the letters. Deciphering those initials. He leafed through it slowly, page by page. Parallelepiped tossed the other books while watching Samos. What’s he up to? Is he going to read the whole thing?

Locks that go out to sea,

where the clouds their glittering dovecot keep

The book danced in his hands. He looked at the boy observing him steadily, waiting for some informed remark.

‘He spent some time here,’ said the supervisor, ‘with a theatre company, Barraca. Yes, he was right here. I think he made a lot of friends. The book’s recent. Under a year.’

‘That was another age, Comrade Samos,’ declared the young boy.

A year. The phrase Parallelepiped used was of someone measuring an astronomical distance. The look of someone abolishing time. He was right. After all, he knew how to measure what was happening. It was a month to the day since the war had started. The first month of Year I.

The war had changed all concept of time. The war had changed many things, but above all measures of duration. Nós Publishing House. He could have given him a lecture, but it didn’t exist any more. It had no future and it wouldn’t have any past either. That was where Galicianist Republicans hung out, those who had this stupid idea of a federal Spain. The publisher was Ánxel Casal. Mayor of Santiago de Compostela. Or rather ex-mayor. In a dungeon right now. Like Coruña’s mayor, Alfredo Suárez Ferrín. He felt something like vertigo to think that these two figures of the Republic, democratically elected mayors, had been imprisoned as enemies of the nation. But the vertigo was exciting, intoxicating. He’d finally arisen from inaction, from a bland form of Christianity. He could shout as during the Crusades, ‘God wills it!’ And in fact this is how, with a warlike cry, he’d ended a short speech at the local branch of the Falange, which now had a large skull painted on the wall. Yes, he felt the telepathic force of Carl Schmitt, his new, revered master. It was naive to believe in a telepathy of words, but not of ideas. In the thesis he was preparing on Donoso Cortés, concerning the dictatorship, he’d noted down an idea he later discovered in one of Schmitt’s texts: a state of emergency was to law what a miracle was for theology. Since the machinery of conspiracy had been set in motion and above all since he’d felt the itching in his brain that came from holding a weapon in his hand that afternoon when Dez invited him to military training on the beach, since then he’d been accompanied every day by the image of Heidegger, the Nazi Rector of Freiburg University, giving the order to descend to Plato’s cave to requisition the projector of ideas. Yes, he knew them. He knew Casal. Compostela’s mayor had been born in Coruña and founded his publishing house there. His wife, María Miramontes, was a well-known designer. His mother, Pilar, had even ordered her famous dress of black chiffon with black velvet grapes from her. The mother’s final act of daring. Needless to say, Casal and Miramontes were friends with Luís Huici, the artistic tailor, the inventor of incredible double-breasted waistcoats and broad-shouldered jackets which were so popular with Coruña’s Bohemians. Waistcoats, ideas. He’d got the young drunk with his speeches at Germinal. Right now, Huici was probably tasting castor oil in the barracks of the Falange.

He gave the book back to Parallelepiped, ‘You can throw it!’ Parallelepiped might have wondered why he didn’t throw it himself though, given the circumstances, that would have been a strange thought. So he just carried out the order. Should somebody ever write a history of the burning of books in Coruña, they could add a non-gratuitous detail: Ánxel Casal and Federico García Lorca were murdered that same morning. The Galician publisher in a ditch outside Santiago, in Cacheiras, and the Granadine poet in the gully of Víznar, Granada. At about the same time, six hundred miles apart.

The book landed on some copies of Man and the Earth by the geographer Élisée Reclus. It was still there, safe for the moment, on those sort of rocks which formed a mountain range the fire ascended. Samos kept looking at it. He was sometimes superstitious and trusted his instinct. Now he was thinking this little book could one day be a rarity. A work printed in the Galician language might become a relic. A first edition of the Six Poems would be as valuable as a medieval parchment.

‘What? Feeling sorry for it?’ Parallelepiped asked him.

Prattler, thought Samos. But right now he didn’t mind him being so nosy.

‘Not sorry,’ he said. ‘Those initials! I’ve just remembered why they could be useful to me. See if you can fetch it. .’

‘Here it is, boss. Just in time.’

‘ In extremis ,’ said Samos with a sigh.

‘ In extremis ,’ whispered Parallelepiped. He was learning lots, he thought, while the books burnt. That’s it, in extremis .

‘Wells, Wells, Wells!’

There’s a flurry of activity.

‘Wells, Wells, Wells!’ shouts the one we already know as Parallelepiped, throwing a book each time he imitates a dog’s bark.

‘More Wells! There’s lots of him. Wells, Wells, Wells!’

For a moment, for the briefest of moments, when he heard that mocking onomatopoeia — ‘Wells, Wells, Wells!’ three books into the fire — there was an acidic reaction somewhere in Samos’ digestive system, which caused him a slight indisposition, a rumbling in the bowels, part of which involved remembering fragments from The War of the Worlds , not as they were, but in Héctor Ríos’ penetrating voice, ‘ Does time pass when there are no human hands left to wind the clocks? ’ It’s Easter 1931. They’re in the Craftsmen’s Circle, in a group of declamation and amateur theatre directed by Ríos, who is studying already at Santiago University, in the Faculty of Law. Two years older, he’s in front of Samos, but they still work together at weekends on that project that so excited them to begin with. A radio version of The War of the Worlds . ‘The radio’s an extraordinary invention,’ asserts Ríos. ‘It’ll transform communication, culture, everything. It’ll cross borders through the air. Coruña Radio is due to start broadcasting soon.’

‘Wells, Wells, Wells! Out the door, and you’re not coming back.’