Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

The idea of a child on his back was something that stuck in his mind, an image his memory had of itself after a visit.

Neto, a friend of Arturo da Silva’s, had had a fight the day before in the bullring and the words hurt as they came out. His eyebrow had split open and they’d stitched it up there and then, without anaesthetic. He also had knocks and bruises and bloody ribs at each commissure of the lips and eyelids. And his nose displayed the enormous surprise of prominent things that have survived an unexpected catastrophe.

Curtis and Luís Terranova had come with Arturo and another boy from Shining Light who was a boxing fan, Pepe Boedo. They’d come to see the victor. And now they were feeling a little disappointed. According to local legend, Neto was a kind of gladiator. So they’d been expecting to hear a description of the fight, a glowing account of his exploits, but instead they were shown into a poorly lit room. The boxer had his feet in a bucket of hot water. Around his ankles, the bubbles looked like a flower arrangement, which was the only concession the scene allowed the hero. Even Carmiña, his wife, appeared to be forging the seven swords of Our Lady of Sorrow, though what she was in fact doing was hammering at a slab of ice in the kitchen. She’d bring in handfuls of irregular pieces, some like rocks, others like nails, for him to choose.

A newspaper was lying on the floor. It seemed to have been written there. Printed in that very room. The matrices of the letters scattered by Neto’s broken anatomy.

CHAMPION’S CALVARY

Good headline, thought Curtis. That newspaper was a bit like a mirror. He watched Arturo da Silva pick it up off the floor and casually put it out of sight.

Neto spoke through the cut in his eyebrow. Monosyllables, short sentences that pushed their way through the stitches. The rasping of words. Craters in some sentences where syllables had been punched out. Arturo da Silva administered the necessary dose. They now understood the reason for their visit was to cure, not celebrate, his victory.

‘All I can see are clouds. Your face looks like a storm’s coming.’

‘Every cloud has a silver lining. Who was it told me that rubbish?’

‘Could have been me,’ said Arturo with the same irony.

‘Culture’ll be the end of you, Arturo. Silver lining, my foot! Are you still attending the Rationalist School?’

‘In the evenings. Occasionally.’

‘I liked it, but I’d doze off. Without my knowledge, as I lay snoring on the desk, old Amil would use me to talk of the evolution of species.’

Curtis and Terranova also attend Master Amil’s evening classes. Arturo persuaded them. Curtis’ first teacher had been Flora, the Girl, the Conception Girl. She hated being interrupted when she was teaching him letters and numbers, but then she still held her tongue. Looking back at his life, in front of the pyres, Curtis remembered the last time he’d seen Flora, when she caused an earthquake in the Academy.

‘I’m leaving,’ she said in the dining-room.

No one seemed to have heard anything. They carried on eating. The suspense of spoons striking the bottom of plates.

‘What are you leaving?’ asked Samantha.

‘This. All of this. It’s nothing personal.’

‘Are you not happy? Do you want a bigger share?’

‘It’s not a question of how much. I won’t sell myself any more.’

Samantha exploded, brought her fist down on the table, ‘There isn’t much to sell!’

‘Well, what’s left of me.’ Flora didn’t take her eyes off Samantha and spoke surprisingly calmly, ‘Don’t be daft. I already said it wasn’t personal.’

‘Who converted you? The boxer? You think he’s going to change your life?’

‘Don’t bring him into this. You don’t have to drill holes with your tongue.’

‘Plenty of beach now. What happens when winter comes?’

‘Carry on with your sums,’ Flora would tell Curtis when she was teaching him how to multiply and had to go at the request of a client. ‘Remember how many you’ve counted. I’ll be right back.’ He counted by piles. She’d taught him using beans, chickpeas, grains of rice. Whatever there was. Numbers had colour and value. But now he had nothing to hand, they’d taken Flora and he had to replace real things with downstrokes. Two by four. Two piles of four. He then discovered she’d come back as he was finishing his sums. He thought if I’m quicker at doing the sums or writing out the sentences, she’ll come back sooner, she’ll get rid of that untimely client sticking his nose in where he’s not wanted. And so it was. The power of letters and numbers.

When he laughed, Neto complained most about the space around his eyes. It hurt him to look. So they had to be grateful to him for looking at them, and this is where he made a heroic effort. Curtis learnt that day that winning in questions of merit involves extra work. Had he lost the fight, Neto wouldn’t have been under any obligation to view them with sympathy. He wouldn’t have had to look at anyone and so he could have given his eyes a rest.

He had a white towel around his shoulders, his feet in a zinc bucket, while the upper light slid down the seated man to the foam’s flower arrangement. They’d arrived during the afternoon. It was December. The slats of the blinds began to contain the darkness. Dampness stretched, leapt out of the bar of soap and licked the pale cracks in Neto’s fingers.

Many of the scenes Arturo moved in, like the boxer Neto’s house, shared one characteristic. You could witness the waking and falling quiet of things. The water in the tub was quiet. An example of sad water.

In one of the talks at Shining Light, Curtis had heard a painter called Huici refer to things falling quiet. He was distracted, thinking about the special train and the tickets he hadn’t sold yet, but his memory was alert and reminded him. The falling quiet of things. Things fell quiet and spoke. A thought put simply, but not easily reached. There it was, like a buoy under the water, but you had to pull on it.

Things spoke and things fell quiet. Here were two perceptions that made a picture or a poem special. One, the speaking of things. Capturing the speaking of things, their expansive aura, their meaning, and translating it into the language of light or sounds. The other, the falling quiet of things. Their hiding. Their being absent. Their emptying. Their loss. Relating or reflecting that was another shudder. The first art caused a frontal shudder. The second, a lumbar tremor.

Just a moment. Even when things fall quiet, there are two classes of silence. A friendly silence that keeps us company, where words can be at leisure, and another silence. One that frightens. One that Rosalía de Castro, Huici told them, called ‘mute silence.’

The warm water in the tub was quiet, a friendly silence. Curtis thought about the special train, the boat, the trip to Caneiros. Which would be on 2 August. The procession upriver. The waking of water.

Neto called to his wife and whispered, ‘Bring the child, will you, Carmiña?’

And then they saw it. The head with the same slight lean of a globe and the relief of bruises, the physical geography of nightmares. The girl had emerged from the painful falling quiet of things. Neto took the child in his hands and gently placed her like a live poultice on the cuts and bruises.

‘Her fontanel, her little head, is the most soothing.’

‘Do you feel relief?’

‘Relief? It’s the best cure,’ said Neto. ‘I can’t explain it. Like a skin graft.’

He rocked forwards with the child on his lap. Gestured to say something. Curtis had the feeling he was about to float an original thought, but the boxer held back the words in the reservoir of a half smile. A position his wounds copied.