Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

During the afternoon, in the long summer hours, when the Academy’s only client was Monsieur Le Clock, the odd sailor would drop by. Most of the women used the afternoon break to sleep in time’s embrace, under a quilt of shadows. And the sailor would look around in search of someone to listen and light on Hercules’ open eyes. Because while he also was in time’s embrace, even when he slept, his eyes stayed open.

‘Not completely, but a little bit, yes.’

‘That’s good,’ declared Pombo. ‘For someone like him, that’s good. He needs them on both sides, like a hare, all the better to see with.’

‘You’ve got them on both sides,’ said Flora, ‘like a sentry.’

‘Get over it, girl. At a certain age, you become invisible. Transparent. They can’t see you.’

‘Even with raised insoles?’

‘Hey Samantha! Will you go and see if that pussy’s laid an egg?’

‘The orphanage? No one’s leaving here for the orphanage,’ said Samantha and for once her authority and sentiment seemed to coincide. ‘The only thing I’m sorry about is I promised Grande Obra a baby Jesus for their nativity scene.’

‘And what’s wrong with the child?’ asked Flora.

‘You’re impossible to talk to,’ said Samantha. ‘He’s ugly. And that mark on his back. .’

‘It’s no problem,’ said Flora suddenly, looking very serious. ‘He’s been offered to the Union as well.’

‘The Union has a nativity scene?’

‘And an Epiphany parade.’

‘Grande Obra asked first,’ said Samantha. ‘The Bolshies have enough with their revolution.’

‘They’re not Bolsheviks. They’re anarchists.’

‘Like me. From here on down.’

‘You’re a brute the size of a plough.’

‘I’m from the village, like you. And proud of it.’

‘I’m not from the village,’ said Flora. ‘I was washed up by the sea.’

‘Now listen here, you. .’

‘The important thing,’ the Widow intervened, ‘is to have a godfather who can say the Creed. So the child doesn’t stammer.’

‘In Italy, there’s a baby Jesus who’s a girl.’

‘And in Vinhó he’s dressed up as Napoleon.’

‘Aren’t we international!’ Samantha exclaimed, while Pombo started singing a Peruvian carol:

Here comes the Mayor’s child

Here comes the Christ-child

It may have been the effect of having to draw back an entrance curtain, but many of the stories the sailors told Curtis or, to be more precise, told his open, attentive eyes were about things that turned up in whales’ bellies. Some brought not only the stories, but the things as well. Like the harpooner Mr Lens.

There were two big whaling companies in Galicia, the Spanish Whaling Company and the Spanish Crown Society. Behind both of them was the influential industrialist Massó. One of the factories was in Caneliñas, in Cee, with the whaling ships based in Coruña Harbour. Lens of Arou, the harpooner, knew nothing about Massó, but a lot about whales. They were his life. The first time he saw a whale was on top of a rock on Lobeira Beach. He was fishing for octopuses with an ear of maize. The rope, the stone, were an extension of his arm. Despite all their intelligence, and Lens’ father said they were like people, octopuses had a weakness, an irrepressible desire to latch on to an ear of maize. And that ear was part of Lens’ body, a third arm. He once caught an octopus as big as himself. When it saw itself out of the water, betrayed by that alluring, golden ear of maize, the octopus, which was huge on the Lens scale, infuriated by such skulduggery, enveloped the boy’s body, and face as well, with its eight arms. But Lens wouldn’t let himself be dragged out to sea. With the octopus stuck to his head, he ran to where his father was and when he finally got rid of it, little Lens bore the mark of its suckers and had been completely drained. ‘It was the octopus’ revenge,’ he told Hercules. ‘It sucked out everything I had. I didn’t have much education, but what I did know, I lost. I had to start from scratch. Put it all back. The names of people and things. Every single word. The whole lot.’ A whale was his unit of measurement. Especially when talking about emotions. Joy, when great, was of whale-like proportions.

‘How many whales have you killed?’

‘The joy is not in killing them, but in watching them emerge. Seeing a whale emerge. It’s the kind of joy that doesn’t fit inside your body. Pain’s like that as well. The trouble with a great sadness is that it doesn’t fit inside your body.’

Hercules remembered this unit of measurement the harpooner taught him on afternoons in the Academy. Real joy and pain were too big to fit inside your body. It can be very painful to see a giant man cry. He’d seen this. Harpooners collapsing with sadness on the table, smashing glasses and bottles. Their pain was as heavy as a whale. But a weak, scared woman can also carry tons of pain on top of her head. A premonition. A whale.

‘And your mother?’ asked Lens of Arou.

‘My mother? My mother cooks,’ replied Curtis hastily, ‘sews and fluffs up the wool inside the mattresses.’

‘I know that. But where is she?’

‘She went to buy some damask,’ Hercules lied.

‘Some damask?’

‘For the covers. She has a thing about damask.’

Vicente Curtis liked the harpooner. But when it came to his mother, he tried to keep men at a distance. The harpooner was twice the size of Milagres. Even Curtis had been too big for her. When he emerged from her belly, he left an empty space in what the Widow called her ‘sacred chamber’.

‘The birth,’ warned the Widow, ‘will be followed by a melancholy air. An insatiable wind that preys on newly delivered mothers.’

‘What do we have to do?’

‘It’s a crafty, human wind that searches out gaps in people and likes to plant sadness in the space left by the baby. Keep the child always close at hand. What the wind wants is for her to hate the child so that it can take his place. You have to love her. And the child as well.’

‘And who’s going to love me?’ asked Samantha.

‘Some questions in life just don’t have an answer,’ said Flora.

‘That was a good one,’ said the madame. ‘I won’t hold it against you.’

Milagres had the child always with her. Not just tied, grafted on to her body. On her back or front, in a series of girdles. When he started walking and disappeared from view, she let out a whine that was like a cat or seagull mewing. Later, when they made the skylight and Curtis embarked on his existence as a head popping out of the roof, the cats and seagulls were like distant company, suspicious residents. He realised how similar they were at night. A crossbreed of feline gulls and cats about to fly. Sleepwalking fauna for a sleepless city.

Curtis would have liked the roof fauna to come down and sniff around the books’ remains. Something to fill the void. Even the books burning badly, slowly being consumed, seemed to be waiting for somebody. Cats and gulls, rooftop plumes, gull-like cats and cat-like gulls remained still, taxidermic, as in an experiment to dispense with the atmosphere.

If only Milagres was with the harpooner now. Curtis had discovered that Mr Lens’ size was proportional to the stories he stored inside. If anyone could exorcise the void, it was the harpooner. To start with, following his mother’s instructions, Curtis provided a barrier. The harpooner would arrive in the Academy at some sleepy hour of the afternoon, when even Pombo took a break, leaving Curtis in charge, practising his scrawl in the light of a green lamp. He would ask after Milagres, the boy would come out with some excuse, sounding increasingly unconvinced, but the harpooner never kicked against the pricks. He’d deposit part of his store of stories in the boy, leading his body to become normal while Curtis’ grew. There was not a drop of fat in the harpooner’s storytelling, it was all lean meat.