Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

‘Do you know where all the umbrellas the wind takes in Galicia end up? On the same boat.’

‘Always the same one?’

‘That’s right. An old container ship, which acts like a magnet for umbrellas. About two hundred miles out to sea. It’s called the Mara Hope . From here, it goes to Rotterdam and sells them on in bulk.’

He then told him how things from the sea rain on earth and things from the earth rain at sea. In Galicia, in the middle of winter, a shower of pilchards had fallen inland from a cloud of seaweed. The cloud had burst, like someone opening a net in mid-air. Thousands of small, silvery sardines falling on the rye. Which is why the fields of Courel sometimes smell of the sea. While the woods are covered in a moss of seaweed with starfish hanging from the treetops. These are the so-called animate waves which rise in gale-force winds, turning into pregnant clouds. ‘Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of animate waves and pregnant clouds. Isn’t there an old newspaper lying around?’

‘It’s true what he says about umbrellas,’ intervened Pombo, who’d finished his break. ‘The other way round too. Have you never seen a flock of cod heading in the direction of Terra Cha? And in Riazor Stadium the other day it bucketed down caps with the name “Numancia” embroidered on them.’

‘I can only talk about what I’ve seen,’ said Mr Lens a tad suspiciously.

‘Honest to cod,’ insisted Pombo.

Curtis enjoyed this duel. Things to-ing and fro-ing by air and sea. They vied not to tell the truth, but to invent the biggest story. Before working as a harpooner in the North Atlantic, Lens had spent many years in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.

‘Never trust the calm,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘It’s what I’m most afraid of. The calm. You know, when nothing happens, there’s a dead calm, the sea like a plate.’

Curtis shook his head.

‘At the centre of a hurricane! What they call the area of calm. Don’t forget it. In the area of calm, be alert, in a state of emergency.’

Curtis thought he heard Pombo blink. Alert. His tongue tickling.

‘You can be on the boat with nothing moving. Everything completely still. When suddenly, swept offshore by the hurricane, something falls. What you’d least expect. Because it’s one thing,’ he said sarcastically, ‘for it to rain a tin of sardines in the mountains the day Pombo goes for a picnic and quite another for it to rain, as I have seen — I have seen! — a flock of sheep on board a ship, carried along by a hurricane.’

‘Sheep with umbrellas, I suppose,’ commented Pombo ironically.

‘Only when the flock has a shepherd. Then they fall with a large umbrella, of the type called “seven parishes”. In the Caribbean, I’ve seen it rain a whole chapter, a Mexican chapter.’

‘It’s normal for a flock to have a shepherd of souls,’ added Pombo, ‘and fall right on top of a pagan from Death Coast.’

‘What’s frightening is to be in the area of calm and think the worst is over,’ said Lens seriously, ignoring Pombo’s jokes. ‘That’s it, you think the worst is over when in fact it’s just beginning. You think the hurricane’s gone and you’re in the eye of the storm.’

His tone now smacked undeniably of the truth. The ship’s name was right. The Mara Hope .

As they listened, even Pombo’s mocking hemisphere was eclipsed. Whether in suspense or under the force of Lens’ memory, the silence in the Dance Academy had acquired the sound of an electric hum, of sultry heat, around the green lamp, which Pombo’s long eyelashes had been drawn to.

‘It’s terrible what you’ve endured,’ Lens continued. ‘Everything’s in disarray, the boat and your bones. And then you find yourself under the illusion that it’s all over. Because the other boats you thought had foundered in the storm are coming towards you, safe and sound. A horizon of ships. You’re dumbstruck by such a miracle. Merde! Shit! Verdammt und zugenäht!’

The harpooner, like many other maritime residents and guests, practised the art of saying ugly words in foreign languages for them to sound a little distinguished. A kind of crude elegance.

‘What happened?’ asked Pombo on tenterhooks, he who’d heard so much.

‘Not a single ship. It was a decapitated forest. Bits of forest torn to shreds which, after the storm, came together at sea and interlaced roots to hold up trunks and crowns like the masts of sailing ships, with nature’s will for weaving tapestries out of tatters. It’s normal in shipwrecks to find a brotherhood of remains. But this was as big as the horizon itself.’

The harpooner’s enormous hands ordered the geology of earth on the table’s tectonic plates. He took a slice out of the table with the corner of his right hand and lifted up a chunk of Yucatan. ‘It was this wooded territory coming towards us, towards our ship in the area of central calm.’

‘Was that before or after you had cataracts?’ asked Pombo at last, unable to control himself.

‘What?’

‘The wood moving at sea.’

‘I’m talking here to Hercules. Anyone else can shut up or provide tobacco.’

‘Portuguese blond,’ said Pombo in a conciliatory tone, holding out a cigarette.

‘To start with, we thought no,’ Lens continued, ‘they were boats, an entire fleet that had been reunited. Because we could hear shouts as well. Isolated, distant. Unintelligible. Sometimes they sounded like hurrahs of joy carried on the wind, others like cries of agony and anguish filling the sea with fear. We approached with our hearts in our mouths. No, they weren’t boats. This was no vast fleet of salvaged ships. As we got closer, our eyes were forced to accept something even more fantastical. What was coming towards us was the forest. The sea had gathered strips of wood, drifting timbers. The masts we descried in the distance were in fact large trees, huge mahoganies. Then we heard an orchestral guffaw. A spine-chilling peal of laughter. All of that nature was making fun of us. Laughter can be truly terrifying when you don’t know where it’s coming from. Until the mystery was revealed. The trees had their birds in them. A colourful display of parrots, orioles and long-crested cockatoos. Someone shouted, “The birds are warning us!” But it was too late. When we tried to turn around, the boat was surrounded by the forest.’

‘And what happened?’ asked Curtis uneasily.

‘The forest gobbled us up. Swallowed us whole.’

‘That’s more or less what happened to me with the wolf,’ said Pombo after the requisite pause to take a swig.

‘What happened to you if you never left this hole?’

‘I’m from the mountains, and proud of it. Bloody mountains! One freezing winter’s day with a lot of snow, the height of a man at least, I was sent with a message down by the border and bumped into the wolf on my way. It stared at me. I stared at it.’

Everyone remained silent. Pombo marked a bony kind of time by rapping the bar with his knuckles.

‘And what happened?’ asked Lens finally.

‘It ate me.’

Pombo adjusted the knot of his necktie and stared at the harpooner artistically. ‘What did you expect? It ate me! That’s right. The wolf ate me.’ And he waited before delivering the final blow, ‘Just as the forest ate that ship of yours.’

‘You don’t know what the area of calm is,’ replied the harpooner painfully.

Some of the fishing boats still have their festive pennants. The vessels haven’t left port for a month. Haven’t been back out to sea. The sirens sounded on the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. A few days later, with the military coup, they sounded again. A day and a night. Without stopping. In the Academy’s attic, Curtis heard them one after the other. He couldn’t see. He could hear. He heard shots and sirens. Shots against sirens. For a time, the shots stuttered, as if sliding down the sirens’ greasy hair. The shots increased, the sirens diminished. The sound of the sirens was round, slow, fleshy, labial. The shots were straight lines which multiplied, pulling on each other, sieving space. Eventually there was only one siren left. Very clear. In long hoots. The shots fell silent. Seemed to be listening as well, in surprise. Then there was a loud volley. The death throes of the last sound being riddled with bullets. Lots of the pennants are frayed, bitten. The atmosphere around the burning books is full of holes. Perforated.