Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

The smoke was looking for somewhere to hold on to, to clamber up. In the upper part of his body, Curtis felt the tickle of its creepers and suckers. Climbing up his face. Invading his nose. Catching on his eyes. Sealing his mouth.

Another day, the harpooner had told him how a sandstorm had consumed paradise in a single night. A place called Tatajuba in Brazil. Curtis realised he wasn’t making it up, he’d been there as he said, from the way he went into details. He even made a pencil drawing on the marble of the kitchen table. How well the harpooner could draw America! His map of Europe was pretty good too. On the Iberian Peninsula, he took great care over the twists and turns of the Galician coast. But America came out from north to south as if by memory. He put a cross to show where paradise had disappeared overnight, eaten up by the sand. This is Tatajuba. This is Camusin. He’d been walking from Camusin, all along the beach, because he’d heard what a paradise it was. On the way, he slept on the beach and woke up to see a sow with piglets bathing in the sea. Or else they were eating fish. Because the fish there could be caught by hand. Skate, swordfish, mullet and porpoise, all jumping about. A Galician fisherman’s dream. Pigs swimming and fish jumping in the air. When he reached Tatajuba, it really was paradise. The following day, it no longer existed. A sandstorm had swallowed it up overnight. What Curtis remembered best about the sandstorm that buried paradise in one night was how the harpooner told him people stopped talking. The sand set their teeth chattering and drowned out their words. And that’s when the men and women who’d worked so hard, with such devotion, gave up.

Curtis hadn’t read many books. All the burning books had something to do with him. They were books he hadn’t yet read. But this one had clearly belonged to him since he’d set foot on the scene. In the end, he picked up A Popular Guide to Electricity .

‘Hey you, put that back!’ The stocky soldier hadn’t let him out of his sight and this time he really did take out his pistol.

‘Now, now, calm down!’ said Samos. ‘It’s just a clown looking for some Tarzan comics. Which one of them would dare show his face?’

Arturo da Silva used first to write out his texts by hand. He had curious handwriting. It was very neat, as if the act of writing, though it called for action, or perhaps because of this, was incompatible with speed. Given the size of his fingers and the heavy machinery of his hands, it must have been a real effort. And the truth is Dafonte, Holando, Félix Ramón, Varela, Curtis, Terranova, Marconi, Leica, Seoane, all the new group of boys who visited the Shining Light premises, some of whom contributed to Brazo y Cerebro , tried to make room when he was using the table to write, forging a territory with his bulk, his head close to the paper and his whole body focused on moving that caravan of words like beasts of burden forwards against all the odds. To start with, the paper had the texture of rocky ground or was treacherous as a marsh. A few words opened the way, like tracks, sleepers or stepping-stones. They were the eyes and feet of those running behind.

It helped him to hear a voice, a voice like that of Amil, the teacher at the Rationalist School, tugging at his fingers.

Amil, who always talked to them of Heraclitus and Parmenides. Life, the course of the universe, all explained as a river. A river which is never the same, which is always changing. You cannot step into the same river twice. A changeless river, a river which is always the same. Heraclitus and Parmenides are so familiar he’s surprised no one in the city is named after them. They’re in the ring. Heraclitus constantly on the go. Parmenides solid as a rock.

You cannot step into the same river twice, he wrote. It wasn’t highly original, but he was pleased with this beginning. It would allow him to talk of that point in history, of everything that was happening, based on the trip upriver due to take place on 2 August.

Reality is constantly changing. We can say it’s never the same, as Heraclitus said of the river. Heraclitus was right, but Parmenides wasn’t wrong. He maintained the river was always the same. Humanity flows like a river. We think everything’s changing, moving, progress is driving history. But it may be an illusion. Parts of the river are stagnant and lifeless.

He created a circle with his arms. And out of that circle an article slowly took shape. As he typed it up, his body imitated its movements.

‘I’m going to call it “The River of Life and Death”.’

‘What river’s that? The Nile? The Ganges?’

‘No, stupid. The river that passes through my village.’

He typed on the Ideal, using a couple of fingers. Above it, a bare bulb hung from interlaced wires in a cloth casing. As his fingers danced over the keys, Curtis couldn’t help seeing Arturo’s exploratory movements inside the ring. On tiptoe, as if he were skipping. His whole body behind the fingers that were typing. Gradually warming up. Now jumping by themselves. When the metal bars got caught up, he took a deep breath. He lived the construction of each sentence in its literalness. As he sought each letter, his fingers an extension of his eyes, what registered on the paper was for the first time. For example, when he wrote ‘elevation’, what Arturo did as he pressed the key was add everything the word could lift. And so, when he moved on to another sentence, his final flourish, the one he’d thought long and hard about, the one that said ‘The river flows inside of us and life is the art of hydrokinetics’, then he got a little nervous, excited, and pressed down hard with the fingers of a dowser searching for a spring. He found a patch of hard ground, the bars got entangled, the carriage got stuck.

‘It’s no problem,’ said Dafonte, who understood the Ideal best. As he repaired the machine, he looked at what he’d written. ‘What’s hydrokinetics?’

‘Something to do with reading in water. I came across it in The White Magazine . It’s a naturist idea.’

‘You’d better explain it.’

He nodded in time to his index finger pressing the ‘x’ key and deleting what he’d written. At first, he didn’t like to delete things, but then he started to enjoy it. The ‘x’ was a curlew leaving its footprints on the sand. He thought as well about the pleasure of stepping in others’ footprints, filling their mould on the beach. He deleted. X xxxxxxxxxx. Curlews. Sandpipers. Plovers. Redshank. Bunting.

Curtis looks up from the book. He’s already learnt there are different kinds of heat. Sensible heat, latent heat and specific heat. Specific heat is the most important, technically speaking. .

‘Well, blow me down if that isn’t Papagaio’s Hercules. Arturo da Silva’s pupil. Of course it is.’

They move towards him, with diligence, forming a circle.

The silence is broken by the sound of turning wheels. Everything seems to be waiting. The gulls adorning the pinnacles of roofs and masts. The sound increases, turning on the stones. Curtis and the Falangists look towards the Rey building on Porta Real. There are the caryatids with flowers in their hair, supporting the balconies. Women’s heads holding the house up.

Then the horse appears. It was a wooden horse making all that noise. The horse Leica kept in his studio on Nakens Street. His father walks in front, with the travelling photographer’s tripod camera over his left shoulder and his inseparable cane in his other hand. Leica pulls on the pretty piebald horse, which today looks like a natural animal, part of the caryatids’ modernist landscape.

‘When are you taking that horse out?’ Curtis had asked him not long before. He couldn’t understand why he kept it shut up in his studio. It would draw the crowds in Recheo Gardens. The finest photographer’s horse. And Coruña was a city that had lots of wooden and papier-mâché horses. It even had a horse factory at the bottom of the hill of Our Lady of the Rosary. But the horse Carirí, the horse that had come all the way from Cuba, was quite a horse. ‘When are you taking it to Recheo?’