Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

‘What?’

The lorry turned sharply. The wheels creaked. It braked suddenly.

We were next to the port in a kind of low, grimy mist. I now understood the reckless driving and the hollow feeling in the stomach. We hadn’t travelled horizontally, we’d fallen. Now I could hear Estremil, the echo of what Estremil had been trying to say. He was cursing. ‘Blasted mouth of hell!’

‘Out!’

The ground was giving off a thick, sticky smoke that, rather than leaving, seemed to return. Sniffed around the embers. A smoke that, instead of disappearing, came back to the trail left by the rakes’ teeth. It wasn’t until we were down by the docks that we realised why we were there. To rake up the ashes and smoking remains of books. Some of those who’d burnt them hung about, sifting through the pyres, kicking at the bones of books. This gesture reminded me of the first image I had of death. Not the first time I saw a dead person, when I was small, which didn’t frighten me since it was my grandfather, who looked very peaceful, cradled by women’s prayers, his arms over the sheet, one hand on top of the other as if he’d caught death with his fingers, but the first time I saw death out of a box, another image. There’d been a fight between two men after a party. They got on badly, but that night, strangely enough, they’d been drinking together like lifelong friends. I remember my father interpreted it as a bad sign. Afterwards he was annoyed with himself for getting it right, ‘If it’s a bad sign, son, don’t say so, because words hanker after what they’ve said.’ Someone woke us early the next morning with the news. One of them was badly wounded, the other dead. They’d come to blows at the crossroads. We children ran to have a look. The corpse had been piously draped in a sheet, awaiting the magistrate’s arrival. All we could see was the outline. A woman told us to go away. She called us ‘death flies’. ‘You’re like flies that won’t leave. I should drive you off like flies.’ This also impressed me. There was something about the label that was right. So I was about to leave, but then one of the deceased’s brothers appeared on horseback. He got down and, without letting go of the reins, approached the body. He was wearing boots with spurs and had a thick, blond moustache like a covering of hay on his upper lip. He didn’t pay us any attention. With the toe of his boot, he pulled back the sheet to reveal the dead man’s face. That was the first time I saw the horror of death, a pointless, ugly death. This may have had something to do with what the brother said. ‘That’s it,’ he spoke to him reproachfully. ‘The time has come for you to sleep out in the open.’

The one stirring the badly burnt books with the toe of his boot had a resinous voice. Part of the smoke had got inside his throat. The action of his toecap lifted layers of ash. He flicked out orders in an effort to speed things up. And warned us, ‘If you see a book which says New Testament or Holy Scripture or something like that, give it to me, understood? It doesn’t matter if it’s damaged or charred. I want it!’ The bitterness with which he spoke made our work even more irksome, as if we were partly to blame. I wish he hadn’t said anything at all. Now everything had a sacred feel. Even the smoke weighed down on our shovels. If those who wore the Sacred Heart as a symbol went so far as to burn Holy Scripture, then my father was absolutely right, ‘Better not to predict what’s coming next’. Everything that had burnt was in that sleepwalking smoke. I thought about the governor’s wife, the librarian. She’d turned up dead yesterday in a field next to the road to Lugo, having been raped and riddled with bullets. She was walking barefoot on the coals, her skin entirely blackened, naked and sleepless among the piles of night.

There was lots of cleaning to do. Here and in María Pita Square. Lots of burnt books. We’d heard they were burning books by the sea. There’d been fires before, when the coup started. But this was something else. Whole libraries going up in flames. Apart from the resinous voice of the one in charge, echoed by the new manager, the only sound was of rakes scratching the ground and shovels loading the lorry.

The one in charge wanted us to go faster. But this wasn’t something you could do any old how. All jobs follow certain rules and none of us could remember how to load the remains of burnt books. Nor could the tools. We were both used to collecting fallen leaves, to the scent of autumn bonfires, which lent the city a medicinal aroma. More than smoke, it was that, an aroma. Nature whose time had come. What was burning today, however, was time itself. I realised that. I didn’t say anything, but I thought it. Estremil, my friend, time is burning. Not hours or days or years. Time. All the books I never read, Estremil, are burning. He was a good reader. One of those who stopped to read, and did so conscientiously. Estremil did everything conscientiously. I bet some of the books he’d read were there, in the ashes being raked up, in the shovel-loads filling the lorry.

I picked up a spadeful. There were plates of ash retaining the form of pages and the ‘black shadow’ of printed lines. Some of those plates hadn’t burnt completely. The flames had gone in a circle and left bits of paper intact. My fingers reached out to one of those wafers quivering on the surface.

‘Look, Estremil, “a drop of duck’s blood”.’

‘What’s that? You’re crazy. You treat everything as a joke.’

I wanted to give it to him. Gave it. As the plate fell apart, the piece of paper was no bigger than a samara wing.

When he trained me, Estremil used to say of autumn leaves, ‘Don’t kill yourself running after them, they’ll come to you. It looks as if they’re falling haphazardly, but they have a direction. See? The flurry bends a certain way. Build a good bonfire, find a good place, and then wait. They’ll soon come.’ He was pulling my leg, testing me, I could tell from the glint in his eyes, but there was meaning in what he said. That was some time ago. Now Estremil was quiet, uneasy. Gritting his teeth. Like me. To stop them banging together. That day, something happened to me that had never happened before. The sway of the lorry stayed in my body. Wouldn’t leave. I couldn’t stop my teeth chattering. I listened to them resounding inside, behind my eyes. Maybe the same thing was happening to Estremil. If he gritted his teeth, he could hold his body together better and concentrate on his pulse to keep the spade steady and not spill the ash, the folds and tips of toasted skin, the nervous resistance of gut-string, the bony splinters of shrivelled paper. The books’ remains.

ON CANTÓNS, CURTIS can clearly see the thick, ashen, earthy clouds, the breath of ruminant fire, coming from the docks. The sky above María Pita Square is also overcast. He knows he can’t turn back. Has to continue to see it with his own eyes.

He looks at the clock on top of the Obelisk. Remembers, ‘His lordship, Time!’ It looks as if it’s always been there, marking centuries, as if the hands had yet to make a circuit. Sada was right. A cuckoo clock would have been better. If a cuckoo were to come out now, thought Curtis, maybe everything would be different. It’d raise the heads of those walking uneasily, counting questions on the slabs of stone like someone stepping on the squares of a chessboard. It might alter the march of those following a straight line. The cuckoo might hinder that soldier in the bonnet galloping astride a straight line.

He thought he saw him, Sada, on his way through Pontevedra Square, where troops were starting to enlist. The rebel army had taken over the city and had control of Galicia, which would be a rearguard territory for what the insurgents called the ‘new reconquest of Spain’. Yes, he thought it was Sada. So tall and burly, he was difficult to miss. He thought he recognised other faces, though recently not only had people’s mood changed, but their faces, presence, physical features as well. This was one of the things that had most surprised him on his walk. A kind of winter had suppressed the summer season. From the skylight, he’d seen the desolation of Riazor Beach. It was the sight of an urban beach deserted in summer, on a beautiful sunny day, that made him afraid. Unfamiliar fear caught up with him. There were days only the Headless Man seemed to emerge from the city’s shell, sitting on the breakwater with a book in his lap. When he decided to escape through the skylight, when he tricked his mother and aunts in the Dance Academy, he discovered years had gone by in days. Hairdos had disappeared, colours had darkened, skirts and dresses lengthened. People had changed their way of looking. Of walking.