Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

A second moth crashed into the lamp. A huge, white-haired saturniid. The moths first banged against the window and then found their way in with the breeze, together with the scent of lavender.

‘I’m going to bed,’ said Henrietta. ‘You should do the same.’

It was the month of July 1881. Summer had irrupted into the old man’s body. Now, having told the story of the storm at Finisterre, he seemed to have calmed down. He took a few unsteady steps towards his desk, wanting to translate some Armenian poems.

‘Good night,’ said Henrietta.

‘Knife!’ he answered.

16 June 1904

HIS. HE THOUGHT it was his. Just as a new swarm, when it leaves the hive and takes to the air with the queen, belongs to whoever catches it. He’d caught a newspaper dated 16 June 1904. Today’s newspaper. He was in the docks, on his way to the far end of the Iron Quay, it being about time he embarked, when the newspaper flew in front of him. The sluggish flight of newspapers that haven’t been read yet, pursued by the seagulls’ mocking calls. Not since his childhood had he been able to let a printed piece of paper take off like that. Others went after bird nests or bats, but he, Antonio Vidal, went after printed matter. Anything would do so long as it had writing on it. Even toilet paper, strips cut up with no respect for the columns’ order, so he’d soon learnt not only to read, but to put the pieces back together. Which helped him to see the world. To spot what was missing.

Antonio Vidal trapped the newspaper by stepping on its wings. He then picked it up and folded it. Calmed it down. The newspaper was no longer alone, it now had someone to read it. It contained news of important events. A Greek freighter had sunk off the Lobeira Isles in the Corcuvion estuary. There’d been so much fog the members of the crew had been unable to see each other on deck. This was followed by reports of adulterated wine, fishing with dynamite. . But his eyes were drawn to the section of Telegrams. He had an instinct for the latest news.

MADRID 15 (23 h.) Parliament extremely dull today. Most MPs went to the bullfight.

‘What? You collecting stories from the ground?’

A strange apparition with a sunlike halo appeared before him. A woman carrying birds on her head. What in fact she was carrying in her basket were newspapers flapping their wings in the sea breeze. The young girl held out her arm, demanding what was hers, with a magnetism in her fingers. Who could say no, it doesn’t belong to you, to someone carrying the weight of the news? He handed back the newspaper and was about to leave when she set down her basket and arranged all the headlines in an extraordinary fan. He stood there while she hawked the news. He’d heard all kinds of things being sold before, animals and fruit at fairgrounds. He’d heard a blind man sing. But never a girl hawking fresh news.

‘What? You going to take the lot?’

His whole body started. He hadn’t been expecting to run into a newspaper seller who was only a girl, early teens at the most, but who spoke like a fully grown woman. She spoke in a way that guarded her body and was dressed like the local fishwives. She might end up selling fish too. If he could contain his surprise, Antonio Vidal might end up seeing fish in that basket. A basket that could carry strawberries and cherries, sea urchins and sardines, depending on the season. But now she was hawking the news in a singsong voice that made her the city centre. If she changed position, the centre would also move.

‘Is your hand stuck? Don’t you know how to tell the time?’

Her last question brought Antonio Vidal back to reality. Over their heads was a scoffing sky, the seagulls’ mocking calls. He counted on his fingertips in his pocket. He’d spent a large amount buying his uncle ‘Doctor Ayala’s Asian Tonic’ and ‘The Miraculous Zephyr’, inventions that were supposed to stop you going bald. He felt he was being guided with a healthy vengeance by his mother’s ghost because in Sucesores de Villar he also bought ‘Carmela’s Miraculous Waters’, a lotion to prevent your hair going grey and to restore its natural colour. His mother insisted, ‘As a boy, he had a receding hairline.’ And added, ‘A receding conscience as well.’ There she stopped and he never wanted to find out more about Uncle Ernesto’s receding conscience. In Havana, he had helped to set up a modern school in Cruceiro de Airas and from the pulpit it was rumoured the emigrants had turned into ‘Masons, Atheists and Protestants’ and were trying to corrupt children. ‘You can’t be all things at once,’ observed Antonio Vidal. ‘You can’t be what?’ ‘A Mason, an Atheist and a Protestant, you can’t be all three things at once.’ ‘You shut up, what do you know?’ his mother, Matilde, told him. ‘Say hello to Uncle Ernesto and then get on with your work, unless you want to end up with a receding hairline too. And don’t go wasting your money.’

‘Do you need a bullet extractor?’ asked the newspaper seller.

‘What for?’

‘For your coins.’

Antonio Vidal scrabbled in his pocket. What he was really looking for were not coins, but some quick, light-footed, low-denomination words to get him out of a tight situation.

‘I’ll take one today,’ he said. And then thought better, ‘No, two. Give me the one that was flying away.’

‘Lucky me!’ she commented ironically. ‘I found myself a tycoon to support me!’

‘I’m off to Cuba, on the steamer Lafayette .’

‘How I’d love to own a news-stand in Havana’s Central Park.’

‘What do you know about Havana?’

‘Everything. Or almost everything. As if I’d been a rich lady sitting in the colonnade of the Inglaterra Hotel. When you get off the boat, don’t go up Prado Avenue. People will laugh at you. And anyone laughing at your accent and beret is a Galician who arrived before and now has a white suit and a dandy white hat. Don’t go up Prado Avenue at least until you’ve got yourself a white suit.’

The whippersnapper handing out advice. She really seemed like a chatterbox now. Talking nineteen to the dozen, words spilling out of her mouth. All that talking made her look smaller. Vidal decided he’d wasted quite enough time. He forgot about walking to the end of the Iron Quay. He still had to visit his boarding-house and the General Transatlantic Company.

‘I’m in a hurry,’ said Antonio Vidal. He folded the two newspapers under his arm and left her gawping.

‘Keep them, take them with you!’ she shouted seriously, sensing his distrust. ‘They’ll each open a door for you, you’ll see.’

She was going to add, ‘I can’t come tomorrow. Tomorrow I have to collect clay on Lapas Beach.’ But she didn’t, he was far away by now. Who cared whether she came tomorrow or not? He hadn’t even asked her name.

Antonio Vidal felt ridiculous with his bottle of ‘Asian Tonic’ and other lotions to stop your hair falling out. Uncle Ernesto had a full head of hair and a stylish haircut. ‘What you looking at? You like my hair?’ He took it off. ‘Here you go, a genuine wig imported from New York. The best there is. Made from the hair of a virgin Amazonian Indian.’ Having arrived in Havana after a two-week crossing, he still wasn’t sure when his uncle was joking or being serious. But the thick, black wig shone in his hands like jet. ‘This is where progress is, don’t forget,’ Ernesto told him, ‘you’re the one coming from behind.’ Yes, he was coming from behind. What’s more, on the steamer Lafayette , having got over his seasickness, he spent almost all the time astern, watching the ship’s wake and reading the newspapers the girl had sold him. He read them from top to bottom every day of the fourteen the journey lasted, enough to learn everything by heart, including the chapter in the literary supplement that came with El Noroeste . He’d read the supplement with the chapter from Anna Karenina so often it seemed the most real part of the whole newspaper. ‘“Here, if you please,” he said, moving on one side with his nimble gait and pointing to his picture, “it’s the exhortation to Pilate, Matthew, chapter xxvii,” he said, feeling his lips were beginning to tremble with emotion. He moved away and stood behind them.’ Everything he knew about the painter Mihailov was in that chapter, but it was enough, he thought. From this fragment, he’d built up a picture of the novel and was convinced it would be extremely similar to the one the Russian author, Leo Tolstoy, had written. Standing astern, he felt a bit like Mihailov. The newspaper, the ship’s wake, mirrored his guilt. He couldn’t get the girl out of his mind, with her basket of newspapers flapping their wings in the sea breeze.