Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

He realised there were people and things asking not to be named. To be spared words. Which is why he stopped scrutinising the soldiers. He knew he shouldn’t do it. For his own good and for theirs.

If they asked him who Sada was, he’d say, ‘I don’t know, I can’t see him.’ And Sada would call him to one side, ‘Can you really not see me, Curtis? Praise be to God, long live the Umbrella Maker of the Universe!’

‘If you want to stay safe, become invisible.’

He was told this plainly by a well-informed man. A Navy legal officer who admired his painting and had a certain sense of humour. ‘I like most of all the way you paint echinoderms and gastropods.’ ‘Now listen here, you,’ replied Sada, ‘there’s no need to insult them.’ The officer was kind enough to warn him. He wasn’t interested in war. His hobby was studying the first world circumnavigation. By Magellan, Elcano and what he called the enigma of the third name. Sada would have liked to return the favour at once and become immediately invisible.

But although he was up to date with Franz Roh’s theory about magic realism in art, Sada didn’t know how to become invisible. He was just too big for escapism. He had magician friends he was unable to help in rehearsals or performances because all the swords wounded him, all the saws sawed him and, in the disappearing act, when the magician announced he’d vanished and was no longer there, he’d appear, ruining the spectacle, like a heavy load that doesn’t know how to transform into spirit.

His informant was clear. He was on the list. Sooner or later, they’d kill him. To be invisible was to become a soldier, to join the conquering army and go to war.

No sooner did Sada’s enormous bulk reach the front in Asturias, no sooner did it slowly stand up in the trench, than he was shot three times. You’d have thought this is what he wanted. But his fellow soldiers told their bosses he’d been talking all the time about being invisible. He considered himself an invisible man. And this is what they called him: The Invisible. One soldier kept quiet. The one whom he’d told about the child and the matador the night before.

In metaphysical art or in magic realism, there as well, the lame matador pursued him. Pointed with his stick, ‘That’s him, that’s the one, the Invisible.’

THEY’RE KILLING ALL his friends. One by one. He has to send them to a safe place.

‘Safe? Where’s a safe place?’

‘The land of wolves. That’s the safest place nowadays.’

When Pombo talked about the land of wolves, he knew what he was talking about.

From the beam in the shepherd’s hut, Curtis had hung a sack full of sand from the river. A gunny sack which, every time Curtis hit it, gave off a fine spray. Terranova encouraged him with that refrain ‘Yamba, yambo, yambambe!’ But sometimes he fell into a melancholy trance and watched the sack swing from side to side. Seeing him stuck in the station of sadness was something new, since Curtis thought he had a permanent spring in his mind protecting him from nostalgia. He’d sing to the sack. ‘The Moorslayer’s not working!’

Underneath the outer roof, the hut had a second ceiling of large cobwebs, not as resistant as gunny, but thick and well made, like a large canopy. ‘There are no spiders,’ said Terranova one night in the light of an oil lamp. ‘Have you seen a spider? Who’s making these webs, Curtis? They must be tireless spiders, but I haven’t seen any. One day, they’ll envelop us and gobble us up. We have to eat them first. Remember what Holando used to say about the French astronomer who only ate spiders? They’re the messengers of time. We can’t see them because they’re spinning with our eyes, with the threads of light. If we eat them, we might see the stars. Otherwise they’ll eat us. Or the bats will.

‘I should be eating skylark pâté, like the soloist of a French cathedral choir. As Picadillo once said, “Nightingale pie, ladies and gentlemen, for the singers.”’

He’s losing his mind. The spiders have got inside his head, thought Curtis. He left the hut. Was going to make him a present. To lift his spirits. He knew where there was food. In the roadside shrine, up at the crossroads. There was a stone relief showing prelates and pontiffs in the flames of purgatory. And a saint with scales for weighing souls, probably St Michael, whom he’d heard about in the Dance Academy’s kitchen from his mother and Pretty Mary. The weighing of souls would take place at the Last Judgement. How much would a good soul weigh? ‘The scales must be pretty accurate,’ said Milagres, ‘like the ones they use on Galera Street for spices.’ She added, ‘Souls must be like saffron. A gram is worth a fortune.’

In the niche, behind the little lights of burning wicks floating on oil, among flowers, he found the present. The dead didn’t care! Terranova was a spirit as well. He also needed an offering. His spirits needed lifting so that he could sing. Curtis didn’t mind what it was. What he wanted was for him to sing. Never to stop singing or pretending to be his trainer as he laid into the sandbag, the sack of time, with his fists.

‘Yamba, yambo, yambambe!’

He found food. More than on previous occasions. At the end of August, gusts of furtive, northerly wind were already scouring the fields of hay. Winter could be very long and swallow up autumn and spring. Eyes open in the back of his head, Curtis cautiously felt inside the niche and, aside from foodstuffs, found an unexpected treasure. A bottle of brandy and half a dozen Farias wisely wrapped in a cabbage leaf that had been tied with a straw plait. He smelt the tobacco inside the cabbage, that rude, precious package, and the mixture seemed to him strong and evocative, even though he didn’t smoke, or perhaps because of this, like the fragrance in the corridor leading from the Dance Academy’s sitting-room to the kitchen, where Milagres kept the factory of tastes and smells working round the clock, with the humble, captivating vapour of soup in the background, visible like a family heirloom. Sometimes he thought it couldn’t be. The girl with the budgies from 12 Panadeiras Street had never set foot in that kitchen. But it was the image of a bowl of cabbage soup, her anxiety as she eats it, that made the memory plausible. Milagres’ laugh, a laugh of popular satisfaction at the joy of eating, eating from hunger, of a rich girl, daughter of a cultivated man she admires, who’s turned up out of the blue, from across the border. Yes, it must be true. Can’t you hear them calling for her, Vitola, María, Vitola, thinking she’s hidden in the garden?

‘Look at her eat,’ says Milagres with pride. And with pleasure, ‘Poor girl, she must have been hungry!’

‘No,’ she replies. ‘I wasn’t hungry. It’s the smell of cabbage. Ever since I was little, I’ve always been desperate to try it.’

So that’s what it was. The fragrance of Milagres’ cooking crossing the border between two cities.

He didn’t smoke, but Terranova did. Despite having a small chest, he liked Havana cigars. They sometimes formed part of his payment in kind, his dockside business activities. He’d drink brandy whenever he could before singing. Two glasses better than one to clear his voice. Who’d have thought that today in far-flung Xurés, working as a shepherd in a mountain hut, he’d have good tobacco and brandy as well as food in abundance?

He unwrapped the cigars and savoured the smell. Took a swig of brandy. Looked at him with theatrical eyes, ‘Now I know who you are, Curtis, after so many years. The souls’ mafia boss! You kept that quiet! I’m at your service. I’ll be whatever you want me to be. Your butler. Your servant. Your shepherd. My captain of souls!’