Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

On 2 August, the day the special train was due to leave for Caneiros, Terranova had been circling the station. Waiting for Curtis. He was sure he’d come, because Curtis had his ticket. Days before, he’d gone to the Academy during the night. Pombo half-opened the door and told him neither Curtis nor anybody else was in, he himself did not exist, and what Terranova had to do was stay in his mother’s house and not go wandering about, which was like wearing a cowbell around his neck. When he went to the station, he couldn’t get in. It was heavily guarded. He peered through the fence from Gaiteira. All the trains were still, a silence of engines that seemed to him resounding. The train to Caneiros never left. It transformed into a phantom locomotive. When they did start up again, all the convoys, somehow or other, were headed for war. Anyone who knew about trains realised they’d changed sound. The engines and tracks were still the same, but the sound had changed.

He found Curtis the day they burnt books. Following Pombo’s plan, they finally boarded a train, but this time as corpses, inside coffins, using real dead people’s identities. As far as Ourense. From there, by road. The driver stopped in Maus de Baños at night. Which is when they dropped their coffins into the River Limia.

‘You’re dumb,’ their contact said to Curtis. ‘You say no to everything. It doesn’t matter what they ask you. Unless they say Guiné. If they say Guiné, you say yes. It’s a code, see? You,’ he said to Terranova, ‘you’re a gypsy.’

‘A gypsy?’

‘A Portuguese gypsy.’

‘All right then.’

Curtis was reading his Popular Guide to Electricity in the smoky light of a carbide lamp. The printed lines trembled in the shadows, as if marching over the yellow surface towards the charred margins, telling a capnomancy, the matter of an ancient divination. The flickering light and spirals of smoke, reflected against the book, appeared to rise from the pages and not from the carbide’s death throes. The Stone Man slept next to the hearth. The woman’s litany sounded like a radio. Domus aurea. Broadcasting at night. Foederis arca. Once he’d heard her sigh over the airwaves. Janua coeli. Salgueiros would die if they didn’t bring the light. Stella matutina. At this point, the Stone Man stirred, opened and shut his eyes. It really was like this, thought Terranova. The woman’s voice was a radio, a connection he’d found. He listened to it as when he used to search for tangos on the crane operator’s Atwater Kent at night and out came uncertain voices. This is how he discovered Paul Robeson. At times, he seemed to fade, to go, to leave them behind. At others, he sounded stronger, with renewed intensity, and you could light a match in his breath. Rosa mystica, Turris Davidica, Turris eburnea. But there was always a distance, as if she were one thing, her voice another, and she also were listening. The woman stopped praying, stopped telling the beads of her rosary. Her fingers, however, kept going. They left the jet and started making beads out of breadcrumbs. One to start with, slowly, it looked as if it would be the only one. Then more and more quickly, small spheres filling the blue and white squares of the oilskin tablecloth. Terranova copied her. The two of them rolling stars. Something had changed in her as their departure approached. She’d thrown off her mourning. Let down her hair. When they went back to the city, he’d send her an Atwater Kent. With batteries and accumulators.

She lifted her eyes, which were damp, glistening. Her shaky hand felt under the table. A rosary of years to make that movement. Finally to whisper an invitation.

‘The dogs are barking. Shall we go and see who it is?’

SOMETHING HAPPENED WHICH upset him and left him speechless. One of his colleagues, who’d later occupy an important post, started urinating on one of the pyres. There’d just been an incident. Someone, that huge lad they called Papagaio’s Hercules, had unexpectedly jumped over the fire the way they do on St John’s Eve to ward off evil spirits. They’d gone after him without success. He ran as if he had wings on his feet. The point is this colleague, back from the chase, went and pissed on one of the pyres. And all the others in their squad, without prior agreement, automatically went and pissed with him. Though he was one of those in charge, Samos was incapable of expressing his disgust. On the contrary, he reacted with a nervous smile. Exempt. This lowly act ruined the picture he’d composed of having an archangelic sword to hand. The books stank more than ever, a mixture of urine and smoke, animal remains. He could make out the folds and tips of Dutch binding, Valencian boards. The horse-nerve twines. That warm piss, spattering on the remains, gave off an unfamiliar smell. They may not have noticed it. The breeze lifted the pestilence to his nose.

When they were out hunting, there was a moment in which the group, already somewhat inebriated by nightfall, would obey a kind of natural order and the hunters would line up to piss in manly formation, with rude, brazen jokes. A disgusting scene. An ugly, base form of Fascism. One of his Portuguese colleagues, his host in Coimbra, who’d taken part in the Viriato Legion of volunteers backing Franco’s army, had been amazed by what he’d seen among fellow troops. Teutónio confided in him, ‘Samos, Spain’s a dangerous country. Are you not afraid to have such colleagues?’

When in 1940 he’d visited Milan and Berlin, he’d been impressed. There was an aesthetics, another dimension, an athletic kind of futurism, he’d said. A harmony of bodies and weapons. Ren was an example of coarseness. León Degrelle, another Fascist who’d sought refuge in Spain, after the war went on the Road to Santiago and complained about the fleas and lice in the towns’ boarding-houses. Ren, who’d gone to welcome him in Portomarín, as a government representative, laughed about him, ‘Very refined, don’t you know!’ Samos the judge had later heard the Minister say, ‘We have to plough with the oxen we have.’ The stink came and went. As for the hunting squad, he and one or two others, Father Munio when he came of course, would try to hold it in or, if they had to, do it a little apart, at a discreet distance, not so far apart as to attract attention, but without joining the common flood. Lofty thoughts don’t come when you want them to. What gave the regime real meaning was not bravado, but the idea of divine leadership. ‘Forget about the vulgar nature of the rabble and think about history,’ Dez had said to him one day. He was the most refined in their circle, spoke with nostalgia of Primo de Rivera’s poetic court and shared his sentiment, ‘What we need is culture.’ Their leader was an envoy of Providence. They had to maintain the link: follow our leader, follow Providence, keep the enemy at bay. That was the important thing. What was written on the face of coins being used by every single citizen: ‘Caudillo by the grace of God’. What was on the reverse, not written, but in everyone’s mind, like a tonsure clipped with scissors of fear, could well be the title adopted by the Assyrian king Tiglath: ‘He who subdued his enemies’. A historical reference he resorted to with delight. In his lectures and seminars, and above all in his involvement with Arbor in Compostela and Coimbra, were those two special moments when he released his Christian Epimetheus, opened Pandora’s box or descended with Heidegger to Plato’s cave in order to arouse the soft, comfortable descendants of the Victory elites. He knew how to wake them. Nothing better than a bolt of lightning from his revered master Schmitt: ‘And Cain killed Abel. This is how the history of mankind begins. .’