Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

At that point, he’d got their attention. The judge would then turn to another hammer-blow from another of his most distinguished colleagues, the future Minister: ‘Without war, there would be no history.’ He’d then take a good look at the Old Testament, where God is known as the Lord of Hosts. ‘The Lord is on my side. Whom shall I fear? The day of the Lord is great and terrible.’

HE’S GOING TO examine a sample of his blood. Having coughed. His blood on the slide. The new world he’s going to discover today was inside his chest. If a drop of water is the first sphere, that drop of blood is a final sphere, since in it are life and death, the two of them working for each other. It’s one of the extraordinary moments in 12 Panadeiras Street. He recalls the eye’s expectation as it approaches the microscope, blinks, sings Natura est maxima in minimis , drawn by the universal exhibition contained in a drop of blood, his own blood. They’ve plundered his cabinet of curiosities, his amateur scientist instruments, appliances for finally seeing what’s invisible, this and the other side contained in a drop of blood. In every drop of blood. Speaking of spheres, they’ve plundered that as well, his wooden globe made in England. The first thing he noticed on that globe, like strange, unnamed territories, were the roses of the winds and the drawings of unusual sea creatures. The one he liked most, and continued to like as time went by, was a half sea-serpent, half-man, playing the lute by the Seychelles. After that, he ventured into the large patches of colour. On the seas and oceans, the globe was marked with sailing ships tracing historical routes. The first his father’s finger pointed out to him was the Beagle , next to the Galapagos. Darwin’s ship. A stubborn finger. It always went back there. The Beagle , the Darwin finger. Later, when it was his own finger doing the pointing and his daughter reading, the thing that captivated her most, the great discovery, were the names of places. These words were the globe’s greatest charm. The Pacific, for example, was populated with words. The dots showing the islands were barely visible, but what really came across were the names. Nanumea. Nanumano. Nanumanga. Nukononu. Pukapuka. In November 1937, in his native city of Coruña, Governor Arellano sends a letter to the president of the Tribunal, proposing that the sheet in the official register recording the birth of Santiago Casares Quiroga be torn out and destroyed. A hitherto untried punishment. The eradication of his name.

Which is on page 447. There the magistrate, one Pérez Arias, certifies that at half past ten in the morning of 8 May 1884, at number 6 San Andrés Street, a child was born, named Santiago. Page 446 belongs to a child called José Suárez Campos and 448 to a girl by the name of María de la Concepción Vaamonde. The secretary, Mr Patiño’s handwriting is very neat, reminiscent of a musical score with quavered letters, a fountain pen like the crest of a golden oriole.

Natura est maxima in minimis. Come, Vitola, come. See what’s inside a drop of water. The whole seed of the universe. Come, come. See what’s inside a drop of blood. The composition of life. It’s all there. Hate as well. We can approach the mystery of life, but it’s impossible to understand the mystery of hate. The kind of hate that causes people not only to kill, but to want to erase you from the census of births. I have to concentrate on that mystery. Read everything there is. It has to be in a drop of blood. It has to have its chemistry.

No, he doesn’t say anything. He’s motionless. Watching himself. Trying to burn up as little oxygen as possible. When he has a relapse, María Casares, Vitola to her parents, thinks of the image of someone carrying an invisible bucket of water on their head. Not a single drop of water is allowed to fall under pain of death. There was a time he hoped he’d beaten it. As a young man, in the sanatorium in Durtol. He always had that bucket. Always had the scythe nearby. Death was part of the way he lived. What he never imagined was that one day they’d try to make him non-existent.

He’d never met this Arellano, the governor who officially declared him a pest and ordered that the name of Santiago Casares Quiroga be removed from the register of the College of Lawyers and any other book for ‘future generations to find no more trace than the record of him as a fugitive’. For many years, Casares, who at one point was Prime Minister, did not appear in Spanish encyclopedias. María Casares knows that Spanish Fascism largely achieved its aim of erasing him from the map of mental geography. He was a symbol of the Republic and now he’s a crater. They’ve plundered all his things. His books, furniture, home. Microscope. Herbaria. Entomological boxes. There’s something on the tip of her tongue. A round, reddish word with seven black dots on its wings.

One of the first songs he taught her. A song for learning how to count. A folk-song, a scientific song.

King-king, how long will I be ?

Twenty-five? Could be .

One, two, three. .

‘The seven-spot ladybird, Coccinella septempunctata ,’ he explains, ‘is, together with the glow-worm, the creature with the most names in Galicia. Why is that? Why those two? It’s called “king-king”. “Little Maria”. “Sunsucker”. “Spotty”. “Seamstress”. “Little Joanna”. Little things have the most names. As Jules Renard says, “truth is of small dimensions”.’

In November 1944, in Paris, they received the news that 12 Panadeiras Street and the rest of the Casares’ property now belonged to the Fascist State. Pillage became law. He was in London at the time, to avoid falling into the hands of the Gestapo. She stopped playing the game that if she closed her eyes at the door of 168 Rue de Vaugirard, she’d turn up on the stairs of 12 Panadeiras Street. On his return, the atmosphere of a liberated Paris helped him to breathe better. As he said, on account of his consumptive optimism, he could see every molecule, taste the air: Natura est maxima in minimis.

A few months later, Gloria died of a cancer that had appeared suddenly like the dagger of an efficient assassin. He was able to close her eyes. María was stunned at the sight of her dead mother. All her previous faces returned to her. Daughter of an unmarried factory worker, seamstress, melancholy woman at the window of 12 Panadeiras Street, minister’s wife, nurse in a military hospital. The word that came to María’s lips, forced a way through her suffering, was beauty. What beauty! And her father said, ‘She always was pretty, whatever she did.’

He felt the crises arrive in the barometer of his chest. They were increasingly strong. He’d adopt the lotus position without moving, like a diver running out of oxygen.

The worst thing was when his temperature rose, because then he’d consume oxygen in his dreams, his nightmares.

One day, he emerged from his delirium, looking wide-eyed and mutilated, as if he’d lost all his teeth. He said he’d been pulled out. He felt in his flesh how he’d been pulled out of the register. Of the book of births.

‘Don’t think about it, Daddy. They’d never do that.’

‘I don’t even know who he is, this governor who wants to tear out my birth certificate. I have to study this, the nature of hate.’

‘Don’t think about it now, Daddy.’

‘You’re right. It uses up lots of oxygen.’

And then he spoke with his hands. If she gave him a finger to hold on to, he’d grab it with the strength of a newborn baby.

POLKA HAD STOPPED playing the bagpipes long before. He hadn’t played them since the war. When he was freed, after labouring in a wolfram mine, it was some time before he could even hold the instrument, let alone play it. While he was away, Olinda would occasionally allow their daughter to blow and try to fill the bag, made of goatskin covered in dark blue velvet with a similar-coloured trim. The girl thought it was always on the verge of turning black as if night had sheltered in the bagpipes with the mystery of her father. But her father returned and the bagpipes remained hanging on the wall. As time passed and the bagpiper paid them no attention, O thought they got smaller, condemned to extinction, like an ancient creature in a forgotten legend, skin and bone of a rare, long-legged bird, with their melancholy colour and golden tassels which seemed to have lost their majesty, but for her were like coloured caresses. No, he couldn’t touch them. Later maybe. Polka said he’d run out of air. His chest wasn’t strong enough. But one Christmas Eve, when Olinda was pregnant with Pinche, he played them again. O was amazed and Olinda almost died laughing as she cradled her own belly. To start with, both Polka and the instrument looked as if they would burst. Polka’s face was red from the effort of containing the air. But the bagpipes sounded again and it seemed to O they were finally letting go of all they’d been saving.