Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

When he returned from the camp, one of the things that made him happy was listening to me read aloud.

‘Shame you weren’t born half a century earlier,’ he said. ‘You could have read in the Tobacco Factory.’ He explained how the workers paid a colleague to read novels to them while they went about their tasks. ‘Shame. You could have been an expert in Dickens!’

‘Sure,’ said Olinda, ‘but if we gave her an extra half-century, she’d be an old woman by now.’

Polka became thoughtful. Took out the little book with the marks. The novel The Invisible Man . He’d hidden this one and a book by Élisée, together with some newspaper cuttings, in a leather pouch he buried under a large, chair-shaped stone. You could see he was emotional. To him, it was something important. Something like a treasure trove.

‘Here. What’s in it? What’s in this book that twitched its ears in the ashes?’

I often read the story. For the three of them. For the neighbours who’d come on a Saturday evening in winter to eat roasted chestnuts or something. We laughed a lot when the invisible man had to watch what he ate. He was invisible, but the food wasn’t. Milk at night, moving through his intestines like a luminous snake. The invisible man was much talked about in Castro. How we laughed at the poor man when a dog found and bit him! And at the cat’s eyes when Griffin conducted his first experiment and managed to make the cat invisible, but with two exceptions: its eyes, which carried on shining, and its claws. This was one of the most successful episodes in the book. The listeners would search for those solitary eyes in the shadows. For an invisible man, snow is a problem. The snowflakes settle on and expose him. The great dream of being invisible has turned into a fatal condition. Which is why, after laughing so much at his misfortunes, people kept a respectful silence when the dead albino becomes visible and someone shouts, ‘Cover his face! For Gawd’s sake, cover that face!’ I think at the time Griffin was more popular in Castro than in Iping. Perhaps because this was the disguise which had always been used during Carnival. Those who dressed up were, in effect, invisible men for a few days. They covered everything, mouth as well, using nylons, sheets, cloths and bandages. Part of the disguise involved not speaking or speaking very little with a distorted voice. At one point, I began to feel sorry for the invisible man. I stopped laughing and read with a pain in my stomach, as if my own cramps could be seen as well. What Griffin, the albino, experienced was the height of loneliness.

Years later, when I went to England to work as a domestic, I was sent to a house in Chichester, not far from Brighton. I went first and Pinche came a few months later to work as a gardener or whatever was needed. Before Pinche arrived, I had a terrible time, there were days I felt like an invisible woman, but I didn’t think about Griffin at all until one Sunday in spring Pinche went for a bike and the owner of the house, a Mr Sutherland, pointed to the horizon with his pilot’s arm and said, ‘Let’s see if you can get to Iping!’

‘I wish you’d keep your fingers out of my eye,’ the invisible man was forced to protest. A sentence I never forgot. And often used as a retort.

Not being good at repartee is like being born without hands. A washerwoman is unarmed if her tongue stops working. Like any woman who lives from what she does. You have to know how to defend yourself. If you’ve lost an item of clothing, well, you’re in a tight spot and you’ve got to have what in crime films they call an alibi. Take unpaired socks, for instance. That’s a problem. Socks have a nasty habit of getting separated. If you stutter, the other people laugh. If they laugh, you stutter even more. And then you’re unarmed. You can’t defend yourself. Polka disentangled me, undid the knots we all carry inside.

‘You have to turn words slowly in your mouth. Think about it. A bird, a blackbird, for example, carries food in its mouth to give its chicks. What it’s carrying is a measure. A beakful. You are both mother and chick. You have to have a beakful with which to defend yourself. Take the necessary words. Turn and re-turn them so that they’ll sing to your tune. Know that you’re not afraid of them.’

Polka also taught me to practise in front of the mirror.

‘Don’t always say you’re right. That’s no good. The first thing you have to tell the mirror is that you don’t agree. Even if it isn’t true. You say, “I don’t agree”. The first commandment is to have the courage to say no.’

When we tried it out, I was good at that part. Better than at re-turning words. I eyed up my opponent in the mirror and spoke from the heart, ‘Well, I don’t agree. . My dog caught a fly, now how about that?’

‘That’s my girl! Keep going. Don’t let her look over your shoulder.’

Of course not. I went and told my opponent in the mirror, ‘I wish you’d keep your fingers out of my eye.’

‘That’s my girl! A perfect retort.’

I walked around the house with a small mirror. To start with, I’d object all the time. But I couldn’t always be arguing. I looked pretty when I was annoyed, it suited me, but it wasn’t my natural state. So, from time to time, I’d say some nice things. And when Polka appeared, I’d put her back in her place. I didn’t want her taking liberties.

Everything changed when we began talking in the river. In the river, I couldn’t argue with her because she wasn’t exactly the same. She was different. For a start, we were both older.

And there were more people in the river. There were the water figures.

IT WAS THE Castrelos iron bridge over the Miño. The night enlarged its arched contours. The night enlarged everything. The dark mountainside as well, crowned by a church with its fortress-like structure. When there’s no hope, everything seems to be on the side of the crime. The moon’s projector. The barn owl’s timed call. The metallic echo of footsteps. Everything grew bigger, the mouth of the river as well, the roar of its current, the yawning abyss, except for him. He felt smaller, the size he was when he visited the bridge for the first time with his father, who read out the inscription of the foundry, ‘Zorroza Bilbao 1907’, and talked to him of progress. The bridge was beautiful. ‘An improvement on nature,’ his father said. And he agreed that the riverbanks and mountains, even the church, looked better thanks to the bridge. Because there they were, in the middle, leaning on the parapet, seeing the river with the bridge’s new eyes. If they made a postcard of Castrelos, it would have to show the bridge. Being there now, on the bridge, at night, he knew what it meant. There was no need to write anything. Just the sender’s name. A sign of non-existence. Wherever the postcard went, they’d know he was no longer important to the force of gravity. What happened to him wouldn’t even be death. The murderers, if they drank, would say, ‘We took him for a walk by the river.’ There is no killing, only the dead.

When the murderers threw him off the bridge, he weighed the same as that postcard he’d imagined on his first visit. Suddenly he regained his real body. He gripped the two iron bars with such strength his hands were made of iron, formed part of the foundry, ‘Zorroza Bilbao 1907’. The landscape was not a hostile stage set. It was on tenterhooks, amazed, waiting for something other than that premeditated crime to happen. Perhaps the Castrelos iron bridge had also grown tired of being a place of horror in the hunt for humans. To start with, the murderers laughed. ‘He doesn’t want to fall,’ said one of them, kicking at his hands with the toecap of his boot. Gradually getting annoyed because he wouldn’t let go. ‘Blasted eternity! Let me.’ And the other rammed his fingers with the butt of his rifle.