Manuel Rivas: Books Burn Badly

This newspaper would end up in the hands of an even more elegant friend of his uncle’s. There was Fermín Varela in the portico of the Inglaterra Hotel, devouring the pages of El Noroeste . Uncle Ernesto was reading it over Varela’s shoulder, a glint in his eyes. Artificial wine? Fishing with dynamite? MPs at a bullfight? He looked at him as if he were to blame. After all, Antonio was the last to arrive. ‘Is ours a country or a scorpion?’

‘What can you do?’ asked Fermín Varela.

‘A bit of everything.’

‘I like the sound of that,’ said Varela.

‘That’s the good thing about being born in the sticks,’ observed Uncle Ernesto. ‘You learn a bit of everything.’

‘Can you fire a gun?’

He couldn’t. But he said he could.

‘Can you give orders?’

‘Give orders?’

‘I mean, can you tell other men what to do?’

He was asking very difficult questions. Antonio Vidal had never thought about that, about the possibility of telling others what to do. He’d come in search of a job. He could work hard, without stopping. But giving orders was something else.

‘He’ll soon learn, Varela,’ Ernesto intervened. ‘There’s nothing that can’t be learnt.’

‘What do you want to do?’

He tried to suppress it, but a voice replied for him, ‘Own a news-stand in Central Park.’

They burst out laughing. They hadn’t been expecting such a remark. But then Varela said, ‘It’s not such a bad idea. I like it, Vidal, I like it. You’ve got potential. The future lies in Vedado, that’s the golden rectangle. But for now your fate’s a little further off. I can offer you a job in Mayarí. Go and work for my wife. A bit of everything, like you say. She’ll teach you how to give orders. She’s a real field marshal!’

Varela spoke with a mixture of irony and boredom.

‘Are you not coming, sir?’ asked Vidal.

‘It’s time for me to be dirty. I’m fed up of the provinces, my Galician friend. I feel like the people of Havana, now I can’t stand the countryside. You’ll feel the same one day.’

‘I come from a village, Mr Varela, well, a crossroads actually.’

‘There you go. But who do you think fills the music halls, gets their shoes cleaned twice a day here, in the colonnade of the Inglaterra, has a drink in the square? We all got off the Central Train, so to speak. And we don’t want to go back. Work hard and you’ll earn enough money to put a wrought-iron news-stand right in the middle of Central Park, next to the Diario de la Marina , and still have enough to build yourself a house on Seventeenth Street.’

‘What kind of work is it?’ he asked his uncle when they were alone.

‘It’s a large estate with wood and cattle in Mayarí,’ replied Ernesto. ‘Remember giving orders also means shutting up. His wife will expect you to give orders and to obey them. She’s the really rich one. And there’s something he didn’t tell you. She’s an educated woman. Reads books and the like. Even prefers them to Varela. What was that about a news-stand in Central Park?’

‘I don’t know. It just came out like that.’

He had a day to make up his mind. Antonio Vidal sat on a bench on Prado Avenue. He was wearing his new linen white suit for the first time and now belonged to the people of light. He’d looked at it from different angles, but realised his principal misgiving was this: he’d just arrived and didn’t want to leave Havana. The second newspaper was spread out on his thighs. He started thinking again about the cynical painter Mihailov in Anna Karenina and the girl with the basket of newspapers on her head by the Iron Quay in Coruña Harbour.

‘What?’

The dark boy’s head had eclipsed the sun.

‘Can you spare a sheet?’

‘What do you want it for?’

‘To make a hat.’

‘Can you make paper hats?’

‘I can’t, but the teacher can,’ said the boy, pointing to a bench further down, where there was a group of schoolchildren accompanied by a young woman who was waving to the boy to come back.

‘Is that your teacher?’

‘That’s right. She’s the one who makes hats. They’re great, just like boats.’

‘Here you go. Take the whole newspaper.’

From the bench, he watched the teacher make hats until there was no more paper. She folded the sheets in a special way. It was true, they did look more like boats than hats. When the schoolchildren came past, what he saw was a procession of figureheads.

‘Thank you, sir,’ said the teacher as she passed.

Sir? He bowed in reply. And then, without trying to stop it, he heard the voice say, ‘Excuse me, madam! It’s very hot today. You wouldn’t have a spare paper boat, would you?’

‘Here,’ she smiled. ‘Take mine.’

12 July 1936

‘SAY MASS FOR us, Polka!’

The stone cavities looked like thrones, granite chairs. Francisco Crecente, or Polka, the only one who wasn’t naked, climbed to the highest rock of the hill-fort’s Ara Solis, with a nostalgic sigh spat out the last cherry pip, made the sign of the Cross and mumbled, ‘ In principio erat Verbum. ’

‘Can’t hear you!’ protested Terranova. ‘Louder!’

Polka felt the sun pricking his eyes. He shielded them with his hand and almost glimpsed what he was looking for. Down the slope, next to the stream, clothes were spread out like a happy graft of people on nature. He stretched out his arms and his preacher’s voice rolled down the hillside on the sun’s rays, ‘ Et lux in tenebris lucet et tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt, etc., etc.’

The second Sunday in July was full of light. There was no trusting that vertiginous sky, the door of all the storms in the Azores, even in midsummer. But this time the mission had been successful. Polka was pleased and proud. They’d accepted his proposal. It was his village. And today it had the feel of paradise.

Everything was a gift of the sun and the landscape didn’t seem to want to keep anything back. He was on top of the world. These ruins were the city’s first settlement, a fortified mount, at a safe distance from the sea. Between Ara Solis and Hercules Lighthouse, up on the isthmus, there was a visual axis. Anyone in Polka’s position could experience that geological view. The city had been reborn from the sea, had surrounded the great Atlantic rock and become a palafitte on the sands and mudflats, making up ground on the bay’s belly, with the sensuality of gardens and buildings whose foundations were glass. The sea today was a kind of mirror and Polka thought the second Sunday in July was a true gift and deserved a blessing.

‘A divine office, Polka, if you please!’

Holando had read out the ten commandments of naturism. As they lay sunbathing, naked on the warm rocks, which were carpeted in velvet moss and golden lichen, the cherry pendulum hanging over their lips, measuring time from outside in, everything that was said sounded like the flowering of reason. The fourth commandment: ‘Thou shalt not forget to bathe every day in cold water’. This got a boo. ‘Where’s the prophet from?’ ‘Dr Nigro Basciano is from Brazil.’ ‘That explains it.’ As for the rest, they were in agreement. Until the tenth one: ‘Thou shalt not eat meat or murder the poor animals, but be merciful to them. Mens sana in corpore sano. Finis . Amen.’

There was a pause, which lasted as long as the cherries.

‘After the celebrations you mean!’ exclaimed Polka finally.

‘What?’

‘All that being merciful to animals.’

‘You treat everything as a joke,’ said Holando. ‘Slaughterhouses are a horrific spectacle. Go down to Orzán when there’s a slaughter. The sea stained with the blood of animals. It’s a prehistoric shame. Cows should be sacred here as well.’