Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

‘Now let me see what you’ve got in there.’

I opened my hand very, very slowly.

‘A boat, eh? A boat in the mist. Lucky you.’

But there was something else Chelo did to help me with language. Teach me how to read and write as soon as possible. Long before I went to school. Chelo’s idea was that I had to transfer my thoughts to my hand. ‘Your mouth,’ she’d say, ‘will speak through your fingers. And what you do with your fingers will demand sound.’ It was true. A straight line had a sound. A wavy line demanded a sound. A curved line, another. You had to write them down. Play with sounds. Not be afraid of them.

I started writing by drawing. Before letters, forms. Zigzags, spirals, crosses. And it’s true that forms produce a sound, a sound that’s already inside you, lying in wait, in the gorge of your throat. I realised this the first time I drew a large triangle. A large triangle demands the sound of a large triangle. In this way, my voice followed the line drawn by my hand. So that letters, when they arrived, were also forms of nature, as t is the mast of a boat and l a cypress. O can be lots of things. An o can be the sun or moon. We had a washerwoman called O. In the calendar of saints, there was Our Lady of Expectation, Mary of the O. I used to laugh when my mother saw her in the distance and exclaimed, ‘Here comes Our Lady of Expectation!’ She was easy to spot since she carried a huge O on top of her head. An O full of clothes. When she arrived, her face was also a smiley O, with two clear eyes, so that her presence recalled the sun and circles of water.

‘Hello, O.’

O, the washerwoman, was one of the women Chelo painted. A series that seemed unending, and in fact was, which she called Women Carrying Things on Top of Their Heads .

HE WASN’T A baby any more. When he was five or six, he wet the bed. Not before. It was around that time. It wasn’t something to shout about. You didn’t come for the clothes, only to be told, ‘I’m afraid the boy’s wet the sheets, he can’t control himself.’ The thing is clothes tell their own stories, like a book. Not that I go about repeating what they say. It’s our secret. The clothes’ and ours. Which is why the bit I like most about washing is laying the clothes in the sun. The point when the sun puts colour back in the clothes and things, the way it shines you’d think you washed the whole place. Puts colour back. In clothes, right, but also in the landscape, in objects, in people’s expressions. So you’re the one who puts black and canary yellow in ears of maize and the football shirts of Elviña Wanderers. Purple in heather. We sometimes think of happiness as being impossible. Between you and me, the closest thing to an unhappy person is someone who’s happy. I’ve heard Brevo, not a bright lad, I’ve heard Brevo called happy and unhappy. What does it matter? The children just call him stupid. Children. Who’d believe it? I’m not surprised some people get stuck on words. Some words are like insects, they change, they seem one thing and in fact they’re another. Polka reckons we’ve got it wrong. Words did not come into being to name things. Words existed first and things came later. So someone said ‘centipede’ and out came the insect. I know it doesn’t have a hundred feet. It’s the intention that counts. Whoever invents the word sets the trap. I wouldn’t want to think of a name for something bad. Imagine you say it and it works. You have to watch what you say. Or not. Maybe the boy, the painter and judge’s boy, maybe he wanted to take the words inside and they turned into a ball, a plug. Because words are like crumbs. When I’m alone with my thoughts, sitting quietly at the table, my fingers make beads with the breadcrumbs on the oilskin tablecloth. By the time you realise, snap out of it, those spherical forms, polished like stars, are watching you. I don’t know about you, but what I do is eat them, the words of bread, of silence, very slowly so as not to choke. Lucky for me I had Polka. Papa. Had it not been for him, I don’t think I’d have got off the ground. I’d be happy. Unhappy. Dumb. I’d still wet the bed. I’ll have to take him to see the boy, Gabriel, one of these days. I bet he’ll know what to do. The painter smiles more than she talks. Not that I like to gossip. About other people. You won’t hear me saying, ‘This boy wets his bed!’ I suppose this business of wetting the bed, this incontinence, has something to do with his stutter. His mother told me it was a nervous thing, some fear inside his head. Which got worse when he started speaking. Stuttering. The body’s full of channels and sluice-gates, I’m well aware of that. What I can’t handle is laughter. If I burst out laughing and can’t stop myself, however tight I squeeze my legs, this joy comes pouring out of my organism. Polka tells the story of a colleague who’d been drinking and stopped to pee at the side of the road, without realising there was a fountain on the other side of the wall. The man had released a whole ocean, but he carried on standing there, his member confused with the spout, until finally he grew anxious, ‘Holy smoke! I’m weeing to death!’

Harmony tells me off, ‘There you go again! You think everything’s a joke.’

No. I don’t agree. The thing is I like talking to myself. Sometimes I can’t wait to be alone, so that I can talk to myself. I start walking and talking and feel a special joy in my legs. My whole body is talking. There are times when I’m about to invent a word and have to stop. Not a good idea. There was one I saw that looked invented to me. A brickie was carrying a sack of cement, which said PORTLAND in big letters. I thought that word was invented. Hadn’t existed before. I could have asked him. He was pretty dishy in that skimpy T-shirt. After that, I saw lots of them, who weren’t bad-looking either, all carrying that word on their shoulders. PORTLAND cement, I mean.

The only one I have to explain myself to is Harmony. Harmony, you see. I know I have to pay her attention.

The painter told me she’d found an alarm mechanism which warns you when the boy is going to pee in his sleep. A mechanism from abroad. I think that’s good. We all need an alarm, whatever the fault. When I saw it, I realised the world was changing. The importance of machines. And those yet to come. Some people are opposed to medicines. For the head. It’s easy to say, but if I get ill, they can give me anything. Acetylsalicylic acid straight off. Whatever’s necessary. I don’t mind being left alone, but not without something to take against a migraine. Sometimes, when I go too far, when I stand against the world, I’m afraid she who organises things will get upset and leave me. Because, of all the women inside, Harmony’s the most affable. She’s great at tidying up the mess, at picking up the pieces, all the scattered rubbish, at putting the mouth back on its hinges and above all at pairing socks. Because if there’s something that bothers me, come nightfall, it’s having odd socks. Not one, not three, but up to half a dozen socks without a partner, which on their own are a question: what happened to the other? It’s one thing for that to happen in a room, quite another at the washing place, where it’s cold, damp, and you’re searching for socks which, when they’re loose, are like insects with a mind of their own. They like to be unpaired. It’s the same inside your head. You’re about to go to sleep when you notice there’s a mess, the things you thought or said are missing a sock. One’s caught on a bramble bush, in a corner behind your eyes, and you have to go and look for it. That’s where Harmony comes in. And she still has time to talk to you with the voice of a bonesetter putting the bones of words in their place, so that you can sleep without pain, without itching, without the cold that makes you lose your hands and feet. That can really happen. Suddenly you don’t feel your hands. You’re washing, but you can’t feel them. They’re the colour of elder wood. You smack them to get the blood running. You breathe on them, as much as you can, like an ox in the crib. Though the best solution is to pop them up your skirt, between your thighs, in the nest. There they warm up. There they revive. But it’s much worse when you lose your hands in a dream. Then it’s Harmony who comes to the rescue and gives you some new hands, like those of a mannequin. What a relief!