Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

‘“American model”?’ asked Mayarí in surprise. And after a pause, as if speech had just returned from a reconnaissance mission, he added another unanswerable question, ‘“No stitching behind”?’

‘It’s just an advert, grandpa.’

‘You never trip up when you’re reading. Did you realise?’

He moved the tip of his cane. ‘What’s it say there?’

Gabriel read carefully, ‘Lumumba says he’ll ask “the devil” for help if necessary to get rid of the Belgians.’

The two of them, mesmerised. As if a porthole had opened up in the ground.

‘The first thing you have to know when dealing with the devil,’ said Mayarí, ‘is that it’s best not to call him by his name. If you’re speaking Spanish, you can address him as Sir or Caballero , he rather likes that. He also doesn’t mind Prince. Prince of Darkness, Prince of the Air and so on. And then there’s Your Excellency, Your Eminence, Your Lordship. He’s terribly keen on protocol. If you address him as Don, he’ll even whistle for you. Not that he whistles well. A fault of the devil’s. What to do? I shouldn’t worry if I were you.’

The sheet of newspaper stayed still. Overhead, with an eye on the cane’s prey, the seagulls and their mocking calls.

‘It’s best to talk to him in languages he doesn’t understand,’ added Mayarí.

Gabriel suddenly felt courage, the need to share what’s inside. Only once had he spoken to somebody in chimpanzee language. A lanky girl with long, skinny legs and a flat chest. From a distance, she looked like a cut-out piece of cardboard. On the dunes in Santa Cristina. When the tide came in, the huge beach became like an archipelago. The huts for selling drinks and snacks stood over the flat part, which was now underwater, like wooden palafittes with roofs of straw, palm leaves or broom, supported on stakes driven into the sand. The softly invading waters brought foam trimmings and strips of sun soaked in green shadows. This unreal oil painting surrounded the buildings, cut the adults off in the colonnade of a happy settlement, as if nature obeyed floating Sunday orders. Gabriel had his back to them, looking westwards over a fairly extensive territory, where freedom meant above all not running into other beings who, like him, were digging holes in the sand and excavating wells they then fortified. It was time to talk to himself in the secret language he was fluent in.

‘ Kagoda, sord ab? ’

‘ Kagoda! ’

He felt the chill of a wet shadow. He was leaning over and digging. The shadow passed over him and stretched along the dune’s valley. He thought of a Mau Mau. Everyone was talking about the Mau Mau rebels in Africa. Perhaps the Mau Mau, outside their territory, spoke Tarzan’s language.

‘ Tand-ramba! ’

Should he obey? His survival instinct told him yes, he should stand up. He did so with trepidation, not daring to look back.

‘ Tand-unk! ’

He obeyed. No, he wasn’t going to move.

‘ Tand-utor! ’

Followed by a guffaw. The shadow slipped away and turned into a body rolling in the sand, in a fit of laughter. He ran towards her in an unfamiliar rage. But she got up, started running and climbed the other side of the dune with feline agility. Now he’d reached the top and was trying to catch his breath while she was down the bottom. She was very thin and taller than him. Her skin was very white, a little sunburnt on the shoulders, as if she’d been let loose on the beach for the first time, her bones jutting out so much it seemed her skeleton had just been hastily assembled. She had blond, curly hair and freckles. Her big mouth maintained a smile, like a tic to protect her from the sun, which was now right in front of her. But what most disturbed Gabriel was that she wasn’t wearing a swimsuit like all the other girls. Just a pair of knickers. Her chest was practically flat, but her nipples, in Gabriel’s eyes, were circles of confusion in both colour and size. They contained all the imagination he’d stored up on the subject of sex, including Zonzo’s biro. The first day he saw it, he’d have swapped all the items in his cabinet of curiosities for that biro shaped like a transparent tube, full of liquid, except for a bubble of air, which allowed a naked woman to swim up and down. Even were it confiscated in customs, it was almost impossible for such an item to make it into his father’s hands. Something like that would always fall by the wayside. It could only be a present from Manlle, the owner of La Boîte de Pandora. One of Zonzo’s privileges. One of the things everyone envied and he appeared to attach little importance to. Because he had one overriding feeling. His hatred towards Manlle.

‘Where are you from?’ Gabriel asked the girl who spoke Tarzan’s language.

‘ Dan-do! ’ she shouted, very annoyed.

Gabriel obeyed. He stayed rooted to the spot. He’d have liked to go after her, but he didn’t move. And she vanished.

‘ Zu-dak-lul! ’ shouted Gabriel, encompassing the vastness of the sea with a sweep of his arm.

‘What does that mean?’ asked Mayarí.

‘Ocean. It means ocean.’

‘In what language?’

Gabriel hesitated. The shout had come from deep inside him and now he was afraid of appearing ridiculous. Mayarí said, ‘Don’t you worry. People who stammer are the best singers. There was one in Cuba who was the king of boleros.’

‘In chimpanzee language,’ said Gabriel.

‘It’s good to know languages.’

Mayarí released the sheet of newspaper and covered up the hole in the ground as if closing the indiscretion of an eye into the earth.

ON THE ROCKS facing the island was a fisher of wrasse. Gabriel remembers this because the man with the rod emphasised, almost boasted, that what he wanted was to fish for wrasse, ballan wrasse, and treated with contempt any other fish he hooked. Some didn’t even make it into the basket, but were scattered over the rocks. To tell the truth, ballan wrasse were masterpieces with their sudden green and red glint and the added excitement in fisherman and spectators of seeing the extraction of something precious from the sea. Aside from their colour, before they landed in the basket, the trace they left in the air was of fleshy lips. A flash of sensuality. The fisherman with the automatic rod, who was dressed impeccably, like a statue on the rocks, sometimes named the fish he threw away with contempt.

‘Another musician!

‘Here’s a clown!’

Gabriel thought he was making it up and rejected them because of their names, creatures that weren’t to his liking. Gabriel and Mayarí focused primarily on the way they gawped or still convulsed. He didn’t know exactly what his grandpa was thinking. He didn’t say anything. But the fact they stared at the same spot, at these creatures writhing in agony, shaking with mute silence, was something Gabriel would always remember as a moment of confused fraternity.

His father, the judge, was a hunter. This was no passing or temporary hobby. As he himself said, it was a constitutional passion. At home, especially in the large study, an Italian room with a small alcove, and the adjoining part of the main sitting-room, there were several trophies. The biggest was the head of a stag with large antlers. There was also a boar’s head, which his father was particularly proud of, not just because of how he’d caught it, but because of the way the head had been mounted, a work of art in his view that had preserved all the animal’s wildness and spirit, so that when you looked at it up on the wall of the study, in semi-darkness, a glint of black sun in its eyes, you could see the exact moment the end appeared. The judge had a special way of rounding off that story.