Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

‘Forgive the boast, but a large specimen measures up its opponent, chooses a superior,’ he’d maintain. ‘Only he who knows it better than it knows itself can hunt a prey.’

The same could be said of the woodcock. Another prize specimen. Not because of its size, but because of its intelligence.

‘The wood’s guardian. A master at camouflage. Better than the partridge any day. A living detector, a periscope in amidst the bracken and leaves. It hears and sees everything that’s going on in the forest. Even with a good dog, it’s very difficult to flush a woodcock. And we had the best, Eusebio’s pointer. A fine companion, yes indeed. We put a little bell around his neck. When it stopped tinkling, this was the sign he’d found the woodcock. I can still hear that silence now!’

The judge gave pride of place to that specimen. You could see it was of great personal value. But a few years later, in the spring of 1963, a capercaillie became the star attraction. Because it had an illustrious partner. The judge had gone hunting with his friend the Minister in the Ancares. As he said, it was a trophy with history. The Minister had shot one specimen and he’d shot the other.

Both the woodcock and later the capercaillie stood on a shelf, flanked by thick volumes, in the most visible part of the judge’s extensive library, that on the wall of the sitting-room next to his study. All four walls of the study were also covered in shelves full of books. It was what he called, with ironic pride, ‘my Crypt’. Soon this was the name everyone used, just as that part of the sitting-room Chelo used for painting ended up being known as the Chinese Pavilion, a name inspired by a folding screen from Macao (‘exquisitely designed,’ they’d taught Gabriel to say as an oral exercise) which the judge had bought in Portugal, on one of his trips as visiting lecturer to Coimbra University, and which soon became an inevitable border point in the house. The name created the space. A landscape of paintings and plants, which seemed to be constantly on the go. In one corner, an exotic touch: a large pot of bamboos, together with ferns and herbaceous plants such as Aureola. In the eastern part of the house, there was a clear preference for plants. Different species all over, on the floor, on the furniture, all along the gallery of course, there were the begonias responding with conviction, even more in winter, to Chelo’s warmth: its leaves went further than the flowers in intensity of colour.

So the sitting-room had two, almost symmetrical hemispheres, though there was a second dimension, that of the line of shadow from the central pillar, which showed the sun’s daily orbit, so that, mornings, the library side was left in shade and the sun illuminated the so-called Pavilion whose inner circle, the nucleus, contained the painter with her easel and a table like the trough found in rural homes. Her Technicolor Table. Instead of bread, the trough held a mine of tubes, jars, pigments, resins, varnishes, lacquers, bottles and the odd rock with plates of mica and other minerals. On top of the table, aside from bowls, plates, tins and boxes which served as palettes, was a pile of soiled cloths. Which grew and grew. Chelo didn’t need someone to make a quip about this. She herself said it was her finest work. She only got rid of the cloths when they overflowed the trough and started invading the outer circle, which went beyond the bamboos. It was then that O, the washerwoman, stuffed the colour-stained cloths into gunny sacks.

When they reached Lapas Beach, they saw a gamela walking. Out of the water, crossing the sand. With the stubborn air of riverboats, even when they’re sailing. Its upturned bottom had the exact curvature of someone leaning over a balcony. A strange being, the boat, a kind of enormous, comical creature painted the colours of dawn, a product of the sea’s imagination. The boat suddenly turned towards them. Under its large shell of white and coloured planks was a smiling, toothless man. The gaps in his teeth made him look more like Mayarí. When Chelo insisted he use his stay in Coruña to order a set of false teeth, he’d always make excuses and crack one of his favourite jokes, which Gabriel didn’t understand immediately, because he pointed to his eyes, not his mouth, ‘I’m bidentate, you see.’

Except when he was talking to himself, Mayarí was pretty quiet. He seemed to understand his silence as a way of taking up as little space as possible. At the same time, however, when he was asked a question, especially by his son-in-law, the judge, he made every effort to satisfy the other, which in his view meant seasoning seriousness with a pinch of humour, the closest thing to a sweet taste. Their relationship was formal; conversation, if it existed, was restricted to dinnertime. Gabriel, if he was paying attention, couldn’t help noticing the difference between his father’s and grandfather’s teeth. The difference was. . monumental. His father’s teeth, apart from being perfect, were made of marble. His grandfather’s teeth, the few there were, were made of granite. Stone slabs. Years later, he could be more precise. His father’s teeth were neoclassical, Mayarí’s dolmenic. From the evening before, he remembered part of the conversation, Mayarí’s intervention, which was celebrated with laughter and seemed to him to contain secret information. The judge had asked him why so many people were abandoning work in the countryside. Why they were leaving the villages. Mayarí thought about it for a moment, adopted a more solemn air and said, ‘When it comes to it, your honour, the problem with the countryside is a problem of height.’ Everyone looked at him in bewilderment, especially Chelo, who’d already asked him not to refer to a member of the family, his daughter’s husband, as ‘your honour’. On this occasion, however, she kept quiet since, like everyone else, she was waiting for the answer to the mystery of the countryside’s height.

‘What height do you mean, sir?’ asked the judge very seriously.

‘I mean the countryside is very low,’ said Mayarí, opening his arms as if stating the obvious.

‘Yes, but not that low,’ said the judge, uncertain why he was being so forthright. ‘Things are getting better after all.’

‘The countryside is very low, so you have to bend down,’ Mayarí explained. ‘The earth should be a little higher, the height of this table at least.’

Everyone ended up laughing, though the laughter was slow. It was the kind of laughter Mayarí set in motion. A slow laughter. Put another way, a comical seriousness.

In one of the books Gabriel was reading in the alcove, mostly because he enjoyed the illustrations, there was a full-page photo he’d have liked to rip out and take with him or put in a frame on his bedroom wall, though it had nothing on Zonzo’s biro with the naked woman. It was an image with the title ‘Eskimo Beauty’. The girl’s features were very similar to those of O, the washerwoman. She wore a Greenlander’s festive costume, the most unusual part of which were the trousers, made of leather on the thighs and down to the knees and then, on the calves and over the boots, of a thin, white, embroidered material. The whole was reminiscent of a well-clad, free-spirited harlequin. Mayarí and the sailor carrying the boat seemed to belong to that moment, on Lapas Beach, to a race omitted by Pericot in his inventory. The race of smiling, bidentate men. In his life, Gabriel would come to realise this is one of the most pleasant smiles a human being can give. Mayarí tipped his hat and bowed his head slightly, and the sailor did the same with the boat.

The boat man walked towards the water. Having set it down, the old man tugged at the boat as at a large, blind, docile animal. When everything was ready, he jumped in the boat, put the oars in the tholepins and started rowing. It was strange. He rowed with his back towards where he was going. His infallible means of orientation. He watched what he was leaving behind, a view that grew wider and wider. His tiny presence transformed the whole sea. Even though he was far off, you could still see the door and jambs of his bidentate smile.