Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

She didn’t reply. What could she say? Besides, there weren’t so many to choose from. The young men were all emigrating. And the old men were more likely to die than dig graves.

‘He’ll get used to it,’ said Don Marcelo. ‘He’ll end up being the most serious person around.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed. That was the trouble with that job. Everyone took to their role, treated the whole world as if it were a graveyard.

Rocío, the cook, suddenly remembered, ‘Will he still be allowed to dress up as a woman?’

‘Not in my parish. Certainly not. I don’t care what he does outside it. I’m not going to take a peek at his legs.’

‘Praise be to God!’

And the priest couldn’t tell whether this was an expression of horror or relief.

‘I’VE GOT A job for you, Crecente,’ said the priest.

He stood up and went to switch on the light. A chandelier where electricity was a tired guest. In one corner, in a basket, were the chestnuts, polished now, with that luminous tint, that suppressed glee of a second life you find in fruit ripening inside houses. Like so many other chandeliers, grapes for sweet wine hung from mimosa branches. Apples, pregnant with aroma, occupied the planisphere of Zamoran blankets. Nuts were lost in thought. More than the solid furniture whose wood was mineral, petrified, extracted from the forest of night, Polka noticed this other presence of the fruit.

He worked as a labourer. Whatever was going. In summer, the odd aubade on the bagpipes. He’d have liked to go back to working for parks and gardens. But he was lame and had a record. Being lame, he used to say, was a record and a half.

You couldn’t have a ‘record’. A word you’d have thought was easier to pronounce than ‘salicylic’, but it had weight and sloped upwards.

Some men had a record and others did not.

He also seemed to have a stubborn destiny.

He was arrested during the war. When he thought they’d forgotten about him, they came to fetch him in a lorry carrying prisoners from Silva and San Cristovo. And they simulated something. They took them at night to Castro. To the ruins of the Celtic settlement. The moon was shining and he could see the shadows of memories, of nine months before, when Holando read out the commandments of naturism. They were told to dig. It was all very sinister, having to dig a ditch there, in Castro. The order was, ‘Dig hard, in a straight line!’ And he thought, Bloody hell, imagine I find Terranova’s treasure now! It wasn’t funny, come on, after all he was digging his own grave. ‘Your mental current’s back to front,’ Holando had told him. ‘When you have to cry, you laugh. You’re a walking paradox.’ The freethinker’s gift. He had to bite his lips, make them bleed to turn the current around. Come on, dig. But one of the spades hit on some metal. ‘What’s this?’ ‘Some junk,’ said one of the soldiers. ‘Let me have a look,’ said another, who was wearing a Cabaleiro cloak. He knocked the clay off against a stone and held the object up to the moon.

‘Well, blow me down if we haven’t got ourselves a torque!’

‘Let me see. Are you sure it’s not a horseshoe?’

Everybody examining the object in the moonlight, fondling the metal, in search of gold.

‘We’ll have to see what it looks like in the daytime. Now get digging!’

‘Straight?’

‘Sideways! One piece leads to another.’

Sideways is better, reflected Polka hopefully. You don’t dig graves sideways.

They were there the whole night. The soldiers eagerly sifting each clod, examining each pebble, poking in holes.

‘Here’s something hard. Oh no, they’re bones!’

‘Bones? An animal’s, I suppose.’

‘Well, what else are they going to be?’ said the big guy in charge of the squad. He then looked at the hole as if the question he’d asked were now turning over soil.

With the thirst for gold came dawn. Painting witnesses on the horizon. Men on bikes and mopeds, women carrying the first light of day. The whole hilltop between the rocks of Ara Solis riddled with holes. The idea was to kill at night. ‘We’re out of time,’ said one of the squad of soldiers and it wasn’t clear whether he meant for digging or killing. The point is they ordered them back on to the lorry and so it was that Polka went to prison. Having dug his own grave, first straight and then sideways.

‘I’ve got a job for you, Crecente,’ said the parish priest. He hadn’t stopped turning the matter over since punishing O. It was obvious he felt remorse. ‘A job for you. With two conditions. No more pagan processions with the lame cardinal and monumental women during Carnival. And no more competing with me by preaching in taverns. I know you do it well, you make people laugh, but it’s time for you to shut up, Polka. That’s the way it goes. You can’t be priest,’ he said ironically. ‘Verger’s taken. That leaves gravedigger. What do you think? As a gravedigger and a bagpiper, you’ll get by, so to speak. .’

‘The man was very chatty,’ Polka informed Olinda.

IT HAD TO be said properly, not any old how. ‘Acetylsalicylic acid’.

‘Come on, Pinche, repeat it.’

‘Acetylsacilytic acid.’

‘Not “sacilytic”! Salicylic.’

Polka believed if you wanted to speak well, you had to be able to say ‘acetylsalicylic acid’. An invention which was to be found in nature, like all others. It just had to be rescued from invisibility, as music is sound rescued in bagpipes. One of Polka’s set phrases, though he was careful when to use it. Everything of importance had been rescued from invisibility. And aspirin was no exception. The best proof of the virtues of aspirin was in river rats if only you could see them. They were always healthy, clean, with shiny skin. Why? Because they gnawed at willow roots. And what was in a willow?

‘Acetylsacilytic acid!’

‘Salicylic!’

O liked the theory of invisibility, but not rats. They didn’t strike her as a model of healthy beauty. She always tried to have a stone to hand in case they showed up along the river. But one day a rat stared at her from the other side, the first time she saw its eyes, and O came to the same conclusion as Polka. She decided it was beautiful. An unsettling beauty, as with all animals that live by the river and try not to be seen, like the praying mantis, easily confused with the grass, or water boatmen, which live on the surface of the water without ever getting wet, darning river marks with their long, slender legs. According to Polka, the most interesting creatures also formed part of what was not immediately visible. And this was the solemn moment when he would contribute his own discovery.

‘No,’ Olinda would say, losing her patience. ‘That’s enough of that!’

‘Where’s the harm in it?’

O and Pinche would laugh. They’d heard it many times before. They already knew that the prettiest creature on earth was the cockroach that ate bat shit in King Cintolo’s Cave.

‘WHAT THIS BOY needs is acetylsalicylic acid. Bring me an aspirin.’

Neves stands still. Rigid. She’d been expecting something else, some cure. A few divine words. Some animal’s anatomy. A picture of saints. Of a cabaret singer. Herb tea. Something.

‘Aren’t you going to say something to him?’

‘Listen, is there an aspirin?’

‘There is. But take care, you’ll make a hole in his stomach.’

‘I know that, woman. Dissolve it in a spoonful of water. And make some coffee.’

‘Coffee?’

‘Yes, coffee. Coffee from the pot.

‘OK. Now listen, Gabriel. Take the aspirin first and hold it in your mouth for a bit, without swallowing, so you get the taste. The bitter taste. Don’t spit. Good. That’s good. Now take a sip of coffee. Coffee’s also bitter. Bitterness on the palate is the best thing to get you talking. Sweetness is far too conformist. That’s it, my boy.