Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

Yours, Salomé Senra

He carried on excavating. The title of one novel in the Far Off West series was indeed The Judge of Oklahoma . There was also The Mysterious Outsider, The Yoke Collector, The Peace of Graveyards . . But what he anxiously sought, and could not find, was Word of Colt . There was something else, however, a folder that had nothing to do with westerns, marked ‘12 Panadeiras Street’.

ON ONE OCCASION, just one, the judge lost his effigy’s composure, his immutable presence that paralysed so many defendants and only the odd mischief-maker would parody in a whisper, far away from the Palace of Justice, recalling that monumental slip-up, ‘Let the trial begin! Show the culprit in!’

The one time his face fell, and he couldn’t help thumping the palm of his left hand with his right fist like a mallet, was when the defendant in question, who was up on charges of ‘disorderly conduct’ and ‘being a public nuisance’, turned out to be someone who looked like his twin. An exact copy, as if out of a mould. His first impulse, having ordered him to stand up and give his name, was to demand an explanation. He felt a chill on seeing that they were exactly the same. Not even a marked difference in their clothes could detract from their awful similarity. He glanced at the people in the courtroom. No one seemed to have spotted what for the judge was a case of mistaken physiognomy. And it wasn’t that they were blind, since he himself agreed with the local saying to define the sort of character you find roaming around courthouses: gait of an ox, eyes of a fox, teeth of a wolf.

The defendant was very daring. He seemed to be imitating him. To be staring at him and in a way so that others wouldn’t notice, with tiny movements of his eyebrows and lips, to be constructing a caricature. He blinked and the defendant did the same. He winked and the defendant repeated the gesture.

‘Stop doing that!’

‘I can’t, your honour. I’ve got something in my eye.’

‘You should have thought about that.’

‘You don’t think about something in your eye, your honour,’ reasoned the defendant, surprised at having to explain such a basic law of nature to a judge.

He really was the spitting image.

While a female witness gave evidence, the defendant pulled out a book he had hidden under his shirt and started reading.

‘Behave!’ said the judge. ‘This isn’t a reading-room.’

The defendant was about to put the book away when the judge ordered it to be handed over. ‘My word, this looks interesting! The Spirit of the Laws by Montesquieu. I’ll have to read it. It’s been confiscated. . By the way, what were you before you turned up here?’

‘I was a judge, but I meted out justice.’

The outsider’s reply caused a wave of consternation to spread through the courtroom.

‘I sentence you to life in exile,’ pronounced the judge. ‘I don’t want to see you in Oklahoma again.’

From The Mysterious Outsider by John Black Eye, Far Off West series.

THE DIRECTOR, PUBLICIST, only editor and typographer of the newspaper Maritime Awakening, Ernest Botana, walked in a daze, having received the order to close issued by the Judge of Oklahoma and carried out by the sheriff, Trigger Happy, and his not very bright sidekick, Light Weight.

‘Why?’ he asked the judge in the short interview he was allowed with the door ajar.

‘In the law, there are no whys,’ replied the somewhat oblique voice of Large White, the Judge of Oklahoma. Adding from a dark room, ‘The point of the law is to be the law, not to be just.’

He’d heard this before and had felt a mixture of fear and disgust, something akin to what a goldfinch must feel when it lands on a limy twig.

‘And don’t lodge any more appeals. I’ve ordered the building to be razed to the ground. I already told you there’s no sea in Oklahoma.’

Suddenly, on the main street, he bumped into a poorly paved shadow. He rolled his newspaper into the shape in his passionate columns he called ‘the Winchester of freedom’ and looked up to find the flinty profile of the supremo. His heart told him to express contempt. That the lives of people in Oklahoma should be in the hands of individuals like the judge at this stage of civilisation made him feel a fatigue he defined as ‘reticulate drowning’. There was a time his optimism knew no bounds and grew on top of itself, step by step, like a cabbage. It was then he’d written a brave and memorable denunciation of State abuse and corruption: The Yoke Collector.

Memorable especially for the judge. The day, no doubt, he swore to get his revenge. And summoned him. He was really annoyed.

‘You’ll feel all the weight of the law. . and a little something extra from me.’

What was published in Maritime Awakening was true. The judge did collect yokes, which he hung in the hallway. He had three particularly interesting specimens: a Texas yoke, a Kansas yoke and a yoke from Oklahoma.

From The Yoke Collector by John Black Eye, Far Off West series.

Sulfe looked around. Between the stag’s antlers was a crucifix. The vision of St Eustace, patron saint of hunters. Three yokes hung in the hallway like coat-racks. One of each of the local kinds, called Galician, Portuguese and Castilian. Why had the judge summoned them? Did he suspect one of them of feeding information to a writer of western novels? What was his name? Black Eye.

‘There are the three yokes, but it’s not a collection. One good yoke is enough,’ said the judge with studied humour that made the others laugh. ‘As you well know, what I collect are Bibles. Tell me if the man isn’t mad!’

‘Who could it be?’ asked Father Munio. ‘Do you suspect anyone?’

He had the novel now. Everything in those hands, clad in a pair of soft white gloves, took on the appearance of remains waiting to be expunged.

‘All I know,’ said Samos, ‘is that someone wishes to malign me in this twisted, abject way. Without naming names, in a world of fiction that is vulgar and remote. . Cast me as the bad guy. A perverse judge of Oklahoma! The trouble is you never know where such a ridiculous, infamous game might end up. Imagine this judge, practising in Oklahoma, is blamed for things, atrocities. . Some people are obsessed with the past.’

‘They’re coincidences,’ said Tomás Dez. ‘That’s all it is, Ricardo, chance.’

The judge and censor exchanged glances. Dez realised this meeting was an indirect way of forcing him to act more diligently. They’d always been close. He couldn’t understand why Samos, who was usually so calm, had lost his nerve over something so trivial. The worst thing he could do was show his fear. Imagine. . There was no need to imagine anything.

Samos, however, regained his composure, adding a touch of humour, ‘I just wanted, friends, to fill you in on this rather picturesque situation. Even in a country as secure as ours, there’s no escaping the evil eye.’

‘There’s something artistic, deeply human, about yokes,’ said Sulfe after a pause. ‘And about halters, those wire and wicker art pieces for muzzling mouths.’

Sulfe stopped abruptly. He had a passion for ‘alighting on the classics’. Being one of them. Each of them. Cultivating his chosen model to the end. Not just knowing what they thought, but how they expressed it. Assuming their voice, as he said. In short, copying them. So his relationship with knowledge was a form of possession. The secret of his moments of brilliance was this identification that led him to act in his lectures, though he was generally a shy man who spat out monosyllables. Recently the process had been reversed. He began to feel possessed by those he studied and delved into. There was no telling when it might happen, no warning. It was like having a ventriloquist who spoke for him, without permission. Who controlled not only the levers of thought, but the threads of speech as well, until turning him, in the most unfortunate circumstances, into a comedian, a satirist or a gossip. Some people lost their memory. Sulfe acquired new memories. He started consuming what he’d always reviled. From Catullus and Sappho to Afonso Eanes do Coton and María Balteira, the last to mention two members of the most obscene school of Galician-Portuguese cancioneiros or songbooks. The discovery of this branch of wild eroticism, words fornicating like bodies, in medieval lyric poetry, together with his interest in Rabelais, had caused not only a mental upheaval but a shift in his organism similar to a radical change of diet. Possibly to defend herself in a conservative environment or else to justify the daring act of absorbing and disseminating universal poetry’s most obscene creations, Carolina Michaëlis talks of this ‘the most dissolute carnivalesque pasquinades’, of compositions whose language is on a par with that of ‘brawlers and gamblers’. Another leading authority on the medieval treasures that lay hidden for centuries, Rodrigues Lapa, talks of a spirited willingness to confront ‘certain verbal sewage’. Dissolute pasquinades! Verbal sewage! When having to refer to these compositions, Sulfe himself didn’t hesitate to talk of ‘a vulgar and immoral branch on a golden tree’. And as he recovered his health, he’d think of a poem by João Soares: