Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

Miss Lucy, Lucy Sánchez, for God’s sake,

if fuck you I could, fuck you I would!

‘Finally,’ he heard the familiar voices of Gargantua and Falstaff, ‘you can tell the difference between pleasure and enjoyment, you’re poking your nose in where you should.’ There was indeed ‘a second world and a second life outside officialdom’, to quote his now revered Mikhail Bakhtin, but not just in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. It was a secret, but he was living a second life in a second world. Yes, he was an amphibian in the new Spanish Middle Ages. On the outside, he was the same old doctor. ‘See these fingers yellowed not from tobacco, but from alighting on the classics.’ He was capable of vehemently, even angrily, defending what he called ‘the grammar of power’. The essential superiority of some languages over others. The mystical, warlike quality of Spanish, which made it more suitable for talking to God. The relevance of Nebrija’s warlike grammar, the Empire’s companion language, as a contemporary apothegm. And so on. But anyone who knew him from before, when he came offstage, would observe an ironical form of boasting, an obvious horror of any kind of ambition for public notoriety, be it in the academic sphere or the sphere of official culture and journalism, where he’d attained the stature of a golden personality. When called on to give his opinion on special occasions, he had a sixth sense which enabled him consistently to match ‘the grammar of power’, the taste of mandarins, which he seasoned with a culture they lacked. There were things he couldn’t even mention. Once he bumped into the mayor and greeted him in his most colloquial Latin, ‘ Quo vadis , your worship?’ The mayor answered him with sickled face, ‘There you go again, Sulfe, spouting German.’ He now enjoyed himself as never before. He’d crossed ‘the threshold of invisibility’. He was a secret being. He worshipped one, mortal God, the great Dionysius, whose feet the dog Cerberus licked at the gates of hell. It was through him, through Dionysius’ eyes, he saw the world now, without others knowing. He was particularly bold when it came to those he’d always avoided. He turned his reading hours into a nocturnal spree in search of ‘dissolute carnivalesque pasquinades’ and ‘verbal sewage’. It had all started as a funny paradox. He’d been asked by the chapter of Santiago Cathedral to study expressions of risus paschalis , paschal laughter, and the so-called festa stultorum , feast of fools, as well as the existence or not of a ‘feast of the donkey’ in the Compostelan Church’s tradition. He didn’t get very far. He couldn’t cope with the fields that suddenly opened. All those books waiting for him on inveterate shelves, in locked cupboards, buried alive in filthy attics and basements. He started poking his finger in cracks he’d previously despised. His warrior philologist’s yellow fingers smelt now of sex and shone like tasty word-slops. What he’d run away from became his bread and butter. As he read, he heard, as if in prayer, the emotional, excited chorus of Bacchantes, ‘When Dionysius leads, the earth will dance.’

He could claim to have been a bibliophile ever since he was a child. He’d certainly grown up with ordered reading, tutored by a pack of Carlist clerics, who kept an eye even on the Spanish mystics and allowed access to enlightened fathers such as Feijoo and Sarmiento only in tiny measures served with little spoons. But somehow he’d become an expert. Books were his most treasured property. When he thought of the old family seat in Ribeiro, he pictured not the land, but the volumes. This set him apart from many other professors and ecclesiastical friends and Compostelan theologians, who were leading authorities on property registers and lawsuits over land inheritance and ownership. And extremely concerned about the culture of rents and the number of feet in a granary. He’d alighted on the classics. And if he’d been given a chair, it was as a result of his knowledge, not of booty or contacts. He was very conservative. A traditionalist. He’d never hidden the fact. Even as a boy, he’d come to the conclusion it was something biological, in his nature. He remembered this with horror when the Dean of Sciences in Santiago conferred a doctorate honoris causa on Franco, comparing his warlike activity to ‘a biological, scientific experience’. In his second life, Sulfe had a stock response, ‘I’m conservative, not inhuman.’ A message that was so simple, constantly repeated as it was in the endless post-war period, it sounded like a bizarre riddle.

Hardly anyone knew about Professor Alfonso Sulfe’s second existence. They may have set out from a similar port, but he’d long since veered off on a course that had nothing to do with the judge Samos or those others who were convinced they had a direct link with God. If he’d renewed a friendship dating back to the 1940s and accepted Samos’ recent invitation to join their conversations in the so-called Crypt (which the judge, with intellectual coquetry, also termed his San Casciano in reference to Machiavelli’s retreat), it was for a reason he kept secret. To start with, he’d replied to the invitation with grateful politeness, alleging, however, that his teaching commitments and his own studies made it difficult for him to attend. He’d be delighted to do so occasionally. But then the embers of a memory revived, turning into a fire that blazed day and night in his brain.

‘It being a madman. .’

Dez was not happy with the meeting. He failed to understand how Samos, who was intelligent, sly when necessary, could have exhibited his paranoia with that western novelist so publicly, albeit among friends. He appeared now to be taking it lightly, but Dez knew how much it bothered him.

‘Strange the way it continues,’ said Father Munio, who with his white gloves turned every book that fell into his hands into an object for dissection.

Ernest Botana the journalist tipped his hat to the pruned, skeletal, naked poplars:

‘Courage, old friends!’

Then he saw the judge coming and stretched out his hand:

‘I absolutely will not allow you to consider me an enemy.’

The servant of the law was confused and blushed. He left, irritated by the weight of that pious affront.

The judge held out his hand to retrieve the novel. He’d have preferred it if Father Munio hadn’t chosen that particular passage to read aloud. It had quite upset him, which is why the page was marked. And now hearing someone else read it aloud finally revealed the source of the unsettling echo in his head. There was the memory of a similar sentence addressed to him.

It was the last time he’d talked to Héctor Ríos in Mazarelos Square, Santiago, outside the Law Faculty, that Christmas Eve in 1935. The day he refused the gift of a book by Wells and Ríos had the audacity, the unbearable goodwill, to comment, ‘I absolutely will not allow you to consider me an enemy.’

A fine coup de théâtre .

That’s right, he refused the book from Ríos, with whom he’d shared a passion for bibliography ever since they were children. He refused the book by Wells, an essay on The Salvaging of Civilisation .

‘I already read it,’ Samos lied.

‘And I read your article,’ said Ríos eventually. ‘“Germany’s Scholars Align Themselves with the Führer”. I think you’ve forgotten one or two. .’

There was Héctor Ríos, saying goodbye to Professor Del Riego on the steps of the Law Faculty and then jovially turning towards him, with his Kantian categorical imperative spectacles, a bundle of books in one hand and bulging jacket pockets. Who knows? He may still have been carrying his notes on cards from Xohán Vicente Viqueira’s lectures in Coruña on ethics, which the pupils of the Free Teaching Institute exchanged with lay devotion, like prayers. ‘Listen, Samos, to what Viqueira has to say: “Conscience is the mental activity of esteeming the good”. Could anyone have put it better?’ Once, in the spring of 1931, Ríos had persuaded him to attend a tribute to Viqueira in Ouces Cemetery. One of the participants, Bieito Varela, knocked on the gravestone and said, ‘Mr Viqueira, the Republic has arrived!’ The atmosphere was pleasant and effusive, with lots of cultured people, but Samos felt uncomfortable. Viqueira’s grave was outside the Catholic cemetery. Why was he buried outside? Ríos looked at him the way he did sometimes, through ironic spectacles that made him feel a fool, and said, ‘He’s outside because they wouldn’t let him in.’