Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

The Woman with Bramble Sphere pursed her lips. Blinked. Tears of laughter were bubbling up in her eyes. It was Chelo’s turn to smile in the face of mystery.

‘What happened with Daniel?’

‘He moved his ears!’

‘His ears?’

‘Yes, madam. He moved them as if they were wings. He could do that, move them without having to touch them. What he called “doing the ding-dong”. But only I saw him do it that day. The day of our First Communion. In church. That day, he did it just for me.’

This is the secret of why the Woman with Bramble Sphere is smiling in Chelo Vidal’s painting. Because she can see Daniel beating his pointed ears like wings.

Nothing more disturbing than the following painting.

That of the Woman Carrying a Secret. It was not known what was in that basket covered with a cloth. The cloth’s contours suggested small, irregular spheres. But the strange thing was the cloth itself. A black cloth. Nobody covered their merchandise in Santo Agostiño or Leña Field with a black cloth. Their head, OK. But never their merchandise.

‘You’ve painted me with a bad look,’ said the Woman Carrying a Secret.

‘No, it’s not bad. That’s the way you look. It’s fine. Adds a touch of mystery.’

‘Not like that, it doesn’t. I may be a bit cross-eyed, but not that much. And it’s one thing to be like that for a moment, another to be like that for the rest of your life. Paintings are for life. I don’t know why you want to make me look cross-eyed.’

‘That is your look. That is beauty. The real thing, emotion.’

‘Well, it looks to me as if those eyes you painted aren’t working properly when they should be beautiful.’

‘In those eyes can be seen all that you contain inside,’ responded Chelo passionately.

‘I’d rather nothing could be seen.’

She’s now the Woman with Lowered Eyelids.

‘Is that better?’

‘Much better.’

Gabriel remembers passing her on the back staircase. He’d often use it to reach the kitchen more quickly. Neves always had a surprise for him. A little beakful, as she called it. He bumped into the Woman in Mourning, whose head-cloth matched the cloth on her basket. She seemed very pleased. When she saw him, she pulled back the cloth and gave him a handful of her secrets.

HIS NAME’S ANTÓN, I think, but what stuck in my mind was what Mr Sada said: this country doesn’t deserve its poets, look how it treats them, working as building labourers, carrying sacks of Portland cement. Every time I see a man with a sack on his back, I think of him. Of my poet. My Portland.

That day, her wish to find him in the painter’s house was fulfilled. She was taking their clothes. On the way from Castro to Elviña, she plucked a few white roses and sprigs of mint and fennel. To give the clothes a nice smell.

Neves received her in the hallway. She heard voices coming from the more open side of the sitting-room, what they called the Chinese Pavilion, and, being on good terms with the maid, she let herself go a little, just enough to see the group of people. All of them deep in thought. Each looking in a different direction. Listening. To him recite. And she still had time to hear about the leaves that don’t fall in San Carlos Gardens, they burn, that’s what he said, on a low heat, at the top of the elms. And he said something about the hanging clusters’ spectral elegance. But she wasn’t quite sure about this.

She went there that afternoon. And others.

In San Carlos Gardens, at the top of the elms, she did indeed see a few coppery leaves that hadn’t fallen. She knew there were some trees that didn’t shed their old leaves until they’d grown new ones. But this was very different. In the whole remarkable plantation, the branches’ austere elevation, fat charcoal markings in the sky, ending in a filigree of twigs, shoots and buds, pure, unsullied lines, well, up there were these copper-coloured leaves on a low heat, burning at dusk without being consumed.

It was one of the happiest moments in her visits to the city. It was unthinkable that she, of all people, should be able to see the black elms’ unfalling winter leaves in the so-called Romantic Garden. Not only did they not fall, they burnt in the plantation’s sober lattice. The more you looked at them, the more they burnt. She was far away, but she could feel the heat on her cheeks.

So when she came back, many years later, one of the first things O did was go and see the unfalling leaves in San Carlos Gardens.

But O’s here right now. She’s twelve years old and is starting to go to the river to wash. She likes the river, but not washing so much. At the crossroads, one road leads to school, another to the river. If she didn’t have to wash, she’d always choose to go to the river. Which is where she’s in the process of discovering the water figures.

Polka suffers as a result of ignorance. Yesterday he was very hurt because he rode side-saddle on Grumpy, the donkey that carries the clothes Olinda and I wash, and some people had a go at him for not riding normally, like a man. All because of ignorance. The animal suffers less if you sit like a woman. Everything that itches is because of ignorance. Ignorance itches. That’s what Polka thinks. He used to have a lot of friends he could talk to against ignorance. One of them was Arturo, Galicia’s lightweight champion. I know there are rumours, some say Arturo could be my Dad. He was killed before I was born, but if he’s in the water, if the river brought him to me, maybe there’s something in it. They loved him a lot. He always had his gloves and books.

‘But if he was a boxer, didn’t he have to hit people?’

‘Yes,’ said Polka. ‘But boxing isn’t quite the same as hitting. With his boxer’s hands, he would write in a magazine called Brazo y Cerebro . In Fontenova, he and others founded a cultural association with a library called Shining Light in the Abyss. It had a glass sign showing a sun. It’s so cold in Fontenova it must have helped having a sign like that.’

‘And what happened?’

‘They killed him like Christ. There was no war here, girl, what they call a war was a hunt and they hunted him down. Before he died, he managed to write on a piece of paper, “The worshippers of Christ make a new Christ every day.”’

‘What happened to the sign with the sun?’

‘They smashed it.’

‘And the cultural association, the books?’

‘They burnt them.’

‘Burnt books?’

‘That’s right.’

Polka talks of him as a hero, a champ the world forgot.

‘The future’s uncertain,’ said Polka. ‘Who can say what will happen? There may come a time, girl, only you know who Arturo da Silva was and that Shining Light existed in a place that is now so gloomy. Hold on to this word as well. Arturo da Silva was an anarchist.’

‘An anarchist? But. .’

‘Yes, I know. I’ve said it now. It’s a frightening word. Just let it be. It can look after itself. It’s all I ask. Hold on to it. Find a little space for it, you don’t have to go back. It won’t bother you.’

He muttered something about invincible resignation. Talking to himself. Polka, Polka. Papa. Olinda says nothing. Almost nothing about her life. She likes radio novels, she becomes absorbed, unaware of time. I know this because, at Amparo the fashion designer’s, there’s a radio in the workshop and when they listen to the novel, read by Pedro Pablo Ayuso and Matilde Conesa, it’s as if the machines are making tears and the pedal is pushing them up the nerves of their legs to their eyes, well, once my mother became absorbed, lost in her friendly silence. Which can happen to anyone. There’s a young lady, Ana told me, who writes poetry and claims to have received this gift from the spirit of Bécquer, we learnt about him at school, ‘the dark swallows will return’, I liked him a lot, she must have done so too, they met in Bárbaras Square, the spirit possessed her and apparently she got pregnant. Pregnant with poetry. Ana and Amalia laughing about it, the spirit’s spunk, ooh, spirit, ooh!