Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

‘Will we go to Bárbaras, O, see if we can find the spirit of that no-good Gustavo Adolfo?’

‘I’ve already been,’ I told them. They were speechless, unable to laugh, I was so quick.

‘You what?’

‘I rather prefer another in San Carlos Gardens. He doesn’t get you pregnant.’

Amalia, pretending to be shocked, ‘Oh, my girl! You’ve turned into a spiritual slut now, haven’t you?’

And there I was, pulling at Olinda, who’d got into the novel and wouldn’t come out. She only came out when the sewing machines stopped. When they’re all going together, they’re like a special train. But when they all stop at once. . ‘What happened?’ asked Olinda in surprise, when they all stopped at the same time.

HE THOUGHT OF a joke of destiny. Mislaid poems with wings. Moved by a spiritual medium. What were they doing there, among the originals for the first issue of Oeste waiting for the censor’s approval? What were those snippets from I Was Forsook doing there? The inclusion of the medieval poem by Guterres at the start could have been a coincidence, some coincidence, but where had three poems by Aurelio Anceis come from? He went back. Annoyed and upset.

There they were, in the table of contents. Three unpublished poems from the anonymous collection I Was Forsook : ‘Zero’, ‘Infinite’ and ‘Standard Vivas’.

He returned to the texts. There was a noticeable detail. The triumphal dates had disappeared. Aurelio Anceis’ game with the regime’s calendar of celebrations. He, Tomás Dez, had also made a change in the book that was now being printed. But a different one. He’d replaced the Fascist anniversaries with others that were either neutral or delicately dressed up as cultural obsequies. Whoever was responsible for including Anceis’ poems in Oeste had simply eliminated the dates and left only the final irony in the poem Zero :

But no one is as wise as Leonardo Fibonacci

who in the crucible of emptiness made zero.

His fingers like claws grasping their prey. He raked through the pages. In ‘Standard Vivas’, he’d removed the pagan calendar of saints that made reference to Apache, Half-tit, Syra, Samantha Galatea and other renowned hetaeras who would never appear in the city’s chronicles. However, he’d left other, more enigmatic names to give critics a headache that not improbable day the work turned into a classic. International names of an ocean-going cosmos. Cape Town’s Storm in a Chinese, or Starry Simona from St Pierre and Miquelon. That’s right, Simona, Pouting, Snubnose, Hunchie. He’d asked Anceis who he was referring to and he’d replied, ‘Sirens. It’s always said there are no more ancient sea myths in Galicia. It’s not true. At least as far as sirens go. Sirens are sirens.’

‘Do you mean whores?’

‘I mean sirens. For that, I turn to Mr Thomas Stearns Eliot and his idea about heights of sensibility. It depends on the height.’

‘What height?’

‘The height you’re writing and reading at. Or depth, if you like. Your vision is only partial. Think of men breaking up ice on deck. Not blocks of ice, ice covering the whole ship, every nook and cranny. And imagine then the skipper decides to head for St Pierre. They haven’t seen or stepped on land for months. Going to St Pierre, which is only a small harbour with a slope of wooden houses, is like a trip to paradise. They’re so happy lots of them start drinking in order to celebrate and, by the time they reach St Pierre, they can’t disembark. They can barely walk. For them, without the need to cite Mr Eliot, the simple fact of saying St Pierre, the decision to go, meant already being there. In paradise. That’s the power of simply saying words, they make a place, change bodies. But let me tell you about those who disembark. Lots of them queue up outside L’Étoile, which is soon Anglicised as the Star, the dance hall owned by St Pierre’s only professional diver, also known as the Communist, and they queue up, do you know why? No, it’s not what you’re thinking. Dozens of men waiting in a line, in the snow, to dance, just to dance with the one they call Hunchie, La Bossue, Miss Hunchback. To put their hand on her hump while they dance. Skippers will pay her up to a thousand francs to go on board ship and pee on the nets. A kind of magic charm. Dancing, washerwomen, lucky sirens.’

The censor Dez couldn’t help cracking his fingers in a sign of sudden discomfort.

‘Well, I’m glad, Anceis, you met Eliot and whoever else out at sea.’

Those of the G, dancing around the axis mundi,

in the Flaming Star. .

‘I know something about Freemasonry, Anceis. The G, the axis mundi, the flaming star, the next bit about the liber mundi. I’m not a complete fool. What’s it got to do with fishing for cod in Newfoundland?’

‘Very simple. The geometry of a dance. The most popular dance hall among fishermen in St Pierre was the Star. The stage was a wooden table. On top of the table was a chair. On top of the chair, an accordionist, the Diver. On top of the accordionist, a lamp. This is the axis mundi. The accordion is the liber mundi, which is both open and shut, virgin, fertilised matter.’

‘After all that,’ said Dez, ‘it’s no surprise my ecclesiastical colleague, with his divine eye, should be confused before what he terms “a muddy mare magnum”.’

‘I like that,’ said Anceis. ‘“A muddy mare magnum”. A realistic reading.’

He again made to retrieve the manuscript.

‘I’d better take it. Truth is,’ said Anceis, ‘I’m not sure I want to publish it.’

But Tomás Dez’s hand, swift as a claw, grabbed the folder containing two handwritten copies of I Was Forsook .

‘No, leave it. I’m going to defend this book as if it were my own. We have an obligation to try.’

He said this with a vehemence that took Anceis by surprise. That word as well. An obligation. It was true. To him, the only reason for writing and publishing it was because he felt a strange obligation, something akin to fate.

‘I’m going to defend this book,’ repeated Dez. ‘Do you know why? Because, talking of heights, above all I’m a poet, Mr Anceis. I haven’t a civil servant’s soul. You’ll think it contradicts my role, but being contradictory is part of the human condition.’

‘You said before the ecclesiastical censor wouldn’t change his negative opinion. Wouldn’t give his nihil obstat . Had it in for my book.’

‘Yes, he does. He’s set against it. We’ll see what he puts down in writing. He told me he considers I Was Forsook a case of overt blasphemy. I told him God can look after himself. But this is a man who goes around with the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in his pocket. Don’t think he’s particularly fond of me. What to do? For me, fanaticism is to religion what hypocrisy is to virtue. In short, we’re up against a wall, but there may be a key. We have to find it. I’ll see what I can do. Where there’s excommunication, there’s absolution. It may take months. Even years. But I swear to you I Was Forsook will see the light of day.’

He’d redone the bit about sirens in ‘Standard Vivas’ as a separate text, whose language, being explicit, was provocative but infused with the moral lesson of a cruel fate awaiting transgressors. An edifying scandal. Aurelio Anceis talked of ‘God’s punches’ as the blind blows of an arbitrary, brutal force, a sworn enemy of beauty, enjoyment and happiness. In Tomás Dez’s version, God’s punches were always well aimed and even the misfortunes of the righteous or innocent had a positive purpose: the quality of their laments, the height of their tragedies.