Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

‘Well, I understand you like things that have to do with nature. Serious stuff, I mean.’

‘Yes, that’s right. Absolutely.’

Ren, swollen with pride, solemnly extracts an entomological box from the suitcase with metal rivets. ‘For you. They’re Coleoptera. To start with, they all look the same, but then you realise they’re different. I never thought there was so much in them.’

Gabriel read the label: Coccinella septempunctata .

Around the lighthouse, in his memory, the tip of Grandpa Mayarí’s cane starts moving, calling out names: little Maria, little Joanna, little Teresa, king-king, sunsucker, seamstress, blond cow, little reed, God’s bug.

Coccinella septempunctata came into the house shortly after Santiago Casares’ photo turned up inside The Time Machine . Now he knew what the young man from Durtol and 12 Panadeiras Street looked like, he could imagine him growing up.

As for Mr Schmitt, he was there, on one of the main bookshelves, behind his father’s chair, sharing the stage, so to speak, with other notables the judge admired. He was there for ages. Gabriel couldn’t say when Mr Schmitt, Don Carlos, vanished from between the tomes of Aranzadi. It was in 1994, on one of his furtive visits just before the trip to Paris, he noticed he was no longer in the portrait gallery. The two photos of the judge with Schmitt had disappeared. The ones he’s looking at now, because there they are for all to see, in the inner sanctuary, a motive of pride, an honour for the judge to be portrayed next to his revered master, both photographs having been dedicated and signed: Katechon . There’s a symmetry in the dates. The first photograph flanked by juridical volumes is dated 1942 in Madrid. The more recent of the two was taken twenty years later, in 1962. It’s strange, despite the time that’s gone by, there’s not much difference, perhaps because the latter’s quality is no better than the first. There’s a certain imperative urgency in Schmitt’s eyes. Gabriel recalls the judge saying it was unusual since his master generally tried to avoid having his photograph taken. On both occasions, the two of them look serious. The second portrait is dated in Madrid and gives the day and month as well. 21 March 1962. Which is when Carl Schmitt received his decoration. Showing the photograph allowed the judge to describe this great event, to which he had the good fortune to be invited by the master of ceremonies, who would later, in July, be appointed Minister of Information. And there was another signed photograph. From the Minister himself. His father knew him, they even went hunting together, but, after the appointment, he simply referred to him as the Minister. There are the two of them. The Minister and he. Smiling at the camera.

‘PAÚL SANTOS UNKNOWN. But you can call me Unknown.’

He said it as if he’d read his name on a poster. An exercise in esteem, control, but also in fathoming out his interlocutor. Simply saying his full name provoked a reaction he measured according to what he ironically termed ‘the Unknown scale’. It immediately helped him to discover if the person he was introducing himself or being introduced to knew something about life, the existence of a very special door in the city, the wheel, a kind of turnstile, where almost every night newborn babies were left, who knows how many, thousands since Charity Hospital opened back in 1791, before which date all Galicia’s unknowns, if they went somewhere, ended up in Santiago’s Royal Hospital.

This is what a priest had written on the baptism certificate. ‘Father’s name: unknown. Mother’s name: not given.’

When Catherine Laboure finally agreed to go with him and show him the document, he read it with care and serenity. Had he been asked, he’d have said he felt well, really well. His only reaction was to gaze at Mother Laboure and smile. This smile that was as slow to form as it was to leave. One of the features that made him so popular inside the grounds of Charity Hospital. The Paúl Santos smile. In short, Paúl Santos smiled when least expected. For example, when something went wrong. When he dropped a plate in the middle of the dining-hall and it smashed into pieces. When. . Some older children conducted a secret experiment. They inflicted small tortures on him, which increased the more he smiled. He knew they weren’t bad, not especially wicked, they just wanted to see how long his smile would last. And there was nothing he could do. He didn’t know how to erase it.

‘It’s a tic,’ said Laboure one day, ‘that smile of yours. The tic of the frozen smile.’

‘One moment, Santos. Allow me to introduce you to an impregnable fortress. Chief Ren!’

Paúl Santos had heard about Chief Ren. He’d come from Barcelona. Two years’ intense work experience in Crime. Every police station had an unusual character who became famous further afield and Chief Ren was one of those veterans. The only reference he had was the inspector’s name. Nothing else. ‘You’re from Galicia? Then you’ll know Chief Ren.’ ‘No, I don’t.’ ‘Well, you’ll meet him.’ ‘What’s so special about him?’ ‘You’ll meet him soon enough.’

What did surprise him was that the station chief should call Ren chief, albeit colloquially. People on top don’t tend to fool about when it comes to hierarchy. But Santos soon learnt that Ren moved in a different orbit. Had his own circle of power. Which he carried with him. The chief, that is the station chief, had been right when he described him as a fortress. Aside from a few details of clothing, such as his hat and his tie, which he wore tight as a hangman’s rope, splitting his neck in two, and which Santos would have loved to pull loose, apart from such details, Ren looked like a large, medieval defence work.

‘Chief Ren, this is Paúl Santos Unknown, who’s joining Crime. The first year to graduate in Modern Criminology. We’re getting old, Ren.’

‘You just got out of school?’

Santos knew he was walking a tightrope. There was no way he was going to call him chief.

‘I’ve come from Barcelona, Ren. Two years on the streets.’

‘Listen, Santos,’ said the station chief. ‘In this building, Chief Ren carries a lot of responsibility. He’s in charge of the Brigade of Politico-Social Investigation. But you should also know he’s one of the greats. This is one of the greats, Santos. Hierarchies aside, in our view he’s the best. In terms of information and in terms of application. Did you hear what the Minister said when he was decorated?’

‘That’s enough, boss! I’m getting overweight.’

‘He called him Great Captain. A great captain of State security. Now what do you say?’

‘It’s a great honour.’

‘It is. He called him something else. A soldier of God and the State. Sometimes you have to recognise things for what they are. Listen to this, Santos. If our archives ever disappeared, there’d be no problem. We’d have Chief Ren’s brain.’

‘Thank you, that’s enough. I think Mr Unknown is like me. He’s not easily impressed. Doesn’t give words great importance.’

‘No, no. I give them every importance.’

Ren’s head was very wide. So was his body. But not his eyes. His eyes were small, didn’t stop moving in their sockets, seemed to suffer from a deliberate squint in contrast to the amimia of his podgy face. The boss’s deference went beyond mere courtesy and momentarily pulled in his large body, which was wide and asymmetrical. The structure of his torso was still that of a strong man, but taken together, Paúl Santos reached the conclusion he was in the presence of a body that was seriously dysfunctional, starting with a belly that had long since stopped trying to be discreet. As for his face, it was noticeably swollen. Santos was meeting him for the first time, but it was a work in progress and he assumed it had something to do with the abuse of alcoholic drinks. It could also be a physical strategy since, when they shook hands, Ren’s face revealed a hard kernel, the scrutinising look of those sunken eyes. His hand was almost twice as big as Santos’, but he didn’t hold back on the handshake.