Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

‘At your service, Mr Ren.’

‘I’m in a dilemma. I’m not sure which you like better, Santos or Unknown.’

‘My friends call me Unknown.’

‘Then I’ll call you Santos. Let me tell you what a confessor told my rather gullible spinster aunt, “Listen, Milucha, even saints have pricks.”’

They burst out laughing. Santos felt his colleague’s slap. A slap of intimacy, which knocked him forwards. Ren seemed to feel better, having got this off his chest. He crossed his arms and his body regained a certain symmetry.

‘Till now, the only Unknowns I’ve met were criminals. Santos, right? So you went to university. Got yourself an education.’

‘I studied law, Mr Ren,’ said Santos, who couldn’t help varnishing his words with a hint of pride.

‘Yeah, me too,’ said Inspector Ren, looking at the station chief. ‘It was lawful.’ They again burst out laughing as if they’d played a joke on a novice.

Santos went along with it. Forced a smile. His first impressions were confirmed. The tone used by the station chief to refer to Ren wasn’t just one of loyalty, even friendship. It pointed to the mental position of a subordinate.

‘I’m called Unknown because I grew up in Charity Hospital, Mr Ren,’ said Santos politely.

‘I know that,’ Ren replied gruffly.

‘His head contains our finest archive,’ said the station chief. ‘All the city’s secrets.’

‘You’re exaggerating. But we have picked up something along the way. Now things will improve. Our friend Santos here will incorporate new methods. Long live scientific police work! I always wished I’d had a scientific training.’

‘The departments are different, but you’ll have to work together when necessary,’ said the station chief. ‘So welcome and don’t hesitate to seek help from a master like him.’

Ren couldn’t hide the fact he enjoyed adulation. Paúl Santos measured his proportions. Ren’s ego was large, physiological. It had increased in size. Ren took up more space now than when they’d first been introduced.

‘Tell me something, Santos,’ Ren intervened. ‘How did you get to Charity Hospital? Did someone take you in their arms? Were you left at night at the wheel? What’s your story? Have you looked into who your parents were?’

The man was wide. That was the word. Strong, robust, but above all wide. His manner of speaking was also expansive. With his arms crossed, he heaped rubble at the other’s feet, without caring if it landed on top of him. The only thing that was different were his eyes. They were lively and small calibre.

‘I was born in the Room for Secret Deliveries.’

Ren fell quiet. He’d be searching through the Archive for Secret Deliveries. This is where rich women gave birth to their indiscretions, so it was said. Santos thought Laboure had trained him to deal with just such people. People like Ren. Laboure’s pauses were not meant to transmit calm, but greater speed to the engine. First she’d drink some coffee. Light a cigarette, inhale deeply and seem to wait for the smoke to go to her head. Then she’d stand up and blow a plume of smoke, ‘ Courage! ’

It wasn’t easy to explain. A nun who gave him strength. Not with tales of martyrs. Her motto was, ‘No excuses’.

‘You weren’t born just anywhere. You were born in the Room for Secret Deliveries. You’ve been called. You’re a chosen one. You have to fight against evil. Il faut tuer le mal! ’ She spoke with drunken clarity. Catherine Laboure visited every corner of the city. Went down alleyways. Knocked at doors. Left a trail of black tobacco, her Gauloises. She’d go down to the port, where she had some local skippers who kept her supplied. But today she was smoking thanks to a legionnaire who’d gone blind and sometimes dealt in cannabis.

‘You can tell good by looking at it.’

She was half crazy. Perhaps the only way to gain respect in such an enclosed space.

‘ Ah, que tu es beau! ’

Then very seriously, ‘You were born in the Room for Secret Deliveries.’

‘So what?’

‘Never be inhuman.’

When they were left alone, the boss said about Ren, ‘He’s not a bad person, it’s just he has a problem with people. There was a British king, George I, a Hanoverian, who was said to be an extraordinary person because he hated only three people in this world: his mother, his wife and his son. Ren’s mother died long ago and he doesn’t have a wife or child. So he’s plenty to choose from.’

Santos smiled the Paúl Santos smile.

‘I think he includes you in that category.’

‘What category?’

‘Humankind.’

On leaving the office, Santos had formed a different idea about the boss’s character. He was one of those who, instead of taking your hand, let theirs hang loosely and quickly withdraw it like a slippery concession. He wondered now whether this sharp observation he’d made about Ren, to his surprise and in confidence, wasn’t in fact a message. A warning from on high.

THE INEXPLICABLE HADN’T changed with the passing of time. Sometimes the crane’s arm wasn’t long enough to reach an object lying on the bottom. But it was long enough to reach the bike. Which became visible at low tide and still seemed, on its own, to be quickly turning its wheels without moving, as if it had acquired the existence of a mechanical echinoderm. The boy with the lazy eye who lost control, Pinche, was saved by one of the Phosphorescents.

‘They killed him. I told you a thousand times,’ the crane operator sighed impotently. ‘So don’t ask me why they killed him if he was champ.’

‘Why’d they kill him if he was champ?’

‘What does it matter if he was champ? Dumb boy. They were out to kill and they got him.’

He had to be discreet. Some people were impenetrable. Memory acts like a mollusc, secretes a protective shell. But sometimes he came across ugly, disgusting scabs that were in denial. With Korea, it was different. He felt strangely obliged to try and explain the inexplicable.

He’d tell him what happened to the Montoyas, the gypsy basket-makers.

There’s a night brigade in the car, the black Opel. September 1936. They’re not out to see what they can get. They’re obeying the orders of the so-called Invisible Tribunal, which is where terror, the decimation of the adult population, is planned. The Falangists are out searching for someone from San Pedro de Nós to ‘give him coffee’. That’s the expression they used. They were sitting in the Union Café, in Pontevedra Square, and the one in charge said, ‘Today we’re giving so-and-so coffee.’ The Delegate of Public Order had agreed, using the same expression, ‘Coffee!’ The radio broadcasts of a nationalist general, Queipo de Llano, had made it fashionable to talk about death in this way. The gypsy basket-makers are in Ponte da Pasaxe, heading west. So they’ve all the pyrotechnics of dusk in front of them. The sun will be sizzling like hot iron in Bens Sea. It’s the end of summer. Nightfall. They can feel it on their backs, almost hear its wickerwork shadows. But what they see are the purple dyes, from reddy blue to clot-like, in the woolly clouds. The Montoyas like colours, prints, wherever they may be, on the landscape or bodies. But today this is also their direction. They’re heading westwards for the simple reason they’re going home, to Gaiteira, next to the railway station. After Ponte da Pasaxe, they’ll turn right along Xubias Road and then dusk won’t be in front of them, but on their left, behind Eirís Mountains. But they haven’t turned yet. The Montoyas are spellbound by the range of purples and one of them bursts into song. As is only natural. He should have started earlier, think the other two. The oldest of the three basket-makers is Manuel, aged forty-five, married to Guadalupe, with whom he has eight children. And then there are his two nephews, Antonio, sixteen, and Manolo, fourteen. It’s Antonio who starts singing. Singing for all of them. Singing a fandango with a grown-up’s voice. Manuel is silent. He thinks when Antonio sings, he’s doing it with his voice, the way he’d sing were he to have the gift of expressing what’s inside. ‘And my sorrow is your sorrow. Your pain is my pain. Your happiness is my joy.’ Merchandise on their backs, purples in the sky, Antonio’s fandango, the smell of sex at low tide. None of the three notices the black Opel coming the other way, from the city. The black Opel’s occupants, however, with the sun behind them, spot the three gypsy basket-makers from far away.