Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

Quickly the boats

surround the whole sea.

He went over to the window. Barcaroles. Atlantic sea-wolves dressed up as gondoliers to welcome royalty. Someone should write a comical history of the city. Lino’s Pavilion packed for the charity concert, the nuns in the front row. The general public trying to hasten the first acts so that they can get to the number they’re waiting for. Chelito, who’s just arrived for the occasion from Barcelona’s Parallel Avenue. Will she or will she not sing The Flea? Part of the public is worried. Views the nuns with suspicion, even if they are Sisters of Charity.

‘ The Flea! The Flea! ’

The host, Mr Lino, appeals for calm. Reminds them of their manners.

‘Why doesn’t Lino sing The Flea! ’

‘Why doesn’t your mother?’

And so on. He only had a photographic memory of the Pavilion with its sensual façade. Shame it burnt. It was one of the temples in that architecture, a peculiar form of Atlantic art nouveau, which spread from the Fishmarket to Recheo Gardens, reclaimed land, and which seemed to have been conceived as a permanent flirt, a joyful plan in which both people and materials took part, the wood’s voluptuousness, the metals’ erotic rebirth, the iron’s sudden vegetal will, the dominant colour of glass everywhere, a second nature of mirrors, spaces to see and be seen, the glass’s second life, at night, somnambulant, electric. The next, splendid wave, which not by chance coincided with Corbu and the Black Pearl’s dockside visit, was of boat-houses. After the war, architectural horror. The violation of modernist carnality. The intimidation of property. The corrosion of the city’s character. The dictatorship’s main feature was ugliness. An unpublishable conclusion. Everything had got uglier. He himself had. So had handwriting.

Lino also owned a merry-go-round, a form of entertainment for a younger audience, which lasted slightly longer than the Pavilion. It arrived by boat from France. Played the ‘Marseillaise’ on the harmonica. Children sat on horses in time to the hymn of the Revolution. But it happened the other way round too. When the municipal band played the ‘Marseillaise’, a popular piece in their repertoire, children thought the band was paying tribute to Lino’s merry-go-round with its wooden horses. As the years went by, music and machinery got out of sync. César Alvajar called it ‘the twanging harmonica’. Coruña, perched on Atlantic rock, is a windy city. Not just visited, but inhabited by winds. There were days, especially if the roundabout was empty, the horses riderless, the wind, at least the wind in the gardens, would sway on the lonely mounts snorting bits of a nasal ‘Marseillaise’.

He closes his eyes. For him, that sound, that twanging roundabout’s wind, has to cross the walls of time. Some things that have disappeared are remembered by lots of people. But only he remembers the merry-go-round, its childish, nasal ‘Marseillaise’. ‘Are you sure it was the “Marseillaise”?’ asked one of the newspaper’s veterans in the condescending tone used with those who have craters or distortions in their memory. Better not to repeat it. Maybe there are memories that choose only one witness. The whale, Sada. Books, him.

When he recalls the burning of books, it all comes back to him with sensorial precision. He had a complete, aerial view from the terrace in María Pita Square. He thought he was well concealed, the perfect place for a spy. The smell reached him, but not the smoke. This was something that caught his attention. The way the smoke from the books hung about. He was watching how people reacted, this was his main focus. He had to write an article and was planning to write one on the art of walking. So he used the terrace as a vantage point. Paid particular attention to the soldiers’ determined, lineal movements and the different movements of people who’d turned up there by chance. How they quickened their pace or took strange, curved, furtive detours. You could recognise a fearful walk. Invent a chironomy of power and fear. He could tell it all with accuracy, but not write about it. Perhaps the idea of an article on the ways of walking came later. A tactic on the part of his imagination aimed at forgetting. Because now he remembers it differently. With that inflamed accuracy. The resinous smell reached him in slow spirals, but lots of it was thick, stubborn smoke that hung around lazy volumes. He realised now what was happening. Something he’d never thought about. The smoke had forms. Fashioned scenes, characters, backdrops.

There was something vengeful about this melancholy. He couldn’t write about it. The soldiers, the pillagers, were there. In charge of the city. Their leader was the Head of State. When could he explain how Cornide House, the most valuable historic building in Coruña’s Old City, was bought for the dictator’s family for the price of a pack of cigarettes? Never. He’d never be able to publish this headline:

FIVE PESETAS

Now we know what price

the authorities put on our dignity

If he didn’t fight against this melancholy, he’d become mute, agraphic. Wouldn’t be able to write or say another thing.

Stringer picked up the cuttings referring to that great Venetian day of joyful torment. The director of the evening Expreso had something to add:

‘Pass this test, please. I’ve an important mission for you this summer.’

Stringer had an intuition. The future rowed like a merry gondolier.

‘This summer?’

‘How do you feel about taking charge of the festival supplements?’

Stringer was nervous. This was something he would never have dared to dream of. He wasn’t envious of editors who spent their whole day constructing news items from the teleprinters, which almost always came from the same source, the state-owned news agency EFE, so named after Franco’s initial.

‘All of it?’

‘Galán will look after publicity. You’ll write like a tachygraphic lion. Interview beauty queens, mayors, the official chronicler, the most important businessman. You can also throw in the odd social poet or Bohemian artist. Get them to chat a bit about California.’

He tried to stop cynicism ruining his humorous intentions. ‘Real journalism, my boy! And you’ll earn a few pesetas. I don’t want to hear again that you’ve been sleeping at night in the phone box, wrapped in newspapers. You’ll have to invent something for the supplement on Caneiros, the Mandeo festivities. Forget about that novel, Balboa. You’ll get home one day and find it’s finished.’

‘Thank you, sir. I’ll do my best.’

Aldán considered asking Stringer for a favour. To see if anyone knew what had happened to an old roundabout. The twanging roundabout that belonged to Lino of the modernist Pavilion and played the ‘Marseillaise’. But he looked at his watch instead and let out a kind of password in farewell:

‘ The Flea! ’

THEY THOUGHT HE wasn’t going to reply. That he too, Hercules, the travelling photographer, the Galician champ’s old sparring partner, had stopped listening. Was moving the dial. Was possibly tuning in to a radio station from the past. They didn’t realise he was walking towards the flames, clad in smoke that made his eyes itch.

‘His one-two. His one-two was very special, wasn’t it, Curtis?’ said the crane operator ardently, trying to rouse him from his reverie. ‘First, his right would go for the face, give the impression it was serious. But it was the left hook that was serious. As if a cobra had leapt off the ground. The one receiving the blow didn’t know where it had come from.’

He looked at Curtis, waiting for a nod, a nuance. Something.