Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

There’s a pauper called Zamorana who lives and sleeps among the tombs and pantheons in the city of the dead, in the seaside cemetery of San Amaro. She once gave Hercules a fright when she stepped out from behind a grave and, holding up a cigarette butt, asked him:

‘Got a light, boy?’

Zamorana is not really a beggar. She has a job paid for by tips that is very important for the city. Coruña’s late departed look out to sea. Near the shore by the cemetery are the Ánimas shoals, the best breeding grounds, with more starfish on the bottom than can be seen in the sky. Though they can also be spotted falling from on high. Seagulls and cormorants fly with starfish in their beaks, so the starfish jettison their captive limb and return to the sea an arm short. The cemetery affords the best view of the mouth of the bay. And this has something to do with Zamorana, who asked Curtis for a light the night he spent by the graveyard. The beggar-woman is a sentinel. When a liner comes into sight, she goes down Torre Street, warning of the boat’s arrival. A liner is full of rich pickings. Zamorana’s voice sounds like a husky conch shell. ‘Boat’s coming, Mr Ferreiro, boat’s coming. . Boat’s coming, Mr Ben, boat’s coming. . Boat’s coming.’

Zamorana emerges with her ditty about a boat’s arrival, and she emerges from the cemetery, not from any old place. Curtis recalls how when he was a boy, Zamorana was already old, already announced boats in her husky voice. He thought she and others like her lasted for ever. María Pita, for example. The procession of country dead remained at the city gates. And the seaside cemetery’s occupants delegated the lighthouse and Zamorana’s husky conch to rouse the city: ‘Boat’s coming.’

The reason Vicente Curtis, otherwise known as Hercules, is thinking about Zamorana is because she’s standing by the Parrote viewpoint. Besides the arsonists, she’s the only discernible presence. She’s unmistakable. She’s wearing all the skirts she owns, the skirts of a lifetime, one on top of the other, so she looks like a female bell. Some ships arrived yesterday. Warships. They’re moored next to the yacht club and are part of the Third Reich’s fleet. She saw them coming, but didn’t go down Torre Street, singing her ditty, ‘Boat’s coming, boat’s coming!’ She watches. She’s seen many things. But not that kind of fire. She’s never read a book. There was a time, perhaps her happiest, when she sold newspapers. She hawked news though she couldn’t read. That’s why she thinks they’re hurting her. Going against her. They’re burning what she never had, what she always needed. There’s something strange about the smoke, it stings, gets behind the eyes. Reminds her of a time she’d rather forget. The day a stranger set fire to the blanket she was sleeping rough under, the day she put out her flaming hair with her hands. And now her hands are scars healed by the sea. That’s why she decided to sleep among the tombs. Where are the readers of books? Why are they taking so long?

‘Oy you, old witch, what you looking at? Get out of here!’ shouts one of the soldiers. ‘Go find yourself a billy-goat on Mount Alto!’

She never kept quiet. This Cain had better listen up. She was going to tell him a thing or two. Put a few things straight. Have it out with him, face to face.

This strange smoke that gets behind the eyes. This itching. The smoky torch. The fire. The smell of fire in her hair. She burnt once already. The skin’s memory. The scars’ itching. She moves off. Better to keep the peace. She returns to her tombs, trailing her bell of cloth. All the skirts of a lifetime.

The book fires are not part of the city’s memory. They’re happening now. So this burning of books isn’t taking place in some distant past or in secret. Nor is it a fictional nightmare thought up by some apocalyptic. It’s not a novel. This is why the fire progresses slowly, because it has to overcome resistance, the arsonists’ incompetence, the unusualness of burning books. The absentees’ incredulity. It’s obvious the city has no memory of this lazy, stubborn smoke moving through the air’s surprise. Even what’s not been written has to burn. Someone arrives from the local tourist office, carrying a pile of leaflets with the programme of festivities, ‘fresh meat’ they call it, possibly in reference to the woman bathing on the front cover under the heading Ideal Climate and the town’s official coat of arms, the lighthouse with an open book on top acting as a lamp giving off beams of light. All this will burn slowly, the design as well, which won’t make it back on to the city’s escutcheon.

‘Plato’s Republic . About time! What’s this? An Encyclopedia of Meat! ’ Bam!

It’s a thick volume that sends embers flying and eats away the angles of ruins like the sudden collapse of a seam on lower buildings. The word ‘meat’ was enough to activate the throw. The head imagines a treatise on lust, pictures of orgies, shame not to have had a peek. When the volume reaches the end of its fall, the Falangist gives it a little kick on the corner with the toecap of his boot. As it opens, with a new eruption of smoke and cinders and the first flames, what meets the eyes is a two-page map of the peninsula with the different provinces shown in colours. The effect is too causal, an accidental jerk of the boot, which the eyes hasten to correct. No, they’re not the provinces of Spain. It soon becomes obvious it’s really an illustration of the different parts of a cow. Loin, sirloin, hock, coccyx, rump, rib, brisket. .

‘What you’ve thrown in there is a book of recipes!’ comes a mocking voice from behind.

‘Then it’ll make a nice barbecue.’

The fires are in the most public part of the city, opposite the symbolic seat of civil power. Hercules shouldn’t head in that direction because Hercules is far better known than he thinks. But for now he’s in luck. He approaches the fires and none of the operators, all of them armed and dressed in the Falange’s uniform, pays him any attention, taken up as they are with the problem of books burning badly. One of them likens them to bricks. And then attaches a geometrical clarification even he finds strange:

‘They’re parallelepipeds!’

Next to him, the youngest soldier wishes to repeat the long word, but realises it isn’t easy and tries whispering it. It sounds like the name of a very rare species of bird. More complicated than palmipedes. He doesn’t have any problems with that, with palmipedes, and looks at the pyre without reading the titles, like an abstraction, like the model of an Aztec pyramid.

‘Pa-ra-lle-le-pi-peds! That’s it. Parallelepipeds.’

He finally got it. He feels better now.

‘Parallelepiped!’ says the sergeant, slapping him on the back.

‘Parallelepiped,’ he replies proudly, following the trail of smoke and gazing up at the sky. Encouraged by his success, he tries to remember the names of clouds he studied at school. All he remembers is nimbus. What’s a nimbus? What kind of cloud is made by the smoke rising from the pyres? But he stops thinking about clouds because the one who likened the resistance of the books to bricks and pronounced the word ‘parallelepiped’ with incredible ease is preparing to fan the fire with some sheets of newspaper. One of them slips out of his hands and flies like a palmiped. A strange bird, the beginnings of a collage in the sky. Curtis also follows the sheet through the air. The soldier who lost it runs after it, jumps and traps it in the claw of his hand. Looks smug. Calls the others over. There they are with arms upraised in a photo taken yesterday, when they lit the first fires, which the clerical daily El Ideal Gallego printed today, 19 August 1936: ‘On the seashore, so that the sea can carry off the remains of so much misery and corruption, the Falange is burning heaps of books.’