Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

Silvia explained that her work was measured by time. When she’d finished, she’d tell them how much it cost.

As she turned to leave, the woman said, ‘Oh, I almost forgot! Greetings from Rocío.’

‘Who’s Rocío?’

‘A colleague. She said she knew you.’

Silvia shrugged her shoulders, ‘Well, say hello then.’

Silvia didn’t want Leica to accompany her home or to visit her. Her rented room, in Gaiteira, was near the old railway station. She tried to avoid having contact with the other tenants or drawing attention. The people there were very silent and those that weren’t old seemed to want to grow old before their time. The house, the solidity of the shadows, the taciturn furniture, the murmuring mattresses, the hysterical indiscretion of the cistern above the only toilet in a tiny, communal bathroom. She was there in passing and did not wish to leave any trace, even of the air that went through her lungs. She wanted to put everything, the air and the light, in a suitcase and take them with her when she left. Poor air, poor light. Her only joy was the sound of the trains as they stopped and pulled off. When she sewed, she tried to work her little Singer in time to the engines. But now she had an urgent task. She devoted all her free time to invisible mending. To that very special undertaking.

There was a ring at the doorbell and her sense of alert told her to go and open the front door but, when she entered the hallway, another tenant, Miss Elisa, had already answered. This woman smelt permanently of spices. Her hands were always stained. Her work, which was endless, was to wrap up pinches of cumin, saffron and paprika in tiny paper envelopes she folded at astonishing speed with her small hands and fat, sausage-like fingers. Silvia’s invisible mending and Miss Elisa’s work wrapping spices took place simultaneously, but belonged to two opposing hemispheres of time.

When she saw Leica in the hallway, politely thanking Miss Elisa for being so kind as to open the front door, Silvia was surprised not to feel bothered. She actually did something she would never have allowed herself to do, especially in that house. She embraced him and let him lift her off the floor. He was radiant.

‘I know I shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t help it. We did it, Silvia! They’re going to use your photo in the advert. In the window of Hexámetro! The first advert for electrical appliances with a local model. And Hercules Lighthouse in the background!’

He moved around the room like a master of ceremonies who opens his arms to turn on the lights. A master of ceremonies who plucks landscapes from the walls. Silvia witnessed her room’s conversion. What had been behind the window came inside. Her room was a railway carriage in the station. She suddenly felt like hearing the sewing machine. A breath of animal and machine filtered through the joins between the floor tiles. The bed didn’t sound embittered as usual. The bed listened to their bodies.

By the time they got up, the station was outside the room, without carriages, and the porter boys, the driver of the hire car, the florist, newsagent and shoeshiner seemed to be frozen. Painted. Only two figures moved up and down the platform. One was wearing a hat, both of them were wearing coats tied with a belt. One was short and fat, the other taller and thinner. They looked to Silvia like a comical, sinister pair. And seemed from time to time to glance over at her window. And perhaps they did.

‘What’s this cape?’ asked Leica. The royal cape suddenly attained the status of a mysterious presence. He said, ‘It looks like a garment with history.’

‘Something the nuns asked me to do,’ she replied. ‘An urgent job for a museum. That’s all I know.’

Silvia explained how the task was almost impossible. She could only use the garment’s own threads. An extremely delicate operation. Rather than finding them, she would have to invent them one by one in order to reconstruct the warp.

‘I’ll be at it day and night.’

‘Now that you’re a publicity star? In this country, history always spoils everything.’

They again fell into an embrace. Something to do with their bodies. It’s not easy to let go of the melancholy of bodies.

He had something to say, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He hadn’t even been able to tell Curtis, whom he trusted so much he’d lent him the horse Carirí so that he could earn a living. Curtis or the cellist. Deep down, he thought no one’s going to realise. I’ll just take Franco’s photograph and that’s it. What about the signature? ‘Sebastián Vidal’ won’t pass unnoticed. He’d better put ‘Sebastián V’. Or ‘V. Photos’ and leave it at that. That should do it. ‘V. Photos’. People will identify Ángel Jalón with portrait photos and Sotomayor with paintings. Who’s going to remember ‘V. Photos’?

He was taken aback when she asked him, ‘Is there anything else you’d like to tell me, Leica?’ But, as always, he was quick to recover himself. He exaggerated his voice and gesture in what he called ‘a Mastroianni moment’.

‘Anything else? Isn’t that enough? Our triumphal entrance into the future. We’re inside the future, Silvia, inside the shop window.’

She can’t actually know anything, he thought. It’s a secret. Nobody, except for my brother-in-law, Judge Samos, and the governor, nobody else knows. Rocío? No. Rocío doesn’t know Silvia exists. Nobody could have told her about Franco’s portrait.

She hadn’t expected him to say anything. She’d have had to force it out of him with a dentist’s pliers. There was no way he was going to confess he’d been married for some time and the woman she’d once met in the studio wasn’t the leaseholder and an old friend. He’d added the last bit with a hint of complicity, as if to say: There is, or there was, something between us, but you’re much more important. What he actually whispered in her ear was, ‘She’s never happy with her portrait. I keep telling her it’s not my problem or the camera’s. Some people are never satisfied and confuse a photographer with a beautician.’

‘He believes everything he says,’ Rocío had told Silvia the day she accosted her. ‘He’s always confusing desires with realities. He lives inside a bubble. You’re hardly the first. Ask him and he’ll deny he’s married. Go ahead and ask him. Go on, be brave. I could show you folders full of photos of all his attempted conquests. Maybe it’s a kind of professional hazard. Maybe he has to fall in love in order to take good photos. I don’t know. Could be. It’s some time since I last looked good in a photo.’

Despite feeling dizzy, her senses on hold due to Rocío’s sudden arrival, Silvia listened to her with interest. A woman who could express the idea that Leica’s camera no longer loved her deserved to be heard.

But Rocío’s tone soon changed, perhaps as a reaction to the surprising calm she observed on the map of Silvia’s face.

‘I want you to know I won’t allow your relationship to continue. I’d crush you first. I can ruin your life, you’ve no idea how far I can go.’

As she said this, she pressed her thumb against the marble table of Delicacies, the café in Catro Camiños, whose display window had until then reflected Leica’s cheerful greeting with one of his Mastroianni smiles.

‘I’ve the means to do it.’

Are you married, Leica? Why didn’t you tell me? No. She wasn’t going to question him. Rocío’s directness made her feel fragile again. Silvia often thought about Medusa’s face. She also felt as if she’d been torn inside. She lived half a life and had noticed since being a girl that living a whole life was forbidden people like her in this patch of world. On days of sadness, she viewed the bay as a pool in which mullets fed on the dreams eyes threw into the sea.