Manuel Rivas: Books Burn Badly

AT FIRST, HE bothers me. He’s young. I don’t know him. It happens sometimes. They get in the way. I was watching out for the tango singer who appeared on stage at the invitation of Pucho Boedo of the Oriental Orchestra. In a white suit and a red cravat. Please welcome a friend of mine who sings like the sea rocked to sleep by the lighthouse: Luís Terranova. . A real looker. Even more so when he opened his mouth. All his childish features vanished and his bones stood out. It was ‘Chessman’, about someone who’s been sentenced to death. I’d never heard a tango sung like that. It was as if he’d just composed it, was making it up. It’s ten and the clock chimes as I take a step into God’s time. Would you believe the time was right? That was at the dance in San Pedro de Nós. I don’t remember now, but I think even the musicians stopped playing. That summer, I went with Ana and Amalia to the different fairs, hoping to hear him again, but he’d disappeared. I would sing the tango by the river — My steps are books, the Lord’s passion; my rest a chair the world put there — and with a bit of effort I finally managed to compose his figure in the water. I know it’s cheating. But I also have the right to evoke some images, not just to wait for those that turn up.

Like this one. This one came of its own accord.

He’s a soldier. At first, I’m a little shocked. He seemed a bit of a monster. So young and in uniform. Smooth-faced. Baby-faced except for the lips, which are fleshy and more forward than his other features. Maybe the mouth hangs open like that when it’s in the water, against the current. He looks at me with curiosity. And a sad smile. He has a round face, like those in our family. He’s blond. The water is golden, not from the sun’s rays, but maybe because of his blondness. I enjoy the figures’ company, but I don’t like it when they stare. I drop the garment I’m washing in their direction, slowly, not to smash the image, but so that it fades away, lurks under a pebble, has a chance to hide in the reeds.

But this time I don’t. This time, I let it be.

A baby-faced soldier with a man’s look. A smooth-faced soldier. In a trenchcoat with big buttons and a stiff collar. Framed by a circle of water. His arms are crossed and he wears a badge on his left sleeve. A man’s look, that’s right. He looks at me without pride, but also without pity. It’s what they do, the water figures, they come and see, look when you look.

I asked Mum about him.

I asked her about the young soldier.

She pretends not to hear me.

Slap, slap! Cloth on stone.

I think Mum would prefer not to know about my figures. Maybe she has enough with her own. I notice she avoids shaking the clothes out by the river when she sees me gazing into the water. I think they also move, change looks along the river, because they’re extremely restless. When one disappears for a while, it’s probably off somewhere in her circles. That’s what happened to the boxer. The boxer hung around here for a while, on my part of the river, and then left. I reckon he went to where she washes since Polka told me the boxer liked women who worked in the local factories.

But she pretends not to see my figures, and I pretend not to see hers.

‘What’s that?’

‘A soldier, a baby-faced soldier.’

‘There’s been more than one soldier,’ she said. Slap, slap!

‘Right. The one I’m talking about is smooth-faced and blond. And smiles. Or sort of, anyway.’

‘You mean Domingos,’ she finally replied, ‘who died at Annual in 1921. The one with the tubes of laughter.’

The figure smiled. It was him, the one with the tubes of laughter.

‘He always smiled,’ said Olinda. ‘Smart as garlic, but weak. Sickly. Our mother, Grandma Dansa, accompanied him to the recruiting office.

‘“This lad’s no good for war,” she told them.

‘And one of them replied, “Everyone’s good for war, if not for killing, then for dying.”

‘One day he wrote a letter, saying he had responsibility for the tubes of laughter, the name they gave the radio operators’ poles. He’d carry the radios on the back of a mule. And he learnt things. Said he could now understand the language of birds. All of his letters were a kind of joke. They seemed to have come not from a war, but from a comedy. They were such a joke grandma cried when we read them to her. At the end, he always put IKTH , which meant I Kiss The Hand Of My Mother . And grandma couldn’t stop crying because of what he’d learnt at war.’

And then Olinda opened up. She talked about something she always avoided, about the soldiers in our family and our locality. The Philippines. Cuba. Morocco. ‘Go forth and multiply as cannon fodder. An empire of bones, piled up year after year. Followed by those who died in the Civil War. What the army lost abroad they tried to reconquer at home.’ That’s what Olinda said. Slap, slap! The wet cloth striking against the stone seemed, in someone so taciturn, to be a way of expanding the story. Words with a layer of dusty sweat, iodine and blood, suddenly soaked, twisted, slapped, soaped, twisted, wrung out. Left in the sun. Clean. A white shirt drying. Some trousers. The wind filling the vacant clothing. At the washing place, in a crack in the wall that stops the north-easterly, there is always a robin. When the women fall silent, the robin sings. A tube of laughter. The old burying the young, according to Olinda. That’s what war is.

Now there’s something funny, and I don’t know if it’s normal or not, but I can’t see myself in the water. I can see Olinda. I look sideways and see my mother both in and out of the water. She’s on her knees, her body next to the washing stone. An angular woman’s body. The stone seems to have been gradually worn down by the stroke of bellies. The axis in our bellies and the shape of the stone are what link the sky, the earth and the water. As she applies soap, I look sideways, first at her reflection in the water and then at her. The sun’s behind her, her hair is gathered by a headscarf tied at the back of her neck, she again adopts an expression of hardness. She’s hard on the inside. Her eyes give nothing away. You can see that better in the water.

Oulton Cottage, night of 11 July 1881

‘I ASKED THE steersman if there was any hope of saving the vessel, or our lives.

‘“None of us will see the morning,” he replied.’

For the second night running, old Borrow recounted the storm off Cape Finisterre. Henrietta MacOubrey, his stepdaughter, decided that this time she’d listen for as long as it took a white moth to collide with the lamp. Two white moths if the first arrived too quickly. It seemed fair enough. He was a good narrator. When he told stories, his whole body became calligraphy in motion, from the flexing of his fingers to the dilatation of his pupils. Having been a Biblical propagandist, he knew the rules of suspense. And that’s why he advanced in stages, subtly, without committing excesses, because he loved to invent, but he despised anything that smacked of implausibility as much as fanatical truth. So he wasn’t telling the story for the second time, but getting a little closer, with inflamed accuracy, to that storm with hurricane winds on the night of 11 November 1836, off Cape Finisterre, the world’s rockiest coastline.