Books Burn Badly

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by Unknown




  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Copyright

  Also by Manuel Rivas

  Dedication

  Author’s Acknowledgements

  Books Burn Badly

  1. The Water Marks

  2. The Night of the Moths

  3. The Newspaper Seller

  4. The Breadcrumb

  5. The Matador

  6. The Burning Books

  7. The Books’ Burial

  8. The Invisible Man

  9. I’ll Just Go and See Who It Is

  10. The Rabble and Providence

  11. Natura Est Maxima in Minimis

  12. Live Phosphorus

  13. Open Body

  14. Dead Man’s Slap

  15. The Doorknocker

  16. The Street Singer

  17. The Lead Locomotive and the Flying Boat

  18. Dez and Terranova

  19. Curtis’ Second Fight

  20. The White Roses

  21. The Prickles of Words

  22. Grandpa Mayarí’s Cane

  23. O and Harmony

  24. Chimpanzee Language

  25. The Strategy of Light

  26. The Urchin Woman

  27. Jolies Madames!

  28. The Apprentice Taxidermist

  29. The 666 Chestnuts

  30. The Gravedigger

  31. King Cintolo’s Cockroach

  32. Acetylsalicylic Acid

  33. The Witch’s Kiss

  34. Pinche’s Bike

  35. The Woman at the Window

  36. The Judge’s Drawer

  37. The Mysterious Outsider

  38. The Yoke Collector

  39. The Supplier of Bibles

  40. I Was Forsook

  41. The Bramble Sphere

  42. The Unfalling Leaves

  43. The Star and Romantic the Horse

  44. The Prohibited

  45. The Championship for God

  46. The Photos

  47. The Paúl Santos Smile

  48. The Inhabitants of Emptiness

  49. The Diligent’s Ball

  50. The Roswell Man

  51. The Chemin Creux

  52. O and Famous Men

  53. The Phosphorescent Diver

  54. Your Name

  55. The Price

  56. Élisée’s Book

  57. Nel blu dipinto di blu

  58. Banana Split

  59. Montevideo’s Cabin

  60. The Song of the Birds

  61. Leica and Silvia

  62. A Dramatic History of Culture

  63. ‘A Sacred Feast’

  64. The Compulsive Writer

  65. The Lighthouse’s Novel

  66. O and Animals

  67. The Portuguese Architect

  68. The Hotel of Mirrors

  69. The Lights Going Out

  70. The Denunciation

  71. The Notebook

  72. A Load of Suspicion

  73. Judith

  74. The Whale’s Belly

  75. The Tachygraphic Rose

  76. Ren’s ‘Museum’

  77. Blue Mist

  78. The Arrest

  79. Popsy’s Delivery

  80. The Lucky Gambler

  81. Disguises

  82. The Camden Town Fire-Eater

  83. Felicity of Expression

  84. The Medal

  85. Purple Rain

  86. Coccinella septempunctata

  87. Working for Eternity

  88. Bigarreaus

  89. You I Can

  90. Something Special

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781409089490

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Harvill Secker 2010

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Copyright © Manuel Rivas and Santillana Ediciones Generales, S.L. 2006

  English translation copyright © Jonathan Dunne 2010

  Manuel Rivas has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published with the title Os libros arden mal in 2006 by Edicións Xerais de Galicia

  First published in Great Britain in 2010 by

  HARVILL SECKER

  Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road

  London SW1V 2SA

  www.rbooks.co.uk

  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9781846551468

  The publication of this work has been made possible through a subsidy received from the Directorate General for Books, Archives and Libraries of the Spanish Ministry of Culture

  The Random House Group Limited supports The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the leading international forest certification organisation. All our titles that are printed on Greenpeace approved FSC certified paper carry the FSC logo. Our paper procurement policy can be found at www.rbooks.co.uk/environment

  Typeset in Quadraat by Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Grangemouth, Stirlingshire

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  Also by Manuel Rivas

  FICTION

  The Carpenter’s Pencil

  Butterfly’s Tongue

  Vermeer’s Milkmaid

  In the Wilderness

  POETRY

  From Unknown to Unknown

  For Antón Patiño Regueira, naturalist and book-collector, in memoriam.

  Burning of books by the Falangists, Coruña Docks, 19 August 1936

  ‘The future is surely uncertain: who can say what will happen? But the past is also uncertain: who can say what happened?’

  Antonio de Machado, Juan de Mairena

  Author’s Acknowledgements

  The author wishes to thank the following:

  The staff of Coruña and the Archive of the Kingdom of Galicia’s libraries. Xan Carlos Agra, Xesús Alonso Montero, Cleudene Aragão, Mimina Arias, Pedro and Pepe Barrós, Manuel Bermúdez Chao, Vicente Boquete Tito, Fermín Bouza, Manuel Bragado, Euan Cameron, Picco Carillo, Esther Casal, Xosé Castro, Ramón Chao, Xosé Chao Rego, Cheni, Antonio Conde, Juan Cruz, Isaac Díaz Pardo, Pilar Diz, Antón Doiro, Jonathan Dunne, Amaya Elezcano, Xaime Enríquez, Guillermo Escrigas, Manuel Espiña, Carlos Fernández, María Estrela Fernández and the family of the murdered Coruñan book-collector Eirís, Benito Ferreiro (son), Xosé A. Gaciño, Víctor García de la Concha, Beatriz Gómez (from Silva), Benito González, Xesús González Gómez, Henrique Harguindey, Juantxu Herguera, the tailor Mr Iglesias, Luis Lamela, Xurxo Lobato, Lola from Lume, Antón López, Alberte Maceda, Santiago Macías, Bernardo Máiz, Danilo Manera, Xosé Luís Martínez, Carlos Martínez-Buján, Xosé Mato, Serge Mestre, César A. Molina, Enrique Molist, Xulio M
ontero, Eirín Moure, Serafín Mourelle, Xosé Manuel Muñiz, Antón Patiño, Dionisio Pereira, Nonito Pereira, Carlos Pereira Martínez, Gabriel Plaza, Xulio Prada, Miguelanxo Prado, Xesús María Reiriz, Manuel Rodríguez, Ana Romero, Josep Maria Joan Rosa, Andrés Salgueiro, Carme Salorio, Manuel Sánchez Salorio, Antón de Santiago, Sito Sedes, Felipe Senén, Xavier Seoane, Xurxo Souto, Celia Torres Bouzas, Dolores Torres París, Olivia Tudela, Alberto Valín, Elvira Varela, Ánxel Vázquez de la Cruz, Mari Vega, Graça Videira, Manuel Vilariño, Dolores Vilavedra, Elke Wehr, Manuel Zamora.

  Iria, Gastón, Miguelón, César Carlos Morán, the group Jarbanzo Negro and Rómulo Sanjurjo.

  Pedro de Llano.

  His uncle Francisco and aunts Manola and Pepita.

  Paco, Sabela and Felicitas.

  Sol and Martiño.

  Isa.

  The Water Marks

  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.

  The Night of the Moths

  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.

  He’d been excitable of late. Spring had been delayed, so summer came
to Oulton Cottage like a frenzied agitator. The dwelling was festooned with the modest exuberance of fuchsias, gypsy flowers he called them, poking through the windows like prodigious Lepidoptera. An ardent atmosphere of drones and pollen made use of each crack and charged in, ready to deliver its message. Inside, everything seemed to hang on his renewed magnetism and to breathe a sigh of relief after the winter episode of a grumpy, prostrate Borrow in the grip of a repulsive current he himself didn’t recognise. Now things were different. He received a few visitors, the occasional gypsy friend who couldn’t tell the time, a virtue Henrietta found annoying. But the old gypsies behaved as if Borrow, the tireless traveller, the polyglot, the youth who could cover a hundred and twenty miles in a day on a pint of beer and two apples, had come back to look after them. Lavengro they called him, which meant wordsmith. Spirited Lavengro never failed to return.

 
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