Books Burn Badly (15 page)

During the afternoon, in the long summer hours, when the Academy’s only client was Monsieur Le Clock, the odd sailor would drop by. Most of the women used the afternoon break to sleep in time’s embrace, under a quilt of shadows. And the sailor would look around in search of someone to listen and light on Hercules’ open eyes. Because while he also was in time’s embrace, even when he slept, his eyes stayed open.

‘Not completely, but a little bit, yes.’

‘That’s good,’ declared Pombo. ‘For someone like him, that’s good. He needs them on both sides, like a hare, all the better to see with.’

‘You’ve got them on both sides,’ said Flora, ‘like a sentry.’

‘Get over it, girl. At a certain age, you become invisible. Transparent. They can’t see you.’

‘Even with raised insoles?’

‘Hey Samantha! Will you go and see if that pussy’s laid an egg?’

‘The orphanage? No one’s leaving here for the orphanage,’ said Samantha and for once her authority and sentiment seemed to coincide. ‘The only thing I’m sorry about is I promised Grande Obra a baby Jesus for their nativity scene.’

‘And what’s wrong with the child?’ asked Flora.

‘You’re impossible to talk to,’ said Samantha. ‘He’s ugly. And that mark on his back . . .’

‘It’s no problem,’ said Flora suddenly, looking very serious. ‘He’s been offered to the Union as well.’

‘The Union has a nativity scene?’

‘And an Epiphany parade.’

‘Grande Obra asked first,’ said Samantha. ‘The Bolshies have enough with their revolution.’

‘They’re not Bolsheviks. They’re anarchists.’

‘Like me. From here on down.’

‘You’re a brute the size of a plough.’

‘I’m from the village, like you. And proud of it.’

‘I’m not from the village,’ said Flora. ‘I was washed up by the sea.’

‘Now listen here, you . . .’

‘The important thing,’ the Widow intervened, ‘is to have a godfather who can say the Creed. So the child doesn’t stammer.’

‘In Italy, there’s a baby Jesus who’s a girl.’

‘And in Vinhó he’s dressed up as Napoleon.’

‘Aren’t we international!’ Samantha exclaimed, while Pombo started singing a Peruvian carol:

It may have been the effect of having to draw back an entrance curtain, but many of the stories the sailors told Curtis or, to be more precise, told his open, attentive eyes were about things that turned up in whales’ bellies. Some brought not only the stories, but the things as well. Like the harpooner Mr Lens.

There were two big whaling companies in Galicia, the Spanish Whaling Company and the Spanish Crown Society. Behind both of them was the influential industrialist Massó. One of the factories was in Caneliñas, in Cee, with the whaling ships based in Coruña Harbour. Lens of Arou, the harpooner, knew nothing about Massó, but a lot about whales. They were his life. The first time he saw a whale was on top of a rock on Lobeira Beach. He was fishing for octopuses with an ear of maize. The rope, the stone, were an extension of his arm. Despite all their intelligence, and Lens’ father said they were like people, octopuses had a weakness, an irrepressible desire to latch on to an ear of maize. And that ear was part of Lens’ body, a third arm. He once caught an octopus as big as himself. When it saw itself out of the water, betrayed by that alluring, golden ear of maize, the octopus, which was huge on the Lens scale, infuriated by such skulduggery, enveloped the boy’s body, and face as well, with its eight arms. But Lens wouldn’t let himself be dragged out to sea. With the octopus stuck to his head, he ran to where his father was and when he finally got rid of it, little Lens bore the mark of its suckers and had been completely drained. ‘It was the octopus’ revenge,’ he told Hercules. ‘It sucked out everything I had. I didn’t have much education, but what I did know, I lost. I had to start from scratch. Put it all back. The names of people and things. Every single word. The whole lot.’ A whale was his unit of measurement. Especially when talking about emotions. Joy, when great, was of whale-like proportions.

‘How many whales have you killed?’

‘The joy is not in killing them, but in watching them emerge. Seeing a whale emerge. It’s the kind of joy that doesn’t fit inside your body. Pain’s like that as well. The trouble with a great sadness is that it doesn’t fit inside your body.’

Hercules remembered this unit of measurement the harpooner taught him on afternoons in the Academy. Real joy and pain were too big to fit inside your body. It can be very painful to see a giant man cry. He’d seen this. Harpooners collapsing with sadness on the table, smashing glasses and bottles. Their pain was as heavy as a whale. But a weak, scared woman can also carry tons of pain on top of her head. A premonition. A whale.

‘And your mother?’ asked Lens of Arou.

‘My mother? My mother cooks,’ replied Curtis hastily, ‘sews and fluffs up the wool inside the mattresses.’

‘I know that. But where is she?’

‘She went to buy some damask,’ Hercules lied.

‘Some damask?’

‘For the covers. She has a thing about damask.’

Vicente Curtis liked the harpooner. But when it came to his mother, he tried to keep men at a distance. The harpooner was twice the size of Milagres. Even Curtis had been too big for her. When he emerged from her belly, he left an empty space in what the Widow called her ‘sacred chamber’.

‘The birth,’ warned the Widow, ‘will be followed by a melancholy air. An insatiable wind that preys on newly delivered mothers.’

‘What do we have to do?’

‘It’s a crafty, human wind that searches out gaps in people and likes to plant sadness in the space left by the baby. Keep the child always close at hand. What the wind wants is for her to hate the child so that it can take his place. You have to love her. And the child as well.’

‘And who’s going to love me?’ asked Samantha.

‘Some questions in life just don’t have an answer,’ said Flora.

‘That was a good one,’ said the madame. ‘I won’t hold it against you.’

Milagres had the child always with her. Not just tied, grafted on to her body. On her back or front, in a series of girdles. When he started walking and disappeared from view, she let out a whine that was like a cat or seagull mewing. Later, when they made the skylight and Curtis embarked on his existence as a head popping out of the roof, the cats and seagulls were like distant company, suspicious residents. He realised how similar they were at night. A crossbreed of feline gulls and cats about to fly. Sleepwalking fauna for a sleepless city.

Curtis would have liked the roof fauna to come down and sniff around the books’ remains. Something to fill the void. Even the books burning badly, slowly being consumed, seemed to be waiting for somebody. Cats and gulls, rooftop plumes, gull-like cats and cat-like gulls remained still, taxidermic, as in an experiment to dispense with the atmosphere.

If only Milagres was with the harpooner now. Curtis had discovered that Mr Lens’ size was proportional to the stories he stored inside. If anyone could exorcise the void, it was the harpooner. To start with, following his mother’s instructions, Curtis provided a barrier. The harpooner would arrive in the Academy at some sleepy hour of the afternoon, when even Pombo took a break, leaving Curtis in charge, practising his scrawl in the light of a green lamp. He would ask after Milagres, the boy would come out with some excuse, sounding increasingly unconvinced, but the harpooner never kicked against the pricks. He’d deposit part of his store of stories in the boy, leading his body to become normal while Curtis’ grew. There was not a drop of fat in the harpooner’s storytelling, it was all lean meat.

‘Do you know where all the umbrellas the wind takes in Galicia end up? On the same boat.’

‘Always the same one?’

‘That’s right. An old container ship, which acts like a magnet for umbrellas. About two hundred miles out to sea. It’s called the
Mara Hope
. From here, it goes to Rotterdam and sells them on in bulk.’

He then told him how things from the sea rain on earth and things from the earth rain at sea. In Galicia, in the middle of winter, a shower of pilchards had fallen inland from a cloud of seaweed. The cloud had burst, like someone opening a net in mid-air. Thousands of small, silvery sardines falling on the rye. Which is why the fields of Courel sometimes smell of the sea. While the woods are covered in a moss of seaweed with starfish hanging from the treetops. These are the so-called animate waves which rise in gale-force winds, turning into pregnant clouds. ‘Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of animate waves and pregnant clouds. Isn’t there an old newspaper lying around?’

‘It’s true what he says about umbrellas,’ intervened Pombo, who’d finished his break. ‘The other way round too. Have you never seen a flock of cod heading in the direction of Terra Cha? And in Riazor Stadium the other day it bucketed down caps with the name “Numancia” embroidered on them.’

‘I can only talk about what I’ve seen,’ said Mr Lens a tad suspiciously.

‘Honest to cod,’ insisted Pombo.

Curtis enjoyed this duel. Things to-ing and fro-ing by air and sea. They vied not to tell the truth, but to invent the biggest story. Before working as a harpooner in the North Atlantic, Lens had spent many years in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.

‘Never trust the calm,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘It’s what I’m most afraid of. The calm. You know, when nothing happens, there’s a dead calm, the sea like a plate.’

Curtis shook his head.

‘At the centre of a hurricane! What they call the area of calm. Don’t forget it. In the area of calm, be alert, in a state of emergency.’

Curtis thought he heard Pombo blink. Alert. His tongue tickling.

‘You can be on the boat with nothing moving. Everything completely still. When suddenly, swept offshore by the hurricane, something falls. What you’d least expect. Because it’s one thing,’ he said sarcastically, ‘for it to rain a tin of sardines in the mountains the day Pombo goes for a picnic and quite another for it to rain, as I have seen – I have seen! – a flock of sheep on board a ship, carried along by a hurricane.’

‘Sheep with umbrellas, I suppose,’ commented Pombo ironically.

‘Only when the flock has a shepherd. Then they fall with a large umbrella, of the type called “seven parishes”. In the Caribbean, I’ve seen it rain a whole chapter, a Mexican chapter.’

‘It’s normal for a flock to have a shepherd of souls,’ added Pombo, ‘and fall right on top of a pagan from Death Coast.’

‘What’s frightening is to be in the area of calm and think the worst is over,’ said Lens seriously, ignoring Pombo’s jokes. ‘That’s it, you think the worst is over when in fact it’s just beginning. You think the hurricane’s gone and you’re in the eye of the storm.’

His tone now smacked undeniably of the truth. The ship’s name was right. The
Mara Hope
.

As they listened, even Pombo’s mocking hemisphere was eclipsed. Whether in suspense or under the force of Lens’ memory, the silence in the Dance Academy had acquired the sound of an electric hum, of sultry heat, around the green lamp, which Pombo’s long eyelashes had been drawn to.

‘It’s terrible what you’ve endured,’ Lens continued. ‘Everything’s in disarray, the boat and your bones. And then you find yourself under the illusion that it’s all over. Because the other boats you thought had foundered in the storm are coming towards you, safe and sound. A horizon of ships. You’re dumbstruck by such a miracle. Merde! Shit! Verdammt und zugenäht!’

The harpooner, like many other maritime residents and guests, practised the art of saying ugly words in foreign languages for them to sound a little distinguished. A kind of crude elegance.

‘What happened?’ asked Pombo on tenterhooks, he who’d heard so much.

‘Not a single ship. It was a decapitated forest. Bits of forest torn to shreds which, after the storm, came together at sea and interlaced roots to hold up trunks and crowns like the masts of sailing ships, with nature’s will for weaving tapestries out of tatters. It’s normal in shipwrecks to find a brotherhood of remains. But this was as big as the horizon itself.’

The harpooner’s enormous hands ordered the geology of earth on the table’s tectonic plates. He took a slice out of the table with the corner of his right hand and lifted up a chunk of Yucatan. ‘It was this wooded territory coming towards us, towards our ship in the area of central calm.’

‘Was that before or after you had cataracts?’ asked Pombo at last, unable to control himself.

‘What?’

‘The wood moving at sea.’

‘I’m talking here to Hercules. Anyone else can shut up or provide tobacco.’

‘Portuguese blond,’ said Pombo in a conciliatory tone, holding out a cigarette.

‘To start with, we thought no,’ Lens continued, ‘they were boats, an entire fleet that had been reunited. Because we could hear shouts as well. Isolated, distant. Unintelligible. Sometimes they sounded like hurrahs of joy carried on the wind, others like cries of agony and anguish filling the sea with fear. We approached with our hearts in our mouths. No, they weren’t boats. This was no vast fleet of salvaged ships. As we got closer, our eyes were forced to accept something even more fantastical. What was coming towards us was the forest. The sea had gathered strips of wood, drifting timbers. The masts we descried in the distance were in fact large trees, huge mahoganies. Then we heard an orchestral guffaw. A spine-chilling peal of laughter. All of that nature was making fun of us. Laughter can be truly terrifying when you don’t know where it’s coming from. Until the mystery was revealed. The trees had their birds in them. A colourful display of parrots, orioles and long-crested cockatoos. Someone shouted, “The birds are warning us!” But it was too late. When we tried to turn around, the boat was surrounded by the forest.’