Books Burn Badly (26 page)

Curtis looked at his hands. He was rubbing them slowly.

‘But none of your Hercules, right? No fateful one-two. You got to keep back the cobra, Curtis, understand? You got to lose. That’s all there is. You fight as if you were going to win, but you got to lose. It’s up to you when you go down, but make it look convincing. Lots of them will be betting for you. We need to see some raw flesh. And if it’s in a pool of blood, so much the better.’

There was a knock at the door of the house on Atocha Baixa. Terranova got up with great difficulty and swore. Someone had locked it from the outside, he couldn’t open.

He heard a voice, ‘Pay attention to what’s coming under the door.’

He then saw an envelope.

‘That’s your ticket,’ said Curtis outside the door.

‘What’s up, Curtis? Why don’t you come in?’

‘It couldn’t be Buenos Aires. It’s for La Guaira. The next ship, got it? I suppose they’ll sing tangos there too.’

‘Where’ve you been, Curtis?’

‘Listen. When you go through customs in Venezuela and they ask you your profession, you have to say you’re an electrical engineer, got it?’

‘Got it, Curtis.’

‘Go on, repeat it.’

‘Electrical engineer, electrical engineer, electrical engineer.’

He went over to the window. It was reinforced. He removed the bar and slid open the bolt. Stuck his head out. There was no one there.

The White Roses

The wild, white roses on the road from Castro to Elviña are small and seem to be putting all their effort not into growth, but into their fragrance. You can miss them, hidden, shy as they are against a backdrop of myrtle, but then they lift their heads and fill the place. Polka says the most envied bees visit those rosebushes.

‘Some bees go in front to look for the flower and then keep quiet about it back in the hive.’

‘That means they’re selfish, not envied.’

‘No. When you and Olinda stop looking for wild roses, there won’t be any.’

In the bundle of clothes and the basket, she’d put white roses, everlastings, fennel, marjoram, rosemary, aromatic herbs for the house of the painter. The knowledge she’d inherited from Olinda. And on her return, Neves, the maid, would hide fashion magazines she liked to read sitting on the toilet.

The Prickles of Words

He didn’t remember when he started getting tongue-tied, but he remembered the day his father noticed. It was the first time he’d received the warning, something inside him had said here comes a word with problems. A word dragging its own skeleton. A spicule without a sponge. A mushroom in the shade. A wounded crab. This warning, this alert, caught him by surprise in front of his father. He couldn’t let the word out, he felt its traction, its attempt to climb, its prickles, but couldn’t let it out because it was crippled, maimed, trembling and possibly beside itself.

‘What is it, Gabriel?’

The way he asked. The way he looked. A catastrophe. Everything was happening not inside him, but on his father’s face. He knew the fear he had of trembling or precipitate words was as nothing compared to the fear his father’s fear gave him. And he sensed his father’s fear was fear of what they’d say in the city. Occasionally, very rarely, he’d heard him say this. ‘What’ll they say, what’ll they think in the city?’ But when he referred to the city, he wasn’t talking about the whole city. Gabriel knew by now what his father meant when he referred to the city.

‘What were you going to say, Gabriel?’

He shook his head.

His father insisted. Rationalised what had happened. His ears tried to remember. Not one, not two, but more. Gabriel was stammering. His son. A child who was . . . perfect. That was the word. In short. He wanted to make sure it wasn’t a nightmare.

‘You were going to say something, Gabriel. Go on. What is it? Are you not well? Say something. Speak. Tell me about the trolleybus.’ His imaginary journeys with Chelo, his mother. Every Tuesday, they’d depart from Porta Real. The red, double-decker buses had been brought from London, second-hand. What fun it was to go upstairs, to sit in the first row, the large front window like a screen in the city’s real cinema. ‘Where did you go yesterday? To Montevideo. Come on, say Montevideo. You sometimes go to Lisbon, don’t you? Lisbon’s easy to say. Say Lisbon.’

‘Lisbon.’

‘That’s good, Gabriel. Another city you go to is Paris. Let’s see if you can say Montevideo, Lisbon, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona. It’s just a joke. A game. I know you can say all of this. But say it to me now.’

‘Montevideo, Lisbon, Paris . . .’

Things always happened somewhere. On the beach this summer, he’d learnt to dive. A little. But for him these first experiences were like underwater journeys. He couldn’t believe it when he opened his eyes and saw Chelo’s feet, enormous under the water, the toes like rock creatures with pearly shells. Now he’d like to dive and go between his father’s legs. He felt the presence of Grand Mother Circa, the grandfather clock, behind him. It had come from Cuba, like the wooden horse Carirí, and been a wedding present from Chelo’s father. He’d always end up there when he started to walk. He’d use it as a support, watch the pendulum. It was a fantastic creature, alive, with its own way of speaking day and night. He used to dream something was happening and this is where he’d hide. The grandfather clock leant against the room’s central pillar. The sunlight coming in from the balcony – it was a winter’s day, but there was a magnificent sun, a ‘Catholic sun’, someone at court had said – drew a dividing line with the pillar’s shadow. So Grand Mother Circa was also, in its own way, a light mechanism. He listened to it up close. He listened to it inside. It calmed the words and ordered them for him. This time, they’d gone on a boat to the Xubias. They’d gone up and down the beach, from the jetty to the estuary channel. On the sandbank, from a neighbouring dune, they could see the two waters fighting it out. Blue and green. They then climbed some rocks to reach a chalet. He tripped several times. Chelo took his hand and helped him up that steep shortcut. The house was closed, except for one of the shutters. How strange. Look. It was a house full of books. Inhabited by books. A house without books must be sad. Even sadder a house of books without people. Brambles and roses intertwined on the pergola. He protested, ‘What are we doing? Why did we come here?’

‘It’s a boat-house. Isn’t it beautiful?’

‘Where did you go, Gabriel?’

‘To Santa Cristina.’

His father’s concern abruptly switched objective. Abandoned him to focus instead on this other place.

‘To Santa Cristina? To that beach in this weather?’

Grandpa Mayarí’s Cane

Grandpa Mayarí hunted down items of news with the iron tip of his cane. He preferred the yellow ones, dipped in sun and frost, swept along the same paths as the dry leaves, though newspaper stays one step behind, on its own. The leaves of trees and newspapers, freed from the date, move westwards in flocks of crazy melancholy. They sometimes crouch in an abandoned doorway, all mucky, like the hair of a pet which has come back from its nocturnal outing with a dead man’s cold slap and been unable to locate the cat-flap. On Mount Alto, the hill on which Hercules Lighthouse stands, some of these itinerant leaves catch on prickly thickets and turn into dry meat. But a few go into a trance and are carried this way and that, tattooing the wind.

These are the ones sought out by the tip of Antonio Vidal, Grandpa Mayarí’s cane.

Here’s one now. The cane pretends not to see. Suddenly darts through the air and harpoons the piece of news on the sea lane opened by feet in the soft grass. We’re on the high cliffs of Gaivoteiro, in the direction of Fura do Touciño, and there’s something of the sea bird in the piece of paper. A final flapping of navigational wings.

Mayarí vacated his position at Aristotle’s Lantern, grocer’s, and chose the start of summer, the best he could remember, to spend a period of time in Coruña. He came to see the boats. This was no excuse, no figure of speech. It was true. Absolutely true. He’d get up very early to go to Muro Fishmarket, which is where fishing boats,
bacas
and
bous
from the Great Sole, unloaded. Although all sales there were by auction and in large quantities, he’d always get some fish, if possible scad and sail-fluke, and sometimes bring one of those large hakes people of the sea call ‘Baby Lola’, perhaps because of their resemblance to baby mermaids, something he accepted because it fell into his hands and he couldn’t say no to the patter of a fishwife, like anyone in the din of a fishmarket who was born a farmer. He never ate it. He liked boats, not fish. In time, I reached the conclusion he bought it for the news, in this case wet and scaly news, since it was usually wrapped in newspaper. He soon got rid of the fish, like someone finally surrendering an infinite, innocent sadness into safe hands, those of Neves, maid and cook, though for a few moments he’d read those sheets of newspaper serving as a shroud. This observation of mine shouldn’t sound strange. What was strange, hence it caught my attention, was that Grandpa Mayarí didn’t read normal, whole newspapers, there being several, including the two that arrived a couple of days late by subscription from Madrid.

From this first visit to the fishmarket, he’d return when dawn was straining at the oars on the other side of the bay, in Mera. He’d come home when the sun was the height of a man in the east. He’d then have breakfast and, happy as a frog in a puddle, take in a view of the port from the gallery. He adored his daughter and maintained a solemn silence in front of her paintings. His daughter, Chelo, respected this silence. I don’t recall her ever asking for his opinion, in search of an adjective, though she could so easily have elicited praise from someone who loved her so much. I’m sure Antonio Vidal liked those paintings, I’m in no doubt, I think I knew him quite well, but I suppose, like almost everyone else, he wondered why Chelo didn’t paint landscapes and, above all, why she didn’t paint seascapes.

I possessed the answer to the question grandpa never asked, but to the one who did ask, I didn’t want to give it.

Chelo painted landscapes on the palm of my hand. Souvenirs, she called them. When she was satisfied, she’d sign them:
Souvenir
by Corot. So this name was always familiar to me, like someone tickling my hand. A name that went from my hand to my eyes with an easel on its back.

When I couldn’t speak, when I stumbled on a word and she saw that this struggle with language was filling me with icy horror, that of an inner being whose teeth are chattering in the cold, teeth and a cold which got inside, behind my eyes, under my tongue, she’d say, ‘Come.’ And paint a souvenir on my hand. ‘White, blue, grey and silver today.’

The habit of opening and closing my hand.

‘Hey, what’s that?’ Grandpa Mayarí would ask.

In the afternoon, we’d go out to Mount Alto, as far as Hercules Lighthouse. But first we’d stop at the Grapevine bar and sit under the trellis. He’d say to me, ‘You watch her laugh.’ When the woman came, he’d order a fizzy water for me. ‘And for the old man,’ he’d say, meaning himself, ‘an electric Ribeiro.’ And it was true, the woman did laugh.

‘Now let me see what you’ve got in there.’

I opened my hand very, very slowly.

‘A boat, eh? A boat in the mist. Lucky you.’

But there was something else Chelo did to help me with language. Teach me how to read and write as soon as possible. Long before I went to school. Chelo’s idea was that I had to transfer my thoughts to my hand. ‘Your mouth,’ she’d say, ‘will speak through your fingers. And what you do with your fingers will demand sound.’ It was true. A straight line had a sound. A wavy line demanded a sound. A curved line, another. You had to write them down. Play with sounds. Not be afraid of them.

I started writing by drawing. Before letters, forms. Zigzags, spirals, crosses. And it’s true that forms produce a sound, a sound that’s already inside you, lying in wait, in the gorge of your throat. I realised this the first time I drew a large triangle. A large triangle demands the sound of a large triangle. In this way, my voice followed the line drawn by my hand. So that letters, when they arrived, were also forms of nature, as
t
is the mast of a boat and
l
a cypress.
O
can be lots of things. An
o
can be the sun or moon. We had a washerwoman called O. In the calendar of saints, there was Our Lady of Expectation, Mary of the O. I used to laugh when my mother saw her in the distance and exclaimed, ‘Here comes Our Lady of Expectation!’ She was easy to spot since she carried a huge O on top of her head. An O full of clothes. When she arrived, her face was also a smiley O, with two clear eyes, so that her presence recalled the sun and circles of water.

‘Hello, O.’

O, the washerwoman, was one of the women Chelo painted. A series that seemed unending, and in fact was, which she called
Women Carrying Things on Top of Their Heads
.

O and Harmony

He wasn’t a baby any more. When he was five or six, he wet the bed. Not before. It was around that time. It wasn’t something to shout about. You didn’t come for the clothes, only to be told, ‘I’m afraid the boy’s wet the sheets, he can’t control himself.’ The thing is clothes tell their own stories, like a book. Not that I go about repeating what they say. It’s our secret. The clothes’ and ours. Which is why the bit I like most about washing is laying the clothes in the sun. The point when the sun puts colour back in the clothes and things, the way it shines you’d think you washed the whole place. Puts colour back. In clothes, right, but also in the landscape, in objects, in people’s expressions. So you’re the one who puts black and canary yellow in ears of maize and the football shirts of Elviña Wanderers. Purple in heather. We sometimes think of happiness as being impossible. Between you and me, the closest thing to an unhappy person is someone who’s happy. I’ve heard Brevo, not a bright lad, I’ve heard Brevo called happy and unhappy. What does it matter? The children just call him stupid. Children. Who’d believe it? I’m not surprised some people get stuck on words. Some words are like insects, they change, they seem one thing and in fact they’re another. Polka reckons we’ve got it wrong. Words did not come into being to name things. Words existed first and things came later. So someone said ‘centipede’ and out came the insect. I know it doesn’t have a hundred feet. It’s the intention that counts. Whoever invents the word sets the trap. I wouldn’t want to think of a name for something bad. Imagine you say it and it works. You have to watch what you say. Or not. Maybe the boy, the painter and judge’s boy, maybe he wanted to take the words inside and they turned into a ball, a plug. Because words are like crumbs. When I’m alone with my thoughts, sitting quietly at the table, my fingers make beads with the breadcrumbs on the oilskin tablecloth. By the time you realise, snap out of it, those spherical forms, polished like stars, are watching you. I don’t know about you, but what I do is eat them, the words of bread, of silence, very slowly so as not to choke. Lucky for me I had Polka. Papa. Had it not been for him, I don’t think I’d have got off the ground. I’d be happy. Unhappy. Dumb. I’d still wet the bed. I’ll have to take him to see the boy, Gabriel, one of these days. I bet he’ll know what to do. The painter smiles more than she talks. Not that I like to gossip. About other people. You won’t hear me saying, ‘This boy wets his bed!’ I suppose this business of wetting the bed, this incontinence, has something to do with his stutter. His mother told me it was a nervous thing, some fear inside his head. Which got worse when he started speaking. Stuttering. The body’s full of channels and sluice-gates, I’m well aware of that. What I can’t handle is laughter. If I burst out laughing and can’t stop myself, however tight I squeeze my legs, this joy comes pouring out of my organism. Polka tells the story of a colleague who’d been drinking and stopped to pee at the side of the road, without realising there was a fountain on the other side of the wall. The man had released a whole ocean, but he carried on standing there, his member confused with the spout, until finally he grew anxious, ‘Holy smoke! I’m weeing to death!’