Books Burn Badly (31 page)

To start with, when she opened the door, she expected there to be a scene. She knew why he’d come. To demand an explanation after the incident with that girl. Well, not such a girl any more, a young lady, and what a tongue! No, it wasn’t right, that punishment, all because of some chestnuts, but O, the girl, shouldn’t have been so rebellious, so offensive, quoting the Bible at the priest, who ever heard such a thing? The girl, we’ll call her that for now, came into the rectory’s enclosure with some other children to collect chestnuts. They’d been warned. One or two of them had received a beating. They ought to have known by now Don Marcelo had a special devotion to Our Lady of the Fist. He’d preached about it in church, when there was that dispute about common land, that he wasn’t a communist even when it came to chestnuts. And Polka in the Cuckoo’s Feather bar went and said if anyone was a communist, it was Christ, he didn’t even own the Cross, poor thing. Don Marcelo wasn’t Don Benigno. She knew that. He bore a grudge. Which may have had something to do with the girl’s punishment, I can’t say. The point is it was Sunday afternoon when they came to steal chestnuts. They reckoned on his taking a siesta. So they came in all confident, even put up a ladder to climb over the stone wall, which was high, pretty solid, with bits of glass along the top. But he can hear you thinking. He’d already suspected them of something during Mass. And he was waiting. He let them make a good pile of chestnuts. And when they’d finished, he turned up in his cassock, as vast as the night. Thundering out, ‘Once a thief, always a thief!’ And they all took to their heels, except for her. She just stood there and had the audacity to confront him, ‘Whoever finds a nut is allowed to keep it.’ Of course he couldn’t believe his ears. He grabbed her by the arm and shook her. ‘You’re a proper little madam! You threw a stone at the roof and it’s landed on your head.’ And O replied, ‘Make your own sermon, but don’t bang on the pulpit.’

That girl ought to wash her mouth out.

No, the punishment wasn’t fair, muttered the housemaid. To threaten her with the police, well, that much was to be expected. But not to make her collect that number of chestnuts. That wasn’t right. It wasn’t right to make her count up to 666 chestnuts. On her knees as well, in the damp grass, it being so cold. But you should have seen her! Seen her count! The chestnuts flew through her fingers. The way her mother used to count matchsticks.

666 chestnuts in a flash.

‘Now go and tell your father about it.’

That wasn’t necessary. That was adding insult to injury. Which is why, when there was a knock at the door and she opened and saw it was Polka, she expected the worst. After all, the tiniest spark can set fire to the whole house.

During the conversation, however, the priest beat his fist on the chestnut table in the rectory dining-room only once. The table was as big as a diocese, to use a parishioner’s metaphor, since on feast days all the local priests could sit around it together. Don Marcelo beat his fist and said, ‘Don’t ask me what Lot got up to with his daughters again!’ We know this because it was the only thing the housemaid heard from the kitchen.

She was very worried, because she’d often heard about Lot’s wife in that passage from Scripture which was read during Mass and seemed to serve as a warning to all women, about gossip, curiosity, that instinct for wanting to know what’s happening, which is why she was punished and became a pillar of salt. She was lost while the angels went about the business of destruction, of burning and razing Sodom and Gomorrah, because there couldn’t be witnesses to such destruction, they didn’t want people talking about the terror inflicted by those angels. This is what crossed her mind, the lesson, applicable to all, that it was better to look the other way. But what confuses her now, what disturbs her as she plucks two pigeons for the priest’s dinner is his warning to Polka not to ask what Lot got up to with his daughters, and his daughters with him, again. He’s not in the mood for sermons. And if he doesn’t tell the whole story, it’s because he doesn’t feel like it, the pillar of salt is enough. She pricks up her ears. Polka starts talking about a certain Elisha, prophet and disciple of Elijah, who lost his temper with some boys who called him baldhead as he was walking along. ‘Go away, baldhead, go away!’ So, bald as he was, he turned around and cursed them in the name of Jehovah and forty-two of the boys were mauled by two she-bears. How many? That’s a lot of carnage for the Lord, I’d say. Anyhow he speaks well, can keep up with the priest, is better even. Little devil, he makes me laugh! The priest puts his hand on his head, which is shorn, and says, ‘I went too far, OK, but you can’t compare what I did with what the bald prophet did to those children.’

She can’t resist, quickly wipes the layer of blood and down off her hands. She’s nervous and heads out of the service entrance towards the chapel to see what it says about Lot and his daughters, there’ll be something in those books, something about the forty-two boys mauled by she-bears on account of the prophet’s temper. Which explains why the housemaid’s expression changed, perhaps for ever, and why the priest asked her if something was wrong when she appeared with a face the colour of pure wax. She was so upset she said nothing about the negligence of serving him with bird down in the cracks of her fingernails.

‘He’s going to be the new gravedigger,’ said the priest.

She wiped the pigeons’ blood on her apron. She knew that rather than talking to someone he was trying to convince himself.

‘Someone has to do it,’ continued the priest. ‘But I did stipulate one condition. No more Carnival procession. No more lame cardinal. No more goliard’s sermons from the tavern’s pulpit.’

And, without wanting to, she felt sorry. Polka was a wretch, but he was funny. She cursed him, but every year, during Carnival, she’d be waiting to see him dressed up as a cardinal, with his
Ora pro nobis
, sprinkling holy water with a watering can. Dressed in purple, he looked better than the priest. He led the procession in which they carried an effigy of the Carnival made of turnips in order to throw it into the River Monelos. Ever since the war, it had been forbidden to wear a disguise, but they’d come out at nightfall from under the stones. Two years ago, they had the audacity to tack photos of Franco, the Caudillo, to the turnip dummy and to give it an escort of revellers dressed up as Franco’s Moorish Guard, riding donkeys. The police turned up and laid into the revellers. But the dummy had already sunk in the river.

She didn’t reply. What could she say? Besides, there weren’t so many to choose from. The young men were all emigrating. And the old men were more likely to die than dig graves.

‘He’ll get used to it,’ said Don Marcelo. ‘He’ll end up being the most serious person around.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed. That was the trouble with that job. Everyone took to their role, treated the whole world as if it were a graveyard.

Rocío, the cook, suddenly remembered, ‘Will he still be allowed to dress up as a woman?’

‘Not in my parish. Certainly not. I don’t care what he does outside it. I’m not going to take a peek at his legs.’

‘Praise be to God!’

And the priest couldn’t tell whether this was an expression of horror or relief.

The Gravedigger

‘I’ve got a job for you, Crecente,’ said the priest.

He stood up and went to switch on the light. A chandelier where electricity was a tired guest. In one corner, in a basket, were the chestnuts, polished now, with that luminous tint, that suppressed glee of a second life you find in fruit ripening inside houses. Like so many other chandeliers, grapes for sweet wine hung from mimosa branches. Apples, pregnant with aroma, occupied the planisphere of Zamoran blankets. Nuts were lost in thought. More than the solid furniture whose wood was mineral, petrified, extracted from the forest of night, Polka noticed this other presence of the fruit.

He worked as a labourer. Whatever was going. In summer, the odd aubade on the bagpipes. He’d have liked to go back to working for parks and gardens. But he was lame and had a record. Being lame, he used to say, was a record and a half.

You couldn’t have a ‘record’. A word you’d have thought was easier to pronounce than ‘salicylic’, but it had weight and sloped upwards.

Some men had a record and others did not.

He also seemed to have a stubborn destiny.

He was arrested during the war. When he thought they’d forgotten about him, they came to fetch him in a lorry carrying prisoners from Silva and San Cristovo. And they simulated something. They took them at night to Castro. To the ruins of the Celtic settlement. The moon was shining and he could see the shadows of memories, of nine months before, when Holando read out the commandments of naturism. They were told to dig. It was all very sinister, having to dig a ditch there, in Castro. The order was, ‘Dig hard, in a straight line!’ And he thought, Bloody hell, imagine I find Terranova’s treasure now! It wasn’t funny, come on, after all he was digging his own grave. ‘Your mental current’s back to front,’ Holando had told him. ‘When you have to cry, you laugh. You’re a walking paradox.’ The freethinker’s gift. He had to bite his lips, make them bleed to turn the current around. Come on, dig. But one of the spades hit on some metal. ‘What’s this?’ ‘Some junk,’ said one of the soldiers. ‘Let me have a look,’ said another, who was wearing a Cabaleiro cloak. He knocked the clay off against a stone and held the object up to the moon.

‘Well, blow me down if we haven’t got ourselves a torque!’

‘Let me see. Are you sure it’s not a horseshoe?’

Everybody examining the object in the moonlight, fondling the metal, in search of gold.

‘We’ll have to see what it looks like in the daytime. Now get digging!’

‘Straight?’

‘Sideways! One piece leads to another.’

Sideways is better, reflected Polka hopefully. You don’t dig graves sideways.

They were there the whole night. The soldiers eagerly sifting each clod, examining each pebble, poking in holes.

‘Here’s something hard. Oh no, they’re bones!’

‘Bones? An animal’s, I suppose.’

‘Well, what else are they going to be?’ said the big guy in charge of the squad. He then looked at the hole as if the question he’d asked were now turning over soil.

With the thirst for gold came dawn. Painting witnesses on the horizon. Men on bikes and mopeds, women carrying the first light of day. The whole hilltop between the rocks of Ara Solis riddled with holes. The idea was to kill at night. ‘We’re out of time,’ said one of the squad of soldiers and it wasn’t clear whether he meant for digging or killing. The point is they ordered them back on to the lorry and so it was that Polka went to prison. Having dug his own grave, first straight and then sideways.

‘I’ve got a job for you, Crecente,’ said the parish priest. He hadn’t stopped turning the matter over since punishing O. It was obvious he felt remorse. ‘A job for you. With two conditions. No more pagan processions with the lame cardinal and monumental women during Carnival. And no more competing with me by preaching in taverns. I know you do it well, you make people laugh, but it’s time for you to shut up, Polka. That’s the way it goes. You can’t be priest,’ he said ironically. ‘Verger’s taken. That leaves gravedigger. What do you think? As a gravedigger and a bagpiper, you’ll get by, so to speak . . .’

‘The man was very chatty,’ Polka informed Olinda.

King Cintolo’s Cockroach

It had to be said properly, not any old how. ‘Acetylsalicylic acid’.

‘Come on, Pinche, repeat it.’

‘Acetylsacilytic acid.’

‘Not “sacilytic”! Salicylic.’

Polka believed if you wanted to speak well, you had to be able to say ‘acetylsalicylic acid’. An invention which was to be found in nature, like all others. It just had to be rescued from invisibility, as music is sound rescued in bagpipes. One of Polka’s set phrases, though he was careful when to use it. Everything of importance had been rescued from invisibility. And aspirin was no exception. The best proof of the virtues of aspirin was in river rats if only you could see them. They were always healthy, clean, with shiny skin. Why? Because they gnawed at willow roots. And what was in a willow?

‘Acetylsacilytic acid!’

‘Salicylic!’

O liked the theory of invisibility, but not rats. They didn’t strike her as a model of healthy beauty. She always tried to have a stone to hand in case they showed up along the river. But one day a rat stared at her from the other side, the first time she saw its eyes, and O came to the same conclusion as Polka. She decided it was beautiful. An unsettling beauty, as with all animals that live by the river and try not to be seen, like the praying mantis, easily confused with the grass, or water boatmen, which live on the surface of the water without ever getting wet, darning river marks with their long, slender legs. According to Polka, the most interesting creatures also formed part of what was not immediately visible. And this was the solemn moment when he would contribute his own discovery.

‘No,’ Olinda would say, losing her patience. ‘That’s enough of that!’

‘Where’s the harm in it?’

O and Pinche would laugh. They’d heard it many times before. They already knew that the prettiest creature on earth was the cockroach that ate bat shit in King Cintolo’s Cave.

Acetylsalicylic Acid

‘What this boy needs is acetylsalicylic acid. Bring me an aspirin.’

Neves stands still. Rigid. She’d been expecting something else, some cure. A few divine words. Some animal’s anatomy. A picture of saints. Of a cabaret singer. Herb tea. Something.

‘Aren’t you going to say something to him?’

‘Listen, is there an aspirin?’

‘There is. But take care, you’ll make a hole in his stomach.’

‘I know that, woman. Dissolve it in a spoonful of water. And make some coffee.’

‘Coffee?’

‘Yes, coffee. Coffee from the pot.