Books Burn Badly (68 page)

Yes, my girl, I know you’ve hidden the fire in your mouth. I’m not afraid of your fire. If only you knew the fire I carry inside . . .

Felicity of Expression

I can be bad as well. Thing is you can’t pretend when it comes to clothes. You can’t lie about the weight of clothes. If they’re damp, that’s worse for me. More weight. They say with washing machines clothes don’t last so long. Who knows? I’d have thought hands are more delicate. Or both. Hands have to slap clothes against the washing stone. Twist them. Wring them out.

Clothes have eyes. Like worms. The eye doctor once told me worms can’t see, but they can feel light and shade. Olinda used to wash the clinic’s coats, sheets, towels, clothes. Pinche had a bad eye, not the evil eye, he saw badly out of one eye. How did we know it was only one eye? Because, when he looked through the keyhole, he saw fine. He told us this himself. He saw better when looking through a keyhole.

‘What keyholes are those?’ asked Olinda.

‘Who cares?’ replied Polka. ‘The important thing is . . . the diagnosis.’

He was so happy to have found that word he smiled at me, repeating it like a gift, ‘That’s it, the diagnosis.’

Olinda mentioned it to the eye doctor and off I went with Pinche. It was very funny when he said Pinche had a lazy eye. The right sees less than the left. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Well, to start with, because it doesn’t want to. That’s why we call it a lazy eye.’ It was a pleasure talking to him. Most doctors never explain anything. They detect what’s wrong, hand you the armament, but you never know what it is you’re firing against in your own body. Dr Abril explained everything and I understood him straightaway. Must be because we both work with the light. That’s something machines don’t do, leave the clothes in the sun. Bring them in when it’s raining, stretch them out again when it clears. There are days the sun is lazy and then it clears, the sun peeps out of the clouds, a kind of grand absolution. Worms only have light and shade. The first way of seeing. Skin-sight. We’re a bit like that. I love the sun. Seems to forgive everything.

‘A lazy eye,’ said Dr Abril.

Pinche kept quiet. His manner was contrite. If he had a lazy eye, he must be partly to blame.

‘What are we going to do?’ I asked.

‘We’re going to make it work. That’s what you do with lazy eyes.’

I’d always thought eyes were the same, Pinche’s or anyone’s, except for Miraceu’s, each of which went about its own business. But in the clinic I quickly realised not only eyes but also profiles were completely different. Which is why Pinche had two sides to him. He could be very brave and very cowardly. Very joyful and very sad. Very good and very bad. Maybe it was all because of his eye.

‘What we’re going to do,’ said Dr Abril, ‘is put a patch on the eye that sees OK. And leave the lazy eye as it is. I know, I know, it seems unfair. It is unfair. We’re depriving one eye, the eye that wants to see, of the pleasure of seeing. But that’s life. It won’t be for long.’

Which may have been why Mr Sada’s poet friend and I never met. Because of a lazy eye.

One eye didn’t fight for him. That may have been it.

‘What are you looking at?’ asked Pementa.

‘Nothing.’

I went red. This was in the Troubadour when Glenda, Pementa and I went out for a drink for the first time. Pementa had just started as a hospital porter. Before that, he’d worked in a psychiatric hospital in Epsom for years.

‘I was lucky,’ he told me. ‘I found the job as soon as I arrived. They even gave me accommodation. I hardly ever left. The patients left more than me. What for? There was a good library, with books in Spanish and Portuguese. I’d never read before, I read like crazy. I learnt a lot there. From the patients. Languages. How to play chess. How not to go crazy. I once went with a group of them to the races. A doctor said to me, “Mr Pementa, a group of patients has been invited to the Derby, would you care to accompany them?” They were all, we were all very elegant. The women in outrageous hats and dresses that looked like artistic grafts on the landscape. The men in suits, the suits of their lives. They’d been waiting for that moment for years. They soon caught the attention of people and the cameras, hats were as much centre-stage there as horses. And our group of Epsom aristocrats was the most visible. I was lucky to find that job. Then came that real lunatic with her government, shut Epsom’s mental homes down. It wasn’t paradise, but I was lucky.’

We were in the Troubadour and Glenda got up to buy another round.

‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ he asked.

‘I’m looking at you with both eyes. The lazy one and the other.’

I’d been lucky too. I didn’t want to come to London, to a general hospital. They’re not like mental homes. They’re much more complicated. More bizarre. Anything can happen. Mental homes are much more tranquil. People are polite and cultured. Here there’s stress all the time, accidents, sirens at night.

Repartee. Before Glenda came back, I had to say something funny.

‘I’m looking at you with both eyes. So that you don’t get away.’

‘Lucky me,’ said Pementa. ‘Ending up in this hospital.’

The night was hard. Pementa slept at the hospital, in a room for porters. No, he wasn’t on duty tonight. So I loosened my tongue and said why didn’t he come and sleep at my place? Tomorrow we’d go to the hospital together. Glenda protested. No way. Her place was much nearer. Besides, when we’d arranged to go out, she’d told Pementa – hadn’t she, Pementa? – there was plenty of room in her flat. Reality was on Glenda’s side. Her flat was half the distance. Less than half. A stone’s throw away. Pementa in the middle. Each of us tugging at his arm, without touching. ‘You’re right, Glenda. I’ll come with you! A night’s a night.’ Glenda, my soulmate, my fellow Godspellian Sunday mornings in Willesden Green, I feel so well with you,
Take my hand precious Lord, lead me home
. She pierced me with a look, silently cursed me. Jezebel, bitch. She would have killed me.

The two of us sleeping together, in bed. Pementa, on the sofa. Glenda and me with our backs to each other to start with. Embracing our own patch of darkness. Resentment sprawled in between. Pementa’s whistles as he slept, lucky him, like a steamboat departing in the night. So I turned and sought Glenda’s body. She moved away, but couldn’t go very far. I inched closer.

‘What is it?’

She spun around. Breathing heavily. Anger on her breath. She could have strangled me if she’d wanted. She was much stronger than I was. In life, she was a gentle, sensual creature. She taught me to appreciate sounds, colours, body postures. A second start in life. Rousing what was asleep. In return, I made her laugh. All those mantras, yantras, asanas, kundalini, latent energy, it’s not that they didn’t work, opposite, they worked far too well. Her body was excessively happy. Ticklish all over, including her eyes and thoughts. Glenda reaped much more than she sowed.

She was probably furious. I wondered what a furious woman would be like inside placid Glenda.

I whispered, ‘I’ve an idea.’

‘Will you leave me alone!’

Quietly, ‘Listen, Glenda, we can share him.’

‘What? You’re crazy!’

In a low voice, ‘One day for you, one day for me.’

I knew she’d laugh. When she laughed, her whole body shook. Without stopping. A reverse Negro spiritual.

Finally that Sunday in winter arrived. It was freezing. We arranged to visit Kew Gardens and saw a rose despite the cold, a white rose, like the ones on the road from Castro to Elviña. There it was, a tiny white rose, next to the ground, opening like a memory in the frostbitten earth. ‘Snowdon’, it said on the sign. That day, the flower, reminded me of a compliment a stranger once paid Amalia, which left us amazed.

‘Your beauty is intolerable!’

Though she was quick enough to reply, ‘And you haven’t really seen me!’

He was more or less blind, despite having a good eye, because he was unable to turn back. Some people are afraid of being lucky.

Lucky me, I thought, next to winter’s solitary flower.

Lucky I wore stilettos that were killing me, chafing my skin, freezing my toes. Even when I’m naked, I won’t take them off. Till the pleasure is too much and they fall off.

Lucky all the cafés shut their doors in our face. A moment ago, I’d have given anything for a hot cup of tea and a cloud, lucky, but now I keep quiet because we’re hugging and kissing, next to the iceberg, and everything’s in motion, there’s pleasure in the world’s navel, which is good for the circulation, and hot air that goes to your head, the warmth of chestnuts roasted in their own burs.

Lucky the Underground carriage was empty to start with, a nuptial carriage that Sunday afternoon, rocking, taking us from corner to corner.

Lucky I kept the fire inside my mouth. The fire the girl from Camden Town gave me.

Lucky we opened the red door. Lucky we climbed the stairs. Lucky we entered the room, embraced in front of the window. Lucky there’s someone to take you from cold to heat. To the other side of the wind, but still inside it.

From the room, we can see the small gardens with their trees. We can’t set foot inside them. Our key is for one floor only. But now we’re able to run across them, jump over the hedges, come and go with the wind. Pictures are fine, but there’s nothing like a window. Windows are better for framing an embrace. Everything we see belongs to the embrace. The railway, the hoarding, the barbed wire, keep out, the plastic bag lifted up, up, but then falling, nostalgic for its weight, as if searching for what it carried.

The wind is one and the same, but each tree has its own. They move in different, sometimes opposite directions. Look. Even the branches of a single tree move differently, as if they’ve torn off bits of wind. The birch shakes, is embraced, more than the others. That plane tree still has a few leaves. Another mystery. Almost every tree has a few leaves that don’t fall. They’re there the whole winter and don’t fall. Why not? The rain as well. I mean the rain is one and the same, but each tree, each bush, has its own. The fatness, the gleam of the drops is quite distinct. See how the drops hang after it’s rained. How they settle on the branches, the buds, the tips of the buds. Settle like notes in a score. Not just the trees. Each house has its own rain. Each window. This window.

Lucky.

Lucky wind.

Lucky rain. Notes sliding down the windowpane.

‘Lucky you,’ they told me for finding someone like Pementa.

‘Lucky,’ murmured Pementa when he found the mole on my back. Lucky. Rocking like a boat on the water bed, he found the mole on my back, the circle of his lips around it, a sucker, his tongue whispering, writing. Lucky. A murmur I heard through my skin, which resounded in the cavern of my chest, alongside my heart, climbed my throat and emerged like a sloe. The black mole opening, ‘Snowdon’, Kew’s rose, the white rose on the way to Elviña, blue wellies, stiletto heels, with the one I like, everything, tossing and turning, black mole, white rose.

Lucky.

The Medal

He was about to open the back door of the house by the marina when someone got ahead of him and opened from inside. That nightmare he sometimes had. Gabriel had seen her only once. They could have been the same age. Except he was the father’s son and she was the wife. Her hair in a bob, smooth and coppery, matched her skirt. Golden locks that were like a continuation of the letters printed on the invitation to the wedding he didn’t attend. Gabriel the Odd sent a cold, irreproachable telegram.
Katechon
came into his mind. The one who holds back the years, though they’re still there, riding an invisible merry-go-round. ‘No, Ricardo’s not at home. He’s too busy. He had a pressing engagement followed by an important lunch with the directors of the Academy of Political and Moral Sciences, who, as you should know but don’t, are visiting, a token of their appreciation, quite unusual really, despite the fact we live in Madrid. The session will be here, during the summer. They’re to pay him a tribute in the provinces. You can imagine the state he’s in, having just received the Raimundo de Peñafort medal.’

‘Yes, apart from the medal, how is he?’

He shouldn’t have asked this question she was waiting to answer with one of those fateful punches you get in a clinch in the ring.

With a youthful spirit. Like an ox. Living a second spring.
Any one will do.

‘Unbearable,’ she said with a triumphant smile, as if she meant a little child. ‘He won’t stop.’

Yes, in this meeting, she was giving him a good hiding with the back of her tongue. He’d come in search of sin, the stain of history, but it wasn’t going to be cheap as far as she was concerned.

Another punch.

‘He’s in fine fettle. Gets up early every day, when it’s still dark, does his exercises on the bearskin, as you know, works in the study and then attends first Mass. Won’t hear about a siesta. Before lunch, he has a quick doze, a few minutes, what he calls the ram’s sleep.’

He’s waiting to be asked in.
Would you like to come in?
But no. She says, ‘I’m sorry not to invite you in, but I was just on my way out. And next time don’t act like a terrorist. Use the front door!’

She raised her index finger, an apparently spontaneous movement that is aimed at poking out the other’s eye. ‘I’m in a hurry! Ricardo and I are due to have lunch with the board of honour of the Academy of Political and Moral Sciences in recognition of a whole life devoted to Law and Justice. Work that has always been solid, discreet, rigorous, never political or biased. The work of an exemplary civil servant. I’ll tell him you called.’

Purple Rain

In La Boîte de Pandora. People betting around the aquarium. Twin dragons fighting. Small fish, large jaws. Destroyed in seconds. The host introduces new combatants with the seriousness of a croupier dealing out cards. Zonzo offers him the house speciality. A drink called Purple Rain. She’s there, singing fados. The reason he came after so long, at nightfall. The effect of her voice: a brush running over his hand, painting a souvenir, walking on soft grass near the cliff face.