Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [108]
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