Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [117]
‘Who could it be?’ asked Father Munio. ‘Do you suspect anyone?’
He had the novel now. Everything in those hands, clad in a pair of soft white gloves, took on the appearance of remains waiting to be expunged.
‘All I know,’ said Samos, ‘is that someone wishes to malign me in this twisted, abject way. Without naming names, in a world of fiction that is vulgar and remote . . . Cast me as the bad guy. A perverse judge of Oklahoma! The trouble is you never know where such a ridiculous, infamous game might end up. Imagine this judge, practising in Oklahoma, is blamed for things, atrocities . . . Some people are obsessed with the past.’
‘They’re coincidences,’ said Tomás Dez. ‘That’s all it is, Ricardo, chance.’
The judge and censor exchanged glances. Dez realised this meeting was an indirect way of forcing him to act more diligently. They’d always been close. He couldn’t understand why Samos, who was usually so calm, had lost his nerve over something so trivial. The worst thing he could do was show his fear. Imagine . . . There was no need to imagine anything.
Samos, however, regained his composure, adding a touch of humour, ‘I just wanted, friends, to fill you in on this rather picturesque situation. Even in a country as secure as ours, there’s no escaping the evil eye.’
‘There’s something artistic, deeply human, about yokes,’ said Sulfe after a pause. ‘And about halters, those wire and wicker art pieces for muzzling mouths.’
Sulfe stopped abruptly. He had a passion for ‘alighting on the classics’. Being one of them. Each of them. Cultivating his chosen model to the end. Not just knowing what they thought, but how they expressed it. Assuming their voice, as he said. In short, copying them. So his relationship with knowledge was a form of possession. The secret of his moments of brilliance was this identification that led him to act in his lectures, though he was generally a shy man who spat out monosyllables. Recently the process had been reversed. He began to feel possessed by those he studied and delved into. There was no telling when it might happen, no warning. It was like having a ventriloquist who spoke for him, without permission. Who controlled not only the levers of thought, but the threads of speech as well, until turning him, in the most unfortunate circumstances, into a comedian, a satirist or a gossip. Some people lost their memory. Sulfe acquired new memories. He started consuming what he’d always reviled. From Catullus and Sappho to Afonso Eanes do Coton and María Balteira, the last to mention two members of the most obscene school of Galician-Portuguese cancioneiros or songbooks. The discovery of this branch of wild eroticism, words fornicating like bodies, in medieval lyric poetry, together with his interest in Rabelais, had caused not only a mental upheaval but a shift in his organism similar to a radical change of diet. Possibly to defend herself in a conservative environment or else to justify the daring act of absorbing and disseminating universal poetry’s most obscene creations, Carolina Michaëlis talks of this ‘the most dissolute carnivalesque pasquinades’, of compositions whose language is on a par with that of ‘brawlers and gamblers’. Another leading authority on the medieval treasures that lay hidden for centuries, Rodrigues Lapa, talks of a spirited willingness to confront ‘certain verbal sewage’. Dissolute pasquinades! Verbal sewage! When having to refer to these compositions, Sulfe himself didn’t hesitate to talk of ‘a vulgar and immoral branch on a golden tree’. And as he recovered his health, he’d think of a poem by João Soares:
Miss Lucy, Lucy Sánchez, for God’s sake,
if fuck you I could, fuck you I would!
‘Finally,’ he heard the familiar voices of Gargantua and Falstaff, ‘you can tell the difference between pleasure and enjoyment, you’re poking your nose in where you should.’ There was indeed ‘a second world and a second life outside officialdom’, to quote his now revered Mikhail Bakhtin, but not just in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. It was a secret, but