Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [128]
The Unfalling Leaves
His name’s Antón, I think, but what stuck in my mind was what Mr Sada said: this country doesn’t deserve its poets, look how it treats them, working as building labourers, carrying sacks of Portland cement. Every time I see a man with a sack on his back, I think of him. Of my poet. My Portland.
That day, her wish to find him in the painter’s house was fulfilled. She was taking their clothes. On the way from Castro to Elviña, she plucked a few white roses and sprigs of mint and fennel. To give the clothes a nice smell.
Neves received her in the hallway. She heard voices coming from the more open side of the sitting-room, what they called the Chinese Pavilion, and, being on good terms with the maid, she let herself go a little, just enough to see the group of people. All of them deep in thought. Each looking in a different direction. Listening. To him recite. And she still had time to hear about the leaves that don’t fall in San Carlos Gardens, they burn, that’s what he said, on a low heat, at the top of the elms. And he said something about the hanging clusters’ spectral elegance. But she wasn’t quite sure about this.
She went there that afternoon. And others.
In San Carlos Gardens, at the top of the elms, she did indeed see a few coppery leaves that hadn’t fallen. She knew there were some trees that didn’t shed their old leaves until they’d grown new ones. But this was very different. In the whole remarkable plantation, the branches’ austere elevation, fat charcoal markings in the sky, ending in a filigree of twigs, shoots and buds, pure, unsullied lines, well, up there were these copper-coloured leaves on a low heat, burning at dusk without being consumed.
It was one of the happiest moments in her visits to the city. It was unthinkable that she, of all people, should be able to see the black elms’ unfalling winter leaves in the so-called Romantic Garden. Not only did they not fall, they burnt in the plantation’s sober lattice. The more you looked at them, the more they burnt. She was far away, but she could feel the heat on her cheeks.
So when she came back, many years later, one of the first things O did was go and see the unfalling leaves in San Carlos Gardens.
But O’s here right now. She’s twelve years old and is starting to go to the river to wash. She likes the river, but not washing so much. At the crossroads, one road leads to school, another to the river. If she didn’t have to wash, she’d always choose to go to the river. Which is where she’s in the process of discovering the water figures.
Polka suffers as a result of ignorance. Yesterday he was very hurt because he rode side-saddle on Grumpy, the donkey that carries the clothes Olinda and I wash, and some people had a go at him for not riding normally, like a man. All because of ignorance. The animal suffers less if you sit like a woman. Everything that itches is because of ignorance. Ignorance itches. That’s what Polka thinks. He used to have a lot of friends he could talk to against ignorance. One of them was Arturo, Galicia’s lightweight champion. I know there are rumours, some say Arturo could be my Dad. He was killed before I was born, but if he’s in the water, if the river brought him to me, maybe there’s something in it. They loved him a lot. He always had his gloves and books.
‘But if he was a boxer, didn’t he have to hit people?’
‘Yes,’ said Polka. ‘But boxing isn’t quite the same as hitting. With his boxer’s hands, he would write in a magazine called Brazo y Cerebro. In Fontenova, he and others founded a cultural association with a library called Shining Light in the Abyss. It had a glass sign showing a sun. It’s so cold in Fontenova it must have helped having a sign like that.’
‘And what happened?’
‘They killed him like Christ. There was no war here, girl, what they call a war was a hunt and they hunted him down. Before he died, he managed to