Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [129]
‘What happened to the sign with the sun?’
‘They smashed it.’
‘And the cultural association, the books?’
‘They burnt them.’
‘Burnt books?’
‘That’s right.’
Polka talks of him as a hero, a champ the world forgot.
‘The future’s uncertain,’ said Polka. ‘Who can say what will happen? There may come a time, girl, only you know who Arturo da Silva was and that Shining Light existed in a place that is now so gloomy. Hold on to this word as well. Arturo da Silva was an anarchist.’
‘An anarchist? But . . .’
‘Yes, I know. I’ve said it now. It’s a frightening word. Just let it be. It can look after itself. It’s all I ask. Hold on to it. Find a little space for it, you don’t have to go back. It won’t bother you.’
He muttered something about invincible resignation. Talking to himself. Polka, Polka. Papa. Olinda says nothing. Almost nothing about her life. She likes radio novels, she becomes absorbed, unaware of time. I know this because, at Amparo the fashion designer’s, there’s a radio in the workshop and when they listen to the novel, read by Pedro Pablo Ayuso and Matilde Conesa, it’s as if the machines are making tears and the pedal is pushing them up the nerves of their legs to their eyes, well, once my mother became absorbed, lost in her friendly silence. Which can happen to anyone. There’s a young lady, Ana told me, who writes poetry and claims to have received this gift from the spirit of Bécquer, we learnt about him at school, ‘the dark swallows will return’, I liked him a lot, she must have done so too, they met in Bárbaras Square, the spirit possessed her and apparently she got pregnant. Pregnant with poetry. Ana and Amalia laughing about it, the spirit’s spunk, ooh, spirit, ooh!
‘Will we go to Bárbaras, O, see if we can find the spirit of that no-good Gustavo Adolfo?’
‘I’ve already been,’ I told them. They were speechless, unable to laugh, I was so quick.
‘You what?’
‘I rather prefer another in San Carlos Gardens. He doesn’t get you pregnant.’
Amalia, pretending to be shocked, ‘Oh, my girl! You’ve turned into a spiritual slut now, haven’t you?’
And there I was, pulling at Olinda, who’d got into the novel and wouldn’t come out. She only came out when the sewing machines stopped. When they’re all going together, they’re like a special train. But when they all stop at once . . . ‘What happened?’ asked Olinda in surprise, when they all stopped at the same time.
The Star and Romantic the Horse
He thought of a joke of destiny. Mislaid poems with wings. Moved by a spiritual medium. What were they doing there, among the originals for the first issue of Oeste waiting for the censor’s approval? What were those snippets from I Was Forsook doing there? The inclusion of the medieval poem by Guterres at the start could have been a coincidence, some coincidence, but where had three poems by Aurelio Anceis come from? He went back. Annoyed and upset.
There they were, in the table of contents. Three unpublished poems from the anonymous collection I Was Forsook: ‘Zero’, ‘Infinite’ and ‘Standard Vivas’.
He returned to the texts. There was a noticeable detail. The triumphal dates had disappeared. Aurelio Anceis’ game with the regime’s calendar of celebrations. He, Tomás Dez, had also made a change in the book that was now being printed. But a different one. He’d replaced the Fascist anniversaries with others that were either neutral or delicately dressed up as cultural obsequies. Whoever was responsible for including Anceis’ poems in Oeste had simply eliminated the dates and left only the final irony in the poem Zero:
But no one is as wise as Leonardo Fibonacci
who in the crucible of emptiness made zero.
His fingers like claws grasping their prey. He raked through the pages. In ‘Standard Vivas’, he’d removed the pagan calendar of saints that made reference to Apache, Half-tit, Syra, Samantha Galatea and other renowned hetaeras who would never appear in the city’s chronicles. However, he’d left other, more enigmatic names to