Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [133]
‘Yes, Commander Dez.’
Commander. He liked it when his secretary called him that.
‘Anything to report concerning Aurelio Anceis?’ Tomás Dez now asked the owner of the Sahara boarding-house. Dalia had shown him into that lounge which still had a gramophone. Mute, but there it was, lending a certain style. The woman also looked more ancient and more attractive than the first time, with those painted nails dancing like dragonflies. ‘Anything new turn up, any request?’
‘You know what he wanted. Everything of his to be burnt. What a fright he gave me when he tried to do it in the kitchen. He wasn’t very good at handling fire. At the end, this became his obsession. In the lounge, he’d start writing verses on scraps of paper and then set fire to them in an ashtray. It was the only time I had to ask him to be careful.’
It was better to confront your ghosts than to carry them on your back, thought Dez. There was a certain matter rolling around in his mind. He realised he was talking to a smart woman, who maybe didn’t just read the fashion magazines with faded covers scattered about the small lounge of the Sahara boarding-house like holidaymakers caught out by winter. The same could be said of Miss Dalia. Her hairstyle, jewels, make-up, nails, everything about her shared a family likeness with the gramophone and those illustrations in Belle époque summer programmes.
‘I wonder if you share my opinion,’ said Dez. ‘There was something wrong with Aurelio Anceis. I mean apart from his illness. Recently he’d become very suspicious, don’t you think?’
‘I know people who spend their lives at sea and come ashore to die, Mr Dez. They can’t accept things. They find us strange. But he never used to complain. On the contrary, to him almost everything was wonderful. In his last days . . .’
‘The man was a wretch!’ Dez blurted out in a loud voice that was petulant and accusing.
‘Did he never tell you about the dance in L’Étoile?’
Now it seemed to be the characters in the cover photos listening to her narrative. Dez guessed she wasn’t the kind of woman to start crying, but she blinked and rubbed her hands, ‘In his last days, of course we didn’t know it, he’d pay tribute to the smallest things. I’d give him an apple for dessert and he’d carry on looking at it for hours. He’d say to me, “Isn’t it wonderful, Miss Dalia?”’
Dez glanced in the same direction as the Sahara lady, but found nothing that could be described as wonderful. She abruptly shook her head and said, ‘If what you mean is whether Mr Anceis had a secret, I’d have to reply I don’t know. If he had any secrets, he took them with him. All he left me was a Festina watch.’
‘That’s all very interesting from the point of view of Anceis as a poet. But right now I was thinking about something else. Do you think there’s any possibility Aurelio Anceis hasn’t died?’
She was stunned. Dez would have liked to know whether her contemplation had to do with him, an assessment of his sanity, or whether she was really considering the hypothesis Anceis might not be dead.
‘Listen, sir. It was very polite of him to die the way he did.’
The Sahara lady had adopted a hard tone that sounded quite genuine.
‘He spent the nights coughing,’ said Dalia. ‘I even considered throwing him out, fond as I was of him. “Mr Anceis, why don’t you go to a hospital or some home?” When I said this to him, he fell quiet. He got over his cough for a time. Either that or he smothered it, who knows? He then had the decency to go and die outside. Without bothering anyone. He even made his own bed. He wrote a farewell letter, which I gave to the police. But first he made his bed. He’d smooth out the creases in his quilt with his hand, like an iron. It was very kind of him to die like this. One thing about sailors, they can fend for themselves.’
Her expression hardened further as she addressed Dez. What questions was he asking? Wasn’t he his friend? She said, ‘Mr Anceis was a correct man. Didn’t they