Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [16]
His expression, his voice, even the size of his body had changed again. Curtis thought this man’s words were linked not only to his mind, but to everything going on in his body. His breathing. The circulation of blood. Incredible, but true. From where he was, he could hear his heart beating.
‘Now I’m going to paint windows,’ said Sada. ‘Never sleep with the windows closed, Widows’ Wind permitting. And if there aren’t any windows, paint them. Invite the sea in!’
‘That’s a good one,’ said Arturo da Silva. ‘The window revolution.’
‘I’m into the naturist revolution. Another commandment is to bathe every day in the sea. I wouldn’t mind having your determination, Arturo, swimming in the sea in winter and summer. Galicia will discover her karma the day this custom spreads. I’m waiting for my own personal bathyscaphe and for when Scandinavian diving suits go on sale in Espuma. Or better still, one of those waterbeds invented by the glorious William Hooper. If this were a practical country, we’d develop an industry of waterbeds. I have to talk to Mr Senra from the shoe factory. Why can’t I be an industrial artist?’
‘I only wish I could paint a starfish the way you do,’ said Arturo. ‘A single starfish is enough to justify a life.’
‘Why paint them if you can go down and collect them in fistfuls from the bottom of Ánimas? I paint the sea because I can’t dive. I have to make do with the starfish that fall from the sky. They escape from the seagull’s beak by amputating the arm it’s holding them by. Did that never happen to you?’
‘It did once. It fell on my head. I was petrified. I thought the Universal Architect had got hold of me.’
‘A mythological sign, Arturo!’
‘It’s Hercules here who needs one of those,’ Arturo says for Curtis. ‘He’s got his first boxing match tonight.’
The Burning Books
19 August 1936
The books were burning badly. One of them stirred in the nearest bonfire and Hercules thought he saw it suddenly fan out its fresh pollack’s red gills. An incandescent piece came off another and rolled like a neon sea urchin down the steps of a fire staircase. Then he thought a trapped hare was moving in the fire, and that a gust of wind, which kindled the flames, was scattering in sparks each and every one of the hairs on its burnt skin. So the hare kept its form in a graph of smoke and stretched its legs to bound off down the glazed diagonal of the Atlantic avenue’s sky.
The first book fires had been built by the docks, on the way to Parrote, on the urban belly so to speak, where the sea gave birth to the city, the first cluster of fishermen. Much grass had grown since then, even on the roofs, whose vocation is to be the brow of a hill, in the area where today the bay’s passenger boats, the city’s trams and national coaches all meet. The other fires are placed alongside, in the main square, which is named after María Pita, the heroine who led the defence of the city during one of the many attacks by sea at the head of a commando of fishing women, and now contains the town hall with its inscription ‘Head, Guard, Key and Antemural of the Kingdom of Galicia’. Curtis had heard of the heroine María Pita at the Dance Academy as if she were still alive, in that undying present that is to be a rumour on people’s lips, not just because she’d stood up to the sea dog/admiral Francis Drake, but because she’d been married four times and the judge had had to warn her that she’d been widowed enough and should see that no more men died in the battle of her bed.
There’s a pauper called Zamorana who lives and sleeps among the tombs and pantheons in the city of the dead, in the seaside cemetery of San Amaro. She once gave Hercules a fright