Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [18]
‘Plato’s Republic. About time! What’s this? An Encyclopedia of Meat!’ Bam!
It’s a thick volume that sends embers flying and eats away the angles of ruins like the sudden collapse of a seam on lower buildings. The word ‘meat’ was enough to activate the throw. The head imagines a treatise on lust, pictures of orgies, shame not to have had a peek. When the volume reaches the end of its fall, the Falangist gives it a little kick on the corner with the toecap of his boot. As it opens, with a new eruption of smoke and cinders and the first flames, what meets the eyes is a two-page map of the peninsula with the different provinces shown in colours. The effect is too causal, an accidental jerk of the boot, which the eyes hasten to correct. No, they’re not the provinces of Spain. It soon becomes obvious it’s really an illustration of the different parts of a cow. Loin, sirloin, hock, coccyx, rump, rib, brisket . . .
‘What you’ve thrown in there is a book of recipes!’ comes a mocking voice from behind.
‘Then it’ll make a nice barbecue.’
The fires are in the most public part of the city, opposite the symbolic seat of civil power. Hercules shouldn’t head in that direction because Hercules is far better known than he thinks. But for now he’s in luck. He approaches the fires and none of the operators, all of them armed and dressed in the Falange’s uniform, pays him any attention, taken up as they are with the problem of books burning badly. One of them likens them to bricks. And then attaches a geometrical clarification even he finds strange:
‘They’re parallelepipeds!’
Next to him, the youngest soldier wishes to repeat the long word, but realises it isn’t easy and tries whispering it. It sounds like the name of a very rare species of bird. More complicated than palmipedes. He doesn’t have any problems with that, with palmipedes, and looks at the pyre without reading the titles, like an abstraction, like the model of an Aztec pyramid.
‘Pa-ra-lle-le-pi-peds! That’s it. Parallelepipeds.’
He finally got it. He feels better now.
‘Parallelepiped!’ says the sergeant, slapping him on the back.
‘Parallelepiped,’ he replies proudly, following the trail of smoke and gazing up at the sky. Encouraged by his success, he tries to remember the names of clouds he studied at school. All he remembers is nimbus. What’s a nimbus? What kind of cloud is made by the smoke rising from the pyres? But he stops thinking about clouds because the one who likened the resistance of the books to bricks and pronounced the word ‘parallelepiped’ with incredible ease is preparing to fan the fire with some sheets of newspaper. One of them slips out of his hands and flies like a palmiped. A strange bird, the beginnings of a collage in the sky. Curtis also follows the sheet through the air. The soldier who lost it runs after it, jumps and traps it in the claw of his hand. Looks smug. Calls the others over. There they are with arms upraised in a photo taken yesterday, when they lit the first fires, which the clerical daily El Ideal Gallego printed today, 19 August 1936: ‘On the seashore, so that the sea can carry off the remains of so much misery and corruption, the Falange is burning heaps of books.’
It’s a strange kind of fire, this, Curtis thinks to himself. Its tongue is invisible. It’s a fire that chews, with canines.
Not long before, at the end of June, huge festive bonfires had been erected in the city to celebrate St John’s Eve. Curtis had been one of a group of boys and young men from Sol Street who collected dried branches, worm-eaten pieces of furniture that held themselves together with the dignity of geometrical spectres and the usual donation of wooden remains, broken planks, disjointed limbs, from the highly active