Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [198]
The result was a graphic hotchpotch in his pupils’ notebooks. The nonsense of lines.
‘Tell me, Balboa, what have you written?’
‘I only had time to jot down, Concentric circles await their day.’
‘Perfect. That’s pure Dadaism. Gabriel?’
‘Nothing, Mr Montevideo.’
‘You’re just beginning. Don’t try to understand it all. Leave your ears free, let your hand do the work. Till you reach ‘irreproachable traceability’, as Don Alfredo Nadal de Mariezcurrena used to say. And you, lawyer?’
‘Drops of rain in a black square.’
Having calmed down a little, Dr Montevideo sought out simple, self-contained sentences in among the sheets of material covering his bed. Fragments of humanistic stenography.
‘Write down this by Éluard: There are other worlds but all are in this one. By Jules Renard: Truth is of small dimensions. Let’s see if anyone can tell me who wrote the next one: Therein no fairy’s arm can transcend the Leviathan’s tail.’
‘That’s by Melville!’
‘Well done, Balboa.’
On another sheet, he found something that made him thoughtful and he decided not to read. Then:
‘Farewell, my book. A single passenger, as I suppose you know, must not keep a vessel waiting.’
‘That’s by Marcus Valerius Martialis,’ said Santos immediately. ‘The poet’s about to return to Bilbilis in Hispania, his native city, after decades of absence.’
Dr Montevideo stared at him with the satirical astonishment of bulging eyes.
‘Very good, lawyer, very good.’
A few days later, after class, Santos said to him, ‘Doctor, I made so bold as to bring you some poems.’
‘Who wrote them?’
‘Who wrote them? I did, Mr Montevideo.’
‘Why?’
What had been irony, a historical joke between poets, at that point became an implacable question, of the sort legal terminology defines as ‘preliminary proceedings’. One of Dr Montevideo’s commandments: Every literary work should have a purpose in mind, like preliminary proceedings.
‘Why? Tell me why you wrote those poems.’
It was an embarrassing situation. His bulging eyes on the verge of firing off like gaucho bullets in search of an ostrich.
Santos had gone bright red. You could see the marks left by those whys like lashes on his cheeks.
‘Reply. You write poems. Poems at such a time. Can you not tell me why?’
‘Well, I suppose they’re a kind of exercise.’
‘An exercise? Respiratory? Typewritten?’
‘To tell the truth, they’re not mine. They’re anonymous copies that fell into my hands. Why? I don’t know why.’
Montevideo’s eyes nestled back into their sockets. He had these outbursts, which he tried to lend a certain style to, but he wasn’t organically equipped to abuse, sustain malicious pressure on somebody, ‘Then forgive me. I’m actually very interested in those poems. You say they’re anonymous? Leave them over there. They might even be fragments of dramatic history.’
Tito Balboa found it very difficult to admit to Dr Montevideo that he was going to abandon his project of writing a novel about the life of Hercules Lighthouse. Somehow it was he who’d helped give birth to the idea of A Lighthouse’s Autobiography. They had certain set days when Balboa went on his own to note down stenographically (sorry about the -ly, Mr Montevideo), to note down in shorthand information about the city’s hidden history: what the lighthouse could see at night. But he was leaving his literary dreams behind in order to devote himself to journalism. Who would have any interest in the story of a lighthouse told by itself, that theory about landscape’s subjectivity, the scars of history on territory, bodies and words? Such a novel would be buried in this world’s end. Maybe later. He had a stock of arguments. A horizon of professional opportunities was opening up before him. He had to mount