Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [199]
‘Festive supplements, eh?’ exclaimed the doctor. ‘Interviews with beauty queens?’
‘Yes, I think that’s one of the things.’
‘And with the mayor. And with the president of housewives. And with the chair of the commerce of agriculture. The parish priest, blah, blah, blah.’
‘That’s right. That’s supplements for you.’
‘And with advertisers.’
‘Yes, I think it’s normal to interview those who place an advertisement.’
‘Do you get paid for that?’
‘I do, Mr Montevideo. I get a tip for each supplement.’
‘A scruple? You get a scruple?’
‘What do you mean, a scruple?’
‘Are you the one who gets paid for the advertisements?’
‘No. That’s left to people with more experience.’
‘You should get paid for publicity.’
Stringer wasn’t sure if he was being serious, but decided to answer him with sincerity.
‘That’s something I aspire to, Mr Montevideo.’
‘Good, my boy. Well, go ahead. You may meet a beauty queen who’s also the mayor’s daughter and your biggest advertiser’s niece. Have a wedding list with Barros or Pote department stores. I’ll send you a copy of Uruguayan divorce law.’
‘I’m also planning to write a purely literary column, Mr Montevideo.’
‘Purely? Pass me the back scratcher.’
Adverbs in -ly made his back itch. Asking for the boxwood scratcher was his most radical way of correcting, expressing the hurt, stylistic misdemeanours caused him. He was offended and sad.
‘I’m sorry. A free-ranging column.’
‘Just try not to use Espasa too much.’
‘I’ll bring you what I’ve written in case you want to bless it.’
‘No. If you show your face around here again, bring tobacco and imported whisky.’
Balboa remembers the first time he demonstrated his trust and sent him on an errand. ‘Go to Santa Lucía Market and perform the miracle of Cana, but with whisky.’ He gave him a blue banknote. It was so strange, so valuable, it seemed to have come from another country.
As he was leaving, with his head down, dragging his heels, ‘Don’t let them trick you! Obituaries are much more profitable. They have to be paid for in cash. The rafters of the sky can come crashing down, only a good death notice will stop a rotary press from going around. If you have to weed festivals, weed festivals. But the first chance you get, boy, step into Charon’s printing boat. Do obituaries. That’s the future.’
‘We don’t have obituaries, Dr Montevideo. It’s a market we can’t get into.’
‘Then your Expreso hasn’t long to live. With no death notices abaft the beam, a newspaper’s going nowhere fast.’
O and Animals
Hairs fall, fall separately, one by one, but then have a tendency to come together, they form an undulating skein on the water, they alight and are sometimes the warp that blocks the pipes. Mother Olympia told me one day that, in ancient stories, loose hairs turn into water snakes. She let it out: ‘I once heard that . . .’ And perhaps never returned to the story, which was left floating downstream like a fallen leaf. That’s another one. Leaves look bigger when they’re floating on the water, they’re the rafts sometimes used by small, itinerant frogs or ladybirds, the ones they call God’s bugs. How serene, how attentive they are on their makeshift boats! It’s the same with large animals. They don’t get restless. The horse carried off by the River Mandeo, as the tide was going out, which reached the sea and was fished out by some people from Malpica, who then exclaimed with reason, ‘The things the sea comes up with, Blessed Mary, without the need for a shovelful of manure!’ They brought the piebald horse to Coruña Docks, looking all formal in the bows. How pretty is a horse’s mane. Like Grumpy’s. How pretty are animals. I’d say there’s not a single ugly animal. ‘You’re bewitched,’ Ana tells me. And when she says that, I do the thing she likes that makes her laugh so much, I imitate Polka’s voice in Latin: ‘Lavabo inter innocentes manus meas.’ They’re all pretty. Come on then,