Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [20]
Three pesetas each. And he could get them tickets for the special train to Caneiros.
Vicente Curtis realised he’d never wondered where the material books are made of came from. No, he wasn’t thinking about ideas, doctrines and dreams. He knew that books had something to do with trees. There was a relation. It could be said somehow or other – and as he walked towards the pyres, he clarified his thoughts – that’s right, we could say that books come from nature. It might not even be false or exaggerated to say that books are a kind of graft. Though that would be to speak in metaphors. This was one of the things that had impressed him about Arturo da Silva, Galicia’s lightweight champion, that his head was full of metaphors. He wasn’t known for this, he was known for his hook, feared like a cobra, and for how he moved, his tireless dancing during fights. His celebrated jig. At this point in his recollections, as the first gust from the fires reached him, so similar it seemed to the leaves in autumn, a smile flickered across Curtis’ face as he heard Arturo da Silva reply to a journalist’s question in a teasing voice, ‘My jig? Don’t tell me you’re one of those who come to see a boxer’s legs!’ The second wave was the smell of untimely smoke, the mournful, afflicted smell of things that won’t burn, it reminded him of the damp, discordant smoke of green wood or the unwilling smoke of sawdust and the remnants of formwork, a fire that hides, grows cold. He knew it well because it signified bad weather and drowning. But he carried on. He knew how much Arturo da Silva loved those books. The people carrying and throwing them called out the source of their spoils, as if a guarantee of origin would give the flames the stimulus they needed, ‘Germinal Library! Hercules Cultural Association! New Era Libertarian Association! Galician Torch of Free Thinking!’ The soldier who seemed to be in charge of the fires, since he was the one others consulted, who from time to time read out titles and origins with gusto but also with nuances, like someone pronouncing a final judgement or a last word, is a man who is devoted to his mission, focused on the sacrifice, who eagerly accepts a copy a joyfully exultant colleague has run across to give him, holding it open by the flyleaves, open, that’s it, and pinned down like someone who’s just caught a rare lepidopteron and is taking it to the leader of the expedition. Time runs around like a stiff breeze, flaps its wings over the pyres and then stops. Everything now hangs on the decree. Finally the supervisor cries out, ‘My word, it’s a Casaritos!’
He pores over the guarantee of authenticity, the distinguishing mark, the ex-libris that matches the owner’s signature.
‘Yes, well done. It’s a genuine Casaritos!’
Curtis knows who he’s talking about. He knows who the supervisor is referring to by this diminutive he relishes with pleasurable disdain. On one occasion, on Panadeiras Street, next to the Capuchins’ myrtle, his mother pointed out Santiago Casares Quiroga, the Republican leader, to him and then boasted, ‘We’re practically neighbours.’ Then, however, Curtis had paid attention not to Casares, whom he already knew as the Man with the Red Buick and the yacht Mosquito, but to the woman and girl accompanying him. The woman wore her hair down in a mahogany blaze while the girl, unusually for her age, wore a white velvet cap with a hairnet, which covered her dancing curls. The Woman with the Mahogany Hair smiled, adopting a pose Terranova would have termed ‘a natural close-up’, while the Girl with the Hairnet seemed preoccupied, her presence austere and even surly. She kept looking back as if she feared that some of those applauding, since many of the people on the pavement had burst into spontaneous applause, would turn into a mob, snatch her cap and abduct her parents. The rest of the time, she stared at the ground absent-mindedly. Casares’ shoes were