Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [220]
‘There’s no secret witness. Boa’s dead.’
‘What?’
‘Yep, our number one witness. She was found with a shot in the head, holding a small revolver, a Bulldog. A hole in her temple. Another sewer in history. Apparent suicide. Bullshit.’
‘Suicide? That woman would never have killed herself.’
Santos left, muttering, ‘Not even for the prize of immortality would she have killed herself.’
The Whale’s Belly
Sada to Dr Montevideo on the subject of boats, ‘To think I could bring them here and not depart on them.’ Suddenly his eyes blazed with St Elmo’s fire. Montevideo knew the painter had just discovered how to enter the mural and perhaps leave for ever. He felt the wall and remarked in surprise, ‘It’s only a thin membrane.’
The Tachygraphic Rose
He’d been thinking about that moment for quite some time. He wasn’t at all sure. He was used to observing people, watching them, examining the smallest details. A hair. The prints left by fingers or lips. To reading the writing bodies leave behind them in a space. The extraordinary information that can be contained in a bin full of rubbish. He thought about it one day. Writing poems, each of which was about a rubbish bin. It would be both biography and geography. It was one of the aspects of his job that most attracted him. He wouldn’t tell anyone this. He’d tell her. A little later on. How the act of emptying a bin on a large table, sorting and arranging families of refuse, was a way of constructing a poetic place, a genuine, enthralling fiction. Catia was an intelligent woman. She’d be interested. For sure. In fact, being a policeman was like being a historian. And the search for clues, rummaging around in a rubbish bin, was a kind of archaeological dig. This position gave him security in front of the other, the one being observed, followed or watched. The biographee, so to speak. With Catia, he had the opposite impression. He was the one being studied. He was under her control, starting with her position in the class of speed typing. From the front, it was she who gave instructions that affected his whole body, who guided him with the invisible threads of words to achieve the goal of his fingers being as fast as his eyes. But it wasn’t just in this time he spent as an automaton, sitting in a row with other pupils. When he stood up, before this woman who was younger and shorter than he was, he felt the mandate continued. His techniques of self-control didn’t work. His desire to neutralise his muscles’ spontaneous joy when, for example, she came to advise him on the position of his elbows actually caused extreme rigidity. It was the same with his speech. He was like a lopsided pair of scales. So when he finally took the step of asking Catia out one Sunday afternoon, after she’d twice agreed to have coffee with him in Borrazás during the break, and when Catia said yes, OK, she’d be there the day after next, at five o’clock in the Beach Club, his typewriter got stuck because he pressed several keys at once.
‘You’re a policeman?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why did you hide it at enrolment?’
‘I have my reasons. Secrecy, a certain kind of secret, is a tool of the trade. More important than a gun.’
‘Why are you telling me now? Better to have kept it a secret.’
‘Right now I’m not a lawyer or a policeman. Or even a criminal. I’m just a guy who’s nervous on a date with a girl he likes.’
‘I’m not in the habit of ruining dates,’ said Catia, ‘but let me get something clear. I don’t see a policeman or a lawyer or a criminal. I see someone who hides what he is.’
‘Listen, Catia, we need the police. Call it what you like. They’re here to protect people. And in my case a little secrecy is needed. I can’t go around with a placard saying, “Long live people!”’
‘It’s not like that,’ said Catia. ‘Don’t try and pretend we live in a normal country. I’m the one who has to be cautious.’
And she did speak cautiously, in a low voice, but what she said sounded very loud, incredibly loud, perhaps because it was unusual for the time and place, and seemed to spread as far as the eyes could see, which