Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [223]
All the objects he found at first had to do with Freemasonry. There was even a mallet and 24-inch gauge. The mallet was similar to one he’d seen in the judge’s office, in the Palace of Justice, which he’d identified as a judge’s gavel. Now he understood what Ricardo Samos meant when he said, ‘It has more history than it seems’.
The torch moved excitedly onwards, the light sniffing out great surprises. A glass cabinet contained the badges and devices of Galician and Portuguese Freemasons or pedreiros livres. The torch stopped at a pair of white gloves. Not exactly a pair. They were the same colour, but of different sizes, as if one of the gloves was for a woman’s hand. Nearby there was an acacia-leaf brooch.
The torch went from one surprise to the next, travelling through history. A design on a matchbox from the First Republic. A peasant in a Phrygian cap saying, ‘Don’t call me Balthazar; I’m a citizen’. The Republican Madonnas Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, shown with wings, diffusely erotic in the darkness. The same or similar ones of modernist sensuality that appeared in the illustrated magazine of Coruña’s Masons which the torch focused on now: Brisas y Tormentas, No. 1, Yr 1, Coruña, 15 April 1900. Paúl Santos took the torch in his left hand and passed his right hand over the magazine. It’s true that, in secret vision, things emit what they say. ‘Breezes and Storms’. Aprons, collars, embroidered in gold. One of the latter with a triangle and the number 33 in red thread inside it. A blue silk sash with white veins telling the years like tree rings. At one end, a jewel in the form of a key. On the label, it said ‘Secret Master’s Sash’. Santos focused the torch for a long time on that enigmatic key with the letter Z on the wards. He was passionate about keys and locks. Anything connected with this invention. Nobody in Charity Hospital had been able to explain how the boy got inside the Room for Secret Deliveries, to which only three people had access at any one time: the medical director, Mother Laboure and the woman who was due to give birth. And she entered through an outer door. She never saw or was seen, except when she was in that kind of camera obscura she came to give birth in. He got in there. Nobody knew how. He was found in the middle of the room, in the dark, with the torch on, inside his mouth, his cheeks acting as a pink lampshade.
He was now immersed with his torch, that light which was his fetish, in another secret place, a kind of study, where there was an hourglass. The upper bulb was empty. The lower, full of sand. Santos did what anyone would do from childhood to old age. Turn the hourglass upside down. Set time in motion. He suddenly realised this simple, ancient object he’d never paid much attention to contained sky and earth. Was measuring his life. It depended on you whether or not symbols had meaning. This hourglass did. No, it didn’t. He wasn’t going to let symbols ensnare him.
Under the stairs was a small door painted black with the acronym VITRIOL in white letters. He remembered this was an old Rosicrucian motto, used by alchemists as well. Knowledge that was not derived from the indoctrination he’d received, despite specialising in criminology as opposed to the fight against subversion, which was the work of the Brigade of Politico-Social Investigation. Even so, they were always being asked to show their support for the cause and he knew that his had to appear unconditional, beyond suspicion. Another order drummed into them with the insistence of a hammer-blow to the head: no disaffection, but no indifference either. They couldn’t be cold. When he heard this for the first time, without heating, Paúl Santos was appalled by the label. Being cold meant