Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [225]
‘If I could choose,’ said Mother Laboure, ‘I’d be a detective. I’d study Law followed by Criminology. I’d fight against real crime. Yep. That’s what I’d be. And not a silly old Sister of Charity.’
She was the one who laughed when she saw Paúl’s expression. Then she added in a hoarse voice and suspenseful tone, ‘Instead of wiping noses, I’d be cleaning up the city’s sewers.’
In the training he received, there was an inevitable section on subversive warfare. Information about the enemy, working constantly at home and abroad, in hiding and in exile, was hardly scientific. They were part of evil. They were anti-Spain. You had to know what they were doing, every step, how they breathed . . . but not delve into their thought too much. Know enough to apprehend them. Hate them. That was all.
But Santos’ scientific mind couldn’t stop finding obstacles. As with the laughter he heard from the seminary window, he couldn’t block his ears.
He’d now got stuck on the R of VITRIOL.
He managed to pull out the first three letters from a corner of his memory: Visita Interiorem Terrae. But couldn’t go any further. The training hadn’t been scientific, pondered Santos. The study of Freemasonry, for example, was limited in practice to knowledge of special laws, the work of the Tribunal for the Repression of Freemasonry and Communism, and to the study of articles and a book signed with a mysterious name, Jakin Boor, though he’d soon been warned this was a pseudonym of Franco, Spain’s own Caudillo. Such an open secret immunised this pile of rubbish against any doubt or observation that might be classed as a criticism. With his innate ability to rise to the occasion when confronted with a mess, Paúl Santos extracted what he thought was the leitmotif: ‘Freemasonry never rests’. Boor achieved something: Paúl Santos’ interest in these conspirators who never let up. ‘It’s the Spirit of Contradiction!’ joked a hoarse voice that could have been Catherine Laboure’s. A sort of supreme assembly of international Masons met ‘every working day in Geneva’, from where they ‘influenced the world’s affairs and dictated orders to the majority of the universe’. They directed everything from liberal governments to PEN Clubs and the League for the Rights of Man. When their teacher asked for a summary of that volume that grew in size as you read it, Santos was crazy enough to raise his hand and reply, ‘Freemasonry never rests’.
Everyone waited for him to continue, including Professor Novás, who gestured to him to expand on his thesis. Santos was known for his expositional seriousness. But something, a kind of filament, what Laboure called ‘the root of a hair’, tickled his way of thinking.
‘Yes?’ the teacher of doctrine urged him on.
‘In the words of our expert, Jakin Boor, Freemasonry never rests, Mr Novás.’
He never thought he’d have so much success in an initiation class for future policemen on account of the indefatigable Boor. In this brief intervention, Santos adopted a serious, pithy tone, in the manner of an aphorism, and a grave look. Franco was often praised for his commitment. The Caudillo ‘never rests’. To use a metaphor churned out by the propaganda machine, ‘The light in the Pardo never goes out’. Recurring in the press, at any moment, for whatever reason, like the stuff of legend, this light in Pardo Palace that never went out had become part of the Spanish landscape. Did this light exist? Santos saw a man with thick eyebrows emerging from inside Franco every night in a green bathrobe and sitting down to write tirelessly next to the famous light. He had a hole in his right slipper, through which poked a toe in the form of a claw he used to scratch his left internal malleolus, the only compensation for being awake. This man was Jakin Boor. And what Santos saw was a figure with devilish traits. Childhood images aside, he’d always found it difficult to see or imagine what the devil would be like. He wasn’t helped by his study of iconography