Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [226]
at the seminary or by his reading of Vicente Risco’s History of the Devil. So much erudition and, if he hadn’t misunderstood, it seemed the closest thing to the devil in Risco’s eyes was a university professor in Santiago. He realised this vision of Boor as the devil in disguise was fed by his conviction that the treatise on Freemasonry grew in size at night and represented a challenge to his mental control. He had to stop thinking about outlandish things, such as Boor’s halitosis, albeit true, since they appeared clear enough in his vision and mental reconstruction of the character involved and he could see him pausing at his writing to breathe into a mirror and try to smell himself. Moments Santos could pinpoint in the text. When, for example, Boor distinguished varying degrees of perversity. He treated them as the enemy, but wrote about international Masons with all the rhetoric of a scholar, a supposed expert. When it came to Spain, however, he seemed to have to concentrate in order to crush some of the fearless insects that were about to collide with the Pardo lamp. In the case of Spain, anything that was not Catholic and absolutist was waste. ‘The scum of society’. As he chewed on these words, Paúl Santos felt something fermenting in his mouth. The Spirit of Contradiction. He didn’t know why there was a bitterness about this ‘scum’ he liked the taste of, like lemon rind. On Sundays, when they were allowed out of Charity Hospital, they’d sometimes invade the terraces of the marina, lively terraces with a view of the sea, when it was time for vermouth on the city’s ocean liner. They’d jump in when the customers stood up and the waiters still hadn’t cleared the empty table, the empty glasses, but there was the lemon rind with a hint of Cinzano. Miraculously they’d sometimes left the olive as well. Santos memorised phrases such as ‘the scum of society’, but could only repeat them by forcing a vision of Boor. Something he instinctively decided to avoid. A scientific mind was not incompatible with an awareness of evil. Boor’s presence bothered him. If he wanted to be a policeman, albeit a criminologist, a scientific policeman, he had to swear allegiance to the National Movement’s principles and declare his unconditional support for Franco. This is what he was going to do. You couldn’t play with that, he knew. But he’d reached a private scientific conclusion he felt very proud of. If Jakin Boor was a pseudonym of Franco, the unknown quantity was not who was behind the character of Franco, but who was behind Jakin Boor. It was the book’s fault. A bad book. He had to study it. Always fatter and emptier at night. An often quoted, though little read, author was Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo. One of his most famous quotes – ‘Spain, scourge of heretics’ – appeared at the front of one of their textbooks. Santos discovered one day this quote came from his History of Spanish Heterodox Thinkers. The title piqued his curiosity. The Spirit of Contradiction. It wasn’t easy to find. This deepened his interest. When he finally had it in his hands and started reading, he felt a mental upheaval that spread to the rest of his organism. Every life he read about struck him as more charming. It was a history that seemed to have come out of the Room for Secret Deliveries. A history of Spain. Of hidden, mutilated, persecuted, burnt, expelled lives. ‘And although there are not many Spanish freethinkers, we might well declare them to be the most impious lot to be found in the world’, wrote Menéndez Pelayo. And yet without wanting to, with the intention of condemning them for eternity, cutting off their heads, he’d performed a monumental paradox, a remarkable three-point turn, that of preserving the stock of freethinkers from oblivion. So there were many nights Santos’ light remained on, visited by moths. He couldn’t stop smiling when he read, ‘In this book, I’ve been pulling out thorns: it wouldn’t surprise me if, through contact with them, some of their roughness stuck to me’.
‘Freemasonry never rests, Mr Novás.’
‘Why don’t you take a rest, Santos?