Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [23]
Father Christmas looked around.
‘Good evening!’
‘Evening, Mr Casares!’
Father Christmas went inside 12 Panadeiras Street and Terranova gave Curtis a nudge. ‘Casares? That Father Christmas was the minister?’
‘That’s right.’
‘He could have left us a present. Shared the weight out.’
‘I think he was carrying books. Books for the most part. Books are heavy.’
‘Well, he could have given us one!’ exclaimed Terranova. ‘Even if it was a book. To say the least!’
One of Curtis’ part-time jobs had been to cart books for the Faith bookshop. He brought them in a barrow from the railway station. They were kept in boxes. One of them, the biggest, had a label which read Man and the Earth (Reclus). Another big one contained The White Magazine-The Ideal Novel. Smaller ones were marked Mother (Maxim Gorky), The Story of the Heavens (Stawell Ball), Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka), How to Become a Good Electrician (T. Corner). As he pushed the iron-wheeled barrow, he stared at the labels. ‘Maxim’. He liked that name as a possible alias for the day he became a boxer. ‘Kid Kafka’ wasn’t bad either. And ‘The Corner’. That was perfect. But he liked ‘Maxim’ as well. The books were heavy. Tobacco weighs a lot less. As do condoms. Terranova was into the international trade of liners. Whatever he could hide under his coat. He was paid in kind by the crew members he took on a tour of the city. An easy job. Many of them stopped not far from port, in Luisa Fernanda’s cabaret or the Méndez Núñez, charmed by the Garotas variety show. The way they came out half naked, singing with a puppet between their legs, ‘Mummy, buy me a negro, buy me a negro from the bazaar, who dances the Charleston and plays the Jazzman.’ Terranova imitated their performance with a boxing glove between his legs. What a clown he was and how well he did it. As when he pushed the barrow and stopped. Read the labels on the boxes one by one. ‘Man, earth, heavens, mother . . . What you doing with all this weight, Curtis? You got the whole world in here.’ ‘I’m going to the Faith bookshop.’ ‘That’s right,’ he replied, ‘always trying to help. To carry all this, you’d need the barrow of faith.’ There were days he spoke like an old man.
‘Maxim’ wasn’t bad, ‘Kid Kafka’ was unsettling, but he liked ‘The Corner’ best.
A gong sounded again inside 12 Panadeiras Street. It was louder this time. Came from deep inside the house. Cut straight through them. Like the cold. Like the moon.
‘A book at least,’ murmured Terranova, ‘would be something.’
‘You want a book?’ Curtis asked him. ‘You really want a book?’
Both of them had their hands in their pockets. Terranova’s feet were half off the kerb and he was leaning forwards. The same game that annoyed Curtis so much when he played it on the edge of the cliffs. His insistence on always walking along the edge, hanging out over the abyss.
He pretended to fall. Did a somersault. ‘Yes, I want a book!’
‘Come on then. I know where we can find some books.’
It was Christmas Eve 1931. They met no one on the way. The sea in Orzán redoubled its efforts when it saw them. Threw foam, drowned in its own roars. They were counting on this. On certain dates, the sea has a tendency to be vainglorious. The more witnesses there are, the more powerful the waves. They advance sideways against the wind. The water runs down their faces. They laugh and curse. In a corner of the Coiraza wall, which acts as a breakwater, the fashioned stone of the quarries is piled up with natural rocks. Kneeling down, with his back to the sea, Curtis moves a stone and puts his hand in the gap. He knows Flora has a store of The Ideal Novel in there. She goes there to sunbathe. And sometimes smokes what she calls an aromatic. These, she says, are her two square metres of paradise. The naked body revives in the open air. Here she reads her short novels. Keeps a stack of them under the stones.
‘The Ideal Novel? These aren’t books, they’re handkerchiefs. Look what’s here: Sister Light in Hell, My Misfortune, Last Love, Decent Prostitutes, The Executioner’s Daughter, Nancy’s Tragedy