Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [244]
Which is why Gabriel Samos made the mistake of staring at her. Not deliberately. He simply didn’t realise. She did. She realised. Gave him a serious look while lighting a cigarette, perhaps so she wouldn’t have to address the ogler. He became embarrassed. Instead of taking a step forwards, tried to hide it. Without saying a word or moving a piece, opened the pit of the intruder.
The performance of The Tragedy of King Lear at Gennevilliers National Theatre was sold out for this night and the next. A woman, María Casares, was playing the legendary king. The reviews had been highly favourable. Talked of her energy, her hoarse voice, her face carved out on the stormy stage. She’d acted in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth. Lear was waiting. And now she was Lear, the king named after a Celtic sea-god. María always thought in terms of nature for a role. The sea was strong and melancholy, impulsive and sweet, brutal and loving. She found her ideal of mature beauty in the weather-beaten faces of those who inhabited Atlantic shores. Since she couldn’t be in Galicia, she was sorry not to live in Brittany. But the theatre itself was a Finisterre, a windy outcrop. In her early seventies, she’d finally acquired the look of an old sea lady.
The books her family had taken on their last trip from Coruña to Madrid, which had accompanied her into exile, included volumes of works by Shakespeare, Valle-Inclán, Manuel Curros Enríquez. This had been her father’s favourite poet. A memory that goes with her everywhere. Not a relentless ghost, but a place made of voice she returns to when necessary. The feeling is warm and strange. An exile within an exile. To send her to sleep, her father recites Galician Melody. Recites fragments from Curros’ Airs of My Land, verses he knows off by heart, which seem to come not from the memory that plays with elevated notes, but from another corner, a deep cave.
‘Another beakful?’
‘Go on then!’
He calls each stanza this, the amount of food a bird carries in its beak for its chicks. María thinks it’s the verses that remind her of him, of Santiago, as he murmurs them next to her bed in the twilight. When she was a girl, her father had periods of frenetic activity followed by bouts of illness. The Melody’s verses are like lines drawn on a face that takes shape as they’re spoken. Lines that contain the mystery of life: what’s hidden behind the eyes. As when she went with her mother to visit him in Madrid’s Modelo Prison. She was eight. He’d been arrested for participating in the clandestine Republican government during Berenguer’s regime, which supported the monarchy. She was horrified. What she saw was the ghost of her father. A bag of bones suffering from consumption and imprisonment. Everything had changed. There was no warm home. The only thing that remained was what was hidden behind the eyes. Which is why the Melody doesn’t rock her to sleep, it makes her more alert, keeps her company. The Melody remembers for her. Wherever she may be. In the dovecot on the Rue de Vaugirard. In La Vergne, her house in Charente. On the Rue Asseline. On all her artistic tours, in the loneliness that follows her artistic triumphs. She has photos, postcards, letters, small personal belongings she keeps like talismans or relics. But nothing like those verses that escaped the burning, the pillage. Something no murderous tyrant or governor can imagine. A Melody protected by the mouth’s dampness or, as her father, Santiago, would say, kept in a corner of the occipital ark. A Melody that talks of the siren (who has song), the snake (who has breath) and God (who has hell).
You have enough
with what is hidden
in those eyes of yours.
Shakespeare was fortunate to make that journey from Coruña to Madrid when her father was appointed minister. He stayed alive. Then accompanied them into