Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [254]
What he wanted was for us to be knowledgeable. What I wanted was for him to carry on talking. Because of what he said and to watch the way his Adam’s apple moved.
He hasn’t shaved for days. Darkness has gone to sleep, so the light of the table lamp concentrates on his face. You can see him better than during the day. Polka’s so skinny, instead of a double chin, he has a hollow that arches the roof of the grotto where his amazing Adam’s apple holds stage. His beard’s a bit ancient. Roots sticking out through cracks in the stone. A laborious renaissance of thickets among crags, stalks with colourful spikes you couldn’t see before his beard went grey.
He was tired that night.
‘I dug the grave and saw myself on top of a palm tree. Felt dizzy again. The body’s memory is such a strange thing.’
‘What were you doing on top of a palm?’
‘Pruning and climbing. It’s the only place in the world you cut and climb.’
‘You used to prune palm trees?’
‘I did. I pruned the palms in Recheo Gardens.’
‘Were they very tall?’
‘They were of a certain height. And I made them taller.’
‘You did?’
‘That’s right. You have to make palm trees. Like building a staircase in the sky.’
I stayed silent because there was a wounded note in Polka’s response as if the pruning had affected his body. I imagined him clambering up the palm tree’s old cuts to reach the branches he still had to saw.
‘Pruning a tall palm is very different from pruning any other tree. It’s like cutting wings. The whole leaf shakes as you’re sawing. Though they’re not really leaves. More like spines. Skeletons.’
His glistening eyes also lived in holes. Polka’s face was an inhabited rock. Not round, a succession of stone slabs with caves where shiny-skinned, expressive creatures darted about. I watched him with my face on the pillow, Pinche having been rocked to sleep by his flowing tones, and it seemed to me his apple was a pendulum moving his lips and the scent of words brought his eyes out, his eyes and his memories, since they illustrated the story he was telling. Polka’s mechanism, set in motion, went in the other direction to night. He was able to resist it. Olinda knew this and called him to bed.
‘Skeletons?’
‘Spines of big fish. Swordfish.’
With my face lying on the pillow, in the mist of sleepiness, I could see him up there, on top of a palm, sawing the skeletons of swordfish. Polka is shaped like a spine. Never had much flesh. He had a friend, Celeiro, whose skeleton alone weighed a hundred and twenty kilos. At death’s door, he said to him, ‘Polka, death doesn’t want you, you’ve nothing to gnaw on.’
Now Polka’s lying down and O is standing next to his bed. Polka’s feet are cold, the rest of him is warm. His ribs are becoming more and more visible, even under the sheet. A body assembled on a palm leaf. The creatures living under the stone slabs of his face seem to be quiet tonight. Except for his eyes. His eyes are wide open and look at her in surprise. Suddenly he blinks as if trying to clear a mist. O doesn’t want to stop talking, maintains the flow of her voice. She may be watching him on top of a palm tree, sawing swordfish spines. Sawing and climbing.
Before falling asleep, O hears Olinda calling to Polka, ‘A lot of hare your mother must have eaten when she was pregnant with you!’
It’s true. He sleeps with open eyes.
O wakes up with a start. Sweating. Has the sensation the imitation leather on the hospital chair has been grafted on to her skin. She was asleep for a few minutes, but saw herself descending one staircase in Polka’s arms, and climbing another, holding him.
‘What do you do in that hospital?’
‘The laundry, Polka.’
‘Are you your own boss?’
‘Mine and the washing machines,’ replied O ironically.
‘That’s good. The washing machines kicked you out of here and now you press their buttons. Let the machines do the work, damn it!’
‘Before going to London, I worked in the house I told you about. In Sussex, invisible man country.’
‘I don’t suppose you saw him,’ said Polka.