Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [26]
‘The Divine Sketch is by Curros!’ said the supervisor without having to look, which impressed his subordinate.
The queries were few and far between. There wasn’t much selection. Books were unloaded in heaps or thrown haphazardly from boxes. When one did emerge from anonymity, like a face emerging from a common grave, the reading aloud of its title conferred on it a dying distinction, the ultimate proof that the title was actually a good one, since there was that cretin, in his own words, Parallelepiped, with certain pomp, asking about it. Here perhaps, unlike with others that gave rise to jokes, the allusion to the divine made his hands itch. Until that moment, he hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to the meaning of the titles, only to the humour in them. He hadn’t discriminated between them. So it was no surprise he should now think there was something strange in his having picked up one that spoke of ‘the divine’ alongside ‘sketch.’ The one that referred to God to ask if he existed shouldn’t be allowed to exist for another second. But this one, The Divine Sketch, suggested the idea of a superior laugh. And he liked to laugh. To laugh at danger as well. He had guts, you might even say he was hardened. Before the military uprising achieved its purpose, he’d been involved with a group of trained gunmen in acts of provocation aimed at destabilising the Republic. On one occasion, they’d broken up a meeting and someone had been shot. It took him some time to believe that he’d done it. And he never really accepted the fact. He’d been shocked. In his view, the amount of blood a wounded man can lose bore no relation to the simple act of pulling a trigger. After a few days, it became less important. Now it wasn’t important at all. Now even winning the war wasn’t enough. The idea of war itself had little to say. Things had advanced to another stage. Beyond war.
‘Manuel Curros Enríquez, that’s right.’
The Falangist, whom everyone now calls Parallelepiped, remembers why the name sounds familiar. The city’s largest sculpture is dedicated to Curros. He must have done something. In the gardens, surrounded by a lake. Very near there. He noticed it because on top of the monument is a naked woman rising triumphantly into the sky. Now that’s a monument. Were it not for the new Post Office, the woman could see the fires. Amazing what you can do with stone. Afterwards he’ll have to go and have another look. At the stone slut.
‘What? What shall I do with this one? Under house arrest?’
Curtis guessed that the authority of the man who decided the destiny of books derived not just from his position in the hierarchy, but from the fact he read a lot and was what is generally termed ‘a man of culture’. In fact, he didn’t stop reading and consulting books, some of them rescued from the flames. While his subordinates carried out the burning, egging each other on with jokes and directing insults at particularly obnoxious titles, their boss circulated. He went from group to group, issuing the same instruction under his breath, ‘Any copies of Scripture, in particular the New Testament, let me know at once.’
Now he frowns.
‘You can throw The Divine Sketch in the fire!’
Parallelepiped moves his arm like a lever, releases his fingers and drops the book without further ado. Then unconsciously, either because his last memory of the sculpture is of water bubbling