Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [27]
With the passing of time, the initial funeral procession of mockery turns into a routine, an industrial-scale burning, which must have something to do with the increasingly thick smoke, a tactile, sticky stench that suggests to Curtis one last metaphor. The books had come down from the trees and fallen into the trap of some men with viscous arms. So, from close up, the embers at the bottom of the fire resembled a cluster of birds reduced to ashen silhouettes and glowing yellow or orange beaks. Had Arturo da Silva been here, the books wouldn’t be burning, thought Curtis. Or perhaps they were burning because he wasn’t here. The fact they were burning was further proof of his loss. And Curtis’ mind, which in Arturo’s words was a spiral staircase, ascended, or descended, another step. It was the boxer from Shining Light, the writer of Brazo y Cerebro, who was burning. The books’ last smell was of flesh.
‘Revista de Occidente. Federico García Lorca. New York (Office and Denunciation). What have we here?’
The name sounded familiar to Parallelepiped. He hadn’t read anything by him, but he’d heard lots of jokes about him under the heading ‘red queens’. In a Fascist publication, one of those papers he did read, there was always a stubborn misprint in the second surname: García Loca or ‘madwoman’.
He opened it up. Adopted a humorous tone:
Under the multiplications
is a drop of duck’s blood
Shit! He didn’t read any more. The drop of duck’s blood changed his voice. He looked away and made an effort to shout:
‘Boss! There’s a Lorca here.’
He threw it with obvious hatred into the middle of the volcano, which spewed out black smoke and shiny sparks.
He took another handful. Meanwhile his boss had approached. The first of the new lot was a slim volume, the only illustration a single scallop shell in the centre.
‘Six Galician Poems! Fe-de-ri-co . . . What’s this? Can’t they leave each other alone?’
He turned to face his boss with the book held out and a look of disgust.
‘Samos! Did this faggot also write in Galician?’
His boss lingered over the cover, though young Parallelepiped thought there was hardly much to read. Six Galician Poems by Federico García Lorca. Foreword E. B. A. Nós Publishing House. Compostela. Samos may have been investigating those dots after the letters. Deciphering those initials. He leafed through it slowly, page by page. Parallelepiped tossed the other books while watching Samos. What’s he up to? Is he going to read the whole thing?
Locks that go out to sea,
where the clouds their glittering dovecot keep
The book danced in his hands. He looked at the boy observing him steadily, waiting for some informed remark.
‘He spent some time here,’ said the supervisor, ‘with a theatre company, Barraca. Yes, he was right here. I think he made a lot of friends. The book’s recent. Under a year.’
‘That was another age, Comrade Samos,’ declared the young boy.
A year. The phrase Parallelepiped used was of someone measuring an astronomical distance. The look of someone abolishing time. He was right. After all, he knew how to measure what was happening. It was a month to the day since the war had started. The first month of Year I.
The war had changed all concept of time. The war had changed many things, but above all measures of duration. Nós Publishing House. He could have given him a lecture, but it didn’t exist any more. It had no future and it wouldn’t have any past either. That was where Galicianist Republicans hung out, those who had this stupid idea of a federal Spain. The publisher was Ánxel Casal. Mayor of Santiago de Compostela. Or rather ex-mayor. In a dungeon right now. Like Coruña’s mayor, Alfredo Suárez Ferrín. He felt something like vertigo to think that these two figures of the Republic, democratically elected mayors, had been imprisoned as enemies of the nation. But the vertigo was exciting, intoxicating. He’d finally