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By Root 554 0

arisen from inaction, from a bland form of Christianity. He could shout as during the Crusades, ‘God wills it!’ And in fact this is how, with a warlike cry, he’d ended a short speech at the local branch of the Falange, which now had a large skull painted on the wall. Yes, he felt the telepathic force of Carl Schmitt, his new, revered master. It was naive to believe in a telepathy of words, but not of ideas. In the thesis he was preparing on Donoso Cortés, concerning the dictatorship, he’d noted down an idea he later discovered in one of Schmitt’s texts: a state of emergency was to law what a miracle was for theology. Since the machinery of conspiracy had been set in motion and above all since he’d felt the itching in his brain that came from holding a weapon in his hand that afternoon when Dez invited him to military training on the beach, since then he’d been accompanied every day by the image of Heidegger, the Nazi Rector of Freiburg University, giving the order to descend to Plato’s cave to requisition the projector of ideas. Yes, he knew them. He knew Casal. Compostela’s mayor had been born in Coruña and founded his publishing house there. His wife, María Miramontes, was a well-known designer. His mother, Pilar, had even ordered her famous dress of black chiffon with black velvet grapes from her. The mother’s final act of daring. Needless to say, Casal and Miramontes were friends with Luís Huici, the artistic tailor, the inventor of incredible double-breasted waistcoats and broad-shouldered jackets which were so popular with Coruña’s Bohemians. Waistcoats, ideas. He’d got the young drunk with his speeches at Germinal. Right now, Huici was probably tasting castor oil in the barracks of the Falange.

He gave the book back to Parallelepiped, ‘You can throw it!’ Parallelepiped might have wondered why he didn’t throw it himself though, given the circumstances, that would have been a strange thought. So he just carried out the order. Should somebody ever write a history of the burning of books in Coruña, they could add a non-gratuitous detail: Ánxel Casal and Federico García Lorca were murdered that same morning. The Galician publisher in a ditch outside Santiago, in Cacheiras, and the Granadine poet in the gully of Víznar, Granada. At about the same time, six hundred miles apart.

The book landed on some copies of Man and the Earth by the geographer Élisée Reclus. It was still there, safe for the moment, on those sort of rocks which formed a mountain range the fire ascended. Samos kept looking at it. He was sometimes superstitious and trusted his instinct. Now he was thinking this little book could one day be a rarity. A work printed in the Galician language might become a relic. A first edition of the Six Poems would be as valuable as a medieval parchment.

‘What? Feeling sorry for it?’ Parallelepiped asked him.

Prattler, thought Samos. But right now he didn’t mind him being so nosy.

‘Not sorry,’ he said. ‘Those initials! I’ve just remembered why they could be useful to me. See if you can fetch it . . .’

‘Here it is, boss. Just in time.’

‘In extremis,’ said Samos with a sigh.

‘In extremis,’ whispered Parallelepiped. He was learning lots, he thought, while the books burnt. That’s it, in extremis.

‘Wells, Wells, Wells!’

There’s a flurry of activity.

‘Wells, Wells, Wells!’ shouts the one we already know as Parallelepiped, throwing a book each time he imitates a dog’s bark.

‘More Wells! There’s lots of him. Wells, Wells, Wells!’

For a moment, for the briefest of moments, when he heard that mocking onomatopoeia – ‘Wells, Wells, Wells!’ three books into the fire – there was an acidic reaction somewhere in Samos’ digestive system, which caused him a slight indisposition, a rumbling in the bowels, part of which involved remembering fragments from The War of the Worlds, not as they were, but in Héctor Ríos’ penetrating voice, ‘Does time pass when there are no human hands left to wind the clocks?’ It’s Easter 1931. They’re in the Craftsmen’s Circle, in a group of declamation and amateur theatre directed by Ríos, who is studying