Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [3]
Now there’s something funny, and I don’t know if it’s normal or not, but I can’t see myself in the water. I can see Olinda. I look sideways and see my mother both in and out of the water. She’s on her knees, her body next to the washing stone. An angular woman’s body. The stone seems to have been gradually worn down by the stroke of bellies. The axis in our bellies and the shape of the stone are what link the sky, the earth and the water. As she applies soap, I look sideways, first at her reflection in the water and then at her. The sun’s behind her, her hair is gathered by a headscarf tied at the back of her neck, she again adopts an expression of hardness. She’s hard on the inside. Her eyes give nothing away. You can see that better in the water.
The Night of the Moths
Oulton Cottage, night of 11 July 1881
‘I asked the steersman if there was any hope of saving the vessel, or our lives.
‘“None of us will see the morning,” he replied.’
For the second night running, old Borrow recounted the storm off Cape Finisterre. Henrietta MacOubrey, his stepdaughter, decided that this time she’d listen for as long as it took a white moth to collide with the lamp. Two white moths if the first arrived too quickly. It seemed fair enough. He was a good narrator. When he told stories, his whole body became calligraphy in motion, from the flexing of his fingers to the dilatation of his pupils. Having been a Biblical propagandist, he knew the rules of suspense. And that’s why he advanced in stages, subtly, without committing excesses, because he loved to invent, but he despised anything that smacked of implausibility as much as fanatical truth. So he wasn’t telling the story for the second time, but getting a little closer, with inflamed accuracy, to that storm with hurricane winds on the night of 11 November 1836, off Cape Finisterre, the world’s rockiest coastline.
He’d been excitable of late. Spring had been delayed, so summer came to Oulton Cottage like a frenzied agitator. The dwelling was festooned with the modest exuberance of fuchsias, gypsy flowers he called them, poking through the windows like prodigious Lepidoptera. An ardent atmosphere of drones and pollen made use of each crack and charged in, ready to deliver its message. Inside, everything seemed to hang on his renewed magnetism and to breathe a sigh of relief after the winter episode of a grumpy, prostrate Borrow in the grip of a repulsive current he himself didn’t recognise. Now things were different. He received a few visitors, the occasional gypsy friend who couldn’t tell the time, a virtue Henrietta found annoying. But the old gypsies behaved as if Borrow, the tireless traveller, the polyglot, the youth who could cover a hundred and twenty miles in a day on a pint of beer and two apples, had come back to look after them. Lavengro they called him, which meant wordsmith. Spirited Lavengro never failed to return.
‘Lavengro,’ he whispered.
Henrietta glanced at the window in case something was moving beyond the fuchsias.
‘There’s no one there.’
‘A terrible winter,’ he said. ‘Forgive my hedgehog’s tenderness.’
Henrietta thought nothing is quite so tiring as an old person’s excitability. More tiring than tiredness itself. Borrow bravely resisted the temptation to go to bed and spent most of the time tied to his desk, like a helmsman at the wheel, he said. He would read Scripture with the severity of someone threading the needle of eternity or start writing feverishly. But from time to time, which upset his stepdaughter, who suffered from what is sometimes termed caretaker’s syndrome, Borrow would leap up in a fit of madness and take to the road, calling out for his gypsy friends, offering to let them camp in the garden, or begin to recite the poems of Iolo Goch and Dafydd ab Gwilym in the rain, natural