Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [4]
For the second night running, he went back to Finisterre. Henrietta had had a long day, but she still wanted to listen to the old man, who drew strength and a Biblical voice from the night. She didn’t find such a description irreverent, something must have stuck after so many years travelling on the road with the Word of God. Though Borrow still joked about himself when he appeared to adopt too missionary a tone. ‘Heavens above, I sound like a prophet of doom. Or a St Lupus!’
Henrietta could see the storm at Finisterre in the camera obscura of Borrow’s eyes thanks to the light and shade in his voice. She saw herself as a moth attracted by the thunder and lightning of the story. The first moth.
George Borrow was convinced that the description of the storm, included in his book The Bible in Spain, was one of his finest literary achievements. The act of writing it had been like a second storm with gusts of wind and immense waves. He dipped his pen in the chaos of the inkpot, scratching the words in the belief that writing fast would create an inflammatory style. But now it was his translations, the murmur of youthful verses, that stirred his memory:
The wild Death-raven, perch’d upon the mast,
Scream’d ’mid the tumult, and awoke the blast.
The sickly steamer left London along the Thames, put in at Falmouth and finally departed with a crowd of passengers suffering from tuberculosis, fleeing from the cold blasts of England’s winter in search of some sun further south. This time he gave the story an ironic twist Henrietta hadn’t heard before, which referred to the state of the ship’s engine: the boat was consumptive as well. This became obvious right from the start. Henrietta knew all the details, she’d heard the story before, but she still liked it when Borrow used the image of cathedrals to describe the clouds of spray and foam. ‘The right ship for the time and place,’ said Borrow ironically. And he added, ‘With the ideal steersman.’ The day before, he’d made mention of the captain, a person picked up in a hurry, who took the vessel too close to the shore, but to whom he attributed the utmost coolness and intrepidity, as he did to the rest of the crew. However, the only voice that speaks for itself in the story is that of the steersman. ‘In less than an hour,’ he says, ‘the ship will have her broadside on Finisterre, where the strongest man-of-war ever built must go to shivers instantly.’
He had written, and was about to repeat, how a horrid convulsion of the elements took place and the dregs of the ocean seemed to be cast up, but in the end he said, ‘Thank God for lightning. It’s good for swearing!’
In a flash of lightning, he saw Cape Finisterre and swore he’d come back with a book of Holy Scripture in thanksgiving. Had the darkness been complete, there’d have been no way of reacting, of putting up resistance. Had the lightning not intervened, with the engine dead and the ship being tossed like a feather, the crew might not have committed the apparently absurd act of hoisting the sails in the face of impending destruction, just as the wind, without the slightest intimation, veered right about.
‘I went back. I kept my promise. And there I met Antonio de la Trava, to whom I gave a copy of the New Testament, the only one I ever dedicated.’
The first moth collided with the lampshade. It had a white, hairy head and the uncannily human features of some moths. The savage, stubborn, suicidal collision gave Henrietta a start and she resolved not to stay beyond the second.
‘Spain is not a fanatic country, but life there can hang on a single word.’
Henrietta forgot the moth and smiled. She loved this episode in which Borrow, being mistaken for the leader of the Spanish fanatics, Don Carlos himself, and on the verge of being shot by the liberals or negros of the Atlantic coast, was saved in extremis during questioning, when proof of his innocence was the way he pronounced the word ‘knife’. ‘“Knife”? Did he say “knife”? The man’s innocent,’ declared Antonio de la Trava,