Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [52]
The smoke was looking for somewhere to hold on to, to clamber up. In the upper part of his body, Curtis felt the tickle of its creepers and suckers. Climbing up his face. Invading his nose. Catching on his eyes. Sealing his mouth.
Another day, the harpooner had told him how a sandstorm had consumed paradise in a single night. A place called Tatajuba in Brazil. Curtis realised he wasn’t making it up, he’d been there as he said, from the way he went into details. He even made a pencil drawing on the marble of the kitchen table. How well the harpooner could draw America! His map of Europe was pretty good too. On the Iberian Peninsula, he took great care over the twists and turns of the Galician coast. But America came out from north to south as if by memory. He put a cross to show where paradise had disappeared overnight, eaten up by the sand. This is Tatajuba. This is Camusin. He’d been walking from Camusin, all along the beach, because he’d heard what a paradise it was. On the way, he slept on the beach and woke up to see a sow with piglets bathing in the sea. Or else they were eating fish. Because the fish there could be caught by hand. Skate, swordfish, mullet and porpoise, all jumping about. A Galician fisherman’s dream. Pigs swimming and fish jumping in the air. When he reached Tatajuba, it really was paradise. The following day, it no longer existed. A sandstorm had swallowed it up overnight. What Curtis remembered best about the sandstorm that buried paradise in one night was how the harpooner told him people stopped talking. The sand set their teeth chattering and drowned out their words. And that’s when the men and women who’d worked so hard, with such devotion, gave up.
Curtis hadn’t read many books. All the burning books had something to do with him. They were books he hadn’t yet read. But this one had clearly belonged to him since he’d set foot on the scene. In the end, he picked up A Popular Guide to Electricity.
‘Hey you, put that back!’ The stocky soldier hadn’t let him out of his sight and this time he really did take out his pistol.
‘Now, now, calm down!’ said Samos. ‘It’s just a clown looking for some Tarzan comics. Which one of them would dare show his face?’
Arturo da Silva used first to write out his texts by hand. He had curious handwriting. It was very neat, as if the act of writing, though it called for action, or perhaps because of this, was incompatible with speed. Given the size of his fingers and the heavy machinery of his hands, it must have been a real effort. And the truth is Dafonte, Holando, Félix Ramón, Varela, Curtis, Terranova, Marconi, Leica, Seoane, all the new group of boys who visited the Shining Light premises, some of whom contributed to Brazo y Cerebro, tried to make room when he was using the table to write, forging a territory with his bulk, his head close to the paper and his whole body focused on moving that caravan of words like beasts of burden forwards against all the odds. To start with, the paper had the texture of rocky ground or was treacherous as a marsh. A few words opened the way, like tracks, sleepers or stepping-stones. They were the eyes and feet of those running behind.
It helped him to hear a voice, a voice like that of Amil, the teacher at the Rationalist School, tugging at his fingers.
Amil, who always talked to them of Heraclitus and