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By Root 707 0

in a sheet, awaiting the magistrate’s arrival. All we could see was the outline. A woman told us to go away. She called us ‘death flies’. ‘You’re like flies that won’t leave. I should drive you off like flies.’ This also impressed me. There was something about the label that was right. So I was about to leave, but then one of the deceased’s brothers appeared on horseback. He got down and, without letting go of the reins, approached the body. He was wearing boots with spurs and had a thick, blond moustache like a covering of hay on his upper lip. He didn’t pay us any attention. With the toe of his boot, he pulled back the sheet to reveal the dead man’s face. That was the first time I saw the horror of death, a pointless, ugly death. This may have had something to do with what the brother said. ‘That’s it,’ he spoke to him reproachfully. ‘The time has come for you to sleep out in the open.’

The one stirring the badly burnt books with the toe of his boot had a resinous voice. Part of the smoke had got inside his throat. The action of his toecap lifted layers of ash. He flicked out orders in an effort to speed things up. And warned us, ‘If you see a book which says New Testament or Holy Scripture or something like that, give it to me, understood? It doesn’t matter if it’s damaged or charred. I want it!’ The bitterness with which he spoke made our work even more irksome, as if we were partly to blame. I wish he hadn’t said anything at all. Now everything had a sacred feel. Even the smoke weighed down on our shovels. If those who wore the Sacred Heart as a symbol went so far as to burn Holy Scripture, then my father was absolutely right, ‘Better not to predict what’s coming next’. Everything that had burnt was in that sleepwalking smoke. I thought about the governor’s wife, the librarian. She’d turned up dead yesterday in a field next to the road to Lugo, having been raped and riddled with bullets. She was walking barefoot on the coals, her skin entirely blackened, naked and sleepless among the piles of night.

There was lots of cleaning to do. Here and in María Pita Square. Lots of burnt books. We’d heard they were burning books by the sea. There’d been fires before, when the coup started. But this was something else. Whole libraries going up in flames. Apart from the resinous voice of the one in charge, echoed by the new manager, the only sound was of rakes scratching the ground and shovels loading the lorry.

The one in charge wanted us to go faster. But this wasn’t something you could do any old how. All jobs follow certain rules and none of us could remember how to load the remains of burnt books. Nor could the tools. We were both used to collecting fallen leaves, to the scent of autumn bonfires, which lent the city a medicinal aroma. More than smoke, it was that, an aroma. Nature whose time had come. What was burning today, however, was time itself. I realised that. I didn’t say anything, but I thought it. Estremil, my friend, time is burning. Not hours or days or years. Time. All the books I never read, Estremil, are burning. He was a good reader. One of those who stopped to read, and did so conscientiously. Estremil did everything conscientiously. I bet some of the books he’d read were there, in the ashes being raked up, in the shovel-loads filling the lorry.

I picked up a spadeful. There were plates of ash retaining the form of pages and the ‘black shadow’ of printed lines. Some of those plates hadn’t burnt completely. The flames had gone in a circle and left bits of paper intact. My fingers reached out to one of those wafers quivering on the surface.

‘Look, Estremil, “a drop of duck’s blood”.’

‘What’s that? You’re crazy. You treat everything as a joke.’

I wanted to give it to him. Gave it. As the plate fell apart, the piece of paper was no bigger than a samara wing.

When he trained me, Estremil used to say of autumn leaves, ‘Don’t kill yourself running after them, they’ll come to you. It looks as if they’re falling haphazardly, but they have a direction. See? The flurry bends a certain way. Build a good bonfire,