Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [62]
‘Not far to go now.’
Nightfall. The gloaming hour. They were on the edge of an inland cliff. In front of them, a huge marsh giving off mists. They’d clearly reached a limit. Then they heard bleats falling from the sky, spine-chilling cries that drew lines, wrote acrobatics two by two. Bleats joining in a serpentine drawing.
‘They’re woodcocks,’ said Silvia. ‘In these parts, they’re called goats.’
‘I never heard birds make such a sound.’
‘They make it not with the throat,’ said the seamstress, ‘but with their feathers. With the wind and their bodies.’
‘Louder!’ shouted Curtis. ‘Louder!’
‘He can speak!’ exclaimed Silvia in surprise.
‘He has his days,’ replied Terranova. ‘Only when he gets emotional.’
The weather changed from one day to the next. It wasn’t a summer storm any more. The clouds were full of stones and dark sea. They creaked and crushed brutally, with adult gearing, having lost the artifice of summer storms suitable for all ages. They had to think of returning. In mid-September, they’d take the sheep back to the village on the border. They’d still have time for a quick trip to the feast of the Acclaimer, the virgin who won’t keep quiet, music booming over the mountains all night. And then back into the Salgueiros’ basement, the house of the Stone Man and the Woman with the Black-beaded Rosary, to make baskets out of chestnut branches as the Stone Man had taught them. The village was good at this trade and the merchandise was sold at markets along the border. That was the deal. In summer, shepherds in the mountains; in winter, basket weavers hidden in the shade. Why was he called the Stone Man? Because he was made of stone. He’d sometimes move, stick his finger up his nose and pull out navelwort of the sort that takes root in between stones, on the edge of roofs. That’s what Terranova would say to make Curtis laugh. The Stone Man had navelwort up his nose, in his ears and all his body’s various orifices. ‘The point is they’re good folk. We don’t know what they think, but we know what they do. They fulfilled their side of the bargain. Gave us shelter. Never asked questions. How long’s it been, Curtis?’
On 2 August, the day the special train was due to leave for Caneiros, Terranova had been circling the station. Waiting for Curtis. He was sure he’d come, because Curtis had his ticket. Days before, he’d gone to the Academy during the night. Pombo half-opened the door and told him neither Curtis nor anybody else was in, he himself did not exist, and what Terranova had to do was stay in his mother’s house and not go wandering about, which was like wearing a cowbell around his neck. When he went to the station, he couldn’t get in. It was heavily guarded. He peered through the fence from Gaiteira. All the trains were still, a silence of engines that seemed to him resounding. The train to Caneiros never left. It transformed into a phantom locomotive. When they did start up again, all the convoys, somehow or other, were headed for war. Anyone who knew about trains realised they’d changed sound. The engines and tracks were still the same, but the sound had changed.
He found Curtis the day they burnt books. Following Pombo’s plan, they finally boarded a train, but this time as corpses, inside coffins, using real dead people’s identities. As far as Ourense. From there, by road. The driver stopped in Maus de Baños at night. Which is when they dropped their coffins into the River Limia.
‘You’re dumb,’ their contact said to Curtis. ‘You say no to everything. It doesn’t matter what they ask you. Unless they say Guiné. If they say Guiné, you say yes. It’s a code, see? You,’ he said to Terranova, ‘you’re a gypsy.’
‘A gypsy?’
‘A Portuguese gypsy.’
‘All right then.’
Curtis was reading his Popular Guide to Electricity in the smoky light of a carbide lamp. The printed lines trembled in the shadows, as if marching over the yellow surface towards the charred margins, telling a capnomancy, the matter of an ancient divination. The flickering light and spirals of