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By Root 581 0

smoke, reflected against the book, appeared to rise from the pages and not from the carbide’s death throes. The Stone Man slept next to the hearth. The woman’s litany sounded like a radio. Domus aurea. Broadcasting at night. Foederis arca. Once he’d heard her sigh over the airwaves. Janua coeli. Salgueiros would die if they didn’t bring the light. Stella matutina. At this point, the Stone Man stirred, opened and shut his eyes. It really was like this, thought Terranova. The woman’s voice was a radio, a connection he’d found. He listened to it as when he used to search for tangos on the crane operator’s Atwater Kent at night and out came uncertain voices. This is how he discovered Paul Robeson. At times, he seemed to fade, to go, to leave them behind. At others, he sounded stronger, with renewed intensity, and you could light a match in his breath. Rosa mystica, Turris Davidica, Turris eburnea. But there was always a distance, as if she were one thing, her voice another, and she also were listening. The woman stopped praying, stopped telling the beads of her rosary. Her fingers, however, kept going. They left the jet and started making beads out of breadcrumbs. One to start with, slowly, it looked as if it would be the only one. Then more and more quickly, small spheres filling the blue and white squares of the oilskin tablecloth. Terranova copied her. The two of them rolling stars. Something had changed in her as their departure approached. She’d thrown off her mourning. Let down her hair. When they went back to the city, he’d send her an Atwater Kent. With batteries and accumulators.

She lifted her eyes, which were damp, glistening. Her shaky hand felt under the table. A rosary of years to make that movement. Finally to whisper an invitation.

‘The dogs are barking. Shall we go and see who it is?’

The Rabble and Providence

Something happened which upset him and left him speechless. One of his colleagues, who’d later occupy an important post, started urinating on one of the pyres. There’d just been an incident. Someone, that huge lad they called Papagaio’s Hercules, had unexpectedly jumped over the fire the way they do on St John’s Eve to ward off evil spirits. They’d gone after him without success. He ran as if he had wings on his feet. The point is this colleague, back from the chase, went and pissed on one of the pyres. And all the others in their squad, without prior agreement, automatically went and pissed with him. Though he was one of those in charge, Samos was incapable of expressing his disgust. On the contrary, he reacted with a nervous smile. Exempt. This lowly act ruined the picture he’d composed of having an archangelic sword to hand. The books stank more than ever, a mixture of urine and smoke, animal remains. He could make out the folds and tips of Dutch binding, Valencian boards. The horse-nerve twines. That warm piss, spattering on the remains, gave off an unfamiliar smell. They may not have noticed it. The breeze lifted the pestilence to his nose.

When they were out hunting, there was a moment in which the group, already somewhat inebriated by nightfall, would obey a kind of natural order and the hunters would line up to piss in manly formation, with rude, brazen jokes. A disgusting scene. An ugly, base form of Fascism. One of his Portuguese colleagues, his host in Coimbra, who’d taken part in the Viriato Legion of volunteers backing Franco’s army, had been amazed by what he’d seen among fellow troops. Teutónio confided in him, ‘Samos, Spain’s a dangerous country. Are you not afraid to have such colleagues?’

When in 1940 he’d visited Milan and Berlin, he’d been impressed. There was an aesthetics, another dimension, an athletic kind of futurism, he’d said. A harmony of bodies and weapons. Ren was an example of coarseness. León Degrelle, another Fascist who’d sought refuge in Spain, after the war went on the Road to Santiago and complained about the fleas and lice in the towns’ boarding-houses. Ren, who’d gone to welcome him in Portomarín, as a government representative, laughed about him, ‘Very