Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [65]
Which is on page 447. There the magistrate, one Pérez Arias, certifies that at half past ten in the morning of 8 May 1884, at number 6 San Andrés Street, a child was born, named Santiago. Page 446 belongs to a child called José Suárez Campos and 448 to a girl by the name of María de la Concepción Vaamonde. The secretary, Mr Patiño’s handwriting is very neat, reminiscent of a musical score with quavered letters, a fountain pen like the crest of a golden oriole.
Natura est maxima in minimis. Come, Vitola, come. See what’s inside a drop of water. The whole seed of the universe. Come, come. See what’s inside a drop of blood. The composition of life. It’s all there. Hate as well. We can approach the mystery of life, but it’s impossible to understand the mystery of hate. The kind of hate that causes people not only to kill, but to want to erase you from the census of births. I have to concentrate on that mystery. Read everything there is. It has to be in a drop of blood. It has to have its chemistry.
No, he doesn’t say anything. He’s motionless. Watching himself. Trying to burn up as little oxygen as possible. When he has a relapse, María Casares, Vitola to her parents, thinks of the image of someone carrying an invisible bucket of water on their head. Not a single drop of water is allowed to fall under pain of death. There was a time he hoped he’d beaten it. As a young man, in the sanatorium in Durtol. He always had that bucket. Always had the scythe nearby. Death was part of the way he lived. What he never imagined was that one day they’d try to make him non-existent.
He’d never met this Arellano, the governor who officially declared him a pest and ordered that the name of Santiago Casares Quiroga be removed from the register of the College of Lawyers and any other book for ‘future generations to find no more trace than the record of him as a fugitive’. For many years, Casares, who at one point was Prime Minister, did not appear in Spanish encyclopedias. María Casares knows that Spanish Fascism largely achieved its aim of erasing him from the map of mental geography. He was a symbol of the Republic and now he’s a crater. They’ve plundered all his things. His books, furniture, home. Microscope. Herbaria. Entomological boxes. There’s something on the tip of her tongue. A round, reddish word with seven black dots on its wings.
One of the first songs he taught her. A song for learning how to count. A folk-song, a scientific song.
King-king, how long will I be?
Twenty-five? Could be.
One, two, three . . .
‘The seven-spot ladybird, Coccinella septempunctata,’ he explains, ‘is, together with the glow-worm, the creature with the most names in Galicia. Why is that? Why those two? It’s called “king-king”. “Little Maria”. “Sunsucker”. “Spotty”. “Seamstress”. “Little Joanna”. Little things have the most names. As Jules Renard says, “truth is of small dimensions”.’
In November 1944, in Paris, they received the news that 12 Panadeiras Street and the rest of the Casares’ property now belonged to the Fascist State. Pillage became law. He was in London at the time, to avoid falling into the hands of the Gestapo. She stopped playing the game that if she closed her eyes at the door of 168 Rue de Vaugirard, she’d turn up on the stairs of 12 Panadeiras Street. On his return, the atmosphere of a liberated Paris helped him to breathe better. As he said, on account of his consumptive optimism, he could see every molecule, taste the air: Natura est maxima in minimis.
A few months later, Gloria died of a cancer that had appeared suddenly like the dagger of an efficient assassin. He was able to close her eyes. María was stunned at the sight of her dead mother. All her previous faces returned to her. Daughter of an unmarried factory worker, seamstress, melancholy