Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [68]
The Matchstick Factory was surrounded by a tall wall. She’d worked in that enclosure for many years. She’d started when she was still a girl. She had to get up early, under cover of darkness. But in her memory it was a party. Like the day a street band came from the parish for her to carry the festive bouquet. She loved carrying her candle. She wasn’t sorry to leave home, to be separated from her parents, as at other times. She worked in all the different departments. Started by counting matches. Her hands and mind were very alert and she got to count so quickly, by thirties, fifties, seventies, nineties, that her fingers ran ahead of her brain, danced attendance on the voices. She then took to sticking the strips of glass-paper that were used to rub and light the matches. The department she liked best, because of the work and company, was the one for cutting and assembling boxes. She was extremely skilled in making boxes. She knew the importance to a household of a good box of matches. She also knew these boxes, especially those bearing phototypes, could become small chests. For keeping someone’s first tooth, a curl, a letter, a ticket for a special train. The women who cut and assembled boxes acquired a certain way of telling stories. Their stories, their secrets, were designed to fit inside a box. Which is why a box of matches, when it’s empty, if you hold it half-open to your ear, will whisper to you.
This box doesn’t say anything.
There were days the women were silent. And then the boxes had matches, but no voices.
She also spent time as an assistant in the laboratory, weighing and measuring live phosphorus, potassium chlorate, glue, ground glass and red aniline, the paste that contains a matchstick’s true soul. Known as English paste. Fire’s mystery. Smoking blood, they call it in the factory.
Olinda woke up in the middle of the night and looked through the window at the lines of candle-women.
In his hut in the labour camp, every time he lit a match, Polka would let it burn until the flame reached his fingers. A match was very important to him. To everybody, since they were hard to come by in the camp. This is the advantage of small things. A ‘wagon-box’, for example, containing ninety matches, with a little skill, passed from hand to hand, can store vital information, detailed plans, for a train not to arrive in port with tons of wolfram. A yellow ‘economical box’ contains seventy matches. Some are even smaller, pocket-sized, and contain fifty or thirty matches. The most attractive are those bearing coloured phototypes. The skill to turn a simple box of matches into a magnificent transmitter of secret information resides in one box in fact being two. But for this they have to be cut and assembled to perfection. The information can be walled up inside this delicate stucco work on rolling paper. In code. For this you need the people giving and receiving the information to be referring to the same book. One number identifies the letter, another the line, another the page. If you don’t know or can’t find the reference book, it’s very difficult to decipher an intercepted message.
Polka held a new match in front of his eyes, closed his left eye and examined the head as a surveyor’s reference point for measuring the world.
The matchstick head filled the mouth of the mine shaft.
‘Let me tell you what it’s made of, the formula for English paste, smoking blood: live phosphorus, potassium chlorate, gypsum glue, ground glass and red aniline.’ He could add, ‘And Olinda.’
‘And Olinda as well.’
‘What’s Olinda?’
‘A special