Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [77]
‘The wind’ll take everything.’
‘I’m owed another ride,’ said Luís.
The storm was carrying the sea inland.
‘I’m not responsible,’ said the fairground owner to Curtis. ‘I’m not responsible for that boat your friend’s in.’
It was then his three blond sons appeared. They’d been helping secure the boats and were drenched and out of breath, as if dressed in water and grease. One of them dismantled the railway with his father. The other two stopped the flying boat, ignoring Terranova’s protests.
‘I’m owed another!’
‘Do you want to end up in the sea like Faustino?’
The other laughed at his brother’s joke. Faustino was a very well-endowed straw man who was thrown into the sea during Carnival. Having fallen, he stayed floating for a while with his huge penis sticking up like a mast. A procession of mourning women wept over the loss, ‘He was the best, the best!’ Some men laughed, others didn’t.
‘I’m not afraid of you, little owl,’ Terranova mocked them. ‘Little owl, I’m not afraid of you.’
‘Let him be,’ said the flying boat’s father. ‘He can go as often as he likes, so long as he keeps on singing!’
He then spat on his hands, which were covered in grease from the lead locomotive’s wheels. ‘The night is whimsical indeed!’
Dez and Terranova
He turned on the light again and started reading without conviction. He only paid attention to the advertisements. The sleepless gaze does what it wants to. He noticed something he hadn’t seen before. The large number of advertisements for electrical appliances, flexible mattresses and shampoos. Great emphasis was laid on the anti-dandruff properties of these last products. It seemed the whole of Spain had taken to washing its hair. He’d brought a stack of newspapers from the censor’s office and was reading ABC, which was published in Madrid. He also had Arriba, the Falange’s official mouthpiece. It was its newspaper, its doctrinal spokesperson, a necessary resource to know what was going on in the hierarchy, essential reading for a man in his position. He sometimes amused himself trawling for small differences. The relevance or absence of a news item. The language of silence. The conservative, monarchist daily had introduced the odd comment on Europe, was even in favour of Europeanism, a reviled concept in the press of the Movement, whose leading exponent was Arriba. Europeanism was the Trojan Horse of the opposition, the enemy, those in exile. In another time, a time that seemed to him now unreal, in which he hadn’t quite managed to affirm his existence, he’d written a great deal on Europe, the rebuilding of a new Holy German-Roman Empire based on the triumphs of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, with the Pope’s blessing. An intellectual standpoint shared by many. The official line. Occasionally time played the dirty trick of returning with the sweaty, delirious thickness of an epidemic, making him believe the Holy Empire was something he’d imagined and in Spain, Europe, the world, only he had written such things. He then decided in his dream to board empty, phantasmagorical vehicles, which drove him through the night to every nook and cranny that had an archive or library. He’d break down the doors and expunge those pro-Nazi articles of his. But almost everything was pro-Nazi, an unending trail. The paper multiplied and grew. He would tear and tear. He’d written the same as everybody, hadn’t he? The judge, for example, his friends at the magazine Arbor, Catholics from the Opus, the leading jurist, Carl Schmitt, weren’t they still saying the same in a different way? In his nightmare, however, the judge Samos would turn to him, ‘How could you have written those things, Dez?’
‘What things?’
‘What do you think? That praise of Nazism. You should have censured yourself, damn it! You have to know how to control yourself. Change style.’
‘Look who’s talking!’
‘I was different. I was a Catholic, remember? The katechon. The one who draws the line. That