Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [78]
‘Hang on a minute! You’re not the only one. I also draw the line. Mark words in red. It’s not so easy to keep words in line. They’re like cockroaches or rats. They live underground, in sewers, among tombs. They’re like insects. Bacteria. It’s easy to stop men in their tracks, but it’s not so easy to contain words. Silences, pauses, are part of language. A man in silence, if he’s honest, is dangerous.’
‘You should have censured yourself, Dez.’
And so on. Banging on about it. There was something perverse about recommending control to a censor. He also could return to the past, if he wanted, like a dog to its vomit. Remind Samos of who he was. The university student who fancied himself as a Catholic intellectual, beholden to the idea of a benevolent God, still reluctant and hesitant on the eve of the coup, like that day in Pontevedra Square when he trembled in front of Arturo da Silva, the boxing plumber, who grabbed his pistol from his hand and chucked it into the sea in Orzán. ‘Weapons are not toys, young man,’ he told him and threw it over the heads of bathers, a parabola seen by everyone, how embarrassing, though he took his revenge, how a man can change in one month, the sudden stimulation of the cultivated Catholic, aesthete, orator, bibliographer, how the blood rises to his eyes and the once cowardly student is ready for anything, even he, Dez, was surprised, what resolve, what firm steps, his pulse is steady, armed and in uniform he looks taller, stronger, his subtle voice has become more daring. He’s now in charge. He’s standing with him, in front of the pyres of books, down by the docks.
‘The Divine Sketch!’
‘Manuel Curros Enríquez. Straight in the fire!’
‘Remember, Samos?’
He didn’t know why he chose Samos as his rival in that nightmare, that night of sticky hours, of a melting clock. Why he conducted such a tense dialogue, since they were on the same side and of the same opinion. The ending, however, never changed. The mere mention of burning books dissipated the scene. All the characters fell silent. Disappeared. The nightmare was officially over. There was no specific instruction. They hadn’t assembled on purpose to agree on perpetual silence, nor had it been suggested at some meeting. The burning of books had simply ceased to exist. The pact of silence applied to the subconscious as well.
No. 5 Chanel Paris.
Everything was contained in that bottle.
It took up an entire page of ABC.
It was like a strange event that captivated his eyes. He realised they were being disobedient, weren’t the slightest bit interested in the articles or reports on the mournful, doctrinal pages of Arriba. All the news and charm were in the emerging publicity.
The censor would have liked to hold that bottle in his hand.
Yes, ABC had much more publicity and its superior, glossy pages showed off the advertisements and emitted the tinkle of money being paid for large spaces: the plots of land in Torrelodones, attention, girlfriends of doctors, engineers, professionals, come and visit the flats being built in the Pilar district. More shampoos, more flexible mattresses, more electrical appliances. On the leisure pages, the eyes were drawn to the large advertisements for fashionable nightclubs in Madrid, such as Black Swan and Moulin Rouge. One of the advertisements was for a Kelvinator refrigerator, which had a smiling woman next to it with an American flag in one hand and a Spanish flag in the other. He got up. In the fridge, there was only a cauliflower and a plate with flakes of cod on it. Both things looked yellow, as if stained by the interior light of a prison. He’d been ‘on night duty’, what in military terms he called not having slept, tossing and turning. He slammed the fridge door shut and started pacing up and down the corridor, a manic-depressive walk in which he went from a sorrowful, reflective state, practising something as difficult as a seductive excuse, to a progressive state of war. The way he walked matched his mood. There was a pause. He put on the record of ‘La favorita’ and sat down on