Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [81]
Of course he never told his elaborate story if Ricardo Samos and Chelo Vidal were present. He felt great admiration for her, the painter. She had all the presence of a great lady with the charm of a young girl who’s come from Cuba and a slight touch, like eye shadow, of having had contact with Bohemian life in the Republican city. But she always put art first. Minded her own business. Her most revolutionary act, thought Dez, had been to wear that rayon suit and dazzle Samos, it wasn’t easy for a woman to quicken his heartbeat. Samos had confided in him. First he’d made that unusual declaration, ‘This cousin of mine is worthy of a crime!’ Then he’d affirmed, ‘She’ll be my wife.’ Dez, at the time, was already a Falangist, but Samos, the future judge, still moved in the world of ideas, fancied himself as an intellectual and contributed to the magazines Acción Española and Integralismo Lusitano, fostered by two monarchist, Catholic groups whose goal was a conservative Iberian league. Back then, Samos claimed the City of God went against the Falange’s ‘primitive aggression’, though he conceded a certain ‘barbaric charm’. So Dez made fun of him, ‘If it’s action you’re after, real action, then you know whom you have to talk to.’ But it was books, not Dez’s perseverance, which led Samos to become a Fascist and join the conspiracy against the Republic. The discovery of Carl Schmitt, that Don Carlos. When they walked through Mina Square, with the huge flag bearing a swastika hanging outside the German consulate, Dez would deliberately make the Roman salute, which bothered Samos to start with. He had that Catholic prejudice against the Nazis. But he got over this after reading Schmitt. This Don Carlos took him back to Donoso Cortés and Joseph de Maistre. A concoction that transformed Samos.
Commander Dez stood up and went over to the record player. ‘La favorita’ had ended, but the record kept on turning. A fault that annoyed him, as did the disobedience of faulty machines in general. The listless, practically inaudible creak grew louder like the groan of an axle in the thick of night. He’d already told Luís Terranova to take it to be repaired.
‘It’s nothing.’
‘What do you mean, nothing?’
‘You just have to lift the arm and put it back on its rest.’
‘Why must you always contradict me?’
‘I’m not contradicting you. I just think differently.’
It had been, he thought, an electrical attraction, an attraction of opposites. For him at least. What bothered him made Terranova laugh. It would always be a mystery. Simple and irresistible. A magnetic body. Electricity. Bodies went about their own business, ignored each other, played at distances or struggled to enter each other, to fit, curves and angles, bones, muscles, gaps, vents. A forging of symmetry. Ad libitum.
‘What was that?’
‘Ad libitum.’
‘You’re crazy, degenerate.’
Degenerate. How he liked to be called that. It was one of the ‘official’ words he used daily in an attempt to classify what was unacceptable. Degenerate. With what pleasure he’d spoken of the degenerate artistic avant-garde as a symptom of social unrest and western decadence. He liked to adopt a virile tone in cultural meetings, especially in a lacklustre environment of schoolmistresses who’d secretly be reading God knows what by Pardo Bazán or Pérez Galdós and small-time artists with the informalist devil inside them, the dangerous look of hunger in those who dream of eating the world of forms. When the order came to close the magazine Atlántida, not long before, around the time Dionisio Ridruejo and others who’d gone soft in the head were disgraced in Madrid, he was one of those who informed the editorial board of the decision and how he enjoyed passing on the head censor