Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [83]
‘You’re so childish! What are you going to do in “Parade of Stars”?’
‘Don’t worry. I won’t sing Violetta’s cabaletta.’
He may have overreacted. It was just a punch. The trouble is Luís was fragile. He had a glass nose and it spewed blood. He was doing it for him. So that he’d lose some of his coarseness and aim a little higher. He also overdid it the day Luís came home with that friend of his, the cowboy photographer, Papagaio’s Hercules.
‘I don’t want to see that hick here again.’
A house has a tendency not to fall. He’d turned up elegantly dressed in his office. His first visit since the time Dez had summoned him to expound his delicate situation. Years had gone by. He’d achieved his objective. He’d taken possession of him. He governed his life and enjoyed his body. Without losing face, power or position. Why’d he come? To tell him his house was in ruins?
‘What a wretch you are. I’ll crush you like a worm. You’ll end up in a prison for queens or with a bullet up your arse.’
‘I just want to lead my own life. Follow my own path.’
‘A goat always heads for the mountain, right?’
Tomás Dez went over to the window. The roofs of the Old City seemed to be squeaking like mice in the storm. The wind drove the clouds, torn from the sea’s straw mattress, to cover the first cracks of dawn.
If only he hadn’t been so inconsiderate, so wild, so . . . He finally found the word a silent part of his mind had been searching for during his vigil. So ungrateful. He repeated it in a fairly loud voice to make amends to himself. So ungrateful! What was he doing awake all night, being martyred, while that pimp was out and about? Martyrdom, martyrdom, martyrdom, that was the word. From then on, his passage through the house, at the slow pace of a procession, turned into a summary trial. His walk regained its measure, his body its figure. Every step he took was a new charge laid against Luís Terranova. He finally felt well. The boss had taken over that weak, crude, unruly body. He felt well all right. As when he took the stage, alerted the audience, silenced the rustling of Sunday poems and brought not emotion, but fear to the literary festival organised by the group Amanecer. It was a spring festival and everything was going like spring. The atmosphere was relaxed, even joky. One of the participants read a poem with a questioning refrain, ‘Where’s the key?’ Until someone in the audience shouted out, ‘Here, between my balls!’ The organisation was linked to the regime, but clearly the time for ardent patriotic hymns had passed. He was nervous, he also had some ‘spring’ sheets in his hand. He’d been invited by a childhood acquaintance, a simple woman turned poet who one day had been naive enough to declare herself ‘pregnant with poetry’, having been possessed on an evening stroll in Bárbaras Square by the ghost of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. The point is she’d agreed to act as messenger and invite him to the festival. She said, ‘Ah, Dez! Censor and poet. How thrilling!’ Yes, she found everything thrilling. But he’d see fear on her face too. Because, when he was announced, as a poet, of course, not as censor, someone inside him forgot his ‘spring’ sheets and deadened his nerves. The boss had taken over. His voice thundered like a cannon. Put an end to smiles and rustling.
My mind has become exact, defined, sure,
from the mist of vague reality far removed.