Paúl Santos stood up as well. He was going to protest, but he thought better and said, ‘I’ll go with you.’
‘No, I’d rather be alone today.’
That adverb, the word ‘today’, struck him as a trail worth following. An adverb to be studied through a magnifying glass.
Before leaving, however, Catia turned and spoke to him at high typing speed, ‘Do you know anything about two men in ashen suits who followed me down the street? Do you know why they were taking photographs?’
Paúl Santos picked up the chemical signals of imminent danger, but had no reply. He stopped seeing cherry colour and, looking into her eyes, shook his head. A scientific failure.
Ren’s ‘Museum’
THE SHUTTERS WERE closed, the darkness thick and humid, a condition that seemed to belong to the house, a darkness incorporated, infiltrated, into the building, where the strange thing would have been light. But Santos picked out, with what he imagined was a mole’s eyesight, the scent of outlines, regardless of the position of windows and lamps.
He lifted the torch very slowly, feeling it in his grasp. As a boy, he liked to think it was the light that moved, using his hand. This torch was his companion, his weapon, a continuation of his body. He knew he could trust Catherine Laboure the night he was caught in the Room for Secret Deliveries and his torch wasn’t confiscated.
The whole of Ren’s sitting-room resembled a history museum. At first glance, Santos didn’t realise almost everything on display was recent. In the light of the torch, objects expressed mute surprise, helplessness. Even the swords.
Swords? Yes, swords. Swords with gold and silver embossed hilts and scabbards, decorated with ornamental or symbolic leaves. Lying on velvet, with labels held by a cord, they were swords that had lost their warlike function and seemed to be afraid. Santos took one with an attractively well-rounded hilt. ‘Venerable Master’s Sword’, it said on the label. With the point, he touched the label of the most ornate one: ‘33rd Degree Sovereign Grand Inspector General’s Sword’.
All the objects he found at first had to do with Freemasonry. There was even a mallet and 24-inch gauge. The mallet was similar to one he’d seen in the judge’s office, in the Palace of Justice, which he’d identified as a judge’s gavel. Now he understood what Ricardo Samos meant when he said, ‘It has more history than it seems’.
The torch moved excitedly onwards, the light sniffing out great surprises. A glass cabinet contained the badges and devices of Galician and Portuguese Freemasons or pedreiros livres. The torch stopped at a pair of white gloves. Not exactly a pair. They were the same colour, but of different sizes, as if one of the gloves was for a woman’s hand. Nearby there was an acacia-leaf brooch.
The torch went from one surprise to the next, travelling through history. A design on a matchbox from the First Republic. A peasant in a Phrygian cap saying, ‘Don’t call me Balthazar; I’m a citizen’. The Republican Madonnas Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, shown with wings, diffusely erotic in the darkness. The same or similar ones of modernist sensuality that appeared in the illustrated magazine of Coruña’s Masons which the torch focused on now: Brisas y Tormentas, No. 1, Yr 1, Coruña, 15 April 1900. Paúl Santos took the torch in his left hand and passed his right hand over the magazine. It’s true that, in secret vision, things emit what they say. ‘Breezes and Storms’. Aprons, collars, embroidered in gold. One of the latter with a triangle and the number 33 in red thread inside it. A blue silk sash with white veins telling the years like tree rings. At one end, a jewel in the form of a key. On the label, it said ‘Secret Master’s Sash’. Santos focused the torch for a long time on that enigmatic key with the letter Z on the wards. He was passionate about keys and locks. Anything connected with this invention. Nobody in Charity Hospital had been able to explain how the boy got inside the Room for Secret Deliveries, to which only three people had access at any one time: the medical director, Mother Laboure and the woman who was due to give birth. And she entered through an outer door. She never saw or was seen, except when she was in that kind of camera obscura she came to give birth in. He got in there. Nobody knew how. He was found in the middle of the room, in the dark, with the torch on, inside his mouth, his cheeks acting as a pink lampshade.
He was now immersed with his torch, that light which was his fetish, in another secret place, a kind of study, where there was an hourglass. The upper bulb was empty. The lower, full of sand. Santos did what anyone would do from childhood to old age. Turn the hourglass upside down. Set time in motion. He suddenly realised this simple, ancient object he’d never paid much attention to contained sky and earth. Was measuring his life. It depended on you whether or not symbols had meaning. This hourglass did. No, it didn’t. He wasn’t going to let symbols ensnare him.
Under the stairs was a small door painted black with the acronym VITRIOL in white letters. He remembered this was an old Rosicrucian motto, used by alchemists as well. Knowledge that was not derived from the indoctrination he’d received, despite specialising in criminology as opposed to the fight against subversion, which was the work of the Brigade of Politico-Social Investigation. Even so, they were always being asked to show their support for the cause and he knew that his had to appear unconditional, beyond suspicion. Another order drummed into them with the insistence of a hammer-blow to the head: no disaffection, but no indifference either. They couldn’t be cold. When he heard this for the first time, without heating, Paúl Santos was appalled by the label. Being cold meant carrying the cold inside you. Actually liking the cold. The perfect school of adherence to the dictatorship in his case was Santiago Seminary. One of the coldest places in the world, a physical cold that got behind your eyes. You had to fight the cold. Franco’s regime and the Church were united, the synthesis of everything, ‘like body and soul’, a continuation of the holy union of throne and altar discussed in a famous book by Archbishop Rafael de Vélez, founder of the seminary and author of an equally famous work, The Sheath of Faith. Santos recalled Vélez’s portrait in the seminary’s dark central corridor. He’d been painted holding that book for which he was famous, the title clearly visible, except that it’d been abbreviated to The Sheath. He also recalled the nervous, furtive laughter the sight of this title provoked in young men who’d only just discovered the comical treachery committed by words when least expected. As for their historical mission, they’d been told the spirit of reconquest and crusade should remain vigilant. As a mark of glory, the novices were reminded that the only time Santiago’s seminarists had demonstrated politically was under the banner of traditionalism, which they’d used to beat the negros, as the liberals of the nineteenth century were known. It was also the seminary that published the first panegyric on Franco during the war, in praise of a movement its protagonists didn’t hesitate to call Fascist, starting with the author of the work, the priest Manuel Silva, who described in detail how the military uprising had been planned, how democratic inspectors and officers had been hoodwinked and all that machinery set in motion even before the elections, which the right was expected to lose, and who wrote with triumphal fervour about bloody acts, the rosary of crimes and human victims, necessary ritual sacrifices to see off not only the Republic, but also the heresy of centuries, anything at odds with the medieval empire of throne and altar. So it was that the Holy Year in Compostela, which should have been 1936, was prolonged for the first time in history so that Franco could be received as Caudillo in the cathedral, greeted with raised arms, led to the altar under a canopy and named Sword of God.