‘The Divine Sketch is by Curros!’ said the supervisor without having to look, which impressed his subordinate.
The queries were few and far between. There wasn’t much selection. Books were unloaded in heaps or thrown haphazardly from boxes. When one did emerge from anonymity, like a face emerging from a common grave, the reading aloud of its title conferred on it a dying distinction, the ultimate proof that the title was actually a good one, since there was that cretin, in his own words, Parallelepiped, with certain pomp, asking about it. Here perhaps, unlike with others that gave rise to jokes, the allusion to the divine made his hands itch. Until that moment, he hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to the meaning of the titles, only to the humour in them. He hadn’t discriminated between them. So it was no surprise he should now think there was something strange in his having picked up one that spoke of ‘the divine’ alongside ‘sketch.’ The one that referred to God to ask if he existed shouldn’t be allowed to exist for another second. But this one, The Divine Sketch, suggested the idea of a superior laugh. And he liked to laugh. To laugh at danger as well. He had guts, you might even say he was hardened. Before the military uprising achieved its purpose, he’d been involved with a group of trained gunmen in acts of provocation aimed at destabilising the Republic. On one occasion, they’d broken up a meeting and someone had been shot. It took him some time to believe that he’d done it. And he never really accepted the fact. He’d been shocked. In his view, the amount of blood a wounded man can lose bore no relation to the simple act of pulling a trigger. After a few days, it became less important. Now it wasn’t important at all. Now even winning the war wasn’t enough. The idea of war itself had little to say. Things had advanced to another stage. Beyond war.
‘Manuel Curros Enríquez, that’s right.’
The Falangist, whom everyone now calls Parallelepiped, remembers why the name sounds familiar. The city’s largest sculpture is dedicated to Curros. He must have done something. In the gardens, surrounded by a lake. Very near there. He noticed it because on top of the monument is a naked woman rising triumphantly into the sky. Now that’s a monument. Were it not for the new Post Office, the woman could see the fires. Amazing what you can do with stone. Afterwards he’ll have to go and have another look. At the stone slut.
‘What? What shall I do with this one? Under house arrest?’
Curtis guessed that the authority of the man who decided the destiny of books derived not just from his position in the hierarchy, but from the fact he read a lot and was what is generally termed ‘a man of culture’. In fact, he didn’t stop reading and consulting books, some of them rescued from the flames. While his subordinates carried out the burning, egging each other on with jokes and directing insults at particularly obnoxious titles, their boss circulated. He went from group to group, issuing the same instruction under his breath, ‘Any copies of Scripture, in particular the New Testament, let me know at once.’
Now he frowns.
‘You can throw The Divine Sketch in the fire!’
Parallelepiped moves his arm like a lever, releases his fingers and drops the book without further ado. Then unconsciously, either because his last memory of the sculpture is of water bubbling on stone or because his skin senses rather than feels an itch, what the boy in uniform does is shake his hands and rub them on his trousers. And then he falls quiet.
With the passing of time, the initial funeral procession of mockery turns into a routine, an industrial-scale burning, which must have something to do with the increasingly thick smoke, a tactile, sticky stench that suggests to Curtis one last metaphor. The books had come down from the trees and fallen into the trap of some men with viscous arms. So, from close up, the embers at the bottom of the fire resembled a cluster of birds reduced to ashen silhouettes and glowing yellow or orange beaks. Had Arturo da Silva been here, the books wouldn’t be burning, thought Curtis. Or perhaps they were burning because he wasn’t here. The fact they were burning was further proof of his loss. And Curtis’ mind, which in Arturo’s words was a spiral staircase, ascended, or descended, another step. It was the boxer from Shining Light, the writer of Brazo y Cerebro, who was burning. The books’ last smell was of flesh.
‘Revista de Occidente. Federico García Lorca. New York (Office and Denunciation). What have we here?’
The name sounded familiar to Parallelepiped. He hadn’t read anything by him, but he’d heard lots of jokes about him under the heading ‘red queens’. In a Fascist publication, one of those papers he did read, there was always a stubborn misprint in the second surname: García Loca or ‘madwoman’.
He opened it up. Adopted a humorous tone:
Under the multiplication
is a drop of duck’s blood
Shit! He didn’t read any more. The drop of duck’s blood changed his voice. He looked away and made an effort to shout:
‘Boss! There’s a Lorca here.’
He threw it with obvious hatred into the middle of the volcano, which spewed out black smoke and shiny sparks.
He took another handful. Meanwhile his boss had approached. The first of the new lot was a slim volume, the only illustration a single scallop shell in the centre.
‘Six Galician Poems! Fe-de-ri-co. . What’s this? Can’t they leave each other alone?’
He turned to face his boss with the book held out and a look of disgust.
‘Samos! Did this faggot also write in Galician?’
His boss lingered over the cover, though young Parallelepiped thought there was hardly much to read. Six Galician Poems by Federico García Lorca. Foreword E. B. A. Nós Publishing House. Compostela. Samos may have been investigating those dots after the letters. Deciphering those initials. He leafed through it slowly, page by page. Parallelepiped tossed the other books while watching Samos. What’s he up to? Is he going to read the whole thing?
Locks that go out to sea,
where the clouds their glittering dovecot keep
The book danced in his hands. He looked at the boy observing him steadily, waiting for some informed remark.
‘He spent some time here,’ said the supervisor, ‘with a theatre company, Barraca. Yes, he was right here. I think he made a lot of friends. The book’s recent. Under a year.’
‘That was another age, Comrade Samos,’ declared the young boy.
A year. The phrase Parallelepiped used was of someone measuring an astronomical distance. The look of someone abolishing time. He was right. After all, he knew how to measure what was happening. It was a month to the day since the war had started. The first month of Year I.
The war had changed all concept of time. The war had changed many things, but above all measures of duration. Nós Publishing House. He could have given him a lecture, but it didn’t exist any more. It had no future and it wouldn’t have any past either. That was where Galicianist Republicans hung out, those who had this stupid idea of a federal Spain. The publisher was Ánxel Casal. Mayor of Santiago de Compostela. Or rather ex-mayor. In a dungeon right now. Like Coruña’s mayor, Alfredo Suárez Ferrín. He felt something like vertigo to think that these two figures of the Republic, democratically elected mayors, had been imprisoned as enemies of the nation. But the vertigo was exciting, intoxicating. He’d finally arisen from inaction, from a bland form of Christianity. He could shout as during the Crusades, ‘God wills it!’ And in fact this is how, with a warlike cry, he’d ended a short speech at the local branch of the Falange, which now had a large skull painted on the wall. Yes, he felt the telepathic force of Carl Schmitt, his new, revered master. It was naive to believe in a telepathy of words, but not of ideas. In the thesis he was preparing on Donoso Cortés, concerning the dictatorship, he’d noted down an idea he later discovered in one of Schmitt’s texts: a state of emergency was to law what a miracle was for theology. Since the machinery of conspiracy had been set in motion and above all since he’d felt the itching in his brain that came from holding a weapon in his hand that afternoon when Dez invited him to military training on the beach, since then he’d been accompanied every day by the image of Heidegger, the Nazi Rector of Freiburg University, giving the order to descend to Plato’s cave to requisition the projector of ideas. Yes, he knew them. He knew Casal. Compostela’s mayor had been born in Coruña and founded his publishing house there. His wife, María Miramontes, was a well-known designer. His mother, Pilar, had even ordered her famous dress of black chiffon with black velvet grapes from her. The mother’s final act of daring. Needless to say, Casal and Miramontes were friends with Luís Huici, the artistic tailor, the inventor of incredible double-breasted waistcoats and broad-shouldered jackets which were so popular with Coruña’s Bohemians. Waistcoats, ideas. He’d got the young drunk with his speeches at Germinal. Right now, Huici was probably tasting castor oil in the barracks of the Falange.