19 August 1936
THE BOOKS WERE burning badly. One of them stirred in the nearest bonfire and Hercules thought he saw it suddenly fan out its fresh pollack’s red gills. An incandescent piece came off another and rolled like a neon sea urchin down the steps of a fire staircase. Then he thought a trapped hare was moving in the fire, and that a gust of wind, which kindled the flames, was scattering in sparks each and every one of the hairs on its burnt skin. So the hare kept its form in a graph of smoke and stretched its legs to bound off down the glazed diagonal of the Atlantic avenue’s sky.
The first book fires had been built by the docks, on the way to Parrote, on the urban belly so to speak, where the sea gave birth to the city, the first cluster of fishermen. Much grass had grown since then, even on the roofs, whose vocation is to be the brow of a hill, in the area where today the bay’s passenger boats, the city’s trams and national coaches all meet. The other fires are placed alongside, in the main square, which is named after María Pita, the heroine who led the defence of the city during one of the many attacks by sea at the head of a commando of fishing women, and now contains the town hall with its inscription ‘Head, Guard, Key and Antemural of the Kingdom of Galicia’. Curtis had heard of the heroine María Pita at the Dance Academy as if she were still alive, in that undying present that is to be a rumour on people’s lips, not just because she’d stood up to the sea dog/admiral Francis Drake, but because she’d been married four times and the judge had had to warn her that she’d been widowed enough and should see that no more men died in the battle of her bed.
There’s a pauper called Zamorana who lives and sleeps among the tombs and pantheons in the city of the dead, in the seaside cemetery of San Amaro. She once gave Hercules a fright when she stepped out from behind a grave and, holding up a cigarette butt, asked him:
‘Got a light, boy?’
Zamorana is not really a beggar. She has a job paid for by tips that is very important for the city. Coruña’s late departed look out to sea. Near the shore by the cemetery are the Ánimas shoals, the best breeding grounds, with more starfish on the bottom than can be seen in the sky. Though they can also be spotted falling from on high. Seagulls and cormorants fly with starfish in their beaks, so the starfish jettison their captive limb and return to the sea an arm short. The cemetery affords the best view of the mouth of the bay. And this has something to do with Zamorana, who asked Curtis for a light the night he spent by the graveyard. The beggar-woman is a sentinel. When a liner comes into sight, she goes down Torre Street, warning of the boat’s arrival. A liner is full of rich pickings. Zamorana’s voice sounds like a husky conch shell. ‘Boat’s coming, Mr Ferreiro, boat’s coming. . Boat’s coming, Mr Ben, boat’s coming. . Boat’s coming.’
Zamorana emerges with her ditty about a boat’s arrival, and she emerges from the cemetery, not from any old place. Curtis recalls how when he was a boy, Zamorana was already old, already announced boats in her husky voice. He thought she and others like her lasted for ever. María Pita, for example. The procession of country dead remained at the city gates. And the seaside cemetery’s occupants delegated the lighthouse and Zamorana’s husky conch to rouse the city: ‘Boat’s coming.’
The reason Vicente Curtis, otherwise known as Hercules, is thinking about Zamorana is because she’s standing by the Parrote viewpoint. Besides the arsonists, she’s the only discernible presence. She’s unmistakable. She’s wearing all the skirts she owns, the skirts of a lifetime, one on top of the other, so she looks like a female bell. Some ships arrived yesterday. Warships. They’re moored next to the yacht club and are part of the Third Reich’s fleet. She saw them coming, but didn’t go down Torre Street, singing her ditty, ‘Boat’s coming, boat’s coming!’ She watches. She’s seen many things. But not that kind of fire. She’s never read a book. There was a time, perhaps her happiest, when she sold newspapers. She hawked news though she couldn’t read. That’s why she thinks they’re hurting her. Going against her. They’re burning what she never had, what she always needed. There’s something strange about the smoke, it stings, gets behind the eyes. Reminds her of a time she’d rather forget. The day a stranger set fire to the blanket she was sleeping rough under, the day she put out her flaming hair with her hands. And now her hands are scars healed by the sea. That’s why she decided to sleep among the tombs. Where are the readers of books? Why are they taking so long?
‘Oy you, old witch, what you looking at? Get out of here!’ shouts one of the soldiers. ‘Go find yourself a billy-goat on Mount Alto!’
She never kept quiet. This Cain had better listen up. She was going to tell him a thing or two. Put a few things straight. Have it out with him, face to face.
This strange smoke that gets behind the eyes. This itching. The smoky torch. The fire. The smell of fire in her hair. She burnt once already. The skin’s memory. The scars’ itching. She moves off. Better to keep the peace. She returns to her tombs, trailing her bell of cloth. All the skirts of a lifetime.
The book fires are not part of the city’s memory. They’re happening now. So this burning of books isn’t taking place in some distant past or in secret. Nor is it a fictional nightmare thought up by some apocalyptic. It’s not a novel. This is why the fire progresses slowly, because it has to overcome resistance, the arsonists’ incompetence, the unusualness of burning books. The absentees’ incredulity. It’s obvious the city has no memory of this lazy, stubborn smoke moving through the air’s surprise. Even what’s not been written has to burn. Someone arrives from the local tourist office, carrying a pile of leaflets with the programme of festivities, ‘fresh meat’ they call it, possibly in reference to the woman bathing on the front cover under the heading Ideal Climate and the town’s official coat of arms, the lighthouse with an open book on top acting as a lamp giving off beams of light. All this will burn slowly, the design as well, which won’t make it back on to the city’s escutcheon.
‘Plato’s Republic. About time! What’s this? An Encyclopedia of Meat!’ Bam!
It’s a thick volume that sends embers flying and eats away the angles of ruins like the sudden collapse of a seam on lower buildings. The word ‘meat’ was enough to activate the throw. The head imagines a treatise on lust, pictures of orgies, shame not to have had a peek. When the volume reaches the end of its fall, the Falangist gives it a little kick on the corner with the toecap of his boot. As it opens, with a new eruption of smoke and cinders and the first flames, what meets the eyes is a two-page map of the peninsula with the different provinces shown in colours. The effect is too causal, an accidental jerk of the boot, which the eyes hasten to correct. No, they’re not the provinces of Spain. It soon becomes obvious it’s really an illustration of the different parts of a cow. Loin, sirloin, hock, coccyx, rump, rib, brisket. .
‘What you’ve thrown in there is a book of recipes!’ comes a mocking voice from behind.
‘Then it’ll make a nice barbecue.’
The fires are in the most public part of the city, opposite the symbolic seat of civil power. Hercules shouldn’t head in that direction because Hercules is far better known than he thinks. But for now he’s in luck. He approaches the fires and none of the operators, all of them armed and dressed in the Falange’s uniform, pays him any attention, taken up as they are with the problem of books burning badly. One of them likens them to bricks. And then attaches a geometrical clarification even he finds strange:
‘They’re parallelepipeds!’
Next to him, the youngest soldier wishes to repeat the long word, but realises it isn’t easy and tries whispering it. It sounds like the name of a very rare species of bird. More complicated than palmipedes. He doesn’t have any problems with that, with palmipedes, and looks at the pyre without reading the titles, like an abstraction, like the model of an Aztec pyramid.