Books Burn Badly (3 page)

Antonio Vidal trapped the newspaper by stepping on its wings. He then picked it up and folded it. Calmed it down. The newspaper was no longer alone, it now had someone to read it. It contained news of important events. A Greek freighter had sunk off the Lobeira Isles in the Corcuvion estuary. There’d been so much fog the members of the crew had been unable to see each other on deck. This was followed by reports of adulterated wine, fishing with dynamite . . . But his eyes were drawn to the section of Telegrams. He had an instinct for the latest news.

‘What? You collecting stories from the ground?’

A strange apparition with a sunlike halo appeared before him. A woman carrying birds on her head. What in fact she was carrying in her basket were newspapers flapping their wings in the sea breeze. The young girl held out her arm, demanding what was hers, with a magnetism in her fingers. Who could say no, it doesn’t belong to you, to someone carrying the weight of the news? He handed back the newspaper and was about to leave when she set down her basket and arranged all the headlines in an extraordinary fan. He stood there while she hawked the news. He’d heard all kinds of things being sold before, animals and fruit at fairgrounds. He’d heard a blind man sing. But never a girl hawking fresh news.

‘What? You going to take the lot?’

His whole body started. He hadn’t been expecting to run into a newspaper seller who was only a girl, early teens at the most, but who spoke like a fully grown woman. She spoke in a way that guarded her body and was dressed like the local fishwives. She might end up selling fish too. If he could contain his surprise, Antonio Vidal might end up seeing fish in that basket. A basket that could carry strawberries and cherries, sea urchins and sardines, depending on the season. But now she was hawking the news in a singsong voice that made her the city centre. If she changed position, the centre would also move.

‘Is your hand stuck? Don’t you know how to tell the time?’

Her last question brought Antonio Vidal back to reality. Over their heads was a scoffing sky, the seagulls’ mocking calls. He counted on his fingertips in his pocket. He’d spent a large amount buying his uncle ‘Doctor Ayala’s Asian Tonic’ and ‘The Miraculous Zephyr’, inventions that were supposed to stop you going bald. He felt he was being guided with a healthy vengeance by his mother’s ghost because in Sucesores de Villar he also bought ‘Carmela’s Miraculous Waters’, a lotion to prevent your hair going grey and to restore its natural colour. His mother insisted, ‘As a boy, he had a receding hairline.’ And added, ‘A receding conscience as well.’ There she stopped and he never wanted to find out more about Uncle Ernesto’s receding conscience. In Havana, he had helped to set up a modern school in Cruceiro de Airas and from the pulpit it was rumoured the emigrants had turned into ‘Masons, Atheists and Protestants’ and were trying to corrupt children. ‘You can’t be all things at once,’ observed Antonio Vidal. ‘You can’t be what?’ ‘A Mason, an Atheist and a Protestant, you can’t be all three things at once.’ ‘You shut up, what do you know?’ his mother, Matilde, told him. ‘Say hello to Uncle Ernesto and then get on with your work, unless you want to end up with a receding hairline too. And don’t go wasting your money.’

‘Do you need a bullet extractor?’ asked the newspaper seller.

‘What for?’

‘For your coins.’

Antonio Vidal scrabbled in his pocket. What he was really looking for were not coins, but some quick, light-footed, low-denomination words to get him out of a tight situation.

‘I’ll take one today,’ he said. And then thought better, ‘No, two. Give me the one that was flying away.’

‘Lucky me!’ she commented ironically. ‘I found myself a tycoon to support me!’

‘I’m off to Cuba, on the steamer
Lafayette
.’

‘How I’d love to own a news-stand in Havana’s Central Park.’

‘What do you know about Havana?’

‘Everything. Or almost everything. As if I’d been a rich lady sitting in the colonnade of the Inglaterra Hotel. When you get off the boat, don’t go up Prado Avenue. People will laugh at you. And anyone laughing at your accent and beret is a Galician who arrived before and now has a white suit and a dandy white hat. Don’t go up Prado Avenue at least until you’ve got yourself a white suit.’

The whippersnapper handing out advice. She really seemed like a chatterbox now. Talking nineteen to the dozen, words spilling out of her mouth. All that talking made her look smaller. Vidal decided he’d wasted quite enough time. He forgot about walking to the end of the Iron Quay. He still had to visit his boarding-house and the General Transatlantic Company.

‘I’m in a hurry,’ said Antonio Vidal. He folded the two newspapers under his arm and left her gawping.

‘Keep them, take them with you!’ she shouted seriously, sensing his distrust. ‘They’ll each open a door for you, you’ll see.’

She was going to add, ‘I can’t come tomorrow. Tomorrow I have to collect clay on Lapas Beach.’ But she didn’t, he was far away by now. Who cared whether she came tomorrow or not? He hadn’t even asked her name.

Antonio Vidal felt ridiculous with his bottle of ‘Asian Tonic’ and other lotions to stop your hair falling out. Uncle Ernesto had a full head of hair and a stylish haircut. ‘What you looking at? You like my hair?’ He took it off. ‘Here you go, a genuine wig imported from New York. The best there is. Made from the hair of a virgin Amazonian Indian.’ Having arrived in Havana after a two-week crossing, he still wasn’t sure when his uncle was joking or being serious. But the thick, black wig shone in his hands like jet. ‘This is where progress is, don’t forget,’ Ernesto told him, ‘you’re the one coming from behind.’ Yes, he was coming from behind. What’s more, on the steamer
Lafayette
, having got over his seasickness, he spent almost all the time astern, watching the ship’s wake and reading the newspapers the girl had sold him. He read them from top to bottom every day of the fourteen the journey lasted, enough to learn everything by heart, including the chapter in the literary supplement that came with
El Noroeste
. He’d read the supplement with the chapter from
Anna Karenina
so often it seemed the most real part of the whole newspaper. ‘“Here, if you please,” he said, moving on one side with his nimble gait and pointing to his picture, “it’s the exhortation to Pilate, Matthew, chapter xxvii,” he said, feeling his lips were beginning to tremble with emotion. He moved away and stood behind them.’ Everything he knew about the painter Mihailov was in that chapter, but it was enough, he thought. From this fragment, he’d built up a picture of the novel and was convinced it would be extremely similar to the one the Russian author, Leo Tolstoy, had written. Standing astern, he felt a bit like Mihailov. The newspaper, the ship’s wake, mirrored his guilt. He couldn’t get the girl out of his mind, with her basket of newspapers flapping their wings in the sea breeze.

This newspaper would end up in the hands of an even more elegant friend of his uncle’s. There was Fermín Varela in the portico of the Inglaterra Hotel, devouring the pages of
El Noroeste
. Uncle Ernesto was reading it over Varela’s shoulder, a glint in his eyes. Artificial wine? Fishing with dynamite? MPs at a bullfight? He looked at him as if he were to blame. After all, Antonio was the last to arrive. ‘Is ours a country or a scorpion?’

‘What can you do?’ asked Fermín Varela.

‘A bit of everything.’

‘I like the sound of that,’ said Varela.

‘That’s the good thing about being born in the sticks,’ observed Uncle Ernesto. ‘You learn a bit of everything.’

‘Can you fire a gun?’

He couldn’t. But he said he could.

‘Can you give orders?’

‘Give orders?’

‘I mean, can you tell other men what to do?’

He was asking very difficult questions. Antonio Vidal had never thought about that, about the possibility of telling others what to do. He’d come in search of a job. He could work hard, without stopping. But giving orders was something else.

‘He’ll soon learn, Varela,’ Ernesto intervened. ‘There’s nothing that can’t be learnt.’

‘What do you want to do?’

He tried to suppress it, but a voice replied for him, ‘Own a news-stand in Central Park.’

They burst out laughing. They hadn’t been expecting such a remark. But then Varela said, ‘It’s not such a bad idea. I like it, Vidal, I like it. You’ve got potential. The future lies in Vedado, that’s the golden rectangle. But for now your fate’s a little further off. I can offer you a job in Mayarí. Go and work for my wife. A bit of everything, like you say. She’ll teach you how to give orders. She’s a real field marshal!’

Varela spoke with a mixture of irony and boredom.

‘Are you not coming, sir?’ asked Vidal.

‘It’s time for me to be dirty. I’m fed up of the provinces, my Galician friend. I feel like the people of Havana, now I can’t stand the countryside. You’ll feel the same one day.’

‘I come from a village, Mr Varela, well, a crossroads actually.’

‘There you go. But who do you think fills the music halls, gets their shoes cleaned twice a day here, in the colonnade of the Inglaterra, has a drink in the square? We all got off the Central Train, so to speak. And we don’t want to go back. Work hard and you’ll earn enough money to put a wrought-iron news-stand right in the middle of Central Park, next to the
Diario de la Marina
, and still have enough to build yourself a house on Seventeenth Street.’

‘What kind of work is it?’ he asked his uncle when they were alone.

‘It’s a large estate with wood and cattle in Mayarí,’ replied Ernesto. ‘Remember giving orders also means shutting up. His wife will expect you to give orders and to obey them. She’s the really rich one. And there’s something he didn’t tell you. She’s an educated woman. Reads books and the like. Even prefers them to Varela. What was that about a news-stand in Central Park?’

‘I don’t know. It just came out like that.’

He had a day to make up his mind. Antonio Vidal sat on a bench on Prado Avenue. He was wearing his new linen white suit for the first time and now belonged to the people of light. He’d looked at it from different angles, but realised his principal misgiving was this: he’d just arrived and didn’t want to leave Havana. The second newspaper was spread out on his thighs. He started thinking again about the cynical painter Mihailov in
Anna Karenina
and the girl with the basket of newspapers on her head by the Iron Quay in Coruña Harbour.

‘What?’

The dark boy’s head had eclipsed the sun.

‘Can you spare a sheet?’

‘What do you want it for?’

‘To make a hat.’

‘Can you make paper hats?’

‘I can’t, but the teacher can,’ said the boy, pointing to a bench further down, where there was a group of schoolchildren accompanied by a young woman who was waving to the boy to come back.

‘Is that your teacher?’

‘That’s right. She’s the one who makes hats. They’re great, just like boats.’

‘Here you go. Take the whole newspaper.’

From the bench, he watched the teacher make hats until there was no more paper. She folded the sheets in a special way. It was true, they did look more like boats than hats. When the schoolchildren came past, what he saw was a procession of figureheads.

‘Thank you, sir,’ said the teacher as she passed.

Sir? He bowed in reply. And then, without trying to stop it, he heard the voice say, ‘Excuse me, madam! It’s very hot today. You wouldn’t have a spare paper boat, would you?’

‘Here,’ she smiled. ‘Take mine.’

The Breadcrumb

‘Say Mass for us, Polka!’

The stone cavities looked like thrones, granite chairs. Francisco Crecente, or Polka, the only one who wasn’t naked, climbed to the highest rock of the hill-fort’s Ara Solis, with a nostalgic sigh spat out the last cherry pip, made the sign of the Cross and mumbled, ‘
In principio erat Verbum.
’

‘Can’t hear you!’ protested Terranova. ‘Louder!’

Polka felt the sun pricking his eyes. He shielded them with his hand and almost glimpsed what he was looking for. Down the slope, next to the stream, clothes were spread out like a happy graft of people on nature. He stretched out his arms and his preacher’s voice rolled down the hillside on the sun’s rays, ‘
Et lux in tenebris lucet et tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt,
etc., etc.’

The second Sunday in July was full of light. There was no trusting that vertiginous sky, the door of all the storms in the Azores, even in midsummer. But this time the mission had been successful. Polka was pleased and proud. They’d accepted his proposal. It was his village. And today it had the feel of paradise.

Everything was a gift of the sun and the landscape didn’t seem to want to keep anything back. He was on top of the world. These ruins were the city’s first settlement, a fortified mount, at a safe distance from the sea. Between Ara Solis and Hercules Lighthouse, up on the isthmus, there was a visual axis. Anyone in Polka’s position could experience that geological view. The city had been reborn from the sea, had surrounded the great Atlantic rock and become a palafitte on the sands and mudflats, making up ground on the bay’s belly, with the sensuality of gardens and buildings whose foundations were glass. The sea today was a kind of mirror and Polka thought the second Sunday in July was a true gift and deserved a blessing.

‘A divine office, Polka, if you please!’

Holando had read out the ten commandments of naturism. As they lay sunbathing, naked on the warm rocks, which were carpeted in velvet moss and golden lichen, the cherry pendulum hanging over their lips, measuring time from outside in, everything that was said sounded like the flowering of reason. The fourth commandment: ‘Thou shalt not forget to bathe every day in cold water’. This got a boo. ‘Where’s the prophet from?’ ‘Dr Nigro Basciano is from Brazil.’ ‘That explains it.’ As for the rest, they were in agreement. Until the tenth one: ‘Thou shalt not eat meat or murder the poor animals, but be merciful to them.
Mens sana in corpore sano. Finis
. Amen.’