Books Burn Badly

The Rabble and Providence

SOMETHING HAPPENED WHICH upset him and left him speechless. One of his colleagues, who’d later occupy an important post, started urinating on one of the pyres. There’d just been an incident. Someone, that huge lad they called Papagaio’s Hercules, had unexpectedly jumped over the fire the way they do on St John’s Eve to ward off evil spirits. They’d gone after him without success. He ran as if he had wings on his feet. The point is this colleague, back from the chase, went and pissed on one of the pyres. And all the others in their squad, without prior agreement, automatically went and pissed with him. Though he was one of those in charge, Samos was incapable of expressing his disgust. On the contrary, he reacted with a nervous smile. Exempt. This lowly act ruined the picture he’d composed of having an archangelic sword to hand. The books stank more than ever, a mixture of urine and smoke, animal remains. He could make out the folds and tips of Dutch binding, Valencian boards. The horse-nerve twines. That warm piss, spattering on the remains, gave off an unfamiliar smell. They may not have noticed it. The breeze lifted the pestilence to his nose.

When they were out hunting, there was a moment in which the group, already somewhat inebriated by nightfall, would obey a kind of natural order and the hunters would line up to piss in manly formation, with rude, brazen jokes. A disgusting scene. An ugly, base form of Fascism. One of his Portuguese colleagues, his host in Coimbra, who’d taken part in the Viriato Legion of volunteers backing Franco’s army, had been amazed by what he’d seen among fellow troops. Teutónio confided in him, ‘Samos, Spain’s a dangerous country. Are you not afraid to have such colleagues?’

When in 1940 he’d visited Milan and Berlin, he’d been impressed. There was an aesthetics, another dimension, an athletic kind of futurism, he’d said. A harmony of bodies and weapons. Ren was an example of coarseness. León Degrelle, another Fascist who’d sought refuge in Spain, after the war went on the Road to Santiago and complained about the fleas and lice in the towns’ boarding-houses. Ren, who’d gone to welcome him in Portomarín, as a government representative, laughed about him, ‘Very refined, don’t you know!’ Samos the judge had later heard the Minister say, ‘We have to plough with the oxen we have.’ The stink came and went. As for the hunting squad, he and one or two others, Father Munio when he came of course, would try to hold it in or, if they had to, do it a little apart, at a discreet distance, not so far apart as to attract attention, but without joining the common flood. Lofty thoughts don’t come when you want them to. What gave the regime real meaning was not bravado, but the idea of divine leadership. ‘Forget about the vulgar nature of the rabble and think about history,’ Dez had said to him one day. He was the most refined in their circle, spoke with nostalgia of Primo de Rivera’s poetic court and shared his sentiment, ‘What we need is culture.’ Their leader was an envoy of Providence. They had to maintain the link: follow our leader, follow Providence, keep the enemy at bay. That was the important thing. What was written on the face of coins being used by every single citizen: ‘Caudillo by the grace of God’. What was on the reverse, not written, but in everyone’s mind, like a tonsure clipped with scissors of fear, could well be the title adopted by the Assyrian king Tiglath: ‘He who subdued his enemies’. A historical reference he resorted to with delight. In his lectures and seminars, and above all in his involvement with Arbor in Compostela and Coimbra, were those two special moments when he released his Christian Epimetheus, opened Pandora’s box or descended with Heidegger to Plato’s cave in order to arouse the soft, comfortable descendants of the Victory elites. He knew how to wake them. Nothing better than a bolt of lightning from his revered master Schmitt: ‘And Cain killed Abel. This is how the history of mankind begins. .’

At that point, he’d got their attention. The judge would then turn to another hammer-blow from another of his most distinguished colleagues, the future Minister: ‘Without war, there would be no history.’ He’d then take a good look at the Old Testament, where God is known as the Lord of Hosts. ‘The Lord is on my side. Whom shall I fear? The day of the Lord is great and terrible.’