Books Burn Badly

The Doorknocker

26 July 1952

ALL SORTS OF things are done for money, even killing, the value of life and all that, there are even some executioners on a State salary. When it came to Foucellas, the most wanted resistance leader, apparently they sent him their finest executioner, so he can’t have been as bad as they made him out to be if they sent him an executioner from outside, from Salamanca, the best they had. Not the worst, the best killer. They kept the day and hour a secret, but people knew. Because the executioner got off the train in Teixeiro to have a coffee. And the one who served him realised it was the executioner as if he’d been wearing a badge or uniform. How did he know? From the hands. His hands were refined, manicured, hidden, peeping out of the burrow of their sleeves. And because he added a lot of sugar. No one had ever added so much sugar to their coffee in Teixeiro before. Some even said, ‘He had a good death, they sent him the quickest.’ Some consolation when you’re being garrotted! He had a thirteen-year-old daughter, who went knocking at the governor’s door to stop her father being killed. We were walking by, with our bundles of clothes, and my mother whispered to me, ‘That’s Foucellas’ daughter at the governor’s door.’ Very early, it was cold. The only sound in the city was that of the doorknocker. Everyone walking by, all the office clerks, the squad lugging an enormous carpet, the workers taking down the hoarding from Colón Theatre, the brickies with their tile-coloured pots under their arms, everyone moved away from there, from that sound of a clapper. The sticky trail a broom leaves on the road. The knocker sounding like a clapper made of bone.