Books Burn Badly

The Roswell Man

‘YOU CAN WRITE about the Holy Company and all that. Beings at night. Holding a cross or whatever. Whether they’re superstitions or not, these fears help religion. Happenings go well with faith. But extraterrestrials cause alarm, widespread panic. It’s as if God and his representatives aren’t protecting us. After almost twenty-five years of peace since Franco’s victory, such stories create insecurity, the impression we’re vulnerable. So forget about the Lighthouse Man, the Galician Roswell and all those fantasies about Hercules Lighthouse being a cosmic meeting place and write about ordinary people, ordinary people doing ordinary things, otherworldly things, but normal otherworldly things, got it? If you like this stuff, OK, go after it. You’ve got Corpus, where there are women expelling demons. Apparently there was one last year, all hairy, seen running down the rows of maize, followed by a bunch of children. Shame there’s no photo. We’ve got all these devils in Galicia and no graphical evidence. Vicente Risco wrote reams. But he didn’t have a Bolex camera, what to do? Then you’ve got the pilgrimage to Santa Marta de Ribarteme, with devotees being carried to the chapel in coffins. Don’t tell me there’s a lack of material. Right next to the city, you’ve possessed women going to Pastoriza, spitting out iron nails against the door. You’ve a brilliant future if you’ll take some advice. What do we want with extraterrestrials in Galicia? What are we going to do with them? Encourage tourism? They’ll attract a few loonies. Just what we need! To become the world capital for raving lunatics. Now, if we had a Loch Ness monster, that would be different. Then we’d be talking!

‘We’ve enough with witches. Witches, imps, the Holy Company and, at a push, between you and me, in confidence, the apostle James’ white horse. Every country has its limit. And, as for spatial matters, we’ve the Betanzos hot-air balloon. Now that’s a civilised superproduction. Compare it with those who chuck goats off a bell-tower! Whatever next? I understand we have to keep up with the times, the fashion. I’m on your side, I feel the beating of the teleprinter in my blood, I understand what you’re saying. Nowadays a country without aliens, well, it’s second-division. All right, don’t tell me about the teleprinter again, I know it’s informed about a UFO sighting in Gaintxurizketa, Errenteria, Euskadi. I tried to explain this to the Delegate of Information and Tourism, we’ve as much right to spot UFOs as anyone else. But we live where we live and we’re not going to change it, me with my gastronomic dishes, you with your cosmic theory.

‘In short, Balboa, what I mean is the governor doesn’t want extraterrestrials in his province. Nor does he want Hercules Lighthouse being presented as a cosmic reference point, an operations base, where, if I didn’t misunderstand you, sowers of cosmozoons are planning a landing. So there’s an end to aliens in the Expreso. A whole squadron of UFOs with Hypernauts and Inhabitants of Emptiness can turn up, we’re not reporting it even in brief.’

‘I still don’t understand why.’

‘Take my advice. Stop asking why! We’re journalists, that’s all. We’re not philosophers or. . selenotropes? Did you ever see a newspaper with question marks? This is not an industry of whys. Why’s the US conducting a war in Vietnam? Why’d they demolish the Cooperative, one of the city’s most beautiful buildings? Why’d they pull down Primitive Baths and the Health Spa, which is a lot of pulling down? Well, my friend, to build a garage. No more Primitive or Health, that’s what great words have in store for them. We could print a full-page WHY? A local, universal, cosmic WHY? It’d be a great day for Spanish journalism. And our evening paper’s last.’

He stood up. He looked fatter when he was annoyed. Today Stringer attributed this abdominal enlargement to his theory on the restriction of whys. He brandished the newspaper in front of him.

‘See this photo? Who is it? Yes, it says so in the headline. It’s Carmencita, Franco’s daughter, water-skiing. Right here, in Coruña Bay. You ever see someone water-ski in a long skirt? No, of course not. Well, she wasn’t wearing one either. Her legs were bare as they should have been. So why’s she in a skirt? Because we received an indication, got it? Someone upstairs picks up the phone and indicates the Caudillo’s daughter has to appear in a skirt, so her legs can’t be seen. You don’t ask why. You just cover her legs. See this article. There’s a quote from a song where it should say, ‘Leaning against the jamb of the brothel’. What does it say? Go on, tell me.’

Stringer read the bit he was pointing to, ‘Leaning against the jamb of the hostel’.

‘Nonsense, right? Why? What for? You want to know why? The guy in charge of words is in charge of us, inside and out. I’ll tell you something else, but I don’t want it leaving this office.’

His habit of glancing to the sides. He looked as if he was going to withdraw his offer. He believed in oaths. He repeated in a deep voice, ‘I don’t want it leaving this office.’

‘You have my word, sir.’

‘I was thinking of publishing a childhood memoir by Salvador de Madariaga. No politics. Memories of a Coruñan child. An intimate piece with a strong regional flavour. Quite innocent. There weren’t even any chlorocephalids.’

‘Chlorocephalids?’ enquired Balboa. The director of the Expreso, who was often reserved, had these expansive moments when he even invented new words.

‘Yeah, those little men with green heads eating astropops, like the ones you saw around the lighthouse. Anyway, I was thinking of printing this piece by the Spanish historian, which would require authorisation since, as you know, the illustrious Coruñan may not be an extremist, but he does live in exile. For this reason, I went to Madrid, to the Ministry. Naively I thought the fact the three of us — the Minister, the writer and me — were all Galician would make it easy. But remember one thing, Balboa. All this pretence about being from the same country is a letter of credence, a visa, for someone who’s planning to stab you in the back. The Minister received me in person and I thought no problem. I explained what it was about and he asked to see the document. He read it right there, in front of me. Very calmly. He was obviously interested. He knew the areas where the child had spent his life. And the fact he was showing some interest dispelled any lingering doubts, any fear I may have had of needlessly stirring up trouble. Then the Minister raised his head, looked at me and said, “No, there’s no way you can publish this.”’

‘No?’

Stringer imagined the story would have some surprise, but he hadn’t expected this abrupt ending. He was shocked. Until recently, his only job had been to record the arrival and departure of boats and the price of fish. Obviously he’d heard about the censor’s office, he knew there was a building on Cantóns with various censors. What’s more, before starting to write, one of his errands had been to take the galley proofs to that building to be approved before they were printed. But normally nothing happened. He’d once heard the administrator who returned the proofs comment ironically, ‘The pages devoted to the glorious 18th of July are exactly the same as last year and the year before that. A newspaper that repeats itself! These layabouts haven’t even bothered to change the headlines.’ Another time, he was given an envelope for the director. Someone had written ‘Confidential’ with a red pencil. But the envelope was half open or half closed and he couldn’t resist the temptation. It said any information relating to Korea was to be treated with the utmost caution. Of course, he knew they meant the Asiatic country, but what he saw was the face of the guy down in the docks, Miguel, otherwise known as Korea. He’d received a beating. His shaven head was a globe with oedemas and scabs representing the poor countries.

‘No?’

‘That’s what he said, “You can’t publish this.” And then I. .’

He blinked. Too much light in his clear eyes. It was something that infuriated him, his glands’ disobedience, ‘Dacryocystitis! A journalist’s nightmare. Would you please lower those blinds!’

Stringer quickly complied. He was afraid the lowering of the blinds would delay the story. So, as he was doing it, he asked, ‘And then what, sir?’

‘I was prepared to plead with him, to beg. It was all so absurd. And it seemed to me such arbitrariness was a defeat for the whole of humanity. I said, “They’re memories of when he was a child, sir. An old man recalling his childhood. That’s all. Why not publish them?” The Minister rummaged through some papers and, without looking at me, pointed to the door and said, “Why? I’ll tell you why. Because where there’s a skipper, a sailor’s not in charge. That’s why.”’

The director of the evening Expreso thumped the table as the Minister had done before him. Aldán was someone who couldn’t say no. It grated on him internally like an ulcer of the soul. In his hypochondriac state, he sometimes thought about this, his soul’s duodenum perforated like a sieve. He admired Benito Ferreiro from the shipping company, who’d just attended a dinner which should have formed part of the city’s honourable history. A tribute to Valentín Paz-Andrade, ex-Republican MP, who’d come back from working as an expert for the United Nations in Mexico. The act was authorised under surveillance, so long as it was presided over by a stooge of the regime. Perhaps one of those who one day urinated on some burning books? Eyes sunken in the fat of time. Anyway, there was lots of talk about Paz-Andrade’s knowledge of the sea. At which point the stooge stood up and proposed a toast, ‘To the Caudillo, Spain’s first fisherman!’

Benito Ferreiro refused to join in the toast. He got up and left the table.

‘Where are you off to, Ferreiro?’ barked the stooge.

Ferreiro turned calmly around and replied, ‘To take a piss.’

‘Let me tell you something else about the censor’s office. Something you can take away with you. Certain scenes can contain tools and instruments of torture. But what can’t appear is their sound. You can see the executioner as he prepares to use the garrotte, but not hear him. That’s the soundtrack.’

It occurred to Stringer there was another man inside the director, a restless creature who was always coming and going. Perhaps a Hypernaut of Infinite Space or an Inhabitant of Emptiness. What he said next had a deliberately obscure meaning, he couldn’t tell whether it was good or bad, ‘What you learn here in a day you won’t learn anywhere else.’ He sat lost in thought, but Stringer knew he was counting to ten with his fingers like beads. An economical way of calming down. He then adopted a confidential tone, ‘The governor called the censor and the censor called me. They’re really upset about this report, as if they’d lost their mind. It seems this lunatic you interviewed has a bag of crossed cables on his back, but also a story inside that can’t be told. Don’t ask me anything else. No extraterrestrials, no boogie-woogie, no Hypernauts of Infinite Space or long-haired musicians, even if they’re English. That’s the final word. So now you know. Stay positive. Don’t go upsetting the boat.’

‘Mr Aldán. .’

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You don’t have to keep secrets from me. I’ll read you the script. Tell you what there is.’ He added something Stringer didn’t necessarily take as a warning, ‘It’s then up to you to get by.’

‘I was thinking, about the Loch Ness monster, I was thinking we also had a sea monster.’

‘Yeah, right. Leviathan and all that. Where there’s sea. .’

‘I’m serious, Don Ovidio. You know the painter Sada?’

‘I know him.’

‘He painted it in his own way. More like a serpent than a whale. He calls it Antaruxa. Because of something he experienced as a child. It turned up in Coruña Bay, after a storm during which the waves, to use the popular expression, climbed the clouds of the sky. They say it whizzed up the Gulf Stream, first went round and round Marola Isle like a big wheel and, on the second day, entered the docks. People could touch it. It was very calm. Actually it was more like a whale than a sea serpent. A snow-white whale. Its eyes were two luminous slits, an emerald green. With two large black stains like sickle-shaped leaves on top of them. It never broke anything. It acted as if it had come to visit the city. According to the eye-witness accounts I’ve seen, it spent all its time gazing at the windows. But some considered it a kind of Kronosaurus, with huge canines a metre long, which would mash up the whole Sea Club’s team. Not at all. It was very artistic. Most people applauded the miracle. But those who thought it a monster got their own way. A company of carabineers was dispatched and an officer gave the order to fire. They shot it. Right here, in the heart of the city, they blew our myth to smithereens.’

‘That’s a terrible story. I never heard anything like it. What can that inebriated boat, Sada, have been drinking?’

‘A cup of red wine, but he barely touched it. He’d wet his fingers and paint with them on the marble table. As the girls in Two Cities say, it’s a shame these masterpieces only last a day. Though this was a cruel painting. All the wine turned into blood. You should have seen it. He’d come to, stand up and shout, “Ready! Aim! Fire! Destroy the miracle!” That’s right. He’d shout there were no sirens left in Galicia because we’d eaten them all. He claimed one of the first canneries was for siren meat.’

‘That’s horrible. Grotesque. Pure showmanship. He should have stayed in his magical world.’

‘I didn’t believe him either, Mr Aldán. I thought it had to be an invention, all this about a whale in the docks, next to the glass galleries. But I was curious. I sifted through some papers and there it was. There was a strange whale, more albino than white, shot to pieces in the very docks of this city. It happened during the toughest part of the war, on the 6th of September 1938. People applauded when it appeared, causing waves that pushed back the guards. It must have sensed the popular support. Until the soldiers, in spite of the wave of boos, shot at it. It ejected water through its monumental siphon. They shot it again. And again. The docks were stained with cetacean blood. People were shocked, dismayed. I thought we could do a report. Create a legend. That of the whale which came to live in the heart of our city.’

‘And didn’t they say why?’ asked the director of the evening Expreso. ‘Why they killed it in this way.’

He suddenly realised he’d fallen into a trap. ‘Forget I asked. And forget about extraterrestrials, the Beatles. . and endearing sea monsters riddled with bullets.’

Stringer decided to carry on. ‘No, Mr Aldán. They didn’t say why. But we could bring the story back to life, create a legend. Have our own monster. Almost all civilisations have imagined a colossal creature. The Scandinavians have the Kraken, with its luminous eyes and gigantic tentacles. There’s Bigfoot in North America. The Yeti in the Himalayas. There are even souvenirs with photos of its footprints in the snow. I think they’re made up, like dragons, unicorns or sirens. But ours is real. This mysterious and intelligent sea creature, the size of an enormous whale, actually existed. Paid us a visit. Wanted to stay. People clapped when it arrived.’

‘What’s the point of a myth if we killed it? Maybe if someone else had killed it. Almanzor, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin. . But like this, that’s some propaganda!’

‘What if it never died?’

‘Did it die or didn’t it?’

‘We could write the story. With their applause, their cheers, the people managed to stop the shooting. A sensible officer, wary of public opinion and himself amazed by the creature, its mythical deportment, revoked the order and granted a pardon. The whale healed. Doctor Rodríguez from the Tobacco Factory came and healed it.’

‘Now we’re out of reality.’

As Stringer told the story, so he began to believe it. He understood Sada’s passionate recreation, the vision in his eyes of Antaruxa, that sea-witch, that stylised cetacean the narwhals escorted to the invisible line drawn by Marola Isle and Hercules Lighthouse. Sada could paint it because he’d seen it. As he talked at the furthest table in the Supply bar, he traced its erotic lines in the ephemeral nobility of red wine on marble:

‘That’s it. The curve, our great contribution to the history of the line, the curve that even stuck to the tongue, as Unamuno said, of Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, who wrote with curves as Don Miguel wrote with frets. This is memory talking and writing in waves, curls, loops, spirals, helicoid, sigmoid literature, the songbooks’ leixapren, the fingers, ah, where are the fingers of the one “sitting at St Simon’s Chapel, caught by the waves, how tall they seem”, Sapphic fingers drawing concentric circles, inward spirals? All rock-carvings are really astrographs. The first writing, the first art, the first topography, the first house: always circles, groups of circles. Hill-forts. Huts. The inner curve, Mogor’s labyrinth, humanity’s first neural incision. The whole monoecious coast, phallic vulva, pornographic nation fertilising shoals underwater. . When was Galicia fucked? The terrible day of the square, more or less.’

Sada fell quiet. He had bursts of energy and bouts of melancholy, like a speech warrior suffering from cyclothymia. In the way he talked, there was something of a phosphorescent diver’s movements since he’d emerge in a sea of pyrotechnics, then suddenly mist. The curtain falls.

Why not create the legend of a city born from a whale? There were historical data. Evidence, proof, that didn’t exist in the case of the tenant of Loch Ness. And the whale was female.

The director of the evening Expreso stood up to stretch his legs. What did this novice know about monsters and monstrosities? Right here in the docks, where the soldiers shot the whale the people applauded during the toughest part of the war, two years earlier, at the start of a new dictatorship, they’d burnt books from cultural associations and public libraries. He remembered that. The memory was accompanied by the smell of old, bound smoke. A sudden mist had entered his office. The director criticised his secretary for using a ventilator — ‘A ventilator in the city of winds!’ — and continued by attacking the country’s capricious climate, partly to blame, so he believed, for the problems of circulation. On days of rain, sales dropped off dramatically. Culture versus nature. He rapped the table. Suddenly viewed Stringer suspiciously, like someone who’s woken from a nightmare to find the culprit standing there. ‘That’s horrible. Listen to me. Forget about that story. It never happened and can’t appear.’ In a whisper, ‘Have you any idea how the Caudillo catches cetaceans from his yacht? Not with a harpoon exactly. Forget about such battlefields. How are we going to run with a story about a whale that’s been shot at? You have to start to distinguish between what you can and cannot tell. My dear friend, allow me to give you a word of advice, if not as an expert, then as a veteran. There are times a good journalist must separate the grain from the straw, so that he can publish the straw. Don’t make the reader suffer. He knows he’s living in a valley of tears. So cheer us up a little. Here. Tell us about the day the town hall dressed up rugged Coruñan sailors as Venetian gondoliers to welcome the Duke and Duchess of Lancaster. How they sang sweet, rhythmical barcaroles, rowing on their feet without even breaking into a sweat.’

Quickly the boats

surround the whole sea.

He went over to the window. Barcaroles. Atlantic sea-wolves dressed up as gondoliers to welcome royalty. Someone should write a comical history of the city. Lino’s Pavilion packed for the charity concert, the nuns in the front row. The general public trying to hasten the first acts so that they can get to the number they’re waiting for. Chelito, who’s just arrived for the occasion from Barcelona’s Parallel Avenue. Will she or will she not sing The Flea? Part of the public is worried. Views the nuns with suspicion, even if they are Sisters of Charity.

‘The Flea! The Flea!’

The host, Mr Lino, appeals for calm. Reminds them of their manners.

‘Why doesn’t Lino sing The Flea!’

‘Why doesn’t your mother?’

And so on. He only had a photographic memory of the Pavilion with its sensual façade. Shame it burnt. It was one of the temples in that architecture, a peculiar form of Atlantic art nouveau, which spread from the Fishmarket to Recheo Gardens, reclaimed land, and which seemed to have been conceived as a permanent flirt, a joyful plan in which both people and materials took part, the wood’s voluptuousness, the metals’ erotic rebirth, the iron’s sudden vegetal will, the dominant colour of glass everywhere, a second nature of mirrors, spaces to see and be seen, the glass’s second life, at night, somnambulant, electric. The next, splendid wave, which not by chance coincided with Corbu and the Black Pearl’s dockside visit, was of boat-houses. After the war, architectural horror. The violation of modernist carnality. The intimidation of property. The corrosion of the city’s character. The dictatorship’s main feature was ugliness. An unpublishable conclusion. Everything had got uglier. He himself had. So had handwriting.

Lino also owned a merry-go-round, a form of entertainment for a younger audience, which lasted slightly longer than the Pavilion. It arrived by boat from France. Played the ‘Marseillaise’ on the harmonica. Children sat on horses in time to the hymn of the Revolution. But it happened the other way round too. When the municipal band played the ‘Marseillaise’, a popular piece in their repertoire, children thought the band was paying tribute to Lino’s merry-go-round with its wooden horses. As the years went by, music and machinery got out of sync. César Alvajar called it ‘the twanging harmonica’. Coruña, perched on Atlantic rock, is a windy city. Not just visited, but inhabited by winds. There were days, especially if the roundabout was empty, the horses riderless, the wind, at least the wind in the gardens, would sway on the lonely mounts snorting bits of a nasal ‘Marseillaise’.

He closes his eyes. For him, that sound, that twanging roundabout’s wind, has to cross the walls of time. Some things that have disappeared are remembered by lots of people. But only he remembers the merry-go-round, its childish, nasal ‘Marseillaise’. ‘Are you sure it was the “Marseillaise”?’ asked one of the newspaper’s veterans in the condescending tone used with those who have craters or distortions in their memory. Better not to repeat it. Maybe there are memories that choose only one witness. The whale, Sada. Books, him.

When he recalls the burning of books, it all comes back to him with sensorial precision. He had a complete, aerial view from the terrace in María Pita Square. He thought he was well concealed, the perfect place for a spy. The smell reached him, but not the smoke. This was something that caught his attention. The way the smoke from the books hung about. He was watching how people reacted, this was his main focus. He had to write an article and was planning to write one on the art of walking. So he used the terrace as a vantage point. Paid particular attention to the soldiers’ determined, lineal movements and the different movements of people who’d turned up there by chance. How they quickened their pace or took strange, curved, furtive detours. You could recognise a fearful walk. Invent a chironomy of power and fear. He could tell it all with accuracy, but not write about it. Perhaps the idea of an article on the ways of walking came later. A tactic on the part of his imagination aimed at forgetting. Because now he remembers it differently. With that inflamed accuracy. The resinous smell reached him in slow spirals, but lots of it was thick, stubborn smoke that hung around lazy volumes. He realised now what was happening. Something he’d never thought about. The smoke had forms. Fashioned scenes, characters, backdrops.

There was something vengeful about this melancholy. He couldn’t write about it. The soldiers, the pillagers, were there. In charge of the city. Their leader was the Head of State. When could he explain how Cornide House, the most valuable historic building in Coruña’s Old City, was bought for the dictator’s family for the price of a pack of cigarettes? Never. He’d never be able to publish this headline:

FIVE PESETAS

Now we know what price

the authorities put on our dignity

If he didn’t fight against this melancholy, he’d become mute, agraphic. Wouldn’t be able to write or say another thing.

Stringer picked up the cuttings referring to that great Venetian day of joyful torment. The director of the evening Expreso had something to add:

‘Pass this test, please. I’ve an important mission for you this summer.’

Stringer had an intuition. The future rowed like a merry gondolier.

‘This summer?’

‘How do you feel about taking charge of the festival supplements?’

Stringer was nervous. This was something he would never have dared to dream of. He wasn’t envious of editors who spent their whole day constructing news items from the teleprinters, which almost always came from the same source, the state-owned news agency EFE, so named after Franco’s initial.

‘All of it?’

‘Galán will look after publicity. You’ll write like a tachygraphic lion. Interview beauty queens, mayors, the official chronicler, the most important businessman. You can also throw in the odd social poet or Bohemian artist. Get them to chat a bit about California.’

He tried to stop cynicism ruining his humorous intentions. ‘Real journalism, my boy! And you’ll earn a few pesetas. I don’t want to hear again that you’ve been sleeping at night in the phone box, wrapped in newspapers. You’ll have to invent something for the supplement on Caneiros, the Mandeo festivities. Forget about that novel, Balboa. You’ll get home one day and find it’s finished.’

‘Thank you, sir. I’ll do my best.’

Aldán considered asking Stringer for a favour. To see if anyone knew what had happened to an old roundabout. The twanging roundabout that belonged to Lino of the modernist Pavilion and played the ‘Marseillaise’. But he looked at his watch instead and let out a kind of password in farewell:

‘The Flea!’