Books Burn Badly

Montevideo’s Cabin

HE DECIDED TO live in exile without having to leave again. He went to bed in the old sailor’s room. Where he wrote western novels signed by John Black Eye and gave shorthand classes using the Martí method. It was all painted for him by Sada, the bateau ivre, the double created by Urbano Lugrís, a man split in two. At the time, Lugrís was painting the inside of Franco’s yacht. The dictator had taken a fancy to his marine paintings and commissioned him to decorate his boat. Like Hitler, he was a frustrated admirer of fine art. Power had enabled him to overcome other frustrations. As a young man, he’d failed to be admitted into the Naval Academy and had taken his revenge by regularly wearing an admiral’s full-dress uniform. But the fact is this Supreme Commander of the Forces of Land, Sea and Air, named Sword of God during the holy year 1937, painted badly. Extremely badly. Above all, he painted the sea badly. Nobody told him this, of course. His flaccid seascapes received unanimous praise. On stage, they disguised his stature using wooden stools and platforms. Positioned the cameras to make him look tall. But he noticed how the sea invariably ran down his brush. One day, he realised he’d never manage to paint a sea urchin. He wanted to paint a bodegón, a still life, but the life was neither still nor moving. He had some fresh urchins brought from Orzán Sea, an intense dark red colour. Before fish, shells and starfish, he’d decided to try an urchin. Which seemed the easiest to do. A prickly sphere. No one would bother to count the prickles. He grew tired of struggling with the shape, each spine. This creature was both charming and deceitful. Rather than from the sea, it looked as if it had landed from space. There came a point he couldn’t tell what colour it was, so he tried a simple solution, to paint it like a child. The result, however, was not a sea urchin. It was an unconvincing splodge. He felt annoyed and impotent. Remembered Lugrís’ paintings. Had him sent for. He would paint all of this on his boat.

Urbano Lugrís was painting Franco’s yacht. At the end of each day, he’d visit Enrique’s and drink Palma del Condado wine accompanied by thin, almost transparent slices of pork loin, which, before eating, he’d raise to the condition of porcine soul. After that, feeling a little tipsy, like an aliped, he’d emerge on to Compostela Street, head home, change his clothes and then, dressed as Sada, take a roundabout route to the Tachygraphic Rose, kiss Catia Ríos, climb the narrow spiral staircase and enter another, twilight world, where he’d paint the old sailor’s room, the refuge where his friend Héctor sailed in bed. The home of an enchanted castaway.

‘Who goes there?’

‘Sada, the drunken boat!’

He’d paint feverishly for periods he alternated with moments of complete absorption, in which he appeared to be gripped by mute silence. During one of these moments, he abruptly broke his silence and said to Héctor, ‘You know? I’m painting the Azor with toxic paints, with lots of emerald green. It might even work.’

‘Will it take long?’

‘What does time matter? Didn’t you hear what Carrero Blanco, his second-in-command, said, “Franco’s mandate is for life!” We need to let the arsenic trioxide do its job.’

‘Don’t torture yourself.’

‘Who ever got me to do magic realism? Shame I’m not a Cubist. You know what the Capitellum asked me? “Say, Lugrís, how do you paint those urchins?” That’s what he asked me. “First I make room for them, your excellency, and then they grow alone, somewhere between the colour of stone and Patinir’s blue.”

‘“Alone?”

‘“With cobalts and by the grace of God, your excellency.” I projected my voice, like Dalí. You can’t be too careful.’

‘You did well,’ replied Ríos. ‘People like that are susceptible to small insults. It’s the big ones they don’t notice.’

When the painter had finished, Héctor Ríos thought the four walls had disappeared. ‘Here you’ll hold out like Nemo,’ said Sada. Adding, ‘All you need is a waterbed.’

‘Are you sure there is such a bed?’

‘There was one in the Persians’ paradise. Made of goatskin. They filled it daily with solar water.’

‘That’s the direction the science of the future should take in this wretched country,’ commented Ríos, who was always inspired by Sada’s ideographic speech. ‘Technique with style. Mould dryers, boxes of light, waterbeds. Our poetry reveals, to those who can read, a lack of material resources. This permanent invocation of light is nature’s simplest movement. Mystical obsession is the result of an absence of heating, a poor diet and sleeping badly.’

‘Leaving paradise aside,’ said Sada, ‘I’m quite sure the great Verne sailed, so to speak, on one of those waterbeds Dr William Hooper invented during the last century. A belief that goes with the dates. I always thought Hooper was an invention of my father’s. But this phenomenon of floating medicine really existed. As confirmed by the British consulate. Here’s the address. The London Waterbed Company, 99 Crawford Street.’

‘If you can get me a waterbed,’ replied Montevideo, ‘I’ll write you a shortcut to Parnassus, an obituary in life that’ll have necrophiliacs leaping for joy. You’ll be immortal for twenty-five years at least.’

‘Don’t forget to include my sublime nickname, bateau ivre, in your obituary. Even if my first name, Urbano, sounds like a mode of transport.’

‘Now sit down for a bit,’ said Montevideo.

‘Are you going to torment me?’

‘Yep. I’m going to read you a fragment of present recalled.’