Books Burn Badly

The Song of the Birds

HE WAS THE man who wanted to say no. Leica went to Rubén Lires, the cellist, for advice. But found someone else who didn’t dare fill in the crossword. There he was, lost in thought, playing a sleepwalker’s tune. The net had reached here also. On San Andrés Street, a group of workmen carried a large carpet from the Jesuits’ church, which had been rolled up and lent for the state banquet. The bow sought a note of pain and fury on the strings, but the arm was disarmed. And fell.

‘I’m going to have to play at the state banquet.’

The time for excuses had passed. Rubén had found protection, an underwater capsule, in music. Now his mastery had made him vulnerable. Visible. He wished he could be a travelling musician, one of those faceless musicians who congregate in Tacita de Plata and wait for village envoys and owners of dance halls. He wished he could be Papagaio’s blind accordionist. He wished he could go back, all the notes return to nothing. Who’d been damn kind enough to think of him? Every year, the local authorities put on a state banquet for the Caudillo. This was followed by a session of classical music with chamber groups and select soloists. At what point, why, how, was his name mentioned? Who dropped it into the conversation? Who loved him so badly to do him such a favour? The praise, the applause, to him was a kind of conspiracy. No, he wouldn’t be able to play. In that world, he considered his art a crime. He should be in prison. Under house arrest. Who was the music-loving provost, the flower-eating swine who thought of him? It was a mark of distinction, an honour, that a local artist would for the first time replace an established maestro at the reception. Rubén Lires spent the night writing anonymous notes about Rubén Lires the cellist. About himself. He ripped them up, they were so precise they were comical, like those pre-communion confessions as a child: ‘I had impure thoughts.’ ‘Did you now?’ ‘Rubén Lires, the cellist, is disaffected. Rubén the Jew. Rubén the Mason. Rubén the Communist.’ He crossed this out, corrected it: ‘Rubén the Trotskyite’. They won’t understand that, better to put ‘Rubén the Anarchist’. They know what that is. ‘Rubén Lires is a degenerate artist.’ That’s it! Denouncing yourself also required a certain style. Then he thought of something more precise that really would set the cat among the pigeons: ‘Despite appearances to the contrary, this man leads a dissolute life. He has no moral stamina, is subject to every vice. He is anti-Spanish, a revolutionary and a freethinker. We were quite surprised to see his name in the programme for this year’s state banquet. Signed: an alert patriot. Long live Franco! Spain for ever!’

‘What do you reckon? Do you think it’ll work?’

He felt Leica’s silence. The reason his photographer friend didn’t say anything was that he was undergoing a similar trial. That of the man who can’t say no. The Judge of Oklahoma talked to the provincial chief, the provincial chief talked to the governor, the governor to the Minister, the Minister to someone in His Excellency’s household. ‘There’ll be photos. A photographic session with the Head of State. And who knows? Perhaps the new Official Portrait. Can you imagine? On all the walls of ministries, thousands of offices, official centres, schools, books. Triumph. Guess who the photographer’s going to be, who’ll have the honour.’

‘I could always say my mother died. They might not ask me when. I’ll say, “Listen, my mother died, I can’t attend the state banquet.” And that’s it. She won’t mind. She is dead, after all. And she always protected me. I can take her flowers. “See, Mum. I should have been playing for all those bigwigs, but I’m here instead, with my own.”’

Rubén was distracted while he spoke. Next to the cello, he looked like a helpless child.

‘I’ll say I’m ill,’ said the cellist suddenly, as if he’d finally hit on the right saving idea. ‘The truth is I don’t feel up to much. They’ll hear the creaking of my bones, the rumbling of my intestines.’

He gazed at the instrument, which was ill as well. Today it resembled a hive that’s been abandoned by the swarm. The cello, through its strings, gave him a bee’s empty look.

‘I’ve arthritis as well,’ he added with a touch of glee. ‘In my left arm. It sends my first and fourth fingers to sleep. These two.’

‘I’m not sure that excuse will work, Rubén,’ said Leica sceptically. He felt he should try to cheer him up, which was a way of addressing his own situation. The dilemma they were in, though Rubén knew nothing about the Great Portrait, wasn’t so bad. They were just two professionals doing their job. Worse, he thought, they were scientists devising increasingly destructive weapons. What was Rubén going to do? Play the cello. That’s all.

So he said, ‘Here, Rubén, think of yourself as a bird that happens by. It’s got nothing to do with the dictator. All the bird does is sing. What does it care if a saint or a criminal is listening?’

Rubén made an effort to imagine the bird. But the image wasn’t so simple. He travelled back in time. There was a story that inspired him. In the palace of Ahmad I al-Muqtadir, king of Zaragoza, member of the Banu Hud dynasty, there was a tapestry showing a tree with eighteen branches, on which birds made of gold and silver threads alighted. The unusual thing about the tapestry was not its luxury, but the hidden mechanism that, when a breeze blew through the palace, caused the birds to move on the branches and sing. Closing his eyes, while he played the cello, Rubén had often entered there in the guise of a breeze. Time was measured by a clepsydra whose hours were represented by doors the water went round closing.

But the water opened the doors as well.

What was Muqtadir like? Was he an assassin listening to birds?

He could always play Pau Casals’ ‘Song of the Birds’.

Leica, from the window, instinctively followed the celestial gully of Santa Catarina Street. Beyond the massive structure of the Pastor headquarters, past the trees and industrial necks of cranes on the Western Quay, was the tapestry where, in winter, starlings flew in a cloud. This cloud was a cartoon composed of dots that took the shape of a formidable bird. The first time they saw them, arriving from Cuba in 1933, Leica and Chelo thought this aeronautical exhibition of hundreds of starlings was a kind of fado by fate, a one-off. There was no way so many birds could share a single aesthetic will, understand their place in the history of the line. It was Mayarí who told them, ‘They’re joining dots to make a huge bird that will scare off the birds of prey.’

But Coruña’s starlings leave after Carnival, during Lent. Go back north. Someone had said they’re the same birds pecking the crumbs of tourists at Stonehenge.

‘They’re not going to kill me,’ said Rubén. ‘They can hardly beat up the musician. They won’t even know who Casals is.’

They’ll know, thought Leica. Of course they’ll know. But he didn’t say anything. He was studying the starlings’ space. If there’s a history of the line, there’s a history of the void as well. The starlings’ absence in the sky was noticeable, just as the mark of a picture frame stays on the wall.

‘Better not to say who it’s by,’ continued Rubén. ‘These days, I can’t get Manuel Seoane out of my head. I had a nightmare. I opened my instrument case and there he was. “What are you doing?” I asked him in horror. “Ssssssh!” he told me to be quiet. “I’m on the run. Protect me. I can’t fit in the violin case.” You could see the bullet holes, which were clean, as if a drill had made them. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t tell him he was dead. “Is there something you’d like to tell me?” he asked. I nodded. “Something important?” I nodded again. But couldn’t get the words out. So he passed me a piece of ruled paper and said, “Write it down on this.”’

Leica knew Manuel Seoane, the violinist, well. He could see him through the viewfinder. He was taking his photo with a cravat tucked into his jacket like the swelling of an artist. His hair was slicked back, but staves rose up in an allegro molto vivace. He’d been shot in Rata Field with other young soldiers loyal to the Republic. An execution, that of eight soldiers, carried out in the light of day. They were accused of plotting a rebellion in Atocha Barracks. The whole city had been summoned to witness the execution. People were supposed to boo them. It would be a large public spectacle and final warning so that those who still hadn’t come round would finally ‘bite the dust’. But they weren’t going out with a whimper. All the time, shouting, ‘Long live the Republic! Freedom for ever!’ The crowd falls quiet. This silence was the last great act of resistance.

In the studio, Leica lifted the needle without stopping the record. This way, he felt he could hear that piece he’d read and reread in the French cinema magazine: ‘Following the release of The Testament of Dr Mabuse, Fritz Lang was summoned to the Ministry to take charge of German filmmaking. That same night, he took a train and fled to Paris.’ Every evening, a train left Coruña for Irún, with a connection to Hendaye on the French border. It was full of Galician emigrants going to work in France. Rubén paid him attention. He’d leave on that train tonight.

‘You have to leave right now,’ Leica had told him suddenly. ‘Don’t think about it. Take your instrument and go on that train.’

How nice to hear that. To hear himself, albeit telling someone else. He gazed at the camera. He knew what the camera was thinking. It was jealous of the cello leaving on the train, with a seat all to itself.