Books Burn Badly

The Lighthouse’s Novel

‘MR MONTEVIDEO. .’

‘Forget what I said. That joke about an inexperienced writer was a bit cruel. I’m always doing that. It’s like a tic.’

In fact, Tito Balboa or Stringer wasn’t worried about the joke. He’d heard it before. Santos, the one who turned out to be a policeman, may have been worried. Whatever the doctor might think, that policeman revered him. Catia as well, who didn’t? But he also had great admiration for Dr Montevideo. Either that or he was very good at pretending. He’d listen to him with rapt attention. Take down all his notes. Do all the exercises. The doctor was convinced he was trying to catch him out, was accumulating evidence, investigating, so that he could then report him. Most of the time, he held himself in check. Other times, however, he started dictating excitedly, improvising a seemingly delirious text that left him exhausted: The concentric circles leave the empty hand, go down a path with glow-worms, are the drops of rain in the blackbird’s stave, quavers that catch on Virginia Woolf’s cobweb covering Malevich’s black square where all the colours await their day. Full stop.

The result was a graphic hotchpotch in his pupils’ notebooks. The nonsense of lines.

‘Tell me, Balboa, what have you written?’

‘I only had time to jot down, Concentric circles await their day.’

‘Perfect. That’s pure Dadaism. Gabriel?’

‘Nothing, Mr Montevideo.’

‘You’re just beginning. Don’t try to understand it all. Leave your ears free, let your hand do the work. Till you reach ‘irreproachable traceability’, as Don Alfredo Nadal de Mariezcurrena used to say. And you, lawyer?’

‘Drops of rain in a black square.’

Having calmed down a little, Dr Montevideo sought out simple, self-contained sentences in among the sheets of material covering his bed. Fragments of humanistic stenography.

‘Write down this by Éluard: There are other worlds but all are in this one. By Jules Renard: Truth is of small dimensions. Let’s see if anyone can tell me who wrote the next one: Therein no fairy’s arm can transcend the Leviathan’s tail.’

‘That’s by Melville!’

‘Well done, Balboa.’

On another sheet, he found something that made him thoughtful and he decided not to read. Then:

‘Farewell, my book. A single passenger, as I suppose you know, must not keep a vessel waiting.’

‘That’s by Marcus Valerius Martialis,’ said Santos immediately. ‘The poet’s about to return to Bilbilis in Hispania, his native city, after decades of absence.’

Dr Montevideo stared at him with the satirical astonishment of bulging eyes.

‘Very good, lawyer, very good.’

A few days later, after class, Santos said to him, ‘Doctor, I made so bold as to bring you some poems.’

‘Who wrote them?’

‘Who wrote them? I did, Mr Montevideo.’

‘Why?’

What had been irony, a historical joke between poets, at that point became an implacable question, of the sort legal terminology defines as ‘preliminary proceedings’. One of Dr Montevideo’s commandments: Every literary work should have a purpose in mind, like preliminary proceedings.

‘Why? Tell me why you wrote those poems.’

It was an embarrassing situation. His bulging eyes on the verge of firing off like gaucho bullets in search of an ostrich.

Santos had gone bright red. You could see the marks left by those whys like lashes on his cheeks.

‘Reply. You write poems. Poems at such a time. Can you not tell me why?’

‘Well, I suppose they’re a kind of exercise.’

‘An exercise? Respiratory? Typewritten?’

‘To tell the truth, they’re not mine. They’re anonymous copies that fell into my hands. Why? I don’t know why.’

Montevideo’s eyes nestled back into their sockets. He had these outbursts, which he tried to lend a certain style to, but he wasn’t organically equipped to abuse, sustain malicious pressure on somebody, ‘Then forgive me. I’m actually very interested in those poems. You say they’re anonymous? Leave them over there. They might even be fragments of dramatic history.’

Tito Balboa found it very difficult to admit to Dr Montevideo that he was going to abandon his project of writing a novel about the life of Hercules Lighthouse. Somehow it was he who’d helped give birth to the idea of A Lighthouse’s Autobiography. They had certain set days when Balboa went on his own to note down stenographically (sorry about the — ly, Mr Montevideo), to note down in shorthand information about the city’s hidden history: what the lighthouse could see at night. But he was leaving his literary dreams behind in order to devote himself to journalism. Who would have any interest in the story of a lighthouse told by itself, that theory about landscape’s subjectivity, the scars of history on territory, bodies and words? Such a novel would be buried in this world’s end. Maybe later. He had a stock of arguments. A horizon of professional opportunities was opening up before him. He had to mount the horse that was in front of him, not let the sun go past the door, etc., etc. In the cabin, when the two of them were alone, he got entangled in proverbs about the sun and horse.

‘Festive supplements, eh?’ exclaimed the doctor. ‘Interviews with beauty queens?’

‘Yes, I think that’s one of the things.’

‘And with the mayor. And with the president of housewives. And with the chair of the commerce of agriculture. The parish priest, blah, blah, blah.’

‘That’s right. That’s supplements for you.’

‘And with advertisers.’

‘Yes, I think it’s normal to interview those who place an advertisement.’

‘Do you get paid for that?’

‘I do, Mr Montevideo. I get a tip for each supplement.’

‘A scruple? You get a scruple?’

‘What do you mean, a scruple?’

‘Are you the one who gets paid for the advertisements?’

‘No. That’s left to people with more experience.’

‘You should get paid for publicity.’

Stringer wasn’t sure if he was being serious, but decided to answer him with sincerity.

‘That’s something I aspire to, Mr Montevideo.’

‘Good, my boy. Well, go ahead. You may meet a beauty queen who’s also the mayor’s daughter and your biggest advertiser’s niece. Have a wedding list with Barros or Pote department stores. I’ll send you a copy of Uruguayan divorce law.’

‘I’m also planning to write a purely literary column, Mr Montevideo.’

‘Purely? Pass me the back scratcher.’

Adverbs in — ly made his back itch. Asking for the boxwood scratcher was his most radical way of correcting, expressing the hurt, stylistic misdemeanours caused him. He was offended and sad.

‘I’m sorry. A free-ranging column.’

‘Just try not to use Espasa too much.’

‘I’ll bring you what I’ve written in case you want to bless it.’

‘No. If you show your face around here again, bring tobacco and imported whisky.’

Balboa remembers the first time he demonstrated his trust and sent him on an errand. ‘Go to Santa Lucía Market and perform the miracle of Cana, but with whisky.’ He gave him a blue banknote. It was so strange, so valuable, it seemed to have come from another country.

As he was leaving, with his head down, dragging his heels, ‘Don’t let them trick you! Obituaries are much more profitable. They have to be paid for in cash. The rafters of the sky can come crashing down, only a good death notice will stop a rotary press from going around. If you have to weed festivals, weed festivals. But the first chance you get, boy, step into Charon’s printing boat. Do obituaries. That’s the future.’

‘We don’t have obituaries, Dr Montevideo. It’s a market we can’t get into.’

‘Then your Expreso hasn’t long to live. With no death notices abaft the beam, a newspaper’s going nowhere fast.’