Books Burn Badly

O and Animals

HAIRS FALL, FALL separately, one by one, but then have a tendency to come together, they form an undulating skein on the water, they alight and are sometimes the warp that blocks the pipes. Mother Olympia told me one day that, in ancient stories, loose hairs turn into water snakes. She let it out: ‘I once heard that. .’ And perhaps never returned to the story, which was left floating downstream like a fallen leaf. That’s another one. Leaves look bigger when they’re floating on the water, they’re the rafts sometimes used by small, itinerant frogs or ladybirds, the ones they call God’s bugs. How serene, how attentive they are on their makeshift boats! It’s the same with large animals. They don’t get restless. The horse carried off by the River Mandeo, as the tide was going out, which reached the sea and was fished out by some people from Malpica, who then exclaimed with reason, ‘The things the sea comes up with, Blessed Mary, without the need for a shovelful of manure!’ They brought the piebald horse to Coruña Docks, looking all formal in the bows. How pretty is a horse’s mane. Like Grumpy’s. How pretty are animals. I’d say there’s not a single ugly animal. ‘You’re bewitched,’ Ana tells me. And when she says that, I do the thing she likes that makes her laugh so much, I imitate Polka’s voice in Latin: ‘Lavabo inter innocentes manus meas.’ They’re all pretty. Come on then, think of an animal, tell me an animal that isn’t pretty. A rat? Take a good look. Look at the other side of the river. Don’t let yourself be influenced by the word. What you don’t like is the word. Besides, Polka said it was thanks to river rats we discovered aspirin. When other animals died in plagues, rats got off scot-free, looking all shiny, because they gnawed at willow roots. The eye doctor, Dr Abril, once said invisible animals, bacteria and the like, are even more beautiful. Like modern paintings. That’s because bacteria are modern as well, I thought to myself. The Colorado beetle’s also modern. And pretty. But, being modern, it can’t be killed by hand. Modern armament is needed. Polka says they’ll end up killing everything, the cure is worse than the disease. The poison also kills off snails and slugs. He won’t go where there are dying snails. We must seem very strange to other animals. You can tell by the way they look at us. When I was little, I told Polka I was afraid of the wolf and he laughed, ‘Well, imagine how afraid the wolf would be if he bumped into me. Wolves are terribly afraid of lame people!’ He says that as a joke. Polka’s not that bad. You can tell ancient animals are ancient because they’ve been around time and seem to have come from the future. Like octopuses and razor-shells. Snails and slugs. Lampreys. Or eels. Maybe hairs turn into eels. That wouldn’t surprise me. Eels are a bit like us. The way they live in the mud, are desperate to eat, slip away when there’s trouble. They can move by land as well. At night, you find eels in the meadows, travelling inland. I’m not surprised. It’s so damp there’s sometimes not much difference between being in the water and out. You could stuff the mist in sacks like stive. People go slowly through the atmosphere not just because it gets in your bones and makes your body stiff, but because they have to clear a way through the mist, like divers in their suits, you have to pass through curtain after curtain. It all takes time and occasionally words, sentences, are imprinted on the air as when you write with your finger in condensation. That way, you find out things that weren’t meant for you. As happened with the letters left in the pocket of trousers that were for washing.