Books Burn Badly

The Denunciation

I EMBARK ON this poem in the hope its felicity of phrase will speed the boat towards St Pierre and Miquelon. I was practising how to type without looking at the keys. Copying a poem from an anonymous book that came to me in an envelope with no return address. We get lots of anonymous letters at the station. Mostly denunciations. You’d be surprised how many anonymous denunciations there are going around. In some of them, you can see the care they’ve taken with their handwriting. How it’s been written and rewritten till the letters look elegant and pretty. Maybe the person writing it thinks this will make their denunciation more effective. Some of the poems in the anonymous book were in fact denunciations. True ones, against history, but I couldn’t process them. They were good poems. The ones that attracted me the most talked of voyages through cod-infested seas to Terranova and Nova Scotia, even higher up, to the limits of Greenland and the Arctic. So my fingers were trotting happily along, driven by nostalgia for a didactic embrace from Catia, the teacher in the typing academy, when an alarm pulled them up. Without looking, I can tell a Fascist by the way he opens the door, since I work with Fascists. It didn’t take me long to realise that the one who’d come in had a fire burning inside him. The sea breeze makes summers in Coruña cool, but suddenly, as if activated by the Hispano-Olivetti carriage return, the temperature rose by several degrees. I knew the man. He was a cold man. And yet now he was dying, burning, to find his wife. Invested with authority, he could have been wearing his gown, but despite controlling his words, he still couldn’t extinguish the fire they caused to spread across his face and light up his eyes. Love? A red colour, I know, but I’d say there was a stronger type of fuel in that mixture. When he talked to me of ‘wounded pride’ and ‘a question of honour’, the way he said it, I knew he was chewing on hot coals and ashes.

At that time, when a woman of her class would never flee, I found the case enthralling, a strange present of amazement wrapped up in surprise. One of those moments you have the exciting sensation your badge has become a hunting permit for banned specimens. And as he discussed certain details, with lots of usury, I felt part of his hotness being passed on to me. He stopped before long. He had a problem. She had a problem. I had a handful of embers.

Paúl Santos leant out of the window. The year before, when he joined the station at around the same time, in the distance, beyond the swinging necks of the cranes, moored next to the yacht club, he could discern the solid presence of the Azor, Franco’s recreational boat. The Head of State would sometimes arrive on it at the end of a fishing trip in the Bay of Biscay. But more often than not the boat arrived first, while the dictator travelled from Madrid by road. In his studies of physiognomy, Santos found a total, excessive, even grotesque correspondence between the Caudillo and his boat. The yacht was snub-nosed, simple in profile and heavy to sail. Any bou heading out for the Great Sole was more elegant. The most complete picture he had of the Azor was on the day it appeared in the bay towing a cetacean that had been shot dead. In the shimmering sea, the hard colours of dusk, Santos observed a violent tension in language. The only verb he could use to describe that act was ‘gun down’. More than an aquatic machine, the Azor was a steamroller of water. As a boat, starting with the name, which meant goshawk, it was a paradox. An absurd reality. Santos knew this thought, even if it were never expressed, placed him on dangerous ground. The truth is the Azor was an imposing, intimidatory presence. That ugly, stunted boat dominated the port. Determined time. Altered measurements. And space.

Santos’ mind had undergone a similar process to when he learnt how to type without looking at the keys. One thought led to another and these two to a third, which to start with caused him anguish (a voice that said, ‘You’ll think the worst’), as when he got trapped around the waist on a potholing expedition down a little explored passageway in King Cintolo’s Cave, Mondoñedo. Having surmounted the difficulty, he found himself in a larger space. Which is what enabled him now to ignore the very idea of the Azor and observe the movement of the cranes loading logs on the Western Quay. Before entering the line of descent, they swung in the air. And he thought it was the stripped, shaken memory that caused the freshness.

No. The boat hadn’t arrived yet this year. Something was up, no one quite knew what. The city had witnessed that strange event, an incident on the evening of 18 July, in the presence of all the authorities and National Movement’s guests at a banquet to celebrate the mutiny that replaced the Republic with a dictatorship. Paúl Santos didn’t need to work it out. The war had started twenty-seven years earlier. He’d been born almost nine months after 18 July. The war of wars. Omnipresent war. A war that stuck like another component in the air, oblivious of time. He didn’t want to think about it. There it was, happy as Larry, thinking everyone’s thoughts.

He had to think about specific things. His job as a scientific policeman. An outstanding detective in Crime. With two important cases on his hands. Different in size, but both affecting the city’s very foundations. On the one hand, Manlle. Manlle’s organisation. He’d been lucky, made lots of progress, had almost all the evidence he needed to expose this criminal empire. And now a kind of gift. He had to find an upper-class lady, a beauty of exemplary conduct, who’d just abandoned her husband, a judge with a promising career in front of him, who was well connected, influential, and about whom it was repeatedly rumoured he’d soon move on to higher things. Come on, think, Paúl Santos. Why did Ricardo the judge call at your office? He could have summoned me to the courthouse and I’d have gone running. He could have done it differently. But no. He came here and denounced his wife for abandoning the conjugal home and, he had reason to believe, committing the crime of adultery.

It must have been the station chief who told him to do this. They were testing him, right? Come on, Santos, think. Be more specific.

Paúl Santos walked over to a shelf where he had his reference books. Carefully read the articles in the Penal Code, and accompanying notes in Civitas, that had some bearing on the Vidal case. He never could have imagined his heart would beat faster on account of the Penal Code.

Adulterous conduct consists of carnal union between two miscreants that can be expressed by the terms: lying together, carnal access, copulation, cohabitation, leading a joint, intimate or marital life. It is essential that the lying together be evident or deduced from proven facts but, given the difficulty of surprising someone in the complete, material act, its existence can be deduced from facts that are more symptomatic, such as spending eighteen days in a hotel. .

Eighteen days?

Why eighteen days?

Despite its absurdity, this law tested the imagination. The penalties were severe, involved imprisonment and related only to woman. According to the law, she could be convicted if she was surprised once with the other miscreant in bed. Adultery is committed by a married woman who lies with a man who is not her husband, and by the one who lies with her, knowing her to be married, even if the marriage is then declared null and void. Paúl Santos, however, was thinking about something else, not the judge or his wife. Eighteen days in a hotel room with the Tachygraphic Rose. He tried to trigger his imagination, but couldn’t get past the first day. He was happy like this. Went back to the typewriter. Pressed a few keys. The word cohabitation. The word miscreant. The word bed. The metal bars got entangled and prevented the carriage return. He started again. Arms at right angles. The optic nerve connected to the fingers, but without looking. That’s right. Have another go. I embark on this poem in the hope its felicity of phrase will speed the boat towards St Pierre and Miquelon.