Books Burn Badly

Ren’s ‘Museum’

THE SHUTTERS WERE closed, the darkness thick and humid, a condition that seemed to belong to the house, a darkness incorporated, infiltrated, into the building, where the strange thing would have been light. But Santos picked out, with what he imagined was a mole’s eyesight, the scent of outlines, regardless of the position of windows and lamps.

He lifted the torch very slowly, feeling it in his grasp. As a boy, he liked to think it was the light that moved, using his hand. This torch was his companion, his weapon, a continuation of his body. He knew he could trust Catherine Laboure the night he was caught in the Room for Secret Deliveries and his torch wasn’t confiscated.

The whole of Ren’s sitting-room resembled a history museum. At first glance, Santos didn’t realise almost everything on display was recent. In the light of the torch, objects expressed mute surprise, helplessness. Even the swords.

Swords? Yes, swords. Swords with gold and silver embossed hilts and scabbards, decorated with ornamental or symbolic leaves. Lying on velvet, with labels held by a cord, they were swords that had lost their warlike function and seemed to be afraid. Santos took one with an attractively well-rounded hilt. ‘Venerable Master’s Sword’, it said on the label. With the point, he touched the label of the most ornate one: ‘33rd Degree Sovereign Grand Inspector General’s Sword’.

All the objects he found at first had to do with Freemasonry. There was even a mallet and 24-inch gauge. The mallet was similar to one he’d seen in the judge’s office, in the Palace of Justice, which he’d identified as a judge’s gavel. Now he understood what Ricardo Samos meant when he said, ‘It has more history than it seems’.

The torch moved excitedly onwards, the light sniffing out great surprises. A glass cabinet contained the badges and devices of Galician and Portuguese Freemasons or pedreiros livres. The torch stopped at a pair of white gloves. Not exactly a pair. They were the same colour, but of different sizes, as if one of the gloves was for a woman’s hand. Nearby there was an acacia-leaf brooch.

The torch went from one surprise to the next, travelling through history. A design on a matchbox from the First Republic. A peasant in a Phrygian cap saying, ‘Don’t call me Balthazar; I’m a citizen’. The Republican Madonnas Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, shown with wings, diffusely erotic in the darkness. The same or similar ones of modernist sensuality that appeared in the illustrated magazine of Coruña’s Masons which the torch focused on now: Brisas y Tormentas, No. 1, Yr 1, Coruña, 15 April 1900. Paúl Santos took the torch in his left hand and passed his right hand over the magazine. It’s true that, in secret vision, things emit what they say. ‘Breezes and Storms’. Aprons, collars, embroidered in gold. One of the latter with a triangle and the number 33 in red thread inside it. A blue silk sash with white veins telling the years like tree rings. At one end, a jewel in the form of a key. On the label, it said ‘Secret Master’s Sash’. Santos focused the torch for a long time on that enigmatic key with the letter Z on the wards. He was passionate about keys and locks. Anything connected with this invention. Nobody in Charity Hospital had been able to explain how the boy got inside the Room for Secret Deliveries, to which only three people had access at any one time: the medical director, Mother Laboure and the woman who was due to give birth. And she entered through an outer door. She never saw or was seen, except when she was in that kind of camera obscura she came to give birth in. He got in there. Nobody knew how. He was found in the middle of the room, in the dark, with the torch on, inside his mouth, his cheeks acting as a pink lampshade.

He was now immersed with his torch, that light which was his fetish, in another secret place, a kind of study, where there was an hourglass. The upper bulb was empty. The lower, full of sand. Santos did what anyone would do from childhood to old age. Turn the hourglass upside down. Set time in motion. He suddenly realised this simple, ancient object he’d never paid much attention to contained sky and earth. Was measuring his life. It depended on you whether or not symbols had meaning. This hourglass did. No, it didn’t. He wasn’t going to let symbols ensnare him.

Under the stairs was a small door painted black with the acronym VITRIOL in white letters. He remembered this was an old Rosicrucian motto, used by alchemists as well. Knowledge that was not derived from the indoctrination he’d received, despite specialising in criminology as opposed to the fight against subversion, which was the work of the Brigade of Politico-Social Investigation. Even so, they were always being asked to show their support for the cause and he knew that his had to appear unconditional, beyond suspicion. Another order drummed into them with the insistence of a hammer-blow to the head: no disaffection, but no indifference either. They couldn’t be cold. When he heard this for the first time, without heating, Paúl Santos was appalled by the label. Being cold meant carrying the cold inside you. Actually liking the cold. The perfect school of adherence to the dictatorship in his case was Santiago Seminary. One of the coldest places in the world, a physical cold that got behind your eyes. You had to fight the cold. Franco’s regime and the Church were united, the synthesis of everything, ‘like body and soul’, a continuation of the holy union of throne and altar discussed in a famous book by Archbishop Rafael de Vélez, founder of the seminary and author of an equally famous work, The Sheath of Faith. Santos recalled Vélez’s portrait in the seminary’s dark central corridor. He’d been painted holding that book for which he was famous, the title clearly visible, except that it’d been abbreviated to The Sheath. He also recalled the nervous, furtive laughter the sight of this title provoked in young men who’d only just discovered the comical treachery committed by words when least expected. As for their historical mission, they’d been told the spirit of reconquest and crusade should remain vigilant. As a mark of glory, the novices were reminded that the only time Santiago’s seminarists had demonstrated politically was under the banner of traditionalism, which they’d used to beat the negros, as the liberals of the nineteenth century were known. It was also the seminary that published the first panegyric on Franco during the war, in praise of a movement its protagonists didn’t hesitate to call Fascist, starting with the author of the work, the priest Manuel Silva, who described in detail how the military uprising had been planned, how democratic inspectors and officers had been hoodwinked and all that machinery set in motion even before the elections, which the right was expected to lose, and who wrote with triumphal fervour about bloody acts, the rosary of crimes and human victims, necessary ritual sacrifices to see off not only the Republic, but also the heresy of centuries, anything at odds with the medieval empire of throne and altar. So it was that the Holy Year in Compostela, which should have been 1936, was prolonged for the first time in history so that Franco could be received as Caudillo in the cathedral, greeted with raised arms, led to the altar under a canopy and named Sword of God.

He turned the hourglass upside down. Earth and sky, sky and earth. His mind was going too fast. Paúl Santos had left the seminary, but not because he rebelled or lost his faith. Because of laughter. That clandestine laughter he was unable to suppress. One day, he opened the window of his room on the top floor of the seminary, with a view of Mount Pedroso to the west, and heard laughter. Another kind of laughter. Not at all clandestine. Seemingly provoked by the sun’s tickling. And he knew he’d never resist a woman’s laughter, however much he pored over The Sheath by Archbishop Vélez. So he went to the hospital in Coruña and spoke to Mother Catherine Laboure, his protector, who was drinking hot black coffee without sugar, who was smoking Celtas in the absence of Gauloises, because Romeo had got waylaid, and who was surrounded by children, a magnet for anyone with problems, anyone who felt unloved, because of her body, some part of her body, there they all were, he as well, a grown man, first up with his problem. He had a thing for laughter. That particular kind of laughter.

‘Laughter never hurt anyone, God included.’

‘What shall I do?’

‘Leave the seminary,’ she replied. ‘Straightaway. You’re not meant to be a priest. If you kill off laughter, you’ll develop an illness in your intestine. I’ll help you find a way.’

‘OK, but what shall I do?’

In a few days, he’d gone from aspiring to be God’s emissary to feeling completely lost.

‘You wanted to fight against evil? Then fight against evil!’

She blew out a cloud of smoke, which she compensated for with a sip of steaming hot coffee. She was crazy, but Paúl Santos knew from experience she was almost always right. She was a courageous nutter in a place for taming. ‘One thing’s the Holy Spirit,’ the chaplain had remarked about her sarcastically, ‘another, the Spirit of Contradiction.’ But she didn’t care. She had two defences. Being crazy and never stopping still.

‘If I could choose,’ said Mother Laboure, ‘I’d be a detective. I’d study Law followed by Criminology. I’d fight against real crime. Yep. That’s what I’d be. And not a silly old Sister of Charity.’

She was the one who laughed when she saw Paúl’s expression. Then she added in a hoarse voice and suspenseful tone, ‘Instead of wiping noses, I’d be cleaning up the city’s sewers.’

In the training he received, there was an inevitable section on subversive warfare. Information about the enemy, working constantly at home and abroad, in hiding and in exile, was hardly scientific. They were part of evil. They were anti-Spain. You had to know what they were doing, every step, how they breathed. . but not delve into their thought too much. Know enough to apprehend them. Hate them. That was all.

But Santos’ scientific mind couldn’t stop finding obstacles. As with the laughter he heard from the seminary window, he couldn’t block his ears.

He’d now got stuck on the R of VITRIOL.

He managed to pull out the first three letters from a corner of his memory: Visita Interiorem Terrae. But couldn’t go any further. The training hadn’t been scientific, pondered Santos. The study of Freemasonry, for example, was limited in practice to knowledge of special laws, the work of the Tribunal for the Repression of Freemasonry and Communism, and to the study of articles and a book signed with a mysterious name, Jakin Boor, though he’d soon been warned this was a pseudonym of Franco, Spain’s own Caudillo. Such an open secret immunised this pile of rubbish against any doubt or observation that might be classed as a criticism. With his innate ability to rise to the occasion when confronted with a mess, Paúl Santos extracted what he thought was the leitmotif: ‘Freemasonry never rests’. Boor achieved something: Paúl Santos’ interest in these conspirators who never let up. ‘It’s the Spirit of Contradiction!’ joked a hoarse voice that could have been Catherine Laboure’s. A sort of supreme assembly of international Masons met ‘every working day in Geneva’, from where they ‘influenced the world’s affairs and dictated orders to the majority of the universe’. They directed everything from liberal governments to PEN Clubs and the League for the Rights of Man. When their teacher asked for a summary of that volume that grew in size as you read it, Santos was crazy enough to raise his hand and reply, ‘Freemasonry never rests’.

Everyone waited for him to continue, including Professor Novás, who gestured to him to expand on his thesis. Santos was known for his expositional seriousness. But something, a kind of filament, what Laboure called ‘the root of a hair’, tickled his way of thinking.

‘Yes?’ the teacher of doctrine urged him on.

‘In the words of our expert, Jakin Boor, Freemasonry never rests, Mr Novás.’

He never thought he’d have so much success in an initiation class for future policemen on account of the indefatigable Boor. In this brief intervention, Santos adopted a serious, pithy tone, in the manner of an aphorism, and a grave look. Franco was often praised for his commitment. The Caudillo ‘never rests’. To use a metaphor churned out by the propaganda machine, ‘The light in the Pardo never goes out’. Recurring in the press, at any moment, for whatever reason, like the stuff of legend, this light in Pardo Palace that never went out had become part of the Spanish landscape. Did this light exist? Santos saw a man with thick eyebrows emerging from inside Franco every night in a green bathrobe and sitting down to write tirelessly next to the famous light. He had a hole in his right slipper, through which poked a toe in the form of a claw he used to scratch his left internal malleolus, the only compensation for being awake. This man was Jakin Boor. And what Santos saw was a figure with devilish traits. Childhood images aside, he’d always found it difficult to see or imagine what the devil would be like. He wasn’t helped by his study of iconography at the seminary or by his reading of Vicente Risco’s History of the Devil. So much erudition and, if he hadn’t misunderstood, it seemed the closest thing to the devil in Risco’s eyes was a university professor in Santiago. He realised this vision of Boor as the devil in disguise was fed by his conviction that the treatise on Freemasonry grew in size at night and represented a challenge to his mental control. He had to stop thinking about outlandish things, such as Boor’s halitosis, albeit true, since they appeared clear enough in his vision and mental reconstruction of the character involved and he could see him pausing at his writing to breathe into a mirror and try to smell himself. Moments Santos could pinpoint in the text. When, for example, Boor distinguished varying degrees of perversity. He treated them as the enemy, but wrote about international Masons with all the rhetoric of a scholar, a supposed expert. When it came to Spain, however, he seemed to have to concentrate in order to crush some of the fearless insects that were about to collide with the Pardo lamp. In the case of Spain, anything that was not Catholic and absolutist was waste. ‘The scum of society’. As he chewed on these words, Paúl Santos felt something fermenting in his mouth. The Spirit of Contradiction. He didn’t know why there was a bitterness about this ‘scum’ he liked the taste of, like lemon rind. On Sundays, when they were allowed out of Charity Hospital, they’d sometimes invade the terraces of the marina, lively terraces with a view of the sea, when it was time for vermouth on the city’s ocean liner. They’d jump in when the customers stood up and the waiters still hadn’t cleared the empty table, the empty glasses, but there was the lemon rind with a hint of Cinzano. Miraculously they’d sometimes left the olive as well. Santos memorised phrases such as ‘the scum of society’, but could only repeat them by forcing a vision of Boor. Something he instinctively decided to avoid. A scientific mind was not incompatible with an awareness of evil. Boor’s presence bothered him. If he wanted to be a policeman, albeit a criminologist, a scientific policeman, he had to swear allegiance to the National Movement’s principles and declare his unconditional support for Franco. This is what he was going to do. You couldn’t play with that, he knew. But he’d reached a private scientific conclusion he felt very proud of. If Jakin Boor was a pseudonym of Franco, the unknown quantity was not who was behind the character of Franco, but who was behind Jakin Boor. It was the book’s fault. A bad book. He had to study it. Always fatter and emptier at night. An often quoted, though little read, author was Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo. One of his most famous quotes — ‘Spain, scourge of heretics’ — appeared at the front of one of their textbooks. Santos discovered one day this quote came from his History of Spanish Heterodox Thinkers. The title piqued his curiosity. The Spirit of Contradiction. It wasn’t easy to find. This deepened his interest. When he finally had it in his hands and started reading, he felt a mental upheaval that spread to the rest of his organism. Every life he read about struck him as more charming. It was a history that seemed to have come out of the Room for Secret Deliveries. A history of Spain. Of hidden, mutilated, persecuted, burnt, expelled lives. ‘And although there are not many Spanish freethinkers, we might well declare them to be the most impious lot to be found in the world’, wrote Menéndez Pelayo. And yet without wanting to, with the intention of condemning them for eternity, cutting off their heads, he’d performed a monumental paradox, a remarkable three-point turn, that of preserving the stock of freethinkers from oblivion. So there were many nights Santos’ light remained on, visited by moths. He couldn’t stop smiling when he read, ‘In this book, I’ve been pulling out thorns: it wouldn’t surprise me if, through contact with them, some of their roughness stuck to me’.

‘Freemasonry never rests, Mr Novás.’

‘Why don’t you take a rest, Santos?’

Santos’ problem, as happened with other quotes that caught his fancy, was that he’d pull them out in quite different circumstances so that the quote became a sort of rejoinder he had to put in the same hiding place as ‘God’s hose’ when he was rebuked by a superior.

It was a long time, not until he met Inspector Ren, before he repeated the formula ‘Freemasonry never rests’.

He opened the door. The torch landed on an imitation skull with a bulb inside, a kind of graveyard souvenir. The light jumped up. There, hanging from the wall, was a skeleton, this time genuine, bones are never deceptive. On a wooden stool, acting as a table, was some sulphur and salt. This rustic table also contained a sheet of paper. Santos pointed the torch and read. It was a questionnaire:

What does a man owe to God?

What does a man owe to himself?

What does a man owe to society?

Santos always tried to keep a cool head. An investigator’s main weapon was his mental control. The mind had to be kept permanently running. He imagined situations of general panic and how he’d react. Mother Laboure’s common sense could be summed up in the joke about a woman who, in the case of a fire, prayed for the Lord to intervene, to which a neighbour said, ‘Tell God, if he’s coming down, to bring a fire-hose’. Once, shortly after starting at the seminary, he told this joke at the end of some spiritual exercises for which the teacher had proposed the theme ‘The Meaning of Prayer in Modern Society’. He just came out with what he thought would be an original response to the theme. He’d never forget their dumbfounded faces. It was as if they’d been listening to Luther once more nailing the Ninety-Five Theses to the wooden door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. This anecdotal event was an important experience for him. He fully understood the meaning of the phrase initium sapientiae timor Domini. He had to know how to keep quiet or camouflage himself in the words of a superior. Yes, the fear of the Lord was the beginning of wisdom. But he also had to fit out a hiding place in his head where he could store the joke about God’s hose. If he couldn’t find that cranny, then he would lose his mind.

Scattered on the floor, as if they’d fallen off a snooker table, the torch lit up some black and white balls. Santos was about to take one. At least he’d have that as a memory. A black ball.

It was then he heard a noise. The front door opening and closing, footsteps in the sitting-room. Whoever it was moved with fluency, though the way of walking and negotiating the furniture was that of a heavy, sluggish man. Probably Ren, the owner of the house. The one who’d turned his lair into a strange museum of spoils. In his dark room, simulacrum of the Chamber of Reflection, Santos lived out an initiate’s experience, interpreting the movements outside (whoever it was struck a quick hand through a bundle of papers), but all the time thinking about the questions ‘What does a man. .?’ like waves crashing against his temples, without finding a suitable answer.

The visitor was in a hurry. He heard papers being shuffled, a cupboard door slamming. Followed by silence. Paúl Santos held his breath. He knew how to interpret this kind of silence. It was the silence of someone sniffing the air. Having a premonition. Waiting for something to creak. He had to be careful. Had Ren heard the hourglass? The last grain of sand would have fallen by now. The sky was on the earth. Ren closed the front door. Santos stayed still. Ren opened again, a surprise tactic. No, nobody here. False alarm. He left. The objects in Ren’s museum had labels. There was an envelope on which it said ‘Recovered Photos’. Santos opened it. There were three photos and the negatives. Promising. They showed smoking pyres in a scene he immediately recognised, the docks and María Pita Square. In all of them, there was a group making the Fascist salute. He couldn’t work out what was burning, just embers on the ground. He carried on exploring. In one corner, there were flags, remnants of standards, a few artistic signs with an emery design on glass. In one, the torch followed the line of a wave and found the dorna boat floating on it. Read ‘Maritime Awakening’. And, in smaller letters, ‘Union of the Fishing Fleet’. The standards belonged to workers’ associations. They had coloured ribbons, embroidered letters and occasional motifs relating to the profession. They reminded him of the banners carried by lay brotherhoods in processions. The union of carpenters ‘Emancipation’, of builders ‘Social Aurora’, of printers, of ‘Light’, of bakers ‘New Union’. There were other smaller, more modest symbols, banderoles hanging from the wall, such as the union of barbers ‘Fraternal’, of net-makers ‘Port’s Progress’. In the case of the ‘Union of Water, Gas and Electricity’, he noticed a single boxing glove tied to the crossbar. Pictures of marine life. One showing Hercules defeating the giant Geryon. Sports trophies. An ABC with wooden upper- and lowercase letters by the Workers Press on Socorro Street.

Then there were books and leaflets, ordered not as in a library, but as in the display of confiscated goods. In gaps between the books, there were emblems, badges, slugs cast by a Linotype machine, typographical devices including a set of borders. In the light of the torch, they were like archaeological remains alternating with ancient parchments.

One leaflet caught the torch’s attention. On the cover was a group of naked men and women bathers, wearing seaweed as a kind of natural dress. He opened it in the middle and read with the torch. There was a question. ‘Is Man a carnivore? No.’ Followed by thirty-five vegetarian dishes for the seven days of the week. He picked one at random. ‘Thursday: rice with apple’. Closed his eyes. Acquired the two flavours on his palate. Thought of a pippin, cinnamon apple. He needed it. He’d been there long enough to hear things speak, the terrible murmur of imprisoned things, and he hankered after fruit. The booty of war, on display, which included a gold tooth. There it was. The size of a grain of maize, it seemed to have broken off a brilliant sentence arrested in mid-air. All the same, the wedding rings were the most impressive. They formed a fraternity of circles, of varying diameter and thickness, but with the natural complementary function of circular figures when placed or drawn together. One of them, which from the size must have belonged to a woman, was labelled with a date. In Ren’s museum, ‘18 August 1936’ was often repeated. The first 18th after 18 July. Santos knew the importance of dates in the history of crime. Dates that can be identified as the mark of a calibre on a missile. The imitation effect. The echo of a date resounding in mental cavities. But he’d never applied this basic criterion of criminology to the calendar. Seasons were important. Abrupt climatic vicissitudes. A leaden sky. He’d just been investigating a series of suicides in the district. The same week, the same early hour, people hanging from the same species of tree, the apple tree. Yes, the sky’s weight. But from now on he needed also to study the history of days.

The stubborn torch persevered like another circle among circles. Awoke things. Unearthed them like a shovel of light. Over the years, how many eyes would have seen this, guided there by the Collector? He suddenly felt something he never allowed himself. Fear. He’d decided to forbid himself fear as others forbid themselves tobacco or alcohol. But now he felt fear. A fear with no exact location in his body. That affected neither his respiratory system nor his sweat glands nor his locomotion. That didn’t belong to him, but alighted on him. A fear that sounded like a whisper. That issued from the intimacy of things. The experience of things. An exhibit’s fear of being erased. Fear of disappearing. The torch took the initiative. Here, on a file like those used in a notary’s office for keeping title deeds, a terse message: ‘Castellana Bridge, River Mandeo’. As he took it, the cover gave way and out fell photographs that seemed to float on the table. That river. It could be said that river was the merriest in the whole of Galicia. It took the sea to the mountains. In the direction of the Caneiros festivities. Santos knew this. He’d gone there once with a group of Law students from Betanzos. He was so impressed he went to tell Catherine Laboure about it. She enjoyed music. That river was like a gramophone. The sailing of the boats, a stream of song. Of course this was no place for her. ‘A nun in Caneiros?’ she mused. ‘Nuns bring bad luck to boats.’ She liked these stories, to hear how people had fun. Listening to them, she’d smoke like a chimney. Not long before, as summer approached, Santos had thought about Catia and Caneiros. Upriver, rays of sunlight among alders. At dusk, the sun like a charred log in the water. Contact between boats, bodies carrying the day’s enjoyment on rippling skirts and blazing shirts. What Santos saw now were corpses. Bodies thrown into the river from the Castile road. Among the photos he saw bobbing on the table, a woman’s face. A small portrait, the edge of which matched the smile and teeth. An inscription on the back in well-rounded handwriting: ‘Monelos Schoolmistress’. He’d never felt so confused. He thought of an unending debate, one of few possible, in the Law Faculty. That of the Plank of Carneades. Two shipwrecked sailors with a single plank. Not helping the other wasn’t a crime if there was only one plank to save yourself. He’d vehemently taken the opposite side. It was a crime. It wasn’t a question of codes. It was a question of conscience. The line between humanity and inhumanity.

‘The thing about Carneades’ Plank is that there’ll always be someone to support, in theory, what you’re saying,’ the Professor with the Pimpled Nose remarked ironically. ‘I’d like to see what you’d do with the plank if you were shipwrecked.’

He couldn’t see himself abandoning or getting rid of the other sailor. So he failed to understand his own actions when he put down the photo of the Woman with Curls, stuffed the photos back into the file and returned it to the shadows.

His mind sought out an alibi. He wasn’t at sea with a plank and another sailor. It’d already happened. They’d already drowned. This was something else. His attention was drawn to a bookshelf with various Bibles, different editions, most of them old and in several volumes. He leafed through one of the books the torchlight fell on, perhaps because of the golden letters on its spine. It was Bernard Lamy’s Apparatus Biblicus, containing beautiful illustrations of animals and plants. There was another book on that shelf, Ulysses, a foreigner taken in by Holy Scripture. It was the book’s foreignness that made him pick it up. Open it at random. There was an ex-libris with a geometrical design: ‘This book belongs to Huici’. It was written in English. He turned the pages. Tried to translate something easy, but his eyes landed on a sort of medley:

Diddlediddle dumdum

Diddlediddle. .

The torch headed urgently for the desk. Went straight to an artistic paperweight. A polished, oval shape. A black woman’s head in ebony. Very pretty. Where’d it come from? He had to go. He’d been here too long. On the desk was a blue cardboard folder with a white label and a name: ‘Judith’. He opened it, though he knew it wasn’t necessary. From the weight, he could tell it was empty.