Books Burn Badly

The Invisible Man

ON CANTÓNS, CURTIS can clearly see the thick, ashen, earthy clouds, the breath of ruminant fire, coming from the docks. The sky above María Pita Square is also overcast. He knows he can’t turn back. Has to continue to see it with his own eyes.

He looks at the clock on top of the Obelisk. Remembers, ‘His lordship, Time!’ It looks as if it’s always been there, marking centuries, as if the hands had yet to make a circuit. Sada was right. A cuckoo clock would have been better. If a cuckoo were to come out now, thought Curtis, maybe everything would be different. It’d raise the heads of those walking uneasily, counting questions on the slabs of stone like someone stepping on the squares of a chessboard. It might alter the march of those following a straight line. The cuckoo might hinder that soldier in the bonnet galloping astride a straight line.

He thought he saw him, Sada, on his way through Pontevedra Square, where troops were starting to enlist. The rebel army had taken over the city and had control of Galicia, which would be a rearguard territory for what the insurgents called the ‘new reconquest of Spain’. Yes, he thought it was Sada. So tall and burly, he was difficult to miss. He thought he recognised other faces, though recently not only had people’s mood changed, but their faces, presence, physical features as well. This was one of the things that had most surprised him on his walk. A kind of winter had suppressed the summer season. From the skylight, he’d seen the desolation of Riazor Beach. It was the sight of an urban beach deserted in summer, on a beautiful sunny day, that made him afraid. Unfamiliar fear caught up with him. There were days only the Headless Man seemed to emerge from the city’s shell, sitting on the breakwater with a book in his lap. When he decided to escape through the skylight, when he tricked his mother and aunts in the Dance Academy, he discovered years had gone by in days. Hairdos had disappeared, colours had darkened, skirts and dresses lengthened. People had changed their way of looking. Of walking.

He realised there were people and things asking not to be named. To be spared words. Which is why he stopped scrutinising the soldiers. He knew he shouldn’t do it. For his own good and for theirs.

If they asked him who Sada was, he’d say, ‘I don’t know, I can’t see him.’ And Sada would call him to one side, ‘Can you really not see me, Curtis? Praise be to God, long live the Umbrella Maker of the Universe!’

‘If you want to stay safe, become invisible.’

He was told this plainly by a well-informed man. A Navy legal officer who admired his painting and had a certain sense of humour. ‘I like most of all the way you paint echinoderms and gastropods.’ ‘Now listen here, you,’ replied Sada, ‘there’s no need to insult them.’ The officer was kind enough to warn him. He wasn’t interested in war. His hobby was studying the first world circumnavigation. By Magellan, Elcano and what he called the enigma of the third name. Sada would have liked to return the favour at once and become immediately invisible.

But although he was up to date with Franz Roh’s theory about magic realism in art, Sada didn’t know how to become invisible. He was just too big for escapism. He had magician friends he was unable to help in rehearsals or performances because all the swords wounded him, all the saws sawed him and, in the disappearing act, when the magician announced he’d vanished and was no longer there, he’d appear, ruining the spectacle, like a heavy load that doesn’t know how to transform into spirit.

His informant was clear. He was on the list. Sooner or later, they’d kill him. To be invisible was to become a soldier, to join the conquering army and go to war.

No sooner did Sada’s enormous bulk reach the front in Asturias, no sooner did it slowly stand up in the trench, than he was shot three times. You’d have thought this is what he wanted. But his fellow soldiers told their bosses he’d been talking all the time about being invisible. He considered himself an invisible man. And this is what they called him: The Invisible. One soldier kept quiet. The one whom he’d told about the child and the matador the night before.

In metaphysical art or in magic realism, there as well, the lame matador pursued him. Pointed with his stick, ‘That’s him, that’s the one, the Invisible.’