The Calligraphy of Dreams

7. HEROES ON THE BONFIRE

“Just in case, because of the flies!” his father says as he tosses books on the fire, one after the other with barely a glance, without checking the title or the name of the author and making jokes the whole time to encourage all those present. “Just in case there are any flies around, isn’t that so, Son? We’re not doing this because we like it.”

He could do it better and more quickly if he had a spade, thinks Ringo, and remembers Harpo Marx shovelling books onto a fire in a comedy movie. But he can’t see anything here to make him laugh. Some of the men are staring into the bonfire with grim, solemn expressions, and the glow is printed on their faces like a plaster mask.

So Señor Gaspar Huguet is burning part of his library “just in case, because of the flies”, the boy deduces from the grown-ups’ comments. His father has made a makeshift bonfire from dry branches and splintered trunks in Señor Huguet’s own garden, behind the shed that is a lumber room by day and by night is used for clandestine coffee roasting. This bonfire is nothing like the festive ones on Saint John’s Eve: Ringo knows that no children are going to come and jump over these flames or throw firecrackers. This is a tedious ceremony presided over by grown-ups who for some reason are extremely downcast. And as though the boredom were not enough, if he moves away from the fire it’s freezing. He also knows that his father works with Señor Huguet roasting coffee in this shed three or four nights a week, from two to five in the morning, hidden from everyone, especially from the local nightwatchman. He can tell when his father has been here, because the next day his woollen jersey and his scarf smell of sugary roast coffee. Now Señor Huguet, seeing Ringo so close to the flames and almost hypnotised by them, comes over and, trying but failing to lend his voice a jovial tone, asks if he’d like to burn something of his own. He says yes he would, thinking of his detested school arithmetic book and also of Fu-Manchu’s daughter and of the blue rats, a mass of writhing blue rats in the flames.

“Stand back or you’ll singe your nose,” his father warns him. “Go and find a dry branch somewhere.”

But the best spot is close to the fire, the warm heart of an inhospitable night full of reddish glows and the long faces of worried people talking in whispers. The faces pucker and say things he doesn’t understand: they talk in low voices about a surprise police raid on Señor Oriol’s house, of the large number of books impounded, a disgraceful abuse, Berta, and with what excuse, eh, what crime is he accused of? Good God, you can imagine. Nor can Ringo understand when someone hidden in the darkness intones “Who lights the fires where none were lit before?” and flames leap out of the roaring bonfire like long-fingered hands calling for and greedily receiving still more books. The thick, swirling smoke reminds him of the genie Djinn springing from the bottle after the sea waves have thrown it up onto the beach, the black smoke against the sky that suddenly turns into a giant, whose booming laughter astonishes the tiny Sabu.

This is during the dying days of a long Barcelona winter, his scarf wrapped round his ears, and his feet always cold, in the street and in the cinema, at school and in the parish choir, under the greenery of Parque Güell and on the slopes of Montaña Pelada. He has just turned eight, his nose is red, curly hair, good big ears, slightly bow-legged like a cowboy, and with his eternally cold feet. Not tonight though, in the dark, overgrown garden where the fire curls books and notebooks, diaries and photos, all kinds of documents and postcards and the identity cards of his father, Señor Huguet, and of some neighbours who have also joined in the burning. He watches forlornly as the flames devour a next-to-new spiralbound notebook with squared-off paper and a cream-coloured cover where someone has written C.N.T. Membership Dues — the anarchist union. He has always wanted to have a book like that. A week before he had seen his father at the dining-room table with this notebook open in front of him, patiently using a razor blade to scratch out names and figures from its pages, until at length he grew tired and furiously threw the blade into his glass of wine, shouting: All on the bonfire, it’s safer that way!

Gusts of wind send pages that have come loose from some volume or other flying into the sky, where they hang for a moment on the crest of the flames, fluttering like huge black butterflies in the midst of a crackling shower of embers. Also burning on the fire are some papers from the private library of the elderly Don Víctor Rahola, a neighbour and friend of Señor Huguet’s. The boy hears Don Víctor himself say this, laughing cheerfully as he does so. He doesn’t seem at all bothered if the flies come or not. You’re not far wrong, nano, because my papers are buzzing through the air like flies! Ringo recalls that the previous summer his mother had been this man’s night nurse in his pretty villa up on Paseo del Monte, looking after him as he lay in bed under a big mosquito net, and that she had told him that Don Víctor was a wise, polite old fellow who loved practical jokes, a writer who no longer writes and often asks her to sit by his bed and read him a book.

“Don’t take your scarf off, Son.”

He sometimes wonders why his mother is never exactly a nurse like all the others. She herself told him one day: I’m not exactly a nurse, I’m more of a care assistant, and a friend of the nuns. She only looks after old people in homes, residences or their own houses, but she is not a qualified nurse. She works at night and is badly paid.

The bonfire’s scorching heat forces the books open, and finger-like flames flick through their pages. Just in case the flies come, he hears someone mutter again behind his back. And also if the cockroaches arrive, or the rats, or lice, he thinks. On some street corners in their neighbourhood there are piles of rubbish that also attract flies, but he cannot imagine why they would want to descend on this fire. Let them come, he says to himself, my father can kill them with his rat poison, together with all the mosquitoes, moths and bugs who dare poke their noses in. He has never needed to light a fire to get rid of them before, and yet here he is now, watchful and diligent, stoking the embers with his stick wherever necessary, pushing back into the flames any publications that fall out or scraps of charred paper. Why though is he burning only Catalan books, just in case? Does that mean they’re books that attract flies, Mother, infected books and documents with fly droppings on them? Is that why they have to be burnt? Because they could infect us all?

But she pays him no attention, or does not hear, and has no idea what he’s talking about. Ringo sees her on the arm of a neighbour, Señora Rius. He watches them with their heads close together, exchanging sad glances, both of them wearing tight-fitting coats with the collars raised. His mother’s constant tendency for sadness … What kind of horrible flies can they be, Mother? Are they tsetse flies, the ones that give you sleeping sickness? Yes, they’re a bit like that, my boy, says Señora Ruiz, with a faint, friendly smile: they put you to sleep and your dreams turn into nightmares. Are the books terribly dangerous for children, sinful books, full of illustrations of naked nymphs with transparent fly’s wings on their back, or fairies with flowing locks and naked breasts who sleep in the lakes and float though the woods, sweet air and water sprites like in that small book you keep at home, Mother, the one with those lovely drawings you like so much? Are the flies that might come so dangerous? Is that why we’re here at night in Señor Huguet’s garden to help father and his friends, just in case the flies come? Yes, we’re here to help. Keep your scarf on properly. So where are the flies? he insists.

The answer comes in the barely audible rustle of burning pages, the murmur of words turned to ashes, an endless buzzing in the boy’s ears. He will hear this again so often that it becomes an insistent whistle.

“Not so close, pumpkinhead, or you’ll get burnt,” his father warns him.

They joke with him, especially his father, and yet he is aware that all those there seem dejected. One of them talks in a low, mournful voice of Don Víctor’s brother, who died barely two years ago, and the boy understands that he was killed by blue flies that had previously destroyed his books. Standing close to the flames, he watches fascinated as the volumes open like black flowers, the pages twisting and turning black while sparks like fireflies climb into the starry night sky. He thinks he can see that the fire is separating the words from the pages, which then fly up for a moment before turning into whirling embers, words and embers joined together as they rise into the night. He suddenly feels the need to step back a few paces, grasp his mother’s welcoming hand and hear her whisper, this time more to her friend than to him: Your father knows what he’s doing. They’ll come with a search warrant, and it’s better they find nothing, isn’t it, María? The eager flames are also reflected in her pinched, sleepy face, as her husband, the irrepressible, merry Capitán of the Rat-catcher brigade, jokes and curses while he wields his stick: “We’re the arsehole of the world, my boy, I’ve told you many times. So now we’re going to warm that arsehole up.” His mother’s thin, cold left hand with its long fingers and pale, unvarnished nails, squeezes his, trembling slightly in a way that distresses him.

“Stay here with me, Son.”

He has seen those fingers sticking a hypodermic needle into the thick, rough skin of an orange, of many oranges, doing the injection over and over again with an unsure, trembling hand, trying and trying until she has perfected it. Why don’t you use your right? He has asked her sometimes. She practises for a few minutes every day before she goes off to work, and for a while at night before going to sleep. She sits on the edge of the bed with her shawl wrapped round her, her back to her husband, who has buried his head under the pillow. On the bedside table there’s a small image of the Infant Jesus of Prague, and the lamp is covered with a red cloth in order not to disturb the Rat-catcher’s sleep, just as it was when Ringo had measles and spent happy hours in the company of The Jungle Book. After a few uncertain tests, with the orange in her right hand and the needle in the left, she administers the jab, suddenly but delicately, quickly but as gently as possible. This is her patient way of learning how to give injections, now that the nuns at Las Darderas have taken her on to look after old people in their residence on Calle Sors, or in their home. She will soon also learn to wrap bandages and to wash old people’s behinds, put them to bed, feed them and keep them entertained by playing cards or Ludo with them, or reading them a book, but what she finds most difficult is to give injections, because she is frightened of hurting them. She occasionally complains she isn’t strong enough to lift some stout, heavy grandmother in and out of the bath, but she is grateful to the nuns for the work, and always finds some reason for being happy.

“Today I learnt how to play three-card brisca.”

It is on occasions like this that Ringo feels closest to her, when he hears her talking about the good times she has at work, and tells them about the old people’s mischief-making and manias, their fears, weaknesses and little whims, and above all when he watches her tirelessly practising with the needle and orange and observes, on tenterhooks, how her shaking hand tries again and again to push the needle in without doing harm. Poor orange! The Rat-catcher laughs from beneath the pillow: Alberta light of my life, you’d learn much quicker if you used a bishop’s arse.

The usual ill-timed, foul-mouthed comment from her husband. Why does she put up with it? Why allow him to call her Alberta, when everyone else calls her Berta, and she herself has said that is what she prefers?

Now I’m going to tell you something about our Alberta, his father explains to him one day, glass of brandy in one hand, gesturing dismissively although his voice is firm, so listen carefully and make no mistake: Your mother isn’t blind, she’s a believer. And remember: to be a believer and to want to be one in spite of everything, to be one for herself and in silence, ignoring our hypocritical and pompous ecclesiastical hierarchy, to be one without having recourse to the ostentation of a corrupted Church and clergy, who pervert the souls of children in catechism classes and the confessional, who offend the memory of the dead at funerals and of the living in their ranting homilies, to be a believer despite all the vileness blessed by bishops and cardinals, and to know as well how to forgive all the fooling around and digs at her expense she faces in her own home, from the mouth of her own husband: all these things are what this modest woman offers as her lesson, one you would do well to remember. It’s true that her good-for-nothing husband does not share her faith or her pious practices, it’s true he is a blasphemer and a heretic, but it is no less true that she never once, however hurtful his jokes, has reproached him for them or tried to stop him …

The whitish smoke, increasingly full of sparks and embers, curls up into the night, and for a brief moment high in the sky forms extraordinary figures that intrigue Ringo. For a moment he imagines he can see the burning bodies of Mowgli and Shere Khan the tiger writhing in the midst of the flames, but they disappear almost immediately. He carries on looking, and it’s not long before he gets a fleeting glimpse of a volume whose title The Conquest of Bread is burning along with its girls who become anaemic in the factories of Manchester, the only words he stumbled across by chance at home one day, when he opened the book out of curiosity, thinking it was a mystery or crime novel. On another collapsed part of the bonfire, a copy from the Men of Daring collection, costing 60 cents with bright-red lettering announcing the title The Wings of Death, suddenly opens its pages like a hedgehog sensing danger, and rolls to the edge of the pyre. The flames have already consumed half the brightly coloured front cover illustration, a plane emerging from a storm cloud to confront a giant condor, wings spread as it threatens to sweep the airman from the skies. Ringo immediately recognises the pilot in his cockpit:

“Oh, no, please! Nooo!”

It is one of the little novels featuring Bill Barnes, the famous Air Adventurer. His father’s lack of attention as he hurriedly emptied their bookcase has condemned the aviation hero to death, burnt to a crisp in a makeshift bonfire behind a shed in a hidden garden in a poor neighbour-hood in post-war Barcelona. Bill could never have imagined such an abrupt, unheroic end. Shit! Shit! The boy points his trembling finger at the book being so unjustly consumed by the flames, and reproaches his father for this huge mistake. Bill shouldn’t be here, Bill and his plane don’t deserve to end this way, turned to ashes right in front of his eyes! Seizing the stick from his father, he tries to pull the book out of the fire, but it’s too late, the hero and all his derring-do shrivel into a dark rose that crumples and wrinkles in a few seconds, ash printed in double columns that for a brief moment is still bound and resistant.

“It’s being burnt to ashes!”

“I’m sorry, son, I must have picked the comic up without realising it.”

“It’s not a comic!”

“I told you not to put anything of yours on that shelf …”

“Why didn’t you look? Why?”

“There’s no need to cry over such a small thing. Right now much more important stories are being burnt, but look, nobody is complaining. I’ve already said I’m sorry.”

That’s a rotten lie, how could he possibly be sorry when he doesn’t have a conscience, only a rat with its stomach full of poison frothing green at the mouth? Ringo glowers spitefully at the charred pages of the book still standing upright, until they finally collapse and completely disintegrate. Bill Barnes curses you from on high, you heartless buzzard! He senses his mother’s hand in his once more, but there is no pull, sign or gesture to show she wants to get him away from there. The fire does not crackle, the books do not seem to complain as they are consumed, apart from a faint whistle. Señor Sucre and Señor Casal are circling around it cautiously: they both laugh at his outburst, at how upset he is over such a small thing. Banned books always smell suspicious, says Señor Sucre, with his perpetual mocking laugh, his throat eager for a tot of brandy. Then Ringo sees old Señor Pujol, the smoke-seller, approaching him. He is coming round from the far side of the bonfire, from the shadows stretching beyond the red glow, and walks with his hands cupped in front of his chest. Can you see this smoke, my boy? he says, opening and closing his hands above a flame. He turns towards him with his hands clasped together, not like somebody praying but as though he had caught a butterfly and did not want to harm it, or as though he was carrying a tiny lit lamp. Then, half-smiling as he looks Ringo in the eye, he opens his hands and lets out a puff of white smoke.

“What do you say if we hide this book of smoke I’ve found in a safe, secret place,” he says ceremoniously. “And when you’re grown-up, you can recover it. Ha, ha!”

Don Víctor is walking head down round the shadowy garden, and seems to be talking to himself. I’m walking on the ashes of beloved books, Ringo thinks he hears him mutter in what sounds like a prayer, although it could just be more tomfoolery. Señor Casal, who had been a school-teacher and now works as caretaker in a building on Calle Camelias approaches the bonfire with a bunch of papers in one hand and a membership card in the other. He stares at it for a moment, and Ringo can read A.F.A.R.E., Army of the Interior. Suddenly, as if it was scorching his fingers, he throws everything into the flames, then steps away and is engulfed by the shadows. When did you get back from Canfranc? somebody asks his father. He was in La Carroña, his mother insists. Where is Canfranc, Mama? These compromising documents, says Señor Roura, trying not to laugh, were until today hidden in a basement in Calle Fahrenheit up in the Clot neighbourhood. Don’t you think that’s an irony of fate? Señor Falcón is also going round like a sleepwalker. He is very tall, thin and short-sighted, and the flames are reflected in his thick glasses until he takes them off to wipe on his handkerchief, and then the fire shines even more brightly in his sick, doleful eyes, as intensely as if he had a ruby the size of a chickpea burning in each pupil.

“What kind of plane was it that you liked so much?” There’s a weary, flat tone to his father’s voice, but it rouses Ringo from his thoughts. “A fighter, a seaplane, a bomber? Come on, we’ll find another one the same, don’t be so upset.”

It doesn’t matter, I’ll make sure Bill’s plane takes off again. That’s what the boy thinks and is about to tell his father, to say it loud and clear so that he is heard by all those who have been laughing at him in a kindly way, those who have come here tonight ready to burn everything just in case, because of the flies. But no-one hears him say anything, and it is quite likely he never managed to utter a word. Possibly he did no more than think it, without taking his eyes off the flames. He will spend his life thinking things like this, without ever saying them. For example, that he can see the plane escaping the flames yet again, climbing into the starry night, leaving far below the writhing black smoke and that strange ceremony of fire, destruction and death. From the cockpit enveloped in flames, the hero smiles at him and waves a greeting.

*

Ringo remembers now another argument with his father that took place some time after Bill Barnes had saved himself by flying out above the big bonfire. The Rat-catcher had eventually learnt what had happened with the air rifle in his grandparents’ vegetable garden, but he brought up the subject as if he knew nothing.

“By the way, son, what became of that air rifle Uncle Luis gave you?”

“I don’t have it anymore.”

“You don’t? What happened?”

“I swapped it for The Mystery of the Laughing Shadow and The Red Menace.”

“And what’s that?”

“They’re novels.”

“You exchanged the airgun for a couple of cheap second-hand novels? Your Uncle Luis won’t be happy when he hears that.”

Uncle Luis isn’t his uncle or anything of the kind. He’s nothing more than a workmate of his father’s, another of the brigade’s rat-killers. A starving barfly, a poor devil, a casual council worker who prefers to spend his time knocking back plonk. He and his father have insisted Ringo call him uncle. Just to annoy him.

“That’s a shame,” his father adds. “It was a good air rifle, comrade.”

Calling him “comrade” is just to annoy him as well. He says it in a friendly way, as if it’s a joke, but that word is two-faced: the Falangists call themselves comrade too, don’t they? And what does it mean when they say it? As time goes by, Ringo is beginning to realise certain things. He hates the fact that his father enjoys upsetting people, he hates that he’s such a show-off, when in front of his mother and his colleagues from the pest control brigade he makes out he’s more of a red, more of a rebel, more libertarian than the anarchist Seisdedos himself — who by the way, Uncle Luis tells him, was killed just three days after you were born, kid, on January 11, 1933. Above all, Ringo detests his father’s self-serving, deceitful way of forgetting certain things, and his barefaced contradictions; he would boast to his friends that he had always been a diehard anarchist, and yet at the same time was proud that during the civil war his Alberta was a switchboard operator at the Socialist Party headquarters. Nowadays the anarchists don’t bite, says the big show-off, they’ve been tamed and trained like mice in a circus, like those grateful immigrants up in Campo de la Bota who kiss the priests’ hands. He comes out with things like that, the lying Rat-catcher, completely out of the blue.

“So you took a dislike to the airgun, did you?” his father goes on. “Might I know why?”

“Just because. I don’t want to see it again, and that’s that.”

“Alright, so you don’t want to see it again. And who did you give it to, who was the lucky fellow?”

“A boy I made friends with. An altar server from Las Ánimas.”

“Hmm.” His father stares at him, and he lowers his gaze. “So you didn’t want to. No way.”

“No way what?”

“… you wanted to kill any more pigeons with that gun.”

“I’ve never shot at pigeons.”

“At birds then. You think you should never have shot them, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“And that’s why you got rid of the air rifle.”

“Yes.”

“And you thought that was an end of it.”

Shit, of course I did, he shouts inwardly.

“Well, there’s something you need to know, comrade,” his father says. “The priest at Las Ánimas has been spotted firing the air rifle in the parish garden. Taking potshots at the sparrows, would you believe? Your friend the altar boy must have lent it to him, or the reverend took it from him, or bought it, who knows? No, don’t look at me like that, he wouldn’t be the first son of a bitch priest to go around firing a gun. So as you see, even if it’s not you pulling the trigger, your air rifle is still killing birds. If you think about it, you haven’t ended anything.”

Ringo suddenly feels anger rising in his throat like vomit. He would gladly have strangled the hypocritical, arrogant, busybody of a Rat-catcher there and then.

“I’m not to blame for that.”

“I didn’t say you were, Son.”

“I was fed up with the air rifle.”

“Fed up with the rifle, or of killing birds?”

“It’s the same.”

“No, it’s not.”

“It isn’t? What’s the point then?”

“Well, perhaps so you learn to be a bit more responsible. And besides, you could have given it to me.”

“To kill rats with? Because you make a living killing rats and mice, don’t you?”

“Yes, that’s my job.”

“With an air rifle?”

“Well, there are better and easier ways, but an air rifle, even if it only fires pellets is also good,” he says, ruffling the boy’s hair. “Don’t be angry, dammit. I’m only telling you all this so you think for yourself a bit, so you understand that to get what you want you have to do more than pick up or not pick up an air rifle.”

Ringo also hates having his hair ruffled. Killing rats and mice with an air rifle isn’t the same as killing birds, he thinks, it’s not something that’s going to stay with you for the rest of your life. It’s not. A disgusting blue rat is a disgusting blue rat, and a little bird seeking shelter from the rain in a fig tree is quite different. Even if it’s a predatory sparrow that’s cruelly devouring a worm. Anyway, he can’t bear being called comrade or having his hair mussed up.

“Besides, I don’t believe you,” he retorts. “The parish priest is a good man.”

“Do you mean that priest with the crew-cut who was the first one to give you music lessons, that Reverend Amadeo Oller, your mother’s friend?”

“He taught me and a lot of other kids at Las Ánimas. Reverend Amadeo would never fire an air rifle.”

“He wasn’t the one who was shooting. It was a young, good-looking priest, a conceited little rat.”

“I couldn’t care less. It’s not my air rifle anymore.”