Books Burn Badly by Manuel Rivas Read Free Book Online

eyes? They showed it not long ago in the same place, Alfonso’s Kiosk. Well, that was how Touchman looked,’ recalled Sada. ‘It’s as if he’s never moved from there and is waiting for me to this day.
    ‘A particular feature Celita had was a slight limp. So he wasn’t brandishing a sword, but a terrible stick. Is there anything more frightening than a child being pursued by a lame matador with a thrusting-stick? Give me a bull any time!’
    Since then, he’d been watching his back. In a state of permanent alert. He’d acquired the visual field of a woodcock, the wood’s guardian, with eyes in the back of his head. ‘I feel destiny running after me,’ said Sada. ‘A lame destiny with a wooden sword or sabre. That’s how things are in Spain, ever on the lookout for the matador. I should have been a descendant of the blessed, a child of the generation that advocated a federalist Utopia. My mother taught me to walk to the music of Le Temps des cerises and all my life I heard my freethinking father tell his friends, “Don’t ever let me falter.” An entire life, almost, taking care not to fall into the hands of the soul hunter – bam! – with his last breath. And it was a moment’s negligence. We stopped hearing the harmonica and heard instead the bells of the viaticum and the confessor triumphantly leaving his bedside, proclaiming, “Today I converted a heretic!” My poor father’s soul turned into a trophy. A bull’s ear in the hand.’
    His expression, his voice, even the size of his body had changed again. Curtis thought this man’s words were linked not only to his mind, but to everything going on in his body. His breathing. The circulation of blood. Incredible, but true. From where he was, he could hear his heart beating.
    ‘Now I’m going to paint windows,’ said Sada. ‘Never sleep with the windows closed, Widows’ Wind permitting. And if there aren’t any windows, paint them. Invite the sea in!’
    ‘That’s a good one,’ said Arturo da Silva. ‘The window revolution.’
    ‘I’m into the naturist revolution. Another commandment is to bathe every day in the sea. I wouldn’t mind having your determination, Arturo, swimming in the sea in winter and summer. Galicia will discover her karma the day this custom spreads. I’m waiting for my own personal bathyscaphe and for when Scandinavian diving suits go on sale in Espuma. Or better still, one of those waterbeds invented by the glorious William Hooper. If this were a practical country, we’d develop an industry of waterbeds. I have to talk to Mr Senra from the shoe factory. Why can’t I be an industrial artist?’
    ‘I only wish I could paint a starfish the way you do,’ said Arturo. ‘A single starfish is enough to justify a life.’
    ‘Why paint them if you can go down and collect them in fistfuls from the bottom of Ánimas? I paint the sea because I can’t dive. I have to make do with the starfish that fall from the sky. They escape from the seagull’s beak by amputating the arm it’s holding them by. Did that never happen to you?’
    ‘It did once. It fell on my head. I was petrified. I thought the Universal Architect had got hold of me.’
    ‘A mythological sign, Arturo!’
    ‘It’s Hercules here who needs one of those,’ Arturo says for Curtis. ‘He’s got his first boxing match tonight.’

The Burning Books
    19 August 1936
    The books were burning badly. One of them stirred in the nearest bonfire and Hercules thought he saw it suddenly fan out its fresh pollack’s red gills. An incandescent piece came off another and rolled like a neon sea urchin down the steps of a fire staircase. Then he thought a trapped hare was moving in the fire, and that a gust of wind, which kindled the flames, was scattering in sparks each and every one of the hairs on its burnt skin. So the hare kept its form in a graph of smoke and stretched its legs to bound off down the glazed diagonal of the Atlantic avenue’s sky.
    The first book