Books Burn Badly by Manuel Rivas

printed words. Rooted in paper, words can be like heather. It can rain on the book, but the words still give off heat. There are some that take longer to burn than others. Which explains why they end up on their own in the ashes, on the surface of small membranes like those of crickets, cicadas and grasshoppers. He’d heard this from Polka. A mountain fire in summer smells of a mixture of vegetation and cricket and cicada wings, burnt song.
    It was night still. He opened the skylight. Clambered over the roofs. At last felt the foxgloves’ rosy touch. His jealousy of cats and seagulls. When he dropped down on to one of the lower roofs and managed to land in Hospital Street, he walked in a daze. Walked in his sleep. This wasn’t a recent state. He’d been like this for quite some time.
    He’d spent the days hiding in the Academy’s attic, his only company the headless Tall Woman, deprived of her oval beauty. Anxious to start with, waiting for news, which swept under the door like a cold current, however warm the voice of the one conveying the news. He’d occasionally peep out of the skylight. It was then Curtis discovered the true meaning of fear. Fear is a beach that is deserted on a sunny day. Or almost deserted, which is worse. Figures in black with large, black umbrellas to keep off the sun. Some catalinas , the name given to peasant women who came to bathe in skirts made of matting. They kept watch on the sea like fish caught in a net. They may have been disturbed by the solitary bather who ran up and down, wearing a strange black-and-yellow-striped costume. And passed between them like a gigantic wasp. There was a new, terrifying silence. Each silence conveyed some kind of horror. He looked at the headless Tall Woman and began to feel the same, like someone who’s lost his head. Only at night did the beams from the lighthouse give it back to him. He ended up at dawn on Riazor Beach. He looked around insistently, in case the bather in the black-and-yellow-striped costume appeared, buzzing like a wasp. He didn’t see anyone. He heard the murmur of the sea, which reminded him of the notion of stuttering speech.
    He climbed up through Peruleiro and Ventorillo. He sleepwalked to Fontenova and the Shining Light building in the Abyss. He was thinking about the tickets for the special train and the excursion to Caneiros. He had to hand in the money he’d collected. He had to settle accounts. It had become an obsession. What would Arturo and his friends think?
    It was he who noticed the fear in things. The discomfort of houses under construction, intimidated by the irritation of their elders. The distrust shown by doorways. The frown of windows. The premises of the libertarian association were in Fontenova. They looked completely dispossessed. Even of their name. The quicksilver glass sign on the front had been smashed. Isolino had made it in the Rubine glassworks, with an emery design reminiscent of a roadside shrine. A sun surrounded by flames. Curtis picked up a stela of sun. It was cold. The confiscators had padlocked the door. Curtis went round the back and broke in through a window. The first thing his eyes sought out was the Ideal typewriter. One of the reasons that had driven him there was the hope no one would have remembered that small centre for social studies in humble premises, in a distant quarter. His most intimate hope was to find the typewriter. He heard the keys like Morse. He blocked his ears to the night’s reports, shut his eyes. And then he felt the keys on the pads of his fingers, Arturo da Silva’s voice as he dictated:
    EXTRAORDINARY EXCURSION TO
    CANEIROS-BETANZOS BY SPECIAL TRAIN
    ‘Leave two blank lines. That’s it. Now continue.’
    The two of them slowly caressing the keys, making a caravan of letters. The whole night in front of them.
    Curtis was in a dark room. He’d forced an entry, opened the windows, but the light seemed reluctant to return. They’d taken everything. Even the