the last book I ever read (Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past, excerpt eleven)

from Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past by Giles Tremlett:

Spain’s experience of war has been better painted than it has been written. The few hundred metres of central Madrid that embrace both the Prado Museum and the Reina Sofía modern arts centre, contain, within them, some of the most telling pictorial denunciations of war ever painted or etched. In his painting The Third of May, 1808, or The Executions on Príncipe Pío Hill and his Disasters of War series of etchings Goya tells of the Spanish uprising against Napoleonic rule in 1808. ‘Yo lo vi’ – ‘I saw it,’ Goya scratched onto one of his copperplates of killing, rape and pillage. In the Reina Sofía, Picasso’s huge, grey-blue Guernica is populated with terrified mothers, dead children, maddened animals and dismembered bodies. It evokes a world numbed by terror.

The horror of Guernica, blitzed by the German Luftwaffe on Franco’s behalf in 1937, was real, and more so because it was innovative. An ancient human fear was turned into reality. Death rained from the sky. A local artist once showed me around the rebuilt town, telling me his memories of the fateful day. He had run for the hills as a boy and watched Guernica burn. What he saw was the invention of blanket incendiary bombing of civilian targets. What was shocking in 1937 became, sadly, commonplace within a decade. Guernica, and nearby Durango, were the experimental laboratories for the carpet bombing of Coventry or Dresden and, ultimately, for the nuclear wastelands of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

the last book I ever read (Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past, excerpt ten)

from Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past by Giles Tremlett:

Spain has a historically high caesarean rate. One study, from 1998 and concentrating on Catalonia, showed 26 percent of births were done by Caesarean. This was two and a half times, for example, the rate in Holland or Sweden. Numbers were riding rapidly. One hospital reached 38 per cent. Some other western countries are now beginning to catch up with that figure, but others have kept them down to around 10 per cent. Medical intervention, in Spain, does not end there. Episiotomies are performed on nine out of ten first-time mothers. Enemas and pubic shaving are also a routine part of the mother-to-be’s trip down the birthing production line at Spanish hospitals. All this, the report pointed out, contravenes a World Health Organization (WHO) resolution on the rights of pregnant women. The fact that the rate of caesareans surges of Friday and Saturday mornings suggests some are performed for the convenience of doctors keen to get away for the weekend (though some mothers are also keen on ‘convenience’ births). Private hospitals are the worst, performing 30 per cent more caesareans. One child I know was, her parents now suspect, delivered several days early by programmed caesarean just so a doctor could get his bill in before the end of the second quarter. I would like to think that was not true. But a theatre nurse said she once threw a doctor’s surgical instruments to the ground – so they would require re-sterilising – because he was trying to rush an operation so he could get to a Real Madrid game.

the last book I ever read (Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past, excerpt nine)

from Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past by Giles Tremlett:

If women’s sexuality scared Franco, his regime’s views on homosexuality were wholly predictable. Browsing through my local second-hand bookstore, I found myself confronted by a book entitled Sodomitas. It was a 1956 tome, which put homosexuality into the same bad of ‘enemies of the state’ as Marxism, freemasonry and Judaism. ‘This book was written to demonstrate the danger that the sodomite poses to the Patria, the fatherland,’ its author, one M. Carlavilla, proclaimed. ‘The herd of sodomite wild beasts, thousands strong, has invaded the busy streets looking for its young prey . . . Your son may return home, corrupted, hiding his shameful secret.

‘There is an undoubted affinity between the sodomite and the communist, both being aberrations against the family,’ Carlavilla added, before launching into a 300-page investigation of the subject.

Homosexuals were a threat to the regime’s ideal of a virile Spain. ‘Any effeminate or introvert who insults the movement will be killed like a dog,’ General Queipo de Llano once threatened. Introversion, it seems, was a thoroughly unmanly, un-Spanis, suspicious attribute. When the country’s greatest twentieth-century poet and playwright, Federico Garcia Lorca, was shot by a Falangist death squad in the hills outside Granada, one of his assassins later boasted that he had ‘shot him twice in the arse for being a poof’.

the last book I ever read (Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past, excerpt eight)

from Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past by Giles Tremlett:

One man has done more to popularise flamenco in the past twenty years than anybody else. He was, of course, a gypsy. His name was José Monge Cruz, better known as Camarón de la Isla, the Shrimp of the Island. The Shrimp was a man with Mick Jagger lips and one of the worst, most bouffant, hairstyles since James Brown. He also possessed the best, most tragic, flamenco voice of the past quarter of a century.

Camarón was an intense introvert – a man of profound, hermetic silences. He lived in a period when young singers, thanks to the influence of pop and rock, could become living legends. It was also a time when flamenco itself opened up, incorporating new instruments and allowing itself to be influenced by the turbulent popular culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Camarón himself would lose from this meeting, dying a rock star’s early death. Along the way, however, he ensured himself the same kind of mythical status of fellow tortured, ‘live fast, die young’ stars like Jimi Hendrix or Jim Morrison. He died in 1992. Some say that flamenco has yet to recover.

the last book I ever read (Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past, excerpt seven)

from Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past by Giles Tremlett:

Both Gil and Ruiz-Mateos sought political power as they tried to avoid court cases and attempted to exact revenge on ‘the politicians’ who were their enemies. Natural populists, they had their small successes. These were men who, in the language of the football terrace or the bull ring, believed that what really mattered was to have un buen par de cojoines – a real pair of balls. They were examples of what the comic film-maker Santiageo Segura – in two hilarious films based around a character called Torrente – termed casposa (dandruff-ridden) Spain.

As the owner of first division Atlético de Madrid football club for his last twelve years, Gil was disciplined several times for insulting referees, including accusing a French referee of homosexuality, and inciting the club’s followers to violence. One black player, the Colombian Adolfo ‘El Tren’ Valencia, was a particular obsession. ‘I’ll kill that black man!’ he once spluttered. His contributions to racial harmony included ‘Spain stinks from so many blacks’. Even the paid-up socios, or season-ticket holders, of Atlético were not safe from his bilious comments. ‘The socios,’ he declared, were from ‘a low social stratus’. But that was not all. ‘Whoever doesn’t have a drug addict in the family, quite possibly has a prostitute.’ Gil was the archetype casposo.

the last book I ever read (Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past, excerpt six)

from Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past by Giles Tremlett:

Does the king’s ‘enthusiasm for beautiful women’ – as one biographer delicately puts it – matter to Spaniards? Not really. Gossiping is a national pastime. In the birthplace of ¡Hola! Magazine and a dozen competitors (whose enthusiasm for royal scandals seems limited to those of other countries) it is also a large publishing and television industry. Spaniards enjoy the tittle-tattle but are rarely judgemental. ‘A Borbón will always be a Borbón,’ they say knowingly, referring to the far more colourful lives of previous monarchs. (Isabel II was said to be a nymphomaniac, while Alfonso XIII had three bastard children, one of whom, Leandro Alfonso, was formally recognized as such by a Spanish court in 2003.) It is a different matter, however, when that enthusiasm encourages, in the words of the same biographer, ‘attempts at blackmail by financiers’.

Paul Preston, the professor of Spanish history at the London School of Economics, wrote the biography referred to above. He also sheds light on one of those episodes that Spanish writers generally ignore or skirt around in their – almost unanimously adulatory – descriptions of their king. In one of the most tragic moments of a difficult childhood, Juan Carlos shot his own brother dead. Juan Carlos, then seventeen, and fourteen-year-old Alfonsito were playing with a gun in the exiled family’s home in Portugal. No clear account of what happened has yet been given. The gun, it seems, was in Juan Carlos’s hands when it went off. The bullet from the .22 pistol either bounced off a wall or simply went straight into Alfonsito’s forehead. Juan Carlos’s father, Don Juan de Borbón, tried to keep his son alive. The wound, however, was mortal. He died a few minutes later. His father wrapped the teenage corpse in a Spanish flag. The incident must have been a key moment in Juan Carlos’s life – both in his relations with a father already using him as a pawn in his games with Franco and in the creation of his own personality, which was still in its formative years. ‘The incident affected the Prince dramatically. The rather extrovert figure . . . now seemed afflicted by a tendency to introspection. Relations with his father were never the same again,’ says Preston.

the last book I ever read (Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past, excerpt five)

from Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past by Giles Tremlett:

Francoism never has been placed on trial (unless the varied judgements of historians count). Silence was at the heart of Spain’s transition to democracy – enshrined in the pacto del olvido. The past, and men like Serrano Suñer, were to be left alone. There were no hearings, no truth commissions and no formal process of reconciliation beyond the business of constructing a new democracy. This was no South Africa, no Chile, no Argentina. The mechanics of repression – police files on suspects and informers – would not be made public, as they would be in East Germany, Poland or the Czech Republic. Nor was Franco’s Spain a defeated Germany or Japan, forced to confront its own guilty past. In fact, it was Franco’s own men who would, largely, oversee and manage the Transición. They would do so in a way that made sure neither they, nor those who came before them, could be called to account for anything they had done on behalf of el Caudillo. ‘The political class turned into angels, proud of the almost Mafioso omertá when it came to talking about themselves,’ wrote one of the handful of critics of that transition, Gregorio Morán.

the last book I ever read (Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past, excerpt four)

from Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past by Giles Tremlett:

One testimony, of a seven-day train trip of women prisoners and their children locked into goods wagons, evoked Primo Levi in its details of hunger, of people forced to live in their own filth, of cold, disease and the death of small children. One of the worst testimonies came from Teresa Martín, who spent her infant years in a disease-ridden women’s jail in Saturraran, in the Basque Country. ‘The memories are still there. If anyone wants the memory of what happened to continue, all they have to do is ask. I am sixty-two. This is the first time I have talked about it. It is the first time anybody has asked.’

The Catalan broadcaster was inundated by letters. Some correspondents drew perplexed comparisons with Argentina, where the right-wing juntas of the 1970s stole children from prisoners who were secretly killed, the desaparecidos. ‘Why do we know more about what happened in Argentina or Germany during their dictatorships than we know about what happened here for forty years, even though it ended twenty-five years ago?’ asked one viewer. ‘I am a university-educated woman. I cannot understand why, after so many years of study, this has never appeared in a history lesson,’ wrote another.

the last book I ever read (Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past, excerpt three)

from Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past by Giles Tremlett:

In physical terms, the Valley of the Fallen is virtually all that remains of Franco. It is an amazing disappearing act, further evidence of the power of forgetting in Spain. For Franco, or, more precisely, Francoism, has been condemned to the ignominy of silent disdain. ‘By tacit national consent, the regime was relegated to oblivion,’ says Franco’s best-known biographer, Paul Preston.

Historians cannot be blamed for this. Dozens of biographers and memoirs of those who knew him have been written. Ever since his death, however, the Franco name has become, in the English sense, an F-word. To be called Francoist or a facha is, almost without exception, an insult. To admit in public to the slightest grain of respect or admiration for Franco is to be a political outcast. This is despite, or perhaps because of, the attempts of a handful of Franco diehards who still see him in terms of the hagiography of his own times. One Benedictine, while I was writing this book, even suggested he should be a candidate for beatification. There can be no real debate about Franco in Spain. He is either black or white, bad or good. There is no grey area in between.

the last book I ever read (Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past, excerpt two)

from Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past by Giles Tremlett:

The Civil War was also a bloodbath that pitted brother against brother and neighbour against neighbour. By the time the guns had stopped smoking and Franco had signed his final parte de guerra on 1 April 1939, some half a million Spaniards were dead. There were no exact figures, but it is thought that some 200,000 were executed by the two sides. There were also thousands of dead Italians and Germans, who fought for Franco, and other foreigners who had volunteered for the International Brigades. One in thirty Spanish men were dead. Some 400,000 went into exile.

The war dragged on for three years. Franco could probably have won it in a lot less time. But he preferred to avoid an early battle in Madrid and, anyway, he was not just after military victory. He wanted more than that. His fellow generals appointed him ‘Head of Government of the Spanish State’ in September 1936, thinking they were creating a wartime dictatorship. In fact, in the words of one historian, ‘They had created a Hobbesian sovereign endowed with greater powers than Napolean, a sovereign who was to shed few of those powers over forty years.’

the last book I ever read (Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past, excerpt one)

from Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past by Giles Tremlett:

The night chosen for killing the three women fell a few days after Christmas and just two before New Year’s Eve. A small crowd had formed as the Falangists prepared to carry out their work. There was no lack of volunteers. Only one man, a future Civil Guard officer called Miguel Suárez, protested at what was about to happen. He pulled a young cousin of his out of the crowd and dragged him out of the square, but he could not stop the rest.

The man in charge was Ángel Vadillo. Later to be known by the nickname Quinientos Uno, literally ‘Five hundred and one’, he was the leader of the local Falange, the Spanish Phalanx. This party of the extreme right had gathered just 45,000 votes around Spain (and no seat in the Madrid parliament, Las Cortes) in national elections ten months before. But, as the only party approved by General Francisco Franco, it was growing rapidly in the areas conquered since the military rebellion against the Republic had erupted in July. Vadillo boasted that he had killed 501 rojos – thus gaining a nickname which, by most accounts, he was proud of.

the last book I ever read (The Carpenter's Pencil: A Novel of the Spanish Civil War, excerpt eleven)

from The Carpenter's Pencil: A Novel of the Spanish Civil War by Manuel Rivas:

He realized that everything he was saying had a wounding double meaning. Doctor Da Barca made no reply, as if all he could hear were the din of the train taking him further away from the warm, perfumed embrace of woman. The lieutenant had told him to take a seat in his carriage. After all, he was also in charge of the expedition. They had things to talk about.

Leaving behind the large tunnel that blotted out the urban horizon, the train entered the green and blue watercolour of the Burgo estuary. Doctor Da Barca blinked as if the beauty hurt his eyes. From their boats, with long rakes, the fishermen combed the bottom of the sea for shellfish. One of them stopped working and looked in the direction of the train, his hand shielding his face, erect on the sea’s swaying surface. Doctor Da Barca recalled his friend the painter. He used to like painting scenes of work in the fields and at sea, but not according to the traditional clichés, which turned them into pretty, bucolic pictures. On his friend the painter’s canvases, people were shown merging into the earth and the sea. Their faces seemed furrowed by the very plough that clove the earth. The fishermen were captives of the very nets that seized the fish. It reached the point where their bodies fragmented. Sickle arms. Sea eyes. Face stones. Doctor Da Barca empathized with the fisherman standing erect on his boat, looking at the train. He may have wondered where it was going and what it was taking there. The distance and the din of the engine would prevent him from hearing the terrible litany of coughing ringing out in the squalor of the cattle trucks like skin tambourines soaked in blood. The panorama brought to mind a fable: with its cries, the cormorant flying over the fisherman was telegraphing the truth about the train. He remembered the bitterness his friend the painter felt when he stopped receiving the avant-garde art magazines he was sent from Germany: the worst illness that can strike is the suspension of conscience. Doctor Da Barca opened his case and pulled out a brief treatise with worn covers, The Biological Roots of Aesthetic Feeling, by Doctor Roberto Nóvoa Santos.

the last book I ever read (The Carpenter's Pencil: A Novel of the Spanish Civil War, excerpt ten)

from The Carpenter's Pencil: A Novel of the Spanish Civil War by Manuel Rivas:

The clock at Coruña railway station had always stopped at five minutes to ten. The boy selling newspapers sometimes had the impression that the minute hand, the longer of the two, trembled slightly before giving up again, unable to cope with its weight, like the wing of a hen. The boy thought that, deep down, the clock was right and that eternal malfunction was a stand in favour of realism. He would also like to have stopped, not at five minutes to ten, but four hours earlier, at the exact time his father was waking him in the hovel that was their home in Eirís. In winter and summer alike, a cloud of mist would settle there, compact damp that seemed gradually to be shrinking the house year after year, weighing down the roof, opening cracks in the walls. The boy was sure that, at night, one of its tentacles came down the chimney and stuck to the ceiling with its huge suckers, leaving behind those circular stains like the images of craters from a grey planet. The first waking landscape. The boy had to cross the city to Porta Real, where he would pick up the copies of La Voz de Galicia. Sometimes, in winter, he would run to chase away the cold from his feet. His father had made him some soles with pieces of car tyre. When he ran, the boy went vroom vroom vrooooom to clear a way through the mist.

the last book I ever read (The Carpenter's Pencil: A Novel of the Spanish Civil War, excerpt nine)

from The Carpenter's Pencil: A Novel of the Spanish Civil War by Manuel Rivas:

“The wrath of God exists! It was God’s victory!”

His voice was drowned out by the coughing, no longer the delicate clearing of the throat at the opera but the undertow of a surging sea. The prison governor, assailed by looks from the authorities, decided to go over to him and mutter in his ear that he should cut it short, today was Victory Day and if things carried on as they were they would be celebrating it with a massacre.

The chaplain’s flushed face turned pale, undone by the frenzy of men coughing as if with silicosis. He went quiet, scanned the rows with disconcerted eyes, as if coming to, and mumbled some Latin under his breath.

the last book I ever read (The Carpenter's Pencil: A Novel of the Spanish Civil War, excerpt eight)

from The Carpenter's Pencil: A Novel of the Spanish Civil War by Manuel Rivas:

In the room his sister had given him, there was a bicycle hanging on the wall. It was a bicycle that no-one used, the tyres so clean they looked as if they had never been placed on the ground. The tin mudguards gleamed like sheets of German silver. Before going to sleep, he would sit on the bed in front of the bicycle. As a child he had dreamt of something similar. Or had he? Perhaps it was a dream he dreamt he had dreamed. Suddenly, he felt cheated. All he could remember having dreamt, the dream that displaced all his dreams, was that girl, that young woman, that woman, called Marisa Mallo. There she was, on the wall, like a statue of the Blessed Virgin on the altar.

the last book I ever read (The Carpenter's Pencil: A Novel of the Spanish Civil War, excerpt seven)

from The Carpenter's Pencil: A Novel of the Spanish Civil War by Manuel Rivas:

“It was nothing out of this world. What suggested the sea was the lighthouse, Hercules Tower. The sea was the shadows. I didn’t want to paint it. I wanted it to be heard like a litany. The sea is impossible to paint. A painter in his right mind, for all the realism he would like to introduce, knows that you cannot transfer the sea on to a canvas. There was one, an Englishman–Turner he was called–who did it very well. His shipwreck of a slave traders’ boat is the most astonishing image of the sea that exists. In it, you can hear the sea. In the shout of the slaves. Slaves who possibly knew no more about the sea than the rolling of the hold. I should like to paint the sea from within, but not having drowned, in a diving suit. To go down with a canvas, paintbrushes and the rest, as I’m told a Japanese painter did.

the last book I ever read (The Carpenter's Pencil: A Novel of the Spanish Civil War, excerpt six)

from The Carpenter's Pencil: A Novel of the Spanish Civil War by Manuel Rivas:

“One day an official from the military health inspectorate appeared in the infirmary. He ordered a patient to be examined in his presence. Doctor Soláns was nervous, as if he felt he was being scrutinized. Doctor Da Barca meanwhile stood back, deliberately asking him for advice and handing him the initiative. Suddenly, as he bent to sit down, the official made a strange gesture and a pistol fell out of his shoulder holster. We were there to keep an eye on a prisoner considered dangerous, Genghis Khan. He had been a boxer and a wrestler, and was a bit mad and would suddenly flip. He had been jailed for unintentionally killing a man during a display of freestyle wrestling. He had meant to give him a fright, that was all. From the start of the fight between Genghis Khan and a wrestler called the Lalín Bull, this little man, who was sitting in the front row, had been shouting it was fixed. ‘It’s a fix! It’s a fix!’ Genghis Khan had blood pouring from his nostrils, he could do that, but still this repulsive little man was not satisfied, as if the spectacle of the wound confirmed his suspicions that the fight was fixed. So then Genghis Khan went berserk. He lifted the Lalín Bull, all twenty stone of him, up in the air and threw him as hard as he could on top of the man shouting that it was a fix, who never felt cheated again.

the last book I ever read (The Carpenter's Pencil: A Novel of the Spanish Civil War, excerpt five)

from The Carpenter's Pencil: A Novel of the Spanish Civil War by Manuel Rivas:

“Anarchists and Communists are constantly at each other’s throats. The other day, at the tobacco factory in Coruña, they almost came to blows. A strange creature, this Da Barca fellow!”

“He seems to act on his own. As a link.”

“Well, don’t take your eye off him. He’s clearly up to no good!”

the last book I ever read (The Carpenter's Pencil: A Novel of the Spanish Civil War, excerpt four)

from The Carpenter's Pencil: A Novel of the Spanish Civil War by Manuel Rivas:

“One night, a cold, winter’s night, there was a shipwreck. As you know, there have always been and still are a lot of shipwrecks off our coast. But this was a very special shipwreck. The boat was called the Palermo and contained a cargo of accordions. A thousand accordions packaged in wood. The storm sank the boat and swept the cargo towards the coast. The sea, its arms like those of a crazed stevedore, smashed up the boxes and carried the accordions in towards the shore. The whole night, the accordions played tunes which you can understand were fairly sad. The music was driven in through the windows by the gale. Everyone in the district was woken and heard it, and the two sisters were scared stiff, like everyone else. In the morning, the accordions lay on the beaches like the corpses of drowned instruments. All of them were useless. All of them bar one. It was found by a young fisherman in a cave. He was so struck by the coincidence that he learned to play it. He was already a spirited, cheerful young man, but the accordion gave him an unusual grace. At the dance, Life fell for him so completely that she decided that love was worth more than the bond with her sister. And they absconded together, because Life knew that Death had a foul temper and could be very vindictive. And so she was. She has never forgiven her for it. This is why she roams to and fro, especially on stormy nights, stops at houses with clogs at the door, and asks whomever she meets, ‘Do you know of a young accordionist and that slut, Life?’ And because the person asked does not know, she takes them with her.”

the last book I ever read (The Carpenter's Pencil: A Novel of the Spanish Civil War, excerpt three)

from The Carpenter's Pencil: A Novel of the Spanish Civil War by Manuel Rivas:

“Is it true what I read in the bishop’s newsletter, Da Barca?” Casal intervened ironically. “That at a conference you said man hankered after his tail.”

Everyone laughed, beginning with the doctor, who picked up the thread. “That’s right. Apparently I also said the soul is in the thyroid gland! But now that we’re about it, let me tell you something. In surgery we come across cases of dizziness and vertigo that occur when a human suddenly stands up, traces of the functional disorder brought about by the adoption of a vertical position. You see, what we humans suffer from is a kind of horizontal nostalgia. As for the tail, let’s just call it a peculiarity, a biological deficiency, that man does not have one, or he does, but it’s been trimmed, so to speak. The absence of a tail is a factor worth bearing in mind when discussing the origins of speech.”

the last book I ever read (The Carpenter's Pencil: A Novel of the Spanish Civil War, excerpt two)

from The Carpenter's Pencil: A Novel of the Spanish Civil War by Manuel Rivas:

Doctor Da Barca smiled thoughtfully. Then he said, “The only good thing about borders are the secret crossings. It’s incredible the effect an imaginary line can have. It gets traced one day by some doddering king in his bed or drawn on the table by powerful men as if they were playing a game of poker. I remember a terrible thing a man once said to me, ‘My grandfather was the lowest of the low.’ ‘Why? What did he do?’ I asked. ‘Did he kill someone?’ ‘No, no. My paternal grandfather served a Portuguese.’ He was drunk with historical bile. ‘Well,’ I said to annoy him, ‘if I were to choose a passport, I’d be a Portuguese.’ Fortunately, however, this border will soon be swallowed up in its own absurdity. True borders are those that keep the poor away from a share of the cake.”

the last book I ever read (The Carpenter's Pencil: A Novel of the Spanish Civil War, excerpt one)

from The Carpenter's Pencil: A Novel of the Spanish Civil War by Manuel Rivas:

The reporter Sousa felt partially relieved. This beautiful, ageing woman who had come to the door, seemingly chosen on a whim by the chisel of Time. This very sick man, out of hospital two days previously, with the spirit of a cycling champion. It had been suggested to him at the newspaper, “Why don’t you give him an interview? He’s an old exile. Apparently he even had dealings with Che Guevara in Mexico.”

Who was interested in that nowadays? Only a head of local news who read Le Monde Diplomatique at night. Sousa detested politics. To tell the truth, he detested journalism. He had recently been working in Accident and Crime. It had got too much for him. The world was a dung-heap.

the last book I ever read (The Knockout Artist by Harry Crews, excerpt seven)

from The Knockout Artist by Harry Crews:

It took only a moment to go up to Jacques’s apartment and find the .38 revolver. He didn’t even need a light. He unsnapped the suitcase, slipped the .38 out of its holster, and put it behind his belt. He went downstairs and got in the car and headed toward Exposition Boulevard, driving slowly, as calm in his heart as sleep. On the way, he stopped at a twenty-four-hour Eckerd Pharmacy and bought a can of lighter fluid, a large can.

the last book I ever read (The Knockout Artist by Harry Crews, excerpt six)

from The Knockout Artist by Harry Crews:

They had turned the northern edge of Audubon Park past Loyola and Tulane universities and were headed now toward the zoo and the finish of the five miles they ran every morning. As he always did, when they came into the last quarter-mile, Eugene went up on his toes to sprint and cried, loud enough to turn the head of an old man walking twin poodles: “Balls! Who’s got’m?”

But he knew who had them. Jacques had balls enough for four fighters. And despite the fact that he had already gone over four miles and outweighed Eugene by thirty pounds and had heavy boots on his feet, Jacques began to pull away from him in the sprint to the finish. And he was laughing all the way, his breathing as easy as if he had been walking. Eugene pulled up, leaned over, and put his hands on his knees, gasping. Jacques came to him and put his huge hand on the back of Eugene’s neck.

the last book I ever read (The Knockout Artist by Harry Crews, excerpt five)

from The Knockout Artist by Harry Crews:

“Is that where you’re from, South Georgia?”

“That’s where I’m from.”

“I’m from Mississippi. We’ll get together sometime and talk about chitlins and incest and other southern contributions to culture.”

the last book I ever read (The Knockout Artist by Harry Crews, excerpt four)

from The Knockout Artist by Harry Crews:

What he wished was that he could write better, that he could get what he wanted to say down on paper in a way that was not so crippled. And more than that, he wished he did not lie to his daddy and his mama and his brother, Edsel. He did not even have to lie. He knew that. But there was something that made him want to lie, or at least made lying necessary. It was all very confusing. He knew it wasn’t really necessary to send money home. He could just stop. Except he felt he could never stop. His daddy and mama and Edsel needed the money badly and he had got used to being able to help them out. Writing the letters and sending the money, made it easier to do what he was doing even if he hated what he was doing. But he had to keep doing what he hated so he could write the letters and send the money. He shook his head violently, as if to clear it after taking a punch. These were strange times. Maybe Pete was right, maybe he had knocked himself out too many times. He looked back at the last two words he had written and could not remember what he wished.

the last book I ever read (The Knockout Artist by Harry Crews, excerpt three)

from The Knockout Artist by Harry Crews:

Pete got off from his job as projectionist at the Flesh and Flash around one-thirty, so Eugene was in no hurry. He rode past the Audubon Zoo, which was not one of his favorite places in New Orleans, but where he often went. Across Audubon Park he could see Tulane University and Loyola University where they sat cheek by jowl, darkened silhouettes against the night sky. He liked the universities even less than he liked the zoo because they reminded him of the young men and women who swarmed about them reading strange books, speaking strange languages, and studying about countries with names he couldn’t even say. Since Budd had abandoned him here two years ago he had by necessity changed from a shy, quiet boy to a man who could shuck and jive the paint off the walls if he wanted to. But all the two years had really taught him was how hopelessly ignorant of real learning he was.

the last book I ever read (The Knockout Artist by Harry Crews, excerpt two)

from The Knockout Artist by Harry Crews:

“Some got heart, some got talent, some got both. Take Rocky Marciano. Everybody that ever fought him, beat him. But he retired undefeated, right?” Eugene didn’t answer. He didn’t say anything much all afternoon, except for an occasional grunt or yes or no. But that seemed enough for Budd. “Marciano would take five punches to land one. But Jesus, what a hitter. Archie Moore was the only guy to ever take him off his feet. He hit Marciano with everything but the ring post. But he got off the canvas and whipped the shit out of Moore. All on heart. There was no quit to him.

“And Willie Pastrano, light-heavyweight champion of the world. Couldn’t hit for shit. All points, no punch. But a win’s a win, that’s what they say.

“Then there’s guys like Scott LaDoux. He’d maul you, brawl you, butt you till you bled, step on your feet, and thumb you blind. But he only wanted to win. And he was only doing what the referee let him do. It’s up to the referee to control the fight. But he would have used his teeth if he could’ve got away with it. I never saw a referee that could control LaDoux. Last I heard he was refereeing wrestling matches. Jesus, wrestling matches, after being in with some of the best fighters in the world. Well, what the hell, we all gotta do something.”