Civil War Rhymed into Forty-Eight Equal Boxes

Look first at box twenty-five, at the small grey bloom of smoke a cutter has thumbed into the block above a general on foot—and then, beneath, at the two lines that finish him: Zumalacárregui quiere / tomar á Bilbao, y muere. He wants Bilbao; he dies; the second verb rhymes and the box closes. A man I remember as heavier than this, and slower in the dying, is here dispatched in a couplet you could hum. The smoke is competent. The death is on schedule.

I will not pretend the sheet is clumsy—it is not. Forty-eight legible scenes, each captioned in a ready jingle, let a buyer hold ten contested years in the hand and recite them like a rosary; the maker knows exactly how much narrative a thumb-sized block will bear, and never overloads it. But watch what the ruling does. The same frame that holds a coronation holds an amnesty holds a bombardment: Solo á Barcelona inquieta, / un bombardeo sugeta—a city shelled into silence, the shelling rhymed with its own unrest, fitted to the identical little window given to a christening. The grid does not know it is narrating a war of extermination, and would not slow if it did.

Its cousins across the border, the block-cut ballad sheets of the Portuguese cordel trade, prize exactly this dense captioned strip and singable tag—and prize it, rightly, above the metropolitan hierarchies that scorned them. So the craft is real; understand what the craft is for. This is not memory but metering—killing ruled down to a throne's footprint, so that a man's last hour, a shelled city, and a baptism arrive at one lullaby cadence and none disturbs the recitation. The rule is not neutral: it is the instrument that teaches the eye grief and pageant weigh the same, and the rhyme is the anaesthetic that teaches the mouth to enjoy the lesson. Forty-eight small anaesthesias, sold by the sheet. The block is already yellowing at the fold, the ink already thinning, the couplet outlasting the killed. When a rhyme can make a bombardment scan—whose sleep, exactly, was the sheet printed to protect? — QK