The Low Voices

by Manuel Rivas

  It was to see oneself in the mirror and feel humiliated, as when one suffers an inexplicable punishment. The barber’s chair, where adults sat so contented and trusting, a magazine or newspaper open in their hands, more or less indifferent to the artistic process being performed on their heads, was an executioner’s chair for us little ones. Our locks fell to the floor, the wild beast retreated. The head was humiliated. But that wasn’t the feeling with which one left Uncle Francisco’s barber’s shop. Not for stylistic reasons. He wasn’t heterodox when it came to the dominant haircut. The scissors and mowing machine advanced implacably over the skull’s lawn. But what happened to one’s head in that place was secondary. The important thing was the discourse. Uncle Francisco’s incessant stream of thought. In reality, a snip-snap of the scissors on high, preceded by a flourish in the air, was not part of the haircut, but the start of a new paragraph.

  When long hair became fashionable, we teenagers gradually abandoned him. In the same building as the barber’s shop, he lent out a room for a rock band to practise. Uncle Francisco’s monologues, of which he had a different one for each client, alternated with this music that had ushered in a fashion he considered disastrous. But he was a narrator above all else, and this situation enabled him to renew his characters and themes. Unlike the haircut, which continued unchanged, the storyteller moved with the times. Irony was his trademark. What kept him on the front line.

  On the right, Uncle Francisco and, sitting down, Aunt Manuela

  ‘Humour, gentlemen, is the pauper’s second sauce.’

  ‘And the first one?’

  ‘Hunger. That’s the best sauce for eating.’

  Only once, as far as he could tell, did Uncle Francisco shut his mouth in the middle of a story and find himself unable to continue. In the story, there was a moment’s terror, when some Falangists broke into the house at night to take away his father, my grandfather from Corpo Santo, with the intention of killing him. At this point, the old man he was shaving, a complete stranger, blurted out:

  ‘I may have been one of them.’

  And he added with a certain pride, glancing around:

  ‘I may even have been the driver.’

  Uncle Francisco held his nerve. Wiped the cut-throat against the leather. Swept it over the old man’s face until removing the last speck of foam. Gave him a few smacks of aftershave. Splish, splash!

  ‘Don’t ever come here again.’

  ‘How much do I owe?’ said the other in surprise.

  ‘Use it to pay for some Masses. Nothing you do will ever be too much to save your soul.’

  Whenever he remembered that day, a shadow fell over his eyes. He explained about the razor, his self-restraint over his instinct, not as something that deserved praise, but as a simple condition, the way a good storyteller should be able to hold his nerve.

  A few years later, I again see María on a table, surrounded by people. It’s in Leonor’s shop and pub, in Castro de Elviña. One summer’s afternoon, after lunch. Most of the men are outside, working. The hour and the absence of men allow the women to be inside the shop, in the shade. They’re also working. Sewing, embroidering, knitting. And María is standing on top of the table. Reading the newspaper aloud. From time to time, they ask her to repeat something. An incident, perhaps. There is no radio or television. María is reading with the lantern of her green eyes, in the midst of a friendly silence. After a while, they lift her down off the table. Caress her. Give her a banana and some cherries. She shares this first wage. Of cherries.

  Corpo Santo tasted of cherries.

  This was the place where my maternal grandfather, Manuel, lived. We never knew our maternal grandmother, Xosefa. She died young, because of an illness, and left behind ten children. Two perished during the misery that followed the Spanish Civil War. Before that, during the coup of 1936, a Fascist group arrived in the night and dragged my grandfather outside to ‘take him for a walk’. He was Republican. And Christian. He was also secretary of the Farmers’ and Stockbreeders’ Mutual. The fact he could write must have been his downfall. On one occasion, he refused, as secretary, to draw up and sign a contract for the sale of cattle in bad condition. Another time, he declined to validate a sale that had been agreed late in the night, after a card game. On such occasions, Manuel of Corpo Santo’s expression of resistance, his way of saying ‘I would prefer not to’, was ‘Gentlemen, we’re out of time!’ Whenever he went to the mountain for firewood or animal bedding, he would use the fact he was alone to read or write. He lost all sense of time. And he was lucky that death, in this case, also lost all sense of time. Because he was saved by a miracle. He was saved by the shout of the parish priest, whose conscience had taken him to the scene of the crime on horseback.

  So it was that, in Corpo Santo, four boys and four girls were raised by my grandfather. They grew like cherry trees. The orchards in Mariñas Douradas, the name of that region, preserved the memory of the French song ‘Time of Cherries’. I associate the happiest days with blackbirds. Sometimes, around the beginning of July, a swarm of us cousins would spend the whole day up in the trees, sharing the treasure with mocking blackbirds. When we were small, we stayed there for long periods. As I would often wake up in one bed, having gone to sleep in another, so, for me as a child, it seemed there was a secret passageway linking the hill with the lighthouse to the staircase in Corpo Santo.

  The one who really communicated with a large part of the world was my grandfather. He did this from a table he used as a desk, on the upper floor of the house. It was one of those unpredictable places where the globe alights in order to rest. The globe gives the impression it never stops, it orbits, suspended in space, turning on its axis, but this is very tiring and from time to time it looks for somewhere to set down. When the globe settles on a particular point in the world, something happens. To my mind, it used to alight on that modest desk, where there were piles of postcards and letters from the diaspora. Addresses, stamps, photographic views, where the colours of the Promised Land, primary and intense, fermented. The postcards formed a kind of mappa mundi. He was a real writer. As the ancient Greeks used to say, ‘an interpreter of interpreters’. He wrote letters to emigrants. The ‘widows of the living’ would come, and he would write down news items and feelings that crossed the sea, beyond Marola, the islet that gave our street its name, the mark of farewell on the bay’s mouth. He had very good handwriting. The letters looked like vegetal landscapes. Over in America, if the reader knew how to read, he would see each word and everything named by it, perhaps even a little more. What hadn’t been said.

  Apart from the small planetary desk, there was another extraordinary place in Corpo Santo. A staircase with pine steps and wooden sides. It led from the hard-packed earthen floor downstairs to the wooden floor on the second level, where the bedrooms were and the chests with items of value: deeds, seeds and dowries.

  During the day, everybody worked hard. But when the frontier of dusk was passed, a wonderful metamorphosis took place. The silent creatures hung their work up on a hook and were summoned to a second life. Around food, wine and fire, words came, bringing news and stories. Downstairs, opposite the hearth, was the cowshed. The cows poked their heads out of the mangers, three irrepressible forces sucking grass and blowing out clouds of steam. The cows’ breath was what covered the valley of Corpo Santo every morning. This factory of mist, so realistic, was like a children’s story. The adults had other stories for themselves. Stories about the Holy Company, the souls of nostalgic dead people who hanker after a coffee with a few drops of brandy. Wolf stories, with wolf men and women. Adventure stories, stories of emigration. The stowaway who can’t make up his mind to get off the ship and so spends his life going to and fro, a secret man, hidden. Stories of fugitives on the mountain, the Maquis. Of crime and revenge. The man who heads to the festa, intending to kill a rival, but when he hears the music, reconsiders and throws the knife away, and when the party is over, the other, the one who was due to die, finds
the weapon, the moon glinting on its blade, and takes it up, determined, with a fixed purpose … Stories of passionate love. In an enclosed convent, where the nuns make dummies of the infant Jesus to sleep next to on Christmas Eve …

  That was the point at which we were supposed to visit the fields of sleep. The children, off to bed. We went, groaning or pretending to groan. Because we knew this expulsion was not serious. We would remain, invisible and clandestine, sitting on the top step, under a lamp that transmitted the wind outside, the intensity of the stories, the embers of the fire and our hearts. In that lamp, suspended by a twisted wire, light came and went without doing so completely. It was a place of intermittences that attracted moths. The elders’ talk kept step with the fire’s humour, and our ears with the lamp upstairs. In the window above the sink, we could see the reflected faces talking in the half-light, as if they belonged to another time that was not the past, but was just that: another time. The words fed on the flames, but there came a moment when they fled from the fire into the dark …

  There were unforgettable nights. As when a letter was read out from a suitor of my aunt Maruxa, a girl of seismic beauty.

  To demonstrate his virility, the suitor had written a letter that was recited many times around the fire in Corpo Santo. It began with a wonderful snippet of information: ‘Yesterday, I saw you at the fair and you should know that I didn’t talk to you.’ The laughter made the flames flicker. Further down the page, the gallant author of the letter proceeded to enumerate his properties in order to impress and captivate the letter’s recipient. He recorded in calligraphic acres an unending estate of fields, meadows, hills and plots of land. He then gave details about his livestock: ‘You should know that we combine seven cows, x number of pigs and at least a hundred Leghorn chickens.’ He then added, quite naturally, ‘And a father in disconformable health.’

  Aunt Maruxa, who later happily married Xoán Agra, a taxi driver from Sada, opened her arms and lifted them to the sky like two exclamation marks: ‘You see! I can’t possibly marry this man!’ The huddle of people killed themselves laughing. And killed the night with a polyphony of little bells. The fire laughed as well, in sparks and smuts. The scene was reflected and painted a picture on the window above the sink. That planisphere in chiaroscuro was the last image to be retained on the eyelid of sleep. Cradled by the low voices, the clandestine children fell asleep on the staircase in Corpo Santo.

  4

  The War, the Cow and the First Plane

  THERE WAS A rumour doing the rounds. A glaring alarm for any who chose to see it in the oblique shadow of the news’ typography.

  Both my grandfathers felt the claws of the human hunt that was unleashed with the triumph of the 1936 Fascist coup. One was at death’s door; the other spent time as a fugitive in the mountains, with some colleagues.

  But all I ever heard from them about the war was a couple of stories where they talked about birds. Two omens linked with nature, from which they knew, with a degree of certainty, what was going to happen before it happened.

  At the beginning of that July, Manuel Barrós, my grandfather from Corpo Santo, one day came back home mournful and silent, he who was normally so lively and chatty. He didn’t feel like eating. And he didn’t regain his spirits until he opened his mouth and explained what had happened. On a cart track, there had been a fight between two hoopoes. Two hoopoes? Oh, come on! It can’t have been that serious. The truth is he’d seen lots of fights between animals, the blustering of males, but never felt such horror before. The two hoopoes were pecking each other to death, unyieldingly. My grandfather tried to shoo them away, but they paid no attention to his shouts or threatening stick. Those small birds had turned their whole bodies into weapons. Their whole being into an impulse of death. Manuel of Corpo Santo decided to abandon the place of horror. He interpreted this event as a defeat for the whole of nature. Despite not being at all superstitious, he said, ‘Something terrible’s going to happen.’

  In the other story, the one about my paternal grandfather, the presence of a bird was more phonosymbolic. Early one morning, around that same date, Manuel Rivas, a carpenter from Sigrás, was on his way to work with some colleagues in the back of a lorry. There was a thick fog, so thick it could have been kneaded with fingers, and the lorry penetrated it slowly. After a curve, a priest in a cassock appeared by the side of the road, like a ghost. He was a corpulent man, whose figure was exaggerated by an enormous, black felt hat and an expansive umbrella. The workmen were taken aback at such an early hour and slowly scanned the apparition, which was soon left behind. Until one of them, a young man, imitated the call of a carrion crow from the trailer:

  ‘Caw, caw, caw!’

  The joke brought about laughter, but there was still time to hear the thunderous reply:

  ‘Go ahead and laugh! We’ll all be laughing around the middle of the month!’

  It was the start of July. A good month. The month of St James. The month of festas. Having recalled this episode, my grandfather would murmur, like someone who has suddenly and surprisingly deciphered a historical enigma, ‘He knew it! That priest knew what was going to happen!’ I’ve always been impressed by the potential of this story, of what occurred that morning in the fog. Someone in possession of a big secret goes and reveals it because he is annoyed at a childish joke.

  Manuel, the one from Sigrás, was affiliated to the trade union. And saying ‘trade union’ on the coast of A Coruña meant the National Confederation of Labour. He spent some time in prison during the two black years (the bienio negro) of the Second Spanish Republic, but the judge himself dropped all the charges. He took part in the long, drawn-out strike to achieve an eight-hour working day. Whenever he referred to this struggle, the briefest of incisions into his silence, a libertarian melancholy would emanate from the depths of his irises.

  With regard to language, there was a huge difference between the grandfather who was a farmer and the one who was a carpenter. Manuel of Corpo Santo was talkative; he would quickly make conversation. He talked, with great pleasure, whenever he had company, and he talked when he was alone. He sometimes didn’t realise this – the fact he was no longer alone – and carried on talking to himself. I remember walking with him, holding his hand, as he talked to himself with growing energy, with the dynamo of his voice, that current transmitted by the squeeze of his hand, the feeling we were about to take off. Manuel of Sigrás, on the other hand, spoke very little. I spent more time with him. I knew him better. But not because of what he said, because of what he kept quiet. He expressed himself using a Morse code of silences. Castro de Elviña was close to O Martinete. We would occasionally go there, María and I. We were looked after by Aunt Felicitas, my father’s youngest sister. And we spent long periods in Aunt Amparo’s workshop, where the rhythm of the sewing machines kept time with the emotions of the radio serials. My grandparents’ house was near a quarry. The open-air mine had advanced implacably and deposited their house on a kind of tremulous cliff. Before the quarry was shut down, life was regulated by a kind of dynamite clock, the hours marked by explosions. When my grandmother was embroidering, there would be a moment more silent than silence. She would lift her needle, there would be an explosion, the trembling of windows, and, without making a remark, she would go back to the laborious construction of her embroidery. When my grandfather returned from work, he would take me with him to a tavern in A Cabana. He would say hello when we arrived, but then we would sit in a corner, on two benches either side of a table. The most common drink was a bowl of white Ribeiro, but he always drank light red wine in a glass and invited me to have a soft drink: Mirinda, orange flavour. And so we would keep each other company, sip by sip. From time to time, he would roll himself a cigarette. The column of smoke was slower and denser than the Celtas my father smoked. It climbed and formed a thick cloud illuminated by the lamp. The exhalation produced an animated design, a landscape. His hair was already silvery by then and, when he removed his beret, it produced a lu
minous effect, a kind of phosphorescence. I didn’t like berets or white hair or wrinkles. I don’t think children in general are attracted by the face of old age. But I liked his head. A lot. In his own way, the silent man also used to talk to himself. In between sips and exhalations, he would ponder something. He seemed on the verge of saying it. He glanced up at the cloud. In the background, the cackle of customers at the bar. At which point he would mutter, ‘Boh!’

  The qualities that were prized most highly in the art workshops of Flanders were ‘a fertile look, a sincere hand’. These two conditions were shared by the farmer, the carpenter and the seamstress. My grandmother from Corpo Santo, Xosefa, died soon after the war, when my mother was still a child. The carpenter and the seamstress had three daughters and a son, my father, who ended up being born in Zamora during a snowstorm, when my grandfather was working on the construction of a hospital. The baby was in luck: the first sound he heard was that of his father building a cradle.