The Low Voices

by Manuel Rivas

  He added, ‘And you’re staying here!’

  He didn’t say this to hurt me; it was just a statement of fact. He was right. But this annoyed me. There was always somebody emigrating. Why leave like this, one by one, and not all of us together?

  On the subject of emigration, we always talk about the nostalgia of the one who leaves and not the one who stays at home. There is sadness in the one who is leaving, but also hope. The unmitigated sadness belongs to the one who isn’t leaving. At that time, all emigration was to Europe, in particular Germany, England, Switzerland and France. But in Castro, as in the rest of Galicia, long before Marshall McLuhan, the theory and practice of the ‘global village’ was already well known. It was often to escape the hostile, suffocating atmosphere of local bosses, as evidenced by that song recovered by Xurxo Souto, which was sung when the large ocean liners departed for America: ‘You’re staying there, you’re staying there, with priests, monks and soldiers!’

  Castro was small, but it was a mappa mundi. If you asked around, you could hear news from the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Uruguay, Venezuela, California … Legendary names: Ventura, Cardama, O Trust, A Manca, Enrique de Bras, Evaristo da Ponte, Manolo of Africa, Manolo Martín … In our childhood, however, most had a European destination. And, if it was sad to leave, the return of the ‘emigrant’s suitcase’ was a cause for celebration. An ark containing wonderful new things. For us, not just toys you couldn’t get here, but also, during adolescence, the smugglings of desire: records, magazines with naked bodies, daring clothes …

  The first television set I ever saw, before Leonor’s pub had one, was that brought by Rigal and Sara when they returned from Germany. They were among the first emigrants to Germany and returned in the early 1960s. When their television set was installed, the house was taken over by the local neighbourhood. The picture wasn’t very good, but it didn’t matter. Standing next to the screen was María Vitoria, Rigal and Sara’s daughter. She also had come back from Germany! Blonde with pigtails, tall, a mysterious look. Actually, perhaps we were the mysterious ones, the way we gawped at her. But why look at the screen if you could look at María Vitoria?

  In Castro, the first teacher I had was called Don Bartolo. Everybody there had a nickname, and his was White Horse. That was the first thing I learned, before I even got into the classroom. The state school was called Catechism, which just goes to show the ironic precision of the locals when it comes to naming things. The teacher was a stocky man who cast a shadow of doctrine and fear. On the far wall, behind the teacher’s desk, the school was presided over by a crucifix and a large portrait of the dictator with an ermine robe and a rider’s whip. They hung there, the two of them, but in very different conditions. Jesus on the cross, naked, nailed, with the crown of thorns and clotted blood on his head and back. Franco the emperor, lofty gaze, larger than his stature, with the powerful presence that comes from being well clothed. Three years with the same stage set in front of our eyes was a long time. The eyes send information, and then the imagination starts working on its own. What you could see was the Caudillo who ruled over everything and everyone, and that helpless, abandoned King of Kings who’d been beaten to death. Christ was a little higher, his head tilting towards the right. The Crucified’s gaze indicated the man with the whip. He clearly had something to do with it.

  At school, a great deal of importance was given to the so-called Formation of the National Spirit. The teacher was a man who was confident in what he was saying. It couldn’t be otherwise. Sometimes, he took us into the playground, an open area separated from the mountain and fields only by a hedgerow, made us each pick up a stick and, in a martial voice, directed manoeuvres to confront the enemy. The enemy existed. Anti-Spain existed. We weren’t quite sure what it was, what it looked like, but it existed and he would sometimes give it a name: the Red Hordes, the Judaeo-Masonic Conspiracy, Perfidious Albion. Denominations that were reminiscent of the youth gangs active in areas of cheap housing, which were known as Cyprus or Korea. In any case, for us, this was a bit of fun. Crawling along the ground, camouflaged by the grass, joyfully obeying the order to shoot anything that moved: crows, sheep, the jet aircraft that left behind two vapour trails in the sky because of our firepower. We played our war games in a place that had once been a battlefield. The scene of the Battle of Elviña. One of our forts was precisely the large rock, the Crag of Goliacho, where the Napoleonic French mortally wounded Sir John Moore. While working the land, my father came across a button that said Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. There was a hiding place in the rock where Moore was cut down, with a vegetal covering of laurels. Here we smoked our first cigarettes, which were sold individually at the exit to Monelos Cinema. Here we trembled in another war. The war of first embraces. Furtive love.

  The teacher had a stick he used as a pointer for the blackboard and maps. But sometimes, when the man became consumed by anger, the stick would turn into a primitive, terrible weapon. I remember the day he laid into one of the boys, Rafael, who was a little younger than me. The boy suddenly wriggled free, let rip a fearful howl and legged it out of the classroom. At this point, the teacher, with his staff of office, announced, ‘After him! And, when you’ve got him, bring him back here!’

  So it was we went after Rafael like a pack of hounds. He was lucky he was as fleet-footed as a hare. But our pursuit was relentless, following the master’s orders. I understood that day there is no greater pleasure for a human than hunting down another human. But something unexpected happened. When we were far away from the school and the teacher could no longer see us, a dissident emerged from the pack of pursuers, stretched out his arms and stopped us. It was Xoán, the giant of the school. He had previously broken a leg. He’d fallen off a wall, and a rock had landed on top of him. He went to hospital and, when he came back, he was twice as big. Apparently, they’d tried out a vitamin complex on him. We all wanted to break a leg after that, so we could receive these extraordinary vitamins. But Xoán did not abuse his power. He was a good classmate. His fist now panned across our faces. And he said, ‘Anyone who touches the boy will get a beating that will land him at the gates of hell!’ Or something like that. A biblical mouth. A biblical fist as well. The feeling one had come face to face, in body and soul, with the beginning of all things.

  The teacher in Elviña was called Don Antonio. He adored that black boxer, Cassius Clay, later renamed Muhammad Ali to remove the inherited trace of slavery. We used to study a list of Visigothic kings, the great deeds of the conquistadors of America, but, in our school around the middle of the 1960s, the real king was Cassius Clay. All because of the teacher. To stand up or walk, he needed crutches. His legs were short and he rotated as he walked, leaving sudden, anatomical wakes in the air behind him. An illness from his childhood, they said. Apart from that, he was a well-built man with the neck of a bull. When he sat in his chair behind the desk, his smooth, prominent head that looked as if it had been varnished, his graphitic look, which was dark and shiny, turned him into a kind of hypnotic, feared idol. Even the globe, positioned on his desk or on top of the wardrobe that served as a library and archive, resembled a minor satellite orbiting that human star. When he moved, the motive power – his energetic head – kept the motionless part of his body on tenterhooks and seemed to carry the fate of the whole class. He had the added misfortune of living on an upper floor in a house near the school, which left him no choice but to climb and descend twenty steps every day. He did this on his own, leaning on his crutches. This was his battle. A struggle we pupils witnessed every morning, the way he came down, twisting and turning, confronting the malfunctions of his body on the lethal arena of the staircase.

  Don Antonio was a rapid man, mentally agile, with a gaze that encompassed the invisible. From his panoptic perspective, he could see the classroom upside down and inside out. He couldn’t just read your thoughts. You could feel the trepanation, the way he extracted your thoughts and dissected them on the desk. Why didn’t he call out from the s
taircase? Why didn’t he let someone help him? He would glance over at us from the landing, while we watched him out of the corner of our eyes. The vision of his slow descent was the image of an epic, painful story, of wounded knowledge. The laborious passage became a kind of sinister rite. Nobody would have been surprised if a trapdoor had opened in the staircase one day and the teacher had disappeared.

  Don Antonio’s school in Elviña

  In class, he was efficient and hard. He could even be cruel when it came to corporal punishment, the way he moved his strong arm and the stick acquired an autonomous existence, detached from the brilliant brain. I can see him now, or at least I think so. The teacher’s perplexed gaze, the way he checks his own arm, having beaten a pupil. This used to happen a lot during catechism on a Saturday morning. Only the right answer would do. For some reason, he was always tense that day. We had to memorise everything, he never explained anything. He took the lesson, and there was no room for mistakes. Not even when it came to the episode with Balaam’s donkey. The stick and the ruler were work implements. They weren’t just taking up space. The first day of class, one boy would hand the teacher the instrument of punishment by order of his parents. Don Bartolo used it as much as Don Antonio. This wasn’t a topic that was ever discussed outside of class. Or in class, either. Don Antonio was competent. The one who taught best. Though he did have a problem with women. Not just with one or two. With the female race. With all of them, or so it seemed. The worst insult for a child was to be called a ‘little woman’. When he reached this limit, the tone of his voice would prick like a needle:

  ‘Little woman! You’re just like a little woman!’

  Everything in him changed, speech and body, when a fight in the world heavyweight boxing championship was due to be broadcast. That day, he would transfer our class to the bar O da Castela, which had the only television in that part of Elviña. As far as I know, a unique, unprecedented move in Spain and perhaps in the world. He didn’t care what others might think. Cassius Clay versus Sonny Liston. The whole class in motion. And at the front, flying on Canadian crutches, a body making quick, abrupt strokes, in the direction of the ring, locked in combat with the world: the teacher.

  15

  You Will Never Be Abandoned

  WE CHILDREN SLEPT on folding beds. This way, in the morning, when we got up, our bedroom could become the sitting room. From that window, you could see the city like a large, illuminated ship, the friendly light of the lighthouse, which proclaimed in Morse code, ‘You will never be abandoned!’ To the west, there were other, frightening glows that emanated from the furnaces and chimneys of the oil refinery in Bens. They looked like giant flamethrowers, an apocalyptic picture in the night, since that was where the sun set. On the other side of the house, where the front door was, there was only mountain. A mountain with a split personality. During the day, the unending forest, the so-called Priest’s Wood, was an undiscovered land for exploring, a place of adventures. At night, a hostile inferno, a place of loss, where the world’s bad temper muttered and groaned.

  One night, my father threw María and me out of the house. We must have been about nine. We used to fight a lot back then, like cat and dog. He wasn’t in the habit of hitting. Nor was my mother. He would go to bed very early. For two reasons. Because at six he was already up, on his way to work. And because he didn’t want to pay the electricity company any more than he had to. He wasn’t a devotee of Our Lady of the Fist, but he was in permanent disagreement with the powers that ruled this world, be they the Vatican or Fuerzas Eléctricas del Noroeste. He had this intuition. Were we to follow his example, there would never be an energy crisis, nor would we suffer from climate change. He never gave way in his militancy against the electric empire. Even in his old age, when central heating was installed at home, he would silently go around turning off the radiators. When somebody complained about the temperature, he would keep quiet, like a member of the Secret Society of Disconnection. But back then we were reading like crazy and would await the arrival of the extinguisher of light with trepidation. He didn’t put on a show. This was a stealth operation. He can’t have enjoyed it, but the battle had to be won. We waited for a while. Until the sounds of sleep emerged from the master bedroom. Then we turned on the light. Like traitors.

  But that wasn’t the reason he threw us out of the house that night. He was right. He wanted to sleep, and we wouldn’t stop fighting. That terrible bone of contention that can lead you to hate the person you love in a minute, and after that you don’t remember what it was. We were struggling furiously when he got up, took us by the arm, opened the door and landed us beneath the stars, on the edge of that locus horroris, the Priest’s Wood. We were amazed to hear the lock turning behind us. A minute earlier, we had hated each other and been scratching each other’s faces. Now, suddenly, the two enemies were alone in the universe. Expelled from the hearth. And, as is well known, there is no greater fear than the fear of being abandoned.

  We were alone in the night, listening to the inner sounds of the house, that solitary house of ours that resisted all tempests. How moved I was by the words Henri Bosco used to describe his home: ‘The house fought bravely.’ The truth is we soon stopped feeling the Hansel and Gretel syndrome. We forgot the cause of our fight. We held hands. We were more united than ever. We swore there would never be another war between us. And the spell worked. From a terrible sense of unease we went to a feeling of calm and then an exciting happiness. If the patriarchal door remained closed, where were we going to seek refuge?

  There were our uncles and aunts. It is common these days to talk about the genome. The similarities and differences between humans and closely related animals such as chimpanzees, bonobos and orang-utans. It’s not true that they don’t have language or use tools. As the great Uruguayan Pablo Casacuberta once explained, we’re almost identical in everything. What is the main difference? We humans have uncles and aunties!

  And there María and I were, happily going through our wonderful list. A Gaiteira, O Birloque, Anceis, Sada, Sergude, the barber’s shop on Bizkaia Street, the tavern in Almeiras … We even had an uncle in Seville: Benito, a meter reader for an electric company, as it so happened. I was under the impression Uncle Benito had walked from Corpo Santo to Seville as a young man, because I was always hearing about the way he walked. He wandered the streets of Seville on foot, from porch to porch, from meter to meter, and in summer the ground became scorching hot. Especially, one imagines, for an employee of an electric company whose job is to charge for kilowatts. Carmina’s mother would always invite this nice young Galician, so well mannered, with a tenor’s voice, into the courtyard, so he could rest in the shade and drink a lemonade. And that was how Benito and Carmina met and got married. Thanks to electricity. Quite apart from his opinion about companies in the electricity sector, my father, like everybody else, was very fond of Benito.

  When he was much older, my father went to take the exam for his certificate of primary education. He studied a lot, with my sister Sabela. He did everything well, but when they asked him the names of some parasites, he fell silent. He didn’t want to say what he was really thinking. At the examiner’s insistence, he gave the name of a parasite that had nothing to do with capitalism or politics: a tortoise. He was very pleased with himself for including this touch of irony. The examiner liked it as well. His next task was to write an essay.

  The theme? ‘My Holidays’.

  My father put down his pen, stood up from the table and headed for the exit. The teacher called after him and asked for an explanation. Why leave now? He replied, ‘I cannot write about something I do not know.’ She kindly insisted, ‘Please sit down. You may write about anything you like.’ So my father wrote about Uncle Benito’s adventure, the legend that he’d gone walking from Corpo Santo to Triana Bridge. He described this enchanting city where meter readers met luminous women in courtyards in the shade. They could even get married and be peacefully happy. And he added, ‘I really liked Sevi
lle, I really did.’ But he never went there. He didn’t like long journeys. He liked travelling less and less. During his final years working, he would get up very early, two or three hours before he had to, and drive the Renault 4 or ‘Cuatro Latas’ very slowly, to avoid unfriendly traffic.

  We had lots of places to go. Uncles and aunts formed a republic, in every sense of the word. There was Pepa in A Gaiteira, who’d always been a keeper of harmony. In O Birloque, Felicitas, but also Aunt Amparo with her sewing workshop. I loved going there. I have always felt well in hairdressing salons and sewing workshops. Half a dozen girls worked in Amparo’s workshop and would laugh and gossip in time to the pedals of the sewing machines. Suddenly, the machines remained in suspense. The voice of Juana Ginzo or Matilde Conesa in the radio dramas of Guillermo Sautier Casaseca. That was how to reach the hearts of people. You had the right to stop your Singer out of emotion! A man, a little man, felt like a dandy in that place. Some of those girls must have been reading Corín Tellado. The equivalent for men was western novels. On this issue, I still had a few inches to grow. I was immersed in the comic books Capitán Trueno and El Jabato. The thing that would change everything, when I had my tonsils taken out, was reading The Last of the Mohicans in an illustrated edition by Bruguera. I now had my own hero, Uncas, with his turtle tattoo. A few inches later, the summer before starting at secondary, I took an overdose of the Far West. A kind of training. My friend from Castro, Manolo de Hilario, was a good supplier. And had good taste. He’s still a great reader of the best literature. And a specialist in the installation of large cranes. Cranes, like ships, are the most fascinating human architecture. Railways as well. There we were, heading for the Far West. I trust his sense of smell, which had its beginnings in those discoveries he made when we were children. Most of the novels bore the signature of Marcial Lafuente Estefanía, but he would recommend other authors such as Keith Luger and Silver Kane. The style was different. Today, from time to time, there are still very serious fights between very serious writers on the subject of whether style exists or not, and what it is. I think these debates take place between people who have never read western novels with the necessary suspension of disbelief. On the hottest days in summer, when the hours were dozing in the shade, Manolo de Hilario and I were capable of reading five novels on the trot, and I swear the style – the aura even – was perfectly visible. The faces sent back reflections like a mirror. There was, for example, Silver Kane’s smile. The oblique line of irony on his mouth. The electricity of erotic tension in his blazing eyes. Yes, the way Far West heterodoxy talked, when it achieved that mixture of sarcasm and irony, was something we felt very close. One of our local heroes was Juan Juanilla, the son of Corazón, an emigrant in Germany, who came back from the cold dressed as a card player on a Mississippi paddle steamer. He had that style. There were people who travelled long distances to watch him play tute in the bar. Not just because of his skill with the cards. For every trick, the right sentence. The fist banging down on the table. Here it comes: ‘Ever since the invention of gunpowder, men have been finished!’