The Low Voices

by Manuel Rivas

  It was said people didn’t even read one book per year, but the fact is they never took the chapbook into account. The one that sold for five pesetas and could even be rented from the kiosk. The girls had Corín Tellado. The truth is they read more than us. They were more avant-garde. In the hairdressing salons, there were gossip magazines and photo-novels. In the sewing workshops, the fashion magazines were a joy to the eyes and the imagination in those sombre times. The models, who looked like aliens with their daring hairstyles and clothes, were the topic of conversation and much laughter. But they also somehow forced people to express an opinion. Liberality was measured in centimetres. In little time, less than you might think, a girl would appear with the same hairstyle, the same clothes. On her own, walking down the road from Elviña to Castro, she could alter reality. Western novels could be read at any age. Years later, in the 1990s, I came across Silver Kane again. We were on the Irish Sea, having reached the 54th parallel, in the region of Black Rock, and he was being read in their bunks by iron sailors, real cowboys on that unceasing, indomitable frontier. Tied in so they wouldn’t be knocked about by the waves, they read with an expression that was familiar to me. The oblique smile. Somebody reading out what the rich heiress of a ranch says to the guy who resists her: ‘Listen, cowboy, I’m looking for a real man. Have you seen one anywhere?’ Listen. The sailor reads aloud. It’s Boquete from Catoira who replies off the cuff, like a classic, ‘There was one, girl; with you, that makes two of us.’

  During that summer full of literature from the Far West, where was María? She really did keep to the frontier. We were palefaces, she was an Indian. At home, other, shabby-looking books started doing the rounds at night. One day, my mother opened one of those strange visitors, I remember it was Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar. She opened another, by Henry Miller. I can see her now, she read something that surprised her and then glanced at María: ‘Don’t go so fast!’ My mother believed in the power of books. She loved them and feared them. She’d read lots of lives of saints.

  My father heard us talking excitedly in the middle of our misadventure. Just like Uncle Francisco. He opened the door and sent us to bed without another word. María and I never fought again. And that night we still had time to turn on the light so we could read while my father fell down exhausted on the road to Seville.

  16

  A Family Photo

  THERE IS A family photo in the album. An official photo, so to speak. It was taken in a photo studio in Catro Camiños, in A Coruña. There are six of us – my parents and their four children, two girls and two boys. All looking very serious. In my parents, there is an expression of distrust. The camera, especially if it knows it’s being questioned, registers that feeling very well. Still today, the photo contains a vibration of impatient hostility. Of course, it was possible for us all to pose happily together for a photo. There are photos like that, at a party, some time later. But if we’re here, in the photo studio, it’s out of a sense of duty, out of necessity. In order to apply for a university grant, something María and I wanted to do, we had to enclose a photograph that showed a ‘numerous family’. I remember the day well. It was raining. My father had escaped from work and was in a hurry. He swept back his damp hair, which was a kind of time warp, in black and white.

  The first family photo was taken several years earlier. One Sunday morning in summer. In Méndez Núñez Gardens, next to the monument dedicated to Concepción Arenal. A difficult place to forget, since the monument consists of a goldfish pond surrounded by thick chains, with the powerful presence of an iron eagle. It’s a public holiday. Full of light. There must have been music and tastes, but they do not form an active part of my memory. The light does, though. Everybody carries a little light with them that day. My mother, for example, wears a hat with a tulle veil. She’s the one who takes the initiative when the photographer appears. Yes, we’ll have our photograph taken. Finally. My mother gathers us together. Tells us to pose. It’s a shame we don’t have a good portrait of the whole family. So it’s not only an act of happiness, it’s also a responsibility. An account that has to be settled with destiny. She positions us. Glances around. The final touch. That’s it. Attention please!

  Motionless. All of us looking towards the photographer. He’s a fat man. Almost as wide as he is tall. He bears a certain resemblance to Oliver Hardy. He wipes his resinous brow with a handkerchief. He seems to be involved in a conflict with his body and clothes. A disaffected suit, too long or too short, who knows? He struggles with the knot in his tie. Stands up. Breathes. Stares. Examines, blinks, clicks his tongue. During the preparations, we remain very still, mute, with the complex of a group that doesn’t fit. Eventually, he prepares the flash. Gestures with his left hand. Last warning. Looks through the viewfinder. Moves his right foot forward. Sways slightly, bends his knees. This position gives the man back a little symmetry.

  ‘Smile!’ he shouts. ‘It’s not a funeral!’

  He jots down his address on the page of a notebook. He looks tall now. My mother searches in her bag for her purse. Opens it and takes out the money. These are two laborious, semi-secret operations. My father stands apart, his hands in his pockets. It’s Sunday. The photo will be ready on Tuesday afternoon, no doubt about it. So there we are on Tuesday afternoon, accompanying my mother. No, my father is not part of the procession. He works as a builder all day. And sometimes as a musician at night. The address is in the area around Santa Lucía Market. We reach an alleyway. My mother checks the number on the piece of paper and knocks at the door. There is no answer. Nobody appears. She knocks louder. In the house opposite, an old woman opens the shutters on the first floor.

  ‘Who are you looking for?’

  ‘A photographer, madam! Is there not a photographer living here?’

  The old woman closes the window with a mournful silence.

  We went back another two or three times. But no. There was no photographer and nobody opened the window. On Sundays, my mother would carefully peruse the gardens. Pay attention to anybody with a camera. Yes, that one’s fat. But people change, they have their right side and their wrong side. One day, she saw him – or thought she saw him – in the group next to the tombola. She ran after him. Cleared a way through the crowd. But the fat man had the speed of light. I sometimes think he’s the one passing by when a man in a suit or overcoat suddenly overtakes me. Hefty, with long strides, fading out of sight. I imagine him going to his real home. Putting down the crippled camera. Opening a darkroom with all the golden memories of all the photographs he never took. There we are, smiling, as united as ever.

  17

  My Mother and the Manifesto of Surrealism

  CONCENTRIC CIRCLES WERE perhaps the first writing in Galicia, together with labyrinths and representations of deer. I say ‘writing’ because they are, without a doubt, signs telling a story in stone, a flint burin in the granite notebook at the mercy of the elements. Astral calendars, liturgical symbols, maps or primitive censuses? There they are, a circular psyche, a cyclical look interweaving time and timelessness. They’re good for thinking and imagining, these petroglyphs that date back to a period known as human prehistory, but constitute a masterful period in the history of the line. What we can say is that their authors were good calligraphers, had ‘good handwriting’, a desire for style, and control over their drawing, the most remarkable feature of which is the extreme simplicity that contains endless information.

  This is what my mother’s mouth looks like.

  I cannot reproduce fragments of my mother’s soliloquies. Needless to say, she only ever talked to herself when she was alone or in the presence of a close relative she assumed was immersed in their own work. María and me, for example, doing our homework. From time to time, the murmur of my mother’s stream of consciousness would grow louder, accelerate, even unfold or diverge into different voices that would sometimes argue vociferously with each other. This happened a lot in what might be called ‘places of water’. At the kitchen sink or
at the place for washing clothes, which might be the local river or the basin my father ended up installing next to the whimsical well. He dug that well for years. He would resume his work every summer, when the well dried up. Until he came across another of those ‘false springs’ that deceived him and filled him with hope. In this way, he got down to fifteen metres, when his figure would be swallowed up by blackness and he thought he had finally reached the end. Confronted water’s Alzheimer’s. The story of that well was the story of a failure. He had built a void. He had also built a desire. I always approached that well with shame and resentment. But now I see it as the mouth of literature. I see my father silently digging or dynamiting stones and language in search of his own stream of consciousness.

  At the kitchen sink, in the rotating action of hands doing the dishes or the movement of washing in the river, my mother talks to herself in suspense. She murmurs, shares secrets, furiously replies to an impertinence or question. There are times it would have been very interesting to know who she was talking to. There was one particular situation that transformed her whole body. An extreme case of metamorphosis. The rage brought on by injustice. She was never violent, she was well mannered, gentle in speech, of a sunny disposition. But I remember her once in an office of the town hall, tired of being mistreated, swearing she would come back with a rock like the one María Pita threw at the pirate and admiral, Francis Drake. So here is my mother, talking to herself. Her face changes. She grows hot, laughs, her eyes become all atmospheric. They glint, cloud over, flash, remain in misty suspense. All of this has to do with words. There’s something going on in the kitchen. I look up from my book or exercises and stare at her, simultaneously amazed and disturbed, not daring to interrupt. If she’s opening up like this, it’s because she’s possibly in a landscape of confidence. I cannot recall what she was saying, probably because at the time I was more concerned with the expressive phenomenon than with the expression itself. My memory is made up of remnants, beads of language that go forwards and back, rotating.

  The author’s mother (on the left) and Aunt Paquita

  It might be said that at this point my mother was wearing her stream of consciousness on her sleeve. She was an open body. She was talking. And others were talking through her. Who were they? In Waiting for Godot, there’s a scene in which Vladimir and Estragon hear the low voices of the dead. They make a noise like wings. Like leaves. Like sand. They whisper. They rustle. They murmur.

  VLADIMIR: To be dead is not enough for them.

  ESTRAGON: It is not sufficient.

  No, it is not sufficient. Why does Juan Preciado return to Comala? His mother makes him promise, that’s true, in order to reclaim the inheritance of his father, Pedro Páramo. But what is that inheritance in reality? His mother describes the place where she is sending her son like this: ‘The air changes the colour of things there. And life whirrs by as quiet as a murmur … the pure murmuring of life.’ Comala may be desolate, but it is not a non-place. On the contrary, it is the place of humanity, as in Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ there is the room of humanity. The place where being dead – or alive! – is not sufficient.

  We don’t really know what literature is, but we can detect its mouth. Not only in books, but in life as well. This mouth rarely warns us it is going to open. It takes the form of a rumour. A murmur. It can even be closed, covered in earth, wounded, feeling how the words swarm excitedly around it. It can be a mouth that is contorted, painted, voluptuous, dehydrated. It can be scandalous, incontinent, enigmatic, impudent, stuttering. What it doesn’t want is to dominate. It is always an eccentric mouth. Alone or in a group, it talks to itself. Its inner movement is that of the dance in which the bodies of words contract or expand while turning. The mouth murmurs Rosalía’s poem:

  Of those footsteps

  That they dance now,

  Forward and back,

  From back to fore.

  Years ago, a friend from Soneira Valley, Roberto Mouzo, an enthusiast of signs in the manuscript of earth, handed me a series of paper reproductions of the petroglyphs on the Death Coast, where there were lots of concentric circles grouped together. These drawings remained on my desk for a long time, turning invisibly around me. One day, I had to fill out one of those questionnaires about the limits of fiction and truth, invention and memory … I was both sorry for replying and unhappy with my answers. But the concentric circles were there. Whatever they might mean for experts, for archaeolatry, they murmured a response about reality and the way to view it. Reality turned out to be just one of the circles of reality. What a ridiculous piece of reality is seen by those who confuse it with sticky topicality. The optics of enlargement shown by the circles include the inner and outer senses, memory and imagination. In The Disasters of War, Goya has a title: ‘One Can’t Look’. From when we were little, the slogan of fear: ‘One Can’t Say’. Or: ‘That’s a sin’.

  The mouth said what couldn’t be said. It sounded like a sin.

  The departure point for the expansion of the petroglyph is shaped like the mouth that talks to itself. There it was, fermenting, on tenterhooks, both discovering and creating secrets. The petroglyph of concentric circles took me to an unusual, unpredictable place above time, like the overgrown track to A Cavaxe. To the beginning of the ‘Second Manifesto of Surrealism’: ‘Everything leads to the belief that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low, are not perceived as contradictions. It would be vain to attribute to surrealism any other motive than the hope of determining this point.’

  The energy source that drives this hope is the insufficient. The simultaneous walking of desire and pain. Like Charlie Chaplin the Tramp, it rests on both of these. The first films we saw were in the Hercules Cinema, in Monte Alto. All of us waiting expectantly in the dark chamber. The whole cinema mimicking the roar of the Metro lion like a liberation. But, before that, we had a logo of our own: the lighthouse casting a beam across the screen that was met with enthusiastic applause. I was very small. From those films, the only images that wash up are those of Tarzan and Charlie Chaplin the Tramp. Down Torre Street, María walked like Chaplin when she was little. This way of walking activates the mouth of imagination and memory. I became acquainted with that mouth very quickly. But I didn’t know it had inspired the enigmatic drawing of the concentric circles or been described in the ‘Second Manifesto of Surrealism’.

  At the time, it was nothing more or less than the mouth of my mother talking to herself.

  18

  The Glazier and Long Night

  THE FIRST BOOK to enter our house that wasn’t a schoolbook was a monumental work. Judging by the title, Five Thousand Years of History, by the size and thickness, a real stone slab. One of those works that leave an immortal mark on your head if they land on top of you. My mother bought it in the La Poesía bookshop on Santo André Street. We went down to the city with her and carried that book between us, as if on a platform in procession. Five thousand years of history on the back of humankind. My word, it was heavy! We carried it with a mixture of respect and glee. In particular because of the circumstances in which it was purchased. It was the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the Virgin of the Sea. We wanted to buy her a gift. Typical presents for mothers were household items. In reality, they weren’t for them. They acted as intermediaries. We were thinking of buying her a coffee machine or something like that. And that was when she took us to La Poesía and said, ‘Actually, no. This time, we’re going to buy a book.’

  As a girl, my mother had been a contented, clandestine reader. She knew verses by Rosalía de Castro off by heart, even though her favourite poem, the one that trembled on her lips, was the funeral oration Curros Enríquez dedicated to the author of New Leaves, one of the harshest secular psalms in the history of Galicia: ‘Ah, of those that wear on their forehead a star! / Ah, of those that wear on their lips a song!’ A poem that su
ms up all this history like the plot of a detective story in which the person who embodied Galicia the best (a contemporary Mother Earth goddess) is devoured by her contemporaries: ‘The muse of the peoples / that I saw go by, / she was food for the wolves, / consumed she did die … / Of her the bones are / that with you will belong.’ We are still living one of the chapters of that nightmare, with the deceased, like Castelao, held under ecclesiastical lock and key in a Pantheon of Illustrious Galicians that isn’t even public heritage. Her beyond should be Adina Cemetery, the one she sang about, and Castelao’s should be the homeland of exile, La Chacarita, the cemetery with the most bird’s nests in the world.