The Low Voices

by Manuel Rivas

  IT WAS A beautiful Sunday. María had asked me to go with her to a coastal town where there was going to be a painting competition out in the open. On the coach, she sat next to the window. Everything outside produced light. She also had a little something for that Sunday light. The ferment of colours in her cloth-lined wicker basket, which contained brushes, oils, jars, and the porcelain bowls she used for mixing. The participants had to choose a section of the local landscape. I remember María painted some seaside houses, one of which had a tavern on the ground floor. It was an architecture in retreat, but which re-emerged that day with the light, the desire for style of naval colours, the tavern door like a songful, mysterious mouth. I wandered about, observing and comparing. My eyes didn’t lie, couldn’t lie. In María’s painting, the reconstruction of the memory of colours, there was something I couldn’t find anywhere else. When it came time to announce the winners, in the evening, in the town hall, María’s painting was awarded the prize of honour.

  Our return was silent and bitter. In theory, this prize of honour was the top award. But the ones that paid money were the other awards, which went to local painters. On top of that, the recipient of the prize of honour was obliged to donate their painting to the organisers. So we headed home with the sense of having been honourably done over. María with her basket of colours and painful smile. I think this was a mark of the house. My father gave voice to destiny, as if the stones already knew: ‘The devil lurks behind the cross!’

  For María, it was always important to earn a living by her own means. From when she was young, she gave classes in summer to small children in Castro. From a young age, while studying for her baccalaureate, she formed part of the resistance to Franco. She was active, very involved, with left-wing clandestine groups such as Red Flag. One Sunday, my mother woke me up in a fluster. She had opened a trapdoor in the henhouse and come across a pile of pamphlets. I lied. Said, ‘They’re mine.’ This calmed her down. She was always more afraid for María. She had the feeling María was ahead of her time. And she was right. María distanced herself from Marxist groups, but not from the fight, when she understood that the idea of changing the world should go hand in hand with a new way of life. She lived life as an anarchist. She left to study philology in Santiago, always in search of work to keep herself going. Nothing was beneath her. She was a great fan of arts and crafts. She made her own clothes, her own furniture. She fixed any problems in the places where she lived, with her box of melancholic tools, which all looked like unique specimens, the survivors of old workshops. She would go out foraging in orchards and by the sea. She was a gleaner of the kind painted by Millet, always searching for something useful in what had been hidden or abandoned. There were shop windows in front of which she would always stop to gaze: bookshops and ironmongeries. Groceries as well, where she would gather boxes to make bookshelves for her library. In her library, grammars sat alongside a DIY manual, and The Book of Good Love by the Archpriest of Hita rubbed shoulders with a book she held in high esteem: Anarchist Aesthetics by André Reszler. She recycled everything. In her ideas, she devised her own garden, her own company, with people like Kropotkin, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Hesse, and the texts of the Situationist International and the movement Provo (‘provoke’), impelled by the Kabouters (anarchist ‘gnomes’). She fed like the woodcock, the wood’s guardian: she became vegetarian. She used to joke, ‘Anarchist? Have you any idea how difficult that is!’

  Her other passion was words. The deambulation of words. Their metamorphoses. Their ways of re-existing. She went after them, as she used to go looking for lucky ladybirds or glow-worms in the nocturnal walls of Castro as a child. She carried words in her pockets. On bits of paper scattered about the house like autumn leaves. In notebooks she herself had bound. And, if she had nothing else, then the palms of her hands, her arms, her skin would act as parchment. When she was out of work, she did translations from English and French for the dubbing of films. A job she shared with Lois Pereiro. Sometimes, the two of them would laugh out loud when working on the dubbing of a porno film. ‘Mm, mm, like that, like that, mm, mm, yes, yes, no, yes, I’m coming, not coming, coming, yes, yes, yes!’ The technique involved turning moans into words. Because they were paid by the word, including monosyllables (I think now, with impatient capitalism, they only pay for words with a stress on the antepenultimate syllable). It was occasional work that didn’t last long. Where she worked for longer, with the devotion of a gleaner of words, was on the team that compiled the Galician Academy’s dictionary.

  María Rivas

  We coincided for a time in Santiago. I was studying and working in Madrid, but returned to Galicia to join the team of the weekly magazine Teima, the first to be published in Galician after the Second Republic. It was a time of great upheaval, great disappointments and hopes, during which the regime endeavoured to outlive the dictator, and the ground of history seemed as fragile as a thin layer of ice. Some say it was a failure, that weekly magazine, together with others like it that sprouted up all over Spain. What strikes me as miraculous is that the spring for us should last a whole year. Carrying out reports, in a single day, you underwent the sensation in one place of being received as a saviour of words and in another, not far away, of enduring the gears of silence-piercing hatred. María went with me to some of the more risky locations. She was there on the day of As Encrobas, 15 February 1977, when dozens of guards surrounded the area in order to expropriate lands that were earmarked for mining. Peasant women on the front line, resisting rifle blows with their umbrellas. All day, until sunset. María couldn’t bear it. She didn’t want to be a witness only. She forgot all about me. She went over to the women to attend to their wounds. On her knees, in the mud, covered in dirt and blood. The guards, panting heavily, furious about the outcome, some uneasy, passed in front of the kneeling girl, her bright white skin smeared with dirt, as if they couldn’t see her. At nightfall, she got up and returned without a word to where the photographer and I were standing.

  Chagall talked about the coloured horses Russian workers and peasants painted at his art school to adorn the streets during the first May Day parade to be celebrated after the revolution. After that, there weren’t any more horses, only official portraits. Our coloured horses were those experiences of indomitable journalism in the Spain of the transition, rebelling against the fatality of things being ‘tied and well tied’. We would end up enduring the grey ‘restoration’.

  For a time, María and I shared an old apartment in Algalia, a district of Santiago. It had dripping water in every room (the Weatherman’s stick again!) and the odd mystery. One day, we heard whispers in the attic. There was a door that was always closed. Until we decided to open it any way we could. There was a little man, a simpleton, who had been locked away. He spent the days eating sunflower seeds. The whole floor was covered in husks. He didn’t speak. He only expressed himself with onomatopoeias. He didn’t move. The look of surprise when he saw an unknown girl and boy opening the door. He traced a smile. The smile of pain. He had a nice face that made him look younger than he really was. We spoke to the landlady. She said we weren’t to give it any importance. He was timid enough. Yes, but what was he doing locked up in the attic? The following day, when we woke up, he wasn’t there anymore. There were traces of sunflower seeds on the stairs.

  María was the only one in our family to know that I had been arrested in Madrid. A concealment to prevent family concern. I had arrived in September 1974. I would turn seventeen in October. It was more or less around my birthday. At a demonstration, at nightfall, on Princesa Street. The police had been tipped off. Our initial shouts were a signal for them to charge. They emerged from every direction. A real ambush. A group of demonstrators ran up a dead-end street like lambs following the orders of the boldest among us, who bore a certain resemblance to the poet Leopoldo María Panero. A comic episode, had we not ended up in the most feared building in Madrid at that time – the national police headquarters on the Puerta del
Sol. There were so many of us in the dead-end street they took us there by bus. Most of us were detained for two days in cells packed with people, after we had identified ourselves, stripped down and had our photographs taken. Five people had been squeezed into my cell, but nobody felt much like talking. I was led upstairs to an office to be questioned. It wasn’t a historic moment. Of the two officers present, one didn’t even look at me, taken up as he was with intellectual labours. The other asked me to identify myself again. ‘So you’re Galician? Your accent gives you away.’ As always when it came to the question of phonetics, I was reminded of César Vallejo – ‘The accent dangles from my shoe’ – but this time I didn’t want to bring poems into it.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And are you on the other side? Against Franco?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He gave me a very professional slap across the face and reminded me that Franco was also Galician.

  ‘So you’re the one who’s stupid.’

  I didn’t reply to this. I was struggling to establish a connection between my accent and being opposed to Franco or not. I felt uneasy that the other policeman, the intellectual, might include the term ‘nitwit’ in my record to describe my affiliation. In my nightmare, I was hopeful he would at least write ‘useful nitwit’. That was about it. They had too much work that day to be wasting their time with a snotty student. One of my cellmates, a young worker, came back from questioning with a broken nail and a bloody hand. Not a word of complaint. He didn’t even allow them a gesture of pain. He deserved the company of someone like Max Estrella in Bohemian Lights, but we all stayed quiet, perhaps in the absurd hope that the murmurs and footsteps coming from the pavements of the Puerta del Sol were the echoes of liberating hordes. Nothing. All the echoes vanished into the night. I didn’t feel like a fighter. I was – we were – humiliated people. The following day, a man turned up with a bucket of lentils. He gave us each a zinc bowl and poured in a spoonful of slops. From time to time, he would say, ‘Shit!’ And let out a laugh.

  Boh.

  When they hurt, María and I would share our secrets.

  Her skin was very white and had freckles the colour of maize bread. I liked her way of being. Her body as well. Her virtually transparent skin. The hydrography of her veins. Her cereal freckles. One day, in Algalia, we embraced as a result of the groundswells. She was crying because of a lost love. I was down in the dumps because of some other disenchantment. We fell asleep in that bed so well suited to shipwrecks: surrounded by buckets and bowls to collect the dripping water.

  But this time it didn’t knock.

  The news of her illness arrived when I was in Ireland with Isabel and the children. Isabel was one of the five girls who lived above the bar Dos Ciudades. We were now staying north of the Liffey river, in Temple Villas, right next to the prison on Arbour Hill, which helped keep the rent down. We felt comfortable, at ease, in that Dublin where on a Saturday, near the house, in Smithfield, there would be a horse and potato market. Nobody had come up with the term ‘Celtic Tiger’ yet. In some pubs, they still remembered O’Brien, the man who always kept his right hand in a glove because he’d promised his mother, on her deathbed, that he would never touch a glass of alcohol again. The women selling products in large prams on Moore Street would say to whoever fondled the tomatoes, ‘They’re not pricks, love! The more you squeeze them, the softer they get.’

  It was my sister Chavela who called. There were no mobiles, but the ring of the landline was clear enough. Now I knew why my father never lifted the receiver. He could scent the approach of destiny. María was sick. How sick? Very sick. They’re going to operate on her, but it would seem she has metastasis. She did. It was already too late. One day, I went with her to Santiago. She wanted to speak to the doctor who had operated on her the first time. There was no hope, either in the words or in the eyes or in the gestures of this man. I looked around his consultation room. The walls were bare. Cast in shadow. The doctor spoke with half his face lit up by a desk lamp.

  ‘I had to come back,’ said María when we left. ‘My own journey to the heart of darkness.’

  In the room where María died, in Castro, both my father and my mother died in a relatively short space of time. On the eve of her death, my mother woke up with a strange sense of energy. After a series of long days in bed, she got up and changed the bedclothes; she wanted to do it herself, using white, luminous sheets of the kind she washed by hand. She then lay down and gave us one of her painful smiles. Farewell, farewell! When my father succumbed, he availed himself of all the coryphaeus’ accumulated irony. He asked us to lift him in the orthopaedic bed, assembled by Paco, so he could climb up high and cure his vertigo once and for all. He then came out with a eulogy of mechanics: ‘Industry has come a long way, thanks to us patients!’

  Those of us who stayed behind had the impression they’d left like this, in a hurry, to go looking for their anarchist daughter. Yes, that was the room where María died. During the terminal phase of her illness, she had asked us to help her leave so she wouldn’t have to suffer any more. Her hand reached out to help. The carnival giants, the Catholic Monarchs, were not in the window this time, rather the introverted green of the lemon tree that had grown in the coarse soil and rubble of the first house.

  Acknowledgements

  This book arose from a series of articles called ‘Storyboard’, published in the cultural supplement Luces de Galicia of the Galician edition of the newspaper El País. I would like to thank Xosé Hermida and Daniel Salgado for the kind attention and welcome they gave me. The articles then chose to ferment, and among the people who helped me to see into another time, to recollect, I am particularly grateful for the contributions of Manuel Bermúdez Chao and Carmelo Seoane, owner of A Artabria (Leonor’s old shop and pub) in the Republic of Castro de Elviña. They were both also generous enough to provide photographs of the ‘restless paradise’. Similarly generous was the photographer Xoán Piñón, who retrieved from his archives two photographs that show my sister María when she was young. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to all my family and the company of low voices.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781473511064

  Version 1.0

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Harvill Secker, an imprint of Vintage,

  20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

  London SW1V 2SA

  Harvill Secker is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © Manuel Rivas 2012 by arrangement with Literarische Agentur Mertin Inh. Nicole Witt e. K., Frankfurt am Main, Germany

  English translation copyright © Jonathan Dunne 2016

  Manuel Rivas has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  First published with the title As voces baixas in Galicia by Edicións Xerais de Galicia in 2012

  penguin.co.uk/vintage

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9781846558672

  This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s ‘PEN Translates!’ programme, supported by Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote literature and our understanding of it, to uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, to campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and to promote the friendly cooperation of writers and the free exchange of ideas. www.englishpen.org

  Published
with the support of the Creative Europe programme of the European Union

  The European Commission support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein

  There are short quotations in this book from the following publications: Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden (Grove Press, 1994); Rosalía de Castro, Galician Songs, translated by Erín Moure (Small Stations Press-Xunta de Galicia, 2013); André Breton, What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings, translated by various (Pathfinder Press, 1978); Manuel Curros Enríquez, ‘To Rosalía’, translated by Jonathan Dunne: in Xesús Alonso Montero, Manuel Curros Enríquez e Federico García Lorca cantan en vinte linguas a Rosalía de Castro (Edicións do Patronato, 1994); Valentín Lamas Carvajal, The Peasant’s Catechism, translated by Kirsty Hooper: in Jonathan Dunne (ed.), Anthology of Galician Literature 1196–1981 (Edicións Xerais de Galicia-Editorial Galaxia-Xunta de Galicia, 2010); Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Lights of Bohemia, translated by John Lyon (Aris & Phillips, 1993); César Vallejo, The Complete Posthumous Poetry, translated by Clayton Eshleman and José Rubia Barcia (University of California Press, 1978).