by Pete Ayrton
Once, when Don Gregorio came to pick me up to go looking for butterflies, my father said to him that, if he didn’t mind, he’d like to take his measurements for a suit.
‘A suit?’
‘Don Gregorio, please do not take offence. I should like to repay you in some way. And the one thing I know how to do is make suits.’
The teacher looked around in embarrassment.
‘This is my trade,’ said my father with a smile.
‘I have a great deal of respect for people’s trades,’ said the teacher finally.
Don Gregorio wore that suit for a year and was wearing it on that day in July 1936 when he passed me in the park, on his way to the town hall.
‘Hello, Sparrow. Maybe this year we’ll get to see the butterfly’s tongue at last.’
Something strange was happening. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry, but they did not move. Those looking ahead turned around. Those looking to the right turned to the left. Cordeiro, the collector of litter and dry leaves, was seated on a bench, near the bandstand. I had never seen Cordeiro seated on a bench. He looked upwards, shielding his face with his hand. When Cordeiro looked like this and the birds went quiet, it meant that there was a storm on the way.
I heard the bang of a solitary motorbike. It was a guard with a flag tied to the back seat. He passed in front of the town hall and looked over at the men chatting uneasily in the porch. He shouted, ‘Long live Spain!’ And accelerated away again, leaving a series of explosions in his wake.
Mothers started calling out for their children. At home, my grandmother seemed to have died again. My father piled up butts in the ashtray and my mother wept and did things that made no sense, such as turning on the tap and washing the clean dishes and putting the dirty ones away.
There was a knock at the door and my parents stared at the handle apprehensively. It was Amelia, the neighbour, who worked in the house of Suárez, the emigrant.
‘Do you know what’s happening? In Coruna, the military have declared a state of war. They’re firing shots against the civilian government.’
‘Heaven help us!’ My mother crossed herself.
‘And here,’ continued Amelia in a low voice, as if the walls had ears, ‘apparently the mayor called the chief of police, but he said to say that he was sick.’
The following day, I was not allowed on to the street. I watched at the window and all the passers-by looked like shrivelled up shadows to me, as if suddenly winter had fallen and the wind had swept the sparrows from the park like dry leaves.
Troops arrived from the capital and occupied the town hall. Mum went out to attend Mass and came back looking pale and saddened, as if she had grown old in half an hour.
‘Terrible things are happening, Ramón,’ I heard her saying, between sobs, to my father. He had aged too. Worse still. He seemed to have lost his will. He had sunk into a chair and not moved. He was not talking. He did not want to eat.
‘We have to burn the things that might compromise you, Ramón. The newspapers, books. Everything.’
It was my mother who took the initiative during those days. One morning, she made my father dress up and took him with her to Mass. On their return, she said to me, ‘Come, Moncho, you’ve to come with us to the park.’ She brought me my best clothes and, as she helped me to do up my tie, she said to me in a very serious voice, ‘Remember this, Moncho. Daddy was not a Republican. Daddy was not friends with the mayor. Daddy did not say bad things about the priests. And most important of all, Moncho, Daddy did not give the teacher a suit.’
‘He did give him a suit.’
‘No, Moncho. He did not. Have you understood? He did not give him a suit.’
‘No, Mummy, he did not give him a suit.’
There were a lot of people in the park, all in their Sunday best. Some groups had come down from the villages as well, women dressed in mourning, old countrymen in hats and waistcoats, children with a frightened air about them, preceded by men in blue shirts, with pistols strapped to their waist. Two lines of soldiers cleared a path from the steps of the town hall to some lorries with trailers fitted with awnings, like the ones used to transport the cattle to market. But in the park there was not the hustle and bustle of markets, but a grave silence, like that of Holy Week. People did not greet each other. They didn’t even seem to recognize one another. All their attention was directed towards the front of the town hall.
A guard half opened the door and ran his eyes over the assembled throng. Then he opened it completely and gestured with his arm. From the dark mouth of the building, escorted by other guards, emerged the prisoners, their hands and their feet tied, roped in a silent line to each other. Some of their names I did not know, but I knew all their faces. The mayor, the trade unionists, the Athenaeum’s librarian Resplandor Obreiro, Charlie, who sang with the Sun and Life Orchestra, the stonemason they called Hercules, Dombodán’s father ... And at the end of the line, hunched up and ugly as a toad, the teacher.
We heard some orders and isolated shouts that echoed around the park like bangers. There was a crescendo of murmurs coming from the crowd, that finally reiterated those insults.
‘Traitors! Criminals! Reds!’
‘Shout as well, Ramón, for the love of God, shout!’ My mother held my father by the arm, as if she were using all her strength to stop him from fainting. ‘Let them see you shouting, Ramón, let them see you shouting!’
And then I heard my father whisper, ‘Traitors!’And then, as his voice grew stronger, ‘Criminals! Reds!’ He let go of my mother’s arm and drew nearer to the line of soldiers, his gaze fixed furiously on the teacher. ‘Murderer! Anarchist! Monster!’
Mum was trying now to hold him back and pulled on his jacket discreetly. But he was beside himself. ‘Bastard! Son of a bitch!’ I’d never heard him aim those words at anyone, not even the referee at the football ground. ‘It’s not his mother’s fault, eh, Moncho? Remember that.’ But he was turning now towards me, urging me on with this mad look, his eyes brimming with tears and blood. ‘You shout as well, Monchiño, you shout as well!’
When the lorries drove off with the prisoners, I was one of the children who ran after them throwing stones. I desperately searched for the face of the teacher to call him a traitor and a criminal. But the convoy by now was a cloud of dust in the distance, as I stood in the park, with clenched fists, capable only of murmuring with rage, ‘Toad! Bowerbird! Iris!’
The Galician writer Manuel Rivas was born in La Coruña in 1957. A campaigning journalist, Rivas is a founding member of Greenpeace Spain and was centrally involved in the protests against the Prestige oil spill caused by the sinking of a tanker off the coast of Galicia in 2002. Rivas, who writes in Galician, has been very important in championing Galician literature and making its stars like the poet Rosalia de Castro known internationally. Many of his fictions have been filmed, including Butterfly’s Tongue, the film of which was directed by José Luis Cuerda. Both book and film are a brilliant portrayal of everyday cowardice and the ease with which people can be made to conform. Subsequent books, The Carpenter’s Pencil and Books Burn Badly, have established Rivas as one of Spain’s most important writers.
FRANCISCO GARCÍA PAVÓN
IN WHICH ARE EXPLAINED
THE ROMANCES OF JOSÉ
REQUINTO AND NICOLÁS
NICOLAVICH WITH LA
SAGRARIO AND LA PEPA
RESPECTIVELY, BOTH YOUNG
WOMEN FROM PUERTA DEL
SEGURA, JAÉN PROVINCE
from Los Liberales
translated by Nick Caistor
IN THE 1935 GRAPE HARVEST, either because more strangers came than ever or because the crop wasn’t very abundant, a lot of people who usually arrived from Andalusia to pick grapes ended up without work. You could see them in the town square, sitting on the edge of the pavements or forming circles while they waited for the landowner to come and employ them in their vineyard. When carts or lorries went by full of companions who had been luckier, they
waved to them sadly. They all came from the provinces of Córdoba and Jaén, especially from Puerta del Segura and Bujalance. Spurred on by hunger, they walked all the way to the flatlands of La Mancha looking for work. Emaciated and prematurely aged, men in faded smocks smoked green tobacco and looked warily around them. Sallow women in brightly-coloured clothes who ate over-ripe melons. They smelled of sour sweat. Their leathery flesh spoke of a centuries-old hunger. At night you could see them clustered in corners. They slept in a heap, all piled together. They left their children with relatives or neighbours in their villages and until they found someone to take them on, dragged all their possessions around town.
It so happened that in September at one of those dusks that are as dark as wine, granddad came home with a radiant young girl, with a splendid body and childish gestures, who was dressed in old rags and wore a pair of tattered rope sandals.
When she arrived we were sitting out in the factory’s big courtyard, by the little garden, enjoying the cool evening air. We all fell silent and looked at this fresh young woman accompanying granddad. Flustered, she stood there in the dark twilight, clutching her little bundle.
‘Here’s a servant for us, Emilia,’ said granddad. ‘Her name is Sagrario and she comes from La Puerta. She wants to stay and live here.’
We all stared in surprise at her buxom charms, so unusual in the ‘strangers’, who were mostly thin, downtrodden-looking.
‘Tomorrow you can buy her a pinafore,’ granddad continued, still staring at her.
Grandma, who never dared question her husband’s decisions, asked La Sagrario what seemed like a simple question:
‘Are you pleased that you’re staying with us?’
La Sagrario’s only reply was to burst into tears. Grandma looked at her husband inquisitively.
‘Damn it, what’s wrong, girl?’
For a while all we could hear were her sobs. Finally she said, still sobbing:
‘I want to be with my Pepa.’
She explained that ‘her Pepa’ was from the same village and that they had been lifelong friends, and she had come to the failed grape harvest with her.
Grandma said she only needed one maid. Auntie also chipped in to say we didn’t need anyone else.
‘What’s “her Pepa” like?’ the two women asked granddad.
‘Dunno. I didn’t notice.’
‘She didn’t want me to be left without a job,’ said La Sagrario, still sobbing her heart out. ‘She vanished when the master came over to talk to me... my Pepa is very good.’
That was how things stood when mama appeared through the shadows of the big courtyard, with her sick woman’s stumbling gait. She had come from her sister Paulina’s house, just opposite.
She sat down, tired as always, and took my hand. I can remember the pale gleam from her big blue eyes. Her pulled-back dark hair. Her small hands.
When they explained what was going on, she glanced at La Sagrario, who was still recovering, clutching her bundle, and raised her arms in the kind gesture she always had for those who were humble and tender-hearted like her.
‘And now there’s the problem of “her Pepa”...’ grandma said, imitating the newcomer’s voice.
Mama smiled and said it would be a godsend if this Pepa were good because she was really upset as our own maid had just announced she was off to the grape harvest the following Monday.
‘So it’s La Pepa then,’ said granddad, who seemed determined to keep La Sagrario.
‘Will your Pepa want to stay here?’ mama asked Sagrario.
‘Yes, señora... ’ she replied, suddenly all smiles. ‘You’ll see. She’s really good. And she has a way with her.’
‘So where is La Pepa now?’
‘Over there, where I was, in a corner of Los Portales.’
‘Well then,’ said granddad, ‘tell her to come and live here until Monday when your girl leaves.’
‘Is that alright, señora?’ Sagrario asked mama with child-like joy.
‘Yes of course, my girl.’
‘Come on, leave your bundle here and let’s go and fetch La Pepa,’ said granddad, delighted everything was settled.
The two of them scurried off to the corner of the arcade where La Pepa had been left on her own.
La Pepa had a pretty face and a pleasant character. A bit silly and clumsy in her movements. A lackadaisical sort, with a very measured way of speaking, and slow gestures. She made a big impression, even if she was so leisurely in her ways. When she finished eating, she used to lay her hands across her stomach and declare to whoever was with her:
Aha, now we’ve eaten
Everything’s fine.
May God give health
To us and our masters...
Let them get caught in brambles
So they can’t get out
And we can’t get in.
The winsome manner in which she acted and talked made her something of a joker.
Often when we went to grandma’s after supper or she came to us, La Sagrario and La Pepa would go out for a stroll together, sharing stories about where they were from and the friends they had there.
And La Pepa used to say:
‘Señora, all the men round here are so soft; but anyhow if one of them showed an interest... ’
Mama took to her at once, and spent a long time listening to her gentle grace and wit.
‘Señora, why do we like men if they’re so ugly and have so much hair?’
She told us tales of gypsies and olive harvesters, who apparently ate something called ‘gachamiga’.
La Sagrario, who was younger than her, used to listen fascinated and made amused comments about everything. She giggled with the high-pitched laugh of a happy child. La Pepa on the other hand laughed more with her face and eyes than with her mouth.
A few months after her arrival, La Sagrario found a very small, really small suitor called Pepe Requinto.
‘My goodness, what have I done to have such a little small man fall for me?’
‘Child,’ La Pepa would tell her, ‘hang on to him until you find someone bigger, half a loaf is better than none.’
‘But he doesn’t even come up to my shoulder... he’s thin as a scalpel... ha ha ha!’
‘Child, don’t be so hard on poor Pepito Requinto. As if size had anything to do with marriage.’
‘Ah, Pepa! On our wedding night it’ll be like I’m breast-feeding him.’
The following year, when war came, the two girls were already well accustomed to life in La Mancha and to all our customs. La Sagrario was officially engaged to Requinto.
‘Pepa my dear, I’m so sorry you don’t have a boyfriend though you’re so beautiful!’
‘Don’t you worry about me, there’s one on the way.’
Requinto took to walking out with both of them, making incredible attempts to look taller.
‘Listen, Requinto, I’m not leaving my Pepa behind for anything. So until she’s got a boyfriend, the three of us can go round together.’
Requinto muttered, knitted his brow and made timid allusions to the need for those in love to be alone.
Pepito Requinto had a battered old Ford he had put together with spare parts from all over. Sometimes to give himself airs he would turn up for La Sagrario in the car, which was such a disaster that not even the militiamen had impounded it for the war effort.
When he invited them out for a drive, they both refused. La Sagrario didn’t want to give him the wrong impression and have him drive her to her perdition rather than to the castle at Peñarroya as he claimed. And La Pepa told him:
‘It’s not that I’m scared, Requinto, it’s more that I’d be embarrassed to go round in a car like a lady.’
An airfield was built on the outskirts of town, on the far side of the park, and squadrons of twin-engined planes kept arriving to stop over or for training. For a long while the crews were Russian. They were usually tall, fair-haired, and wore leather flying jackets. They smiled at everybody and didn’t
speak a word of Spanish. They attracted attention, among other things, because they smoked cigarettes at the end of long cardboard holders.
A doctor living opposite us made friends with the first Russians who arrived, and it became a habit that any of them who were in town passed by his house at sunset. They played the piano in his yard, sang songs we thought were very sad, and drank squatting down until they fell over.
The children and maids who lived nearby used to gather in the doctor’s gateway to watch the Russians dance, sing and drink. One evening we were with La Pepa in the doorway watching them having fun. They seemed happier than ever. They jumped high into the air. They sweated. The one playing the piano was going crazy. We didn’t know, or I don’t remember, why they were so happy.
During a pause in the dancing, a very tall, blond Russian who had been peering at us all evening took out a long box of chocolate bars and offered it to La Pepa with a smile, but without saying anything.
La Pepa went bright red and said:
‘God go with you, my lad.’
He stood there like an idiot, staring at her. She lowered her eyes. As they remained like that for quite a while, everybody’s gaze eventually focussed on this silent idyll.
Finally, still looking down, La Pepa slowly opened the box and offered the Russian and those of us with her a bar each. The Russian bowed as he accepted his. While La Pepa was handing out ours, he stared at her with his blue, metallic, slightly almond-shaped eyes. Then he took another bar from the box, gave her half to bite, and ate the other half himself. All this in the midst of a great silence. As the two of them were chewing on their halves, all the Russians looking on suddenly raised their glasses in the air. One of them brought a glass for La Pepa and another for his comrade; he said something out loud and they all drank, laughing and shouting loudly, apart from La Pepa, who looked startled. But her Russian gave her a gentle push, and she took a sip. Then the dancing and singing started up again. When it was La Pepa’s friend’s turn to dance, he did so without taking his eyes off her, as if he was dedicating all his bends and leaps to her.
