The Low Voices

by Manuel Rivas

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Manuel Rivas

  Dedication

  Title Page

  1. First Fear

  2. Sitting on the Emigrant’s Suitcase

  3. The Clandestine Children’s Staircase

  4. The War, the Cow and the First Plane

  5. Come Back When You Step on the Sun

  6. The Sky’s Ruins

  7. The Saxophone’s Farewell

  8. The Journey to Restless Paradise

  9. The Weatherman

  10. The Celtic Treasure and the Astronaut

  11. The Weight of the World on Their Heads

  12. Drinking the Rainbow

  13. Franco’s First Funeral

  14. The Teacher and the Boxer

  15. You Will Never Be Abandoned

  16. A Family Photo

  17. My Mother and the Manifesto of Surrealism

  18. The Glazier and Long Night

  19. Heraclitus, Parmenides and the Co-ed Institute

  20. A Job Where You Don’t Get Wet

  21. A Normal Person

  22. The Anarchist Woman’s Smile

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  The Low Voices draws on a patchwork of memories from Rivas’s early life under Franco. There’s his beloved elder sister, María; his mother, the verbivore; his father, a construction worker with vertigo; and a supporting cast of local priests, chatty hairdressers, wolf hunters and monstrous carnival effigies.

  The book is full of wonderful personal stories, set against a background of the ravages of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath at home, and the wider world as Coca-Cola sets up a factory nearby and news comes in of men landing on the moon.

  A brilliant coming-of-age novel from one of Spain’s greatest storytellers, The Low Voices is a humorous and philosophical take on memory, belonging, and the nature of storytelling itself.

  About the Author

  Manuel Rivas was born in Coruña in 1957, and writes in the Galician language of north-west Spain. He is well known for his journalism, as well as for his prizewinning short stories and novels, which include the internationally acclaimed The Carpenter’s Pencil and Books Burn Badly. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.

  ALSO BY MANUEL RIVAS

  Fiction

  The Carpenter’s Pencil

  Butterfly’s Tongue

  Vermeer’s Milkmaid

  In the Wilderness

  Books Burn Badly

  All Is Silence

  One Million Cows

  The Potato Eaters

  Poetry

  From Unknown to Unknown

  The Disappearance of Snow

  To Xesús González Gómez, author of The Secret Language, who one day, in the Raval in Barcelona, talked to me about the ‘low voices’.

  The Low Voices

  Manuel Rivas

  Translated from the Galician by Jonathan Dunne

  1

  First Fear

  WE WERE ALONE, María and I, hugging in the bathroom. Fugitives from terror, we hid in the dark chamber. On stormy days, you could hear the sea’s roar. Today it was the rusty, asthmatic mutter of the cistern. Finally, we heard her voice. Calling for us. With unease, to begin with. Then with growing anxiety. We had to respond. Show signs of life. But she took the initiative. We heard her panting, hurried footsteps, the eager sniffing of someone picking up a scent. María drew back the bolt. My mother pushed open the door, bringing the light with her, a storm still in her eyes. Her fear was that of someone who comes home and finds no trace of the children she left playing calmly. Our fear was more primitive than that. It was our first fear.

  My mother, Carme, worked as a milkmaid. We rented the ground floor of a house on Marola Street, in the district of Monte Alto in A Coruña. My father had recently returned from South America, from La Guaira, where he’d worked in construction, scaling the summits of buildings and climbing the sky on fragile scaffolding. A quick emigration, just enough time to save the money to buy a plot of land. Many years later, in his old age, he confessed a weakness, he who wasn’t in the habit of opening up his secret zone: he suffered from vertigo. All his life, he’d had vertigo. And a large part of that life had been spent on building sites, as a bricklayer’s mate and finally as a master builder. Never, until he retired, did he confide in anyone. About his vertigo. About the fact he felt horror inside when he was down on the ground, looking up, and above all when he was up in the air, looking down. Panic from the very first step. But his foot always went in search of the second step. And the second step always led to the third.

  The author and his sister María

  ‘Why didn’t you say?’

  ‘What would happen to a workman who went around saying he suffered from vertigo? Who would take him on? Vertigo? The word didn’t even exist!’

  He almost died in La Guaira, stuck in a hut on the hillside, between the forest and a few other shacks, but only he knew about this. During his fever, his sole connection with reality was the voice of a parrot that kept intoning a woman’s name: ‘Margarita! Margarita!’ He knew it existed, this bird. Perhaps the woman as well. One day, he thought he heard, ‘Go cry in the valley, old parrot!’ But he never saw them, the bird or the woman. When he got better, one Sunday, on his day off from work, he went looking for the parrot. He wanted to talk to it, to offer it his thanks. It had been his only thread to life. But he never found it. My father didn’t give this story a magical interpretation. In that place, birds, like people, came and went.

  Early in the morning, he would drink a black coffee and leave on his Montesa. Our father, who had returned. Before that, he had a Vespa – and then a Lambretta, which formed part of our family’s mythology since it could carry us all without a whimper, with that sense of self-denial displayed by certain domestic appliances. That was his breakfast: black coffee, piping hot. Whenever he had a cold or the flu, he would double the dose of coffee and take an aspirin. He had an almost fanatical faith in acetylsalicylic acid. When his body turned against him and one leg refused to walk, he had to be admitted to hospital. The doctors who operated on his leg found traces of at least two heart attacks. He’d survived these attacks in secret, but silences like that usually write in Braille on a tunnel of the body. Only once, in passing, did he remark that he’d lost the strength in his arms. Whenever he lifted them to operate on a ceiling, they would put up a heavy resistance. He would look at them in surprise, as at two old, unruly companions. Of the memories that used to make him laugh, one was of his youth as a musician in various dance orchestras and of the drummer so taken up with the others’ playing that he missed his cue. The paso doble ground to a halt, suspended somewhere in the night, until the conductor’s apocalyptic command made itself heard: ‘Cymbals, boy! Let the wonders of the world ignite!’ An order issued in this way, like a cosmic outburst, sounded like part of the spectacle, but it still took the boy a little time to re-establish the connection. Wonders. Cymbals. The paso doble. Him. In the end, the drummer got going and made the whole night tremble. So, whenever my father’s arms grew tired on site, whenever he noticed a lack of energy, he didn’t think about a possible heart attack, but about the infallible outburst ‘Cymbals, boy! Let the wonders of the world ignite!’

  Just as my father couldn’t possibly suffer from vertigo, so my mother couldn’t possibly fall ill. There were only two moments of real peace. One was on her way to church on a Sunday morning. Not the Mass itself so much as going to Mass. That opiate journey, that translation. The other moment was when she had the opportunity to read. Her turn with the newspaper. Having cooked a meal, cleaned, washed, scrubbed, put everything in
order, she had this means of escape. A few minutes of total abstraction. The same with books, any book that happened to be lying about the house. This relationship, this happiness, was admirable. You could shout there was a fire, a flood, anything. Our mother would remain entranced. Trapped. Abducted. She wouldn’t reply. Wouldn’t even look up. Her only reaction was to draw closer to the object of vigil.

  There were times when it seemed it would pass, this business of falling ill. ‘I don’t feel so well, I’m going to lie down for a while.’ And the time of healing would last as long as a Mass or a reading. When the disease finally arrived, it wasn’t in the manner of the story she used to tell us. It didn’t come on a visit.

  ‘Who is it?’ asks the old peasant farmer in bed, surprised by a knock one winter’s night.

  ‘It’s me!’ says an unmistakable voice. ‘Open up at once!’

  This goes on until the old farmer plucks up the courage to say, ‘Off with you! There’s no one at home.’

  And Death mutters, ‘It’s just as well I didn’t come, then.’

  That’s where I should start. With the murmuring of the first laughter associated with one of her many stories. For instance, a sailor who has survived a shipwreck is captured by a tribe of cannibals. They start cooking him in a pot and add lesser ingredients, tubers and pulses, on the side. As the water heats up and the anthropophagites dance around the fire, building up an appetite, the Galician dives down into his own stew and tucks into potatoes and peas. The head cannibal cries out in admiration, ‘Look how happy our food is!’ This way of saying goodbye was a form of heroism that filled us with pride. Our hero got eaten by cannibals, yes, but it was an optimistic story. Like the stories by Carlos O’Xestal we used to listen to on the radio, on a Sunday lunchtime. A bagpiper and storyteller, O’Xestal was a strange celebrity during our childhood. His heroes were common people, the humblest there were, who triumphed by means of ingenuity and irony. And who spoke Galician, something that was very unusual on radio broadcasts. The biggest laughs O’Xestal got were when he mimicked those trying to disguise their accent, like covering up a blemish, in such comical situations as that of the young man who missed the ship sailing from A Coruña to Buenos Aires, and when he got back home, having never left Galicia, did so talking like a writer of tangos. The Galician language belonged to this world, but there was a problem with it. Places, moments and situations in which it sounded like a sin on the lips. It lived in the caverns of mouths, but somehow eccentrically, like a tramp that studies the path and company before starting to walk. Once an acquaintance of my parents visited them to let them know he’d finally been accepted as a janitor at some bank. They congratulated him. My father remarked, ‘You’ll have to buy yourself a new suit …’ He replied, with a curious exposition of textile sociolinguistics, ‘It’s bought already! Yesterday, I tried it on with a tie. As soon as I tightened the knot, I broke into magnificent Spanish!’

  O’Xestal made almost everybody laugh by laughing at almost everybody, with goads that sometimes pricked the sensitive skin of taboos and complexes. From time to time, he would perform at banquets, in front of the highest authorities on a visit to Galicia. The occasional permissiveness that is granted to the buffoon or comic. Until he suddenly disappeared. The voice on the radio. The pictures, always in traditional clothes, in the papers. O’Xestal’s disappearance wasn’t something I was aware of at the time. The truth is I’d lost interest in that kind of autochthonous humour. My mind had moved on to other things. Until one day, I came across a news item in which the humorist made his reappearance – but not in the entertainment section, in the section about accident and crime. A police report that talked about a raid in which various people considered a ‘social menace’ had been detained. Among them was O’Xestal. I interviewed him years later. I was appalled by his account. The abuse, the humiliation, the terrible experience of prison in Badajoz. All for the ‘crime’ of being homosexual. During the Franco years, the law lumped ‘pimps, villains and homosexuals’ into one group. By the time he left prison, marked as an outlaw, he was a rebel. A revolutionary. Leading a modest life with his mother in a small village on the coast (Lema, in Baldaio), he risked his neck at the front of a resistance movement to prevent the appropriation of a large nature reserve. Interwoven with his biography, his old stories acquired a different meaning. There was plenty of pain behind the humour. I thought about him not long ago – his ironic smile that never says goodbye, that permeates wakes, that tries to cross over into the beyond – when I saw a slogan painted in tar along the wall of a coastal cemetery, which said of the dead, ‘You poachers!’

  Or perhaps it was a message from the dead for the living …

  There is a conversation I shall never forget. An immaterial ‘property’ from the Department of Unauthorised Childhood Recordings. One of those times in the book of life when the mouth of literature spontaneously makes itself known. We are already living in Castro de Elviña. The winter has come wading into Galicia. Fierce, sullen and cold. An unending downpour. Days of no work, the wind howling around the gaps in buildings. My father has been restless, cornered, for several days, the condensation on the window framing the tenth legion of storm clouds.

  Suddenly he bursts out:

  ‘I wish I could have a week in prison!’

  My mother is knitting. A new creature is coming. Is on the way. She’s been knitting tiny articles of clothing for days, weeks, as her belly keeps growing.

  ‘I wish I could have seven days in hospital!’

  María and I are doing our homework at the kitchen table. We glance at each other. Prison? Hospital? The future looks promising. They have a communication code we have yet to fathom. It seems my mother’s response was convincing. They smile. Half smile. Weave a rumour. The warp of a murmur. Fall quiet. They are the existentialist avant-garde. They are exhausted. They have extracted words from the grottoes of their gums.

  He didn’t talk much, and was never rhetorical, even though he’d give off sudden sparks, as when he remembered the odd excessive binge: ‘We drank like Cossacks!’ The way he said it, I felt comfortable as the son of a Cossack. The pronunciation of the exoticism ‘Cossacks’, his eyes opening wide in amazement, reflected the historical nature of the deviation. He also used to say, ‘That is worth a potosí!’ What was a potosí? A potosí was a potosí. A mysterious measure of wealth I handled thanks to my father. And when Potosí appeared on a map in the school encyclopaedia as the name of some silver mines in Bolivia, it was already part of our family heritage. I was drawn in as well by the expression he used to define maximum ignorance: ‘He’s such a brute he doesn’t even know the names of trees.’ In the Odyssey, Odysseus only manages to convince the blind, incredulous Laertes that he is really his son when he recalls the name and number of the trees, as his father taught him, in the orchard on Ithaca, which would one day be his. When she evoked this passage in class, our teacher’s voice would break and, with a bit of imagination, you could see the orchard in her oceanic eyes. We knew that Luz Pozo was also a poet and pianist. A mature woman the whole school was in love with, from the youngest student to the military veteran who took gym, passing through the caretaker, the French lectrice and all the teachers of religion. If anyone wasn’t in love with her, it was through the misfortune of not having met her. We had heard about poets who crossed Galicia diagonally on motorbikes at weekends, hundreds of miles, just to see her. And we knew it was true when, years later, she left on a motorbike with the poet Eduardo Moreiras. But now we’re in her class at school. Luz enters the classroom, followed by an erotic wake whose special quality is to promote greater peace than excitement. Eros, taken by the hand, alights on the study material, the challenge of forcing open Luis de Góngora’s ‘Polyphemus’. But it’s one thing to talk about literature, it’s another thing entirely to hear the mouth of literature. And that is what I heard, quite clearly, when Luz Pozo read what was happening in the orchard on Ithaca, at that precise moment when memory merged with the manuscript of
the earth, Odysseus listing all the fig trees, apple trees, pear trees and vines. There was a second text, a murmur only I could hear in my father’s mouth when he wished to signal an extreme case of ignorance: not knowing, not wanting to know, the names of the trees that surround you.

  Whenever he argued with my mother, he would use an expression I found cryptic, with a hidden meaning:

  ‘You are the Spirit of Contradiction.’

  She never held back what she was thinking. She was sweet, but not docile. At that time, the laws regarding women were even more shocking than people’s attitudes towards them. A woman was a subordinate being. She could do nothing without her husband’s approval. But my mother could not accept such a submissive role, and my father knew it. So, whenever he felt thwarted, he would allude to the influence on my mother of that invisible creature, the Spirit of Contradiction, which soon formed part of our domestic mythology. In their own way, neither of them was particularly sociable. They constituted a pair of conjugal recluses, but their solitudes were different. My father avoided crowds whenever he could. When it came to sporting events, he experienced real aversion. He tried, unsuccessfully, to engender in me the same hatred he felt towards football. After that, he tried to keep me away from the grounds. We had a neighbour, Gregorio, a technician for Radio Coruña, who offered to take me along to Riazor Stadium. For my father, those epic hours when Deportivo was playing out its very existence, which was every Sunday afternoon, were a good time for us to go out in the garden. I felt miserable, and he would try to persuade me that paying to see two factions of adult men chasing after a ball, driven on by a roaring mob, represented a kind of defeat for humanity. Until he admitted his own defeat and I was allowed to go with Gregorio to Riazor. After leaving the stadium, we would drop by the house of some relatives. Their building was connected to a large hairdressing salon. As the adults talked, I would peer into that enchanted world, with its mirrored walls and the chairs with disturbing helmets in which heads would undergo a metamorphosis (that enigmatic expression, ‘to have a perm’!), a scene that is now deserted, but alert, with the futuristic nostalgia of murmurs, colours and aromas. The enamel of dragonflies flashing on absent nails. There was a charm about the place one resisted as much as one was drawn to it. The charm of what it would be like to be a woman. Or what one would be like as a woman. Back at home, after night had fallen, my parents were listening to the radio. They used to do this with the light out, the only illumination coming from the radio dial. Our house hanging on the hillside looked just like a ship. The wind whistling over the harmonica of the roof, the beams from the lighthouse licking our darkness. Special effects from outside that heightened the suggestiveness of the radio. We were both in and out. The voices and static formed part of nature. Life had a storytelling vocation. I had been at Riazor, that other bustling, suspended spaceship, amid the ebb and flow of roars. I had been in the fantastic hair salon, in that shadowy light of large chrysalises. And now, leaning on the window of night, I felt like an equal next to the Man Who Despises Football and the Woman Who Talks To Herself.