The Low Voices

by Manuel Rivas

  They could both be very silent or very talkative. I learned that language had seasons. Days when words sprouted, days when mouths rested, days when they talked to themselves, days when dry leaves fell from lips and went spinning off towards a bitter destination. There was a special characteristic about my father’s speech that made it different from that of most adult males. He never swore or cursed, even when he was expressing extreme annoyance. He never called on God, the Virgin, the saints of the Church or the angels in heaven. He never even bothered the devil. That seemed natural enough in a believer like my mother, but it surprised me in a man who never set foot inside a church. In fact, men at Mass on a Sunday were a rarity. They would attend burials, funerals and anniversaries. Also High Mass on a feast day. But even on those occasions most would remain outside, in the yard, and those who went inside would take up position at the back of the building. Men didn’t kneel. They remained standing in that area of half-light under the choir loft. It was also strange for a man to receive communion. To participate in communion, to receive the sacred form, required confession. And that – going to confess to the priest – was something that tried my father’s patience. Whenever they argued about this, it would have been normal to expect a stream of curses.

  The author’s parents at their wedding

  ‘What is the priest? He’s …’

  Airily, he answered his own question with the most outrageous euphemism he could find:

  ‘A man! He’s nothing more than … a man.’

  But that came later, long after our first fear. Memory goes a-wandering, it crosses fields, darts across the Avenue, walks like Charlie Chaplin the Tramp inside the Hercules Cinema. Or walks like women with things on top of their heads. All of them – well, almost all – carried something. A prolongation of basic things. Take, for example, the walk of the milkmaid. My mother would begin by delivering to Monelos. Then she’d get on the trolleybus and start again on San Xoán Street, at Asunción’s shop. One of the places she served was a military establishment attached to the cavalry. One day, a soldier whispered to her, ‘You can put water in the milk, don’t worry, they add even more once it’s here.’ Meanwhile, we were living on Marola Street, renting the ground floor. María can’t have been three and I was under two. Back then, before it was blocked by the violent actions of the land registry, the street had an open horizon and ran into the surroundings of the Tower of Hercules. Very near our home was a place known as the Farmhouse. No, it wasn’t an ethnographic museum. It was a real farmhouse at the limits of the city with the sea. A house with cows and a traditional cart. That was a real journey into space, going on that cart. The fields that bordered the provincial prison were fertile ground with lush crops and potatoes that tasted of the sea. There were meadows, willows, a choir of blackbirds in the field next to Lapas Beach. The cows moved between the city limits and the cliffs. In my memory, they represent a canvas of mythological pop art. How the Tower of Hercules, declared a world heritage site, could benefit from a few amphibian cows in the sun! That space is now occupied by fixed sculptures and a municipal obsession with lawns, the green acrylic laminating the sylvan colours. The cows of time have disappeared. They’re mooing out at sea.

  We were alone on that ground floor on Marola Street. We were sitting on the floor. I was playing with a toy lorry. There was a loose tile, which could be removed. Underneath it, a bug, a cockroach. I was trying to grab it, with good intentions, I wanted to give it a ride on the lorry, but it kept running away, anticipating my hand’s movement. And then María lifted her head, all alert, all of her smiling. She jumped to her feet and ran towards the window that looked onto the street. I followed her, as always. In symmetry. She walked with her feet pointing outwards, bandy-legged, and I was pigeon-toed, with my feet pointing inwards. Each of us walked as best he could. Aunt Paquita had a limp. She would exclaim joyfully, ‘The lame one’s here!’ And there’d be murmuring: ‘How pretty you look! How well you limp, Paquita!’ But now we were alone. María ran with her feet pointing outwards and I ran with my feet pointing inwards. We heard music in the street. Saw clowns throwing streamers. Fireworks. A party. The window was a marvellous screen. Until suddenly two monsters appeared, filling it completely, with heartless eyes, their noses banging against the glass. We’d never seen danger up so close before. The horror.

  ‘You fools!’ said our mother. ‘It was only two carnival giants. Isabella and Ferdinand, the Catholic Monarchs.’

  2

  Sitting on the Emigrant’s Suitcase

  FOR A YEAR, my seat at the strange nursery was a suitcase. I felt as if I were sitting inside the ferry terminal or in customs.

  After our first fear, the attack of the giants, our mother decided my sister María and I shouldn’t spend so much time on our own while she did her rounds as a milkmaid. Sometimes my godmother, Amelia, would look after us. My godfather, Pepe Couceiro, was a fan of mechanics and scientific progress. For a time, he focused all his ingenuity on combustion engines. He could build a two-seater car out of a motorbike. His intention was to travel the Galician roads inside that capsule and even go beyond the Pyrenees, to Europe. He had an enigmatic expression: in advanced countries, ‘all the countryside is landscape’. And he would gaze at the horizon nearby with scientific fatalism, sorry that not even an inch of Galicia would ever be redeemed. He had a spirit like Marco Polo’s. So much so that he ended up working as a seller of spices, an expert in that precious, aromatic merchandise. The first time I had the impression someone was formulating a revolutionary thought, toppling the universal system of weights and measures, was when my godfather revealed a little pigment on the end of his forefinger, stared at me and solemnly declared, ‘A kilo of saffron is worth more than a kilo of gold!’

  One day, he took me on one of his expeditions as a spice merchant. I remember it as the first real journey of my life.

  ‘To the end of the world!’ he exclaimed enthusiastically.

  I had a certain tendency to take things literally. I was prepared to go to the end of the world, but was also a little worried. Until he patted me on the head: ‘You’ll see. We’ll get to Finisterre!’ And we did. The journey lasted all day, like the sun, from dawn to dusk. Along the Costa da Morte, or Death Coast, towards the outer reaches. The two of us stuck in the capsule of a small car, on this occasion a SEAT 600. As we stopped off at shops, grocers and restaurants, my godfather, quite a short man, grew for me in historic stature. I felt proud to be accompanying the spice trader. Paprika, cinnamon, saffron! We were very well received, heralds of plenty, bearers of precious merchandise: tiny envelopes containing fragments of colours, aromas, tastes, which would scatter when they were opened. Or tins of pepper, illustrated with prints of exotic women that accorded with the nature of the treasure. I’d seen women – my own mother, neighbours – filling these envelopes and folding them in a flash, with dazzling speed, and at that precise moment the women looked like the beauties in the prints because they accompanied their labour, the swiftness of their fingers, with the lightness of jokes and laughter. I’d noticed a difference between women and men when they were working in a group. Men were much more taciturn.

  On the way back, in the town of Carballo, my godfather announced, ‘Now we’re going to buy a souvenir!’ What was this souvenir? And he added with happy determination, ‘So you can take it to your mother.’ When someone said ‘to your mother’, it almost always meant a present for the whole house, for everybody. We learned this quickly enough. And what he bought was a large loaf of bread the child in question couldn’t get his arms around. A soft, hemispherical loaf that on the journey home seemed to ferment on the lap of the sleeping child’s body.

  ‘What bread! It’s like another world!’

  It was bread, yes. But it was also something other than bread. What a shame! I’d forgotten the word. Souvenir. My first souvenir.

  There was other secret knowledge. The initiatory ground, the first nation, had the form of a triangle, if we consider three monumen
tal markers as vertices. The first was the seaside cemetery of Santo Amaro. Regarding this place, I remember a neighbour, in conversation with my father, praising the cemetery in the highest possible terms: ‘This cemetery is the healthiest in the world!’ And he explained its qualities: well oriented, luminous and breezy. The second vertex, very close to our home on Marola Street, was the provincial prison. Not so healthy. Back then, at dusk, from up on the cliffs, one could see the prisoners in the courtyard. From time to time, there would be a snatch of song. It was a windy place, next to the sea, which was almost always rough. In fact, the wind and the beating of the waves integrated every murmur, shout or voice into a stubborn, musical warp. The only thing that escaped was the intermittent sound of a stonemason who had his workshop in a hut. The mallet beating the chisel he used to sculpt granite, crosses, gravestones, dominated with its handmade time like a bitter clock. When the stonemason finished for the day, silence would fall to its knees, as if this was what the chisel had been working on. Some days, relatives would clamber up the cliffs and communicate with the prisoners using coloured handkerchiefs in a code of signals. ‘Look, there he is, so near!’ So far. From that unsettling lookout, everything seemed at hand and inaccessible. A greeting at a distance of several yards, but years away. It was necessary to find hope. To turn around. To search for the third vertex. And there it was!

  The lighthouse.

  It was the light of a living creature. A light that awoke, lived at night and slumbered at daybreak. When there was a thick fog, it was this same creature that mooed like a cow. It wasn’t a sudden, blinding glare. It gradually stretched, fed its flashes with the last embers of dusk, at that hour when everything becomes a stranger to itself. The Tower of Hercules gave off light, and at the same time you had the sensation it was gathering the dark side of everything it licked. Of what was happening on the cliffs, in crevices, on corners. ‘What corner will we see each other on, Monte Alto?’ Monte Alto was a district full of corners where many names of bars, shops, workshops evoked the corners of the map of America. It was easy in that place to go from Montevideo to Buenos Aires. The light of the lighthouse licked and gathered everything. Shadows, dreams, secrets. It may still have them. Under the lighthouse, in an ossuary of light. The flashes, luminous blades, ran over the tiles, filtered through the slats in the blinds, momentary bursts that scythed the rooftops but left the darkness even darker than before. The lantern of the lighthouse sewed what was outside onto what was inside: wakefulness and sleep. The unending sea and the walls of narrow rooms.

  But now we’re on our way to the first school. The strange nursery.

  We weren’t old enough to go to school in an official centre, and ‘children’s gardens’ didn’t exist then, even as a euphemism. There was no sense of drama the first day. María and I quickly understood that our whole physical and emotional energy should be directed not at the useless effort of resisting, but at the will to clear a way and find somewhere to sit as soon as possible. That first little school, in a private home, was on a parallel street in Monte Alto and was run by two sisters who acted as nursemaids, sentinels and mistresses. It was enough for them to keep track of numbers. The children in that concentration room were like grains of sand. But something extraordinary happened: the expansion of space, one of the least studied features in the history of popular architecture. Marcial Suárez has already said that Allariz is the place in the world with the most churches per square Catholic.

  For almost a year in the strange nursery, I sat on a suitcase. I don’t know whether it was a question of fate or not, but it really was a suitcase. Not the metaphor of a suitcase. The first day, amid all the uproar, I looked at the suitcase and the suitcase looked at me, the causality that took the form of a woman’s divine voice saying, while pushing me with implacable delicacy, ‘You, shrimp, sit down on that suitcase.’ Before one had learned how to read or write, one already understood the iconography of the suitcase. Almost all houses had one or several of these suitcases. Now that I think about it, the suitcase’s measure was just about that of a square child. But I never looked to see what was inside the suitcase in the strange nursery. What I held, and never let go, was a fuchsia, almost fluorescent plastic briefcase. Nobody ever asked me to open it. So one day I did it myself. Pulled on the zip. There was nothing there.

  Years later, at school in Castro de Elviña, the teacher asked us one day what we wanted to be when we were older. He didn’t follow a pedagogy of participation, so we remained cautiously silent and waited to see what would happen. Where was the question aimed? Why did he want to know what we wanted to be? What was it he really wanted to hear? And then, in that mute silence, like a festive whoop, came the voice of someone we called Red of the Wood, who shouted from the back, ‘Emigrants!’ The teacher was taken aback and fell into a mournful silence. The external wall had a large lattice window. Whenever a pane fell out or broke, it took a long time to be replaced. So there were always holes out to the open, through which the wind whistled or the rain drove. One might say the holes used these moments of bewilderment to make themselves heard. The teacher seemed to become aware of them, the gaps in the wall, the damp stains, the peering in of the elements. He who had just been talking to us about the time when Spain was a huge empire ‘where the sun never set’. How much he – and we – liked that phrase! Solar precision brought history closer. We were in a remote place, in a battered building, the sacks of powdered milk sent by the Americans piled up in a corner, but the sun was there as well, not setting, at least for the moment, and the teacher was kind enough to implicate us all in a great, imperial epic. We had dominated the world. We had carried the cross the world over. We even used to go out collecting money in order to save the souls of Chinese children. But now the teacher had asked what we wanted to be when we were older and this sincere voice, coming from the back of the class, had the effect of a fallen pane that smashes on the ground. The children of the Empire dreamed of becoming emigrants.

  That suitcase, the one in the strange nursery, must have had at least enough room for two emigrant children. So one day they sat a classmate down next to me. We never spoke. We never even looked at each other. I just asked for permission to get up and go to the toilet. I went down the corridor on my own. There were framed photographs of women on the walls. Not the teachers. My attention was drawn to the hairstyles, the clothes, the long black gloves of one, another in what looked like a man’s suit with a smoking cigarette holder between her fingers. Above all, their look. They were the ones who looked out or stopped looking. I pushed open a door. It happened to be to the kitchen. In the middle, a large table with a green and white checkered tablecloth. On top of the table, like an effigy, sat a cat. An unbelievable cat, unlike all the cats I’d seen up until that moment, with long, immaculate white hair and a glowing aura, a celestial cat with a bow and a little bell around its neck. The cat glanced at me, over its shoulder, with indifference. And it was then I realised that I’d set foot in America.

  3

  The Clandestine Children’s Staircase

  IN THE STRANGE nursery, sitting on the suitcase one day, I heard María’s voice.

  It was a voice that came from on high. So I lifted my head and saw her standing on the table, above all the noise, with a spelling book in her hand. It really was my sister. But the voice was new: it had been born that very day. María was a little more than a year older than me. I didn’t even have a spelling book. I went to school with an empty briefcase, which I wouldn’t let go for anything in the world. And now, there she was. Reading aloud, in the middle of an astonished silence. Without making any mistakes, without stuttering. Reading syllables, whole sentences. She was capable of pronouncing the divine words ‘mi mamá me ama, mi mama me mima’. And ‘uvas iglesia bicicleta’. She turned page after page, and the teacher asked her excitedly to carry on, carry on, wanting to see whether what was happening was really true or just a superstition. I already knew my sister had a special relationship with words. She was a
verbivore. She went out gathering words and carried them home. You can tell because of the separation in her teeth, in early photos, that her mouth was full of words. It must have had something to do with our family. My mother was a verbivore as well. She talked to herself in a way that bewitched us, without realising, without even knowing we were listening. In the house or houses we lived in, there were no books at that time. The first poems I heard were in my mother’s solitary mouth, poems she recited to herself or to someone who kept her company in her imagination, even when she was washing or scrubbing. Whatever it was, it was something strange, captivating, but also disturbing. It was the mouth of literature, unannounced. This being nourished by the sound of words was a family secret, however. I didn’t know María had learned how to read from one day to the next, but nor was I surprised. There were herbivores and carnivores. And then there were those who fed on words. There were plenty of that species in my family. One of the first I discovered was my uncle Francisco, my mother’s brother, who was a barber. For us children, a haircut was a kind of torture. Our heads were shaved without further ado. As a precaution against lice, we were given a convict haircut. In nature, it would seem there is a desire for style, which is revealed, for example, in symmetry. In the way a sea urchin grows or the degree at which a fig tree bends on the coast. In the flight of a flock of starlings. Or the monstrous threat posed to predators by the drawings on the wings of certain butterflies. These are observations and enchantments, marks in the history of the look. Detecting humiliation also forms part of the primitive equipment of some species.