by Manuel Rivas
Things got complicated after that. This last delivery brought about a discomfort in the seamstress that bothered her continually. She walked like a cloud. In the shadow of a dream. The worst thing for a working-class family, during the post-war years of hunger, was not to have work or land. It was better during those years to be a farmer. The girls were looked after by their aunts. The three women, all single, had worked as housemaids in A Coruña. They’d managed to put something by, they loved each other, looked out for one another, were very sensitive in their dealings. Far removed from macho rudeness and abuse, they’d turned their home into a real doll’s house. This is where Amparo, who would later become a successful fashion designer, grew up. She showed textile subtlety in her speech and behaviour. In her workshop, she treated everybody – adults and children, men and women – as if they were cut from the finest cloth in Galicia. My father’s destiny was somewhat different. He himself said he lived like a ‘little savage’. He barely attended school. In order for him to eat, they sent him to live with his grandparents, who were farmers, so he could pasture the cows. But he didn’t eat much. He spent the day between moos, he used to say. And at night, he mulled over the unending litany of the old people’s rosary. This was his work for years. Acting as a butler to cows. Early in the morning, he would sometimes pass in front of the doll’s house wrapped in scraps of mist from the river. He went so far as to stroke the doorknocker. But he never knocked. The cows were getting away along the riverbank. Amphibian shapes driving through the reeds and fog.
One day, he heard a deafening roar in the sky. It was a twin-engine aircraft, descending right next to the trees. It looked as if it were about to land on top of them. My father said it was so close he could see the pilot’s face. A kind of time in suspense. He looked at the pilot and the pilot looked at him. One of the cows was curious to see the pilot’s face as well. My father’s head was raised, so the cow did the same. The tip of a horn collided with a dimple in his lower jaw. Leaving a shapely scar.
When he was older, there were women who remarked that a scar like that made a man more interesting. They asked him how he’d made that dimple, which was in the manner of Robert Mitchum. And my father replied, with historical precision, ‘It was somewhere between a cow and a plane!’
5
Come Back When You Step on the Sun
HE WAVES NOSTALGIA away, like a fly from his face. My father says, I can hear him now, ‘You thought you had the animal tied, but it was the animal who had you tied.’
That business of pasturing the cows was something common to the childhood of all my parents’ generation. Everybody, uncles and aunts, herded cows and sheep at some time. Unending days, tied to the animal. It’s not a metaphor. The small size of the properties, the concern about crossing boundaries, the fear the animal might suddenly take off, startled by a sting or a sound or a shadow in the suspicious world of the mountain. This meant you had to keep it tethered by a rope. And the rope acted as a bitter restraint on the person in question. Sunk in thought next to the grazing cow. My mother found pasturing the cows to be a nightmare. But especially the terror of having to go with Yellow. All cows that have recently given birth respond to the calls of their calves. But Yellow responded to all the calls of all the calves, whether or not they were her own. And she didn’t just respond with a mother’s moo, that cry that sends a shiver through the grass and propels clouds forwards. She started running, dragging the girl with her, until the girl let go of the rope and the cow went leaping over walls and hedges in search of the call. The next day, my mother would try taking her as far away as possible, leading her down deep tracks to the other side of the mountain. Until she thought she was in another world, in another bell jar, where the noises and sounds of Corpo Santo couldn’t reach. But someone once said eloquence is in the ear of the listener. Wherever she went, the cow heard a calf calling to her. Until one day the girl decided she wasn’t going to keep the rope holding Yellow taut. What’s more, she wasn’t even going to look at her. She wished she had a slate to write on. A book of saints to read. She could do it on the ground: write, draw a few scribbles, with a stick. They glanced at each other, she and Yellow. What she drew on the ground, when you looked at it, could have been a cow. The other, the real one, was calm today, enjoying the grass. About time. The girl thought about something she’d heard the previous night. How a cow can feed her calf even after she has died. She keeps a trickle of milk going for a whole day. How old are you, Yellow? How many children? When I was born, you were already here. They said then you were capricious. Don’t deny it.
It was good to talk to the cows. To know how to talk to them. It was good for the animals. And good for the humans. For cowgirls, it was a way of killing time, loneliness, fear. And irritation. Carme got over her fear of the mountain with an errand her father gave her. She had to take a bundle of bread and food. She had to leave it on a rock, in a crevice. Who’s it for? That doesn’t matter. It’s for someone who needs it. If you’re stopped by the guards, all you have to do is say, ‘It’s mine.’ Not another word. Another day, she took a jug of milk. When she came back the following day, the jug was empty. Poor people, not only were they invisible, but they were also hungry. Going back to cows, it was easy to run out of patience, truth be told. One day, a storyteller named Xan das Bolas came to the dance hall in Tabeaio. He was already famous for his roles as a nightwatchman and a civil guard in several films. He can’t have been a bad comedian, since in a sequence of Historias de la radio he played the role of a sergeant in the civil guard, being hoisted onto people’s shoulders. The day after his stellar performance in Tabeaio, it was the turn of Pepa, my mother’s younger sister, to pasture the cows. And she addressed them. She gave them a courageous speech. No muttering under her breath, no sweet nothings.
‘I’m going to be a bohemian!’
It was a strange word, waiting for its turn, and this is why it came out so naturally. From Dona Isabel’s factory of synonyms for naming the forbidden, perhaps.
‘I’ve had enough of you!’ shouted Pepa in her discourse to the cows. ‘I’m going to be a bohemian. And a film star. I’m going to elope with Xan das Bolas!’
Pepa must have been about eight. Her discourse reached the ears of Dona Isabel, who had an extraordinary information service. This Dona Isabel was the parish priest’s niece and lived with him in the Big House in Corpo Santo. Next to it was the small, humble abode of the Barrós family, bursting with children. Eight of them managed to survive, four girls and four boys – whichever way you looked at it, a lot of mouths for a widower. So Dona Isabel formed a kind of protectorate for them, albeit provisional and open to the whims of fate. It would seem my mother, Carme, was her favourite. Because she was quiet. This was true. My mother was quiet because she talked to herself. And was never a bother. When she wasn’t working, she would shut herself up in the attic to read the lives of saints. She would enter that dark chamber and seek a ray of light between the tiles to feed her clandestine happiness: the literature of lives that were extreme, unusual, radical, extraordinary. They may have been saints, but what she read – or the way she read them – was the lives of unrestrained, bewitching women, and strange men with ‘wind in their branches’.
Carme was never a problem. She did her work without complaint. She went from the cowshed, from milking the cows, to the attic with her saints.
What Pepa had said, however, was very worrying. She was the smallest, and she’d stood gazing at the road and talked about leaving.
‘She said she was going to elope with Xan das Bolas!’ shrieked Dona Isabel to my grandfather.
‘With Xan das Bolas?’
She was an enigmatic woman, as devout as she was romantic, as repressed as she was passionate. She felt drawn towards my grandfather and at the same time obliged to stay away. God had been considerate towards her, but had not equipped her with the grace of humour.
‘A little girl’s joke,’ said my grandfather. ‘Don’t give it importance.’
/> But she was used to ruling. Her own life, and the lives of others.
‘Even so, it would be better for the girl not to go with the cows anymore.’
Not far from Corpo Santo, in a place called Castelo, was another cowgirl, Manuela, who would later marry Francisco, one of my mother’s brothers. Francisco may have had worn patches on his trousers – he was a poor fellow – yet he was heavily contested in every household. In all the houses, there was a welcome and a seat for Francisco. Because Francisco, be he poor or not, was a gift. To start with, he could catch trout in the river by hand. And stories as well. By hand. As they flew past. He had various jobs, but this one, telling stories, kept him going. He worked in a shoe factory that belonged to the Senra family, a family with a long Republican tradition. It was later confiscated. He then became a barber.
María and Aunt Pepa
I have already spoken about him. He retired some time ago. Even so, at the age of ninety, old clients still solicit his presence at home, in an old people’s home, in hospital. Francisco resists, but ends up going. With his vanity case. Scissors and comb. And memory. The vanity case of memory. Words. Because he knows he hasn’t been called for his skill as a hairdresser. What they want is to listen to him. And if he has his scissors with him, well, so much the better, for dotting the suspense. A tap of the scissors. There is the inflection. The unforeseen.
The scissors slice through the air. One moment. Time to rewind.
The king of the mountains was O Xalo. When night falls, it has the disposition of a wild, stubborn land that wants to see the sea again. It’s still an impressive mountain, but back then it was even more so. There were no tarmacked roads, nor had half its back been built on. It was a mountain that allowed you, or refused to allow you, to pass. Every time, you had to find a way through. And that was where Manuela stepped on the sun.
She was eight. Her two brothers had been recruited for the war. So it was her turn – there was nobody else – to drive the cattle to pasture. The cows, two oxen and a horse.
‘Go to O Xalo. There’s plenty of grazing. They’ll run free, more or less. You won’t have to watch where they’re stepping.’
‘How long for?’
‘Come back when you step on the sun.’
However much she asked, she couldn’t work out how she was going to step on the sun. Until the time came. She spent the whole afternoon waiting. On tenterhooks. With an eye on the sun. How she was going to step on it. Until the moment arrived, and it was really quite simple. The sun was at her feet. And so she stepped on it.
What she never got over was lightning. She was terrified of thunderstorms. Especially when she became a seamstress. A travelling seamstress. She’d learned how to sew when she was fourteen, on a Singer. She tried sewing at home, but it hardly made her prosperous. She often got paid in kind. You do my clothes, and I’ll give you some eggs. Some potatoes. Some flour. But nothing like the day when a photographer, in order to pay for what she’d done for his daughters, did a session for her. Not one photograph. A whole session.
If the orders didn’t come or there weren’t that many, then she’d have to go looking for them. She and a friend, María, decided to become travelling seamstresses. They carried a portable Singer on their heads from village to village. Over mountains and valleys. Down paths and deep tracks. Sometimes, a third friend would join them. It didn’t matter how well the friend could sew. When she sang, it was the same as with the lark. Which scatters all fear. Grabs hold of clouds, thunder and lightning. This girl sang so well she ended up fronting various dance orchestras and along the coast of A Coruña became a star, much admired, by the name of Finita Gay. Until she boarded a ship to make her fortune in America.
Manuela carried on with her portable sewing machine for a while. From village to village. One day, she met Francisco along the way. He didn’t sing to banish the bolts of lightning. He distracted them with his stories. They all fell and thundered somewhere else, on the mountain of O Xalo, where barefoot cowgirls step on the sun.
6
The Sky’s Ruins
FOR A TIME, having come back from Venezuela, my father worked in the village of O Rego, the place in Sigrás where he was raised, doing up the family home, and he took us with him. When the repair work began, we slept in a shed that was attached to one side of the house. On a wooden floor you got to by climbing a staircase. There was no electric light, just volumes of shadows and aromas. María and I, sharing a bed, on a corn-husk mattress. We had slept in humble farmhouses, feeling the caress of the stone next to our pillows, hearing the scurrying of mice in the attic, the strange creaking of beds that brought sighs from the marital bedrooms or the shuffling of an old man and the shell-like sound of the chamber pot, the willow fighting with the wind on the window, the ebb and flow of the dogs’ warning barks. This was something different, new. Intense sensations activate all the senses. The inner senses – the current of memory – and the outer ones. But there are times when all the senses rely on one. That summer night in the loft, all the senses, having done their work, converged on sight. In the old roof, not far from our bed, there were gaps, missing tiles. But they didn’t seem dangerous, rather a deliberate act on the part of the ruins. They were windows to the firmament. We’d never seen the sky so close before. The stars, so trusting.
Stretched out, covered by a blanket, not talking, we forgot to worry about the rudimentary bed, the veins of the husks printed on our bodies, perhaps because everything was getting lighter, airborne and luminous, with a glow we hadn’t seen before, which spread slowly through the dark room, landing on our faces with the texture of mill dust. If María didn’t say a word, if María slept with her eyes open, if María was blue in the night, like the cobwebs, the apples and the bales of hay, then I would be the same. It was only for a few nights. We never said anything. Not even to each other. We never complained. Our mother would have got annoyed, demanded alternative accommodation. We kept the starry roof in the pocket of our darkness. The night adopted us. Revealed itself to us. In a way, we would always be part of its lineage.
‘Weren’t you afraid?’
‘Not at all!’
‘These two can sleep with their eyes open,’ said my father.
‘Are they barn owls?’ asked my father’s cousin, staring at us.
‘Real barn owls.’
The young man then mimicked the call of the barn owl. A screech that pierced the day and night. He was a barn owl too.
They treated us well. The village, for children from the city, was one long party. Especially if something abnormal happened to you. For example, if you were wounded.
The two young men who did most of the work for that farming family in Sigrás adopted me as a mascot for their tireless team. I always travelled like a king. On the cart. On horseback. One of the jobs that season was to plough, harrow, and finally level the ground with a levelling board. This was a glorious moment for me. The levelling board was a frame set with thick osiers. Drawn by animals, it acted like a comb that levelled the ground the plough had already softened. So that it didn’t slide over the surface or take off because of the drawing power of a pair of oxen, the levelling board was weighed down with stones. And on top of the stones went the child. It wasn’t the closest thing to a dream. It was a dream. To climb on a mat or trolley pulled by oxen and to travel on a stone throne over the unending expanse of black earth. The unfamiliar adventure was also the child’s first experience of a certain power. Being transported by those mythological creatures that obeyed the friendly voices. But the child also abruptly learned that animals, even the meekest oxen, don’t enjoy work and are dying to throw off the yoke as soon as they can. Despite the ballast of child and stones, the cattle noticed the lightness and gave a sudden jerk. Because of the abrupt movement, the child fell off and was hurt by one of the stones. He had blood on his knee. Red blood with a white streak, strangely enough. He didn’t like this at all. The two young men rescued him, carried him in the air, running along shortc
uts, and all three fell as they jumped over a wall. What he remembers is that, instead of heightening the drama, this made them burst out laughing. And the more one laughed, the more the other laughed. The child didn’t know what to think. So he burst out laughing as well.
When they reached the houses, the bleeding had stopped. And formed a scab. It looked good on the child’s leg.
‘He’s going to stay with us in the village forever. He’s going to be a wild thing!’
More laughter. What to do? You had to read everything they said back to front.
My father told me the story of a wild man. Perhaps so that I would know what a wild man was really like. His name was Ganzo. He met a girl, and they fell in love. He would come down from the mountains, from a more isolated village. On horseback. Her father didn’t approve of the relationship. He suspected that his daughter was disobeying him and locked her up at home. He was always on the lookout. Here was a man who wielded a stick, with a reputation for being very harsh. He also had a shotgun. Not an easy man to stand up to. Every Sunday, Ganzo would come down and plant himself in front of their house, motionless for hours and hours, staring at the front door. Night would fall, and he would leave. Nobody ever came out to talk to him. But the following week he would be back. One day, the door opened and the girl’s father emerged with a weapon.
‘What do you want, Ganzo?’
And he replied with a historic command:
‘Release the captive!’
The girl’s father was deeply affected, perplexed. This man from the mountains had shown him up in front of everybody.
Sometimes, when I’m writing, I am reminded of this story. The ending. Those surprising words, which were said in Spanish with medieval brio. The precise use of the delicate term ‘captive’. I mentioned it to him one day. My father clicked his tongue. Gazed at some indeterminate point in the distance.