The Low Voices

by Manuel Rivas

  ‘That’s not what he said.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘Really.’

  He saw the disappointment in my eyes. I understood we were studying the same subject matter in our own, different ways. On the borders of truth and fiction.

  ‘What did Ganzo say?’

  He looked at me. He was about to say it. He smiled inwardly. Didn’t say anything.

  ‘You have to tell me,’ I pleaded with him.

  ‘It would be better to drop it.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  He seemed now to hesitate, not between fact and invention, but between two realities.

  ‘Let the bitch go! That’s what he said.’

  ‘The bitch?’

  ‘Yes. It seems that’s what he said.’

  ‘The other one was better.’

  We were sitting on the porch. There was a plant that had drawn his attention. How quickly it grew. Its jubilant green colour. He was also on the verge of saying something about that plant, but he never did. It was a cannabis plant sown by María.

  ‘I’ll tell you what happened,’ he said, with reference to Ganzo. ‘One heard one thing, another heard another.’

  ‘But what do you think he said?’

  ‘I don’t know. The girl’s father shot at his feet to frighten him away. But he stayed where he was. He didn’t flinch. I heard the shot. That much is certain.’

  After one village, there was another, more distant village, which was the former’s remote place, the last frontier, but after this village there would be another, and another that had its own remote marker, in a geographical chain towards the unknown, which was a kind of imaginary reverse. In reality, everything formed a mental geography, a dense confederation of villages, an unending intersection of roads. The remote place might be an hour’s walk away. I remember that the first pilgrimage we ever went on, from Corpo Santo to San Bieito, was a long way. It was very hot, and by the sides of the road there were cherry trees that offered shade and fruit. We couldn’t reach the branches, but the adults gave us some to eat. They were happy, and so were we. Processions were always something more than just a Mass. They were a party that transformed the day. Suddenly the sides of the road converged into a corridor of bodies and groans. Cripples. Blind people. Disfigured faces. Women in mourning with babies on their bosoms. I’d seen people begging before, but not in such a choral way. I was impressed by the psalmody of their voices and above all, at a child’s height, by the mute expression, the fixed gaze, of their stumps. The rite of healing, exorcism or protection in San Bieito involved passing through a hole in a stone wall. For children it was easy, but not for an adult. If the adult was fat, seeing him there, half his body on one side and half on the other, was comical to begin with. But misfortune – if it’s going to be funny – mustn’t last. Losing one’s balance and falling over. Slipping on the pavement. A slap that knocks the other over. A pie in the face. One’s trousers falling down. All of this is funny if it doesn’t last. When someone is trying to pass from one side to another, through a gap in the wall, and this is a holy, curative rite, and it’s obvious he can’t, he gets trapped, his face becomes sweaty and distorted, it’s like witnessing the comical and its reverse at one and the same time. The miracle doesn’t exist, but its defeat does. The flailing arms of the carnal metaphor. Everybody pushing, the encouraging voices, would sometimes ensure a successful passage, and the body would collapse on the far side, like someone falling onto the grass of the imagination. Relief would sweep through the crowd. A general comforting of people and stones. Relief. That must be the closest thing to a miracle.

  No, San Bieito wasn’t far. But it was for me. It was the first time I saw a blind man with one eye that laughed and another that cried. The hole in the stone united ailments and parties, whoops and groans, petitions and sky rockets, dawn and dusk. And the image of the wall, like a border with the beyond, with its round passage, like a curative, but also a sarcastic and occasionally cruel eye. I ended up realising San Bieito was part of a country that was both invisible and omnipresent. A cobweb blown and transfixed by the wind of history, but not broken. Many of our first trips, aside from family visits, were to sacred places which appeared on the calendar as feast days. Pilgrimages, at least part of which one did on foot. Today, if allowed to, cars will penetrate and profane even the fairground. There’s a reason for going on foot. With a votive offering on one’s head. To give time to the sacred. This is the time for approaching what is eccentric. When I write, I go on foot. Determined, content, with a cherry from time to time. Until the legs start trembling because over there is the wall. And the hole in the wall.

  Sometimes, one doesn’t arrive, and that’s because of not going on foot. This happened the last time I went to Santo André de Teixido, the most eccentric and possibly the most authentic pilgrimage. By car. In the company of Liz Nash, a British writer and journalist, the whole way talking to her about the saint who came by sea in a stone boat. Explaining the meaning of this expression, ‘stone boat’, which refers to the type of ballast. Interpreting the legend that says whoever doesn’t go to Teixido when alive will go when he has died. The reason for not killing animals, even insects, since they could be deceased people on the road. The idea of re-existence, the transmigration of souls, in popular knowledge. And so on.

  Until we get to the sanctuary. The sun sets the sea ablaze, while expert nature prepares a beautiful sunset for the last remaining pilgrims. At the side door of the temple is a priest in a cassock and clerical collar. It’s the end of the day for him too. Liz goes to talk to him and asks for his interpretation of the legend. Through the half-open door can be seen the pale anatomies of wax votive offerings, like broken toys waiting for a miracle. She’s really very interested. It’s fascinating to come across a living belief in the transmigration of souls – such an oriental philosophy – at the far end of Western Europe. The priest takes a swig. Glances over at me. Gazes at the sea. At Liz.

  He clicks his tongue.

  Says, ‘Old wives’ tales!’

  Now that’s a wild man.

  7

  The Saxophone’s Farewell

  MY FATHER NEVER travelled by plane. He had already seen the face of that strange aviator and been warned about aviation.

  By train, he travelled often. Especially when he was young. On the roof of the carriage. He regarded the day he was told he was going to work as a bricklayer’s mate on a building site in A Coruña as a kind of liberation. Unlike in that story by Clarín, ‘¡Adiós, Cordera!’, in my father’s story the cow was the one who was sad, while my father’s heart leapt for joy the day he left the green prison of the meadows behind. He never missed his time as a herdsman. And he certainly would have had no interest in being described as a ‘friend of animals’. Despite the headbutt that occurred during the aeronautical episode, it wasn’t a question of fear or hatred. He almost always kept a polite, but non-negotiable distance from them, even if they were pets. The most notable exception was Knuckle, a small, long-tailed mongrel who could not be described as being so clever, all he had to do was talk. I am one of those who think that animals talk, but we don’t understand them. What made Knuckle different was that you could understand a large part of what he was saying. He expressed himself with great sincerity, albeit with a hint of irony. In my father’s opinion, he wasn’t exactly a person. He was something else: a personage. During the long winter evenings, they would watch television together. They also shared an enjoyment of music. For my father, humankind’s greatest achievement was a band of jazz musicians.

  ‘They play like God!’

  Knuckle died soon after I started working as a journalist. I wrote an article in which I shared a concern raised by my mother: can an animal like Knuckle go to heaven? The surprising thing was that, a few days later, a wise theologian, Andrés Torres Queiruga, replied by saying, ‘Why ever not?’ Animals had souls. And there was no reason for humans to be left alone in the beyond. My mother cut out the article, a
nd it was one of the things she kept in her bedside table while she was alive.

  It came time to slaughter the pig, and my father did the opposite of most people. He disappeared.

  The little house in Castro de Elviña, where we went to live in 1963, was in a remote place known as Nacha Mount, next to a dirt track that led up to O Escorial and the broadcasting tower of Radio Coruña. One of the first nuggets of information I gleaned, with dismay, from locals was that this summit was where the wind turned around. A quality that is attributed to many summits, but in this case – and all you had to do was hear the sullen roar of the eucalyptuses – seemed much more realistic. It wasn’t just one or two witnesses who said this. Everybody made the same remark: ‘You’re going to live where the wind turns around!’ That business of watching the wind change direction was something that kept me occupied – and preoccupied – for quite some time. Especially when my father declared, ‘The city will never reach here!’ There was some truth in this. The seagulls from A Coruña always turned back here, at the ne plus ultra of the enormous radio tower, even when it was stormy. The starlings did the same, drawing sudden cartoons in the sky. But the crows didn’t. The crows flew high overhead, on their own or in ragged formation, and then suddenly swooped down or soared towards the unknown. I rather liked the crows. In church, always damp and cold, our bodies petrified like the rest of the temple, there was a point at which we revived, and it was when the priest read that part in the Book of Genesis with the episode about Noah’s Ark. Everybody watching the priest’s hands as he mimics the action of releasing the dove and the raven with their mission as meteorological informers after the flood. The dove came back with an olive leaf in its beak, but nothing else was ever said about the crow. Whatever happened to it? Of course, it never came back. All you had to do was see it up there, on our mountain. Roaming free. The dove is a journalist. The crow, that vagabond, is a poet. The cuckoo as well. The cuckoo also continued with its journey. I never heard the cuckoo so clearly again. One of the few times my grandfather the carpenter broke his silence was to tell me a proverb slowly, like someone distilling a haiku: ‘If the cuckoo doesn’t sing in March or April, either the cuckoo is dead or the end is coming.’ There was a large rock that bore its name and had its shape, a winged stone bird whose beak pointed in the direction of the lighthouse. A rock that was about to fly, this was its position. Every year, in March or April, the cuckoo came by. It was on its way north from somewhere in Africa. There must have been a saga of African cuckoos following the same path. It was obvious the route was intentional because the cuckoo didn’t hurry past. It cuckooed for a while, growing louder and softer. All our desire focused on our sight, on wanting to see the cuckoo. A Zapateira back then was an unending expanse of mystery, a no man’s land inhabited, for us, by imaginary creatures that sometimes came visiting in the shape of a fox, a rabbit, a weasel or a barn owl. It was also the first place the cuckoo sang. There was still no road there, no golf club. Until the road and the golf course were built. And Franco’s retinue arrived in summer, the whole mountain bristling with hundreds of guards. Up high, we were never sure whether the wind jostled the crows, their ragged flight, or the crows directed the wind.

  My father couldn’t stand the pig slaughter, or that of any other animal. He would build the sheds, the pens, the cages – that small, domestic farm around our garden. He would help to raise them. He built the bath, that trough where the pig was preserved in salt. The pig slaughter used to take place during St Martin’s summer, under the November sun. It was a day of great festivity in every household. In popular Galician culture, which is so Pantagruelian, the pig is a providential source of nourishment, so to speak. There is the eloquent image of a local who is asked his favourite bird and looks up at the sky to exclaim, ‘If only pigs could fly!’ There are lots of laudatory proverbs, and they aren’t always that old. Like the one that says, ‘The pig has saved more people than penicillin.’ But my father would disappear that day. He didn’t want to know anything about the slaughter. His horror was not even modified by a desire for revenge. When he was self-employed, he would sometimes go months without getting paid. After such periods of abstinence, sometimes the whole lot would come along at once. The house was isolated. An easy target for thieves. Things would get stolen some Sundays when we weren’t there. There wasn’t that much to take. The point is, one Saturday my father got paid for the work of several months. The next day we were invited to a family gathering. Where to keep the money? The idea was brilliant. He put the peseta notes in an empty paint pot. A metal pot with a secure lid he hid in the pigsty, beneath the undergrowth that served as bedding. He shut the door with a padlock. The idea was brilliant. Who would ever think of such a hiding place? When we came back in the evening, the padlock was still in place. He opened the door. The first thing he saw was the pot. Without its lid, and with nothing inside. The pig had rooted and rooted until it found the pieces of paper. In a flash, the animal had gobbled down the work of months. But my father didn’t go to that slaughter either.

  One of my uncles would carry out the task of killing the pig. The labours that followed were performed like a rite: scorching the skin with torches, washing it, opening it, cutting it into pieces, salting it. My mother took care of all the preparations. She also found the arms to hold the animal down. The role of executioner was not imbued with any ritual content or artistic display. It was just a question of killing. Identifying the fastest route to the heart and sticking the knife in. Quickly, but carefully. I remember being there when they made the cut to collect the flow of blood in a bowl. And to stir the blood, which would go to making blood sausages, so it didn’t coagulate.

  My father’s absence was never remarked on. It was simply ignored. It was just a strange thing, and there you go. Like belonging to another religion.

  My mother took care of the other sacrifices, the poultry and rabbits. It wasn’t her vocation to be a butcher, she did it to give us something to eat. Someone had to do it. One of the worst days of her life was when a beheaded duck wriggled free. The bird carried on flying for a while above our heads. She tried to calm herself down, as well as us: ‘Poor thing! It had a lot of electricity.’

  We avoided the theme of sacrifice, but sometimes it turned up unexpectedly and not in the best place. At the table. As happened with the baritone cockerel. It woke us every morning. Time went by. My mother postponed the fatal moment. Until, having given us prior warning, she prepared it for a feast day. We knew she was hurting the most. She wandered about on her own, saying, ‘This is it. Never again!’ My father didn’t eat that day. All of us chewing a musical scale with the rice. From time to time, years later, my father would remember the singer:

  ‘That cockerel was worth a potosí!’

  This was the maximum value my father could assign to anything. A potosí was what the saxophone was worth as well.

  My father learned to read music before books. Music theory before his ABC. He learned a few letters, he spent several months at school, but to read and write properly he used his free time doing military service in the barracks in Parga. He was in the band, and it was so cold in winter he used to say, ‘The notes hung frozen in the air.’ According to him, during that glacial period, a cornet got stuck to a note one night and couldn’t be prised away from the lips. We all laughed at this exaggeration, and he said, ‘You’re laughing out of ignorance.’ He was right. The old army barracks in Parga, abandoned today, the huts covered in brambles, fills the eyes with cold, even if you observe it from afar in summer. That boy who from the age of twelve would run from Sigrás to Cambre Bridge, like so many others, to jump on the trains and go to work in the city, by a happy coincidence would learn to play the saxophone. My grandfather the carpenter got him an instrument in exchange for some work he’d done. Manuel worked on site and then attended lessons with a teacher who made a living playing the piano in a nightclub in A Coruña.

  From his life as a bricklayer’s mate, my father always recalled the d
ay it occurred to him to heat twenty-four workmen’s pots using some teak planks. They produced a wonderful fire, all embers, no smoke. He was amazed. The building site was in O Recheo. He didn’t realise this wood was worth almost a potosí and the site owner, when he turned up in his white shoes, let fly a curse that shook all the branches in Méndez Núñez Gardens. He expressed his intention aloud: ‘I’m going to barbecue that bricklayer’s mate!’ That day, with the help of his colleagues, my father also disappeared.

  He got out of that situation and others. In time, he would make a good builder. Even though, when he was young, the thing he loved best was the saxophone. For years, he combined both jobs – his salary as a builder with his weekend performances at open-air dances and in dance halls. Musicians in A Coruña would congregate around the bar La Tacita de Plata. This is where he met the real heroes of popular emotions. Those who kept the spaces of romance and partying open during that wretched period. He played in prearranged and spontaneous orchestras. This was when musicians got hired by village mayors or the owners of dance halls. The decline of the dance hall, that is what set many musicians back. It was the life of a sparrow. In summer, grain; in winter, the inferno. My father never abandoned his job as a builder. Like the sparrow, he was afraid of winter. As children, we watched him leave with his saxophone after work. He would climb on board a wagon with the other members of the orchestra, often on his way to a remote place, in lands that bordered on León and Asturias. Until that unbearable rhythm got the better of him, like Chaplin in Modern Times, dancing sleepily on an unstoppable machine.

  The author’s father, the saxophonist