The Low Voices

by Manuel Rivas

  The builder, the professional amateur, abandoned music. But the saxophone remained. For us children and our mother, it was the house’s secret treasure, dozing in its case on top of the wardrobe, awaiting better times. The saxophone would occasionally come down and alight in my father’s hands. The last time we heard it was at a party on Christmas Eve. My father played paso dobles, boleros and even the odd Christmas carol. My mother killed herself laughing. That evening, I understood, I thought I saw, when and why they fell in love. Here was a man transformed, creating harmonies.

  Early one evening, my father arrived in the company of a man with a moustache that formed a kind of horseshoe around his mouth. He was stocky, but trailed his arms, as if he bore the weight of an anatomical tiredness. There was something decadent about him. Both of them were very serious. Silent. My father entered the master bedroom and took the saxophone case down from the wardrobe. We cried. It just happened. María and I started crying. It was a lament for which there was no consolation. The feeling that all the clocks of all times had been broken. My father wasn’t expecting this sense of solidarity with the old saxophone. He stood there, looking perplexed and disturbed. He called us over and said in a serious voice:

  ‘Do you know why I’m giving it to him? He needs it to make a living.’

  We cried, yes, but I think the saddest thing was that man with the dark eyes and the horseshoe moustache. We watched him leave with the black case. Suddenly, he turned around to face us. He put his hand in his pocket and gave us a twenty-five-peseta coin. He then walked down the hill, in the dusk, his body listing to one side, like someone leading a soul by the hand.

  8

  The Journey to Restless Paradise

  THE FIRST IMAGE is that of an old woman dressed in mourning in the window. But she’s not looking at me. I follow the direction of her gaze, and there is a busy man. It’s Farruco, lining up his shoes and boots on top of a wall. He cleans them, polishes them with bitumen or horse fat, and makes them shine with a cloth and brush. He then orders them in pairs, according to their age. There are the shoes of a lifetime, in the Sunday sun.

  Gaston Bachelard defined the world painted by Chagall as a ‘restless paradise’. I didn’t know anything then about Bachelard’s poetic philosophy or Chagall’s uneasy village, but I knew this place as a child and grew up there. A paradise where colourful horses ate thorns; harsh, with the name of a battlefield, but true. It was Castro de Elviña.

  My father was happy to have built there, with his own hands, what he called in the Venezuelan style a ranchito. A one-storey house on the hillside. He chose to fit the door, which my grandfather had made, on the day of the great snowfall of 1963. He crossed the Monelos river and the railway with the door on his back. There were three of us: my grandfather the carpenter carrying the frame; my father with the door; and the child bringing up the rear, holding a tool, counting their footsteps and trying to step in their footprints. My father had to do it. He had to place the laurel on top. He had to have his own home. But his most precise definition of independence was the following: ‘You have to live somewhere where you can’t hear the neighbour pulling the chain.’

  To begin with, Carme, my sister María and I were not at all convinced by this biblical exodus from Monte Alto to another, even taller mountain at the end of a dirt track, with torrents of rainwater and lacking any public transport. To get to the city, you had to cover a large distance across open country to reach the Avenue (Alfonso Molina) and then wait for the Cockroach, the bus that came from the coast, full of people, and did justice to the song ‘La Cucaracha’, which was often sung by the passengers: ‘The cockroach, the cockroach / can no longer walk / because he doesn’t have, because he lacks / four back wheels.’ Very near the bus stop, they had just inaugurated the Coca-Cola factory that would supply the whole of Galicia. A remarkable building for its time, it was a huge glass cube next to the road, surrounded by nature. While waiting for the Cockroach finally to arrive in a splutter, we would gaze in amazement at the unceasing movement of the conveyor belt, where rows of bottles of the potion would enter one side empty and come out the other full, without the presence, so far as we could tell, of any human being. When they talk to me about magical realism, that literary label so abused by lazy critics, the first thing that comes to my mind is that transparent factory and the vision of the bottles filling up on their own, while we waited for the ancient, heaving bus with its embittered engine. The way the Cockroach moved, that was realism. And there was something magical about it too.

  Castro de Elviña women

  We’d had to leave Marola Street in a hurry, a rapid evacuation. The owners wanted the ground floor for something else and gave us no notice. I remember my mother went to discuss a moratorium with them. She took me along with her. She was very calm, but that day I could feel her racing pulse in her hand. We were received in the hallway by the wife. She was a stiff, bejewelled kind of woman. My mother said something similar to Rosalía de Castro’s poem ‘Justice by the Hand’. The woman called out for her husband. We were surprised to see a little man in an apron. The woman tried to incite him against my mother, but he quivered and spoke in a whisper. It wasn’t clear who or what he was more afraid of – the irate tenant or his wife’s commands. In the end, Carme stared at this stuttering figure, took me by the hand, and we left without another word. On the way back, she kept talking to herself. All I could feel now on the palm of my mother’s hand was the fuming of her sirvente.

  While my father got going with the work on the house, on that patch of hillside he’d bought with the help of his Venezuelan bolivars, we stayed for several months with my paternal grandparents, the carpenter and the seamstress. They also lived on a mountain, next to O Birloque and A Cabana, in O Martinete, a place of which almost no trace is left. My grandfather worked away from home, but had a workshop on the ground floor of the house and, on Sundays, would cultivate a field next to the Monelos river, which flowed through the fertile land of A Granxa and into the port of A Coruña. Back then, the river was still alive. If eels swam up it, it was because they remembered the thousands of years the little Monelos had meandered through Os Sargazos. Since then, the river has also disappeared and been buried. It crosses the city in a pipe and merges with the sea without anybody noticing. Sometimes, during a downpour, you can hear the mutter, the roar, of the river’s ghost in an underground garage.

  One of those who lived in O Martinete was a mute man with a long beard. I think his name was Fidel, or that was what they called him, possibly with reference to the Cuban revolution. He was a good friend of my grandfather the carpenter. The two of them got on very well in silence. Fidel the sawmill operator always wore blue overalls and really did resemble a legendary hero. He had the air of an Argonaut who’d lost the power of speech on an island where words are stolen. He was both thickset and nimble, and put all his body into making signs whenever he wanted to convey something. Needless to say, he was the most communicative neighbour for miles around. My grandfather would listen with his eyes and then become thoughtful or nod. They could be like this for hours. He was a whole, philosophising anatomy, exclaiming with his eyelids, emphasising with his eyebrows and writing in the air with his arms or hands, his fingers composing ideograms. One day, the fountain stopped working. No water emerged from the spout. The mute, who understood all about machinery, started to explain the problem to the huddle of neighbours. He didn’t use words but, judging by the attention they paid, you could see the extraordinary eloquence, the energy, of his talking body. The way he drew the water’s path in the air. The law of communicating vessels. When he’d finished, the water started flowing out of the spout. It couldn’t do otherwise. Nobody needed any more convincing. It would have been a shame for the water not to emerge.

  And then the day of the great snowfall arrived. The day for carrying the door. For having our own home.

  This is the area where the University of A Coruña now stands. It should really be called the University of Ca
stro de Elviña. That was one of the first things they taught me. Castro was one thing, A Coruña another. In this area, where everybody hankers after the city’s coat of arms, Castro is the only place known to have defended its position as a village. This is what happened when the first neighbourhood association was constituted. The meeting took place in Leonor’s pub. The governor, at a time when governors were like a panoptic eye that watched over everything, dispatched a plain-clothes policeman. He didn’t need to introduce himself. He was the only one dressed in a suit and tie. The secret man took a seat and started noting down everything that was said. At one point, however, he stopped writing, and that was when the assembly unanimously agreed to remain as a ‘village’, rejecting the term ‘city district’. A woman, who warned she’d left a saucepan on the stove, then intervened to protest against a tax for the cleaning of chimneys. Had anybody ever laid eyes on this municipal chimney sweep? Might the long-awaited, real chimney sweep not be that man, the one taking notes? The civil servant was nonplussed. He grabbed his notes and scurried away like a nervous, frustrated detective afraid of a place that is not so much dangerous as imaginary.

  We realised we’d reached a breeding ground on land as soon as we arrived. We were about to put down roots in a territory that seemed hostile. Dogs ran free and snapped at our outsider heels. María and I didn’t dare set foot outside the precinct. The only thing that calmed us down that night was spotting the beam of the lighthouse. It was further away now, but this meant you could see it better. Its circular glow penetrated the dusk and entered through our window. When we woke up and went outside, we saw the whole mountain had been painted in colours. The washerwomen had spread out their clothes. And the Barreiro girls, Pepe and Maruxa’s daughters, were atop the Cuckoo’s Crag. Among other things, we learned that carnival was coming. And on Shrove Tuesday, at the football stadium, something would happen that had never happened before.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘There’ll be women playing!’ said Beatriz.

  If women were playing football, then clearly we weren’t in the back of beyond. It was true the wind turned around here. How could it not? It was at the service of the washerwomen.

  9

  The Weatherman

  I SAW HIM dig two wells. He probably dug others. Real wells, artesian wells, for the supply of water. Even though this wasn’t his job. On the contrary. My father’s work as a builder was more closely linked with height than depth. But when it was necessary, he would open a hole in the ground. And start building downwards.

  He worked for a long time with Xosé, a younger man who called him ‘master’. Xosé of Vilamouro was very serious, very quiet, and while he worked only ever expressed himself with deep onomatopoeias and the experimental music of tools in action. I was struck by the way he addressed my father as ‘master’ and did it so naturally. This meant there was a master doing the same job, which implied not a hierarchy, but respect. In this case, the master was my father. There are words that fill the look. I could argue with my father, be in disagreement, get annoyed, but, whenever he was working, I couldn’t help viewing him as a master. The builder’s silence, like that of other trades, has to do with the need to hear the sound of his work. The sound produced by the tools entering into contact with the material. A lack of harmony reveals a fault in the symmetry. You have to hear the trowel or the ruler when you plaster a wall. But, on animated occasions, the opposite process can take place. Now Xosé and my father are humming, whistling, trumpet and sax, in comes the trombone, the music affects the tools, filling them with a desire for style. Perhaps in this as well, my father, who learned music theory before his ABC, is playing the role of master. When something in the material rebels, when the mass disobeys, he falls silent. Looks around, examines the disharmony. Checks the mixture. Proceeds over the fault. Doesn’t swear or curse. I know what he’s going to say …

  ‘Cymbals, Manuel! Let the wonders of the world ignite!’

  When he was working near home, I would take him his lunch in an earthenware pot with the lid tied down by a strip of tyre. They almost always kept a bonfire going on site, from which they would remove some embers to heat the pot. That fire had a special smell. A fire on site smells of the building site. They generally use bits of plank from the moulds. Damp, covered in lumps of cement. Fire doesn’t like them. It starts emitting smoke. What keeps the flames going, what revives them and gives them meaning, is the thick paper from the sacks of cement. The flames rise and fall sulkily. It’s important the way the paper, splinters and planks are positioned. A pyramid with the correct amount of air flowing through it. But this reticence makes the flames more long-lasting. It’s a fire that’s difficult to put out, even if it’s raining. When it was very cold, they would build a primitive stove, burning sawdust in a metal drum that was also used for preparing whitewash. I liked the smell of the building site. The fragrance of cold, hard, headstrong materials. Until the structure had been built, the materials would occupy the site with a sullen identity. The heap of sand smelled of the sea. In those days, they fetched sand from the beaches or dunes. It had to be sieved. What filtered through was fine sand like flour. What didn’t filter through were crumbs of the sea’s memory, bits of shell, of sea urchin, a crab’s pincer. On the lookout and bad-tempered, the iron, wood, bricks, blocks, asbestos, tiles, slates. This is why the bonfire was important, however poor it might be. It was like a sign or an ownerless dog that refused to budge from the empty site. After two or three weeks, everything was different, the materials had adopted a different disposition. A state of cheerfulness. The bricks weighed less. The pulley wheels squeaked. The spirit level and plumb line legislated over the void.

  The author’s father on the left

  When it comes to building, there are jobs that are imbued with a certain aura. The job of painter, for example. My father could immediately tell who the carpenter, electrician or plumber was. He had no problem identifying the painter. It was obvious from the haircut, the shirt, the style. What about the builder? The builder is the one who puts everything together where there was nothing before, the one who places the laurel on top. There’s a roof, a house. But there’s something wrong with being a builder.

  ‘Become a painter. They sing on site. They’re good to work with. And they wear shirts that give off light.’

  Xosé used to laugh at this business with the shirts. Perhaps that was the problem with builders. They didn’t dare put on a loud shirt. I wanted to be a lorry driver. I had great admiration for a friend of my father, Jorge from Palavea. He used to wear bright shirts as well. But when the lorry broke down, he would remove his shirt and slide under the machine with a naked torso. He didn’t come out until he’d fixed it. He referred to his lorry as a large, strong, good, but slightly deranged animal. Which broke down for the most absurd reasons. Once, after hours of fishing around, he came out from under the lorry, complaining vociferously, and showed me a steel ball bearing. Glinting in the sun. See this? It had a black spot, like a tiny amount of decay on the enamel of a tooth.

  He was sweaty. Grimy. He stared at the lorry’s snout in dismay. The way they behaved, they resembled each other more and more closely.

  ‘That’s the reason it stopped. Do you find that normal?’

  The way they related to their tools. This was another detail that caught my attention whenever I visited the site and observed Xosé and my father. They felt a responsibility towards them, which they never shirked. The day only came to a close when they’d cleaned and washed the tools. They did this meticulously, leaving not a single stain. Their hands would grow soft, pale, all wrinkled, like skinless creatures, while the tools would regain a modest splendour and lie down in a resting position, as in a dormitory. Until tomorrow.

  In some part of my brain, in the secret Department of Essential Information, is the day my father explained to me the purpose of a plumb line and, in particular, of the air bubble in the tube of a spirit level. The house is supported by the air bubble, that o
ne right there. The bubble sees a lot better than your eye. The bubble has information about terrestrial coordinates, meridians and parallels. The bubble corrects your eye. It is not deceived. It is always sincere. Put up a wall, and you think you’re doing a great job, but the bubble in the spirit level may come along and tell you you’re not, it’s not straight, however much you think the opposite. And it’s the bubble that’s right.

  The bubble in a spirit level, that drop of intelligent emptiness, has exercised a hypnotic attraction over my eye ever since. The immediate reflex of checking the level, or lack thereof, in the objects around it. Tools were the best toys we children had. The idea of making a boat wasn’t an imaginary intention. We could give it a go – and we did. We had wood, we had tools. And the sea wasn’t far away. An excess of nails brought about our failure on the first day. In the end, however, the problem was financial, not naval. If we wanted to go hunting for treasure in Castro, we had mattocks, pickaxes and shovels. And we went. It wasn’t a joke. Torques had turned up together with a beautiful Celtic diadem with triskeles and a clasp in the shape of a golden duck, that emigrant from here to the beyond. The trouble was, as Pepe de Amaro explained to us on our return from digging, defeated, that it’s not you who finds the treasures, it’s the treasures that come looking for you. The truth is we children in Castro liked tools almost as much as football. Not to work with, of course, just to play at working.

  Access to our house was not that easy. The water supply was a public fountain in the grounds of the vicarage, where there was also a place for washing. But the supply was intermittent, given the character of the parish priest, who was somewhat feudal, not to say Neolithic. So there was an important problem. My father went searching for an essential treasure: water. The house was on a hillside, and he dug a well, convinced a spring would soon appear. He dug and dug. He came across granite and fought bravely against the stone with a mallet, iron wedges and even dynamite. It was unbelievable: there was water everywhere except in that well. While he went exploring in different parts of the property, the water would rise to the surface on the floor of our house, in the most hidden corner, under the beds, with effervescent irony. The house was located under a kind of atmospheric passage in the north-west of the peninsula, which is where the most powerful formations of Atlantic clouds came in. This wasn’t a subjective impression. It was what the Weatherman said, with his Stick in the Atmosphere.