The Low Voices

by Manuel Rivas

  Who’s that descending the path on a motorbike? In a helmet, he looks as if he’s concentrating hard, his body in a dynamic posture, close to the machine. It’s Rafael the cobbler. When he gets off, you can see he’s short and has a hump. This is not exactly the place to start, but he doesn’t mind, he spreads luck wherever he goes, all you have to do is see him. Some people are even jealous. What wouldn’t they give to have a hump like the cobbler’s! I like to take our family’s shoes to be repaired in his workshop in Elviña on a Saturday afternoon. Every Saturday afternoon, if at all possible. The workshop is small. You arrive, sit down on a stool. He is opposite, behind his worktable, in his leather apron. His head is big, enormous, with an impish grin. The whole ceiling is covered in images of naked or almost naked bodies, photos, calendars, posters, cut-outs from foreign magazines: a cosmopolitan collage, an infinite and fertile erotic landscape.

  ‘You can come back for the shoes later.’

  ‘No, no. I prefer to wait.’

  My eyes always gravitate towards the same model, the same calendar. He follows the direction of my gaze.

  ‘She never gets a year older!’

  I am about to reach the curve in the road that leads from Elviña to Castro. After a long straight stretch, there’s an abrupt ninety-degree turn. There were days the wind, coming back from school, wouldn’t let us walk. We played with it, and it had fun. Clinging to each other’s arms, we stood against it, and the wind pushed us back, as they say master stonemasons do to move stones by pushing them with their fingertips. A touch more, and we’d take to the air like kites. Where are the Castro children? The wind has taken them! That bend in the road was the best place to keep an eye on the track to A Cavaxe. It must have been a little windy because the undergrowth swayed when the path opened to make way for the Unforgettable. Out of the vegetal tunnel emerged Blondie of Vilarrodrís in her captain’s uniform.

  We’d seen the odd match on Shrove Tuesday between single and married ladies, all of them local. They would play on a pitch next to the Avenue that belonged to the bar Parada, which was where the Cockroach and other buses stopped. It was such a modest, stony pitch that all teams gave themselves a chance of winning. Lightning Football Club then built a new stadium, complete with changing rooms, and at carnival it was decided to celebrate this fact with an international match. Here comes Blondie with her team from the adjoining parish, Arteixo.

  Running across country, for miles, in a football shirt and shorts. All of this, as the poet Manuel María wrote, in those ‘incestuous times’. At the front, like a model in a Pirelli calendar, like an optical revolution in that era of textile mourning, was Blondie of Vilarrodrís. She had emigrated and, on her return, opened a bar called Odette. She wore her hair in the flapper style and bore a certain resemblance to Brigitte Bardot. Not that the two needed comparing. Blondie of Vilarrodrís was there. She was real. So much so that she’d just jumped through the bracken in order to pass from the invisible to the visible along the track to A Cavaxe. Now, on the football pitch, she demonstrated her silky skills. And, something that was a little more complicated, she graciously turned to face the roaring crowd, which had come from all around and was emitting arias di bravura every time the girls of Elviña, Castro and Vilarrodrís touched the sphere of the world.

  On Shrove Tuesday, there was always someone to block the streams so the rivers would dry up and the washerwomen wouldn’t have to go to work and could come and play, or at least watch, those games that marked a turning point in women’s football. The carnival mandate was fulfilled: it was necessary to turn the world upside down!

  What happened during the rest of the year was the exact opposite. The washerwomen of Castro de Elviña carried the sphere on top of their heads. They washed for upper-class families in A Coruña or for clinics, hotels, restaurants. They came and went with enormous loads balanced on a crown or pad, most of the time on foot, sometimes with a donkey. In the caravan, there were also women who sold fresh produce in the city squares. It was noticeable, the way they carried their merchandise. A form of aesthetics developed by the imagination of necessity. An earthen algebra: the positioning kept the fruit alive. It was possible to meet the fishwife along the track. Almost always, whenever she got to our house, all she had left was horse mackerel. I hated them. Children simply don’t like fish bones, and that’s all there is to it. But there was one day the fishwife, coming up the hill, struck me as the most extraordinary creature in existence. She was carrying a basket full of sea urchins.

  Women came and went with weights on top of their heads in order to have their hands free to carry other heavy things or the weight of a child. Everything they carried was necessary. Essential. Provisions, water, milk, wood. Clothes. Some washerwomen’s hands were worn down by soda. Their backbones, because of the weights they carried, looked like inverted pyramids. It was amphibian work, always in contact with water, with a damp stone, feeling the cold. Talking of visions on the road, I once saw the washerwomen of Castro with the sphere of the world on their heads. What happened every Shrove Tuesday was that they and other workers would kick the male’s planetary ball around. Their shrieks of laughter resound in the empty stadiums, race over the grass, like a triumph of humanity.

  12

  Drinking the Rainbow

  THE CITY KNEW little or nothing about Castro. Those from Castro, apart from knowing about the city, had a universe of their own. A gift of knowledge. Atmospheric, for example. From when we were children, we received a thorough meteorological education. In modern times, they stuck the university in that area, but there already existed a popular School of Winds, Storms and Clouds. One of the first things my new friends in Castro taught me was how to catch a rainbow with my hands. There were puddles where the rainbow would place its artistic desire with oily density. You could feel the spectrum of all the colours of the cosmos in your hands. Lift them to your mouth. Lick, taste, drink the rainbow.

  It was no accident that the football team, founded when people stole the ball from the elites and discovered how to play in the mud, should be given and still bears the name Elviña Lightning. Seen from Castro, the bolts of lightning were nightmares from the open sea: sudden, fierce, incandescent forests that seized the celestial void with anxiety and rage. There was a wonderful rock from which to watch the natural cinema of lightning. The Cuckoo’s Crag, near our house, on the way to O Escorial. The cuckoo was large, sculpted by the weather’s imagination in the free workshop of the elements. Any sculptor would have immediately gone down in history for a work like that. It looked like a bird, with its stone wings, its golden-green lichen eyes and its beak pointing towards the city, in axial connection with the Tower of Hercules-Breogán.

  We would climb and sit on the cuckoo’s neck, feel the excitement of those who have always dreamed of flying. There was a sweeping panorama of the whole Artabrian bay. The call of the West. There, like an invisible nation, was the Compass Rose. Many years later, after my military service, I found out that heavy machinery had demolished the Cuckoo’s Crag. I never thought the death of a stone could hurt so much.

  From that prominence and other lookouts, we could see a storm approaching A Coruña long before anybody in the city knew about it. During rainy spells, the washerwomen would spread out their clothes whenever it cleared. That time of light between downpours, like the pause between the ticking of a clock.

  When water was sighted by the Tower, the Castro washerwomen knew they had three emergency minutes. A succession of alarm calls would ring out. They would cover and uncover the clothes horse of the mountain and fields. Memory retrieves these images like the activism of an artistic will. This is what it was. Same as the pyramids of a hundred lettuces! The tied lettuces were jewels in the fields of Castro and Elviña Valley. They sealed them with bulrushes so they would swell on the inside and, having cut them, the women would take them to sell in the squares of A Coruña. They carried them in baskets. Each basket, a hundred lettuces. No more, no less. They placed them in co
ncentric circles to form a conical construction that was crowned by the hundredth lettuce. Everything the women carried on their heads was essential. I can see the women with pails of water. The women with pitchers of milk. The women with bundles of clothes. The women with bales of hay. The fishwives with their wares. Since there’s nothing else I can do, I would like to place inside Miss Celia’s basket or bucket a verse from Nelly Sachs’s ‘Epitaphs Written in the Air’: ‘Irradiated by fish in a glorious dress of tears.’

  In Castro, a sister and brother were born, Sabela and Francisco Xavier, known as Chavela and Paco. There was one day my mother said, ‘Sit over there and hold out your arms.’ So I sat opposite her, and my arms became the support for unravelling or making a skein of wool. Ever since that day, hours of silence have had a sound. A precise, laborious percussion. A textile music. That of knitting. Enigmatic articles would materialise, in keeping with a miniature human anatomy. The first thing my mother knitted was a pair of woollen socks. As she finished these doll-sized booties, my mother was sending a message, like someone waving two flags in the International Code of Signals: ‘Something new is about to be born!’

  My mother always took great care that our feet were warm. She waged a relentless war against the cold, damp and draughts. Children were always frightened of the wolf or the Sack Man, but for my mother the worst monsters of all were the Drip Man or the Man with Draughts. These poor monsters loved us a lot. They always kept us company, whether they were visible or not. They formed part of our home. As did the Weatherman. He may never have realised this. He must have had his own life. Drawn his maps every day. Careful with the Azores. Here’s a patch of low pressure. There’s a high. Without preference. He never showed much enthusiasm for one or the other. His stick was the stick of destiny, and he provided the voice. He looked like someone you could trust, but without influence. His stick had a life of its own. It decided. Pointed at our roofs, our heads, and kept returning to Castro de Elviña.

  At home, before gas became the norm, we had an iron stove, the so-called bilbaína or económica. This is where my mother would hold a drying camp every winter. My father came back one evening looking as if he’d just survived a shipwreck. He’d first got wet on site and then become soaked on his journey home on the Lambretta. This was an elastic motorbike that accommodated four of us. How? With a desire for style in the way we were positioned. The fact is my father turned up, looking pale and miserable. As he shakily changed into something dry, my mother spread the wet clothes that were stiff with mud, like a diving suit, over the iron stove. I was by the stove as well, doing my homework in the warmest place. And that was when my mother paused in what she was doing, became aware of my presence and, staring at me, said in an almost reproachful tone:

  ‘When you grow up, I hope you find yourself a job where you don’t get wet!’

  13

  Franco’s First Funeral

  THE CHESTNUT TREE in Souto had chestnuts for all the world.

  The chestnut tree, when it was young, was painted by the great Germán Taibo (A Coruña, 1889 – Paris, 1919) in his landscape Souto de Elviña. He must have seen something special in it, that genius of the eye who was too quickly taken by the Grim Reaper, along with the members of the Ailing Generation. Taibo was also the author of the most famous nude in Galician art, which showed his French lover, Simone Nafleux.

  This marvel of creation can be seen in the town hall in A Coruña. During the dictatorship, the naked woman’s picture was kept for a long time in a municipal basement, and even after it resurfaced, it would still be concealed whenever there was a public event or a visit by the authorities. When Archbishop Quiroga Palacios first came, they decided to cover the sensual work of art with a flowery cloth of red and white carnations. In the middle of the act, however, a draught came in and blew the cloth onto the floor. In front of the perplexed faces appeared the luxuriant body of the stunning Simone, with her golden locks. Archbishop Quiroga, who shared a peasant background, humour and bonhomie with his contemporary Pope John XXIII, went and exclaimed with roguish irony, ‘But why on earth have you kept such a divine creature hidden?’

  The chestnut tree was divine as well. There were other chestnut trees, but the one in Souto, very near the archaeological remains, next to the stream in O Lagar, was a biblical tree and a little bit communist, since it would multiply its chestnuts according to need. All you had to do was have a grain of faith. There was the day it looked a little exhausted, some beating it, others scurrying along its branches like squirrels, but if you trusted it, if you were patient, the chestnut tree would come up with a number of chestnuts for your necklace. Nobody left that place without enough conkers to make a necklace for All Souls. There was no boy or girl without that protective and edible ornamental rosary whose beads were cooked chestnuts.

  They tasted better if you boiled them with catmint, a medicinal, aromatic herb we found by the sides of the road to O Escorial. The knowledge of herbs and plants was another thing we never learned at school. One day, my mother took me out for a strange harvest: to collect gorse flowers. Among the prickles, in the brambles, we pecked at blackberries like birds. But what was the point of collecting gorse flowers? It would be years before I heard that Breton legend which tells of how God wanted to create the most beautiful flower and started painting gorse flowers on a stick, in that yellow later recreated by Van Gogh. The trouble was, the devil was lurking about, and as soon as God left, he went and painted on the spines. So it was that gorse was born, the most striking symbol of this life of ours, the lineage’s coat of arms: flower and thorn.

  There we were on the mountain, harvesters of gorse flowers, filling a cloth bag held by my mother. Her serious face, the melancholic gleam of her eyes as she collected the flowers, constituted a last hope. We found this out when she said, ‘They’re for Aunt Maruxa, who’s very ill. Gorse flowers are good for the heart.’

  During All Souls in Castro, we made skulls by hollowing out pumpkins. At night, in the corners and on the darkest roads, they would shine with candles inside. To begin with, this custom filled me with fear. It seemed to come from a macabre place. But actually it was quite the opposite. A game that was both training and memory. Walking and running along the border between this world and the next. Sharing the parish of the living and the dead. In the parish of St Vincent, the gravedigger towards the end of the twentieth century was an exceptional man. He was from Castro and was known as Antonio O Chibirico. Our gravedigger was the life and soul of the party. A wonderful dancer. A funny, witty man whose imagination belonged to another time and whose humour was not always well understood. On occasion, he would approach the doors of taverns and shout, ‘You have to keep on dying! You won’t let a man earn a few pesetas!’

  The normal thing is not to be ‘normal’. The normal thing is to be different. This is what life teaches you when it remembers. There is Farruco, with all the shoes of a lifetime. He wasn’t rich. He worked as a bricklayer’s mate. But he kept everything. Recycled everything. If Castro was as clean as a new pin, it was because Farruco had passed by. He built himself an alternative architecture. A shanty-town architecture. He died, but part of it is still left because it was so well made and coated with naval paint from unfinished pots he collected. So the shanty town had the aesthetics of arks marooned on the mountainside. Though, for me, the greatest spectacle was seeing that row of shoes on a Sunday, from childhood to old age, and the way he polished each pair. There were the soles and heels of the years of life, like the rings in the trunk of the chestnut tree in Souto.

  Antonio and the captain of the women’s football team during carnival

  Apart from skulls made out of pumpkins, during All Souls children were given chestnuts and the odd sweet. When, years later, Halloween was imported with all its commercial fanfare, I remembered that chestnut tree in Souto, the gravedigger and socialite Antonio, and the carnival troupes. The Murmurers from Elviña. The Skulls from Castro. Sometimes, they would meet up along the way and become
the Murmuring Skulls. The Mariner produced a wonderful meco, an effigy that had to be buried. A figure that was well endowed. With an enormous penis, sometimes made of wood. Other times, it was a real turnip taken out of the ground, of portentous size. They once stuck some photos of the tyrant to the effigy and accompanied it on the back of donkeys like Franco’s Moorish Guard. The Priest would lead the way with a censer (this was the libertarian Pepe de Amaro, unless I’m much mistaken). The Pagan was also good at acting out the role of God’s provisional minister. Needless to say, the Widow was a man. In between sobs, (s)he would recite the surrealist litany:

  In saecula saeculorum

  pig meat bacon is.

  At which point, they would chuck the tyrannical effigy into the Monelos river.

  They never hurt anybody. But despots don’t have a sense of humour. The members of the troupes were arrested. Mistreated. Some remained in custody. Lent arrived with a sniff of fear. Caused not exactly by the pumpkins or the deceased.

  14

  The Teacher and the Boxer

  WE MUST BOTH have been about six. It was my first day at school, and he came to meet me: Antonio, known as the Red. Reasonably enough. I noticed the flaming colour of his hair. The other children soon formed a ring around us. Yes, this was going to be the first day and the first fight. It had fallen to us. An older child placed a stick on Antonio’s shoulder and then spurred me on, ‘Let’s see if you’re a man and can take it off him!’

  I don’t recall at that moment having any particular interest in showing that I was a man. Given the situation I was in, I probably wouldn’t have minded being taken for a more modest creature. But I realised there were times when one’s fate has been written. It wasn’t necessary to move. A shove launched me in the direction of the Red, the stick fell, and us with it, fighting, drawn by a fatal law of gravity. We later became friends. I remember one day, on our way to school, Antonio cheerfully informed me, ‘I’m leaving for England tomorrow.’