The Low Voices

by Manuel Rivas

  Carme, my mother, had read a lot as a child. Most of all, she’d read the lives of saints. Volumes of exemplary lives that dozed in the darkness of the attic in the vicarage in Corpo Santo. The vicar’s niece, Dona Isabel, grew fond of the girl and semi-adopted her. The large Barrós brood had been left without a mother. This Dona Isabel was very special. A suitor had presented her with a parrot, which she baptised Pio Nono and taught Latin. But the Vaticanist parrot, whose cage was on the balcony, soon switched language when it heard the pine-cone collectors from Altamira passing by. It was a fan of the vox populi and quickly learned how to swear magnificently. That was until Dona Isabel ordered it to be confined to the attic, where Pio Nono, deprived of speech – a low voice – gazed at the reading girl. My mother, apart from laughing with the parrot, made the most of Dona Isabel’s patronage to disappear to the attic, where, alone with books, she would lose all notion of time.

  There were no books in our house. But we soon found out that the house was calling for them. One of the first things my father did when we moved to Castro was subscribe to a newspaper, in this case La Voz de Galicia. It was a wonderful period, when the newspaper was directed by Pedro de Llano Bocelo and then by Francisco Pillado. Bocelo was a popular character in a way that few journalists have been in A Coruña. My mother read him with enthusiasm because of his quest for solidarity with the underprivileged. In the hands of my parents, the newspaper really was ‘the working man’s book’. For my father, it constituted a whole ritual. He would read it very slowly and read it all. The only section he missed out was the section devoted to sport. He hated football so much he wouldn’t even shout ‘Long live Russia!’ when the Spanish national team was playing.

  Often, on a Sunday morning, a young man with a book in his hand would climb the hill to O Escorial, in the direction of A Zapateira. We knew his name. This was Chao, Pai-Pai and Felisa’s son. He greeted us and carried on towards the unknown. But we children would fix our eyes on what he was carrying in his hand. On the paper creature. The secret.

  One morning in winter, on the way to school, Domingos, who was a little older than me, informed me that Chao had been taken prisoner. Prisoner? What for? In a low voice, Domingos then said something that froze my insides: ‘One can’t say!’ How terrible must the crime have been if it couldn’t even be expressed in words! What could he have done, this amusing, entertaining young man who took books for walks in the mountains? It was back in 1964. In the newspaper, alongside others, appeared the photo provided by the Political–Social Brigade. Manuel Bermúdez, alias Chao, his face transformed, looking like a bandit. In fact, Chao, who’d been working since he was thirteen, first in a graphite factory and then as a glazier, had been involved in the anti-Fascist struggle since 1959. He was a nonconformist when it came to speech. Including the sentences that served to underline the slamming of cards in the tavern: ‘The flies will come and warn you!’, ‘Go and see if the cat has laid an egg!’ or more enigmatic stuff, such as the solemn ‘By the beard of Dostoyevsky!’ This spirit would explode during carnival, with its popular surrealism: ‘The Mass will be on the eighteenth of July if the deceased receive their bonuses. In saecula saeculorum, pig meat bacon is!’

  One day, in the bar Os Beléns in Monelos, he came across Guillerme, who told him, ‘Don’t talk so loud! Keep your voice down. There are other things you can do.’ Guillerme had just arrived from France. He’d brought some clandestine newspapers, such as Mundo Obrero. Off they went, on the Guzzi, to deliver it around districts and villages in the shadows. For years, those young men on their motorbike managed to escape the eye that saw everything. Chao lived the experience with fear and emotion. There was a lot of indifference and distrust. But in the most unexpected, isolated places, there would be a hand in the night impatiently awaiting the secret pages.

  Carnival in Castro de Elviña

  In A Coruña Prison, a group of political prisoners organised a kind of free school, open to ordinary inmates. One day, Chao read a newspaper cutting that said, ‘The dangerous offender against private property Suso the Scorpion has been arrested.’ The following day, the Scorpion entered prison. Those who knew him welcomed the recidivist: ‘The Scorpion’s back, the Scorpion’s back!’ He enrolled in the makeshift school. He was really quite innocent by nature. Chao asked him, ‘What are you here for, Suso?’ And he explained, ‘This time, for stealing manure.’ Chao found the metaphor difficult to believe: the dangerous offender was in prison for having stolen a cart of manure. The Scorpion added, ‘But I didn’t tell the police I had stashed away some treasure.’ The Scorpion was a likeable character. The theft of manure didn’t go to court, however, and the order came to set him free. They threw him out, so to speak. The treasure man cried when taking his leave of the clandestine school, ‘I have such a good time here. You have tobacco and everything!’ In prison, Chao also came into contact with some tricksters who had swindled Hispano Americano Bank out of a fortune. They were Argentinian, elegant in appearance; they looked like dandies. Their food in prison was brought to them from an expensive restaurant that served platefuls of seafood. They would discuss the injustices of the economic system. While tucking into goose barnacles, the virtuoso swindlers would rebuff Chao – who was trying to explain the alliance between the forces of work and culture – by saying, ‘You really are a bunch of idiots! Where’s the money? In the banks! Go after it!! That’s the way to fight capitalism!’

  When he came out of prison, we saw Chao again on a Sunday, on his way to the mountains, with a book in his hand. It didn’t take María and me long to set out after him. The title of the book was Long Night of Stone by Celso Emilio Ferreiro. That day, thanks to the youthful glazier, we were able to see wounded words emerging from under the stones. When a state of emergency was declared or there was a strike or the regime was sharpening its claws, Chao would disappear. He’d already said he wasn’t going to lounge around in bed, waiting to be arrested again. María and I used to visit a cave, an old mud pit. We’d go with a bucket to fetch clay so María could make some figures. If you didn’t know it was there, it was difficult to find. The entrance to the cave was narrow and obscured by bracken. It was nice being inside. Seeing the mouth of light, feeling its glow inside the earth. A warm, damp chamber with the welcoming, ancestral smell of mud. One day, we came across a checkered blanket folded up in a corner. On top of it was a book, one of those books that still talk, half read: The Brothers Karamazov. So this was the room of humanity, the cave we could perhaps return to one day as a refuge.

  We never told anyone about it. Not even our mother, who would have sent us back with milk and bread for the mysterious tramp. Not even Chao. By the beard of Dostoyevsky!

  19

  Heraclitus, Parmenides and the Co-ed Institute

  WE WERE STANDING up on the worn velvet seats of the old Monelos Cinema. Dancing wildly to ‘Los chicos con las chicas’. Los Bravos made a film from that song that was such a hit at the end of the 1960s. But we had a special reason for shouting out the elementary refrain: ‘Boys and girls have to be together!’ The institute in Monelos was the first co-ed institution in the whole of Galicia. It was located in a border area, where new blocks of social housing met fields of maize. A revolution. A frenzy. Sometimes, groups of pupils from private, religious schools would come to witness the spectacle. Boys and girls leaving class together. Bell-bottoms, the first miniskirts. But, above all, the excitement of being together. Suddenly establishing a connection with a look while the teacher Caeiro explains an essential debate that permeates the whole of history. Either you’re Parmenides. Everything remains. Or you’re Heraclitus. Everything flows: you never bathe in the same river twice.

  Heraclitus was right, said Caeiro, but Parmenides wasn’t wrong.

  The river, girl. Bathe together, girl. Remain, flow. It’s all in the classics.

  I ran. I always had a strong wish to attend that school. In my feet and in my head. I would go across country as far as Elviña. Cross the Avenue like a Viet
Cong. Officially named Alfonso Molina, back then it was called ‘the Ho Chi Minh route’. Lots of people got run over there until they finally built a footbridge. One of those who died was Manuel of Corpo Santo, my grandfather the scribe. This keen walker wasn’t killed in the war, but ended up being knocked over by a car on the Avenue. A poacher. The driver made off. And Manuel was stranded in the ditch, at the hour that separates the dog from the wolf. I ran in order to cross that mined frontier every day. I then followed a path that bordered the railway, next to a sea of rye. Until I reached the ‘district of flowers’, an area with blocks of social housing that were worthy of the name. There was an architectonic imagination that had envisaged something different and lacked the prison-like appearance of other new estates. This co-ed institute wasn’t just an exotic destination for peeping Toms. It was also a centre of attraction for juvenile gangs, the most famous being the Red Devils. They would go there more in search of fun than action. They would sometimes turn up with a portable record player, and the playground would transform into a party. In a way, they belonged to the institute. They should have been pupils, but they weren’t, even though there were some who were both ‘within and without’. I was struck by the hierarchy that existed in these groups. Their leadership wasn’t just a question of strength. One of the bosses was the Chinaman, who was short and light as a fly, but had the most intimidating eyes. So you had to try not to look at him, because, if you did, you soon felt the blade of his tongue scraping the back of your neck: ‘Hey, you, what you looking at?’ With the support of the group, he dominated by means of his cruelty. He carried a set of screwdrivers in the pocket of his sheepskin jacket. There was another kind of leader whose charisma came from the enchantment aroused by dangerous beauty. This was the case with Miguel the Palavean. His appearance always took the form of a ghostly apparition. Thin, olive skin, jet-black hair, full of laughter, aware of his charm, he provoked immediate uproar, in which there was a mixture of expectation and caution. It was him, really, it was him! But it seems true that the gods punish the chosen. Life would be hard on those who were hard. A mirror full of scars.

  I ran towards that place. I would have gone on Sundays if it had been open. I spent seven years at the co-ed institute: the six years of my baccalaureate and the one year of university orientation. It was on the side of the mountain, surrounded by meadows and fields, behind Oza Church. The first few years, it was little more than a shed with a flimsy roof and walls, always looking like a temporary shelter that fought bravely against the storms. What ever happened to Heraclitus, Parmenides, and the girl who bathed in the river?

  With María and others by the Tower of Hercules

  For us, studying was a rash adventure. I mean for María and me. We were pushed by our primary school teachers, Don Antonio and Dona Fina. But this divided the family. It was uncommon back then for the children of a working-class family to continue their studies after school. My father wasn’t sure about this. And now I understand him. He saw me working on a building site and had already found a job for María as a sales assistant in a shoe shop. Not bad, right? She went to try it out for two weeks. One day, she came back from work and said, ‘I’m not going anymore. I want to be a student.’ María, when she was clear about something, wouldn’t budge. She had the soul of a suffragette. So students we were. She enrolled in A Milagrosa, a public institution that had links with the provincial orphanage. In the fourth year of her baccalaureate, María won a writing competition sponsored by a soft drinks manufacturer, in which all the teaching centres took part. First in A Coruña. Then in the whole of Spain. Her prize was a trip to Puerto Rico. The headline in the newspapers: ‘Bricklayer’s Daughter Wins National Writing Competition.’ That story by María, written when she was fourteen, was an unusual text imbued with beautiful harshness. The life of a tree, its felling, its journey to be cut into pieces in a sawmill. The kind of story that makes you ask, ‘How is this possible?’ A year after the award, María got rid of the presents she’d been given. Everything except for a few records of Puerto Rican music and a book of Tagore’s collected poems. She burned everything in the garden, under my mother’s silent gaze. My mother knew that freedom could hurt. A free woman was growing inside María, whose eyes were getting bigger and bigger, like bell jars. She didn’t stop crying the day of the coup in Chile, with the death of Salvador Allende. There were those who knew the reason, and others who asked, ‘But what’s wrong with the child?’ My mother kept quiet.

  We had friends in common, who would pass each other on the way. Lots of them studied in Monelos. The place of studies coincided with the place of desire. The erotic place. The contrast between ‘place’ and ‘non-place’ is often a topic of discussion. There is ‘the other place’, where a second life is born. Something happened there. A psychogeographical concordance, a special set of teachers and a generation of stammering rebelliousness that wanted to say what one couldn’t say.

  At the co-ed institute, we requested the hall for a free activity organised by pupils. The most daring group in the Monelos crew – Celsa, Xoana, Chuqui and Luciano – recited a poem by Bertolt Brecht that could well have been the slogan of those times: ‘How the Ship Oskawa Was Taken Apart by Her Crew’. We played records by Voces Ceibes. And interpreted The Peasant’s Catechism by Valentín Lamas Carvajal, that prodigy of insurgent humour written by a blind man at the end of the nineteenth century:

  – Are you a peasant?

  – Yes, for my sins.

  The one asking the questions, the one playing the priest, was Pedro Morlán. And I was the peasant. Morlán made a very good confessor. Perhaps because of his presence – that of a tall, pale, thin, revolutionary young man. The ideal, the revolutionary dream, was in the air. There were some conservative teachers, but they were generally the most eccentric. Even the priests were Reds. First of all, Don Maurilio. And Rodríguez Pampín, who came later, timid in appearance, always deep in thought, the stony weight of the sky on his head. The complete opposite of Don Maurilio, who was a small, fibrous, electric kind of man. It seemed the whole of his body was at the service of his voice. For upholding masterly lessons or sermons with the salt of the earth. Through this priest, the son of peasant farmers in Castile, we learned about Hélder Câmara, the archbishop of Olinda and Recife who opened the way for liberation theology, about Ernesto Cardenal, and Camilo Torres, the Colombian guerrilla priest; we also learned the basic concepts of structuralism and psychoanalysis. The roots of a community were established. We saw through to the other side of scripture. Had Christ returned, he would have been crucified again on the spot. All you had to do was see the processions during Holy Week. But watching Don Maurilio demonstrate the existence of God by means of the atheist philosopher Althusser, who was very fashionable back then in intellectual circles, was no lesser spectacle. I say ‘watch’ because he used the blackboard a lot for his diagrams of Marxist structuralism, but always kept them within the limits of the blackboard. God appeared above the blackboard, on the throne of his superstructure. The most convincing argument that dispelled any doubts about faith was watching him play pelota. This stocky priest would roll up his sleeves and be transformed into pure, invincible infrastructure. With the co-ed institute surrounded by the jeeps of the Armed Police, the so-called ‘greys’, these priests had the courage to say a funeral mass for two shipyard workers shot dead at a demonstration in Ferrol on 10 March 1972. Pampín spoke Galician. And spoke inwardly. If Maurilio’s God was a historical optimist at the forefront of constructivism, for whom Bauhaus could be a continuation of Genesis, one imagined Pampín’s God as a vulnerable, existentialist being who was willing to shake hands with uneasy Nothingness, a creator more in need of protection than almighty. I went to the boarding house where he lived, a very modest room in Catro Camiños. He handed me a book and said, ‘Keep it hidden under your jersey and don’t take it out until you get home.’ It was Forever in Galicia by Alfonso Castelao, published in exile in America and known as the Galician Bible. A book that wa
s used to being hidden and saying the things one couldn’t say. With humour and pain. Written by a man who was losing his sight. Aged, defeated, smothered by the advance of Nazism, suffering from survivor’s guilt, Castelao watches from his room, at dusk, how the windows of the buildings in Manhattan light up. He is exhausted. Alone. He writes, ‘I am the child of an unknown country.’ But something extraordinary happens. A groundswell. Chaplin’s walk. He goes to Harlem. It’s winter. He sketches a young black tramp. Possibly the best portrait of his life. ‘Listen,’ says my mother with the secular Bible in her hand, ‘what is Galicia’s Holy Trinity? The cow, the fish, the tree.’ Both priests, Maurilio and Pampín, were kind at a time that wasn’t. The Church wasn’t kind to them, felled as they were like trees.

  Something else happened back then. Franco’s secret police, the Political–Social Brigade, paid a visit to the management of the co-ed institute. The acts of the ship Oskawa being taken apart by her crew on a Saturday came to an end, as did our experience of the freedom of the press on a cyclostyle. The management said it was for our own good. They were nice people. Teaching us a lesson. An intense, historical immersion. Now, it was fear’s turn. But we had already tasted freedom, the greatest sin in Spain. What one cannot say had infiltrated our molars. We had heard Michael Servetus on the lips of our teacher Caeiro: ‘Libertatem meam mecum porto.’ I carry my freedom with me. At the exit of the co-ed institute, there was always an ashen car containing men with an oblique glance. The Suburban Free Institute, the boys and girls, were under scrutiny.