The Low Voices

by Manuel Rivas

  20

  A Job Where You Don’t Get Wet

  ‘SON, CAN’T YOU find yourself a job where you don’t get wet!’

  Apart from attending the co-ed institute, I tried to prepare myself as well as I could to carry out my mother’s mandate. Among other things, I went to a typing school. There is a poem by Pedro Salinas in which he calls the keys ‘happy girls’. I felt that happiness the first day I sat down in front of the keyboard. My fingers were sluggish, they got the levers all mixed up, but everything changed when the typing tutor came up, positioned my fingers on the keys and pressed down to give them the necessary impetus, the gentle motive force that would propel the carriage and the walk of universal writing. To do this, she stood behind you, embraced your shoulders and took control of your hands to turn the fingers into well-informed, walking operatives. Hers was a corporal kind of speech in which words, fragrant skin and locks formed part of a unique language whose accent was on your fingertips. I never thought typing could be so erotic. My fingers picked up speed: light, happy and Bohemian. I was sorry not to progress to shorthand, but I had to find myself a job where I wouldn’t get wet.

  The day I climbed the stairs to the offices of the Ideal Gallego, I didn’t know whether I wanted to be a journalist, only that I wanted to be a writer. At the time, I wrote verses, which I thought were poems, in among my maths numbers and equations. When the teacher came over, I would conceal the secret with my hands and body. The poem curled up like a hedgehog. But one day he discovered it, the poem, the open hedgehog. His reaction was to read it, his thick lenses surveying that strange creature, the surprised hedgehog, a poem among numbers. I was expecting a telling-off, not a verdict. But what he said was, ‘Why do they always write sad things?’ I cannot remember how sad it was, the poem, that hedgehog advancing with its own unanswered questions between rows of equations, but I do remember being taken aback by the way he used the plural to identify me. I wrote poems. I wrote sad poems. I belonged to a strange tribe that wrote sad poems. Perhaps the problem was in the nuance. I didn’t get around to explaining to him that the poem was sad, but the way I’d written it was happy. The hedgehog was learning how to type.

  In the psychogeography of those times, there are other unforgettable places where the hedgehog uncurled. One was the library in San Carlos Gardens, in the Old City. It was a long way from Monelos, after class. I used to go there via the port, which I entered from A Palloza. The port was an open area back then. One could enjoy the most beautiful architecture: ships and cranes. The work of netters spinning and mending their large marine cobwebs. The boisterous voices of those returning alive from their combat in the Gran Sol. On the stage set of the sky, above the bay, the most exhilarating spectacle was the clouds of starlings sketching cartoons to confuse the birds of prey. Some of those clouds of starlings would alight in the circular San Carlos Gardens. As would the more or less sad poets among us. Not far from there, they opened the first pub in A Coruña: Dylan’s. Thanks to Carlos, the brave man who came up with the idea, this was a small establishment that dreamed towards the future like vinyl. A place of discovery. You could immerse yourself every day in the wilderness of music and people saying all the things one couldn’t say. It also belonged to the geography of the other place, where you heard things you’d never heard before. Even the unexpected. All that complicit music, the unending, runaway kiss with that mysterious girl, a bit cross-eyed and hoarse, merged with the startling power of María Callas in ‘La mamma morta’.

  Sorridi e spera! Io son l’amore!

  Dylan’s was the room of humanity. A nomadic home. Forward and back, from back to fore. A small place in the Old City, fighting bravely. Against fines. The sanctions that forced them to close for a while. Some afternoons, you would arrive and the door would be locked. Not a whisper. On the corner, the crooked silhouette of a secret policeman. Where had the songs gone? The dry leaves in San Carlos Gardens, drawing circles on the vinyl of the ground, in the wake of the cross-eyed girl.

  ‘Are you going?’

  ‘I have work to do. I mustn’t be late.’

  ‘Don’t go!’

  I left. With my head down. The stigma of the accursed race. Work. I never saw her again.

  Vivi ancora! Io son la vita!

  I wanted to be a writer, but what kind of profession was that? Most of the writers I admired had earned a living on a newspaper. From Mark Twain to Graciliano Ramos, the Brazilian who wrote Barren Lives. Hey! Try not to quote so much. Don’t overdo the quotes. Learn to quote without inverted commas. Remember the time you attended a conference by a Famous Writer. He read his speech with a certain lack of enthusiasm. Someone from the public asked him which authors had influenced him most. He began to pluck names out of the air, with growing excitement: Shakespeare, Cervantes, the great English novel, the great Russian novel, the great French novel, Faulkner of course, not forgetting Valle-Inclán … The ironic mouth of literature sounds from the audience, ‘What fault is it of theirs that you write?’ In A Coruña, there was a strong tradition of throwing barbs. And people with a good aim, who were courageous. A recital by the leader of the Falangist poetry group Amanecer (Dawn) was interrupted at the crucial moment by a shout of ‘Another plate of squid!’

  At the co-ed institute, we edited a magazine that ended up being clandestine. I interviewed heterodox mouths of local culture. One that led to another. The playwright Manuel Lourenzo, imprisoned in his youth; the musician Miro Casabella, grandson of a blind singer of ballads; the humorist and comics writer Chichi Campos, whose every panel was subversive … Many couldn’t be published, but they formed part of the freedom I carried with me. A casual coincidence, the hasty exit from a concert by Miro that hadn’t been approved by the governor, allowed me to meet Toño López Mariño. It was like meeting Bugs Bunny and Jack Kerouac at the same time. Toño had gone from the lesser seminary of Santiago to the Beat Generation in a single jump. He was one of the last to graduate from the school of journalism in Madrid and signed his chronicles with the initials WBS (Why Bother Signing). I told him my story, and he suggested I drop by the Ideal Gallego. This ancient journal of Catholic intransigence was going through a period of intense change, with a new director, Rafael González, from Andalusia. It wasn’t quite on a level with Combat. There was an old, very conservative guard on the staff, but there were others who subscribed to and practised principles and obligations of journalism like those espoused by Albert Camus. Not to lie. To confess what you do not know. To stand up against any kind of despotism, whatever the excuse … In short, not to dominate. Xosé Antón Gaciño, Luís Pita and Gabriel Plaza were new reference points in the world of Galician journalism. They were the ones who would occasionally be insulted on the stairs to the Ideal by extremists who called themselves the Warriors of Christ the King. The Ideal’s new soul was altering the way information was presented, much to the chagrin of the Fascist authorities and reactionary clergy, who observed with increasing amazement how their old parish newsletter was sprouting wings. But that wasn’t all. The journalists contributed to the city’s cultural awakening. They organised the first serious retrospective of work by Urbano Lugrís, the seascape surrealist. When you see one of his pictures, you think the sea exists in part so that Lugrís could paint it. He used to say he painted in underwater workshops like a solitary companion of Captain Nemo. It was the summer of 1975. We were carrying the pictures one by one under our arms to the Association of Artists. He endured the drama of having to paint the inside of the Azor, Franco’s yacht, with sea motifs. He then got drunk. They say his best works were done in red wine on the marble tables of different taverns. I remember now. We’re walking in a line, each of us embracing a Lugrís, when we come across the extremists roaming free in María Pita Square. Armed with chains. They have no way of knowing what pictures we’re carrying under our arms, but we realise that to them they represent potential rubbish, degenerate art, simply because we’re the ones carrying them. Gabriel Plaza mutters, ‘Don’t look at them,
keep going.’ I’m not a street brawler, I know this, but I feel a strange force emanating from the picture. I could protect it with my body to the end.

  But that hasn’t happened yet. I am climbing the stairs to the Ideal. Not the main ones, but the ones at the back that led straight to the editorial office. There was no control post or private security. In those years of upheaval, editorial offices were marketplaces. The door opened, and in would come a neighbourhood committee, a trade union representative, a group of women shellfish gatherers wanting to know whether there were any men with the balls to publish their complaints. There were people with news on top of their heads. Live news, news in kind. Now I’m the one climbing the stairs. Nobody sees me. To gain confidence, I climb two steps and go down one, climb two, go down one. I have the staircase syndrome even before I’ve gone up it. Why did I leave my poems in the office? They’re not good, and they’re sad as well. I should go back for my poems. Please excuse me, I made a mistake. I have other texts, journalistic texts. I have also carried out a few interviews for the school magazine. What’s that about the poems? Please let me explain. My godfather has a typewriter. It’s a portable typewriter, very small. He’s a travelling salesman, a seller of spices. By the way, did you know that a kilo of saffron is worth more than a kilo of gold? He uses the machine to write his invoices, so the carriage is very short. He wants me to be a cultured man, to be useful. He told me years ago, ‘Write if you want, write using the typewriter.’ So I started to write, of course I did, like someone playing with letters. What do I write? The carriage is short. I think. Let me write some verses. Lines that look like verses. Poetry. This is how my poetic vocation began. It was determined by the size of the carriage. A game. Children’s stuff. You’d better give me back the poems. It might lead to prejudice, confusion and so on. I don’t want to publish poems. I want a job where I don’t get wet.

  I have some sad poems and my notebook from the co-ed institute. The one who opens the door and does not close it, but welcomes me in, glancing inquisitively at the sheaf of poems, is a young woman by the name of Ánxela Souto, the director’s secretary. I don’t know about magic, but magical causality certainly exists. My first poems find a home in her hands. I feel like Charlie Chaplin after a groundswell. In the best place possible. I come back a week later. Just a moment, please. The director will see you. The director? Yes, that’s him, the director. ‘Somebody read your poems,’ he informs me. ‘Said they weren’t bad.’ This could make for a good title: ‘Poems That Are Not Bad’. The most generous review I’ve ever received. But nothing can beat what he says after that: ‘Stick around for a couple of days! Let’s see what you can do!’

  I left school and, without telling anybody, went running to my first job. I climbed the stairs two by two, opened the door to the editorial office. In the circles of keys, the ‘happy girls’ were dancing, propelling iron machines. There was the factory of words. The large office where rumours took shape. The rhythm of traction, the writing’s advance on the carriage, produced columns of smoke. There were slow ones, thick and dark, that didn’t quite take off, forming a cloud of nostalgia around their author. Others that rose with artistic calm, forming arabesques before throwing themselves at the blades of the fans. And then fleet-footed ones, the swift, direct smoke of furious writing.

  Almost all the journalists smoked. The typewriters had small metal ashtrays soldered on to the side. It was fine to know how to type, but if you wanted to be a real journalist, the first thing you had to do was buy some tobacco. In among the clouds, along the central aisle, Ánxela led me to a desk. She sat me down in front of a man with oversleeves of the kind worn by old journalists. He was a frail, silent man, so I wasn’t surprised when he handed me a typewritten sheet and said with a conjuror’s solemn irony, ‘Make it intelligible and give it a headline of fewer than ten words.’ On looking closely at the sheet, a correspondent’s chronicle, I realised it was a copy of the carbon copy. It was hard to make out the words, which carbon shadows only hinted at. A couple of days. Something to do. More than I could dream of. There’s no pay. I’m an apprentice. It’s the first time I’ve heard this word. It sounds ancient. I hear people saying, ‘Get the apprentice to do it.’ The apprentice, I wonder to myself. Who can that be? Until I realise the arrow is aimed at me. I am the apprentice. I still don’t know whether it sounds good or bad.

  The veteran’s name was Javier Guimaraens. A legend on the old Ideal, responsible for local information about towns and municipalities. Very austere in everything, including in the way he expressed himself. His extreme thinness may have had something to do with the obsessive practice of pruning texts. He was a very conservative man. Even to identify himself, he didn’t need long sentences. On that first day, he looked at me over his glasses, like an entomologist sizing up an unknown specimen on the other side of the desk. We never collided after that. He was highly respectful and taught me a lot about verbal paucity. I followed my instinct, focusing on headlines of fewer than ten words and on my job as a palaeologist poring over municipal texts.

  One of the apprentice’s first missions was to be the bearer of news. I mean this literally. A lot of chronicles from local correspondents arrived by coach. There was no bus station, so you had to go to the different stops and the drivers would hand you an envelope. Chronicles by phone, reversing the charges, were only acceptable in extreme cases, such as a serious accident.

  I handed the municipal envelopes to Guimaraens and sat down to wait for new challenges in the world of journalistic conjuring. There were texts that were written by hand, in scrawly, complicated handwriting. Others that possessed an admirable desire for style, laborious, calligraphic poems whose spirit flagged in order to inform us of the coming visit of the Provincial Delegate for Choirs and Dances of Education and Rest of the National Movement’s Women’s Section. In these cases, it was necessary to type them out. Those that were already typed had to be revised, corrected and sometimes abridged so they would fit the space available. Needless to say, they had to be given a headline of fewer than ten words. Some chroniclers made their feelings known. For them, aside from bold type, a successful headline was a long one that told the whole story. I turned into a fan of Guimaraens’s minimalism and gobbled up more and more words.

  One day, my immediate, minimalist boss handed me a sheet. He didn’t even look at me or open his mouth. By the format and other marks, I quickly identified its source. It was a chronicle from Boiro by a correspondent who signed himself ‘Enmuce’. Enmuce was highly reliable. And very hard-working. He used to send in a chronicle almost every day. The problem was that he sent the same chronicle to every newspaper. Most correspondents were not paid. Their only compensation was being published. In contemporary language, we might say it formed a ‘virtual payment’. Enmuce used carbon paper to make copies. But there were lots of copies. Up to seven. Things got really complicated when you received one of the last copies. But this had never happened before. Not until today. Not being able to understand a single word. It was the end of summer. My reputation really was on the line now. Including the job in which I didn’t get wet.

  I had to use the opposite technique to minimalism. What it says, more or less, in the Icelandic Edda: ‘The first word will lead to the second, and the second to the third.’ The chronicle was in Spanish, and the first word identified itself, even gestured to be seen: ‘patata’. Little by little, using the carbon signs that were visible and the traces of the keys, I managed to decipher the unknown territory. To weave the words together. Certain words led to others. I felt that the words that had disappeared wanted to return to life. They were peering out from behind the keys. I reassembled this chronicle that spoke of the discovery of a gigantic potato on the very day a UFO had been spotted in the area. Unidentified Flying Objects were very fashionable back then. There’d even been a government directive ordering the restriction of news about UFOs, since they might unsettle the local population and question the heavenly order. But the news about a UFO and a
gigantic tuber, now that was hot stuff.

  The correspondent was congratulated. And I carried on waiting for further messages from the outer system.

  21

  A Normal Person

  THE DEADLINE. THE deadline was sacred. If we were late closing, we would miss the connections. The connections were the crucial points in the newspaper’s distribution. A dense network of strategic crossroads on the map of Galicia. In cities, it was easy to make up for a delay. But the war was being waged in towns and villages, in a territory with the most widely dispersed population in Europe. It was here, at the connection points, where our own vans passed the baton to coaches and all kinds of vehicles – some private – that completed the route. You had to be there at the agreed time. Being late was not an excuse. Mist, rain, snow, gales, formed part of normality. It wasn’t a convincing argument for a driver to attribute missing a connection to the Great Flood. There was always a way through.

  ‘A connection has been missed in Ortigueira!’

  Missing a connection was a real drama in the life of a newspaper. A defeat. A mournful statistic. Because there was a struggle back then, copy by copy, to defend or even take small positions. Large maps of Galicia hung on the walls, some of them in relief, inhabited by a dense mass of coloured pins. In red, the points where the real battle was taking place: the critical connections.

  One night, in the editorial office, things got complicated. By the time I realised, there was no one to give me a lift. I had no money for a taxi. The weather was bad. The house in Castro was a long way to go walking through the storm. It was a shame I hadn’t gone with Toño. One Friday, leaving the office, he had invited me along. His parents had a bar, Dos Ciudades, on the border between the Old City and the Fish Market. They lived on a floor of the same building. A small floor occupied by beds. Toño had five sisters. And there were the five girls, laughing amongst themselves, laughing at me. ‘But he’s just a baby! He looks as if he’s just come out of a seminary!’ How nice, what a lovely surprise, how dizzy it made me feel, to hear so much laughter and to be laughed at. I swore I would return. But not on this occasion.