The Low Voices

by Manuel Rivas

  So I hid in the office. Slept in a phone booth, lying on paper, covered in a jacket. The telephone was up above me, high, mute, taciturn, alert. What would I do if it rang? What if it was the news of the year and I was the only one there, in the right place, at the right time? I still hadn’t worked out whether I would answer or not when I fell asleep. On top of the papers. I was a real journalist now. I was woken in the morning by the singing of the cleaning lady. Without being seen, I went to the toilet and then sat down at a desk, pretending to have something urgent to do. Everything was fine until the deputy director, Juan Molina, turned up and was met by the head of administration. I should say the ‘all-powerful boss’, as teletypes referred to the union leader Jimmy Hoffa. He was furious. Something terrible had happened. I listened in. My heart thumping away. What terrible thing could have happened? I wasn’t the culprit, but, whatever it was, I could be a suspect.

  ‘We missed a connection in Pontedeume!’ said the thundering voice.

  ‘We closed on time,’ replied Molina in a low voice.

  ‘Well, close before time!’

  I breathed a sigh of relief. But that day I thought someone should write an underground history of journalism. That talked about exile and censorship, yes. But with a chapter devoted to connections and the men and women in delivery. There was so much pressure I would sometimes envisage writing an article that paid tribute to the heroes of distribution. ‘In the history of western media, there is nothing like the extraordinary network set up for the distribution of newspapers in Galicia. Not even the legendary Pony Express reached such a level of precision and efficiency in its connections.’

  In life, you should never miss your connections.

  There’s another lesson my university teachers never taught me, and I never heard at conferences or read in books by media experts. The importance of obituaries for printed newspapers. In particular, the paid kind: funeral notices. As far as I’m aware, nobody has ever published a funeral notice on the Internet. At the Ideal, as at every newspaper, the editorial deadline was sacred. The pressure from the all-powerful administration was very strong, owing to the dramatic war waged over connections. But at night, at the critical moment, it was the manager of the printing press who had the last word. During the day, a serious, polite man, something that is generally said about those who maintain an intimidating silence. The manager’s humour and features would gradually change as the deadline approached, foreshadowing the moment when this silent man would turn into a ruthless foreman.

  If memory lets go and descends the stairs from the editorial office to the printing room, it will no longer be able to deal with anything other than the fresh aroma coming from cast words. The letters – what was written upstairs, truths and lies galloping over the keys – are now leaden. This is one of my madeleines. The way the words smelled of lead. Or, to be more precise, the way they smelled of lead and milk. Because there were the linotypists, sitting in front of the large machines, sculpting out language, each with a bottle of milk at their side. Because words, even true ones, intoxicate bodies. Whenever I could, I would go down there, sometimes to collect the first copies from the rotary machine, when the ink would smudge and tattoo headlines onto your hands. I would go down there because, for me, the real smell of a newspaper, apart from the smoke of typewriter tobacco, was a mixture of lead, milk and ink down in the printing room.

  Yes, a time came when all authority was vested in the manager of the printing press, and there was only one thing that could stop the frenetic process that led to the rotary machine starting up: a funeral notice. For as long as possible, someone would remain on call in administration to hire out these funereal spaces that were charged by module, by surface area, at a higher rate than commercial publicity. With a procedure that was non-negotiable. You had to pay up front. This was the first time I heard the expression ‘pay in cash’.

  ‘Funeral notices are paid for in cash!’

  This may have served to underline their essential nature. There was no arguing over stuff that was paid for in cash. Nobody ever discussed the contents of a funeral notice. Or the price. The paper could wait for a while if somebody called the hotline to say they were on their way because of an unexpected death.

  At the time, there was some speculation over the demise of local and regional newspapers. The difficulties such papers would have to survive. Taking part in a European survey, the writer Álvaro Cunqueiro, who was director of the Faro de Vigo, was the only one, together with the director of Sud-Ouest, to question this catastrophic vision: ‘I don’t know what will happen to other newspapers, but the Faro de Vigo – with classified ads in the bows and funeral notices in the stern – is a ship that will never sink.’ And the truth is they are still sailing. Sud-Ouest with its equivalent: the avis d’obsèques. Death in Galicia, when it comes down to it, is still advertised on paper and paid for in cash. The deceased don’t trust virtual reality.

  I hadn’t realised the importance of death notices or those unwritten rules in the functioning of a newspaper until the case of my interview with Luís Seoane. My own, very private case. The first time I experienced with real anxiety the existence or non-existence of a text. Seoane was not just a great artist. He had been an essential reference point during the Galician exile and continued to play that role in the intellectual resistance to Franco. He had a house in Buenos Aires, but had started travelling to Galicia and Spain more frequently after setting up a new ceramics factory in Sargadelos, together with Isaac Díaz Pardo. This duo also had plans to found a newspaper, Galicia, that would recover and renew enlightened, democratic, autonomist ideals crushed by Franco’s regime. So Luís Seoane was in A Coruña, inaugurating an exhibition at a new gallery. I had just started as an apprentice at the Ideal, a publication with a history that ruffled feathers in newspaper libraries, the official spokesperson for the most intransigent brand of National Catholicism. But things were changing quickly. An internal revolution had enraged the board of directors, the National Association of Catholic Propagandists. I proposed an interview with Luís Seoane. Finally, as dusk fell, Gabriel Plaza, editor-in-chief, gave me the green light. Seoane himself was taken aback by this appearance. He knew nothing about me, obviously. But he knew a lot about the Ideal, a paper that was widely associated with ignorance or war. He agreed to talk, but was on the defensive to begin with. This may have made the interview more difficult for me, but also more interesting. Thinking about Keats’s poem, I asked him about the place today of truth and beauty, and he replied in a flash, ‘Beauty can also be terrible.’ It was drizzling when I left, and the flagstones in Cantóns glowed with the reflection of banking neon. I ran all the way to the editorial office. It was almost empty. I wrote without looking at my notes, obeying the unconfessable maxim of journalism that says, ‘If you forget, invent. And you’ll be right!’ If you invent well, that is. The manager of the printing press appeared upstairs, following the trail of that somnambulant typing. I was almost unknown to him. Before he could speak, I shouted out with anxious fervour:

  ‘It’s an interview with Luís Seoane!’

  He chewed over some words. Then said in a loud voice:

  ‘I don’t suppose it’s for today?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Here it is!’ I proclaimed triumphantly.

  I wrote out the headline by hand. He took the text. And, as he left, said:

  ‘It may not go in. We’re waiting on a funeral notice.’

  I waited. I’d learned to smoke by then. I already had the property of a cloud. Every time a door squeaked, I expected it to be the relations with a sackload of money urgently collected in the early hours of the morning. Every last peseta had to be counted. But they didn’t come. And eventually the manager of the printing press gave the go-ahead. I was already downstairs. He looked at me. ‘That interview’s in.’ He didn’t look unhappy. I think he liked the fact that someone from editorial had gone downstairs to get his hands dirty.

  The summer was the best time for an apprentice. Ther
e was a veteran journalist, Ezequiel Pérez Montes, who beat all the records. He was capable of interviewing eight of Franco’s ministers in a single day, which left the special envoys feeling amazed. He kept his distance. He was a celebrity in the city! But for me it was a real spectacle watching him in action. I remember the day he interviewed a local painter, who was always fishing around for compliments. And Ezequiel asked him:

  ‘Where would you like to be hung, master?’

  All that was missing was the noose. The man replied straight from his heart:

  ‘In the Louvre, of course.’

  Most editors went on holiday in the summer. So the apprentice ended up doing a bit of everything. Port information. The sensation you were really constructing a poem, with the names of ships docking or leaving. Accident and crime reports. That detective formula I always thought would make a great start to a novel: ‘Proceedings have been instituted in the case.’ To institute proceedings – what else is literature, if not this?

  Some days, I wrote the horoscope, but that was far from easy. Whenever I saw somebody else doing it, whenever I read it, I thought it was a joke. So off I went. But I knew people who were Libra or Pisces or … In fact, I knew people who were every sign, including my own. What if I harmed somebody or infused a wretch with false hope? There is a Galician proverb: ‘Nobody ever saw the day after today.’ I realised you are compromised by the things you write. A horoscope is committed literature as well.

  During that apprenticeship, there was upheaval in the political institutions. Democratic or anti-Fascist organisations were hunted down. Sometimes, at night, you would hear a whisper at the door. The journalists from Political Information went out. They encountered people in a hurry, with a clandestine communiqué and the wake of being prison fodder. One of those who came to the staircase was Moncho Reboiras, who was later shot down by Franco’s police in Ferrol. There was a writer named Margarita Ledo working on the Ideal at the time. She suddenly disappeared. Portugal had just gone through the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974. One day, I was asked, ‘Could you take a bag of personal effects for someone who has to flee?’ I was given the address and went. Margarita was the one leaving. She was going to steal across the border on her way to exile in Portugal. We embraced. A little later, the government police arrested Gaciño. His chronicle of political life on a Sunday was the most widely read in Galicia by people on both sides of the fence. The Catholic paper’s analyst was accused by the governor of being no more and no less than the brains of the democratic opposition in Galicia. What Gaciño was was a good journalist. He carried everything around in his head, that much was true. The regime, despite its panoptic eye, was taking more and more stabs in the dark. The demise of the dictatorship was in sight, but it was that dangerous moment when fear engenders fear. In the evening, a group of journalists went to demonstrate in front of the civil governor’s residence and delivered a statement in which we denounced the witch-hunt and asked for the prisoner to be released. There must have been a dozen democratic journalists protesting in front of the gate, but we felt like more, especially when Luís Pita opened his mouth and out came the voice of Max Estrella in Bohemian Lights: ‘Bastards. And they are the ones who protest against the Black Legend of Spain!’ There are times when a few people seem like more. As in a shipwreck.

  I don’t feel nostalgia for that time. ‘Nostalgia is what dogs have if you take away their bone,’ said the freethinker António Sérgio in order to have a go at the chief apostle of saudosismo, the poet Teixeira de Pascoaes. What I do feel is a certain nostalgia for being an apprentice. Because the apprentice could come and go without being seen. He was an invisible journalist. Who’s that boy? He’s an apprentice from the Ideal. I suppose they had no one else to send. So the apprentice goes back to being invisible. But he hears, he listens. He is informed by the low voices. Someone is talking about a scandal. In the corridors of the town hall, the Minister for Culture and Sport is annoyed with a theatre group. He lets it be known to an agent:

  ‘How on earth could you decide to put on that play, the Horrorsteia.’

  ‘It’s not the Horrorsteia, it’s the Oresteia.’

  ‘Well, that just makes it worse!’

  The theatre man cannot bear any more attacks from this cultural leader:

  ‘The monster the rest of us carry inside, you have on the outside.’

  The minister gazes down at the man from his position of authority. He needs an idea and waits for it to travel to his head. He is offended. It seems as if he is going to exact the most terrible vengeance. In the end, he says:

  ‘Let’s not start dropping hints, shall we?’

  I internalised being an apprentice a great deal. As I did the fact of having gone into journalism as a result of a few poems. I managed to go to Madrid to study at the new faculty of Media Studies. I was awarded a grant and sent almost daily chronicles for a section called ‘North Station’. This is where we arrived on the Atlantic Express, eleven or twelve hours by train from A Coruña to Madrid. That bit about the poems is a stigma that forms part of my body. The first exercise we were given in the faculty had to do with journalistic language and precision. A subject that was close to my heart, as a gobbler of words. When the teacher, Federico Ysart, handed back our assignments, he threw mine on the table and said out loud, in a critical tone:

  ‘This isn’t journalism, it’s literature!’

  He was a very good professional, one of the best in that faculty, which had some really terrible teachers. He worked for an influential magazine, the weekly Cambio 16. But I recall with a certain pride that his verdict didn’t hurt me. I felt content that my journalism should strike him as literature.

  I was always an apprentice. I never stopped being one. I found this out on the day I interviewed a normal person.

  I was doing work experience at the broadcasting centre of Spanish television in Galicia. The director was Alexandre Cribeiro, a poet as well as a producer. He’d worked for a long time in Madrid, where he’d been active in the UNESCO Club. It was summer. Santiago de Compostela. The permanent staff had gone on holiday. Cribeiro gathered us interns together and asked us something really rather unusual:

  ‘What television would you like to make?’

  We had ideas, but they slipped through our fingers. They weren’t used to taking possession.

  ‘The BBC!’ said a whisper.

  ‘Well, go ahead then!’ said Cribeiro ironically. ‘No, really. What topic should we cover first?’

  There was a lot of controversy at the time about the first law to deal with the voluntary termination of pregnancy. The so-called abortion law. Up until then, women could go to prison if they aborted. During that period of transition, debate wasn’t possible. Only the burning of words and anathemas.

  ‘Don’t even think about abortion,’ said Cribeiro, divining our thoughts.

  Yes, if we were the BBC, abortion would be the number one item on the agenda.

  Cribeiro accepted with one condition:

  ‘You have to begin the bulletin with three opinions, each with the same margin of time. A representative of the Church who is against the law. A woman in favour. And then a man or a woman, the opinion of a normal person.’

  That seemed simple enough. Especially in Santiago. The cameraman and I emerged onto Obradoiro Square and soon got a statement from Canon Precedo. It wasn’t difficult locating a feminist voice either. In Santiago, these two souls – the reactionary and the liberal – have lived side by side for ages, like the scallop shell that can be a symbol of Mars or Venus. All we needed now was the ‘normal person’.

  At the time, we still worked with celluloid. Connected by the microphone cable, the cameraman and I constituted a hybrid species of futuristic archaeology, moving slowly but eagerly. The cameraman knew the city better than me. I asked him:

  ‘How about that one there?’

  ‘That one? He’s more stubborn than a mule.’

  ‘What about that one over there?’
/>   ‘He could eat the stones of the cathedral!’

  An hour and a half later, with the deadline for going back to the studio drawing closer, I realised how difficult it can be to find a normal person when you need one.

  We were about to give up when I saw her.

  We were in the middle of Toural Square, next to the fountain, and she entered through the side. As soon as she came in, she saw us. And we saw her. The cameraman looked at me. And nodded. This was the one. She was carrying bags in both her hands, which hindered her movements. We cut her off diagonally. She tried to escape down an alley, but the cable enabled us to perform an enveloping manoeuvre that prevented her from leaving the arches.

  There she was, opposite me. Panting in amazement. A normal person.

  ‘Madam,’ I asked straight away, ‘what is your opinion about the law for the termination of pregnancy, the so-called abortion law?’

  I was afraid she might scream. Cry out for help. But she calmed down and fixed me with a stare:

  ‘Listen, boy. I’m not from around here, I just came to buy some shoes.’

  We raced to the studio to open the news. She was the one. We had her at last. A normal person.

  22

  The Anarchist Woman’s Smile