by Unknown
She and her mother had also saved on joy. While Polka was away, they had to save on everything. Like women dressed in mourning. They saved as well. Not only did they wear the same dull clothing, but their nature changed. They spoke less, didn’t laugh, hardly spent anything on looking at others. They saved on words, joy, light. And yet all the people in mourning, like O and Olinda, didn’t feel any less, more perhaps, and they didn’t have any less to say. More perhaps.
They saved.
Everything that had been saved at home, in all the homes, now emerged from Polka’s bagpipes. Because once again he’d sized up those booming pipes, those snoring pipes, an inheritance, good for parties but also for accompanying choirs, processions and union marches.
On 1 May, the priest had said to him, ‘You played the bagpipes in town for Sacco and Vanzetti and now you come here to play them for St Joseph.’
‘I play Saudade, father, for all souls, yours included. This danceable requiem doesn’t hurt anyone.’
No, it wasn’t that priest who informed against him. This was something he’d never know. Some people died as a bet in a game of cards. They had no idea, were asleep perhaps, while their fate hung on a movement of cards or dice. After Polka was arrested, Olinda was sacked from Zaragüeta Matchstick Factory. In fact, all the employees were sacked, mostly matchstick-makers, about three hundred women, and their union was outlawed. The factory didn’t work for several months. Then it opened again with staff specially selected by the Falange who had to belong to the Glorious Movement. Olinda didn’t pass the test. She obtained a not unfavourable report by bribing one of the local bosses who’d multiplied in an ever increasing chain of command supervising the confiscations. But it was all for nothing, because another local boss decided the jobs would go to a group of highly recommended women who’d recently joined the Fascist Party. Within a few months, parallel power structures having quickly sprung up, this marginalised, fanatical group of pre-war gangsters took control of the city. As she staggered about from place to place, Olinda was shocked. The governor had ordered the Roman salute to be obligatory. In any official building or even in the street, whoever should ask for it, you had to raise your arm and respond with the standard ‘vivas’. In an atmosphere like that, Olinda witnessed a change in many people that went beyond political opportunism. Something like a biological mutation. Not just in appearance. Some people’s voices changed. Some people didn’t hear her. And, most upsetting of all, some people didn’t see her. Despite the fact she was pregnant. She even wondered if she still existed. Lots of people had disappeared. Maybe she had too, without realising. Many workers from the Tobacco Factory in Palloza and the Matchstick Factory in Castiñeiras lived in the suburbs like Olinda. They’d get up early, when it was still dark, with oil lamps and candles to light the way. These luminous processions would converge. Get their bearings, see each other like lines of glow-worms in the night. These moving lines carried words as well as light. Constructed murmurs, songs, news, as each candle arrived. Sometimes one of the lights would be missing, there’d be an empty place, a gap in the sentence, murmur or song. This meant someone had disappeared. Olinda never missed the procession of lights until she gave birth. These lines of female workers reminded some of the Holy Company of Souls, but for Olinda it was just the opposite. With the death of Arturo da Silva, the arrest of Polka and the disappearance of all those young people who were supposed to board the special train to Caneiros, being there, being a candle, was a strange duty she had to fulfil while she could. The child she was carrying, the heavy load in her belly, was another certainty, you might have thought. The uncomfortable graft in her body was like an advertisement, a guarantee of reality. Or at least it should have been. But what worried her was that no one, on her bureaucratic rounds to safeguard her job, referred to her state. No one, even out of habit, used the phrase ‘happy condition’, as if in her case it would have been a mistake. No one congratulated her. You can have disappeared, thought Olinda, and be pregnant. The child be real, but not you. That’s why she had to get up every morning and join the procession of candles.
Olinda did not get past the so-called ‘period of purges’. As far as she could tell, there were at least two weighty arguments against her. Her husband was in prison and she had just given birth. She tried not to think with her mind so as not to lose it. At times, however, furtive thoughts would come to her, such as the belief that a situation like hers was a cause for mercy and not greater punishment. But she had to avert such thoughts, otherwise she’d go mad. This elementary law no longer applied. She also had to forget the word ‘purges’. She had not got past the ‘purges’. Those now holding power did so on the basis of hundreds of uncleared murders. Who raped, tortured to death and slashed the breasts of the librarian, the Republican governor’s wife, having caused her to miscarry? Who were the purgers? She should feel honoured to be a purgee. She should take comfort in the whispers she heard as she passed, ‘That’s one of the purgees.’ But no. Everything that was happening took its toll on her body. She found herself ugly. She’d lost the shine in her eyes and hair. Purged, impure. She hardly had any milk to give to the baby. How could she have been born so pretty?
The Matchstick Factory was surrounded by a tall wall. She’d worked in that enclosure for many years. She’d started when she was still a girl. She had to get up early, under cover of darkness. But in her memory it was a party. Like the day a street band came from the parish for her to carry the festive bouquet. She loved carrying her candle. She wasn’t sorry to leave home, to be separated from her parents, as at other times. She worked in all the different departments. Started by counting matches. Her hands and mind were very alert and she got to count so quickly, by thirties, fifties, seventies, nineties, that her fingers ran ahead of her brain, danced attendance on the voices. She then took to sticking the strips of glass-paper that were used to rub and light the matches. The department she liked best, because of the work and company, was the one for cutting and assembling boxes. She was extremely skilled in making boxes. She knew the importance to a household of a good box of matches. She also knew these boxes, especially those bearing phototypes, could become small chests. For keeping someone’s first tooth, a curl, a letter, a ticket for a special train. The women who cut and assembled boxes acquired a certain way of telling stories. Their stories, their secrets, were designed to fit inside a box. Which is why a box of matches, when it’s empty, if you hold it half-open to your ear, will whisper to you.
This box doesn’t say anything.
There were days the women were silent. And then the boxes had matches, but no voices.
She also spent time as an assistant in the laboratory, weighing and measuring live phosphorus, potassium chlorate, glue, ground glass and red aniline, the paste that contains a matchstick’s true soul. Known as English paste. Fire’s mystery. Smoking blood, they call it in the factory.
Olinda woke up in the middle of the night and looked through the window at the lines of candle-women.
In his hut in the labour camp, every time he lit a match, Polka would let it burn until the flame reached his fingers. A match was very important to him. To everybody, since they were hard to come by in the camp. This is the advantage of small things. A ‘wagon-box’, for example, containing ninety matches, with a little skill, passed from hand to hand, can store vital information, detailed plans, for a train not to arrive in port with tons of wolfram. A yellow ‘economical box’ contains seventy matches. Some are even smaller, pocket-sized, and contain fifty or thirty matches. The most attractive are those bearing coloured phototypes. The skill to turn a simple box of matches into a magnificent transmitter of secret information resides in one box in fact being two. But for this they have to be cut and assembled to perfection. The information can be walled up inside this delicate stucco work on rolling paper. In code. For this you need the people giving and receiving the information to be referring to the same book. One number identifies the letter, another the line, another the page. I
f you don’t know or can’t find the reference book, it’s very difficult to decipher an intercepted message.
Polka held a new match in front of his eyes, closed his left eye and examined the head as a surveyor’s reference point for measuring the world.
The matchstick head filled the mouth of the mine shaft.
‘Let me tell you what it’s made of, the formula for English paste, smoking blood: live phosphorus, potassium chlorate, gypsum glue, ground glass and red aniline.’ He could add, ‘And Olinda.’
‘And Olinda as well.’
‘What’s Olinda?’
‘A special ingredient in some matches. The ones that light straightaway have got Olinda in them.’
One of the technicians in the mine was a Portuguese engineer. He picked various prisoners to be his assistants, some of whom were highly competent. There was one, a Catalan, who’d been in Coruña in the summer of 1936, when war broke out, with some architect friends. Joan Sert got on well with Polka. Actually he followed him wherever he went because he’d never heard him complain. Polka carried the wounds of a failed escape. He said ants were left inside and then told him about the wasps that grow inside figs.
‘They lay their eggs in a flower and then the fruit grows and the wasps have to bore a hole through the flesh. Which is why fig trees are always surrounded by wasps. The same thing happened to me. They tied me to a tree with open wounds and the ants used this opportunity to come inside me. Now, from time to time, they want to get out.’
Polka put his hand in his mouth and produced a handful of ants. ‘See? See how they want to get out?’
Joan Sert looked at him in amazement and said, ‘You’re a surrealist!’
‘Don’t lay any more charges against me. How many years would I get for that?’
‘For what?’
‘For being a surrealist.’
Olinda was not allowed to return to the Matchstick Factory. There was always the river. The traditional occupation of women in Castro, washing for Coruña’s middle classes. Washerwomen, for good or bad, were from another world. Even their shape, their figure in the street, was different. Bodies with bundles, with a huge globe on top of their heads. Amphibian creatures from villages by rivers and streams who took away dirty clothes and returned them clean. Sometimes even ironed and smelling of roses.
So Olinda joined the procession of women carrying things on top of their heads. A washerwoman living nearby gave her a job. Washing for the eye doctor’s house and surgery. This was lucky. Because it gave her confidence. Reality. If she could wash for the eye doctor, then there was a certain amount of light. This was followed, she wasn’t quite sure how, by the opportunity to wash for Chelo Vidal. One door opens another. She was not without matches. Invisible friends kept her supplied. She could throw a few boxes in the bundle and sell them. She could even take the odd box, the odd phosphorus box, to the doctor and painter.
Open Body
‘A washerwoman has to be good at repartee. A quick retort, girl, otherwise they’ll eat you alive. But keep it polite. Words and stones, once thrown, you can’t recall.’
Olinda taught me the trade. I even know how to make lye using vegetable ashes. But it was Polka who taught me repartee.
He said, ‘This girl has an open body. She won’t have any problems. Her body’s more open than Moeche’s.’
‘Moeche’s?’
‘A girl who one day started talking with the voice of a priest, and expert in dogmatics, who’d died over in Havana. On Sundays, she’d go out on to the balcony and deliver the most wonderful sermons in a Cuban accent. People came from all over the parish in their droves. Until one day she got fed up, went out onto the balcony and called them pagans and Corinthians. Among other things.’
‘You’re always pulling my leg.’
‘It was in all the papers. Manuela Rodríguez. Back in 1925. This is what happens when people are bored. If you ever talk in a voice that isn’t yours, don’t worry. Don’t panic. It’s what you get for having an open body.’
The fact I had an open body calmed Olinda down. She suffered just to think I was no good at repartee and had inherited her silence. Not that Olinda stuttered or had a short tongue. She was very alert. When she was young, when she worked at Zaragüeta’s, making matches, she could lift the roof all on her own, she was the life and soul of the box-room, ‘the Spark of Castiñeiras’, according to Polka, not a small thing in a matchstick factory. ‘My spark,’ he says when he’s feeling romantic or wants to encourage her. Among the old, yellowed papers in the drawer of his night table is a cutting from La Voz de Galicia with the title ‘A Trip to Castiñeiras’ and a circled bit which says: ‘The ones seen here chatting work at tables in a nearby room, sticking boxes and building crates for them. They’re all women, lots of pretty women!’ Polka repeats, ‘“They’re all women, lots of pretty women!” Now that’s what I call a good journalist.’ Something happened to Olinda, silence entered her body. But that’s another story.
She doesn’t talk a lot now. Not that she’s dumb. She’s afraid of mute silence. Says it can get inside you and then doesn’t want to come out. She had friends at the factory who suffered from this silence. But there’s another silence she calls friendly silence, which helps. She says, ‘Good words don’t cost much and are worth a lot.’ It’s obvious she chooses her words. Which ones to say and which ones to hear. As when Polka’s talking. She doesn’t mind him being like a radio. But she doesn’t listen to him all the time. Sometimes he can be broadcasting and she’s immersed in silence. But suddenly she’ll come out of her hole and pay attention or laugh out loud. Those are the words that matter. I wish I knew which ones they were.
Guillerme, or Pinche, my little brother, is a lot like her, like Olinda. He was born quiet. He was born a man. A little man. The first time I got to appreciate how similar they were was when I saw him help wind the tangled wool from an old sweater into a ball in order to knit a new one. Pinche with arms outstretched, straight, parallel, pulling the wool taut. The two of them joined by the moving thread. Not a word. Winding silence.
Speak, when it comes to speaking, he’s not bad. Except for ‘salicylic’. He can’t say ‘salicylic’.
‘Not “sacilytic”!’ shouts Polka. ‘Salicylic.’
According to Polka, I could say ‘salicylic’ when I was only two. It was the first and last time Olinda took me to see him in the labour camp. A Sunday visit. A few minutes. The mine wasn’t easy to get to! Couceiro, the seller of herbs and spices, took us in his sidecar. And Polka all the time making me say ‘sa-li-cy-lic’. ‘Salicylic acid’. I could not have known this was an expression of a father’s great love for his daughter. Making her say ‘salicylic’. I think I cried and everything. I had the impression when they came out of the mine shaft, they were possessed by strange words. But I said it: ‘salicylic’. And then he gave me a pair of clogs he’d made with his own hands. He said, ‘They’re for when you go to the river.’ But the clogs, made of birchwood, were too small and could only be used as thimbles. Or for playing in the water. For making ladybird boats.
When he returned from the camp, one of the things that made him happy was listening to me read aloud.
‘Shame you weren’t born half a century earlier,’ he said. ‘You could have read in the Tobacco Factory.’ He explained how the workers paid a colleague to read novels to them while they went about their tasks. ‘Shame. You could have been an expert in Dickens!’
‘Sure,’ said Olinda, ‘but if we gave her an extra half-century, she’d be an old woman by now.’
Polka became thoughtful. Took out the little book with the marks. The novel The Invisible Man. He’d hidden this one and a book by Élisée, together with some newspaper cuttings, in a leather pouch he buried under a large, chair-shaped stone. You could see he was emotional. To him, it was something important. Something like a treasure trove.
‘Here. What’s in it? What’s in this book that twitched its ears in the ashes?’
I often rea
d the story. For the three of them. For the neighbours who’d come on a Saturday evening in winter to eat roasted chestnuts or something. We laughed a lot when the invisible man had to watch what he ate. He was invisible, but the food wasn’t. Milk at night, moving through his intestines like a luminous snake. The invisible man was much talked about in Castro. How we laughed at the poor man when a dog found and bit him! And at the cat’s eyes when Griffin conducted his first experiment and managed to make the cat invisible, but with two exceptions: its eyes, which carried on shining, and its claws. This was one of the most successful episodes in the book. The listeners would search for those solitary eyes in the shadows. For an invisible man, snow is a problem. The snowflakes settle on and expose him. The great dream of being invisible has turned into a fatal condition. Which is why, after laughing so much at his misfortunes, people kept a respectful silence when the dead albino becomes visible and someone shouts, ‘Cover his face! For Gawd’s sake, cover that face!’ I think at the time Griffin was more popular in Castro than in Iping. Perhaps because this was the disguise which had always been used during Carnival. Those who dressed up were, in effect, invisible men for a few days. They covered everything, mouth as well, using nylons, sheets, cloths and bandages. Part of the disguise involved not speaking or speaking very little with a distorted voice. At one point, I began to feel sorry for the invisible man. I stopped laughing and read with a pain in my stomach, as if my own cramps could be seen as well. What Griffin, the albino, experienced was the height of loneliness.
Years later, when I went to England to work as a domestic, I was sent to a house in Chichester, not far from Brighton. I went first and Pinche came a few months later to work as a gardener or whatever was needed. Before Pinche arrived, I had a terrible time, there were days I felt like an invisible woman, but I didn’t think about Griffin at all until one Sunday in spring Pinche went for a bike and the owner of the house, a Mr Sutherland, pointed to the horizon with his pilot’s arm and said, ‘Let’s see if you can get to Iping!’