All Is Silence

by Manuel Rivas

  Leda touched Fins’ eyelids with her fingertips.

  ‘A game? He was dead,’ said Brinco. ‘You should have seen him. He went all pale and stiff . . . Blimey, Fins! You looked just like a corpse.’

  Leda watched Fins, sounding him with her eyes, as if she wanted to share a secret with his body. ‘It’s nothing. They’re just absences.’

  ‘Absences?’

  ‘Yes, absences, that’s what they’re called. Absences. It’s nothing. And don’t go blabbering about it!’

  The girl looked up and soon changed her tone. ‘And these coffins?’

  ‘They have an owner already.’

  ‘That wouldn’t be your dad by any chance?’

  ‘What’s wrong with that? He saw them first.’

  ‘Funny, isn’t it?’ exclaimed Leda ironically. ‘He’s always the first.’

  Brinco’s expression turned sour. ‘You have to be awake when others are sleeping.’

  Leda glared at him, still mocking, ‘Of course you do. That’s why they say your dad goes around howling at night.’

  He’d have liked to fight her. They’d done this once, played at fighting. The three of them. Whenever he sees her, he starts to feel difficulty breathing. Fury rising in his body. The thumping of his heart injecting a burning red neon light into his eyes. She’s prettier when she’s silent. She doesn’t know that the mouth is for keeping quiet.

  ‘You better be careful what things you howl, Nine Moons.’

  ‘One day someone will tear your soul from your body,’ she replied. Whenever she got mad, she spoke differently. In a voice with shadow.

  ‘You’ve plenty of tongue, but you don’t scare me.’

  ‘They’ll pluck the worms from your head one by one.’

  Fins rose from the coffin, suddenly wide awake, and quickly made to change the subject. ‘So is it true you’re going to sell these coffins at the inn?’

  ‘We sell lots there,’ said Brinco. ‘Anyway, you shut up, you’re dead.’

  4

  THE MAIN BEACH in Noitía was shaped like a half-moon. To the south lay the fishing district of San Telmo, which had grown as a shoot of the village which started it all, A de Meus, with its stone houses and sea-painted doors and windows. Further south were the disused salting places and the last drying place of octopus and eel. There, sheltered from the widows’ wind, the ramp of the first harbour was preserved. After the rocks of Balea Point came Corveiro Bay. In the middle of it all, the town, spilling new buildings like scattered dominoes. Between San Telmo and Noitía, following the coastal road and before reaching the bridge at Lavandeira da Noite, was Chafariz Cross. From there started a smaller road which climbed uphill to the Ultramar inn, bar, shop, cellar, with its adjoining dance hall and cinema Paris-Noitía.

  The far north, where the river Mor and its reed bed formed a natural border, was still untouched. This was a zone of dunes, the oldest with abundant vegetation to leeward, with a predominance of the bluey-green patience of sea holly. The front line of dunes was very steep, where the vanguard of the storm hit first. At the top of these dunes, tied down with the long hair of Bermuda grass, rose a crest of marram grass against the wind. Further north, protected by a natural armour of rocks, was another, more isolated beach. But anyone looking for it, after a pine grove to the rear of dead dunes, would find the emblazoned gate and walls of Romance Manor.

  Which is why the vans stopped before that, at one end of the half-moon, where there were barely any bathers even in summer, except on a public holiday. Most holidaymakers didn’t make it past the reeds. But people in vans were not holidaymakers. They were something else. Some arrived at other times of the year. Like these two, this couple, who’d left their van in a corner at the end of the track used as a car park, at the start of the dunes. It was a Volkswagen which had been fitted out as a caravan and painted the colours of the rainbow, with curtains on the windows.

  Leda didn’t say a word. She was used to doing things like this, of her own free will and on the quiet. What Fins and Brinco did was follow her. They clambered up the inside of a dune until they were confronted by the sea. Hidden by the crest of marram grass, they could see without being seen. There they were, the couple. Rather than swimming, they played at moving away and coming closer with their bodies. In the waves, in foamy whirlpools, attempting not to lose their footing. In the end, both man and woman emerged from the sea. They were holding hands and ran laughing over the sand in the direction of the dunes. They were both tall and slim. She had long, blond hair. It was a luminous day with a young, springy kind of light which glistened on the sea. To the spies, what they were seeing resembled a hypnotic mirage.

  ‘They’re hippies,’ said Brinco with a certain contempt. ‘I heard about them in the Ultramar.’

  And Leda murmured, ‘Well, they look Dutch or something to me.’

  ‘Ssssssssh!’

  Amid laughter, Fins told them to be quiet. The couple, seeking somewhere to hide, came closer to the peeping Toms. The lovers caressed each other with their bodies, but also with the ebb and flow of their breath, their words.

  ‘Ohouijet’aimejet’aimeaussibeaucouptuestplusbellequelesoleil tu m’embrasses.’

  ‘Ohouioucefeudetapeautuvienstuvienstumetues tu me fais du bien.’

  The accelerated pleasure of bodies on sand, that pleasurable violence, the throbbing of their whispers, unsettled the sentinels. Fins ducked down and leaned against the inner slope of the dune, and the other two copied him.

  ‘That was French,’ said the red-faced Fins in a whisper.

  ‘Who cares?’ said Brinco. ‘You can understand everything.’

  It was Leda who decided to take one last look. And what she saw was the torso of the woman on top of the man, astride him, copulating, lifting her head to the sky and stopping all the wind, tensing her body, filling the horizon, everything an attentive gaze could take in. At the highest point, the woman closed her eyes, and so did Leda.

  Then Leda started rolling downhill. And Fins and Brinco had no choice but to follow her.

  ‘If they’re hippies, I suppose they’d be talking hippy.’

  They’d already passed the bridge by the reeds, but were still a little nervous. Their bodies had yet to settle in their bodies. From time to time a mouth would let out a blast. They didn’t talk about what they’d seen, but what they’d heard.

  The other two burst out laughing. Leda didn’t like it.

  ‘I was only joking!’

  ‘No you weren’t,’ said Brinco in order to wind her up. And he continued the joke: ‘Hippies speak hippy!’

  ‘You’re a couple of idiots. You’ve a screw loose.’

  ‘Don’t get mad,’ said Fins. ‘Nothing’s wrong.’

  ‘You can go to hell, go write on water,’ shouted Leda. ‘You’re both the same.’

  5

  THEY WALKED, DEEP in thought, along the side of the coastal road. The two boys had their hands in their pockets and were watching Leda’s bare feet on the tarmac. She played with her flip-flops, humming the tune of ‘Lola’ and swinging them in the air like huge dragonflies.

  When they reached Chafariz Cross, on the other side of the road leading to the Ultramar, they saw another boy who was younger than them. He was calling to them and waving his arm urgently.

  ‘It’s Chelín! He must have found something,’ exclaimed Leda.

  Brinco cannot avoid being sarcastic whenever he sees Chelín. ‘Sure, he’ll have found something. He doesn’t know how to live without that damn pendulum.’

  ‘Well, it works sometimes, doesn’t it, Leda?’ said Fins in a conciliatory tone.

  ‘Only because he’s so damn stubborn,’ replied Brinco.

  Leda gazed at them both as if rebuking them for their ignorance. ‘His dad used to unearth springs. He was clairvoyant, a water diviner. He discovered all the wells in this area with a rod or pendulum. There are people like that, who see into what’s hidden. With magnetic powers.’ She learned her trade in the river and sea,
washing and collecting shellfish. Her speech had a gurgle that made her stand out. An excess load that acted as defence. And she still had time to murmur with what was left of her open body. ‘Some people are just smoke. They don’t kill or frighten, tie or untie.’

  ‘Amen,’ replied Brinco.

  ‘That must be why he’s so good at stopping the ball,’ interjected Fins. ‘Hidden powers!’

  ‘Maybe. But where the hell is he taking us?’

  Leda ran to meet Chelín. She knew where they were going. For a short while the path became deeper, surrounded on either side by clumps of laurel, holly and elder, which bent down as if to form a vault. It finally gave way to a stone staircase. Next to each step, fermenting moss that resembled a curled-up hedgehog. Suddenly, on top of the hill, a house which seemed to be propped up, supported, by nature. One of those ruins that wants to disappear but can’t, which is bound, not cleft, by the ivy on the walls. Behind a tangle of gorse and broom were two hollows. A dislocated wooden door and a distrustful window with a squint. The building was so taken by nature that the visible part of the roof was a field of foxgloves, and at the eaves the thickest branches of ivy intertwined in order to fall back on themselves as gargoyles. On the threshold of the door, the leaves had respected the tiles, perhaps because of their vegetal forms, which were modernist in style, orange and green, and adorned an inscription in letters glazed blue on white: ‘American Union of Sons of Noitía, 1920’.

  Chelín was taken up with his role. He concentrated all his senses, outside and in, just as his clairvoyant father had taught him. There was something special about the pendulum in his hand. The magnetic weight at the end of the chain was a bullet.

  To start with, it didn’t move. But then slowly the pendulum began to sway from side to side.

  Leda rebuked the disbelievers: ‘See?’

  ‘He’s doing it with his wrist,’ replied Brinco. ‘You’re a fraud, Chelín. Here, give it to me.’

  Chelín ignored him. Because he knew Brinco was a stick-in-the-mud, and because he really was following another clue. Absorbed in the intricacy of flows, deposits and currents. He started walking towards the hollow of the door, the pendulum swaying ever more quickly.

  ‘Come on, have no fear!’ exclaimed Leda with conviction, because she knew Brinco was more than reluctant. Normally so forward, he always came up with excuses here, warned that the place was dangerous, on the verge of collapsing.

  The inside of the School of Indians was largely in shadow, but there was a crater in the roof through which entered a substantial beam of light. A natural skylight opened by a circular cascade of tiles. And there were other, smaller holes, cracks through which entered spears or arrows with the nature of sun rays. The air was so thick that the light found it difficult to penetrate as far as the ground. But it was important it did so, both for the intruders and for the place itself. Because what this beam of light and the occasional slender lantern illuminated was the large relief map of the world which covered the floor. Carved in noble wood, it had been treated, varnished, skilfully painted and preserved, not with the idea of eternity, but so that it could accompany as optimistic ground, somewhere between time and the intemporal, the future of Noitía. In the American Union of Sons of Noitía’s school, built with the donations of emigrants, there was this peculiarity, which was later copied: each pupil sat in a corner of the mappa mundi and moved with the passing of the years, so that when he finished, he could be said to be a citizen of the world. There were other things that made the so-called School of Indians unusual. The typewriters and sewing machines sent from Argentina or Uruguay. The impressive library, imported or paid for. The zoological collection with the presence of desiccated animals and birds in glass cases, according to the custom of that period. There was still the odd specimen, the spectre of some bird which had been left for an unknown reason, like the long-necked crane hanging incredulous next to the detachable pedagogical skeleton missing an arm. On the main wall, faded like cave paintings, the trees of Natural Sciences and the History of Civilisations. Faded as was the map on the ground, over which the children walked, with Chelín and his pendulum leading the way, across countries and continents, islands and seas, the geographical names still discernible, despite the gnawing and abandonment of time.

  Chelín came to a halt. The pendulum was swinging like crazy. He’d brought them to a shady corner where they could make out a bulky shape covered in a brand-new tarpaulin, which upped their expectations, since the visitors weren’t much interested in relics. A large part of the furniture and collections had burned in another time, an archaic period outside time, referred to by the grown-ups as ‘war’. There were still a few books on the dusty shelves, subsumed by cobwebs and rilled by lice. Not much was left. A few furtive visitors would come and rummage through the rotten, gnawed, fearful remains. Though each year the population of bats increased, hanging on their shadowy hooks.

  Nobody dared. In the end, Chelín took hold of the bullet and decided to lift one end of the tarpaulin. They were silenced, astonished.

  ‘Well done, Chelín! Now that’s what I call a treasure.’

  It was a large cargo of boxes full of bottles of whisky. The discoverers of the haul gazed in fascination at the image of the tireless Johnnie Walker.

  Leda moved forward and managed to extract a bottle with the famous label of the rare and much sought-after imported whisky. She turned to Chelín and declared a historical redress in admiring tones: ‘You’re our hero, Chelín!’

  Fins pointed at him triumphantly. ‘No more Chelín. From now on, Johnnie. Johnnie Walker! Our captain!’

  The blast of a shotgun echoed around the old school’s interior as if propelled by the core of this last sentence. The echo. The fragments of tile. The crazed flight of the bats. The bulging eyes of the clairvoyant’s son. Everything seemed to have come from the weapon’s smoking barrel. Leda was so dazed she dropped the bottle of whisky, which fell to the ground and smashed in a bluey area named ‘The Atlantic Ocean’.

  Two figures emerged from the darkness with absolutely no intention of passing unnoticed, and came to a halt beneath the accidental skylight in the roof. The first to make himself visible was a giant hulk carrying the shotgun. But he was soon replaced in the foreground by a second man wearing a white suit and panama hat, who wiped away his sweat with a crimson handkerchief without removing his white cotton gloves.

  They knew who it was. They knew it was useless trying to escape.

  He took possession. The large bully dusted off a chair and offered it to his superior. When he started talking, he did so in a deep voice, which was both intimate and imperative. The man was Mariscal, ‘the Authentic’, as he himself liked to be known. The other man, the one with the weapon, was Carburo, his inseparable bodyguard. Nobody used that word. He was the Curate. The Stick under Orders. The Bully. This was his name. He’d worked for a time as a butcher, and used this snippet from his CV whenever he thought it appropriate, with convincing self-esteem.

  ‘I shit on the keys of life, Carburo! Don’t worry, boys, don’t worry . . . This oaf has a taste for artillery. I’m always telling him, “Carburo, ask first. Then do what you have to.” A fortiori. These things happen. You finger the trigger, it’s the trigger that’s in charge. As the philosopher once said, with gunpowder and a kick in the balls, that was the end of man.’

  Mariscal became thoughtful, his gaze fixed on the ground. The wood-carved map in relief. The work that must have gone into it, the work involved in remembering.

  He raised his eyes and noticed Leda. ‘Where did this girl come from?’

  ‘I came from the mother who had me!’ exclaimed Leda in a rage. She was furious about the loss.

  ‘Kyrie eleison,’ said Mariscal after a pause. ‘And who is that saint, if one may ask?’

  ‘Not “is”,’ said Leda. ‘She died when I was born.’

  Mariscal clicked his tongue and leaned over. He seemed now to be inspecting the trail of lights in the ceiling. You gr
ew up well, girl, he murmured to himself. Nature is wise. Very wise. History returns, he thought, and it’s good to step aside. He recalled Adela, an employee at the canning factory where Guadalupe used to work. He didn’t stop still until he’d bought the factory. He hated the owner, the foreman, those stingy, sticky exploiters. Let them go grope their own mothers. The owner didn’t want to sell, but had no choice in the matter. And when the factory was his, he said to Guadalupe, ‘Now they can sing and eat all they like.’ But that was only for a while. He ended up employing the same foreman. Adela? Yes, Adela. Her beauty, her shyness, her resistance, her sudden yielding, her unfathomable sadness in the mezzanine after what happened happened. She shut herself up at home. Never came back to work. Somebody convinced Antonio Hortas, a poor, single sailor, to marry her and give his surname to the baby. Antonio didn’t need much convincing. Or paying. Because Antonio Hortas loved that woman. And if it was a question of horns, he didn’t mind; he knew plenty of illustrious members of the Confraternity of St Cornelius.

  God keeps an eye on the devil, who’s just a poor old demon. God gives as much as he has to give.

  ‘Mutatis mutandis,’ murmured Mariscal, avoiding the girl’s gaze. And then recovering his tone of voice, ‘Well, troops . . . there’s an end to it. You heard nothing. You saw nothing. Os habent, et non loquentur. They have mouths, and speak not. Learn that and you’ve gained half a life. The rest is also very simple. Oculos habent, et non videbunt. They have eyes, and see not. Aures habent, et non audient. They have ears, and hear not.’

  In the ruinous School of Indians, his voice sounded charming, velvety and hoarse. They were all ears and eyes.

  He fell silent. Sized up the weight of his charm. Then added, ‘Manus habent, et non palpabunt. They have hands, and touch not. Don’t pay much attention to that. The hands are for touching and the feet are for walking. But it fits the bill when things have an owner. As is the case here.’

  They listened like schoolchildren being treated to an impromptu masterclass. Here was a man acting himself and revelling in the role. He cleared his throat. Stroked his lips.