This book arose from a series of articles called ‘Storyboard’, published in the cultural supplement Luces de Galicia of the Galician edition of the newspaper El País. I would like to thank Xosé Hermida and Daniel Salgado for the kind attention and welcome they gave me. The articles then chose to ferment, and among the people who helped me to see into another time, to recollect, I am particularly grateful for the contributions of Manuel Bermúdez Chao and Carmelo Seoane, owner of A Artabria (Leonor’s old shop and pub) in the Republic of Castro de Elviña. They were both also generous enough to provide photographs of the ‘restless paradise’. Similarly generous was the photographer Xoán Piñón, who retrieved from his archives two photographs that show my sister María when she was young. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to all my family and the company of low voices.
Manuel Rivas was born in Coruña in 1957, and writes in the Galician language of north-west Spain. He is well known for his journalism, as well as for his prizewinning short stories and novels, which include the internationally acclaimed The Carpenter’s Pencil and Books Burn Badly. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.
The Low Voices draws on a patchwork of memories from Rivas’s early life under Franco. There’s his beloved elder sister, María; his mother, the verbivore; his father, a construction worker with vertigo; and a supporting cast of local priests, chatty hairdressers, wolf hunters and monstrous carnival effigies.
The book is full of wonderful personal stories, set against a background of the ravages of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath at home, and the wider world as Coca-Cola sets up a factory nearby and news comes in of men landing on the moon.
A brilliant coming-of-age novel from one of Spain’s greatest storytellers, The Low Voices is a humorous and philosophical take on memory, belonging, and the nature of storytelling itself.
WE WERE ALONE, María and I, hugging in the bathroom. Fugitives from terror, we hid in the dark chamber. On stormy days, you could hear the sea’s roar. Today it was the rusty, asthmatic mutter of the cistern. Finally, we heard her voice. Calling for us. With unease, to begin with. Then with growing anxiety. We had to respond. Show signs of life. But she took the initiative. We heard her panting, hurried footsteps, the eager sniffing of someone picking up a scent. María drew back the bolt. My mother pushed open the door, bringing the light with her, a storm still in her eyes. Her fear was that of someone who comes home and finds no trace of the children she left playing calmly. Our fear was more primitive than that. It was our first fear.
My mother, Carme, worked as a milkmaid. We rented the ground floor of a house on Marola Street, in the district of Monte Alto in A Coruña. My father had recently returned from South America, from La Guaira, where he’d worked in construction, scaling the summits of buildings and climbing the sky on fragile scaffolding. A quick emigration, just enough time to save the money to buy a plot of land. Many years later, in his old age, he confessed a weakness, he who wasn’t in the habit of opening up his secret zone: he suffered from vertigo. All his life, he’d had vertigo. And a large part of that life had been spent on building sites, as a bricklayer’s mate and finally as a master builder. Never, until he retired, did he confide in anyone. About his vertigo. About the fact he felt horror inside when he was down on the ground, looking up, and above all when he was up in the air, looking down. Panic from the very first step. But his foot always went in search of the second step. And the second step always led to the third.
‘Why didn’t you say?’
‘What would happen to a workman who went around saying he suffered from vertigo? Who would take him on? Vertigo? The word didn’t even exist!’
He almost died in La Guaira, stuck in a hut on the hillside, between the forest and a few other shacks, but only he knew about this. During his fever, his sole connection with reality was the voice of a parrot that kept intoning a woman’s name: ‘Margarita! Margarita!’ He knew it existed, this bird. Perhaps the woman as well. One day, he thought he heard, ‘Go cry in the valley, old parrot!’ But he never saw them, the bird or the woman. When he got better, one Sunday, on his day off from work, he went looking for the parrot. He wanted to talk to it, to offer it his thanks. It had been his only thread to life. But he never found it. My father didn’t give this story a magical interpretation. In that place, birds, like people, came and went.
Early in the morning, he would drink a black coffee and leave on his Montesa. Our father, who had returned. Before that, he had a Vespa – and then a Lambretta, which formed part of our family’s mythology since it could carry us all without a whimper, with that sense of self-denial displayed by certain domestic appliances. That was his breakfast: black coffee, piping hot. Whenever he had a cold or the flu, he would double the dose of coffee and take an aspirin. He had an almost fanatical faith in acetylsalicylic acid. When his body turned against him and one leg refused to walk, he had to be admitted to hospital. The doctors who operated on his leg found traces of at least two heart attacks. He’d survived these attacks in secret, but silences like that usually write in Braille on a tunnel of the body. Only once, in passing, did he remark that he’d lost the strength in his arms. Whenever he lifted them to operate on a ceiling, they would put up a heavy resistance. He would look at them in surprise, as at two old, unruly companions. Of the memories that used to make him laugh, one was of his youth as a musician in various dance orchestras and of the drummer so taken up with the others’ playing that he missed his cue. The paso doble ground to a halt, suspended somewhere in the night, until the conductor’s apocalyptic command made itself heard: ‘Cymbals, boy! Let the wonders of the world ignite!’ An order issued in this way, like a cosmic outburst, sounded like part of the spectacle, but it still took the boy a little time to re-establish the connection. Wonders. Cymbals. The paso doble. Him. In the end, the drummer got going and made the whole night tremble. So, whenever my father’s arms grew tired on site, whenever he noticed a lack of energy, he didn’t think about a possible heart attack, but about the infallible outburst ‘Cymbals, boy! Let the wonders of the world ignite!’
Just as my father couldn’t possibly suffer from vertigo, so my mother couldn’t possibly fall ill. There were only two moments of real peace. One was on her way to church on a Sunday morning. Not the Mass itself so much as going to Mass. That opiate journey, that translation. The other moment was when she had the opportunity to read. Her turn with the newspaper. Having cooked a meal, cleaned, washed, scrubbed, put everything in order, she had this means of escape. A few minutes of total abstraction. The same with books, any book that happened to be lying about the house. This relationship, this happiness, was admirable. You could shout there was a fire, a flood, anything. Our mother would remain entranced. Trapped. Abducted. She wouldn’t reply. Wouldn’t even look up. Her only reaction was to draw closer to the object of vigil.
There were times when it seemed it would pass, this business of falling ill. ‘I don’t feel so well, I’m going to lie down for a while.’ And the time of healing would last as long as a Mass or a reading. When the disease finally arrived, it wasn’t in the manner of the story she used to tell us. It didn’t come on a visit.
‘Who is it?’ asks the old peasant farmer in bed, surprised by a knock one winter’s night.
‘It’s me!’ says an unmistakable voice. ‘Open up at once!’
This goes on until the old farmer plucks up the courage to say, ‘Off with you! There’s no one at home.’
And Death mutters, ‘It’s just as well I didn’t come, then.’
That’s where I should start. With the murmuring of the first laughter associated with one of her many stories. For instance, a sailor who has survived a shipwreck is captured by a tribe of cannibals. They start cooking him in a pot and add lesser ingredients, tubers and pulses, on the side. As the water heats up and the anthropophagites dance around the fire, building up an appetite, the Galician dives down into his own stew and tucks into potatoes and peas. The head cannibal cries out in admiration, ‘Look how happy our food is!’ This way of saying goodbye was a form of heroism that filled us with pride. Our hero got eaten by cannibals, yes, but it was an optimistic story. Like the stories by Carlos O’Xestal we used to listen to on the radio, on a Sunday lunchtime. A bagpiper and storyteller, O’Xestal was a strange celebrity during our childhood. His heroes were common people, the humblest there were, who triumphed by means of ingenuity and irony. And who spoke Galician, something that was very unusual on radio broadcasts. The biggest laughs O’Xestal got were when he mimicked those trying to disguise their accent, like covering up a blemish, in such comical situations as that of the young man who missed the ship sailing from A Coruña to Buenos Aires, and when he got back home, having never left Galicia, did so talking like a writer of tangos. The Galician language belonged to this world, but there was a problem with it. Places, moments and situations in which it sounded like a sin on the lips. It lived in the caverns of mouths, but somehow eccentrically, like a tramp that studies the path and company before starting to walk. Once an acquaintance of my parents visited them to let them know he’d finally been accepted as a janitor at some bank. They congratulated him. My father remarked, ‘You’ll have to buy yourself a new suit …’ He replied, with a curious exposition of textile sociolinguistics, ‘It’s bought already! Yesterday, I tried it on with a tie. As soon as I tightened the knot, I broke into magnificent Spanish!’
O’Xestal made almost everybody laugh by laughing at almost everybody, with goads that sometimes pricked the sensitive skin of taboos and complexes. From time to time, he would perform at banquets, in front of the highest authorities on a visit to Galicia. The occasional permissiveness that is granted to the buffoon or comic. Until he suddenly disappeared. The voice on the radio. The pictures, always in traditional clothes, in the papers. O’Xestal’s disappearance wasn’t something I was aware of at the time. The truth is I’d lost interest in that kind of autochthonous humour. My mind had moved on to other things. Until one day, I came across a news item in which the humorist made his reappearance – but not in the entertainment section, in the section about accident and crime. A police report that talked about a raid in which various people considered a ‘social menace’ had been detained. Among them was O’Xestal. I interviewed him years later. I was appalled by his account. The abuse, the humiliation, the terrible experience of prison in Badajoz. All for the ‘crime’ of being homosexual. During the Franco years, the law lumped ‘pimps, villains and homosexuals’ into one group. By the time he left prison, marked as an outlaw, he was a rebel. A revolutionary. Leading a modest life with his mother in a small village on the coast (Lema, in Baldaio), he risked his neck at the front of a resistance movement to prevent the appropriation of a large nature reserve. Interwoven with his biography, his old stories acquired a different meaning. There was plenty of pain behind the humour. I thought about him not long ago – his ironic smile that never says goodbye, that permeates wakes, that tries to cross over into the beyond – when I saw a slogan painted in tar along the wall of a coastal cemetery, which said of the dead, ‘You poachers!’
Or perhaps it was a message from the dead for the living …
There is a conversation I shall never forget. An immaterial ‘property’ from the Department of Unauthorised Childhood Recordings. One of those times in the book of life when the mouth of literature spontaneously makes itself known. We are already living in Castro de Elviña. The winter has come wading into Galicia. Fierce, sullen and cold. An unending downpour. Days of no work, the wind howling around the gaps in buildings. My father has been restless, cornered, for several days, the condensation on the window framing the tenth legion of storm clouds.
Suddenly he bursts out:
‘I wish I could have a week in prison!’
My mother is knitting. A new creature is coming. Is on the way. She’s been knitting tiny articles of clothing for days, weeks, as her belly keeps growing.
‘I wish I could have seven days in hospital!’
María and I are doing our homework at the kitchen table. We glance at each other. Prison? Hospital? The future looks promising. They have a communication code we have yet to fathom. It seems my mother’s response was convincing. They smile. Half smile. Weave a rumour. The warp of a murmur. Fall quiet. They are the existentialist avant-garde. They are exhausted. They have extracted words from the grottoes of their gums.
He didn’t talk much, and was never rhetorical, even though he’d give off sudden sparks, as when he remembered the odd excessive binge: ‘We drank like Cossacks!’ The way he said it, I felt comfortable as the son of a Cossack. The pronunciation of the exoticism ‘Cossacks’, his eyes opening wide in amazement, reflected the historical nature of the deviation. He also used to say, ‘That is worth a potosí!’ What was a potosí? A potosí was a potosí. A mysterious measure of wealth I handled thanks to my father. And when Potosí appeared on a map in the school encyclopaedia as the name of some silver mines in Bolivia, it was already part of our family heritage. I was drawn in as well by the expression he used to define maximum ignorance: ‘He’s such a brute he doesn’t even know the names of trees.’ In the Odyssey, Odysseus only manages to convince the blind, incredulous Laertes that he is really his son when he recalls the name and number of the trees, as his father taught him, in the orchard on Ithaca, which would one day be his. When she evoked this passage in class, our teacher’s voice would break and, with a bit of imagination, you could see the orchard in her oceanic eyes. We knew that Luz Pozo was also a poet and pianist. A mature woman the whole school was in love with, from the youngest student to the military veteran who took gym, passing through the caretaker, the French lectrice and all the teachers of religion. If anyone wasn’t in love with her, it was through the misfortune of not having met her. We had heard about poets who crossed Galicia diagonally on motorbikes at weekends, hundreds of miles, just to see her. And we knew it was true when, years later, she left on a motorbike with the poet Eduardo Moreiras. But now we’re in her class at school. Luz enters the classroom, followed by an erotic wake whose special quality is to promote greater peace than excitement. Eros, taken by the hand, alights on the study material, the challenge of forcing open Luis de Góngora’s ‘Polyphemus’. But it’s one thing to talk about literature, it’s another thing entirely to hear the mouth of literature. And that is what I heard, quite clearly, when Luz Pozo read what was happening in the orchard on Ithaca, at that precise moment when memory merged with the manuscript of the earth, Odysseus listing all the fig trees, apple trees, pear trees and vines. There was a second text, a murmur only I could hear in my father’s mouth when he wished to signal an extreme case of ignorance: not knowing, not wanting to know, the names of the trees that surround you.
Whenever he argued with my mother, he would use an expression I found cryptic, with a hidden meaning:
‘You are the Spirit of Contradiction.’
She never held back what she was thinking. She was sweet, but not docile. At that time, the laws regarding women were even more shocking than people’s attitudes towards them. A woman was a subordinate being. She could do nothing without her husband’s approval. But my mother could not accept such a submissive role, and my father knew it. So, whenever he felt thwarted, he would allude to the influence on my mother of that invisible creature, the Spirit of Contradiction, which soon formed part of our domestic mythology. In their own way, neither of them was particularly sociable. They constituted a pair of conjugal recluses, but their solitudes were different. My father avoided crowds whenever he could. When it came to sporting events, he experienced real aversion. He tried, unsuccessfully, to engender in me the same hatred he felt towards football. After that, he tried to keep me away from the grounds. We had a neighbour, Gregorio, a technician for Radio Coruña, who offered to take me along to Riazor Stadium. For my father, those epic hours when Deportivo was playing out its very existence, which was every Sunday afternoon, were a good time for us to go out in the garden. I felt miserable, and he would try to persuade me that paying to see two factions of adult men chasing after a ball, driven on by a roaring mob, represented a kind of defeat for humanity. Until he admitted his own defeat and I was allowed to go with Gregorio to Riazor. After leaving the stadium, we would drop by the house of some relatives. Their building was connected to a large hairdressing salon. As the adults talked, I would peer into that enchanted world, with its mirrored walls and the chairs with disturbing helmets in which heads would undergo a metamorphosis (that enigmatic expression, ‘to have a perm’!), a scene that is now deserted, but alert, with the futuristic nostalgia of murmurs, colours and aromas. The enamel of dragonflies flashing on absent nails. There was a charm about the place one resisted as much as one was drawn to it. The charm of what it would be like to be a woman. Or what one would be like as a woman. Back at home, after night had fallen, my parents were listening to the radio. They used to do this with the light out, the only illumination coming from the radio dial. Our house hanging on the hillside looked just like a ship. The wind whistling over the harmonica of the roof, the beams from the lighthouse licking our darkness. Special effects from outside that heightened the suggestiveness of the radio. We were both in and out. The voices and static formed part of nature. Life had a storytelling vocation. I had been at Riazor, that other bustling, suspended spaceship, amid the ebb and flow of roars. I had been in the fantastic hair salon, in that shadowy light of large chrysalises. And now, leaning on the window of night, I felt like an equal next to the Man Who Despises Football and the Woman Who Talks To Herself.
They could both be very silent or very talkative. I learned that language had seasons. Days when words sprouted, days when mouths rested, days when they talked to themselves, days when dry leaves fell from lips and went spinning off towards a bitter destination. There was a special characteristic about my father’s speech that made it different from that of most adult males. He never swore or cursed, even when he was expressing extreme annoyance. He never called on God, the Virgin, the saints of the Church or the angels in heaven. He never even bothered the devil. That seemed natural enough in a believer like my mother, but it surprised me in a man who never set foot inside a church. In fact, men at Mass on a Sunday were a rarity. They would attend burials, funerals and anniversaries. Also High Mass on a feast day. But even on those occasions most would remain outside, in the yard, and those who went inside would take up position at the back of the building. Men didn’t kneel. They remained standing in that area of half-light under the choir loft. It was also strange for a man to receive communion. To participate in communion, to receive the sacred form, required confession. And that – going to confess to the priest – was something that tried my father’s patience. Whenever they argued about this, it would have been normal to expect a stream of curses.
‘What is the priest? He’s …’
Airily, he answered his own question with the most outrageous euphemism he could find:
‘A man! He’s nothing more than … a man.’
But that came later, long after our first fear. Memory goes a-wandering, it crosses fields, darts across the Avenue, walks like Charlie Chaplin the Tramp inside the Hercules Cinema. Or walks like women with things on top of their heads. All of them – well, almost all – carried something. A prolongation of basic things. Take, for example, the walk of the milkmaid. My mother would begin by delivering to Monelos. Then she’d get on the trolleybus and start again on San Xoán Street, at Asunción’s shop. One of the places she served was a military establishment attached to the cavalry. One day, a soldier whispered to her, ‘You can put water in the milk, don’t worry, they add even more once it’s here.’ Meanwhile, we were living on Marola Street, renting the ground floor. María can’t have been three and I was under two. Back then, before it was blocked by the violent actions of the land registry, the street had an open horizon and ran into the surroundings of the Tower of Hercules. Very near our home was a place known as the Farmhouse. No, it wasn’t an ethnographic museum. It was a real farmhouse at the limits of the city with the sea. A house with cows and a traditional cart. That was a real journey into space, going on that cart. The fields that bordered the provincial prison were fertile ground with lush crops and potatoes that tasted of the sea. There were meadows, willows, a choir of blackbirds in the field next to Lapas Beach. The cows moved between the city limits and the cliffs. In my memory, they represent a canvas of mythological pop art. How the Tower of Hercules, declared a world heritage site, could benefit from a few amphibian cows in the sun! That space is now occupied by fixed sculptures and a municipal obsession with lawns, the green acrylic laminating the sylvan colours. The cows of time have disappeared. They’re mooing out at sea.
We were alone on that ground floor on Marola Street. We were sitting on the floor. I was playing with a toy lorry. There was a loose tile, which could be removed. Underneath it, a bug, a cockroach. I was trying to grab it, with good intentions, I wanted to give it a ride on the lorry, but it kept running away, anticipating my hand’s movement. And then María lifted her head, all alert, all of her smiling. She jumped to her feet and ran towards the window that looked onto the street. I followed her, as always. In symmetry. She walked with her feet pointing outwards, bandy-legged, and I was pigeon-toed, with my feet pointing inwards. Each of us walked as best he could. Aunt Paquita had a limp. She would exclaim joyfully, ‘The lame one’s here!’ And there’d be murmuring: ‘How pretty you look! How well you limp, Paquita!’ But now we were alone. María ran with her feet pointing outwards and I ran with my feet pointing inwards. We heard music in the street. Saw clowns throwing streamers. Fireworks. A party. The window was a marvellous screen. Until suddenly two monsters appeared, filling it completely, with heartless eyes, their noses banging against the glass. We’d never seen danger up so close before. The horror.
‘You fools!’ said our mother. ‘It was only two carnival giants. Isabella and Ferdinand, the Catholic Monarchs.’
FOR A YEAR, my seat at the strange nursery was a suitcase. I felt as if I were sitting inside the ferry terminal or in customs.
After our first fear, the attack of the giants, our mother decided my sister María and I shouldn’t spend so much time on our own while she did her rounds as a milkmaid. Sometimes my godmother, Amelia, would look after us. My godfather, Pepe Couceiro, was a fan of mechanics and scientific progress. For a time, he focused all his ingenuity on combustion engines. He could build a two-seater car out of a motorbike. His intention was to travel the Galician roads inside that capsule and even go beyond the Pyrenees, to Europe. He had an enigmatic expression: in advanced countries, ‘all the countryside is landscape’. And he would gaze at the horizon nearby with scientific fatalism, sorry that not even an inch of Galicia would ever be redeemed. He had a spirit like Marco Polo’s. So much so that he ended up working as a seller of spices, an expert in that precious, aromatic merchandise. The first time I had the impression someone was formulating a revolutionary thought, toppling the universal system of weights and measures, was when my godfather revealed a little pigment on the end of his forefinger, stared at me and solemnly declared, ‘A kilo of saffron is worth more than a kilo of gold!’
One day, he took me on one of his expeditions as a spice merchant. I remember it as the first real journey of my life.
‘To the end of the world!’ he exclaimed enthusiastically.