IN THE STRANGE nursery, sitting on the suitcase one day, I heard María’s voice.
It was a voice that came from on high. So I lifted my head and saw her standing on the table, above all the noise, with a spelling book in her hand. It really was my sister. But the voice was new: it had been born that very day. María was a little more than a year older than me. I didn’t even have a spelling book. I went to school with an empty briefcase, which I wouldn’t let go for anything in the world. And now, there she was. Reading aloud, in the middle of an astonished silence. Without making any mistakes, without stuttering. Reading syllables, whole sentences. She was capable of pronouncing the divine words ‘mi mamá me ama, mi mama me mima’. And ‘uvas iglesia bicicleta’. She turned page after page, and the teacher asked her excitedly to carry on, carry on, wanting to see whether what was happening was really true or just a superstition. I already knew my sister had a special relationship with words. She was a verbivore. She went out gathering words and carried them home. You can tell because of the separation in her teeth, in early photos, that her mouth was full of words. It must have had something to do with our family. My mother was a verbivore as well. She talked to herself in a way that bewitched us, without realising, without even knowing we were listening. In the house or houses we lived in, there were no books at that time. The first poems I heard were in my mother’s solitary mouth, poems she recited to herself or to someone who kept her company in her imagination, even when she was washing or scrubbing. Whatever it was, it was something strange, captivating, but also disturbing. It was the mouth of literature, unannounced. This being nourished by the sound of words was a family secret, however. I didn’t know María had learned how to read from one day to the next, but nor was I surprised. There were herbivores and carnivores. And then there were those who fed on words. There were plenty of that species in my family. One of the first I discovered was my uncle Francisco, my mother’s brother, who was a barber. For us children, a haircut was a kind of torture. Our heads were shaved without further ado. As a precaution against lice, we were given a convict haircut. In nature, it would seem there is a desire for style, which is revealed, for example, in symmetry. In the way a sea urchin grows or the degree at which a fig tree bends on the coast. In the flight of a flock of starlings. Or the monstrous threat posed to predators by the drawings on the wings of certain butterflies. These are observations and enchantments, marks in the history of the look. Detecting humiliation also forms part of the primitive equipment of some species.
It was to see oneself in the mirror and feel humiliated, as when one suffers an inexplicable punishment. The barber’s chair, where adults sat so contented and trusting, a magazine or newspaper open in their hands, more or less indifferent to the artistic process being performed on their heads, was an executioner’s chair for us little ones. Our locks fell to the floor, the wild beast retreated. The head was humiliated. But that wasn’t the feeling with which one left Uncle Francisco’s barber’s shop. Not for stylistic reasons. He wasn’t heterodox when it came to the dominant haircut. The scissors and mowing machine advanced implacably over the skull’s lawn. But what happened to one’s head in that place was secondary. The important thing was the discourse. Uncle Francisco’s incessant stream of thought. In reality, a snip-snap of the scissors on high, preceded by a flourish in the air, was not part of the haircut, but the start of a new paragraph.
When long hair became fashionable, we teenagers gradually abandoned him. In the same building as the barber’s shop, he lent out a room for a rock band to practise. Uncle Francisco’s monologues, of which he had a different one for each client, alternated with this music that had ushered in a fashion he considered disastrous. But he was a narrator above all else, and this situation enabled him to renew his characters and themes. Unlike the haircut, which continued unchanged, the storyteller moved with the times. Irony was his trademark. What kept him on the front line.
‘Humour, gentlemen, is the pauper’s second sauce.’
‘And the first one?’
‘Hunger. That’s the best sauce for eating.’
Only once, as far as he could tell, did Uncle Francisco shut his mouth in the middle of a story and find himself unable to continue. In the story, there was a moment’s terror, when some Falangists broke into the house at night to take away his father, my grandfather from Corpo Santo, with the intention of killing him. At this point, the old man he was shaving, a complete stranger, blurted out:
‘I may have been one of them.’
And he added with a certain pride, glancing around:
‘I may even have been the driver.’
Uncle Francisco held his nerve. Wiped the cut-throat against the leather. Swept it over the old man’s face until removing the last speck of foam. Gave him a few smacks of aftershave. Splish, splash!
‘Don’t ever come here again.’
‘How much do I owe?’ said the other in surprise.
‘Use it to pay for some Masses. Nothing you do will ever be too much to save your soul.’
Whenever he remembered that day, a shadow fell over his eyes. He explained about the razor, his self-restraint over his instinct, not as something that deserved praise, but as a simple condition, the way a good storyteller should be able to hold his nerve.
A few years later, I again see María on a table, surrounded by people. It’s in Leonor’s shop and pub, in Castro de Elviña. One summer’s afternoon, after lunch. Most of the men are outside, working. The hour and the absence of men allow the women to be inside the shop, in the shade. They’re also working. Sewing, embroidering, knitting. And María is standing on top of the table. Reading the newspaper aloud. From time to time, they ask her to repeat something. An incident, perhaps. There is no radio or television. María is reading with the lantern of her green eyes, in the midst of a friendly silence. After a while, they lift her down off the table. Caress her. Give her a banana and some cherries. She shares this first wage. Of cherries.
Corpo Santo tasted of cherries.
This was the place where my maternal grandfather, Manuel, lived. We never knew our maternal grandmother, Xosefa. She died young, because of an illness, and left behind ten children. Two perished during the misery that followed the Spanish Civil War. Before that, during the coup of 1936, a Fascist group arrived in the night and dragged my grandfather outside to ‘take him for a walk’. He was Republican. And Christian. He was also secretary of the Farmers’ and Stockbreeders’ Mutual. The fact he could write must have been his downfall. On one occasion, he refused, as secretary, to draw up and sign a contract for the sale of cattle in bad condition. Another time, he declined to validate a sale that had been agreed late in the night, after a card game. On such occasions, Manuel of Corpo Santo’s expression of resistance, his way of saying ‘I would prefer not to’, was ‘Gentlemen, we’re out of time!’ Whenever he went to the mountain for firewood or animal bedding, he would use the fact he was alone to read or write. He lost all sense of time. And he was lucky that death, in this case, also lost all sense of time. Because he was saved by a miracle. He was saved by the shout of the parish priest, whose conscience had taken him to the scene of the crime on horseback.
So it was that, in Corpo Santo, four boys and four girls were raised by my grandfather. They grew like cherry trees. The orchards in Mariñas Douradas, the name of that region, preserved the memory of the French song ‘Time of Cherries’. I associate the happiest days with blackbirds. Sometimes, around the beginning of July, a swarm of us cousins would spend the whole day up in the trees, sharing the treasure with mocking blackbirds. When we were small, we stayed there for long periods. As I would often wake up in one bed, having gone to sleep in another, so, for me as a child, it seemed there was a secret passageway linking the hill with the lighthouse to the staircase in Corpo Santo.
The one who really communicated with a large part of the world was my grandfather. He did this from a table he used as a desk, on the upper floor of the house. It was one of those unpredictable places where the globe alights in order to rest. The globe gives the impression it never stops, it orbits, suspended in space, turning on its axis, but this is very tiring and from time to time it looks for somewhere to set down. When the globe settles on a particular point in the world, something happens. To my mind, it used to alight on that modest desk, where there were piles of postcards and letters from the diaspora. Addresses, stamps, photographic views, where the colours of the Promised Land, primary and intense, fermented. The postcards formed a kind of mappa mundi. He was a real writer. As the ancient Greeks used to say, ‘an interpreter of interpreters’. He wrote letters to emigrants. The ‘widows of the living’ would come, and he would write down news items and feelings that crossed the sea, beyond Marola, the islet that gave our street its name, the mark of farewell on the bay’s mouth. He had very good handwriting. The letters looked like vegetal landscapes. Over in America, if the reader knew how to read, he would see each word and everything named by it, perhaps even a little more. What hadn’t been said.
Apart from the small planetary desk, there was another extraordinary place in Corpo Santo. A staircase with pine steps and wooden sides. It led from the hard-packed earthen floor downstairs to the wooden floor on the second level, where the bedrooms were and the chests with items of value: deeds, seeds and dowries.
During the day, everybody worked hard. But when the frontier of dusk was passed, a wonderful metamorphosis took place. The silent creatures hung their work up on a hook and were summoned to a second life. Around food, wine and fire, words came, bringing news and stories. Downstairs, opposite the hearth, was the cowshed. The cows poked their heads out of the mangers, three irrepressible forces sucking grass and blowing out clouds of steam. The cows’ breath was what covered the valley of Corpo Santo every morning. This factory of mist, so realistic, was like a children’s story. The adults had other stories for themselves. Stories about the Holy Company, the souls of nostalgic dead people who hanker after a coffee with a few drops of brandy. Wolf stories, with wolf men and women. Adventure stories, stories of emigration. The stowaway who can’t make up his mind to get off the ship and so spends his life going to and fro, a secret man, hidden. Stories of fugitives on the mountain, the Maquis. Of crime and revenge. The man who heads to the festa, intending to kill a rival, but when he hears the music, reconsiders and throws the knife away, and when the party is over, the other, the one who was due to die, finds the weapon, the moon glinting on its blade, and takes it up, determined, with a fixed purpose … Stories of passionate love. In an enclosed convent, where the nuns make dummies of the infant Jesus to sleep next to on Christmas Eve …
That was the point at which we were supposed to visit the fields of sleep. The children, off to bed. We went, groaning or pretending to groan. Because we knew this expulsion was not serious. We would remain, invisible and clandestine, sitting on the top step, under a lamp that transmitted the wind outside, the intensity of the stories, the embers of the fire and our hearts. In that lamp, suspended by a twisted wire, light came and went without doing so completely. It was a place of intermittences that attracted moths. The elders’ talk kept step with the fire’s humour, and our ears with the lamp upstairs. In the window above the sink, we could see the reflected faces talking in the half-light, as if they belonged to another time that was not the past, but was just that: another time. The words fed on the flames, but there came a moment when they fled from the fire into the dark …
There were unforgettable nights. As when a letter was read out from a suitor of my aunt Maruxa, a girl of seismic beauty.
To demonstrate his virility, the suitor had written a letter that was recited many times around the fire in Corpo Santo. It began with a wonderful snippet of information: ‘Yesterday, I saw you at the fair and you should know that I didn’t talk to you.’ The laughter made the flames flicker. Further down the page, the gallant author of the letter proceeded to enumerate his properties in order to impress and captivate the letter’s recipient. He recorded in calligraphic acres an unending estate of fields, meadows, hills and plots of land. He then gave details about his livestock: ‘You should know that we combine seven cows, x number of pigs and at least a hundred Leghorn chickens.’ He then added, quite naturally, ‘And a father in disconformable health.’
Aunt Maruxa, who later happily married Xoán Agra, a taxi driver from Sada, opened her arms and lifted them to the sky like two exclamation marks: ‘You see! I can’t possibly marry this man!’ The huddle of people killed themselves laughing. And killed the night with a polyphony of little bells. The fire laughed as well, in sparks and smuts. The scene was reflected and painted a picture on the window above the sink. That planisphere in chiaroscuro was the last image to be retained on the eyelid of sleep. Cradled by the low voices, the clandestine children fell asleep on the staircase in Corpo Santo.