THE CITY KNEW little or nothing about Castro. Those from Castro, apart from knowing about the city, had a universe of their own. A gift of knowledge. Atmospheric, for example. From when we were children, we received a thorough meteorological education. In modern times, they stuck the university in that area, but there already existed a popular School of Winds, Storms and Clouds. One of the first things my new friends in Castro taught me was how to catch a rainbow with my hands. There were puddles where the rainbow would place its artistic desire with oily density. You could feel the spectrum of all the colours of the cosmos in your hands. Lift them to your mouth. Lick, taste, drink the rainbow.
It was no accident that the football team, founded when people stole the ball from the elites and discovered how to play in the mud, should be given and still bears the name Elviña Lightning. Seen from Castro, the bolts of lightning were nightmares from the open sea: sudden, fierce, incandescent forests that seized the celestial void with anxiety and rage. There was a wonderful rock from which to watch the natural cinema of lightning. The Cuckoo’s Crag, near our house, on the way to O Escorial. The cuckoo was large, sculpted by the weather’s imagination in the free workshop of the elements. Any sculptor would have immediately gone down in history for a work like that. It looked like a bird, with its stone wings, its golden-green lichen eyes and its beak pointing towards the city, in axial connection with the Tower of Hercules-Breogán.
We would climb and sit on the cuckoo’s neck, feel the excitement of those who have always dreamed of flying. There was a sweeping panorama of the whole Artabrian bay. The call of the West. There, like an invisible nation, was the Compass Rose. Many years later, after my military service, I found out that heavy machinery had demolished the Cuckoo’s Crag. I never thought the death of a stone could hurt so much.
From that prominence and other lookouts, we could see a storm approaching A Coruña long before anybody in the city knew about it. During rainy spells, the washerwomen would spread out their clothes whenever it cleared. That time of light between downpours, like the pause between the ticking of a clock.
When water was sighted by the Tower, the Castro washerwomen knew they had three emergency minutes. A succession of alarm calls would ring out. They would cover and uncover the clothes horse of the mountain and fields. Memory retrieves these images like the activism of an artistic will. This is what it was. Same as the pyramids of a hundred lettuces! The tied lettuces were jewels in the fields of Castro and Elviña Valley. They sealed them with bulrushes so they would swell on the inside and, having cut them, the women would take them to sell in the squares of A Coruña. They carried them in baskets. Each basket, a hundred lettuces. No more, no less. They placed them in concentric circles to form a conical construction that was crowned by the hundredth lettuce. Everything the women carried on their heads was essential. I can see the women with pails of water. The women with pitchers of milk. The women with bundles of clothes. The women with bales of hay. The fishwives with their wares. Since there’s nothing else I can do, I would like to place inside Miss Celia’s basket or bucket a verse from Nelly Sachs’s ‘Epitaphs Written in the Air’: ‘Irradiated by fish in a glorious dress of tears.’
In Castro, a sister and brother were born, Sabela and Francisco Xavier, known as Chavela and Paco. There was one day my mother said, ‘Sit over there and hold out your arms.’ So I sat opposite her, and my arms became the support for unravelling or making a skein of wool. Ever since that day, hours of silence have had a sound. A precise, laborious percussion. A textile music. That of knitting. Enigmatic articles would materialise, in keeping with a miniature human anatomy. The first thing my mother knitted was a pair of woollen socks. As she finished these doll-sized booties, my mother was sending a message, like someone waving two flags in the International Code of Signals: ‘Something new is about to be born!’
My mother always took great care that our feet were warm. She waged a relentless war against the cold, damp and draughts. Children were always frightened of the wolf or the Sack Man, but for my mother the worst monsters of all were the Drip Man or the Man with Draughts. These poor monsters loved us a lot. They always kept us company, whether they were visible or not. They formed part of our home. As did the Weatherman. He may never have realised this. He must have had his own life. Drawn his maps every day. Careful with the Azores. Here’s a patch of low pressure. There’s a high. Without preference. He never showed much enthusiasm for one or the other. His stick was the stick of destiny, and he provided the voice. He looked like someone you could trust, but without influence. His stick had a life of its own. It decided. Pointed at our roofs, our heads, and kept returning to Castro de Elviña.
At home, before gas became the norm, we had an iron stove, the so-called bilbaína or económica. This is where my mother would hold a drying camp every winter. My father came back one evening looking as if he’d just survived a shipwreck. He’d first got wet on site and then become soaked on his journey home on the Lambretta. This was an elastic motorbike that accommodated four of us. How? With a desire for style in the way we were positioned. The fact is my father turned up, looking pale and miserable. As he shakily changed into something dry, my mother spread the wet clothes that were stiff with mud, like a diving suit, over the iron stove. I was by the stove as well, doing my homework in the warmest place. And that was when my mother paused in what she was doing, became aware of my presence and, staring at me, said in an almost reproachful tone:
‘When you grow up, I hope you find yourself a job where you don’t get wet!’