Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

The bagpipes kept not only the light they’d saved up inside their black velvet, but a lot of silence. Silence must be kept. O soon distinguished two classes of silence. There was mute silence. The silence of suppressing what cannot or should not be said. A precautionary, fearful silence. And then there was friendly silence. The silence that makes you think. The silence that protects you and allows room for meditation. The silence of the bagpipes waiting for Polka.

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.