Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

Olinda woke up in the middle of the night and looked through the window at the lines of candle-women.

In his hut in the labour camp, every time he lit a match, Polka would let it burn until the flame reached his fingers. A match was very important to him. To everybody, since they were hard to come by in the camp. This is the advantage of small things. A ‘wagon-box’, for example, containing ninety matches, with a little skill, passed from hand to hand, can store vital information, detailed plans, for a train not to arrive in port with tons of wolfram. A yellow ‘economical box’ contains seventy matches. Some are even smaller, pocket-sized, and contain fifty or thirty matches. The most attractive are those bearing coloured phototypes. The skill to turn a simple box of matches into a magnificent transmitter of secret information resides in one box in fact being two. But for this they have to be cut and assembled to perfection. The information can be walled up inside this delicate stucco work on rolling paper. In code. For this you need the people giving and receiving the information to be referring to the same book. One number identifies the letter, another the line, another the page. If you don’t know or can’t find the reference book, it’s very difficult to decipher an intercepted message.

Polka held a new match in front of his eyes, closed his left eye and examined the head as a surveyor’s reference point for measuring the world.

The matchstick head filled the mouth of the mine shaft.

‘Let me tell you what it’s made of, the formula for English paste, smoking blood: live phosphorus, potassium chlorate, gypsum glue, ground glass and red aniline.’ He could add, ‘And Olinda.’

‘And Olinda as well.’

‘What’s Olinda?’

‘A special ingredient in some matches. The ones that light straightaway have got Olinda in them.’

One of the technicians in the mine was a Portuguese engineer. He picked various prisoners to be his assistants, some of whom were highly competent. There was one, a Catalan, who’d been in Coruña in the summer of 1936, when war broke out, with some architect friends. Joan Sert got on well with Polka. Actually he followed him wherever he went because he’d never heard him complain. Polka carried the wounds of a failed escape. He said ants were left inside and then told him about the wasps that grow inside figs.

‘They lay their eggs in a flower and then the fruit grows and the wasps have to bore a hole through the flesh. Which is why fig trees are always surrounded by wasps. The same thing happened to me. They tied me to a tree with open wounds and the ants used this opportunity to come inside me. Now, from time to time, they want to get out.’

Polka put his hand in his mouth and produced a handful of ants. ‘See? See how they want to get out?’

Joan Sert looked at him in amazement and said, ‘You’re a surrealist!’

‘Don’t lay any more charges against me. How many years would I get for that?’

‘For what?’

‘For being a surrealist.’

Olinda was not allowed to return to the Matchstick Factory. There was always the river. The traditional occupation of women in Castro, washing for Coruña’s middle classes. Washerwomen, for good or bad, were from another world. Even their shape, their figure in the street, was different. Bodies with bundles, with a huge globe on top of their heads. Amphibian creatures from villages by rivers and streams who took away dirty clothes and returned them clean. Sometimes even ironed and smelling of roses.

So Olinda joined the procession of women carrying things on top of their heads. A washerwoman living nearby gave her a job. Washing for the eye doctor’s house and surgery. This was lucky. Because it gave her confidence. Reality. If she could wash for the eye doctor, then there was a certain amount of light. This was followed, she wasn’t quite sure how, by the opportunity to wash for Chelo Vidal. One door opens another. She was not without matches. Invisible friends kept her supplied. She could throw a few boxes in the bundle and sell them. She could even take the odd box, the odd phosphorus box, to the doctor and painter.

‘A WASHERWOMAN HAS to be good at repartee. A quick retort, girl, otherwise they’ll eat you alive. But keep it polite. Words and stones, once thrown, you can’t recall.’

Olinda taught me the trade. I even know how to make lye using vegetable ashes. But it was Polka who taught me repartee.

He said, ‘This girl has an open body. She won’t have any problems. Her body’s more open than Moeche’s.’

‘Moeche’s?’

‘A girl who one day started talking with the voice of a priest, and expert in dogmatics, who’d died over in Havana. On Sundays, she’d go out on to the balcony and deliver the most wonderful sermons in a Cuban accent. People came from all over the parish in their droves. Until one day she got fed up, went out onto the balcony and called them pagans and Corinthians. Among other things.’

‘You’re always pulling my leg.’

‘It was in all the papers. Manuela Rodríguez. Back in 1925. This is what happens when people are bored. If you ever talk in a voice that isn’t yours, don’t worry. Don’t panic. It’s what you get for having an open body.’

The fact I had an open body calmed Olinda down. She suffered just to think I was no good at repartee and had inherited her silence. Not that Olinda stuttered or had a short tongue. She was very alert. When she was young, when she worked at Zaragüeta’s, making matches, she could lift the roof all on her own, she was the life and soul of the box-room, ‘the Spark of Castiñeiras’, according to Polka, not a small thing in a matchstick factory. ‘My spark,’ he says when he’s feeling romantic or wants to encourage her. Among the old, yellowed papers in the drawer of his night table is a cutting from La Voz de Galicia with the title ‘A Trip to Castiñeiras’ and a circled bit which says: ‘The ones seen here chatting work at tables in a nearby room, sticking boxes and building crates for them. They’re all women, lots of pretty women!’ Polka repeats, ‘“They’re all women, lots of pretty women!” Now that’s what I call a good journalist.’ Something happened to Olinda, silence entered her body. But that’s another story.

She doesn’t talk a lot now. Not that she’s dumb. She’s afraid of mute silence. Says it can get inside you and then doesn’t want to come out. She had friends at the factory who suffered from this silence. But there’s another silence she calls friendly silence, which helps. She says, ‘Good words don’t cost much and are worth a lot.’ It’s obvious she chooses her words. Which ones to say and which ones to hear. As when Polka’s talking. She doesn’t mind him being like a radio. But she doesn’t listen to him all the time. Sometimes he can be broadcasting and she’s immersed in silence. But suddenly she’ll come out of her hole and pay attention or laugh out loud. Those are the words that matter. I wish I knew which ones they were.

Guillerme, or Pinche, my little brother, is a lot like her, like Olinda. He was born quiet. He was born a man. A little man. The first time I got to appreciate how similar they were was when I saw him help wind the tangled wool from an old sweater into a ball in order to knit a new one. Pinche with arms outstretched, straight, parallel, pulling the wool taut. The two of them joined by the moving thread. Not a word. Winding silence.

Speak, when it comes to speaking, he’s not bad. Except for ‘salicylic’. He can’t say ‘salicylic’.

‘Not “sacilytic”!’ shouts Polka. ‘Salicylic.’

According to Polka, I could say ‘salicylic’ when I was only two. It was the first and last time Olinda took me to see him in the labour camp. A Sunday visit. A few minutes. The mine wasn’t easy to get to! Couceiro, the seller of herbs and spices, took us in his sidecar. And Polka all the time making me say ‘sa-li-cy-lic’. ‘Salicylic acid’. I could not have known this was an expression of a father’s great love for his daughter. Making her say ‘salicylic’. I think I cried and everything. I had the impression when they came out of the mine shaft, they were possessed by strange words. But I said it: ‘salicylic’. And then he gave me a pair of clogs he’d made with his own hands. He said, ‘They’re for when you go to the river.’ But the clogs, made of birchwood, were too small and could only be used as thimbles. Or for playing in the water. For making ladybird boats.