Manuel Rivas: The Low Voices

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.