Manuel Rivas: The Low Voices

‘I had to come back,’ said María when we left. ‘My own journey to the heart of darkness.’

In the room where María died, in Castro, both my father and my mother died in a relatively short space of time. On the eve of her death, my mother woke up with a strange sense of energy. After a series of long days in bed, she got up and changed the bedclothes; she wanted to do it herself, using white, luminous sheets of the kind she washed by hand. She then lay down and gave us one of her painful smiles. Farewell, farewell! When my father succumbed, he availed himself of all the coryphaeus’ accumulated irony. He asked us to lift him in the orthopaedic bed, assembled by Paco, so he could climb up high and cure his vertigo once and for all. He then came out with a eulogy of mechanics: ‘Industry has come a long way, thanks to us patients!’

Those of us who stayed behind had the impression they’d left like this, in a hurry, to go looking for their anarchist daughter. Yes, that was the room where María died. During the terminal phase of her illness, she had asked us to help her leave so she wouldn’t have to suffer any more. Her hand reached out to help. The carnival giants, the Catholic Monarchs, were not in the window this time, rather the introverted green of the lemon tree that had grown in the coarse soil and rubble of the first house.

This book arose from a series of articles called ‘Storyboard’, published in the cultural supplement Luces de Galicia of the Galician edition of the newspaper El País . I would like to thank Xosé Hermida and Daniel Salgado for the kind attention and welcome they gave me. The articles then chose to ferment, and among the people who helped me to see into another time, to recollect, I am particularly grateful for the contributions of Manuel Bermúdez Chao and Carmelo Seoane, owner of A Artabria (Leonor’s old shop and pub) in the Republic of Castro de Elviña. They were both also generous enough to provide photographs of the ‘restless paradise’. Similarly generous was the photographer Xoán Piñón, who retrieved from his archives two photographs that show my sister María when she was young. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to all my family and the company of low voices.