Manuel Rivas: All Is Silence

When they reached Chafariz Cross, on the other side of the road leading to the Ultramar, they saw another boy who was younger than them. He was calling to them and waving his arm urgently.

‘It’s Chelín! He must have found something,’ exclaimed Leda.

Brinco cannot avoid being sarcastic whenever he sees Chelín. ‘Sure, he’ll have found something. He doesn’t know how to live without that damn pendulum.’

‘Well, it works sometimes, doesn’t it, Leda?’ said Fins in a conciliatory tone.

‘Only because he’s so damn stubborn,’ replied Brinco.

Leda gazed at them both as if rebuking them for their ignorance. ‘His dad used to unearth springs. He was clairvoyant, a water diviner. He discovered all the wells in this area with a rod or pendulum. There are people like that, who see into what’s hidden. With magnetic powers.’ She learned her trade in the river and sea, washing and collecting shellfish. Her speech had a gurgle that made her stand out. An excess load that acted as defence. And she still had time to murmur with what was left of her open body. ‘Some people are just smoke. They don’t kill or frighten, tie or untie.’

‘Amen,’ replied Brinco.

‘That must be why he’s so good at stopping the ball,’ interjected Fins. ‘Hidden powers!’

‘Maybe. But where the hell is he taking us?’

Leda ran to meet Chelín. She knew where they were going. For a short while the path became deeper, surrounded on either side by clumps of laurel, holly and elder, which bent down as if to form a vault. It finally gave way to a stone staircase. Next to each step, fermenting moss that resembled a curled-up hedgehog. Suddenly, on top of the hill, a house which seemed to be propped up, supported, by nature. One of those ruins that wants to disappear but can’t, which is bound, not cleft, by the ivy on the walls. Behind a tangle of gorse and broom were two hollows. A dislocated wooden door and a distrustful window with a squint. The building was so taken by nature that the visible part of the roof was a field of foxgloves, and at the eaves the thickest branches of ivy intertwined in order to fall back on themselves as gargoyles. On the threshold of the door, the leaves had respected the tiles, perhaps because of their vegetal forms, which were modernist in style, orange and green, and adorned an inscription in letters glazed blue on white: ‘American Union of Sons of Noitía, 1920’.

Chelín was taken up with his role. He concentrated all his senses, outside and in, just as his clairvoyant father had taught him. There was something special about the pendulum in his hand. The magnetic weight at the end of the chain was a bullet.

To start with, it didn’t move. But then slowly the pendulum began to sway from side to side.

Leda rebuked the disbelievers: ‘See?’

‘He’s doing it with his wrist,’ replied Brinco. ‘You’re a fraud, Chelín. Here, give it to me.’

Chelín ignored him. Because he knew Brinco was a stick-in-the-mud, and because he really was following another clue. Absorbed in the intricacy of flows, deposits and currents. He started walking towards the hollow of the door, the pendulum swaying ever more quickly.

‘Come on, have no fear!’ exclaimed Leda with conviction, because she knew Brinco was more than reluctant. Normally so forward, he always came up with excuses here, warned that the place was dangerous, on the verge of collapsing.

The inside of the School of Indians was largely in shadow, but there was a crater in the roof through which entered a substantial beam of light. A natural skylight opened by a circular cascade of tiles. And there were other, smaller holes, cracks through which entered spears or arrows with the nature of sun rays. The air was so thick that the light found it difficult to penetrate as far as the ground. But it was important it did so, both for the intruders and for the place itself. Because what this beam of light and the occasional slender lantern illuminated was the large relief map of the world which covered the floor. Carved in noble wood, it had been treated, varnished, skilfully painted and preserved, not with the idea of eternity, but so that it could accompany as optimistic ground, somewhere between time and the intemporal, the future of Noitía. In the American Union of Sons of Noitía’s school, built with the donations of emigrants, there was this peculiarity, which was later copied: each pupil sat in a corner of the mappa mundi and moved with the passing of the years, so that when he finished, he could be said to be a citizen of the world. There were other things that made the so-called School of Indians unusual. The typewriters and sewing machines sent from Argentina or Uruguay. The impressive library, imported or paid for. The zoological collection with the presence of desiccated animals and birds in glass cases, according to the custom of that period. There was still the odd specimen, the spectre of some bird which had been left for an unknown reason, like the long-necked crane hanging incredulous next to the detachable pedagogical skeleton missing an arm. On the main wall, faded like cave paintings, the trees of Natural Sciences and the History of Civilisations. Faded as was the map on the ground, over which the children walked, with Chelín and his pendulum leading the way, across countries and continents, islands and seas, the geographical names still discernible, despite the gnawing and abandonment of time.

Chelín came to a halt. The pendulum was swinging like crazy. He’d brought them to a shady corner where they could make out a bulky shape covered in a brand-new tarpaulin, which upped their expectations, since the visitors weren’t much interested in relics. A large part of the furniture and collections had burned in another time, an archaic period outside time, referred to by the grown-ups as ‘war’. There were still a few books on the dusty shelves, subsumed by cobwebs and rilled by lice. Not much was left. A few furtive visitors would come and rummage through the rotten, gnawed, fearful remains. Though each year the population of bats increased, hanging on their shadowy hooks.

Nobody dared. In the end, Chelín took hold of the bullet and decided to lift one end of the tarpaulin. They were silenced, astonished.

‘Well done, Chelín! Now that’s what I call a treasure.’

It was a large cargo of boxes full of bottles of whisky. The discoverers of the haul gazed in fascination at the image of the tireless Johnnie Walker.

Leda moved forward and managed to extract a bottle with the famous label of the rare and much sought-after imported whisky. She turned to Chelín and declared a historical redress in admiring tones: ‘You’re our hero, Chelín!’

Fins pointed at him triumphantly. ‘No more Chelín. From now on, Johnnie. Johnnie Walker! Our captain!’

The blast of a shotgun echoed around the old school’s interior as if propelled by the core of this last sentence. The echo. The fragments of tile. The crazed flight of the bats. The bulging eyes of the clairvoyant’s son. Everything seemed to have come from the weapon’s smoking barrel. Leda was so dazed she dropped the bottle of whisky, which fell to the ground and smashed in a bluey area named ‘The Atlantic Ocean’.

Two figures emerged from the darkness with absolutely no intention of passing unnoticed, and came to a halt beneath the accidental skylight in the roof. The first to make himself visible was a giant hulk carrying the shotgun. But he was soon replaced in the foreground by a second man wearing a white suit and panama hat, who wiped away his sweat with a crimson handkerchief without removing his white cotton gloves.

They knew who it was. They knew it was useless trying to escape.

He took possession. The large bully dusted off a chair and offered it to his superior. When he started talking, he did so in a deep voice, which was both intimate and imperative. The man was Mariscal, ‘the Authentic’, as he himself liked to be known. The other man, the one with the weapon, was Carburo, his inseparable bodyguard. Nobody used that word. He was the Curate. The Stick under Orders. The Bully. This was his name. He’d worked for a time as a butcher, and used this snippet from his CV whenever he thought it appropriate, with convincing self-esteem.