Manuel Rivas: All Is Silence

The sailor pretended to zip up his mouth. Felt guilty for the sense of unease. Attempted a smile. ‘I used to cry with one eye and laugh with the other.’

Fins had been dividing his imagination and gaze between the print of his parents and the illustration in his book. He took advantage of his father’s sudden silence. ‘Dad, have you ever seen an Argonaut?’

The sailor sat down at the table, next to his son. Thought about it. ‘Well, there was a Russian boat that went down once. The sailors wore heavy leather jackets. Black leather jackets. Good they were too…’

‘No, Dad. I’m not talking about people. Have a read of this: “Such cephalopods are very ugly animals. If one looks inside an Argonaut’s eyes, one sees that they are empty.”’

Fins looked up from the book and stared at his father. Lucho’s expression was one of enormous surprise. He was running through all the sea creatures he knew. He thought about the rainbow wrasse, which some years was male and others female. He thought… But no, he’d never gazed into an Argonaut’s empty eyes.

‘That book came from the School of Indians,’ he said. He poured himself a glass of claret and emptied it in one go.

‘Why was it called that? School of Indians?’

Lucho’s hurt gesture. His smile. He always made the most of this opportunity. Fins knew what he was going to say, the same old joke about playing cowboys and Indians, being an Apache and so on. But this time a flicker of pain interrupted his smile. A spasm introduced by memory.

‘Many from here — many! — left for America. Most were stonemasons, carpenters, bricklayers, day labourers… and sailors. Once they’d got themselves a bit of silver, the first thing they’d do is go and buy themselves a suit for dancing. The next thing, get together in order to set up a school. That’s what they did. All over Galicia. It was for them the Modern School. But after the war, when it was abandoned, it got this other name, School of Indians.’

He glanced over at Amparo, who was slowly inserting pins into the cushion.

‘It wasn’t just any old school. It was the best school! Everything they had hoped for. Rationalist, they called it. And they sent typewriters, sewing machines, globes, microscopes, barometers… They even packed in a skeleton so we could learn the names of all the bones. They set up loads of schools, but this one had something special. An extraordinary idea that the floor of the school was the world. They made it out of noble wood. That floor was built by the very best carpenters and carvers. Every now and then, you’d sit in a different country.’

He fell silent. Made an inventory. In this composition of the thinker, he held his head with such pressure, so horizontally, that he seemed to be stopping a leak in his temple.

‘That’s all that’s left, more or less. The floor and the skeleton.’

He stood up and with his right forefinger started pointing at his left hand, ‘Trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate…’ One word jumped on top of another. Lucho Malpica was content. He noticed the fizz of memory on his lips, the fact that he could remember. That salty taste.

‘Do you know which is the most important bone of all? No, you don’t.’ He smacked his son on the nape. ‘The sphenoid!’

Lucho then made a bowl with his scarred hands and declared, as if holding a human skull, ‘I can hear the teacher now. Here’s the key, the sphenoid! The bone with a chair like a Turkish bed and a bat’s wings, which opened in silence all through history to make room for the enigmatic organisation of the soul.’

He stared at his hands in surprise, the bowl of eloquence they’d made. Then exclaimed in amazement at himself, ‘Blessed hosts!’

The other two, mother and son, also stared at him in wonder. He was a taciturn type. On the quiet side. At home there was a connection between his ruminations and the knocking together of the boxwood needles. To Fins, when he became aware of it, this was a wounding sound. A chattering of the house’s teeth. But there were these moments, increasingly rare, when the sound became transfigured. And the cud showed itself.

‘Which parts of the world did you sit in, father?’ asked Fins with shared enthusiasm.

Lucho Malpica suddenly changed tone. ‘I don’t want you going there.’

‘Any day now the sky will fall on top of you!’ added his mother.

Lucho went over to the window to take a look at the sea. From there, he spoke to his son in an imperative tone. ‘Listen, Fins, you need to go and clean the vats again.’

‘He’s too big to be getting into those vats,’ remarked Amparo angrily. ‘Besides, he gets dizzy.’

‘Not half as much as at sea,’ mumbled Lucho.

He got down on his knees by the hearth in order to stoke the fire. At his back, the smoke imitated the seascape, taking the form of mists and storm clouds. ‘What do you want me to do, woman? Rumbo asked me. I can’t tell him no.’

‘Well, it’s about time you learned to say no once in a while!’

Lucho ignored his wife. If only she knew the times he’d had to say no. He decided to speak to his son, and did so vehemently. ‘Listen, Fins! Don’t go telling anyone about your absences. If you talk about it, you’ll never get a job. Understand? Don’t ever talk about it. Ever! Not even to the walls.’

Amparo took up her work and the boxwood needles resounded again like the house’s anguished inner music. There was now a thread connecting the lacemaker’s imagination and the way the needles knocked together. In Amparo’s mind, seeing what she’d seen, there were new and old times. On occasion, the new times even gave birth to the old. Which was why she preferred not to let the memories show themselves. The shadowy mouths had had their say. When she was a girl, anyone who suffered from epileptic fits or prolonged absences ended up being considered mad. A simple nickname like that could land you in the madhouse.

A great-aunt had died there. Back when each internee had a number tattooed on their skin. There had even been professional loony hunters who’d visited remote villages and poor districts in covered wagons like cages, searching for suitable candidates. The Church, in league with some powerful families, had founded a hospital. And the administration took money from the local councils according to the number of internees. The more loonies, the better.

Oh yes. She knew what she was talking about. Which was why she kept quiet. And her fingers ran further away.

FINS HEARD THE door knocker and knew who was at the door. Three knocks in succession, followed by another. The knocker was a metal hand. A hand Lucho Malpica had found in Corcubión Estuary. He said it came from the Liverpool , which had sunk in 1846. He’d cleaned off the rust and polished it very carefully — like a real hand, he said — until it shone again like metal. According to him, the hand of the knocker was the most valuable object in the house. Whenever he came home drunk from one of his personal shipwrecks, he’d stroke the hand, taking care not to bang it.

The three knocks were repeated, followed by another. His mother also knew who this Morse code belonged to. She stopped her knitting and gazed at the door with distrust.

Fins ran to open it. It was her. Leda Hortas.

He had no chance to ask questions. She pulled at him excitedly. First with her eyes. Then she grabbed hold of his arm. Even she wasn’t aware of how strong she could be.

‘Come on! Run!’

She let go and started running barefoot towards the beach. Fins didn’t have time to close the door. When he heard his mother’s voice again, he didn’t want to. He knew she’d be sitting down, muttering, ‘Nine Moons!’